Results matching “Options”

Charging an electric vehicle is pretty easy: just like my cell phone, I plug it in when I get home and it's fully charged in the morning. It doesn't matter how long it takes because I'm not waiting for it to finish; the car just charges up and waits for me.

Electric vehicle drivers are excited to see the first DC Quick Charge stations coming online. Oregon and Washington have done their part to power up the West Coast Electric Highway allowing electric vehicle drivers to travel I-5 from the Canadian border to the Oregon-California border and take advantage of stations that can charge a Nissan LEAF or Mitsubishi iMiEV from empty to 80% in about half an hour. This greatly increases the usable range of electric vehicles for longer trips and also provides a safety net for rare situations when drivers unexpectedly need more than their normal overnight charge.

Unfortunately, there's a problem that is causing a lot of confusion that can result in a driver getting less charge than needed. Even though the stations are working properly, drivers may think something went wrong because of a user interface issue.

The above is the screen from an AeroVironment DC Quick Charge station in Tumwater, WA, as shown while charging our Nissan LEAF in June. The screen shows the driver two pieces of information: the amount of energy delivered to the car and a charge percent.

The problem is the displayed charge percent: it is not the car's state of charge (SOC) and should not be treated as such by a driver to decide when to end the charge.

It's pretty well known that it's difficult to determine the exact SOC of a car's battery. Even the best estimate of the battery's SOC may be off by a few percent. That's not what's going on here. The SOC value reported to the station is completely artificial and differs significantly from the car's estimate of the true SOC.

In addition to showing the invalid SOC value to the driver, Blink quick charge stations also require the user to choose a station-controlled charge limit. This has two big problems. First, the LEAF wants to control the charge and will stop the charge at either 80% or near 100% based on the battery state at the start of the charge, so even if you choose 100% on the station the LEAF will terminate the charge at 80% if the car was at 50% or less when the charge started. Second, the Blink station doesn't know the real state of charge and therefore cannot know when to stop charging at the point it says it will.

Here's an example. I recently used the Blink quick charge station at Harvard Market in Seattle, WA. I arrived with just over a half charge remaining, which means the LEAF will allow me to do a full quick charge up to near full capacity. After plugging in the car, the screen on the Blink station gave me a choice of charge levels, defaulting to 80%, which was the highest level shown. I had to press a "more options" button to be able to choose a 100% charge. The graph below shows data collected from the resulting 52-minute charge, comparing the car's actual SOC with the SOC shown on the station's screen.

As you can see, not only is the reported SOC higher than the actual SOC, the reported SOC rises more quickly, increasing the gap as the charge progresses. Throughout the entire charge, the SOC shown on the station consistently overstates the actual charge level and the problem gets worse later in the charge period. As the car gets to about 80% actual SOC, the reported SOC jumps up to plateau near 100% and just sits there for the remainder of the charge, even though the car is far from fully charged.

Had I left the default 80% setting, the charge would have stopped when the reported SOC hit 80%, but the car was really only at 73% at that time. A requested 90% charge would have stopped around 80% actual.

Any driver who sees this behavior and doesn't know that the charge percent value on the station is not the SOC would see it jump up to 97%, perhaps watch it sit there for a few minutes, and likely decide that it would be a waste of time to spend any longer waiting for that last 3%. If the driver ends the charge at that point, the car will be missing perhaps 10% of the potential charge. If that last 10% is needed to finish the journey, this could result in a very unhappy EV driver.

It's not clear where this value comes from, but displaying this invalid SOC on the quick charge stations has created user interface problem with unfortunate consequences for LEAF owners, and perhaps iMiEV owners as well.

So to any EV driver using a CHAdeMO quick charge station that shows an SOC percentage:

1. Ignore what the station shows. Put a sticky over it if you have to. Only look at the car's representation of the SOC.

2. If the station offers you different charge levels, choose 100% charge so that you get the car's best available charge level. If you want to stop the charge early for some reason, do it based on the SOC shown by the car.

I'll contact the quick charge station manufacturers to make sure they are aware of this problem. In the meantime, please help spread the word so EV drivers can get the maximum benefit from these highly valued stations.

For charts of two AeroVironment quick charge sessions, see Cathy Saxton's report. More tips for using quick charge stations are available on our Avoiding Quick Charging Pitfalls page.

Cathy and I took an 1,823-mile electric vehicle road trip to attend the Plug In America board meeting in Berkeley, CA, on June 23rd, 2012. Ever since we took delivery of our Tesla Roadster in June of 2009, I've wanted to take it on a long road trip just to have the experience. Over the past three years, the challenge of making the drive from Seattle to California has been greatly reduced. When Rich Kaethler took delivery of his Roadster in San Carlos, CA, and drove it back to Seattle in August of 2009, and Chad Schwitters made his long trek from Seattle to San Diego and back in April of 2010, these were pioneering efforts. Now we have full speed (240V/70A) Tesla charging along I-5 from British Columbia to southern California, which makes it possible to do the Seattle-to-San Francisco drive electrically in just a couple of days.

The Tesla Roadster offers a wide variety of charging options, from 120V/12A up to 240V/70A. Charging at higher voltage and current charges faster, but most of the time charging speed isn't an issue. If you drive a typical commute and charge at night, even the lowest power will get the car fully charged overnight. At least with the early Roadster firmware, charging at 120V was pretty inefficient because of the fixed charger overhead, but what about charging at 240V at various amperage limts? My theory was that charging at higher current is more efficient because you spend less time paying the charging overhead, but another owner challenged that assumption with the theory that higher current is less efficient because it generates more heat and thus increases the amount of energy spent keeping the battery pack cool.

Another aspect of charging is that for any given current setting, the Roadster will charge steadily at that current until it gets near the top of the charge, at which point it will start to taper off. This reduces your charge rate near the top of the pack. This aspect of charging isn't documented in the owners manual.

If I don't care about charging time, what's the best amperage for energy efficient charging? If I'm on a road trip and want to squeeze the most range out of time spent at a charging stop, how should I space my stops and how long should I charge at each one? I've collected enough data to shed some light on these questions.

Methodology

I performed a series of charges at various current levels from relatively low battery states up to a full standard mode charge. For each charge, I collected time, voltage and amperage once per minute, and state of charge once every 10 minutes. From that, I can compute energy used during every segment of the charge and the total energy used.

To track our energy use for driving, we have a dedicated electric meter for each of our EVs. To validate my energy calculations, I verified that the total energy calculated per charge matches the value computed from the meter readings.

All charging was done overnight in cool weather with a 2008 Roadster. The 16A charge was done with firmware version "3.5.17 15", all other runs were done with firmware version "3.4.17 15". The 16A charge stopped at a lower state of charge (96%, 188 IM) than I normally see (98%, 193 IM). I don't know if this is due to the lower current limit, the new firmware, or a one-time fluke.

Charge Rate	Wh per Std %	Wh per Ideal Mile
120V - 12A	807	414
120V - 16A	723	371
240V - 16A	589	306
240V - 24A	544	282
240V - 32A	527	274
240V - 40A	512	266
240V - 48A	524	272
240V - 70A	516	268

Charge Rate	Ideal Miles per Hour	Current Tapering Begins At:
		Std %	Std IM	Range %	Range IM
120V - 12A	3.3
120V - 16A	5.1
240V - 16A	13	93	179	82	205
240V - 24A	20	94	180	82	205
240V - 32A	28	93	178	82	207
240V - 40A	36	93	178	81	204
240V - 48A	42	91	174	80	201
240V - 70A	61	84	161	75	188

Let's assume I want to get the most range for time spent charging, and don't need to charge all the way to the top. From the above table we see that if I'm charging at 48A or lower, I can expect to see the charging rate start to taper off at around 80% or a bit over 200 ideal miles (range mode). If I'm lucky enough to be charging at 70A on the road, my charge rate will start dropping around 75% or 188 ideal miles. I'll keep charging above 40A until I hit that 80%/200IM mark, so if my next charging stop is only 40A, I may as well keep charging to that point.

I'm sure there's some variation from car to car, and the pack and ambient temperatures will change charging behavior, so don't plan your trip to depend on these exact values, but this is at least a rough guide.

Charging Profile Graphs

Let's start by looking at how the state of charge varies over time using different current limits at 240V. All charges are standard mode all the way up and normalized so that all the charge sessions are shown from the same starting point, around 36%.

The following email was sent to Tesla Motors customers on Tuesday, January 20th.

From: Elon Musk, Tesla Motors
To: Tesla Roadster Customers
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:45 pm PST
Subject: The Importance of Options

A much fuller account of the history of Tesla is worth telling at some point, but for now I will just talk about the essentials of why we needed to raise prices on options.  Fundamentally, it boils down to taking the tough steps that are difficult but necessary for Tesla to be a healthy company and not fall prey to the recession.

When the initial base price, for cars after the Signature 100 series, of $92k was approved by the board a few years ago, it was based on an estimated vehicle cost of roughly $65k provided by management at the time.  This turned out to be wrong by a very large margin.

An audit by one of the Series D investors in the summer of 2007 found that the true cost was closer to $140k, which was obviously an extremely alarming discovery and ultimately led to a near complete change in the makeup of the senior management team.  Over the past 18 months, observers will note that Tesla has transformed from having a senior team with very little automotive experience to one with deep automotive bench strength.  We now have executives with world class track records running everything from design to engineering to production to finance.

To bring the cost of the car down, we have reengineered the entire drivetrain, which is now at version 1.5 and will be at version 2 by June.  The body supplier was also switched out from a little company that was charging us nutty money and had a max production of three per week to Sotira, who supplies high paint quality body panels to Lotus, Aston Martin and others.  In the process, we had to pay several million dollars for a whole new set of body tooling, as the old tooling had been made incorrectly.  The old HVAC system was unreliable and cost almost as much as a new compact car, so also had to be replaced.  The wiring harness, seats, navigation system and instrument panel also had to be modified or replaced.

After reengineering and retooling virtually the entire Roadster and completely restructuring our supply chain, we are now finally coming to the point where the variable cost of the car (to be clear, this excludes fixed cost allocation) is between $90k to $100k.  With a lot of additional effort by the Tesla team and the help of our suppliers, we should be at or below $80k by this summer.  There is some variability here due to exchange rate shifts.  Although we gain an automatic currency hedge by selling in both Europe and the US, we are still vulnerable to the Yen, which is very strong right now.

Obviously, this still creates a serious problem for Tesla in the first half of 2009, given the $92k to $98k price of most cars delivered over this time period.  The board and I did not want to do a retroactive increase of the base vehicle price, as that would create an unavoidable hardship for customers.  Instead, apart from a $1k destination charge increase to match our true cost of logistics, we only raised the price of the optional elements and provided new options and a new model (Roadster Sport) to help improve the average margin per car.

The plan as currently projected, and which I believe is now realistic, shows a high likelihood of reaching profitability on the Roadster business this summer.  By that time, we will be delivering cars that have a base price of $109k plus about $20k or so of options (having worked our way through the $92k to $98k early buyers) at a rate of 30 per week.  We are fortunately in the position, rare among carmakers, of not having to worry too much about meeting 2009 sales targets, as we are already sold out through October and have barely touched the European market.

My paramount duty is to ensure that we get from here to there without needing to raise more money in this capital scarce environment, even if things don't go as well as expected.  I firmly believe that the plan above will achieve that goal and that it strikes a reasonable compromise between being fair to early customers and ensuring the viability of Tesla, which is obviously in the best interests of all customers. It's also important to note that the price increases will affect 400 customers, all of whom will take delivery after Jan. 1 and receive a $7,500 federal tax credit. We made the pricing changes to ensure the viability of Tesla in the long term, regardless of government incentives, but we hope the credit will offset the increase for most customers.
 
There is one additional point that relates to the government loans that Tesla is seeking for the Model S program, a much more affordable sedan that we are trying to bring to market as soon as possible.   A key requirement is that any company applying be able to show that it is viable without the loans.  If we allow ourselves to lose money on the cars we are shipping today, we place those loans at risk.  Mass market electric cars have been my goal from the beginning of Tesla.  I don't want and I don't think the vast majority of Tesla customers want us to do anything to jeopardize that objective.

Elon Musk
CEO & Product Architect

Here is the new pricing table updated with the information in the letter sent to Tesla Roadster owners on January 16th. This is an unofficial compilation for comparison purposes, based on my understanding and interpretation of the old and new packages, options and prices. Please post any corrections in the comments.

The email describing the new options and pricing did not detail the cut-off between the old pricing and new pricing, but I believe the new pricing applies to all 2008 model year Roadsters which had not already entered production. I will update as details become available.

Note that there are significant changes from the options communicated to owners nearing production earlier in the week.

The following options were previously available and are now available at adjusted prices and in different bundles:

	Original ($)	Current ($)
SolarPlus Windshield	(included)	400
High Power Connector	(included)	3,000
Forged Alloy Tesla Wheels	(included)	2,300
Painted Hardtop	3,200	3,200
Metallic Paint	500	1,000
Premium Paint	1,000	2,000
Paint Armor	approx 1,400	1,495
Premium Interior	1,800	1,800
Floor Mats	125	150
Mobile Connector (120V/15A & 240V/40A)	350	N/A
Mobile Connector (120V/15A)	N/A	(included)
Mobile Connector (120V/15A) Additional	N/A	600
Mobile Connector (240V/30A)	N/A	1,500
Upgraded Stereo Head Unit with Navigation System	1,200	N/A
Bluetooth	100	N/A
Sat Radio	400	N/A
Premium Speakers	800	N/A
Homelink door opener	(included)	N/A
Electronics Group (includes above 5 items)	N/A	3,000
Destination Charge	950	1,950

The apparent change in the 240V mobile charger from 40A to 30A may be to satisfy regulatory requirements. I will update this when I find out more from Tesla.

These are new options not previously available:

	Price ($)
Executive Leather Interior	6,000
Premium Carbon Fiber and Leather Interior	9,000
Clear Carbon Fiber Hardtop	5,000
Clear Carbon Fiber Accent Group	9,000
Performance Tires	850
Custom Tuned Adjustable Suspension	4,000
Battery Replacement	12,000
Extended Warranty (2yr/24,000 miles, excludes battery)	5,000

At this time, we don't know what the performance tires are or how they compare to the current and previous standard tires. I will update when we learn more.

Price Increase

The price increase for owners who had previously locked in their options depends on which options were chosen and which previously standard options the owner is willing to give up. Here are some examples:

Increase	Scenario
$ 1,000	New base model, losing alloy wheels and SolarPlus windshield, and replacing HPC with 120V/15A mobile connector.
$ 6,700	The previous base model configuration with no options added, which includes the HPC, the SolarPlus windshield and the silver forged alloy Tesla wheels; also gets 120V/15A mobile connector.
$ 9,350	Fully loaded model from previously available options, mobile connector reduced from 240V/40A to 240V/30A.

Revision History

• Jan 17 2009 13:44 PST: revised table of examples to include original base model.
• Jan 17 2009 23:32 PST: confirmed that Homelink transmitter was standard equipment.
  

Update: Tesla Motors announced the new options and pricing to all owners on Friday, January 16th. I've posted an updated analysis.

Tesla Motors is in the process of rolling out price increases to their customers who have pre-ordered a 2008 model year Roadster which has not yet entered production. Customers whose cars are about to enter production, after a two-year wait and a fourteen-month delay, are right now getting phone calls in which they are told they have to accept this price increase and re-select options before their car can go into production. This price increase applies to all 2008 Roadster orders starting with VIN 210.

These 2008 model year customers were given a base price of $92,000 and required to make a substantial deposit at a small start-up company with no experience in producing cars. Those early deposits of $30,000 to $50,000 were used along with investment capital to fund the development and early production of the Roadster. Around the time that Tesla delivered their first production car in February of 2008, they opened orders for 2009 model year cars at an increased base price of $109,000 to reflect both increases in their cost projections and also the then-proven ability of the company to produce cars.

Customers whose cars are going into production this month were required to lock in their option selections in September. All customers with orders for 2008 model year orders, some 600 cars, were required to lock in their selections by November of last year. Tesla Motors is unlocking those selections, raising the prices, and requiring owners to reselect their options with the higher prices.

This is coming as a big surprise to owners being informed of this given that they locked in their options and price months ago. A casual reading of our contract sure makes it sound like once we locked in our choices we were committed to buying the Roadster with those options, and Tesla Motors was committed to delivering that package for the price we agreed to.

Here is the table of original and current options and prices as provided by Tesla Motors on January 14th, 2009.

	Original Price	Current Price
Base Vehicle	$92,000	$92,000
SolarPlus Windshield	(included)	$400
High Power Connector	(included)	$3,000
Mobile Connector	$350	(included)*
Hardtop	$3,200	$3,200
Metallic Paint	$500	$1,000
Premium Paint	$1,000	$2,000
Premium Interior	$1,800	$1,800
Floor Mats	$125	$150
Navigation System	$1,200	N/A (see stereo bundle)
Bluetooth	$100	N/A (see stereo bundle)
Sat Radio	$400	N/A (see stereo bundle)
Premium Speakers	$800	N/A (see stereo bundle)
Stereo Bundle	N/A	$3,000
Destination Charge	$950	$1,950
New Options
Performance Tires	N/A	$1,150

The most obvious price increases are from the unbundling of the high power connector (HPC) and a $1,000 increase in the destination charge. The HPC connects the Roadster to home power for rapid charging. Previously, the HPC was included in the price of the Roadster for early orders. (Tesla had previously unbundled the HPC for 2009 model year orders.)

A second big change is the removal of à la carte audio upgrades. Previously, owners could choose to separately upgrade the speaker system and head unit (including a navigation system). With the upgraded head unit, owners could choose to add support for Sirius satellite radio and/or Bluetooth mobile phone integration. Now all of these items are available only as a single bundle for $3,000, which is $500 more than the total system cost originally. The option of spending just $800 for the built-in premium speaker system is no longer available, a disappointment to owners who wanted the factory speaker look with an aftermarket head unit.

There's also a subtle change in the mobile connector. Previously, owners were able to order a mobile connector for charging away from home. The promised mobile connector was to be compatible with both 120-volt and 240-volt connections using a variety of outlet adapters. Tesla later discovered regulatory hurdles to selling a 240-volt connector, so now owners have only a 120V/15A connector that takes about 37 hours to charge a fully depleted battery pack. Said another way, the mobile connector charges at a rate of about 6 miles of added range per hour of charging. Tesla is now including that 120V low-power mobile connector at no charge, with no timeframe or cost estimate for the 240V/40A mobile connector.

According to Doreen Allen, Tesla Motor's reasoning for the price increases is that they are working hard to get to being profitable on each Roadster delivered, and that the federal tax credit of $7,500 which became effective on January 1, 2009, means that the net effective price of the Roadster decreased at the beginning of this year. Additionally, the à la carte audio options were creating too much complexity in production and had to be consolidated to be sustainable.

This owner finds it particularly galling that he and his wife got the message from Tesla that our car is being held from starting production until we agree to these sudden, retroactive price increases on the same day that Tesla Motors published a blog Tax Incentives: Why the Roadster costs less than its sticker price.

On a personal note, we complained a lot, but in the end picked a set of options and agreed to pay the price increase because we want Tesla to be successful and we want our car as soon as possible. It didn't seem worth it to spend a week complaining and arguing about it, not when our car was ready to go into production.

Yesterday, Tesla Motors delivered their first production Roadster to their first customer: Elon Musk, chairman of Tesla's board. It has the "beta" transmission, and production will trickle out vehicles through the first half of 2008 until they have the final transmission design finished and tested.

There was a minor event marking the delivery of "P1" to Tesla headquarters, and a few members of the press were invited. According to several reports online, Elon Musk and Ze'ev Drori gave an interview and mentioned that the White Star would offer a range-extended model as well as the pure electric.

Even though this has been know for a while, this news has picked up traction and some are saying that Tesla has sold out their vision of producing pure electrics and switched to making hybrids like everyone else is doing.

This is totally wrong. To explain, I should first explain what's good about a pure electric vehicle, what's bad about hybrids and how what Tesla is doing is better than a hybrid.

Electric Vehicles

Briefly, here are the advantages of driving a pure electric vehicle:

• Much lower well-to-road carbon and other pollutant emissions.
• Zero emissions when powered from renewable sources.
• Greatly reduced maintenance.
• No more trips to the gas station.
• Quiet.
• Electric is the ultimate flex fuel.
  
• No added energy infrastructure required.
  

The biggest downsides are cost and charge time/range.

The auto industry has been mass-producing cars for a hundred years, so they have figured out how to mass produce them cheaply, or more correctly they define what people expect to pay for cars. As electric vehicles become mainstream, their costs will come down. Battery technology is currently a barrier to reducing cost, but there is lots of working going on in that area, with many avenues for significant improvement.

We have all been trained by the oil company propaganda machine to worry about the range of electric vehicles, even though most of the day-to-day driving needs for the vast majority of drivers would be met by the 100 mile range of the GM EV1 that was produced in the late 1990's.

But range isn't really the issue. Do you ever hear a car ad that brags about, or even mentions, a car's range? The range of a gas car is of minor importance because it's quick to refill a gas tank. With electric vehicles, the charge time can be much longer. But it doesn't have to be. In fact, charge time can be a huge advantage over a gas vehicle.

Consider the Tesla Roadster. It has a range of between 160 miles (worst case, driving like a maniac on the freeway) and 270 miles (mellow city driving). That's more than enough for almost anyone's daily driving. When you get home, it's just like your cell phone: you plug it in and it's fully charged long before you're awake the next morning. (It takes under five hours to charge a completely discharged Roadster with an appropriate electrical connection, significanly less if your daily commute is under 200 miles.)

Plugging in your car at night is a huge time savings compared to making the weekly trek to the gas station, and far less expensive (about 2 cents per mile).

Charge time does become an issue if you want to drive more than 200 miles in one day. The good news is that the limit to the charge rate isn't the design of the car, it's the capacity of the outlet. It's possible to charge a Tesla Roadster battery pack in about an hour if you have access to enough current. It's not practical to put such a large circuit in your home, but it would be practical to install several in parking lots at restaurants, malls, etc. So, drive your 200 miles, stop and put a couple of bucks into a charging station and your Roadster is all ready to go after you've eaten a leisurely lunch.

Once electric vehicles reach critical mass, gas cars will seem stupid by comparison. Why would anyone choose to drive a horrible pollution factory which has to be frequently maintained and manually filled with a carcinogenic and highly flammable fuel at enormous cost, most of which is sent overseas to support totalitarian govenrments?

Hybrid Vehicles

Hybrid vehicles seem like a great compromise, half way between a gas guzzler and an electric vehicle. They can in fact offer better fuel economy for smaller vehicles, but they throw out every other advantage of an electric vehicle. They still have all of the stuff from a gas vehicle that requires frequent maintenance: oil changes, muffler, catalytic converter, spark plugs, fuel filters, etc. You still have to go to the gas station periodically, and you're still running an inefficient gas engine.

But it's worse than that. In a hybrid, you punish the engine by adding the extra mass of a battery pack, reducing fuel economy and power. You also burden the battery pack with the weight of an engine and gas tank. This isn't the best of both worlds, it's the worst of both: very limited pure electric range from the battery, and poor acceleration from the gas engine.

The best of the hybrids, like the Toyota Prius and the discontinued Honda Insight, deliver great gas mileage and make for a significant improvement over the typical gas guzzler. Other hybrids are a complete fraud, offering very little in the way of improved gas mileage, instead they claim improved acceleration from the electric boost.

My wife and I do the vast majority of our driving in a Honda Insight. We've been driving one since the summer of 2001 and really like the car. But do we get the great fuel economy from the electric hybrid, or from the small aerodynamic design? I can't help but wonder if we could get better mileage from a truly optimized pure gas vehicle. I know we can do better from a pure electric.

Even through we love our Insight, hybrids are a horrible compromise. They seem like a desperate attempt by the auto companies to hold on to the revenue stream that comes from the ludicrous amount of maintenance required by a gas powered vehicle, while pandering to a growing concern for reducing environmental impact.

Range Extended Electric Vehicles

There's a variation on the hybrid design that makes a lot more sense: take a pure electric vehicle and add a small efficient gas-powered generator that can extend the range of the vehicle for long trips.

The gas engine only needs to run when you are taking a long trip, so most of the time it doesn't need to run at all. It's a small engine, and not hooked into the drive train, so the extra weight is greatly reduced compared to a traditional hybrid. Also, the engine doesn't have to run wide range of RPM and torque combinations needed for a drive train, instead it can run in its most efficient mode getting maximum power out of the gas it burns.

You still have a lot of the gas-engine maintenance issues to deal with, but you do get all of the other advantages of a pure electric, plus you can drive farther between charges for those long road trips. This could open the door to a lot of people owning a vehicle that allows them to drive nearly all of their miles in pure electric mode, without having to keep a gas guzzler in the garage for longer trips.

Tesla's White Star

Tesla's next model after the $98,000 two-seat Roadster will be the much more practical White Star, a four-door, five-passenger sport sedan that will range in cost from $50,000 to $70,000. Tesla will offer the White Star in two models: pure electric and range-extended electric. By offering these two options, far more people will be able to consider owning a vehicle that can be driven pure electric for the vast majority of their driving needs.

Look for details on the White Star to be announced in the second quarter of this year, at which point we should also get its real name. (White Star is just the code name, the Roadster was originally code-named Dark Star.)

The White Star will be followed a few years later by a higher-volume lower-cost economy vehicle, code-named Blue Star. It takes time to start a whole new auto industry, and Tesla is leading they way. I hope they succeed and inspire a great deal of competition from other car makers, either today's big auto makers or the crop of startups that will displace today's giants from the market if they don't adapt to the changing world economy and global environment.

Tesla Motors hosted a town hall meeting today, with attendees in San Carlos and over the phone. This is my summary of the major points according to my notes. Expect a full audio recording of the call to be made available on Tesla Motor's web site as soon as possible.

Elon Musk started by reaffirming their commitment to both the Roadster and the White Star sedan. Roadster customers are helping to support Tesla's long term goal to get into the mass production of electric vehicles.

JB Straubel briefly described the plan announced last week to move to a single-speed transmission (really just a gear box) and meeting the original performance specs by sending more current to the motor, using an improved cooling system to allow for increased heat dissipation. This new gearbox is what the White Star team has been working on, and isn't just a last minute scramble to solve the Roadster's transmission issues. The single gear ratio will be 8.27:1, which is between the old first and second gears, closer to second gear. The top motor speed will remain at 14,000 RPM, with a slight chance of modest improvement. The goal for 0-60 time is 4 seconds under real conditions, and perhaps less than 4 seconds under ideal testing conditions. The top speed may come down a bit, but is expected to stay at or above 120 mph. Due to increased efficiency, the driving range may improve slightly, but less than 10%, perhaps in the 230-235 range. The 0-100 time will be improved by having a broader torque curve, likewise the quarter mile time is expected to drop into the 12-second range. These are just goals and estimates, they won't know for sure how it will all perform until they have production units to test and run through the EPA tests.

They will be using the same motor and battery pack, primarily only the PEM (power electronics module, aka the inverter) is changing. The current air-based cooling system will be improved, with as few changes as possible. The White Star will have a liquid-cooled drive train, but they are not implementing that in the Roadster. The increased current sent to the motor is made possible by new parts being available, something that wasn't possible when they originally decided on a two-speed transmission.

With no transmission, the gear shifter is purely an input to the firmware. Drive and reverse simply set the motor direction, and neutral disables power to the motor. There is a park-lock controlled by key-on and key-off, but no "park" position on the gear shifter, just like a manual transmission ICE car.

The change to the gearbox is not expected to require any new crash tests, the weight of the new gearbox will between the two transmissions that were put through the previous crash tests. The changes are small enough that other systems should not be affected. Testing the gearbox will be a lengthy process, starting this summer. They will upgrade their current test vehicles in the US and the UK for early testing as soon as possible.

Regarding risks in the new design, they are working with a very experienced designer with a solid track record. The new gearbox has less than half the parts, and less than half the bearings compared to the two-speed transmission. They have already put over 100,000 miles on the original one-speed prototype gearbox without problems. The new design will reduce weight and cost while also increasing efficiency and reliability.

The new design will have much less backlash than the two-speed, by a factor of three. In gearbox design, there's a trade-off between reducing backlash and increasing efficiency. The one-speed gearbox will perform better than the two-speed transmission in that regard.

The Car and Driver review said the "heavy-use" range is about 160 miles, a bit lower than the 170-mile range previously stated by Tesla's aggressive driving range. That test drive was done in the cold, rain, with the top off and the heater on, and with a heavy passenger, and no restraint using the accelerator.

The Roadster will have multiple driving modes: maximum performance and maximum range were mentioned. These will change how the car drives, and also how the firmware estimates remaining charge.

Elon Musk's car, Production Unit 1, will arrive this Friday, between 11:00 am and 2:00 pm!

Early production begins on March 17th, at about one car per week with the interim single-speed transmission. Production will ramp up, first to two per week, then three per week, as fast as possible without waiting for the new gearbox. Tesla estimates they will be using the new gearbox by vehicle number #100, roughly estimating to have cars in the 400s produced by the end of the year. By 2009, they expect to be producing 40 per week, for a total of 1,500 in 2009.

The 2009 model year Roadster is expected to see a cost increase. Slots that have been vacated in the 2008 model year schedule are going for $125,000. The Roadsters will be a pretty hot item when they hit the road, attracting a lot of attention. One customer asked about a lo-jack (hidden GPS tracking) option as a theft deterrent , and Tesla said they would look into offering something as a delivery option.

The charger is built into the car and charging options are simply a combination of a cable and a firmware setting. The current options are 1) 120V/15A which plugs into a standard wall outlet, 2) 240V/40A which plugs into a dryer outlet, and 3) 240V/70A which requires installing a special charging plug. Tesla is also looking into a pay per use 1-hour charging option that would be available in specific locations to make it possible to charge the car over lunch when making a long distance drive. The current battery pack can handle the rapid charge, which will likely be done using a high voltage DC bypass.

Owners who take one of the early units with the preliminary one-speed gearbox will be able to have the new gearbox swap completed in one day, plus any required shipping time. By the time cars are delivered, there should be Tesla service centers on both coasts, so they don't have to ship cars across the country to do the swap. Tesla may offer these early customers the option to keep the preliminary transmissions (if the 0-60 time isn't important to the customer), with some incentives for doing so.

Tesla expects to reveal a static model of the White Star (and presumably its real name) in the 2nd quarter of 2008, and to break ground on the production facility late 2008 or early 2009.