The arguments in this thread are amusing to say at the least. 30 minute charging times, high prices of Tesla cars. Yes all that is true. But this was never about 'Electric cars are awesome now'.<p>I'm pretty sure cars during and before pre Henry Ford times were not very great in terms of their overall affordability, total cost of ownership and availability of fuel all around the country. You could trust your horse to drive you back home on any day more than a car. Similar to that, the IBM computers during their early days. You mobile phone is likely to have more computing power than all the computers IBM sold a few decades back, they were highly painful to use, maintain and use. Needless to say all these things had huge maintenance issues.<p>But these things have caught on. So have automation, productivity and so many other new things that eventually people show friction towards but later take them to be fate accompli and learn to move forward.<p>Electric cars, self driving cars, wearable computing(like Google glasses) well these really might look to be unfeasible at this time. But please, these are just ideas which are waiting for their time to come, with a little push they will eventually catch on.
I would say Elon Musk is the greatest entrepreneur of the past century - even more so than Steve Jobs. He simultaneously created three separate companies, all in extremely complex industries, and combined all of them into one overall strategy.<p>The precision manufacturing they learned with Space X is incorporated into the Tesla S. Their aim is to make the Model S the most reliable and problem-free vehicle due to this precision.<p>Now they are incorporating SolarCity technology into the entire system. This is absolutely brilliant!
Is it outrageous to think that eventually this "gas" will be free because outlets will compete to have Tesla and other electric customers <i>stuck</i> at their restaurant, bar, store for a half hour?
I was looking forward to this announcement and watched the live announcement. The most interesting/surprising parts of the announcement to me was:<p>1. Superchargers are already deployed in California. Nice work, Tesla, for building it out and proving it works.<p>2. The whole U.S. will be covered in a few years. Great for traveling cross country.<p>3. It's solar-powered. I wonder if they have a electricity backup... probably, my guess. But still impressive.<p>4. It will be FREE for Tesla owners. I don't know how they're pulling this off. To me, this was the most shocking part. How are they going to pay for construction, rent, etc, and still afford this? It's a great extra benefit for Tesla owners... to travel around the country for free (of course you need to buy the car and maintain the car, but still).<p>I wonder if the extra electricity generated from the solar panels will go into paying the rent for the spaces.
Ugh, tech reporting. Is there a original source for this somewhere? Theres some limited info at <a href="http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger" rel="nofollow">http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger</a>.<p><i>100 kilowatts good for three hours of driving</i><p>From the announcement video, it seems they are charging at 370V with a maximum of 225 amps = 83.25kW. So that 30 minute figure for half a charge is pretty real. The cost for one such charge would be approximately 3$ with industrial prices for electricity. Given that you can feed solar power back into the grid at rates above or equal to what normal customers pay for their electricity, I could see them making break-even on this when discounting the initial investment (which will pay back hundred-fold in adoption rate for their cars).
Personally, I get annoyed when a company takes an existing term with a defined definition, and then decides to change the meaning.<p>A supercharger is a mechanically driven air compressor which forces air into an engine. For a car company to take that name and redefine it into a marketing effort, well, it's annoying. Kind of like those 'turbo' buttons that used to be on the front of a PC.
This is it - the tipping point has finally arrived.<p>This is a killer combination of rapidly falling prices in solar PV (thank you China/Kyoto protocol/Global warming), meeting the falling prices of Li-ion batteries (thank you astonishingly successful decade of laptops/smartphones/tablets), meets a cyclic economic boom (thank you GFC), meets rising gas prices (thank you OPEC/cheap oil/peak oil), meets anti-carbon incentives (thank you IPCC), meets autonomous cars (thank you Google), meets the development of nuclear fusion (thank you ITER) all combining into one massive tailwind for the one company just on the cusp of absolutely crushing it.<p>It's a complete clusterfuck of fortune, falling costs, converging secondary technologies and economic forces concentrated in one company protected with monopoly pricing, akin to those found by Apple, Google, YouTube, Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, Facebook and many other tech giants.<p>TSLA will go 10x within the next 20 years (or get bought out before it - unlikely) as it rides these convergent waves of progress.<p>Please for the love of capitalism short the crap out of it and don't buy it! I need to get as much of this stock as cheap as possible over the next 2-3 years of savings :D - you'd be doing me a favour!<p>Full disclosure: I have a significant amount of my net worth in TSLA stock and have done so on and off for 2 years (riding cycles for fun). I used to own AAPL - until relatively recently - whereupon I transferred all holdings to Google/Tesla. I may be exiting Google within the next 6 months due to rapid appreciation.
Making a "charging station" that could take the place of an existing gas station would be huge feat of engineering.<p>When I go from the SF bay area down to LA, I get gas at kettleman city (because of the in-n-out :) and I go to the chevron station there. From google street view, it looks like that station can fuel 12 cars at a time. And when I'm there, there's often a line for a pump.<p>A gas stop takes, say, 2 minutes. A tesla charging stop takes 30 minutes. So serving the same peak flow of cars would take 15 times as many car spots: 180. Land looks cheap in that part of the central valley, so it might be feasible to have that much space. But 180 chargers, peak, each using 100 kilowatts would use 18 <i>megawatts</i>.<p>Great scott! That's a lot of power. So it looks like this is still in the range of luxury-car, low-volume stuff. I can't imagine what it would look like as a mass-market thing.
If these become as popular as they seem like they should, I foresee long lines at the supercharging stations. I'm sure that 1. Tesla have thought of it and 2. They will milk the positive publicity from such an occurrence, but it could still be a PITA for, eg., folks who want to get home from Vegas.
So painful that the actual article was buried because they used a different link:<p><a href="http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger" rel="nofollow">http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger</a>
I think electric cars will only really flourish once self driving vehicles become more practical and common. That convergence, along with civilian drones, will expand and improve our options for transport immensely, while also improving efficiency dramatically. It's still a long way to go, but the technologies to make it happen exists today. It's going to be more of an infrastructure change, for example to provide specially marked routes and stopping points for self driving vehicles. The benefits of implementing this is going to take a while for people to realise, but doing so will be comparable or cheaper than current mass transit projects, while offering significantly more flexibility regarding routes and capacity. It will allow people to improve the mobility they have with their own cars now, while improving efficiency so people can live better in and around bigger cities.<p>For example, instead of bus routes, you can have a car come to pick you up at or near home at a scheduled time, or on demand, to take you to the train station to make a scheduled train on time. When the train arrives in the city you can have a similar car take you to the office. The cars can manage stopping to recharge by itself. The car routes can be updated and optimised based on demand or congestion, new routes can be added easier than bus routes. Software can manage your individual trips so you only have to make decisions based on time and cost. Deliveries can be done with automated cars and flying drones, and this can be adapted much quicker based on demand.
Here's a thought (disclaimer - IANAEE):<p>Could we charge electric vehicles while driving? Could we bury, say, some coils under the highways and have cars have a transformer on board to draw power from the road? That would remove the need for charging stations on a long-distance trips almost completely.
Tesla had a 250 million dollar operating loss in 2011 and 106 million last quarter. Add 700 million of debt onto that, and... I wonder how long they can keep up this kind of expansion.<p>This however, is really cool.
I think its interesting to hear people constantly challenging this technology.<p>Fist it was it couldn't be done. An electric car? No way.<p>Then Telsa Motors comes out with an electric sports car. No way! Too expensive! Top Gear made a mockery of the car. Not feasible, what happens when you run out of charge?<p>Then Tesla Motors figures out a way to create "re-fueling" stations for their cars. No way! 30 minutes to charge my car? WAY too long! Stupid.<p>Whether you know it or not, each step this company takes, it's answering every one of the doubts people have about this technology. Affordable completely electric cars are a lot closer than most people think.
I notice that they have multiple stations along the 5 between SF and LA, but nothing between Gilroy and Los Angeles, which is around 350 miles. Why not a stop in Santa Maria or similar?<p>I suspect the problem is no where isolated enough that they won't have to worry about large numbers of local residents choosing to just go to Supercharger station rather than charging at home. As an occasional use to make people comfortable with a Tesla (long trips are possible), this is probably well worth the money. But it's unlikely to sustainable if owners choose to forgo the home charger.
Come on, 30 minutes for a charge that'll get you just 180 miles? I just checked the 2012 Honda Civic specs[0], you can fill up with 13.2 gallons in 2 or 3 minutes, and that'll get you 13.2*32 mpg combined = 422 miles. There's no way this is gonna work unless the charging process is much faster or they swap batteries instead.<p>0: <a href="http://www.edmunds.com/honda/civic/2012/road-test-specs.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.edmunds.com/honda/civic/2012/road-test-specs.html</a>
It's this kind of hybrid (paid/free) model that solves the chicken and egg problem; the more common the fuel pumps, the easier it is for people to switch to electric.
When will they include a solar charger with the vehicle? "Buy a Tesla. Drive it for free, forever."<p>Add to that an engine that requires /a magnitude/ less maintenance than a gas one.
This is a very disruptive technology. I am wondering how much surface of solar panels (and "solar power") do they need to charge to answer to all the demand on a daily basis. And by extrapolation is this can be done widely (for buildings, universities, homes...)?<p>The oil industry should rethink its business model. And we should buy Tesla's stock right about now.
Why not a small trailer with battery packs for long trips? or if you don´t want-need to go green, it could go with an engine and a generator. You connect it to your car and that way you can add range in an easy way.
It´s also fast to swap at the e-station, just 2 min...
A lot more slides and details here:<p><a href="http://www.treehugger.com/cars/tesla-unveils-its-supercharger-network-drive-free-forever-sunlight.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.treehugger.com/cars/tesla-unveils-its-supercharge...</a>
The 30 minute charging time kind of sucks, but it's a small price to pay for owning a completely electric car, and I'm sure it's probably up there as far as improvements go on the priority list.
As a plugin prius owner. I find it a bit annoying that they don't just work with existing charging networks like ChargePoint to help expand the accessibility of electric car charging.
I think this conversation should be less about the electric vehicles and more about the idea of creating a decentralized solar grid. And one that will encourage existing gas station owners to do the same and bank on all that lost solar energy.