Tesla to Texas: How Do You Like Us Now?

[jw33]

Do not care. Opening up on some one with full auto machine gun is also illegal and that will be the least of my problems if the day ever comes where I have to use my stuff.



Masters in materials and mechanical engineering. Orbital Corp, and the Eaton Corp. Decided that I did not like working in a corporate structure and gave it up.

I have never failed at anything that I have set my mind to and am quite well off for it.



It is not a matter of keeping it cool. The problem is the lost watts that heat represents.



The factors that you are describing are well known by the industry and are often quoted by environmentalist groups when they talk bad about the oil industry. Charging the battery in an electric car just adds a few more steps where you lose 80 percent of the power at each step.

Where did you work at Eaton and what did you do?

[racrguy]

That is my question

Investors.

[Slowhand]

Jesus christ this fucking thread.

[Gasser64]

But an electric motor can run cool. If you are pushing low current through it. Maybe its too low maybe that is where im lost. Maybe pushing that low wouldnt get you anywhere. Im happy to learn.

You see what im getting at though

Operating anything electronic at low enough levels will not produce heat, or at least very low levels of heat. Probably everyone here has experienced this in one way or another

So my question was could you run an electric car that way. My guess is no but id still like to read the explanation

[quikag]

This is true. There is a good reason we don't want them in TX. When the brand fails to succeed, we would have 6500 people standing in the unemployment line. It's a fad. An expensive fad.

How is it that the facility is supposed to cost $5B and Tesla is only putting in $2B? Who comes up with the rest? Better not be taxpayers.

I also find it funny that Tesla has had to install charging stations along major highways so you aren't riding home with Tommy the wrecker driver.

$70k+ is retarded!

Surprised you don't realize where Tesla is headed. I thought their stock was overvalued at $130/sh and now it's over $220/sh. Their cars are some of the best ever made when you take their inherent limitations into account. For being their first fully developed electric car, it's a home run and a sign of big things to come when they release their SUV, the Model X, and then a less expensive car "for the masses" down the road.

Trust me, this plant isn't going anywhere after it's built. It will make batteries for decades. On how the other $3B is going to be had, it's called convertible bonds and investors will buy them up quickly.

[aggie97]

Surprised you don't realize where Tesla is headed. I thought their stock was overvalued at $130/sh and now it's over $220/sh. Their cars are some of the best ever made when you take their inherent limitations into account. For being their first fully developed electric car, it's a home run and a sign of big things to come when they release their SUV, the Model X, and then a less expensive car "for the masses" down the road.

Trust me, this plant isn't going anywhere after it's built. It will make batteries for decades. On how the other $3B is going to be had, it's called convertible bonds and investors will buy them up quickly.

it's a fad. When there is no infrastructure to "refuel" the damn things, the product will die no matter how good it is. Big Oil will kill the idea of "power stations" that Tesla is having to put in themselves and the product will die. The ONLY way Tesla will survive is to build a fuel cell car or a hybrid. The fully electric car, no matter how good, will die if you can't get a 5 minute quick charge at the corner store. The market for a $70+ inconvenient toy is very limited and once Tesla sells cars to those 10,000 people, the market is ZERO. Then consider there will be ZERO aftermarket and ZERO mechanics to work on the damn things and you have another flop.

I don't understand the Stock value thing...I figured "business" people would be smarter than that but it could just be a false "inflation" of stock price based on fad spending. Give it 2 years and the stock will trade at $20 or less.


Kudos to Tesla for being innovative and building a nice product....but I have met 3 people that own the damn things and while they LOVE the car, they all HATE having to plan their trips for recharges....otherwise they drive their gas powered car. We even had one at the race track and he was sneaking over and plugging into the RV plugs BETWEEN sessions, otherwise, he couldn't drive it home to Houston. At the end of the day, he was going to have to go to a friends house locally to charge up just to drive the 80 miles home. So while you figure in the lower costs of "fuel"....you have to figure in the additional hotel rooms and towing charges along the way. Also, what is the lifespan of the batteries and how much do they cost? $70k in depreciation on a $70k in 5 years is a JOKE!

Like I said....Fad. Ride the wave while its high but jump off before the reef.

[Sean88gt]

This is true. There is a good reason we don't want them in TX. When the brand fails to succeed, we would have 6500 people standing in the unemployment line. It's a fad. An expensive fad.

How is it that the facility is supposed to cost $5B and Tesla is only putting in $2B? Who comes up with the rest? Better not be taxpayers.

I also find it funny that Tesla has had to install charging stations along major highways so you aren't riding home with Tommy the wrecker driver.

$70k+ is retarded!

I think it would be a $70k car as a gasser. When considering it's inline with other cars in the class, the price isn't bad, especially when you look at Korean offerings that are now in that price range. I don't think it's a fad, I think it is a response to where fuel prices are heading.

Surprised you don't realize where Tesla is headed. I thought their stock was overvalued at $130/sh and now it's over $220/sh. Their cars are some of the best ever made when you take their inherent limitations into account. For being their first fully developed electric car, it's a home run and a sign of big things to come when they release their SUV, the Model X, and then a less expensive car "for the masses" down the road.

Trust me, this plant isn't going anywhere after it's built. It will make batteries for decades. On how the other $3B is going to be had, it's called convertible bonds and investors will buy them up quickly.

I agree with this, the valuation is insane, but people are buying, and Musk is funding an idea that is growing legs. He also did it a lot better than GM, which is getting nearly $40k for their volt, that goes 37 miles on a charge...

it's a fad. When there is no infrastructure to "refuel" the damn things, the product will die no matter how good it is. Big Oil will kill the idea of "power stations" that Tesla is having to put in themselves and the product will die. The ONLY way Tesla will survive is to build a fuel cell car or a hybrid. The fully electric car, no matter how good, will die if you can't get a 5 minute quick charge at the corner store. The market for a $70+ inconvenient toy is very limited and once Tesla sells cars to those 10,000 people, the market is ZERO. Then consider there will be ZERO aftermarket and ZERO mechanics to work on the damn things and you have another flop.

I don't understand the Stock value thing...I figured "business" people would be smarter than that but it could just be a false "inflation" of stock price based on fad spending. Give it 2 years and the stock will trade at $20 or less.


Kudos to Tesla for being innovative and building a nice product....but I have met 3 people that own the damn things and while they LOVE the car, they all HATE having to plan their trips for recharges....otherwise they drive their gas powered car. We even had one at the race track and he was sneaking over and plugging into the RV plugs BETWEEN sessions, otherwise, he couldn't drive it home to Houston. At the end of the day, he was going to have to go to a friends house locally to charge up just to drive the 80 miles home. So while you figure in the lower costs of "fuel"....you have to figure in the additional hotel rooms and towing charges along the way. Also, what is the lifespan of the batteries and how much do they cost? $70k in depreciation on a $70k in 5 years is a JOKE!

Like I said....Fad. Ride the wave while its high but jump off before the reef.

http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger

They are putting charging stations everywhere. Tesla very well could become "big electric." I don't see how this is any different than the crazy idea 110 years ago of sticking gas stations everywhere. My Dodge gets roughly 240 miles per 22 gal fuel up. If I could switch to full electric I would. I'm just driving back and forth across the metroplex, so it would make sense.

I'm sure horse owners thought the internal combustion engine was a fad as well.

[Nash B.]

But an electric motor can run cool. If you are pushing low current through it. Maybe its too low maybe that is where im lost. Maybe pushing that low wouldnt get you anywhere. Im happy to learn.

You see what im getting at though

Operating anything electronic at low enough levels will not produce heat, or at least very low levels of heat. Probably everyone here has experienced this in one way or another

So my question was could you run an electric car that way. My guess is no but id still like to read the explanation

ANY heat produced by an electronic motor is energy that is not converted to mechanical power, and thus lost/wasted energy.

[aggie97]

My Dodge gets roughly 240 miles per 22 gal fuel up. If I could switch to full electric I would. I'm just driving back and forth across the metroplex, so it would make sense.

good lord, I am seeing 14.0 city in a one ton 4x4 diesel and nearly 18 in the 2500. are you driving a half ton with your foot to the floor 24/7? I used to get 14-21 mpg in the 1/2 ton hemi I had.

[Chas_svo]

https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/...C81&_mSplash=1


Elon Musk has established a well-deserved reputation for designing and building things that take off quickly — rockets, electric cars … and stock prices. But his biggest impact won’t necessarily be in speeding up how we get from here to there. It may be in transforming a much slower-moving industry: electric utilities.

Musk’s transportation companies, Tesla Motors and SpaceX, as well as SolarCity, the solar company whose board he chairs — not to mention the still-theoretical Hyperloop high-speed rail system — are tied together by one underlying idea: how we power things is archaic and inefficient. And in his peerless zeal and passion to reinvent automobiles, space travel and more, he is — wittingly or not — creating innovative and less-polluting energy ecosystems.

A key component of that ecosystem was announced last week: a $5 billion, 10-million-square-foot so-called gigafactory, to be located somewhere in the western United States, for producing lithium-ion (Li-On) batteries. These are the devices that power much of our rechargeable world, from phone and laptops to — well, electric vehicles. The 7,000 or so standard-issue Li-On batteries crammed into a Tesla Model S, for example, enable it to go from zero to 60 in less time than it takes to say “We design, develop, manufacture and sell high-performance fully electric vehicles and advanced electric-vehicle power train components,” the opening line of the company's IPO application.

Until Tesla, battery technology hadn't historically advanced to the point where it could provide consumers with an electric vehicle that had compelling range and performance, one reason why incumbent automobile manufacturers focused largely on hybrid-electric vehicles instead of pure electric models. The lithium-ion battery cells Tesla uses have evolved to the point that they can provide higher energy density, or more energy per kilogram, at a lower cost per energy unit than competing battery cell chemistries.

By building its own battery factory, Tesla is doing what it does best: engineering and building a higher-performance, lower-cost version of an existing technology. Those batteries will help usher in Tesla’s third-generation vehicle, a relatively affordable mass-market vehicle.

But the company’s gigafactory stands to energize much more than that. By optimizing the price and performance of rechargeable energy storage, Tesla stands to upend the staid business model of electric utilities.

In December, SolarCity — co-founded and run by Musk’s cousins, Lyndon and Peter Rive — announced a service, called DemandLogic, to install and operate lithium-ion batteries made by Tesla alongside photovoltaic panels. As GreenBiz.com reported,

Business customers sign a 10-year contract with monthly fees, rather than purchase the batteries and solar panels up front. SolarCity is also putting combined solar-storage systems at residential buildings in California but has not yet made that offering generally available.

The batteries themselves are the same used in Telsa's electric cars, but packaged with power electronics to store solar energy, provide power to a building and connect to the grid. The entire system is remotely monitored by SolarCity.

The ability to store solar (and wind) energy in batteries has long been considered renewable power’s killer app. Batteries allow renewable power to be utilized when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Marrying solar with batteries — and doing so with innovative financing that doesn’t require a hefty downpayment — is a game changer for owners of homes and commercial and industrial buildings. That's SolarCity's ploy.

It’s not just about saving money — or being environmentally responsible, for that matter. It’s about resilience. As the electricity grid becomes less and less reliable — whether from outages due to extreme weather, physical and cyber attacks on power stations and grid operators, fuel shortages or other factors — being able to operate a business or simply keep the freezer cold will become of growing importance. Never mind the ability to keep streetlights and traffic lights powered, ATMs humming and the Internet streaming.

For utilities, this may be the beginning of the end of the current monopolistic business model. Today's electric power utilities could lose half of their addressable market to energy efficiency, solar and storage and other distributed generation technologies, according to "Energy Darwinism — the evolution of the energy industry," a recent report from the investment banking arm of Citibank.

Traditional utilities’ central power plants have been a vital service to building economies around the world, but today’s market needs — not to mention the disruptive specter of climate change — demands a new, distributed business model. Much like the Internet itself, energy needs to be a dynamic ecosystem where at any given time an electricity customer can be either an energy producer or consumer. That opens to door to a new generation of products and services, including arbitrageurs that negotiate prices and redirect kilowatts in real time in order to provide the grid with the electricity it needs. (Think eBay for energy.)

The SolarCity-Tesla hook-up already is providing some of what utilities have traditionally offered. As Laurie Guevara-Stone at the Rocky Mountain Institute recently put it:

What's really exciting in the solar-plus-battery arena is what batteries offer beyond backup — to both solar PV and the grid and utilities. Voltage and frequency regulation. Black-start capability after macro- or microgrid outages. Using batteries as a less expensive alternative to peaking plants during high demand periods. Demand charge reductions via peak shaving. Shifting load profiles with batteries to take better advantage of time-of-use electricity pricing. The list goes on.

The threat to utilities is hardly hidden. “Our business model is to become the energy company of the 21st century,” SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive told The Atlantic late last year. “You’re still connected to the grid but the grid would be your secondary provider and the primarily provider would be your solar system and your storage device.” Imagine: coal-fired power plants as back-up, not primary power.

Tesla and SolarCity are hardly alone in this quest, and Li-On batteries are only one of several promising energy storage technologies. There’s compressed air, liquid air, pumped-storage hydro, flywheels, superconducting magnets, molten salt, underground hydrogen and more. Each of these has its own ecosystem of startups, funders, pilot projects and potential customers. And each is vying for what is seen to be a massive market opportunity that will upend how we think about, buy and use energy.

But Musk is alone in leading the disruption, what with his hyper-ambition, systems thinking and almost limitless ability to attract money and attention. Will Tesla’s sleek vehicles someday be an afterthought, much like the Apple II, largely forgotten amid Steve Jobs’ roiling of the media and entertainment industries?

It could well be that Tesla’s Roadster, Model S and whatever comes next will be mere vehicles to a new energy future.

[Sean88gt]

good lord, I am seeing 14.0 city in a one ton 4x4 diesel and nearly 18 in the 2500. are you driving a half ton with your foot to the floor 24/7? I used to get 14-21 mpg in the 1/2 ton hemi I had.

Negative. Just enjoying 11-12mpg. That is primarily stop and go. All highway will reward me with 14. Durango r/t awd.

[aggie97]

Negative. Just enjoying 11-12mpg. That is primarily stop and go. All highway will reward me with 14. Durango r/t awd.

ah, thirsty 360! I had one of those in a 2000 Dakota 4x4. It was a thirsty beast.

[Sean88gt]

ah, thirsty 360! I had one of those in a 2000 Dakota 4x4. It was a thirsty beast.

Indeed. When I was driving 20 min in snow in Denver, it made sense. Down here? Not so much. It's about to hit the block in favor of a crew cab something or suburban.

[quikag]

it's a fad. When there is no infrastructure to "refuel" the damn things, the product will die no matter how good it is. Big Oil will kill the idea of "power stations" that Tesla is having to put in themselves and the product will die. The ONLY way Tesla will survive is to build a fuel cell car or a hybrid. The fully electric car, no matter how good, will die if you can't get a 5 minute quick charge at the corner store. The market for a $70+ inconvenient toy is very limited and once Tesla sells cars to those 10,000 people, the market is ZERO. Then consider there will be ZERO aftermarket and ZERO mechanics to work on the damn things and you have another flop.

I don't understand the Stock value thing...I figured "business" people would be smarter than that but it could just be a false "inflation" of stock price based on fad spending. Give it 2 years and the stock will trade at $20 or less.


Kudos to Tesla for being innovative and building a nice product....but I have met 3 people that own the damn things and while they LOVE the car, they all HATE having to plan their trips for recharges....otherwise they drive their gas powered car. We even had one at the race track and he was sneaking over and plugging into the RV plugs BETWEEN sessions, otherwise, he couldn't drive it home to Houston. At the end of the day, he was going to have to go to a friends house locally to charge up just to drive the 80 miles home. So while you figure in the lower costs of "fuel"....you have to figure in the additional hotel rooms and towing charges along the way. Also, what is the lifespan of the batteries and how much do they cost? $70k in depreciation on a $70k in 5 years is a JOKE!

Like I said....Fad. Ride the wave while its high but jump off before the reef.

I think you're being seriously shortsighted and you have a lot of incorrect information. Many of the Model S owners have other vehicles to drive when they have to road trip over 250+ miles, but for 95%+ of their trips the Model S gets the job done. As battery technology gets better, it will charge faster and last longer. When Tesla introduces a car the "masses" can buy, it'll be way cheaper with a longer battery life, range, and quicker recharge based on the R&D they are getting with the Model S and soon to be Model X.

Batteries have a 10+ year lifespan and Tesla had a promotion a while back where they guaranteed residual value at 50% or so after x number of years. Can't remember. Actual depreciation will probably be less than that because when you think of the moving parts and things that can break, it's actually less than an ICE car.

Anyway, you can keep betting against Tesla and Elon Musk, but Tesla is paving the way of the future. That said, I'm going to cry when big thumping V8 cars are a thing of the past, but the pissed off whine off a very high power electric motor with 100% torque the second you push on the accelerator taking you to 60mph in less than 4 seconds will probably help ease the pain.

[racrguy]

Negative. Just enjoying 11-12mpg. That is primarily stop and go. All highway will reward me with 14. Durango r/t awd.

I always knew you hated yourself, but I had no idea it was that bad.