And what about those people who have to park on the street... or in a parking bay away from the house... or in our case across the road from the flat... Yep, lets just run the cable from my first floor flat, across the road, and into the car and leave it like that overnight... and hope it's all still there in the morning...
They were charging up a test S model over night at the Mini factory back in December. Nice looking car a lot bigger in the flesh. Plus there is a Lime Green Roadster model that I've seen several times driving about Oxford.
There is a guy in my area, the boss of a friend of mine, who owns and drives the original Tesla daily. He owns a roofers company and uses it every day for home-work, to visit clients and check up on jobs. Off course you need to consider the driving radius and where you are going to charge. It helps that he also installs/sells solar panels and has a solar-powered charging station at home and at his company. He still owns a petrol powered car for longer trips and holiday drives. But this isn't about a proof of concept anymore, these are real cars suit of daily usage. Although I won't argue that they are already a cheaper solution to a petrol powered car. Battery's last longer then three years, but they are still a big cost to consider. For me, this is the first company that builds really attractive full electric, real-life, cars. They still have a long way to go, but this is a huge leap forward. Next step will be a reasonable-priced version. Technology will keep on improving and hopefully some time very soon somebody will invent a improvement in battery technology (life time, amount of energy, price, ..). That will really be the launch of these cars. This is the start of the future cars.
Indeed, for now this kind of technology is being rolled out, people that have garages will have no problems in recharging the car, then you will be finding more and more public recharging spots, it will come to a point where you can leave your car parked on the street and connected to the recharging station (this is happening on several USA states and even in Portugal (of all places) with the MOBI.E recharging network, http://www.mobie.pt/pt/postos-de-carregamento ). There are also some pilot programs on V2G, google it, it is very interesting. Also, if not electric what is the alternative when crude becomes very expensive and we can not drive our ICE cars?
Yes please on more two wheeled electrics! Lower initial cost, still enough range for most commutes, smaller battery to replace is cheaper. Makes it easier to get into the electric world while maintaining a full-sized internal combustion vehicle.
There are some in Taipei (there's at least a million mopeds in the city), but they are few and far between. I'd love to work for a company making "performance" electric mopeds.
There are some things that confuse me a lot about hydrogen powered cars. In my mind they are a bad choice. I will try to explain why i think of this. English is not my first language, i am very sorry if the following is not the best English you have ever read. When i compare 2 things i try to remove the parts where they are equal and compare where they are different. A normal fuel cell car is not that different from an electric car, they both have an electric drivetrain and lots of electronics. The difference comes from the energy storage system and energy control systems (regulate the flow of fuel/electrons). For storage the Tesla S has a heavy ass battery with a chemistry that may be flammable after a severe impact and has a 265 mile range. The Honda FCX has a hydrogen storage tank that gives it a range of 240 miles. Both cars travel more or less the same distance and have a energy storage system that is flammable, therefore i can remove these parts. For the energy control systems the Tesla S has a BMS with current and capacity sensing and (i think) an H-bridge type of controller with some interesting control algorithms in it in order to drive that Three phase, four pole AC induction motor with copper rotor. The Honda FCX has mechanical valves, pipes, multiple types of sensors (it has to detect hydrogen leaks and tank pressure), a fuel cell, (i think) some kind energy buffer, BMS for the regen 288V li-ion battery it has and the H-bridge for controlling the AC Synchronous Permanent-Magnet Electric Motor. The FCX is mechanically more complex. Both are dependent on expensive materials (lithium, neodymium, platinum, etc...). Then we get to the infrastructure. I want to get this out of the way: As far as i know hydrogen is not a power supply, it is a energy carrier. Unless of course it is an undesirable byproduct from another industry, but considering that if we have to replace all the cars on the road with hydrogen cars there will be a need for dedicated hydrogen producing infrastructure. As far as i know there are 2 ways to supply a hydrogen fueling station with hydrogen, you either produce it off site and transport it to the fueling station (via truck or pipeline) or you produce it locally via electrolysis of water. As far as i know you can not use regular fuel tanks to store hydrogen, the hydrogen escapes easily or you need high pressure tanks if you are going to store it pressurised, this means that the current infrastructure has to be retrofitted, everything from the tanker ships, tanker trains, tanker trucks, distribution pipes, local storage tanks and pumps have to be changed. Plus all the inefficiencies of pumping, compressing and hydrogen escaping via the tank walls, pipes and valves (it is the smallest molecule and therefore it can pass through the tiniest of cracks, even though the material itself). If you want to use cheap hydrogen from other industries you will need to rehaul everything and use hydrogen that most certainly will come from hydrocarbon sources, like natural gas. Unless of course you are using that hydrogen that is a byproduct of the nuclear industry, but that is another can of worms that i do not want to open. Local electrolysis of water is interesting in that you do not need to transport all of that hydrogen from it’s source to the distribution center, you just need electricity, a distilled (as far as i know) water source and some storage tanks. Where i feel that this fails is that you are converting electricity into hydrogen and then into electricity, as far as i know this is horribly inefficient. If we consider that the efficiency in comparison with a BEV (battery electric car) is in the order of 50% (it is less), this means that for every HEV (hydrogen electric car) you need to produce enough energy to supply 2 BEVs. The thing the boggles my mind and makes my language barrier wider is that you need to have all of this production where your local gas station is. Think about it, your local gas station (that will be retrofitted for hydrogen) will have to have an electrical supply enough to recharge 2N electric cars, where N is the number of cars that refuel at your local gas station during a day. Plus the hydrogen storage tank and an adequate water supply. Most BEVs can be recharged on any household plug, this may take some time to recharge the battery fully, in a normal 240V EU plug with a 16A protection you will recharge a full Model S battery in about 24 hours. If you use their High Power Wall Connector you can recharge the car in about 5 hours. The supercharger can recharge the entire battery in about 40 minutes. But if you don’t have a parking garage and need to park the car outside? Here you will need a standard charging station where you park your car. As far as i know they are relatively easy to install, think of them as the old parking meters, and are distributed. They are becoming very common in several places. Yes it is faster to refuel a hydrogen car, but the infrastructure costs and energy costs make me think that it is an inferior solution. Seriously, is your work so far that you would need to recharge/refuel several times a day? How much time do you spend at work? How much time do you sleep? How much time does your car stay parked? Isn’t that enough time for recharging a battery? Then we get into the byproducts. Here i am talking about electric grid to motor, both BEV and HEV will use the same power stations and have the same drivetrain, the difference here is in efficiencies and local emissions. A HEV fueled with hydrogen that is produced from a central point will most certainly use sources that come from hydrocarbons, like natural gas, creating carbon emissions and making us go from a finite source of fuel into another finite source of fuel. Nothing has changed. If the hydrogen is produced locally you need to supply twice the power that would be needed in a BEV setup (as seen above), and it is centralized at the gas station. Also i don’t think it is a good idea to dispose of oxygen (the byproduct of electrolysis of water) into the atmosphere, and if you store it you need adequate tanks for it. The byproduct at the car is water, which is nice, it is non toxic. As far as i know it comes out in vapour form and a little bit drips in liquid form. Then i think about places where there are tens of thousands of cars driving in the city, if each of these cars is blowing out water vapour like a small slow kettle won’t this create some problems? Water vapour is a greenhouse gas, it makes things real damp and, considering that the atmosphere can only hold up to a limit of water vapour, won't this make it rain more often in very crowded cities? Won’t this create problems with icy roads in winter conditions? Now i look back at the text i wrote and i see a wall of text. I am very sorry about this. Thank you if you read it all. Please point out the flaws in my reasoning so i can improve my knowledge.
DXR_13KE Interesting post well thought out, Still waiting for Nexxo's opinion in here. Let me just introduce you all to the Tesla model X Insides Outside freaking ugly in my opinion, but then again my opinion doesn't matter.
As far as i know the model X has a faster acceleration than the model S, has 7 adult seats, has no rear view mirrors, only rear view cameras. It is freakishly big and has awesome gull wing doors.
50% efficiency on the fossil fuel to electricity conversion. 90% electricity to kinetic in the Tesla motor. That compares very favourably to the 30% of a typical combustion engine. Plus the power plant will have much stricter air quality standards. Nuclear is saving the planet as long as we can get around to digging some proper holes in the ground for disposal.
And as long as you don't make the power stations on a ****ing earthquake or tsunami zone. And you have a competent and independent industry standards body that doesn't just sign off things because of politic pressure or fears over spending. When you have all that, yea, it's great.
When you add the ~90% charging efficiency and the extra 10-20% extra mass you have to move around (which also contributes to rolling resistance) they look pretty similar. Personally I think the future is a toss-up between electricity and ethanol how quickly battery technology improves.
And it will stay in the future if we keep sending rivers of money to the middle east and the military for sending democracy to these middle east countries.
Can't they make the roof a solar power generator or would that just be ridiculously expensive or just not make enough charge for it to be worth it?
In the uk at least it would not charge enough as we get no sun. In the Winter those solar panels you see on houses dont really produce alot of charge. ( bearly enough to heat the hot water) Let alone run even a computer on them which uses alot less electric than a car does. They are also not size efficent, You require many panels to get decent charge 8 + is the recommended and they are all 2x3meters minimum. Solar at the moment is just not really there, Fusion is a dream that will not become a real thing in the life time of most people on this forum. The Tesla cars ive seen are very expensive for what you get performance wise. Unless your a rich celeb who needs it for status to say I have a electric car I dont personally see the point. You can buy a top spec bmw for the same price as most of the teslas are.
Was in Westfield's at Shepherd's Bush a couple of weeks ago, almost spaffed in my pants when I saw they had a Tesla shop. That's how I feel about Tesla.
No where near enough energy. In midday summer sun you get about 1kW per m^2. One horsepower is 0.75kW. The weight penalty would be greater than energy input.
1KW isn't too bad when you consider you're probably not using much more than 15 KW cruising at 70mph. The problem is the cost of pv cells.
