Tesla Model S, Third Fire

[EEVblog]

So while there are solutions for wealthy enthusiasts, unfortunately as far as the "general public" and less than balmy environments are concerned, looks like we are still waiting.

Of course we are. They are still an emerging technology and at present only suited to those who have the money and the operation lifestyle that suits them.
This all seems pretty obvious to me, but it seems a lot of people expect something different?
Heck, look at how many decades it took to refine the regular ICE car to what we expect today in terms of features, performance, mileage, bang-per-buck, and refueling infrastructure etc.
FYI, and interesting factoid. I live in one of the most populous modern cities and suburbia in the world, and there is precisely ONE petrol station between my house in Baulkham Hills and the Sydney CBD (or my in-laws north of there) 32 km away, and that is currently closed for renovations.
And there are ZERO petrol stations between my place and my mums place 17km away, and also the gym and local shopping centre.
With any of these common trips I have to go very significantly out of my way to fill up. For my use, an electric cars would actually be more convenient to fill up than my petrol car.

[Kremmen]

Just to avoid confusion; i fully agree and my personal expectations are more or less in line to what you outline above. It will take time to build the infra, it didn't happen overnight for gas cars either.
At the same time it is a bit concerning that there hasn't been any significant breakthroughs in battery technology. Progress of course but no quantum leap that would solve the capacity question once and for all.

[free_electron]

--> The ex-factory cost of an electric car must be comparable to a gas car to gain any kind of general popularity.

We are in the stage right now of the 5000$ LCD tv. As production ramps up the demand for the most expensive part increases, making em cheaper. Tesla's battery is already less than 1/3 the cost of other EV  makers batteries. As volume increases this will go down
I nobody starts by making the 5000$ LCD tv we would would still be looking at huge vacuum bulbs.
To make this 5000$ tv attractive you gotta load it with some fancy stuff noone else has.
That is exactly what Tesla did. They packed the inital machine with so much new ideas it is attractive and the people who can afford to buy in that pricerange will pick it over the competition.

The next machine is a crossover as the polls and collected data have requested that. Yes it is the same price as the sedan, but both these cars are the trailblazers that will let the suppliers ramp up production of parts and bring the price down.

The model E (everyone) will be a smaller 4 door family car, with a 200 mile range (60kw pack) and targeted at the price of a kitted out Nissan Leaf (35 to 38k). This car will be shown at the detroit motorshow in 2015, 14 months away.

--> The car must have a practical endurance somehow comparable to a gas car.

My tesla can run 50 miles further then my gasoline car could. If i roll downhill i get a part of my expended energy back. Try that with a gasoline , or a fuel cell car !
Driving the Tesla at reasonable speeds (very hard, because that 'grin' when flooring it is so addictive) and you easily pull 300 to 320 miles out of the pack. Reasonable being : use cruise control so the cars computer can optimise, go 45 to 55mph max which is peak efficiency. Some guy pulled over 420 miles out of the pack.

.
--> The car must be rechargeable "reasonably" while you are on a long trip.

Battery swap. 90 seconds and you don't even need to get out of the car. Drive up, pay using credit card or smartphone, or your account, robot swaps the pack in 90 seconds. Costs the price of a tank of petrol required for same distance.
Tesla cars were designed for this from the get-go. First swap station is being installed right now.

--> Electric cars must function in all weather conditions similarly to a gas car.

Over1500 cars have been delivered to Norway. Work perfectly fine in extreme cold. Battery loss is not a problem. Plug the car into the parking stall 'engine block heater' and the battery is kept warm and topped off. No range loss. Without plugging in you lose 20%.
This technology will evolve and get better .

So while there are solutions for wealthy enthusiasts, unfortunately as far as the "general public"

Like i said , we are at the 5000$ LCD price point.
When those came out lots of people balked at that as well. 10 years later everybody has one, with a larger screen and more features and at a cheaper price than the old vacuum balloon box.

If nobody takes the risk of making the first electric car it will never happen.
The component prices are still high, mandating a premium car so it is attractive over competition in the same price bracket.

Ramp up production, parts prices drop, car prices drop.
If you strip all the gadgetry out off the tesla, use a standard 9 inch display with nav and audio, use a 60kw pack and make the car 3 feet shorter .. Specialist estimate it can be done at the 40k pricepoint with todays battery prices. Turn on the new panasonic fab next year (doubling the worlds liion cell production capacity, tesla placed an order for 2 billion cells for the next 3 years...) and the battery price will drop further , making such a car profitable and affordable.

At that point the supercharger network will be complete and the battery swap machines will be rolling out.

Mercedes has released their B class based on tesla battery and drive train. Toyota camry is in the works and rav-4 is available.

If other car makers hop on the tesla drivetrain bandwagon they can use the supercharger network and swap station. Of course this is all 'future music' and just like with lcd tv, many a manufacturer willl rise and fall, consolidate, buy parts from someone else or just throw in the towel and rebadge.
Most brand name tv's these days use samsung panels. Buy a sony and it has a samsung panel.

The same could happen to car makers. Brands will keep on going. But they will buy tesla drivetrains. This is already so with ICE cars. Many a Mazda uses a renault motor. There are other brands that don't make the motor anymore, they buy it from a competitor or a dedicated motor supplier

[Kremmen]

As i said i am not arguing against electrical cars at all. You are of course correct in that this is the early days and the price trend is downwards. Barring totally unforeseen issues it will happen because fossil fuels will only get more expensive until we reach the balance point after which the floodgates for electric vehicles open, so to say.
My post was just my 2 eurocents into the discussion. At the same time i do suspect it will be some time before we see widespread electric car usage in the cold climates. I won't start arguing with the Norwegians since they have their share of freezing winters. Nevertheless, i am not sure if you have a realistic picture what it is like in the cold and dark midwinter and your everyday activities are critically dependent on the availability of reliable transport. That by the way is the reason why all these car mfgs crowd into Swedish and Finnish Lapland to do the winter endurance tests. If you mean to sell to the northern markets then you need to demonstrate that your merchandise will work there. Not all do by a long shot. It will be interesting to read the results when the electric cars join the competition.
OK, that is not the scenario for which these vehicles are primarily developed now and it should not stop the mfgs from doing it. Like you said, you can only reach the goal if you start the race in the first place. More than arguing against, this is just my personal ventilation around the concept of electric propulsion.

[Robomeds]

I might be called a liar for this but it seems there is doubt the battery pack model will see the light of day.
http://www.teslamotors.com/en_GB/forum/forums/its-december-wheres-battery-swap
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/21/the-tesla-battery-swap-is-the-hoax-of-the-year/
That doesn't mean the car is a failure but there was some hype their that was not followed with a viable product.  It will be interesting to see what next year's profits look like since they will have much higher volumes but it appears lower EV credits per car. 

[tom66]

Myself I am a skeptic about the pack swap... it's fast but seems like it will be very expensive and may just help Tesla boost ZEV credits. The Tesla definitely has the support but I think it will be too expensive to do a nationwide roll out. And there's little point if you only have a few stations.

[Rufus]

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/21/the-tesla-battery-swap-is-the-hoax-of-the-year/

I thought the Tesla battery swap video looked like a scam, thought they were only scamming potential customers not maybe $150 million from tax payers as well.

[nctnico]

Maybe free_electron could look under his Tesla and discover how the battery swap would work. I guess there have to be some obvious elements as centre holes, release latches, etc.

[echen1024]

Maybe free_electron could look under his Tesla and discover how the battery swap would work. I guess there have to be some obvious elements as centre holes, release latches, etc.

Maybe he could do a teardown of his tesla? 

[tom66]

I'm not sure the coolant that's mentioned by others is a big problem. The Tesla has various valves that could activate to prevent coolant entering certain loops, the series/parallel mode for example.

Extra coolant could be pumped into a tank or added after the battery is replaced.

As it stands, each swap station would likely need at least 20 batteries plus (maybe) an on-station attendant, and complicated robotics. The attendant is probably needed because such a complicated robot will be subject to environmental damage, pebbles, stones, leaks, spills, etc. It needs regular maintenance and inspection.

There's the additional complexity of 85kWh and 60kWh packs -- plus what do you do about future vehicles using 50kWh or so  pack sizes? It's just too expensive for what it offers. If it costs $500k to build the station plus $500k in batteries then you need to do 16,000 swaps a year to break even (at stated $60 swap cost.)

High power DC charging (120kW+) with longer range batteries solves the problem... 350 to 400 miles and a 20 minute charge is completely reasonable... I certainly could not keep driving that long without a stop. 200~250 is part the way there and suitable for most people.

[Kremmen]

Assuming the charging takes 20 min@120 kW then one charging station can do 3 cars per hour while sustaining 120 kW pull from the power grid. Further assuming an "average" service station might serve what - say 60 cars per hour during peak business hours. That would be one car per minute. Assuming 5 pumps that would be 12 cars per pump per hour. To me it sounds reasonable, at least for some locations. Getting the same performance from the charging stations would require 20 stations. At 120kW per station that would come to 2.4 MW of sustained power during the peak time. A rather hefty figure and one no current power grid is going to come close to providing at premises like a gas station. That alone will be a serious upgrade of support infra in terms of money and effort. Of course YMMV but even a modest charge station would need a serious upgrade in its power feed. Just a thought.

[M. András]

well here the utility companies and grid owners charge a pretty nice amount of money for "grid upgrade and maintance" so i wont pity them for forcing them to do what they charge for

[tom66]

The difference with EVs -- most people charge at home. High power charging stations are for road trips only -- and should remain so, outside of cities. Road trips are something that for most is done only occasionally. Also the charging peaks at around 120kW but averages closer to 90kW, not that it makes much difference in your scenario.

With nearly 21,000 Model S shipped Tesla has used 2.1GWh in a year for the US supercharger network. This is around 100kWh per vehicle. If they charge at 120kW and take 35 minutes total, this means that on average the supercharger is used for less than ~70 minutes per year for each vehicle, or a total charger-minute rate of 1.5 million minutes for all vehicles. There are plans for a roll out of 200 superchargers, but for now there are about 35 each with around 4~6 charging bays, meaning on average each bay is occupied for 8,571 total minutes a year, out of a total of 525,000 minutes available.

This is of course an average but shows how 200 superchargers could likely adequately serve 200,000 vehicles, if the usage rate stays similar. I expect the rate to increase as car cost falls, as a different demographic will be targeted.

There was a poster a while back that claimed in the UK if everyone had an EV the total energy usage would increase by approx 1/4. This is a lot, but is a good incentive to upgrade our ageing grid in places where it is desperately needed.

[Kremmen]

well here the utility companies and grid owners charge a pretty nice amount of money for "grid upgrade and maintance" so i wont pity them for forcing them to do what they charge for

Tell me about it. This is the time of year we really experience the joys of rural life around here. Looks like year by year the xmas storms are getting worse. Much of Finland is still supplied by air lines going thru forests. The cheapskate power companies will do minimum maintenance only on the powerline streets and you regularly get outages due to falling trees when weather gets heavy. Recently due to public pressure they have been forced to expedite the plans of ground cabling but at the current prices? Not a chance - every company wants more dough for providing the service they have committed to. Fortum (some EU members will recognize the name) even pulled out altogether from Finland because they could not maintain their extortionist profit margins when finally forced to do something for the money they collected. All the worse for us the captive clientele since now the owners will be like some totally faceless Chinese conglomerate that is even less interested in actually providing. I have a hard time believing i'm actually saying this but please nationalize the whole shit and provide it as a state owned service. Like it used to be in the good old days. Can't be any worse...

[nctnico]

There was a poster a while back that claimed in the UK if everyone had an EV the total energy usage would increase by approx 1/4. This is a lot, but is a good incentive to upgrade our ageing grid in places where it is desperately needed.

Expect to pay for that! At home charging won't be a solution for a significant number of people when EVs are the same price as an ICE car. It depends a bit on what country you live in. In the NL I expect the majority of the people needing to rely on super chargers to get their EVs charged. Besides that you need to think about where the cars are when the sun is shining. Most of the cars will be parked at the place where people work. It makes sense to implement 'slow' charging solutions at industrial and office areas so the use of solar (and wind) can be maximised and the EV batteries don't suffer too much from repeated fast charging.

About the battery swap: coolant doesn't need to be a problem when using non-spill couplings. The replacement battery pack has coolant inside just like the one which comes from the car. IMHO Tesla will have a huge legal problem if it turns out automated battery swapping is not possible.

[lemmegraphdat]

Just tell him Native Americans are the real Americans.  The rest of us are immigrants or decedents of immigrants.

 I don't remember exactly what I said but I blew a gasket on both occasions. Especially over the stupid racist comment. I can put up with a lot of stupidity and make jokes but that kind of thoughtless idiocy just blows my mind.

[nctnico]

The U.S. Energy Information Administration has released their outlook a few days ago.
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/0383%282013%29.pdf

On page 60 you can read that it is expected that between now and 2040 the US will use 4% less fossil fuels. To be honest I'm a bit stumped by this low number.

In Europe they aren't very optimistic either:
http://ec.europa.eu/energy/observatory/trends_2030/doc/trends_to_2050_update_2013.pdf

On page 42 they show the projected fuels and type of cars. It seems I'll be driving in ICE based cars powered by mostly fossil fuels until I die.

[tom66]

I predict that when the first cheap, real world 400~500 mile EV is released there will be a similar PR movement to the health effects of cigarettes, but instead by oil companies. Targets would be:

- EVs are not green
- oil is greener / carbon offsetting
- AGW "has not been shown to be true"
- etc.

The falling demand of oil should reduce the price of it, which may slow EV adoption.  Oil will still be around for older cars, and classic cars, and likely for very long distance vehicles, backup power generation and speciality applications. And of course, aircraft will still burn fuel, until (or unless) a better alternative is found.

The falling cost of oil might lead more power plants to be built which burn oil, however poor that may be for overall emissions.

However, like any industry, it will certainly not die overnight... I look to a more optimistic "half vehicles by 2050" outcome myself. That being said, some technologies have replaced others shockingly fast. I can't think of a single person I know that still has a CRT TV, even though they only stopped production around 5 years ago.

One of the reasons oil companies support hydrogen is it keeps them in control of the market. There's only a few large corporations that extract and sell oil. They can keep prices high by market manipulation. The middle east also has great influence on the market, which gives great political power to a few individuals in certain countries. With electricity, it's possible to go off the grid, and countries can become less dependent on just one country. Even on the grid, there are hundreds of electricity supply companies, and countries continuously buy and sell electricity between themselves as supply and demand changes. Electricity is one of the few commodities that can't easily be stored, it is produced and consumed almost immediately. This means that squandering it is a lot harder, too, unlike with oil, which can be stockpiled.

[nctnico]

It took flat screens (plasma screens where invented in the 1930's) over 60 years to become popular. I wouldn't call that shockingly fast. More like 'introduced when the market was ready'.

You are also overestimating Europe's dependance on the middle east for oil and gas :
http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/net-energy-import-dependency/net-energy-import-dependency-assessment-2

Only a minor amount of fuel is imported from the middle east.
A similar picture can be found for the US (which imports most from Canada, Mexico and Venezuela).

[SgtRock]

Dear Tom:

There's only a few large corporations that extract and sell oil. They can keep prices high by market manipulation.

--With respect, I do not think you can prove that one. I will admit that there is a lot more proof of AGW than the above statement, and the proposition that doubling UK electric bills for working people is going to have any practical effect on GW.

--Thanks again for helping everyone with their TVs.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"
Carl Sagan 1934-1996

Best Regards
Clear Ether

[tom66]

An aside: Plasma TV technology was invented in 1963, not 1930, unless you're talking about neon lamps. DC plasma panels were available in the early 80's, and were used in military applications, but they were impractical as they were resistively driven, making them ridiculously inefficient, low brightness and required very expensive electronics. First AC panels demonstrated in early 90's (efficiency much greater, around 3~4%, and easier to make in small sizes) and Fujitsu released a 42" WVGA panel in 1997 for around $25,000.  However, these were generally very prototype-like and had poor reliability and picture quality. A Dr. Larry Weber can be thanked for the modern AC PDP with various inventions such as the resonant energy recovery circuit which made plasmas practical. Panasonic hired him  (and his company PlasmaCo) to design the first line up of panels in 1996 to be released in 2001. They are a lot newer than people think!

My previous statement on extraction companies refers to those with a large market share, such as BP, Exxon, Shell. There are many more companies with only a few wells each but the larger companies control the majority of the market share.

[free_electron]

It took flat screens (plasma screens where invented in the 1930's) over 60 years to become popular. I wouldn't call that shockingly fast. More like 'introduced when the market was ready'.

The same can be said for LCD and LED. Lcd has been around since the 40's as well. Led's were invented even arlier.

The fact of the matter is: plasma tv's started appearing in the late 90's in volume in big stores like best buy and circuitcity and compusa. One or two years later the large screen LCD followed in mid 2000 the oled came out and tanked. Now they are trying a relaunch with a huge 55 inch curved oled

[tom66]

The LED was invented in the 1962, though LED like effects were noticed before then in diodes.  In 1964 the first practical LCD was demonstrated (DC-bias type) but it took Sharp until about 2001 to release a practical 20" colour panel costing nearly $5,000 and boasting a massive 640x480 pixel resolution.

OLED never bombed. You could be thinking of FED or SED... It's just too expensive to make. It's still too expensive to make. And it's hard to make non-curved OLED. LG has demonstrated a prototype flat OLED, but it costs more than the curved ones. And it uses more power than an equivalent LED TV for all but darkest content. So that's a step in the right direction. Still a while to go...

@free Do you know if the Tesla uses TN LCD or VA LCD for dashboard and touchscreen LCD? You can see if TN LCD is used because it is not visible off axis. VA is visible from every angle.  Some pictures I saw of the dashboard LCD showed poor off axis performance but I wasn't sure if that was just a camera effect.

[echen1024]

It is a VA panel. The color is pretty good and so are the viewing angles.

[tom66]

Good. That's what I would expect. The price difference between TN and VA panels now is small. It amazes me laptop manufacturers keep using it.