Great post!…

Too bad we dont have EVs here where I live.

The way they treat the consumers that support their company is ridiculous.

GM / FORD / DODGE could take a lesson from the Koreans, Stand behind what you build and sell. Americans want VALUE. Value is buying something you know isn’t going to fall apart and has a warranty to back up that value. Take all those bad transmissions, bad paint jobs, falling off parts and FIX them.

Step 2 in your bail out would be to build something we really want. A 3000 lb Chevy VOLT Or $50K Chevy retro Camaro isn’t it…

Yes I understand the principle of regenerative breaking, and everything you said, but even without the alternator system, you have drag from wind that slows the car. by redirecting some of that wind, you eliminate the drag on the car, and put that same drag against the squirell cage rotor, thus using the push or drag of the wind to turn the squirel cage.

rw

There’s no free ride. If you hook up an alternator and squirrel cage to a wind scoop or directly to the wheels, yes, it would generator power, but at the sacrifice of drag. There’s no free ride in life. As a kid, if you ever engaged one of those little bicycle generators that runs a headlight on your bike, you instantly would know this as you had to pedal harder to make the light shine. Introducing regenerative braking – Voila! Here you want drag (braking) and you are getting something useful (power) instead of something wasted in the brake pads (heat).

Cheers to Tesla whom I visited in LA last summer. There’s nothing like the experience of the Jetsons-like whir of an EV’s electric motor!

Ron (EV converter)

I recently wrote a blog on the tesla site, and they removed it. It had to do with the engineer at tesla stating they would be opening a wind scoop in the front of the car to handle some air flow and other functioning that had to do with cooling the batteries. I recommended they open a scoop to drive a wind driven squirell cage that in turn drives a small alternator that generates enough AC back to the batteries to extend the charged life of the batteries. Having worked in the electrical field for years, I have worked with alternators and generators extensively. Anyone that tells me you need to recharge batteries with regenerative braking is just trying to add cost to the automobile. Instead of charging only when you break, you can charge all the time with the squirell cage alternator system.

After this was put on the Tesla site, they promptly removed it. I think they know about this type of system, however, want to charge more money for it in future models.

Wake up tesla! If you don’t do it, the after market will do it just like they do everything else.

I love your car, but your 240 miles to a charge stinks, when you can add amps to the battaries at any time your rotor is going around. Hook it to one of the wheels, and you have a constant flow of amps throughout the life of your driving experience. I have no idea how far you could go then.

rw

Wind, water and sun beat other energy alternatives, recent study finds.

The best ways to improve energy security, mitigate global warming and reduce the number of deaths caused by air pollution are blowing in the wind and rippling in the water, not growing on prairies or glowing inside nuclear power plants, says Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford.
…

“Jacobson has conducted the first quantitative, scientific evaluation of the proposed, major, energy-related solutions by assessing not only their potential for delivering energy for electricity and vehicles, but also their impacts on global warming, human health, energy security, water supply, space requirements, wildlife, water pollution, reliability and sustainability. His findings indicate that the options that are getting the most attention are between 25 to 1,000 times more polluting than the best available options. The paper with his findings will be published in the next issue of Energy and Environmental Science but is available online now.,,,”

Indeed, a battery-powered U.S. vehicle fleet could be charged by 73,000 to 144,000 5-megawatt wind turbines, fewer than the 300,000 airplanes the U.S. produced during World War II and far easier to build. Additional turbines could provide electricity for other energy needs.

See http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2009/january7/power-010709.html

Congrats Chris ! Hope you have many enjoyable years of Tesla roadster-ing ahead of you ! Since you are “plugged in” more than most to the EV world, could you comment on the eerie quote above from a CNN Money article. Chrysler’s VP of Advanced Vehicle Engineering dropped it in an interview and the last sentence appears to imply Chrysler might make a play to buy Tesla. How many other “2-seat sports cars built in a Lotus body” do you know of ? Detroit is just arrogant enough to buy up Tesla and destroy it in the same way they killed the EV1. Please say it isn’t so.

To the comment someone made about where our electricity comes from: How we are getting our electricity is irrelevant. Centralization of fuel-to-power conversion will reduce pollution and increase efficiency.

Consider if you had 100,000 1Kw Honda generators, or 1 100Mw Combined Cycle Gas Turbine that sends the electricity from the expansive & thermal forces generated to your home. The CT will get ~85% efficiency in energy conversion, the portable generator will get half that at best (because all the heat is energy loss and it is not practical to install the recapture systems on something that small).

It is for that reason I am not a great fan of Hybrids; they are still wasting your energy dollar.

Now ultimately if we want to reduce the carbon liberated into the atmosphere by power production we will have to build a lot more nuclear plants to make baseline load. Wind & solar are good supplements, I have solar panels on my roof that balance out about 85% of my power consumption at home. But note, at night I must draw from the grid (coal, gas but not likely nuclear here in Colorado).

Wind is sporadic in most places, and where you can find relative constant winds (Wyoming for instance) the distance to points of consumption make the line losses a net loss for mass power production (ie not profitable and thus not practical because who is going to do it for free). IE, if you use power in New York, it is coming from the Tri-state & surrounding area, not the midwest. There is also an issue of load balancing, wind power spikes & dies rapidly and that acts to destabilize the grid. It is very expensive to install the best buffer for this (flow-batteries) to the point if you were to use solely wind power you’d pay factors in higher energy costs (think, a second house payment).

Hydro is a great source, and given a large enough head water body can smooth seasonal flow variations to be a baseline source. The problem is there is only so much water falling so many vertical feet to derive the energy from. And then someone gets upset because a red feathered 3-eyed guppy can’t swim downstream to breed when you build the dam to create the head water supply. There is also tidal power, however this is still in R&D stage in most cases, and the dynamic force of ocean tides as well as corrosiveness of salt water are challenges that have not been overcome – you can build it, but it won’t last very long to recoup the cost. River hydro you can contain the force and apply it in a steady balanced manner to reduce the strain on equipment – why some hydros are passing their 100th year in operation.

For years there has been vigorous opposition to nuclear power. Most of it is based on ignorance. For one thing, when you burn coal, you drive off the light elements, leaving silicates & heavy metals behind. Guess what else is distilled down in that process? Radioactive isotopes that come up from the earth with the coal; coal & ash have more radiation exposure in their handling than nuclear workers are exposed to in a modern plant. The accidents that have happened were by shoddy implementation of nuclear plants and handling under Soviet Socialist rule. 3 Mile Island was a joke of an “accident” – some steam was vented off, not the reactor core. There is more radiation on the coal pile than was in that steam.

They have just been up north looking at a new range of vehicles.

Perfect for the city…

@Henry, You’re seriously going to compare a car to PayPal? Get over it.

It’s great to hear about a Tesla in all day driving situations.

– Ian

Great post. Keep it up. We love Tesla!

I’m looking foward to reading more from those who have taken delivery of the Tesla Roadster.

for more Tesla related news, articles, and forums..check out http://www.planettesla.com

It is important to remember, however, that while electric cars do help end our reliance on foreign energy, and they are cleaner at the tailpipe….

Electrical generation in the USA is still predominantly fossil fuel based (coal and natural gas). And the Bush administration has been doing everything they can to prevent cleaning those up, easing pollution restrictions and mining regulations.

So let’s not just trade one bad energy source for another.

While we are advocating for electric cars, we ALSO need to be pushing for cleaner and more renewable electricity generation.

Electric cars may not emit at the tailpipe but we all live downwind of some sort of powerplant or downstream from some sort of polluted water…

But electric cars are a huge, monumental actually, step in the right direction.

I will install a back-up alarm soon before I run into a pedestrian and its shopping cart when leaving the parking spots at the supermarkets on my ultra-quiet, low budget EV.

Enjoy your Tesla!!!

It would still be cheaper than a GM Volt that is estimated to be over $40,000 if it ever makes it to production.

Just found your blog after seeing your movie Who Killed the Electric Car yesterday, Thanksgiving day. This is the time everyone should know more about what happened to the EV of the nineties. On the eve of a possible automakers bailout people should want to hold them to higher standards of product and ethics. I feel like buying a bullhorn. Let’s clean this planet up!

Now Chris and all the other Tesla-ites are making new energy news as they leave the gas stations behind for good, and lead the charge full speed ahead forward to cleaner air and renewable energy.

There’s a signpost up ahead, …welcome to the Twilight Zone. (what, no gas, EVer again)?!!

Bo Bennett
Host of the EVcast