Tesla in Trouble?

Watch Dog Silicon Valley reported yesterday that Tesla Motors faces new competition in the world of cool electric roadsters, and speculates that the company is unlikely to come to turn San Jose into the green Detroit that some have imagined.

Commenting on Chuck Reed’s Wednesday State of the City speech, Watch Dog reminded its readers that one year ago, Reed built his address around the Tesla move and his ambitious plan to make San Jose a green-tech capital. This year’s speech, of course, was considerably less optimistic—and contained no mention of Elon Musk’s visionary car company, which announced big plans for our city in 2008.

The blog also points out that Dodge recently unveiled its own “100% electric car with a sleek, cool, fast Lotus body” at the Detroit Auto Show.

From the post: “Let’s see: Both cars are electric and both cars are Lotus-like. One comes from a company you’ve heard of that has dealerships everywhere and the other is no-name brand with few dealerships…”

 

10 Comments

  1. Where does the electricity come from for electric cars? Why oil and coal burning power plants from somewhere else. They do nothing to break our addiction to oil. They just put the pollution and green house gasses into another community. Kind of narcissistic and NIMBY’ish. As of now, a hybrid car makes much more sense than any electric car. For that matter just a gas combustion engine getting 40 plus miles per gallon makes more sense. Until we are willing to build nuclear power plants as France, Japan, India, and a host of other countries are doing, electric cars are just a feel good green proposition. By the way, I hope everyone looking for a new car takes a look at American cars, they are every bit as good as any foreign car and cost a lot less to buy and maintain.

  2. #1 I agree partially. electric cars are not the answer, neither are hybrids. They both use energy, an extraordinary amount of energy to carry a single person around.

    Electric cars and hybrids are the answer to a different question, the question of “How can I flaunt my riches and feel like I am a forward-thinking, concerned-for-the-environment neo-hippy?”

    The real question is “Why do I need a car to drive by myself at all?”

    Electric cars and hybrids will do for energy independence and global warming what filtered cigarettes did for lung cancer.

  3. I would not be so quick to count Tesla out.

    Dodge can’t build a decent gas burner. What are the odds they will do any better with an electric car?

    Or to put it another way, I don’t think the celebs will be rolling up at Spagos in an electric Dodge!

  4. #1 and #2.  As solar, wind, and tide generation become more economical, more of our electricity will come from there.  That makes electric vehicles cleaner than those with combustion engines. 

    In addition, it is much easier to remediate emmissions, including CO2, at central generating facilities than to have local point sources traveling around on our roads.  So even fossil fuel based energy being used to charge electric cars is better than fossil fuel being burned in traditional cars.

    Also, as individuals, business, etc begin to add local solar systems, it will make even more sense to charge electric vehicles.  Why are so many people holding on to the traditional fossil fuel economic model?

  5. #4,

    Even the most optimistic projections by scientists put the energy amounts generated by solar and wind at 10-15% of our total needs. We will soon be paying $10 a gallon for gas and going into a full fledged depression if we don’t go nuclear for our immediate needs. The founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, is now a big supporter of nuclear, as well as other energy sources, as he has seen through the nuclear hysteria.

  6. #6 you’re right, nuclear ain’t so bad. The problem with it is that it’s expensive to build the plants and takes a long time.

    Also, if we were 100% nuclear we’d run our of U235 in about two decades. That might be time before solar, wind et all become cheap (or rather cheap in comparison to the new price of electricity, which will be much higher than now), but maybe not. And we’ll be left with the waste to store forever.

    Oil supply is running out. Beware, a better US and global economy will precede oil and gas shortages and much havoc.

    The answer is energy conservation. Public trans, bicycling and *gasp* walking places. Also LED lighting for the home. CFL’s have mercury and aren’t as efficient as LED.

    I believe the power grid of the future has a solar panel on all residential roofs, with peak and night time generation coming from natural gas and *ugh* coal plants. The residential solar will power businesses and the plants will power the people.

  7. The big problem with electric cars is the batteries. No one so far has built one that can go further than 200 miles, which means it couldn’t be a primary vehicle for a person. It would be practical for deliveries, like for Fedex.

    The other problem is the materials for batteries. They use materials that are obtained from unstable places like the Congo, and when they stop working they create a disposal problem because they are dangerous and polluting.

    In the days before most people had cars, department stores and grocery stores would deliver your purchases to your house. Before the dotcom bust there was a company doing groceries like that—order online and they deliver to your house. If people moved more to public transportation, that’s probably the model we would go back to, so the delivery vehicles could be electric.

    Tesla’s different anyway, because they have a luxury product that sells mostly on its coolness. It’s like people who buy iPods even though competing MP3 players give you more features at 1/3 the price.

  8. What ever happened to Nuclear Fusion for Unlimited Ultra Cheap Electricity??

    Back in 1975 I worked at Lawrence Livermore Labs for six month constructing all kinds of neat electronic devices (but no nuclear bomb stuff). It was a fun job, punching sheet metal, stuffing boards, wiring and testing, from start to finish.

    LLL was a great place to work; with flex time.  Come in any time between 7 and 9 AM, put in 8 hours.  Had a folding bicycle in the back of my Bug.  At lunch I could freely explore the entire huge place (except the Bomb Tower).  All kinds of neat projects were underway. Nuclear reactors feeding linear accellerators, magnetic plasma bottles,  duplex whatever?, insitu steam oil well injection, etc.

    The most ambitous was “Shiva” that just started.  Many arms full of laser light amplifiers concentrated on a steel ball. Huge capacitor banks would release vast amount of stored energy through the ball’s windows. Inside a frozen deuterium pellet was compressed by all the laser beams firing at once resulting in nuclear fusion. 

    They figured within 25 years they would have progressed beyond break-even and produce cheap unlimited electric power with no residual radiation nor dangerous spent fuel.

    That was 39 years ago!  What happened to all of these experiments?  Why no electric power from fusion?  How have all the scientists and engineers failed us?

    Livermore is a long commute from Santa Cruz. Used my folding cot in the back of the VW to sleep in fellow workers’ garages.  Only commuted twice a week back to Santa Cruz. Within six month found a local SC job, and later a local government job just 5 minutes commute away.  Couldn’t stand my idiot bosses, so I retired as soon as I could at 55. 
    Hope you too were lucky enough to get a government job with a good pension plan!

  9. #8,
    We will not run out nuclear fuel in the next 2 decades, or next 200 years. Uranium is one of the most plentiful elements on earth, not to scare the nuclear hysterics.

    “The problem with it is that it’s expensive to build the plants and takes a long time.”
    We spent an extra trillion dollars on energy last year when the price of gas went up to $5 a gallon….we could have built many nuclear plants at $5 billion each….a plant can be built in about 3 years if the Sierra Club attorneys don’t delay things in court to pad their own pockets….

    #4,
    “it is much easier to remediate emmissions, including CO2, at central generating facilities than to have local point sources traveling around on our roads.  So even fossil fuel based energy being used to charge electric cars is better than fossil fuel being burned in traditional cars.”
    Wroooongggg…..the modern car is virtually emission free, that and the loss of power sent on power lines kind be as much as 25%, meaning you have to burn 25% more coal/oil to generate the same amount of energy used by an electric car, or to put it another way your miles per gallon are reduced 25% not to mention the energy you need to use to push around a huge battery on your car.

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