Court rejects Tesla’s latest libel spat with Top Gear Tesla's on-going libel case with the BBC over a negative portrayal of its Roadster electric sports car on Top Gear suffered another setback when the courts ruled that it could not amend its claim. "We are pleased Mr Justice Tugendhat has ruled in favour of the BBC on both the issues before the court, first in striking out …
ISTR that batteryuniversity was not too bad a site, but haven't seen it in 3 years.
As for cadmium, don't know where you live, but the Europeans don't like it that much, and it's devilishly hard to find these days, despite being a much better chemistry for some uses, and copes better with lots of abuse. (However it's not very nice, and China did shut-down permanantly one Panasonic battery plant because their safety record was suspect).
As for calibration, and fully discharging; Anything with a "fuel gauge" needs to know the capacity of the battery to be able to tell you how much is left. The only way it really knows this for sure, is to monitor a complete discharge to full cycle. When you run your laptop completely flat, the battery monitor counts the number of coulombs into the battery to know it's capacity and then counts them out as you use it to know how many are left. If you never discharge it completely, it never knows how much the battery has aged, and may tell you that you have 40% time remaining, when in reality its 0%.
This whole debacle says far more about the prevailing American culture of corporate spin control (particularly techie companies with a Northern Californian bent) than it does about the merits of electric cars. In the US and most of the European media, Tesla could have huffed and puffed and bullied their way to a retraction, because ultimately, advertising dollars are at stake. However, "due to the unique way the BBC is funded", Top Gear is under far less pressure to toe the commercial line. A good example of that is the way Clarkson slagged off a certain overblown Italian supercar on this week's episode; you won't find that level of candour in any of the commercial media because it get's jumped on by the PRs pretty damn quick (look up a journalist called Chris Harris for the inside, er...spin on this).
Clarkson and co can't be controlled, and long may it continue frankly.
I've heard it said that nearly all car magazines are on back handers. Not sure about that, but some of them are definitely "committed" to certain brands. Pick up a copy and count the number of pictures in the first 5 or 10 pages. If 90% are of the same brand or two, you are reading xxx. If you can be bothered, count the rest of the pics in the mag. It returns to random after the first 10 pages.
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Buy some Jerry Cans, fill them with gasoline, and keep them at home.
Never, never ever, refuel your car except at home from the aforementioned Jerry Cans.
Never, never ever, refuel your car's gas tank above one-eighth of full.
Try it for a year and see if you like it.
True the options are *limited* but just consider.
Fuel cells. Yes you need a reactant deliver infrastructure but so what? One of those already exists. My *ideal* option would be to use *sugars*, eliminating the conversion to Ethanol or Hydrogen and allow sourcing from any sort of plant.
Kinetic energy storage. High speed flywheels can be pretty light weight and store substantial energy. Vacuum housing and *very * strong magnets have been known since the early 80s.
The issue is that the best form factors for *conventional* batteries are not those of flywheel systems.
Just a thought.
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