The $50K price is just $10K-$12K more than the leaf, volt, and focus. For a performance vehicle, I find the Tesla S to be a good value. The Tesla S has exceptional styling, excellent cabin room, enormous power, and outstanding range. In the high performance models, the price gap with other performance cars all but disappears. You simply cannot compare this vehicle with the leaf, focus or volt. Those are $16K cars that cost $38K. It appears that the cost per kw in the Tesla is about half that of the other EV cars.
Could be that there are better ways to power EVs than what is presently being show outside of the research labs! This transistion has more to do with BIG OIL than it does with alternate energy...and YES they DO exist! Nikola Tesla DROVE a alternate zero energy car more than 70 years ago and I believe he would be proud of his name sake company and the way they are navigating the road blocks of of EV naysayers.
The explanation is good, but I would have liked to see more of the vehicle instead of the talking head. Show us some of the detail of the very interesting model that was behind her.
You know your an engineer, when you would rather look at the mechanincs than the pretty girl!
In one respect, Tesla is taking a pragmatic and cost-effective approach in using 18650 Li-O cells, as opposed to engineering a totally new battery. 18650's are already produced in large numbers so their unit cost is already pretty decent due to economics of scale. They are just engineering the packaging of them, and due to their small individual form factor, the enclosure can be wrapped around drivetrain components as needed. It is not a long-term battery solution, but it is a good bridging approach and gets them into the market as the range leader. I think they will do OK.
Finally, an electric car that doesn't look like one. No rear "fender skirts" and flat wheel discs. For those that still desire an element of excitement while getting from point A to B, this may just hit the mark.
Having enjoyed driving kerosene-fired steam cars, it would be fun to try Tesla's coal-fired steam car. Coal fired? Of course! We just don't see the boiler and steam engine since they live at the power station. A truly "green" electric car would charge its batteries from a renewable source. About 20 years ago I designed a solar charging station for a friend's electric car. It used conventional lead-acid batteries but it served quite well for commuting to work and back.
I agree, Naperlou. Prices will come down with production volume. Using your $25K number, it appears their batteries cost between $500 and $600/kWh. Most experts predict that those costs will drop to around $400/kWh as production volume rises.
The big, unanswered question, of course, is when will the battery technology advance. Expectations to the contrary, the high-end, sporty electrics/hybrids like Tesla and Fisker have not advanced battery technology. When you look at those companies and run that numbers, that's not surprising. They simply don't have the cash to put into battery R&D. The conventional wisdom appears to be that batteries (capacity and energy density) don't follow Moore's Law and NEVER WILL. That's why I was pleasantly surprised to hear some positive expectations about battery research from a Mercedes engineer I spoke with last week at CES. Please see my story, "CES: Mercedes Foresees Progress in Batteries, Composites.
Rob, that is precisely the point. The high margin cars help get you started, but will never reach volumes. The battery pack on the origial Tesla, which is a small two seat sports car, cost $25K and weighs 900lbs. It also had a significant range (over 250 miles). Compare that to a Volt or Leaf. As they advance the battery technology, they will be able to bring out cars that compete in price with the Volt and Leaf and conventional hybrids that will open up a mass market. I should think that this is only a couple of years away.
UK-based Plastic Logic and French company ISORG have created what the pair tout as a first in flexible printed electronics: a large area, conformable, organic image sensor printed on plastic.
For 3D printing to make the jump from rapid prototyping to manufacturing, engineers will need to find easier ways to move products from their CAD screens to their printers.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
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For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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