Telsa Will Make an Electric Leafblower As Garden Equipment is a Big Pollution Source

Elon Musk has tweeted that Tesla will make a quiet electric leaf blower.

In 2017, the California Air Resources Board, said that by 2020, the biggest single ozone polluter in California is going to be all this gardening equipment.

California has 16 million gas-powered garden machines from leaf blowers to mowers.

California tougher emissions standards for small gas engines and to offer major incentives for landscaping businesses to change over to electric.

Gallon for gallon of gasoline used, the small gasoline engines found in lawn mowers, leaf blowers, and other power equipment pollute at a higher rate than other equipment and vehicles.

Each weekend, about 54 million Americans mow their lawns, using 800 million gallons of gas per year and producing tons of air pollutants. Garden equipment engines produce up to 5% of the nation’s air pollution and even more in cities.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a new gas powered lawn mower produces volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides emissions air pollution in one hour of operation as 11 new cars each being driven for one hour.

SOURCES- Air Resources Board, Tesla, Elon Musk Twitter, EPA
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

25 thoughts on “Telsa Will Make an Electric Leafblower As Garden Equipment is a Big Pollution Source”

  1. Cash for clunkers removed an enormous number of older daily drivers from the road. I saw an immediate change to the age of cars in street parking throughout my city. Tons of new civics and camrys appeared right away.

  2. I have always marveled that with pollution control such a high priority, our regulations pushed new vehicles to reduct harmful emissions (HC, NOX, CO) by 98.5%….but we chased diminishing returns because we did not have the courage to force old cars off the road. If a 1971 car pollutes 40-50 times more than a new car, our programs needs to incentivize getting those old cars off the road. Any other action is wasted effort.

  3. Tucker Gott a YouTube powered paraglider channel, has about 877k subscribers, and I am sure there are others. I gotta think there are at least 50k of those who want to do this stuff, if it was reliable and electric. Probably double that have either never seen this stuff or assumed it was well out of their range.

  4. If they have figured out how to make it quiet and not infringe on Dyson stuff, it could make money. It is possible they came up with something when they were working on the air blasting thing for the new Roadster.

    The answer though is government. We have to outlaw gasoline yard devises. I have been saying this for several years. Nothing will really change until then. A great deal of the lawns are mowed by services, and they find it easier to just use gas.

    What he could make is electric tractors. Lots of money in tractors, and they should not need huge batteries either. All the electronic stuff, and automated stuff is right up their alley. Farms have plenty of room for wind and solar to charge stuff. Then inch down into smaller and smaller tractors, then ride-on mowers…

    If he does have some really efficient quiet air blasting technology, I would suggest he make powered paraglider motors. They want big bucks for that equipment (like $8k), and the current stuff requires a lot of maintenance and is very loud. There are a couple electric paramotors, but they are weak and you get maybe 10 minutes in the air…while gas you can be up there a couple hours. Match that 2 hours and the power, and they will pay $10k. Not much compared with the $100k of a model S, but it is much smaller, very simple, and easy to make. I also think there is a market for paramotors at least 10 times the current number…if it was reliable and quiet electric. $5k, and many many people would buy them.

  5. It’s hard to get standards agreed upon, but *so* beneficial when they are. Eg: pick a standard separation between rails on railways & *everyone* use the same one.

  6. I’ve had a robotic electric lawn mower for a couple years now. 13k sq ft of lawn. Works perfectly, finely mulches the grass, operates at night and parks and charges itself. It also mulches the autumn leaves into about 1/10th their volume. A rake and elbow grease does the rest. Why wait for a tesla mower/blower?

  7. In theory I could. In practice, I’d already bought the rechargeable edger before becoming aware of its deplorably short battery life, and I’m too cheap to replace it with one that would run off an extension cord.

  8. Just curious – is there something about your lawn that prevents just using a long extension cord? I use that, and it’s generally minimal hassle – only occasionally getting stuck on something. It’s a bit more awkward for mowing, but as long as you’re mowing ‘away’ from the cord (ie. moving away from the outlet) its not bad.

  9. Well, it would expand the market for his power cells, and lawn equipment has to be simpler than car design and manufacturing.

  10. Haha, I was actually thinking the same thing. I think the smarter move, assuming they had the cash would be to purchase a controlling interest in green works or similar electric lawn equipment company and either convert their packs or release a seperate line of Tesla cell powered equipment, and operate dealerships within solar city stuff and make a market out of the soon to be used vehicle cells that are no longer suitable for the vehicles themselves. make a standardized power drop for all sorts of amenities, like camping, construction sites etc….all for super cheap as the product has already had one useful life and could be had at half or less of the original $/kwh. they’d corner the market.

  11. Why fast recharge rather than a very few standard sizes so they can be swapped out?
    From the POV of running the electric grid swap out batteries are better because fast charging spikes the demand, while swap out batteries charge when other demand is less than supply & so flatten the demand.

  12. Quite right. Nothing as good as an electric motor. Nothing as bad as a weak battery pack. They need more power and they need to recharge faster.

  13. I have an electric leaf blower. The biggest issue is that it isn’t powerful enough and it doesn’t last as long. In fact, I bought an extra battery because of that. Please sell a backpack unit with double the battery power and more power. I have a large yard.

  14. I tend to agree; I already have electric gardening tools, like my leaf blower and edger, just to avoid having to keep a bunch of two stroke fuel around. (Not the chain saw, though. Electric chain saws suck.) The battery packs are, relatively speaking, garbage. Mostly packaging, not battery, over priced, last only a few minutes.

    If he can get around proprietary connector designs, I’d pay good money for a battery pack that would last long enough to get the job done, instead of having to swap them several times while edging my lawn.

    This really IS the weak point in electric lawn tools, the working ends are fine.

  15. If this is really why he’s going to build it, it’s a bad sign.

    Typically, you want companies to be building something because they can sell it at a profit, not for some secondary reason unrelated to profit.

  16. I dunno, I would have expected Dyson to be the first to a quiet electric leafblower, as they are very experienced with air entrainment/ejector designs. Why isTelsa even sticking their fingers into this is beyond me, even with the alleged corporate mission of reducing CO2. Hell, if Liquid Piston actually took off, it would be a good alternative to conventional two stroke engines for leafblowers.

    Actually, what are typical duty cycles for a leaf blower in operation though? Would a hybrid battery/generator even make sense considering the small form factor issues?

  17. Goverments should incentivize gardining tools and micro transportation. This is a lower hanging fruit than electric family cars and will help accelerate many other forms of electrification.

  18. Because he wants to make money and the money isn’t in selling packs, it is in adding value to the packs. If Tesla can make super batteries (due to acquiring Maxwell) then they might as well monetize their purchase.

    Put another way: would you rather be the company that sells batteries to Dyson for their vacuums or would you rather be Dyson?

  19. Or he could just sell reasonably priced battery packs for everyone else.

    The biggest barrier of electrification of everything else isn’t the motors, controllers, or traditional manufacturing stuff. It is that they can buy or sell tiny volumes of battery packs at reasonable prices.

    If anyone sold standardized sizes of battery packs for lawn and garden, scooters, motorcycles, and heavy duty, they would have a much stronger impact on the market than producing another bespoke integrated device + battery.

    https://meangreenproducts.com/

  20. Ok I give Mr Musk a good deal of worry over how he runs Tesla but this is a pretty good idea.

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