There is no market failure in multi-cell lithium battery management with high C discharge that will be even slightly impacted by a tiny car manufacture. Your statement is completely without merit.
Careful about that tiny car manufacturer statement---last I checked Tesla had a 11.22 billion dollar market cap, and it continues to grow exponentially. And hey, look, they're hitting scale, and reducing the cost of the model. They've already gotten it down to about $50k. And the founder's stated objective is to keep on reducing that. ho boy. I'd trust that Elon is a hell of a lot more of an expert then you, but then again, maybe you're some bizzaro version of Steven Chu or some s**t. You can always short TSLA if you feel otherwise. Good luck!
Please specify exactly which "technology" that "paid for and properly developed" will lower in cost? I assumed it was battery technology but since your quotes don't address that at all, I might have been mistaken. (Or more likely you realize it was moronic and are running away from it) Your quotes say Tesla is diversifying into solar panels, which similarly to marketing cheaper models, is a business decision. You seem to be confusing the price of the technology and production dropping (which would be a great thing for the government to invest in) to a company getting larger on the government's dime and expanding into a new market that has a higher profit potential. Which is corporate welfare. If you want to change your statement to read "The government will choose a zero emissions car company to subsidize in order for it to grow" that will not be false. You stated" The technology in that $100,000 car, once it's been for paid for and properly developed, will eventually lead to $50,000, then $20,000, then $10,000 electric cars. " Which is completely false. And Tesla is tiny compared to the current market for 1. high capacity, lightweight single cell batteries. (cell phones, tablets, everything) 2. Algorithms for multi cell charging, balancing, high discharge rate usage. (portable power tools, laptop batteries, electric wheelchairs) Your entire first statement is foolish, and no amount of long quotes about how awesome Tesla is doing with government assistance with change it.
Why are you comparing electric car battery to small portable devices battery? One is pretty mature and reached massive scale and hence lower price while the other is still in infancy and reached no scale yet and thus have lots of room for improvement in not just price but technology.
Great question. The cells that are used in these cars are the same size as found in things like cordless drills and laptop batteries. The most common size, 18650, is the general industry standard. The difference is a drill or laptop pack might use 9 cells and a car uses a few thousand. That really makes no difference because you have to balance, monitor and control 9 the same way you do 900. The Tesla battery is just someone taking a DeWALT pack and connecting them in series and parallel to achieve the desired voltage. It isn't complicated as you might expect because it isn't a scale up, it is a multiplication. Nothing is becoming larger except the current and capacity. You note the price of the drill battery or a laptop battery is a little over 100 dollars and think that the low price is because of the known technology. Actually the price of the Tesla battery pack is a bargain compared to the drill. Because you are buying close to 8000 cells compared to 10 cells in the drill's pack for 120 dollars. So the opposite is true, the lower price is with the car's battery.
I forgot to mention that I talked about cell phones because while they do not need multi cell configurations like other applications, the technology push there is within the chemistry of each cell. Laptops and drills with multiple cells have pushed charging times shorter, balanced cells to decrease danger, and refined algorithms to increase pack life. Single cell devices like phones and tablets are pushing the technology of single cell battery chemistry to do similar things along with increased capacity, decreasing self discharge, increasing extreme temperature tolerance and performance, and decreasing weight. Since most of these cells are made by a few companies, that research is easily and quickly transferred to anything using battery packs.
y'all know this is a win for China and their abundant Rare Earth Mineral mines that wreck havoc on the Environment. Ironic, isn't it.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/514601/why-its-okay-that-tesla-makes-cars-for-rich-people/ From MIT Technology Review How about, before you launch into bombast, you actually look into these issues, before becoming flippant? I have to admit that electrical engineering is not my strong suit, but research does not seem to be yours. The very fact that Tesla is branching off into an area where they are benefiting from previous economies of scale is an explosive innovation that certainly reduces the cost of batteries and production for electric cars. You don't seem to understand that Tesla doesn't have to bring down the price of lithium packs (though it certainly, at a $11 billion clout, have more influence than you think, I wouldn't call it a tiny car manufacturer). The very fact that it is mass-producing cars with these packs in the first place, and developing the optimum manufacturing processes for doing so, is an explosive innovation that will bring the possibility of a $30,000 electric car that performs well into reality within a few years. Why do you have such a fetish on hating this anyways? I'm curious. If the end result are quieter cars that depend less on foreign countries for pollutants, what better return on investment can the American government get? Or should America invest in consuming all of the raw material in the world, or pumping up false credit cycles with the banking sector?
A smart person should buy a Tesla, take the batteries apart, unpack the batteries, repack and sell as drill batteries, make enough money to buy a 2nd Tesla with the 1st one being a parts car.
For more on Tesla's venture into breaking new ground--- http://www.technologyreview.com/news/513151/why-tesla-survived-and-fisker-wont/
Is it any less polluting to plug a car in to charge using electricity generated using for the most part fossil fuels? A lot of this electricity is lost during transmission on the way from the power plant. Also, a lot of energy was probably required to produce the battery pack that will need to be replaced at some point. Do these cars require any less fossil fuels to produce/run than regular cars?
Batteries are recyclable. And even if the electricity is generated using fossil fuels, the electric car is still far more efficient than the ICE, which is highly wasteful by its very nature.
I do think there needs to be more written about where the materials come from, what their carbon footprints are of extracting these materials, and (as mentioned above) where the electricity to power these vehicles is coming from (judging from the article, it appears the company is interested in becoming independent of the grid with solar power).
You continue to embarrass yourself. "as measured by performance and cost to manufacture" because they are using off the shelf parts and NOT INNOVATING, they are making cheaper packs than the Chevy Volt for example. The Volt uses far larger cells designed specifically for a car. This puts them temporarily behind the curve but once it's been for paid for and properly developed will become cheaper. In other words, the exact opposite of Tesla.
I would like to see what you have to back that up and how you define efficient. Generation losses, transmission losses to house and loss during charging are significant. From a cost standpoint energy is far cheaper and environmentally friendlier to buy in the form of electricity, but I would like to see an analysis from an efficiency standpoint starting from fossil fuel to work done.
Tell me how Tesla is not innovating when they're going about designing applications for lithium packages in electric cars, and perfecting the manufacturing processes behind it. This is using something with application in other areas, and using it in a new area, something nobody else is really doing. The dumbf**k way of creating new specialized batteries might be innovation in the purer sense of the word, but it doesn't make any sense economically, at the moment. Tesla proposes already to create a $35,000 model electric car that performs up to the standards consumers expect from gas motor vehicles. Once the technology that was developed to transfer this application and fit lithium packs into an electric car model has been paid for, and developed properly with leaner manufacturing processes that save labour hours, money, and reduce the cost and price of the model , Tesla will be able to develop cheaper electric cars. Again--- I personally think you are embarrassing yourself by throwing sand in the form of personal insults, but I understand that you have carried yourself away in your quest to define me as a moron based on one sentence, rather than debating the ideas at hand. If you could get yourself off that narrow focus, what exactly do you have against the development of electric cars anyhow? Why are you so adamantly opposed to Tesla? If you consider Tesla to be a product of excessive government support, would you care to propose some alternatives that could offer better return? Thanks.
There are some very bad environmental impacts beside carbon that Rare Earth mining causes. Like death to workers. The carbon footprint probably works out well, though And yes, china has a large majority of these minerals to the point my understanding is they can corner the market
