Look inside ELON MUSK'S CAR! Tesla S wundervehicle has voom The Model S isn’t the car Tesla wants to sell. At an event in London over the weekend when the company handed over the first right-hand drive to UK customers – including mummy-pr0n purveyor EL "50 Shades of Grey" James – SpaceX bigwig Elon Musk said the car was “more expensive than we would like”, and that he would like to thank …
Yes, please do. If you enter their website, and take a look at their car animation opening the doors, you'll see that the doors are hinged to open UPWARDS, in tight spaces. The doors get barely wider than the rear view mirrors. The problem lies in opening that in low clearance, though, but most of parkings in the planet usually accommodate an extra 5 feet in height.
"Tesla X. Looks cool, but try doing that in an low clearance car park." There fixed it for you.
That's BAD wording, El Reg. Shame on you.
In a country not even building enough electricity generation capacity to keep the lights on, where's all the power going to come from, exactly? I'm all in favour of transitioning to electricity for transport, but there needs to be some really, really serious generating infrastructure put in place to enable this to be more than a rich man's hobby. And that doesn't mean sprinkling "Superchargers" about the place.
Current UK power consumption on ground transport equates to about 25% of the national grid (allowing for greater efficiency of pure electric drive). Of course, it will be a long time before we get anywhere near that, and will require some huge technological leaps to eliminate the obvious limitations of electric vehicles. It will almost certainly be more effective to develop a way of converting electricity into petrol (or some equivalently energy-dense liquid fuel).
The answer is in the difference between peak and off-peak demand. Economy 7 has been around for years to try to encourage people to use off-peak power because it's expensive to have capacity that isn't used, even more so if the government insists on adding renewables which are intermittent or cyclic in nature. EV charging with smart chargers can help even out the troughs, and it is even possible for them to help with the peaks too by feeding surplus energy (as defined by the driver, and at a profit to them) back into the grid.
Don't think this will be a concern for a long time, If you compare the potential power usage of the 20 planned Tesla supercharger locations with UK domestic demand, my back of fag packet (alright, I used Excel) with generous assumptions on usage says that the total annual Tesla power is about 0.2% of the UK domestic power. We shouldn't have to build too many more power stations to cope with that.
Average UK domestic electricity consumption 3,300 KWh (from Ofgen)
Number of homes in UK 25,000,000
Total domestic electricty comsumption 82,500 GWh
Tesla supercharger output 125 KW
Number of hours in year 8,766
Utilization per slot 75%
Annual consumption of a single slot 821,813 KWh
Number of slots per site 10
Number of Tesla supercharger sites 20
Total Tesla Consumption 164 GWh
%Increase in UK electricity consumption due to Tesla 0.20%
A clever idea, but there are some major stumbling blocks:
1. Assuming it takes many hours to recharge (and if it didn't you'd do the recharging in place), you need a lot more (50-100% depending on assumptions) batteries than cars. Someone will have to pay for all these extra batteries, which are a big part of the cost of an electric car. Which brings us to ...
2. You've just bought a shiny new electric BMW. After you've driven it a couple of hundred miles, how happy will you be for the battery (~50% of the value of the car) to be swapped for one from a 10-year-old rust-bucket Toyota?
3. You need to get all manufacturers to agree on a standard battery (or maybe two). This is not just an issue for an international standards committee (though anyone who's ever been involved with one knows how intractable they can be), but the form-factor of the battery determines the car shape to a great extent, and manufacturers like to differentiate their models.
some major stumbling blocks:
4. A 'swapping station" would need to have a large number of batteries on charge, ready to meet demand. To be cost-effective you're probably looking at swapping hundreds of batteries per day. That's way beyond charging with some 'spare" energy from renewables, you're looking at major grid infrastructure. Maybe if the swapping stations were in the Drax or Sizewell visitor carparks...
5. What would the planning folks say about a warehouse with 100+ full Tesla-style Li-Ion batteries stored? I doubt the local fire brigade would be keen to have it on their patch.
"That's way beyond charging with some 'spare" energy from renewables, you're looking at major grid infrastructure."
Well, it doesn't seem intractable. Just charge overnight when demand is low. The gap between daytime peak usage and nighttime low usage in any given conurbation is plenty enough to charge some batteries. This probably isn't the right site on which to proclaim a technical challenge as being somehow beyond the wit of man to address.
"5. What would the planning folks say about a warehouse with 100+ full Tesla-style Li-Ion batteries stored? I doubt the local fire brigade would be keen to have it on their patch"
Let's hope no-one tells them about petrol stations.
Just charge overnight when demand is low
The problem isn't quantity of power available, it's getting it to the charging point. At 125kW for a single "charging station", you could be looking at upwards of 2MW grid connection to each site. Easy to do in a technical sense, certainly, but not cheap and unlikely to be practical (or pretty) if you need one every 50 miles along a motorway, where you find conventional filling stations today.
Let's hope no-one tells them about petrol stations.
I think most fire brigades would much sooner deal with a fire in a petrol station than a fire in a warehouse full of charging Li-Ion batteries. Petrol tends not to spontaneously combust in storage, either.
"2. You've just bought a shiny new electric BMW. After you've driven it a couple of hundred miles, how happy will you be for the battery (~50% of the value of the car) to be swapped for one from a 10-year-old rust-bucket Toyota?"
Why would you care? You're buying the energy but leasing the container. If the battery doesn't perform properly, you take it back, get a refund and swap the battery. Forget about battery ownership - they're owned by the manufacturer.
Well to accomodate a potential for an additional 1.25MW peak load on a typical domestic distribution substation, you'll need some major, and expensive upgrades.
Mean load for a house is around 1.25kW - peaks at maybe 10kW if you've got the kettle, oven, tumble dryer and immersion heater on. A single Tesla on a "supercharger" is the equivalent of shoving 10-12 homes worth of peak demand on the grid - and at the lower distribution level our grid wasn't designed for it. I've heard estimations that more than 3 electric cars on your average domestic street is liable to knock it out as the substation simply can't cope. And it isn't like substation manufacturing is a high volume activity which can knock one up for easy installation with a weeks notice. Our grid is only slightly newer than those new-fangled victorian railways we still have lying around. It'll take decades to upgrade.
The fact that at an increase of 0.2% consumption for an infrastructure of 200 charging points which will service, what, 14000 vehicles? (10 cars a day charging themselves once a week) - you'll need to build 59x 1MW wind turbines at a generous 33% utilisation factor for that 164GWh requirement you have. List price ~ £1m/MW installed (2012) = £59,000,000, so a not insignificant £4200 per vehicle. (and they'll need replacing every 10 years.) That's just the capacity, let alone distribution and the rest of the critical infrastructure Not exactly cheap to save the planet, is it? Conventional fossil fuel is probably a quarter of that price, but even so, a 0.2% increase in UK consumption for vehicles which can be owned by 0.0002% of the population is actually still a rather concerning figure, if these things are going to become popular. If only our electrical infrastructure wasn't already on it's knees...
@Credas
Just install some wind turbines... All the magical power of sunshine and butterflies will provide you with all of the electricity you will ever need.
Isn't that right Ontario Canada?
Or maybe it gives you crumbling electrical infrastructure and a good portion of that 300 billion dollars of provincial debt.
Wind works great...where wind works great. We have scads of it out near Crow's Nest Pass in Alberta. Cheap and reliable power.
The problem isn't the peak demand wind. It's that we still have all this goddamned coal around. What we need to be doing is tearing out our coal plants and replacing them with Nuclear. Especially in Canada! We have proven reliable technology, the best engineers and craftsmen in the world and enough Uranium to last until we can start mining asteroids for more.
At least Ontario has the Bruce Power nuke plant. Bloody hippies got the natives all riled up when Bruce tried to build one up by Athabaska and they murdered the project. Bastards.
Nuclear and Hydro for base load and wind to supply peak. That's a decent setup and it's where the bloody money should be going.
'...normally goes there for a long period of time' - I know you said normally, but every time I go into Westfields I cannot wait to get out of it - usually less than 20 minutes for me.
But I sort of agree with you, maybe 'most people going into a shopping centre will be there for at least an hour'
Surely these will be at Motorway service stations, given the car will do 200+ miles on a charge (let's not get into that debate here though) the likelihood is you'll want to stop to empty your bladder at somewhere convenient and en route, if you are there for an hour rather than the preferred 2 minutes you'll buy no end of useless junk from the shops! Just can't see people popping into a shopping complex just to recharge - though maybe there are exceptions like Cribbs Causeway now I think about it..
I'm not sure making you stop for an hour where you used to stop for 2min is going to work, it seems far more sensible to install these in places people would choose to go to... but now people with such cars will always go to that place rather than competitors without the technology.
Maybe towns with Tesco and Sainsbury will see the two competing to win the charging spot.
There's one between my work and the commuter rail station that is clearly labeled as being for customers of a restaurant across the street. I know it is a sample of one, but it's the only one I've seen. It's a shame about Tesla not being interested in self-driving cars, though...
As a new car the Tesla S is an attractive proposition; the same money as a decently specced 5-series, slightly faster to 60, the same comfort and 'driving appeal' by all accounts and a couple of grand per year saving on fuel.
The free/bundled supercharger network is interesting too; even if one assumes that day-to-day charging will be at home or work. Even if it costs the same overall for commuting and other mundane journeys, the fact that it could be taken to Scotland for £10 worth of tyre wear is certainly appealing.
The real questions are used values, the life of the battery before replacement and the cost of that. Huge depreciation per se wouldn't kill it, you'd simply buy one a couple of years old for cheap; if the battery had sufficient economic life left in it. It doesn't take many thousands of pounds every 8 years in battery replacements to knock on the door of the per-mile cost of fuel for conventional cars.
Apparently there is a 600,000 mile Tesla engineering mule car which still has 70% battery life. Sorry, I can't find a proper source for that information though. 8 years is the warranty. If everything only lasted it's warranty life then an awful lots of cars would be in the scrapper. I think you can expect considerably more than 8 years life.
Don't gotget that Tesla has that 2 minute battery swappy thingy that swaps your battery - twice - faster than a bloke in a similarly sized motor can fill his tank. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY - so you may get an older battery or you may get a newer one.
I had heard of that, but I also heard it was a bit of vapourware to satisfy some California subsidy or another.
If it does come off, the only way it could work is if you rented the use of a battery from Tesla, so when swapped it would be in/out of their pool. How much would the rental cost? That's the big question.
Well, a British 13A socket delivers approx. 3kW. A 32A spur can deliver a little over 7kW. If you have your house wired for 3 phase you might get 50 so long as nobody else in your immediate vicinity wants to do it too. That's also expensive.
Assuming 80% conversion efficiency, you will obviously get less at the car plug.
If you're desperate and there isn't enough power in the road you could presumably drive a Nissan fast charger from a 60kVA rated Diesel generator, or of course just buy a Diesel car. And if you are worried about particulates, there are always hybrids.
Look, I'm sorry, I want EVs to succeed but currently Tesla is a manufacturer of look at me vehicles which is benefiting from Californian legislation. As Musk himself says, Li ion is the only game in town and it has downsides. I can't help thinking the real answer is to stop developing electric cars - the vehicle technology is good enough - and for governments to have a Manhattan Project on battery technology and means of distribution.
After all, the petrol car arose because this wonderfully easy to use liquid fuel was discovered that gave better speed and range than the horses and electric cars of the day. Benz didn't develop his car to run on redistilled Stolichnaya and then say "It'll be really great when we have a more economical fuel".
After all, the petrol car arose because this wonderfully easy to use liquid fuel was discovered
And let's not forget that cars only make up a small part of road traffic, so even if a new infrastructure is created for them, the old infrastructure will still have to be there for HGVs, etc. There's also little chance that air travel will ever be able to work on electricity, so some sort of liquid fuel will be required.
Overall it makes far more sense to develop renewable liquid fuels than to go back to the dead-end of battery-electric cars for mass transport.
"Well if a Tesla charges to full in an hour, and a leaf takes 8 to 12 hours then I would say much more rapidly."
Unfortunately these are not the facts (unless you opt to slow charge the Leaf and rapid charge the Tesla). Both take about the same time to charge, but you get more range in the Tesla.
I've got a Nissan Leaf 1st gen. and I can do a full charge at home (assuming the battery is almost empty) in ~5.5 hours. But then, I'm not using a three-pin socket, and I would guesstimate that most Leaf drivers don't either. Instead I use a 16 A EV charger. Gen. 2 Leafs can home charge at 32 A obviously halving the charge time.
But then, the whole statement is comparing apples and oranges. Nissan Leaf quick chargers are widespread (look at ecotricity's website) and can charge a Nissan Leaf from 0 to 80% in half an hour. Having said that, the battery capacity of a Leaf is lower than that of a Tesla.
and as for the actual cost of the electricity isn’t that great and it’s far better to build it into the price of the car., it sounds great until the government realize how much fuel duty and VAT they'd lose if everyone were to go electric. Then the supercharger sites all get hit with tax bills based on the number of cars charged per day, we'll see how long it stays "free".
For everyone in the UK to change to an electric car within one year, we would need to build more lithium ion batteries than have ever been made since they were invented.
Math:
Registered vehicles in the UK: 3.5x10^7 vehicles
Li-ion cells in each Tesla S: 7x10^3 cells
Worldwide Li-ion production: 6.6*10^8 cells
Years of current worldwide Li-ion production to equip UK with enough cells for cars: 371
Li-ion powered cars: for the rich only. Being smug about "saving the environment" whilst you use 10000 times the resources of the next guy to get to work - priceless.
"For everyone in the UK to change to an electric car within one year, we would need to build more lithium ion batteries than have ever been made since they were invented."
So what? If we all switched to space hoppers we'd need to build more space hoppers than have ever been made since they were invented.
Your maths is kind of wonky because increased demand shifts the economics of accessing the resources required to make Li-Ion batteries. It's bizarre to do some sums on a completely different transportation model than exists today and then presume that there wouldn't be a similar shift in production of the raw materials.
This may have gone over your head, I was using scientific notation in order to get across the magnitude of the issue at hand. If li-ion electric cars are the solution to our reliance on oil, then what is required in order to have a society pretty much like ours where transportation is a personal freedom.
You can clearly see from the numbers that producing enough li-ion batteries cheaply enough or in sufficient quantities to power the worlds vehicles. It is not like li-ion is a new, barely investigated or exploited technology that can be easily made cheaper to produce, it is already at scale, and producing the kind of cells that go in to a Tesla.
So, we have a technology, cool as it is, that is not going to "save the planet", it is not going to reduce vehicle emissions, since only a tiny proportion of upper middle class people and their delivery drivers will be driving one. Fine. The problem comes when these users insist that the rest of us pay for their toy with infrastructure investment in to the grid so that they can use it as they like.
This comes after the same people force us to pay for thousands of miles of new grid to get cables offshore and to the top of hills, which could have paid for every coal fired power station in the UK to be replaced with nuclear.
"While it takes seven hours to charge a Nissan Leaf or Citroën C-Zero on the three-pin plug systems they use, a Tesla S will charge from empty to full in an hour with a Supercharger."
Erm... I can fully charge my C-Zero in an hour too. Please don't write electric vehicle articles if you don't understand how they work - your level of knowledge is reminiscent of Stephen Fry trying to explain how GPS works by your car sending messages to satellites.
I've had a growing irrational hankering for a Model S now though the numbers don't stack up (at the moment, anyway)..
About £72k (85kW model, natch) for the car though a ~£3500 annual saving in running costs over the (current) XKR which is nice but does little to offset the rather stout purchase price. Presumably servicing would be much cheaper, too, as there's no valves/cylinders/coolant(?)/sparkplugs/oilfilters/etc to pay for or go wrong beyond four motors, brakes and aircon?
It'll have to remain a hankering for now...
The closest Jag is probably the XFR as it's a full five seater.
That'll take £65k from your wallet, so only a couple of years to make that back.
Depreciation - who knows - but it's a fair bet it'll be better than the expensive to run XFR.
Which is unfortunate because I'd like a Model S :)
I would think that most people who have need to drive through London or use on street parking would prefer something a bit smaller. It's also not hard to imagine the London Mayor deciding that people rich enough to afford a Model S are rich enough to pay for a congestion charge.
how about this, Mr Osbourne? I'm sure you wouldn't mind "tweaking" the law to "compensate" for "billions and billions" lost to the HM Revenue (to be lost / to be maybe lost) when people stop buying petrol and stop paying the fuel tax.
p.s. I don't have a car, not planning to get one, never had one.
"What? They're going to tax me feet??!!!"
...
"If you drive a car, I'll tax the street
If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat
If you get too cold I'll tax the heat
If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet"
'Taxman', George Harrison (The Beatles), 1966
"The 125kW Superchargers work much more rapidly than the existing charging infrastructure for electric cars. While it takes seven hours to charge a Nissan Leaf or Citroën C-Zero on the three-pin plug systems they use, a Tesla S will charge from empty to full in an hour with a Supercharger. Drivers can find which chargers are available – and many of the charger bays have eight or 12 spaces – from a phone app and remotely monitor the state of charge of their charging car while waiting."
The Nissan Leaf can charge at 50kW, which charges from empty in 30 minutes. Charging a Tesla on a domestic supply takes all night. A Leaf can charge in 4 hours using a wall point.
"Musk says that Tesla is happy to open up the charging network to rival electric car manufacturers with provisos that their cars can cope with the rapid rate of charge and that they agree to the business model of charging the manufacturer a per-user fee based on usage rather than charging drivers for usage."
Tesla Superchargers are proprietary, and no other manufacturers use their connectors. The EU has also agreed a "standard" charging mechanism which manufacturers will be encouraged to use - it isn't Tesla's.
"Musk says that using superchargers will be free for Tesla owners forever. He can do this because the cost is all in the infrastructure, the actual cost of the electricity isn’t that great and it’s far better to build it into the price of the car."
Depending on which model Tesla you buy, access to the Supercharger network is included or not. The lower spec models you have to pay for.
Come and live at my place for a week. Bring your Tesla.
If it works for the week - even with the reduced number of miles I tend to do these days - I'll line up for one of your 3rd-generation cars, because that's the sort of cash I'm prepared to spend on a vehicle.
I really, really want to be able to drive an electric vehicle, but I cannot work out how to make it practical when you live in a Victorian terrace :-(
Vic.
Those words invariably ring alarm bells for me.
He is front loading the cost of the product on the basis that usage (i.e. fuelling it) will be free to the user 'forever'. But we all know that 'forever' really means 'for as long as we offer the service' which in the case of a fairly radical model like this may be considerably earlier than the heat death of the universe, or even considerably earlier than when the wheels finally drop off the car. In fact, it might quite likely be well before the new car smell has worn off.
Even if they end up being hugely successful, the charging points start to regularly get full up and they start charging newer customers for each charge, they'll easily get shot of the early adopter freeloaders by subtly changing the charging specs to make v2 incompatible, or having 'premium' points for those who pay while the ones who're 'free forever' fight over a single broken and unmaintained charger at the other end of the country or whatever. Personally, I'd sooner pay per charge and know that there is a continued incentive for Tesla to continue to serve me, than pay upfront and know that it's all dead cost to them from that point onwards.
Hey Reg: Not only are the gull wings of the Model X designed to work well in a crowded car park, the Nissan LEAF and Citroen C-Zero (and Mitsubishi i-MiEV and Peugeot iON) are all capable of charging via CHAdeMO, which will bring them to 80% charge in approximately 30 minutes. Try researching your topic before writing.
That's all very well, but charging points are not going to be in that great supply. At busy times, the fuel pumps at service stations may have two people in the queue. What happens when the electric charging stations have a queue?
What's more, the number of chargers you can run in parallel is limited by the power available, while at least with fuel pumps the electrical power needed isn't really a problem. People are claiming wind power isn't viable because the wind doesn't always blow, but in the same way external events would cause large demand surges for EV charging, meaning that rapidly available surplus capacity would be needed if EV adoption was widespread. The next thing will be variable charge cost depending on demand.
A Scientific American study years ago suggested that EVs would work if they were charged at moderate rates overnight, thus using base generation efficiently. That means relatively few daytime chargers.
My company runs 3 forklifts on lead-acid batteries in our warehouses, with 2 massive 380V inverters that charge them at 48V / 100A.
With a bit of tinkering we could install the J1772 with straight-to-DC cabling (level 2 or 3?), and perhaps offer free EV parking to customers using Leafs (Leaves?), Zero Motorcyles or Teslas, all straight from regular, off-the-shelf gear.
I smell profit selling inverters and universal J1772 fixtures to places like supermarkets, apartment buildings and shopping centers, and changing our core business for the next 20 years.
48V at 100A is only 4.8kW. You need 10 times that per charging station.
I sneer at 48V 100A: that's SELV and just needs routine precautions. The 500V/100A or so you need for a credible electric car charger is a very different kettle of fish, get it wrong and it's instant death, though not instant enough for you not to notice.
that one was already funded by American political favors, government loans and "EV Credits". He needs a "new" car that is funded by European political favors, government loans and "EV Credits" by which he can profit again.
Isn't this pretty much what Tesla did when they tried to sell Roadster manufacturing capability before getting the State of California and the Feds to give them a sweet deal on NUMMI?
Are the European cars going to be built without Union labor too?
Firstly, thanks to everyone who posted corrections about the Nissan Leaf charging times, and the availability of our Electric Highway (which is capable of charging Nissan Leaf and others) in as little as 30 mins at many motorway services in the UK :)
Now, Tesla says that they can offer free supercharging to their customers forever, and they can do that because all the cost is in the infrastructure, the actual electricity cost isn't so great and they build the charging cost into the car. When we looked at it the cost was around £2,000 to add free supercharging to your Tesla order, or free if you have the top end car - but safe to presume the £2,000 is built into that.
We can see that the 60kW car does 2.9 miles to the kWh and the 85kWh does 2.6 (these are the most gas guzzling EVs on the planet BTW) - and against that you have £2,000 most of which is spent on infrastructure. If you assume infrastructure is free, that £2,000 would pay for about 44,000 miles of driving in the 85kW car at today's prices (assume 12p a kWh).
That's hardly a lifetimes driving - it's more like a couple of years worth - and that assume zero infrastructure cost, whereas Musk says it's the other way round, negligible energy cost.
Something clearly does not add up. Are Tesla making promises they won't later be able to keep?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
