http://www.teslamotors.com/

Apparently their taking the covers off tomorrow


There are rumoured connections between this company and Lotus....

looks like an elise. what did they do throw a electric motor in it?

I wonder if the penny a mile thing isn't going to get them into trouble eventually. How much will it cost to replace the battery pack, and how frequently will that need to be done?

How heavy will this thing be? A 4000lb Elise wouldn't be all that joyful to me.

Sorry, but I'm just not conviced all-electric is the way to go for anything but a pure "city" runabout.

I saw a similar idea in an article of the LA times. It was an electric Ariel atom that some company is putting together for sale under a new brand (forget the name). Supposedly has insane performance and good range, but a healthy price tag (lithium ion batteries). Their target market is wealthy folks who want to be environmentally friendly.

I don't know...

I wouldn't mind an electric car for going to work. Just run an extension cord out to my parking space

Free mooching electricity!

If the insurance wasn't much higher and the car came with a good warranty I would drive it. Not gonna pay more then 25k for it though.

I am waiting for an electric truck. High mpg commuter cars are fine, but I need some utility in my daily driver. 3/4 to full ton payload capacity, pull 5000 lbs, run off-road like a champ and never make a noise loud enough to scare a baby. I'm still waiting............

They are apparently going through vehicle testing - so I'm wondering if it is actually an elise body - or of they just based it on the elise....

I bet it looks like this:

http://blog.wired.com/teslacar/index.album?i=0

-Steve

When I read about these guys before, it seemed as though they were targeting a $100K price tag.

Demick

My thoughts as well. Batteries don't last nearly as long as a dino-powered engine. And I read the battery pack is made up of 6800 separate lithium ion batteries! No thanks.

Then there's the whole green factor nonsense... Just pushes the pollution from the car to the plants that produce the electricity.

I just don't get the appeal. I guess the torque and the quietness... But I'd rather get torque another way, and I like the sound of a healthy gas motor!

To a place that is much easier to regulate and which can be upgraded (in theory) as new (greener) technology becomes available.

Skip

A glorified golf cart.

Nikola must be rolling in his grave.

John

P.S. With all the technological improvements of even just the last 100 years, battery technology advances have not kept up.

P.S.S. There was genius, and then there was Tesla.

oops, thought this was about the metal band from here

So what about if you hook the charger for it to a stationary bike, perhaps even a whole bank of them at a gym? Then the only pollution you get is the carbon dioxide exhaled. That and the smug spewed forth by the self righteous yuppies driving it of course.

that is much cooler than this Fiat conversion

Looks pretty cool, the website has an unveiled pic now. The backend looks sort of like the Elise, I wonder if they had styling help from Lotus?

"The Tesla Roadster’s “fuel tank” weighs in at about 1,000 pounds..."

This argument is often used, but really doesn't make sense. Yes, it is true - the energy must come from somewhere - and producing that energy usually generates pollution (although there are pollution free sources like solar, hydro, etc).

But still, if this argument was really true, then it would also be true that we would be just as well off for every household to have it's own gas powered generator to power all of our electrical needs. I think we can all agree that this is a ridiculous notion. It is much more efficient and less polluting to have a few power plants produce the electricity for large populations.

I really believe that in the future, the concept of each motor vehicle having it's own gas burning power plant will be seen as just as dumb, inefficient, and polluting as the idea of individual generators for each household sounds to us now.

Demick

Did anybody see Al Gore's movie? I didn't but I did see the Tom Brokaw special on Discovery Channel (look for additional airings, it was good). They didn't mention increasing regulation on power plants. I would think that's an area that is pretty soft due to the current administration and lobbying.

We have to hurry up and build a lot of nuclear power plants so we can look down our noses at China for burning all that coal.

Nothing on curb weight I could find. They do claim the battery pack is recyclable, and will last over 100K miles.

Lotus did have a hand in the design, and the cars are assembled in the UK at the Lotus factory. One wonders if this means the Malaysians are involved, seeing as Lotus is actually owned by them. I'd thought at least portions of the Elise were made in Malaysia...

If they can get it to market for under $50K, I think they may be succesful. They they're over $100K, I have doubts.

They show maps with the 250mi radius from SF and LA. Alas, you can't drive the car from LA to Vegas, which will, I think, limit their market a bit (seriously!). They also show it going from SF to Tahoe, but I'd say you'd be right on the limit trying to drive that thing from anywhere in the Bay Area to a ski slope.

I disagree with your disagreement.

Right now, liquid fuels are the most efficient method to supply "portable" energy, aside from nuclear, which is simply impractical today (and likely will be for a very long time). Despite gasoline's obvious flaws, it's energy per unit volume/mass is pretty hard to argue with. Hydrogen also works well here, and I expect solving the storage problem will happen long before portable nukes will, and likely long before battery technology improves to the point that all-electric vehicles can really compete with fuel-based vehicles in all respects. If batteries could be recharged in under 60 seconds AND provide 150-200 mile range, OK. If batteries could supply 1000mi range before a 3-4 hour recharge, probably still OK. Neither of those are true, yet.

Individual generators is also not necessarily inefficient, dumb, or polluting. A 1kW solar array on every household in California would dramatically cut the need for any other source of power generation. Solar's big problem is the area required, and the surface area of all of those roofs is going begging. It wouldn't handle 100% of the need, but it could cut the requirement from the power grid by a lot, 30-50%, I'd venture. My house (far from a paragon of efficiency) uses an average of 10 kWh of electricity per day. If I could generate 1kW for just 4 hours per day, I've just cut my usage by 40%.

Gasoline has a great energy per unit volume/mass storage capacity. But our engines only utilize 25% of that energy for driving the car, and throw 75% of that energy out the tail pipe (so to speak).

Agreed that all electric cars are not generally feasible as a replacement for the IC motor right now. But I believe it will happen. I was simply arguing against the 'green' factor being nonsense due to simply displacing the pollution elsewhere.

When battery/electric cars do become more feasible, removing a gas burning engine from a car and replacing it with storage capacity for electricity generated elsewhere will be a good thing for the environment/pollution.

When I made the individual generator analogy, I was comparing a gas motor in a car to a gas powered generator for a home. Obviously, generating electricity at home via solar power is an excellent solution and should become more common in the years to come as the cost of solar panels drops.

Demick

So what material is the body made of??

Anyone hear of the exploding laptop story? Dell is blaming the lithium-ion battery. Also, the Dept. of Transportation has banned cargo shipments lithium-ion batteries in the cargo hold of passenger airplanes since Dec. 2004. A UPS cargo plane caught fire in Feb, 2006. Perhaps the Tesla Roadster has explosive performance.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32550
http://www.dot.gov/affairs/faa001.htm

Can't say much but I have been given a ride in the prototype (Thanks Dave L.!) and this thing is a ROCKET! I made the cooling tubes for the battery pack before it went offshore. Founder is Elon Musk, he can afford one.

QUOTE: A favorite trick here at Tesla Motors is to invite a passenger along and ask him to turn on the radio. At the precise moment we ask, we accelerate. Our passenger simply can’t sit forward enough to reach the dials. But who needs music when you’re experiencing such a symphony of motion.

I actually think it looks better than an Elise, becuase it is 'cleaned up' with less of the 'swoopy bits' that the latest Elise has. I always preferred the original body.

In the FAQ section it says about battery life being 500 charge cycles. Then, at 250miles range thats 125,000 miles. However, if you put it on charge every night regardless of having done 250 niles or not, wouldn't you end up with a life of less than 2 years!? That would be a BIG problem for me!

I do like it though, I wonder what the price is. I'm waiting for a Solar install in the next month, so I would be very green with one of these

Richard

Energy delivery systems are not all that efficient. When I worked for Trans-Canada Pipelines, they deliver natural gas from Alberta into eastern Canada, I was told that they are their own best customer. Half of the gas from the wells is used to power the pumps that deliver the other half of the gas to consumers. That is a 50% efficient delivery system.

Electricity grids are not very good either, but I don't know the efficiency figures.

Lithium batteries are scary enough in small packs for laptops. Big packs for cars have all the appeal of transporting nitroglycerine. In fact it reminds me of the 356 crank, it was never a matter of IF it fails, but WHEN it fails. To me it is not a question of the capabilities of the engineering team, but a matter of statistics.

Nikola Tesla

Is Tesla going to be there?

Click to view attachment

Those girls are uuuuuuuugggggllllllyyyyyyy.

nope.




dead.

P.S. Maybe he could be convinced to 'roll by' though..........

John

ok, how about these ones?

Honestly, don't you guys read Slashdot.org?

Lots of info about Tesla's new car.

Around $80k
Worked with Lotus
Sounds like lots of fun

If they REALLY wanted to follow Nicolai Tesla's thinking, they'd transmit the power through the air. Forget batteries! The Cap'n

Ha Ha. One of the only 'big' things to come out of Sacramento.

That might be true in general but not with the "team" we have in charge these days....if anything controls have been loosened and regulations weakend in the name of short term profit///

Don't leave "those girls" alone with your wife....those guys got more ass than a toilet seat....the tall one in the middle is a "shirttail" relative of my wife..

I did not intend on making fun of your family, so please excuse me. I just get a kick out of the Hair. And as for leaving them alone with my wife? I most certainly will not, and thank you for the advice.

Still a neat car too.

They are called Tesla because they could not spell testiculle. OOPS, neither can I.

They made fuel driven cars to clean the environment of horse schmit and now will clean the air with nuclear electric power charged cars. Is that realy smart?


I shake my farty ass at all those who think they are smart or something; ya like our fearless leaders.