Tesla Model S poses for cameras Tesla has published some glossy shots of its upcoming Model S saloon caressing the tarmac. Model_S_001 Tesla's Chief Designer tearing up the tarmac The images are the first of the Model S to have been shot at speed and in natural light, circumstances that certainly seem to suit the car's aesthetics. The lucky so-and-so …
@yinn
Agreed on the BMW-alike, especially the lights.
Still very pretty though :o)
With the 300mile extended range battery I can see this being a nice package (assuming you have a garage to charge it in).
At least Tesla are pushing things forward (albeit a bit slowly) in the leccy car field rather than ponsing around with silly hybrids that don't actually get the efficiencies they claim.
Battery tech is advancing very quickly at the moment, and workable ulta-capacitors are about a decade away, so I think the range will become much less of an issue in the next few years. It will take a while, but I fully expect to be driving a leccy car in about 20-30 years time.
At this price, what problems are such cars supposed to be addressing? The manufacturer is simply trying to climb onto a hopefully profitable bandwagon, without seriously resolving the problems such cars should be addressing. We're not going to be solving any of our environmental problems with this kind of glossy overpriced bling.
Does not look tampered with at all (although that obviously does not prove it isn't).
If you've ever taken panning shots with not too fast shutter speeds (which is what that photo looks like, given the blur of the vegetation in the background) you'd see that. Specially since the car is sliding its back to the right, apparently (look at the corrective position of the front wheels).
Very good looking car, anyway, and decent specs overall, it seems.
PShop not necessary -- just a high F-Stop on the lens (large aperture) would give that narrow depth of field. And if the Tesla and the car carrying the photographer are both moving then, even with auto-stabilization, I'd want a fast shutter speed which would make a wide aperture necessary just to get enough light onto the film/CCD.
I'm not saying that PShop COULDN'T have been used, just that I don't believe that it's at all necessary and no shenanigans involved.
You don't take your sport coupe out to run 150 miles... If you do, you've got time to stop at a charging rig and wait 30 minutes for a top off. or if you've got the cash for a leccy sport coupe like this and 150 doesn't slice the bacon, then annother 10-15K or so for the 300 mile battery should not be that big of a deal. By the time this hits the streets, I'm sure we'll be talking SCiB or Li-Tit batteries, not LiIon, and charging to 80% in 15-30 minutes is not a bad deal if you can find a rapid charger on a commercial grid.
I spoke to one of the Tesla guys at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, and apparently they think the Roadster batteries will last 10 years or 200,000 miles. Now, if my maths are right, and you are doing close to 20K miles per year, then at 25mpg @ £5 per gallon, 200K miles would cost you £40K. If it costs around £4 to charge, and we assume a 100 mile range average, that is 2000 charges over the same period, so an electricity cost of £8K, so you can pay up to £32K for an electric car and get "free" motoring compared to a petrol car.
I think I know what my next car will be...
Air vents? Why not? I would imagine that anything that uses large amounts of power would need cooling, no matter how efficient the design or the source of the power.
As for Photoshopping, I can pretty much guarantee that every promotional photo of car you have seen has been retouched. When I was involved on the fringes of the industry many years ago I saw plenty of 10"x8" transparencies of cars that were hand retouched by talented airbrush artists (not a Photoshop monkey with an undo function). Sit it next to an identical original and you couldn't fail to be impressed by the skill involved.
> "why do designers think lecy cars need an air intake, or fake radiator grill?", etc.
Because electric motors (and even the batteries) generate heat during operation and need to be cooled.
Possibly they don't need as prominent an intake, but styling products for consumers can be a tricky business; making the car too unlike existing I.C.E. designs-- in physical appearance-- could turn more people off than it attracts.
am i the only one that is thinking that most leccy used to charge this car is going to come from Coal powered leccy stations,
really at the end of the day we are targeting alot of money on two possible ideas with the leccy car and hydrogen fuel cell, wouldn't it be worth all manufactorers sticking to one concept (either batter or Hydrogen) so then we can develope that idea faster,
also..ok i was to travel from London to inverness for a meeting distance is 456 Miles, Ah Bugger got to add 30 mins into my schduel if i travel by car to charge the dam battery, worse if i want to go further,
"also..ok i was to travel from London to inverness for a meeting distance is 456 Miles, Ah Bugger got to add 30 mins into my schduel if i travel by car to charge the dam battery, worse if i want to go further."
456 miles at 70mph would take you about 6 1/2 hours (assuming you could keep that speed up, didn't stop for traffic lights, roundabouts, traffic jams, inevitable roadworks etc). Google maps (London - Inverness) tells me its more like 560 miles and getting on for 10 hours anyway.
So... You plan to leave at, say, 8am, arrive 6pm (ish), and don't intend to eat or drink *anything*; or go to the bathroom ("John" for our American friends) whilst concentrating on driving for 10 hours solid. Okaaay.
Where have you been? It seems every one of el Reg's numerous articles on electric cars is accompanied by at least one comment pointing out that hydrogen is better - followed by a slew of replies explaining why it ain't so.
There's no point in rehashing those arguments yet again so I'll just point out there's a reason for the dearth of hydrogen car articles here. Something to do with an actual death of hydrogen-powered cars.
Hydrogen fans, face it. Hydrogen was a good idea about twenty years ago.Now with battery technology forging ahead and no viable solution to hydrogen's storage and efficiency problems in sight, the hydrogen car is deader than a very dead thing.
i think your missing the point really, in a world where were all about doing things quickly getting from A to B as fast as possible,) your saying people are going to swap there 5-10 min fill up Tank, speed off to a plug in for 30 mins and mess about, (lets be honest it doesn't take 30 mins to go to the bathroom and eat a sandwitch)
how ever you look at it, really its not going to suit the way of life we have at the moment, untill a much longer life battery comes out, or be able to handle faster charges ( or even better charge as you travel),
i mean ok this is still a fairly new concept and there is alot of advances we can still make, but comparing Hydrogen to batter, at the present moment i can see which one would win
Saying that it looks too much like an Aston / Massarati? How is that a bad thing!!! It's not like the easten clones that look like european cars but with all the goodness sucked out, it just looks very sexy.
Shame the price in NL is never going to be close to the 40K they quote in the article - at that price it's cheap compared to the competition. The only thing that bothers me is how to fill up on the road. If I can top up the charge in the same time as I can refil my petrol tank I'm sold. Wow, a couple of years ago I would never had thought I'd say that!
"why do designers think lecy cars need an air intake, or fake radiator grill?"
Your computer is an electric device that requires cooling. An electric car is an even bigger electric device that requires even more cooling! Head back to your high school physics class, and you'll learn that, amongst other things, moving parts and friction generate heat.
If you want to go london-inverness in a day then you need a slightly different electric vehicle - one that collects it's electricity as it goes from an overhead wire rather than having batteries. This means it can go at >150mph.
Of course to go that fast you would need some sort of automatic steering system, you could have sensors in the wheels that followed some sort of parallel metal track embedded in the road.
Perhaps in another 150 years they will invent something like that.
Is that with all the leccy gadgets turned off?
What about with aircon/stereo on (to provide the V8 soundtrack), or night driving with lights, windscreen wipers in the wet etc?
Still prefer to spend my cash on something that sounds like it's hurting at 8,500RPM and makes enough noise to scare the twunts out of the middle of the road as I trundle past a school at mach 2 at lunchtime while eating my lunch and texting the local HAPO's that I aint got my seatbelt on.
/me goes off to burn some trees
Though I understand the low drag design of a sportscar benefity electric cars, I still need a station wagon. Ideally with a hitch.
And triple ISOFIX. ;)
500km range is already fine with me, should geve ~350 on a quick charge. Would make me move my lazy ass (as recommended) if the refilling takes 20 minutes, so I can live with that one.
But were getting close.
Paris, because of ... cloase (Oh my, this was a cheap one...)
There's another reason, apart from cooling the electric motors (and liquid cooling is a necessity here).
The condensor for the aircon unit needs to sit somewhere in a stream of outside air too.
Finally, with a flow of air through the bay, you don't have to worry about other things in there that generate lesser amounts of heat (e.g. inverters) as you can just shove on a heatsink and the heat'll be carried away by the air stream.
Probably one of the best looking cars out there.
And Holzhausen is the ex lead designer at Mazda - so there is more than just a little shade of the mazda 6 and all the new mazda range come to think of it.
The reason why it looks like any other car? If they made it look too ultra-modern, no-one would buy it. I think this looks very much like a car that will sell by the bucketload assuming the price is right. However, they are just leading the pack - if this takes off, expect world+dog to release a viable electric car - but they would have to compete with the best aspects of the tesla to work.
Hopefully this will spur development of better, longer lasting and more powerful batteries (see the Sony press-release last week about their new Lithium batteries) much like Mobile phones and laptops have driven the battery market so far.
My first anonymous post:
A big sorry to all the photography experts on here: You don't photograph new cars any more. The pics are generated from CAD files and bunged into a background. That's why they all look so perfect these days. EVERY still you see now is done this way. Moving pics are probably 50:50 CG and real, moving rapidly CG. That way, there's never dirt, blemishes, misaligned panels, etc. Also, change a door handle after the images are created and the pic is updated immediately. Saves a mint.
We even have to do a significant amount of work generating noise, as the pictures look unreal as originally created - the human eye is too good at spotting the difference.
Anon for obvious reasons.
The only stunning thing about this is the utter blandness of it. The styling brings nothing new to the party whatsoever, and it looks particularly tired when placed next to the new XJ.
Performance and range hardly tear up any rule books either.
A con. An expensive con too. The Yanks can keep it.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
