However, I’m not all that keen on electrics. Over Thanksgiving, I drove 600-plus miles, from Boston to Albany via the backroads (~170 miles), around the Albany area, from Albany to NYC (~160 miles), and then back to Boston (~200 miles).

I wouldn’t expect someone to take an current tech EV on a trip like that. Not for years to come until the battery can be charged in seconds and last for 350 miles per charge.

Ooops! Looks like we are close.

There is now a company here in TN called MicronTN that builds a “battery” (capacitor):

Lightweight: 11 lbs
All-season performance: Full power at -40°F to 150°F
Rapid recharge: 30 seconds
Longevity: 500,000 duty cycles (15-20+ years)
Environmentally friendly: lead free, acid free, long lifespan
1200 to 2000 amps depending on which “battery” is used.

Imagine a mix of these with NiMH batteries in an EV?

The MicronTN batteries handle voltage spikes while NiMH batteries supply the constant load to keep the vehicle moving.

A driver pulls up to a charging station and charges the MicronTN batteries in seconds which then through a regulator begin to charge the NiMH batteries as the EV heads off down the road.

Not saying it is ready for prime time now but see how far things could go? When I “discovered” one of these batteries sitting on the counter at our local NAPA my belief that EVs that meet the naysayer’s expectations could be just around the corner – maybe five to six years if the tech continues to progress and not get shelved.

See Chevron shelving the NiMH battery tech, patents, and “patent encumbrance”.

In America we need fewer naysayers and more can do folks ’cause the Chinese/Indians/-insert name of small country with motivated peoples- will eat our lunch if we sit back and get too comfortable.

Instead of making fun of the geeks who want to think outside of the box let’s keep moving forward on the tech regardless of what the price of gasoline is. We need a a nation of rocket scientists and computer geeks regardless of how unpopular the rest of America think they are.

It would appear from pessimistic comments I hear about EVs that we should continue driving 25 mpg V-6 gasoline powered cars and ~18 mpg trucks or SUVs b/c nothing else will measure up. With the current economy what it is I think it would be in America’s self interest to get to the forefront of EV technology (and solar and wind and other “green tech”) and stay there for the next 50 years.

Our leadership doesn’t often subscribe to long term thinking or making choices that have long term benefits over higher short term cost.

I plan to buy a MicronTN battery after Christmas and start experimenting with it. It might just the right energy storage method for wind. Am anxious to build an electric go-cart with it for the kids. I want to install it as my car’s primary battery and see how it behaves. I want to see why it would not be well suited for an EV that gets charged every night.

Jason Calcanis is prone to say stupid things. In 9-10 years a car that dies after 100 miles will be just as useful as it is today — which is to say, not much. A niche as the green yuppie family’s 4th car, perhaps.

If there are more electric cars on the road, maybe we’ll see third parties/SEMA marketing small trailers with diesel generators and extra luggage space to allow them to take longer trips. Sort of like a Volt, but you’d have the option of ditching the engine for around town and you’d probably escape the EPA emissions testing for diesel vehicles.

As an engineer with 30+ years of experience, let me assure you that there is a long list of technological milestones that many engineers thought would not be achievable. I remember the VP I was working for lecturing me for at least an hour on why voice over ip would never work and another colleague telling me back in the 70’s that it was impossible for computers to communicate with each other at speeds exceeding 19,200 bits per second and we’d never see a faster data rate.

I ran into these sorts of attitudes many times with my own products and have had a lot of battles over the course my career. I can think of at least three products I was told could not be built by management and colleagues, but was able to pull it off each time.

It may not be lithium ion, but trust me, someone will come up with something and it will happen sooner than 5 years.

But Tesla should not get a bailout. If they can make it on their own, with Musk’s money, great. If they can’t, they should die.

We will get the benefits of evolution, with the strongest surviving, only if we let the market kill off the weak. Protect the weak, by a bailout, and you have no evolution. Nothing improves.

Wrapping all these existing (old) ideas into a new product is cool. But over promising and under delivering is NOT. Tesla has spun up Apple-levels of PR, but unlike Apple, they haven’t delivered on even a small fraction of their promise.

EVs will never be as useful as an ICE-driven auto. Period. Electricity is not portable. Making it portable increases weight at an exponential rate, so range will always be limited and recharge times always unrealistic. Like Scotty famously said: “You canna’ change the laws of physics!”

–chuck

@Stein
Well, yeah, there is an awful lot that we don’t know about the Tesla, little things (sarcasm alert) like range and battery life. But having ridden in one, I can tell you that the torque and the handling are awesome.

I love new ideas. I detest lousy ideas.

Have a look at http://www.betterplace.com

Now, there’s a half decent idea, where the ecology of the power infrastructure has been thought through.

With Tesla? Not so much.

Every time there is an oil shortage or a run up in the price of oil the back yard mechanics go to work then the oil prices go down and some of you short sighted fools laugh at the experimenters.

Have the new energy people solved all the problems – not yet.

But the technologies for solar, wind, wave, and battery energy are improving while our ICEs continue to give us lots of heat, noise, dirty air, piss poor efficiency, and balance of trade difficulties.

One day the oil pushers will pull our chain with some excuse for high prices and then fail to reduce their prices quickly enough and our engineers, backyard mechanics, and entrepreneurs will be ready.

Encourage, welcome, and enjoy the experimenters and early adopters.

OK, I’ll be the naysayer. Tesla has shown that they can build a bespoke EV at $110K, kinda. They have an unproven battery, an ready disproven transmission, and have failed to meet any of their production goals.

They have yet to provide a production vehicle for an unbiased test of performance and range (AFAIK).

The Tesla is a plaything of the rich eco-weenie, for whom a Prius is just not exclusive enough. They can’t possibly sell enough of them to amortize development costs in a reasonable time, let alone generate enough free cash flow to develop the White Elephant sedan.

I wish them well, but I don’t thin they can make it, and to give them $400MM in government loans is a waste of my tax money. What they REALLY want is money that will bail out their investors, and pass along the failure to the taxpayers.

Remember the government boondoggle from a few years ago, where we paid for the New Generation car, only to have it abandoned after untold billions of dollars were wasted?

As always,the battery pack is the Achilles Heel of EV’s, and it’s yet to be solved. Until then, we’ll continue to have companies start up and swindle investors with Blue Sky promises.

“Tesla: The Turbonator of EV’s”.

Meanwhile, politicians, the media and various interested parties could spend a touch of time having a look at what Shai Agassi is up to. Even Ahnuld likes him.

http://www.betterplace.com/

I think the biggest problem with the Tesla hype in the media is the complete lack of perspective. For example:
- If GM wanted to waste hundreds of millions of dollars, they probably could have bought some lotuses and computer batteries and built 60 Roadsters with a completely unproven reliability.
- The loan Tesla is asking for is over 60 times it’s annual revenue. If GM were to ask for the same ratio, it would be about 10 trillion dollars.
- Lotus has made 60 cars in a year. Gm or Toyota makes 60 cars in less than 3 minutes.

Sure this is a car but how much of the cost of the car is the car and how much of it is the new EV technology? If it can survive a decade the technology will evolve and come down in price to something us normal working folks can afford. If they die I’m certain that Detroit will do nothing to bring a product similar to the Tesla to market. I think they have made that clear. Chrysler says they will but I’ll believe it when I see it. I hope they do but I expect they’ll go broke first.

America needs some real change of establishment. What we do, how we do it, and who gets rich from it needs to change and be replaced by brighter, more creative minds. Unfortunately there is enough gov’t legislation, enough FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), and enough consumer Sheeple that argue they won’t make any compromises to adopt alternative ideas that getting a firm foothold in America’s markets is really tough.

Plenty of folks who will argue they would never move from an ICE to an EV because it won’t charge as fast, or go as far per charge vs a tank of gasoline, or whatever. If the price can come down and enough early adopters can support the company then in a decade our kids will be buying EVs without a thought to what their parents think about EVs.

There are a number of really interesting developments out there in the “alternative universe”. EVs, green tech, free Linux instead of Microsoft, and folks who are rediscovering that which our grandparents already knew like life without prepackaged everything.

Meanwhile there is plenty of FUD about Linux by Microsoft fans, legislation in California favoring peaker fossil fuel plants vs rooftop solar (legislation I hear of complicating installation of solar), etc etc

They suffer both cycle loss and calendar loss. They good bad just sitting around.

The most expensive component in almost every electic car with any range is the battery. It is also amongst the shortest lived components. Would you buy a car that needed a complete new engine every 4 or 5 years. Tesla only offers a 5 year pro-rated battery warranty.

It will be interesting to see what kind of warranty GM gives the Volt battery pack. They can do everything right, but a lithium pack lasting 10 years is unheard of.

Electric cars have been viable, efficient, brilliant idea for over a hundred years and for all that time, the batteries are the weak link that erases those advantages. This hasn’t changed yet.

To the extent that you believe it’s good public policy to put public money into “retooling” Detroit toward battery-powered or gas-electric hybrid or whatever, then it’s good public policy to give some of that support to Tesla.

Why? Tesla is following a time-honored product development strategy, where your initial market is charged a mint because they’ve got to have it. That lets you sort everything out and eventually push the technology into lower cost / higher volume production. Consider, for example, the Microsoft Xbox 360. The initial versions cost $300-$400, depending on options. Today, you pay $100 less for the same thing, and you’re less likely to have it overheat and burn your house down.

Again, to the extent that you believe it’s good public policy to spend $25B on revamping Detroit toward our hybrid/electric/whatever future, Tesla is certainly deserving of a piece of the pie. Who do you think is more likely to deliver an EV product that somebody can actually buy in the next five years for, say, $50K? Tesla or Chrysler?

Don’t get me wrong, there is very legitimate scientific and technical research being done now that will take 5 to 10 (or much longer) years of hard work to see any practical benefits from.

But to claim that an end user product will be ready to purchase in 9 years is a load of horse poop. Let me know when that product is 2 years away and the company is starting the actual specification and design process.

Every 5 years somebody proclaims a cure to cancer or AIDS is just 5 years away.

“That’s what Detroit should have been doing!”

Hmmm – mystery of mysteries!