Tesla touts battery that turns a Model S into 'third fastest ever' car Tesla has launched a new power pack that it claims will make its Model S sedan the third fastest road car ever produced. The electric car company announced the release of a new 100kWh battery that it claims will accelerate its highest-end Model S car from 0-60 in just 2.5 seconds and 0-100 in 2.7 seconds. That puts it just …
"The electric car company announced the release of a new 100kWh battery that it claims will accelerate its highest-end Model S car from 0-60 in just 2.5 seconds and 0-100 in 2.7 seconds."
Um, I'm pretty sure that's bordering on worlds-fastest-strictly-speaking-street-legal-but-really-a-drag-car fast (IE Bob Lutzs stuff, or Red Victor), not production car fast. I'm not even sure where that number came from.
Come on Kieran, which numbers did you transpose in the copy? ;-)
Steven R
Also, Tesla used to use Motor Trend to verify acceleration, and may still do so, which means the quoted 0-100kph time would be about the same as the actual stationary-60mph time:
"...the Motor Trend standard excludes the first 28 cm of rollout. Including this rollout adds approximately 0.2 seconds to the acceleration."
Tesla All Wheel Drive (Dual Motor) Power and Torque Specifications
JB Straubel, Chief Technical Officer, September 21, 2015
OTOH I've seen a Model X P90D Ludicrous outdrag a Challenger SRT Hellcat from stationary, but also an Audi RS6 flip that result from a 5mph rolling start. Real-world experiences with the new battery pack will no doubt mean that very few cars will keep up, even if the ultimate acceleration [*] isn't always available because of things like the battery being lower than a certain capacity (I heard this was 70%), or that it hasn't been pre-warmed as part of the car's internal preparation when activating Ludicrous mode...
[*] The limit on acceleration on the Tesla is down to a few things, such as adjusting the max power sent through the front motor to prevent wheelspin as the car bias shifts rearwards during sudden acceleration, and the max current draw from the battery. From the same link above: "With the shaft horsepower coming out of the motors the situation is not always as simple as front + rear. As we have pushed the combined motor horsepower higher and higher, the amount of times where the battery chemical horsepower is lower than the combined motor horsepower has increased." Tesla have improved the battery, so seem to have raised (if not yet removed) one of the limits on the maximum amount of energy they can pour through the motors.
Musk also noted that although tweaks and improvements in battery technology had enabled the latest super-powerful battery, "we are quite close to theoretical limit."
That's unfortunate. The thing we really, really need to make electric cars attractive to the mainstream isn't face-ripping acceleration (which is a given with the torque characteristics of electric motors) but battery capacity and charge time. Where's the advance in battery technology going to come from?
Battery capacity is a seriously difficult intertwined chemistry/physics problem. There's still a ton of unknown things going on in a battery.
Believe me, considering the payoff, a lot of companies and R&D people are working on it.
That's why you see all the super-hyped "researchers discover new superbattery" news articles where it always says "should go into production in 5-10 years" (i.e. never) and you never hear about it again.
Edit: my feeling is that people should work on making current batteries cheaper (which is what Musk is doing with the Gigafactory) which will make electric compete with gas, and then that will drive more demand for charging station infrastructure.
My electric bike cost US$18K and 85% of that was the battery. It's a hell of a performance machine and I do actually get 80+ miles out of it going 70mph, which is great considering how un-aerodynamic a person on a motorcycle is. It should cost $12K max though, to compete with gas.
My FJR takes $16 in gas every 2 weeks. My SR takes about $1.20 in electricity to go the same distance and I don't have to search for hippie-free non-ethanol gas.
That's why you see all the super-hyped "researchers discover new superbattery" news articles where it always says "should go into production in 5-10 years" (i.e. never) and you never hear about it again.
MIT have recently announced that their lithium metal battery should be in production for phones by next year and offers an apparent doubling of volumetric energy density, and will be going into production for drone batteries this year. Search on MIT Solidenergy.
Where's the advance in battery technology going to come from?
If I knew that, I think I'd be quite rich by now....
I think that patience is the key. As mentioned, a lot of people are working on this.
The thing is, if you look back a few years, most technologies were reported as hitting their "limit", and now we regularly go beyond those limits.
From the IT sphere, I can remember articles in the early 90's in BYTE magazine, which said, quite authoritatively, that a CD-ROM faster that 8-speed was impossible, and that there was simply no way to get more than 33kbps per second of data down the cheap and nasty copper wire phone lines that went to domestic premises.
Of course, there's no reason to suppose that the answer is a battery as we think of them now. You still need a portable energy store, but the one we all end up using in 50 years time may bear no relationship to the chemical-based ones we have now.
Lithium ion batteries are as Musk points out, close to as good as they ever will be,.
Lithium air is the only technology that can theoretically do better, but its fraught with practical problems - especially safety.
What we really need is a safe way to turn a match head of plutonium into 100,000 miles of electricity...
Do we need much more improvement? As you point out screaming to 100mph in the blink of an eye is pretty pointless in the long run.
!00KWh is not bad and a lighter less flash car is going to have a far more usable range. And then we come to the idea of self drive car pools. When you get to a hundred thousand of these then you've got most of the urban-urban travel covered - I personally dont give a shit what my taxi looks like and most people will be happy with wifi and a window and a comfy seat and a smooth drive.
Musk is selling to the movers and shakers but with luck this technology will drip down. Still not sure about that tube thingy though.
I don't doubt that Tesla have increased the battery capacity from 90Kwh (?) to 100kWh, which will have increased the all-up weight by ~50kg. This will certainly extend the range, but how does it improve the acceleration? I assume they must have upped the power rating of the drive motors, but the article doesn't mention it.
Tesla limits the power draw of the P90D because the motors are capable of pulling more than the battery can provide. If the battery can provide 10KWh more then they can can set a new higher upper limit on the effective combined front/rear motor power with the P100D upgrade. I've linked a source from Tesla in a comment further up here.
10 kWh is energy, for quicker acceleration you need more power not necessarily energy. In fact 10 kWh is about one liter of diesel fuel but we know adding another liter to the tank won't make a car quicker.
The difference in power output is likely coming from reduced internal resistance and perhaps enhanced thermal management. The reduced internal resistance will give more power and have the added benefit of bumping up the overall capacity. Consider that if the internal I2R losses are reduced it will contribute to slower heating and its associated increase in resistance allowing more power to be pulled from the cells. Now since there are only so many joules stored in the cells the slower heating means you aren't losing as many of them to heat which ups the capacity.
Batteries have a maximum current rating too - usually 'a lot.' Exceeding this rating will cause internal damage.
This is why a car battery and a UPS battery are not interchangable, even though both are 12V lead-acids. The car battery is designed for lots-o-amps to run the starter motor, but would be killed by prolonged discharge. The UPS battery can handle discharge, but would likely catch fire if you tried to run the starter motor off of it, if it worked at all. Li-ion have a similar issue, though in their case the chemical problem is more due to heat buildup and electrolyte breakdown - which still translates into 'battery go boom' if you overload it.
You are aware of where the batteries in this thing are right?
I.e. Right at the very bottom of the car. As in all of the weight is at the cars lowest point. This generally makes for a car being pretty good in the corners having all of the weight at the bottom. They also have fully independent suspension, again good for keeping a car on the road, as well as all wheel drive, which considering how high tech the rest of the car is, wouldn't surprise me at all to find it'd been programmed with torque vectoring (different amounts of force to each wheel to increase turning force, originally developed for rallying and is standard kit on a mitsubishi evo car since the early noughties).
Just as a few observations, based off some assumptions I know but basic physics alone says it should corner well.
There is no getting away from weight being a problem round corners. If you have a 2 ton mass full of energy then getting it to change direction is much much harder than if you have 850kg regardless of where you put most of the mass.
Having the low CofG from the battery in the floor helps with the manners in the corners, and puts some force down of the tyre contact points, but that large mass still wants to keep going straight.
But, what amuses me about these cars is that they are road cars, and road cars are about safety and efficiency, not about high cornering speeds and facebending acceleration off the line (people who test their 0-60 times in public always look like complete dickheads to everyone else).
The Tesla has some excellent safety engineering (though they are ****ing expensive to repari), but we hear very little about that.
"But, what amuses me about these cars is that they are road cars, and road cars are about safety and efficiency, not about high cornering speeds and facebending acceleration off the line (people who test their 0-60 times in public always look like complete dickheads to everyone else)."
Golf car park bragging rights...
>> There is no getting away from weight being a problem round corners. If you have a 2 ton mass full of energy then getting it to change direction is much much harder than if you have 850kg regardless of where you put most of the mass. <<
Surely a lighter car will put less force through the tyres onto the road, so they won't be able to transmit as much lateral force before they skid, when you corner. So your light car will be skidding all over the place rather than going around a corner.
Or on the other hand....
Jeremy Clarkson takes it around the track explaining it to us, then lets the Stig time a lap.
Then I'll be impressed.
Of course, I would also be impressed if I can take such a vehicle from here in sillycon valley down to the LA area (I have in-laws there) without re-fueling. The distance is over 300 miles. I currently do it quite easily in my wonderful SUV. Oh, and charge it up in the time it takes me to fill the tank (around 15 minutes most of the time!).
Sorry, not impressed now.
Do you often drive over 300 miles non-stop to visit the in-laws and then leave again 15 minutes later? You're tough to please if an EV with a range (380 miles for the P100D) that accommodates probably 99% of trips doesn't impress you yet! Facetiousness aside, what it does need is for prices to come down dramatically and widespread fast charging infrastructure.
I'll wait until Jeremy Clarkson takes it around the track explaining it to us, then lets the Stig time a lap.Then I'll be impressed.
You'll probably be waiting a while for Clarkson to return to the BBC...
@werdsmith said:
"I was replying to this comment:
You'll probably be waiting a while for Clarkson to return to the BBC
No mention of Stig there."
I was referencing this comment:
"Jeremy Clarkson takes it around the track explaining it to us, then lets the Stig time a lap.
Then I'll be impressed."
No mention of you there.
""accommodates probably 99% of trips"
And, of course, you can afford to buy a second car for that other 1%."
If you can afford a Tesla in the first place, yes you can. That's pretty much the whole point and is exactly what Musk is quoted as saying here - these are expensive toys for rich people, and while they're pretty damn impressive they're certainly not intended to be useful for everyone in all situations. If you can afford one, you can also afford to deal with its problems. If you can't afford one, its problems are not your problems.
So, going from the text on the article image, it doesn't seem too great a stretch to go from P100D to Plood, which means the Model X would be Xplood... Then again, if one includes the L for Ludicrous and omits the model, one arrives as Ploodl - will it learn to fetch ones slippers and the morning paper?-)
If I'm crossing the street in front of a Dodge Hellcat I will maybe have a chance because I will hear the roar and can run for the curb. Does the Tesla give a warning to pedestrians when doing this fast 0-60 thing? If not, can we have someone run ahead of the car while waving a flag to warn horses, dogs, and pedestrians? It takes me a lot longer than 2.5 seconds to cross the street.
While I might be flamed for the comments, think about what Telsa has accomplished.
1. P90D - Ludicrous speed at 2.8sec, 0 to 100kph. Cost $120,000 reasonably equipped. The only cars that can do that are a Porsche 918 and Bugatti Veyron, at close to $2M.
2. Range is getting close to 300 miles. Find a 30 minute supercharger and you are at a real world family gas stop, bathroom and snack fill up at the same time delay on the trip.
I personally regret my 2011 Mercedes E550 purchase and cannot wait for my car. A Tesla.
Quote
Find a 30 minute supercharger
Good luck with that one matey. My nearest one is 50+ miles round trip.
So how useful is a Tesla to me?
Useless.
In time and when governments bang the collective heads of the EV makers together and enforce common EV charging plugs and cables they will be a niche market. Current Tesla's are toys for the rich not us common plebs. PErhaps this mystical Model 3 will change that? Until it starts to ship it is nowt more than hot-air.
I drive a Plug-in Hybrid that gets charged from the Electricity generated on my Roof and get 20-25 miles range from it. Perfect for around town. Speaking of which, there is one EV charging point in the town outside the town hall. Free to use the leccy but £1.50/hour parking (limit 2 hours). more expensive than any other car park in town. Go figure.
I drive a Plug-in Hybrid that gets charged from the Electricity generated on my Roof and get 20-25 miles range from it.
If your roof so important that it needs to be capitalised? :)
Joking aside, that is the exact situation I'm wondering about - just how many solar panels do you need to install to charge a Tesla from empty in one night? It would be an interesting metric.
I'm quite interested in the Model X, especially with this new battery. Not so much for acceleration (I've had plenty of powerful cars), but for city and around-city use it is always better to have a good range margin. That said, we can probably afford to invest in a supercharger installation - purely as a client service, of course :).
Joking aside, that is the exact situation I'm wondering about - just how many solar panels do you need to install to charge a Tesla from empty in one night? It would be an interesting metric.
Very roughly... Tesla is 100KWh, you never run them to zilch so I'm going to assume when you've used 70% of that the car is 'flat' (the reason for this choice will become clear in a moment). There are charging losses and I'm going to use 10% as a number plucked out of thin air. Therefore your source needs to deliver 77KWh to recharge your Tesla.
The most appropriate source for overnight charging is obviously a, or rather several, PowerWalls. These are 10KWH boilerplate but to get any reasonable life out of them you need to use no more than 7KWh (the above is clear now I hope). Therefore you need 11 PowerWalls.
Each PowerWall needs charging and again assuming 10% loss the source for that needs to deliver 7.7KWh. The first link below says a typical solar panel can deliver about 400Wh per average day. Rounding up for easy numbers that's 20 panels per PowerWall and 220 panels per Tesla.
That's pretty obviously beyond the size of most rooftops so I'll assume installation in a field. The panel in the second link is 670x1015mm, call it a meter square, double it to allow row spacing and you need an area 21 meters per side in the US, at a guess double that in the southern England or in Scotland, Scotland.
http://www.windynation.com/jzv/inf/Sizing%20a%20Solar%20Power%20System
http://www.windynation.com/Polycrystalline-Solar-Panels/WindyNation/100-400-Watt-100W-12V-Portable-Solar-Panel-with-Adjustable-Mount-Rack-RV-Boat/-/1324?p=YzE9NDU=
Handy rule on solar: It doesn't matter what size panel you are buying, once you get beyond the toy-phone-charger scale they all cost about the same. Currently, approximately £1/watt of capacity.
50W panel? £50.
100W panel? £100.
You get the idea.
If you want to actually see this output you need an MPPT controller, a rather expensive device that is only used on large setups, so add £100 for that. You only get about 80% of the output power without one, but on small-scale solar it's cheaper to just add a bit more panel area than it would be to add an MPPT unit.
Free to use the leccy but £1.50/hour parking (limit 2 hours). more expensive than any other car park in town. Go figure.
Tragic. The rest of us are subsidising your EV at the moment in a multitude of ways, so if you have to use a more expensive car park and get free electricity you'll have to forgive my lack of sympathy. However, with £35bn raised in road based taxes, the honeymoon period of both cash subsidies and tax exemptions for EVs is already starting to draw to a close. Anybody in the UK buying a Tesla S from 2 April 2017 and will be paying £310 road tax each year for the first five years, and we'll progressively see road taxes creeping up even for lower cost EVs.
Unless the government will forgo all those road taxes (and I think we can agree that they won't), then they need to raise about £800 per car per year. Whilst there's few EVs in the fleet, they can avoid the issue and allow fossil fuels to take the tax, once we have any appreciable level of EV penetration they need to come up with a way of taxing them at the same sort of level. So that could be GPS tracked road pricing (you do want your every movement recording, don't you?), a flat rate £800 a year vehicle duty, variable duty based on expected mileage that amounts to around 7p/mile, or some other cludge like a 22p/kWh surcharge on electricity used for vehicle charging.
I think they'll decide road pricing is the way forward. They'll use the GPS and mobile capabilities built in for the e-call system (mission creep, what a surprise!), some bunch like Crapita will be contracted to build and operate a complex and expensive central registry of all vehicle movements, and drivers will be charged from a baseline that needs to be around that c7p per mile - more on congested roads or at peak times, less for off peak. The next step will be that GPS tracking will be used for automated enforcement of speed and certain other rules. As you can imagine, there's a whole host of practical difficulties, but looking at the government's commitment to their beloved smart meter programme, do you think that they will be put off?
>Anybody in the UK buying a Tesla S from 2 April 2017 and will be paying £310 road tax each year for the first five years
Actually that's not 100% clear. From the VED website: "Cars with a list price in excess of £40,000 will incur a supplement of £310 on their SR for the first 5 years in which a SR is paid.".
The Tesla doesn't pay SR because it's a zero emissions vehicle. Or, strictly speaking, it has an SR of £0. So does that count as paying or not paying?
The attached document looks like it might be a bit clearer and does seem to imply that you would pay the £310, but it's hardly cut and dried.
Also a bit woolly on how things like optional extras are handled. If you buy a car that's £39,995 list, but the opt for an extra that adds £500 to the price, does that tip you over into the supplement? Seems a bit draconian, especially as you're likely to negotiate a discount of a few thousand anyway.
If optional extras aren't considered, then I can see a lot of manufacturers offering engine upgrades and the like as "optional extras".
Start with a BMW 318, optionally upgrade the body, engine and equipment, take delivery of a 750 with an original list price of around £25k and £40k of extras.
The Tesla doesn't pay SR because it's a zero emissions vehicle. Or, strictly speaking, it has an SR of £0. So does that count as paying or not paying
The rich people surcharge is on top of the standard rate. The standard rate for a ZEV is zero. So the surcharge is added to that zero, and they'll pay £310 a year. Of course, even that's a con on the rest of us because electric vehicles aren't zero emissions at all, but hey ho.
On the topic of options, they are included. The basis of calculation is the list price of the car as sold. Not the list-price-less-extras of what you order. That makes cheating difficult for the makers, and ignores any discounts. Since the makers hate discounting, they aren't too worried about that, it will be dealers trying to make quota who have the problem.
Going back to my original post, what we're seeing is the progressive introduction of vehicle duty for electric cars. Government can't afford to forgo the £35bn+ it makes from motorists. And as another poster points out soon all cars will cost £40k, but even before that they'll start changing thresholds and costs. They can smear the incidence of duty and operating taxes, they can't get away from the need to raise an average of £800 per car per year. Unless you're going to vote for a hike in tax rates for middle income earners.
Going back to my original post, what we're seeing is the progressive introduction of vehicle duty for electric cars. Government can't afford to forgo the £35bn+ it makes from motorists. And as another poster points out soon all cars will cost £40k, but even before that they'll start changing thresholds and costs. They can smear the incidence of duty and operating taxes, they can't get away from the need to raise an average of £800 per car per year. Unless you're going to vote for a hike in tax rates for middle income earners.
Oh, but that's not the only thing that will go up. One of the issues casually omitted in talking about the wonderful new shiny world of EV everywhere is that your fuel saving will be the direct cause of increases elsewhere. After all, the far majority of fuel prices is actually tax, and by the simple expedient of saving you start impairing the government's other route to taking your money (it's already having a problem because of low fuel prices).
So, you may save, but your overall costs are unlikely to drop long term. Short term, sure, because they first need to lure you into that trap (let's call it the Microsoft approach to sales). Once there's enough volume prices WILL go up. Unless, of course, you can convince a government to waste less but that seems unlikely..
I too drive a PHEV (if you're in the UK, it's very likely to be the same model as yours). It takes 5 hours to recharge the 10kWh battery from a domestic 13A socket, so that means doing the same for a Tesla with the full 100kWh would take two days, not very practical! You could pay several hundred pounds (a trivial sum if you can afford a Tesla) to get a higher power outlet, which would reduce that to about 36 hours, but there's a limit to how much power you can draw from a UK domestic setup (25kVA is usual), and you'll probably want to do some cooking or wash your clothes at some point.
but there's a limit to how much power you can draw from a UK domestic setup (25kVA is usual)
Which doesn't bode well for the government ambitions for electrifying both transport and heating. Even if you uprate the household electrics, there's the far more complicated situation of the distribution system, which was designed for far lower loads than fast charging of EVs would introduce. Electrifying heating (even using heat pumps) makes the problem dramatically worse, both because of the amount of energy, and the fact that everybody tends to need it at the same time.
The superchargers are there for the journeys where you need to stop and charge, not for you to use as a daily exercise, the fact that your nearest one is 50 miles away, means that you know you can currently travel 150 miles away, and still make it home with the help of said charger.
If you have a charger at home and solar panels why the hell do you need to charge anywhere else if your just using it on battery as a city runabout?
Plug in hybrids are built for running in the city on battery to cut polluiton, current BEV such as the Leaf are built for day to day city commute, Telsa is pushing the current manufacturers to help increase the take up of BEV as a full car rather than a second, city runaround.
I have to point out I run a Leaf as my only car, but it works for me as I have charging available at home (with solar panels) and at work, which is an easy commute across Newcastle and Gateshead. First long trip in car next weekend when I travel up to Aberdeen.
It annoys me that Tesla get all the props for their battery tech, using standard 18650 cells, when Nissan have created a whole new battery form for the leaf:
http://hackaday.com/2015/04/29/jay-turns-over-a-new-leaf-scores-batteries/
http://s913.photobucket.com/user/sunworksco/media/image-618.jpg.html (watch out for ads, sorry)
Elsewhere on Youtube you can watch a guy chipping holes in a charged cell with a hammer, whilst it continues to deliver power.
Tesla's three businesses are underwritten by U.S. tax dollars or they would all have been shuttered by now. He is receiving tax payer money for Tesla cars from the Feds as well as the state of Nevada and other locales where the politicians are duping the public into believing that EVs are practical and that electricity is free and made from foo foo dust instead by coal burning power plants in many nations.
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