Elon measures the fundamental good of Tesla should be measured by the number of years by which it accelerates the transition to sustainable transport. This would mean reducing the time until the existing 2.5 billion (Elon’s tweeted number) internal combustion powered vehicles are replaced. There are 100 million new cars and trucks being added every year.
Very much so. There are 2.5B cars & trucks on Earth. Even replacing 1% of that fleet would require making 25M vehicles per year. Tesla will make over 500k cars in next 12 months, but that’s a mere 2% of 25M or 0.02% of global vehicle fleet. Car industry slow -> demand >> supply.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 14, 2019
I’ve always thought that the fundamental good of Tesla should be measured by the number of years by which it accelerates the transition to sustainable transport & energy
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 14, 2019
SOURCES- Elon Musk Twitter
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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The skateboard is the best approach for electric. Low center of mass, easier battery changes, better side impact protection, and more storage. The only negative is that it can be vulnerable to junk on the road so it needs somewhat expensive protection.
If you change batteries, you would have to change all the batteries, so they are level and respond to charging the same. What you propose would necessitate a major undertaking to change the batteries. The batteries also have cooling systems that involve water. In body panels they would be vertical requiring stronger pumps and more energy to move the water around.
No, one big battery module is best, and the only place you can put that that does not interfere with storage and is accessible for replacement is under the car.
The only way this can change is if batteries become much more energy dense…at least 3x more. Then in-trunk becomes an option.
Pleb,
if 90% of your driving is done while using your 100 mile battery charge than you reduce 90% of your emissions.
dc generator directly to battery, no inverter necessary.
ice/generator combo is dirt cheap, remember you are removing 67% of your battery cost, $ trade off is ++.
downside is using ice again, but for only very small % of driving.
They should do that with Uber/Lyft drivers. Seriously.
Make the generator an accessory that you can put in the trunk or back seat when you need it. No need to include it in the base model for people who don’t need it. For people who want it, the extra plugs and air vents are installed in the car as an option, and the generator is a plug-in accessory you put in when you need it.
Within a city 100 km will cover my driving. Between cities I might go over 1000 km in an all day drive.
I’m dubious about recharging electric car batteries in less than several hours. This has problems both for reducing the number of recharges on the battery & for creating spikes in demand on the power grid.
If we really want all electric cars, make the batteries one standard size & swap them out to be recharged at a modest pace. This turns the batteries from a pain to the grid operator to a benefit since then the batteries can be recharged when other electricity demand is less than the supply.
I would say that all serious entry level EV’s are at 200km of range already. seems pretty good enough without having to pay for 2 power systems in the vehicle….all to what end…to save 10 minutes filling up and pay 3x the price to do so?
I think your fundamental point is still correct though, a little better in some scenarios is the enemy of good enough.
It doesn’t dramatically reduce cost. it increases cost as you need an extra engine, generator, inverter, battery pass thru. extra weight, extra volume, extra complexity, larger compliance needs and you inherit all of the maintenance woes of having an ICE all over again.
It eliminates range anxiety only as long as you’re still willing to stop..which you might as well just stop at an electric charger, with cc3 will charge in less than 20 minutes, even from empty.
it also doesn’t accomplish the primary goal of reducing both point of source emissions and overall emission footprint.
What I see being a nice transition to a more sustainable future is something a little more pragmatic and a little less radical. If refineries were not needed to be making gasoline and diesel 99% of the time and using the majority of the feedstock, they could then focus on plastics, rubbers and all manner of other critical necessities, making them much cheaper, and natural gas becomes the industrial fuel of the future as it already burns cleaner. however, for consumer, a 3-400 mile paradigm is what most ICE vehicles are at already. so we are maybe 5 years from such a parity. the Tesla charging network alone has I think 2 states left where there is not a charger within 100 miles on an overland road..but its ok because you can charge any electric at home for a fraction of the cost already.
I’m with Roseland67 on that.
Plug in hybrids that can go 100 to 200 km on a charge.
Insisting on all electric is making the really hard to achieve perfect, the enemy of the the more easily achievable good enough.
The overwhelming majority of us, (90%), drive less, than 100 miles/day.
Build the vehicle with enough batteries to do that AND add a single speed, specific duty dc generator, (ICE), to charge the battery if you need to drive more than 100 miles.
The driver gets all of the benefits of the electric drive train, (efficiency, speed etc)
and if additional mileage is needed for longer range simply “tank up”, using the existing fueling infrastructure.
Probably not for cross country but for all other this should work well.
This drastically reduces the cost,
eliminates range anxiety,
eliminates emissions for 90% of your driving time.
What am I missing?
i think being able to 80% charge an EV car in not much more time than an ICE will also be important. If you are just driving an EV to and from work each day then who cares, but what about the day you need to run errands all over town and haven’t planned it out in advance like a nutter?
At Tesla he has a compensation plan for over 50 billion dollars over a period of 10 years. I reckon that this compensation, his stocks that would increase 10X and the income of starlink will help provide some of the funds needed to build some infrastructure on Mars.
I am guessing but there is more money pouring into battery research then any other research. Batteries are the only thing holding back the future. Cars, exoskeletons, mobile robots, drones etc. The list goes on and on. That breakthru will probably come soon with the advent of faster computers running deep learning.
I am kind of surprised they don;t take the cue from other major programs for their software. Rent/lease it by the month. And make it free for the first 6 months.
“Skateboard” designs aren’t new. GM played around with them in the fuel cell concept cars from the 90s.
Actually the skateboard is an easy place to put batteries. A big rectangular area, better than fitting batteries in to other places and making them all fit (like a phone battery).
I get a bit nervous when Mr Musk describes the metric for his company to not be profitability but a more vague “Degree to which we accelerated the future”. First of all without profits nobody will make EVs. Secondly profits and accelerating the future are not mutually exclusive.