Results matching “Tesla Roadster”

For the month of November, I drove the Roadster 762.2 miles. That's mostly with just me in the car driving a variety of city and highway miles. I tend to drive enthusiastically most of the time, but the month also included a roundtrip drive to Longview, WA on cruise control at 55 mph.

During the month, I put about 247.8 kWh into the car from the wall (213.3 kWh metered from my garage plus approximately 34.5 kWh from an unmetered NEMA 14-50 outlet in Longview). That's 325.1 Wh/mi and includes charging losses, battery pack self discharge, heater, headlights, etc. That's my wall-to-wheel number and is based completely on things I can measure.

From July 25th to August 27th, I drove the Roadster 696 miles and pulled 234 kilowatt hours (kWh) from the grid, giving us 336 Wh/mi. That included some hot weather and four 1/4 mile runs at Pacific Raceways.

On individual charges, I see efficiency vary from 240 Wh/mi to over 400 Wh/mi, and obviously much higher for things like drag racing.

I charge consistently at 240V and 40A at home. In Longview it was 230V and 40A. Because of charging overhead, I assume I would get slightly better charging efficiency if I charged at home at 70A. So, my numbers are just that, my numbers. Another driver would get different numbers depending on driving, weather, road conditions, and charging habits.

The EPA estimates documented in the paperwork for our car say 260 Wh/mi city and 290 Wh/mi highway. I've seen information from early 2008 Roadsters that had the EPA numbers and 340 and 360 Wh/mi.

You may have heard Roadster owners talk about numbers well below my 330 Wh/mi numbers. These are most often the number reported by the car's info screen which are not wall-to-wheel numbers, and in fact are (as far as I know) not at all documented as to what that number means. I have figured out some things about the numbers reported by the car, which I'll now explain.

For the month of November, the Roadster's trip meter says that I used 207.9 kWh, and thus 272.8 Wh/mi. But what does that mean? Did I push 207.9 kWh into the motor, or is that net of energy pushed back into the pack from regenerative braking (regen)? Does it include energy used to run the accessories and/or running the coolant pump and fans during charging?

On the "Energy History" screen, the Roadster tells me my "net energy used" for the month was 233 kWh and that I got 26 kWh from regen. What does "net" mean? I would assume that "net" means "net of regen," i.e., power from battery pack minus power into battery pack from regen. Except, if I compare those numbers to what the trip meter says, I notice that 233 - 26 = 207, which is suspiciously close to the energy use number reported on the trip meter.

From that, I infer that the trip meter's number is net energy use from the battery pack (power drawn minus regen put back in), and thus the so-called "net energy" from the energy use screen is really the gross energy pulled from the battery pack including energy that went into the pack from both wall charging and regen charging.

Do these numbers include the energy spent on accessories? Is the difference between what I put in through charging (247.8 kWh) and the car's reported net energy use (207.9 kWh) just charging losses or does that also include accessory use? I have no idea.

The only number I can stand behind, and the only number I can compare with other electric vehicles, is the wall-to-wheel number. The efficiency number reported on various of the Roadster's info screens is useful for understanding how driving style and conditions affect efficiency and for predicting/optimizing range, but is seemingly useless in any other context.

I believe the same is true of any efficiency number for the Leaf given out by Nissan, or any other EV manufacturer or driver, unless that number is as clearly defined and directly measured as the wall-to-wheel number.

It used to be that the Tesla screen reported an energy number after each charge that was much lower that what was actually drawn from the wall. I suspect that was the energy that actually made it into the battery pack, but I never saw it defined by Tesla. More recent firmware versions are reporting a number that is close to the number I read from the wall meter (and averaging multiple consecutive readings together agrees to within 1% of the wall reading). This is a big step forward for drivers who want to monitor their actual wall-to-wheel energy use and efficiency, but don't want to go to the expense of installing a dedicated meter. It would be a real benefit to the Tesla community if Tesla would (a) define the number they currently report and (b) make the energy drawn from the wall across multiple charges easily available.

Regarding range on a single charge, my personal record is 192 miles driven with a passenger in 100+ degree weather starting with a bit less than a full charge and ending with 10 miles of range left. On the trip back from Longview in cool weather, I drove 136.9 miles using cruise control at 55 mph using 55% of the battery. To the extent that you can extrapolate that to the full battery, that figures out to about 249 miles of range. On the trip down to Longview earlier the same day, also using cruise control at 55 mph, it was raining and colder, so I had the wipers, headlights and heater on and used 65% of the battery pack, for an extrapolated range of 208 miles.

My car is a 2008 Tesla Roadster with firmware version "3.4.15 15" (upgraded from "3.4.13 15" on 11/15/2009).

Edited at 10:23 pm on 12/13 to correct typo in second paragraph.

On Monday, the weather was too nice to not be out driving so I decided to take a spin up to Mt. Rainier to see if the roundtrip could be done on a single charge. Thanks to Todd Laney for planting the seed by suggesting it as a possible Roadster owner drive route to follow our adventure on Sunday.

I used Google maps to plot a route and get mileage/time estimates. Google estimated the drive at about 2:30 and my goal was to make the roundtrip in four hours. On the way back I took Highway 18 instead of Cedar Grove Rd SE, which wasn't that scenic and smelled of landfill.

I left our house at 4:00 pm, with a full standard mode charge at 194 ideal miles. I reset the trip meter so I could easily track mileage and energy used. I left later than I had hoped, and I paid for it by being stuck in traffic pretty much the entire way from Issaquah to Enumclaw. That didn't help with my four-hour goal.

Give or take a few stunning views of Rainier near Black Diamond, the drive didn't get fun until I left Enumclaw (and the traffic) and got onto SR 410, a two-lane road through forest. I was pushing to make up lost time, but mindful of the risk of deer crossing the road, so I kept the speedometer at or a little above the speed limit. I didn't see much traffic and only passed one vehicle, a van going well below the speed limit.

I neglected to record state when I entered the park to begin the ascent up the mountain, but I recall the battery being around 90 ideal miles and the trip odometer would have been around 70. At about 4 miles from Sunrise, the trip and battery state crossed at 79 miles driven and 79 ideal miles left in the battery pack. If I were on level ground, I would have been considering bailing at that point, but I knew I had used extra energy climbing that I would get back on the descent. Also, I was still driving in standard mode, so I could switch into range mode to get another 25 miles of range.

The best part of the drive was the winding ascent up the mountain, wonderful conditions for the Roadster, although the road was pretty uneven in spots. I was having fun but not being crazy about it. Two thirds of the way up the mountain, I came up behind another car and resigned myself to taking the rest of the drive at his pace, which would have been fine. However, as soon as I came up behind him, he immediately pulled over to let me pass. I don't know whether he was scared of the red sports car, or just really nice. I waved in appreciation as I passed.

I arrived at Sunrise at 6:08 pm, just a few minutes later than my goal time. I let the car sit for a few minutes while I tracked down a restroom and snapped a quick photo. Ready for the return drive, the trip meter said I had driven 83.7 miles and used 28.01 kWh. The touchscreen altimeter said 6300 ft, temperature at 60 F, with the SOC at 47% and 69 ideal miles (standard mode).



For the descent, I got regen nearly the entire way. I stopped twice on the way down, once at the viewpoint just below Sunrise where I got my cell phone signal back and called to update Cathy on my progress, and at the bottom to record data. At the park exit, 14.0 miles from Sunrise, the battery state was up to 71 ideal miles, a net gain of two ideal miles from the reading at the top.

I was treated to a beautiful sunset with a thin crescent moon just above the horizon as I was finishing up the drive on SR 410 approaching Enumclaw.

I had a TomTom GPS navigation device programmed for the route home, mostly to show me remaining miles and ETA. When I left the summit at 6:20 or so, it was predicting I would get home just before 9:00, which was obviously wrong since I made the trip there in just over two hours. After exiting the park, the ideal miles tracked the remaining miles pretty closely, showing a buffer of about 10 miles the entire way, while the ETA dropped steadily.

I got home at 8:20, missing my four-hour goal by about the length of my stops. The trip meter read 168.8 miles and 41.76 kWh. Our house is about 100 ft elevation, so the trip involved climbing then descending 6,200 feet. The battery pack was showing a temperature reading of four (the highest of the blue ticks), PEM and motor at 3. After sitting for 20 minutes to stabilize, the state of charge read about 5% of the battery left, 9 ideal miles.

Charging back up to full (standard mode) from 240V/40A took 5:20 and put 44 kWh back into the battery pack. The meter on the wall indicated it pulled 50.0 kWh hours, or 296 Wh/mi from wall to wheel, about 12% below my average of 336 Wh/mi.

If Watt-hours per mile doesn't mean anything to you, at 9 cents per kWh for "green power" from Puget Sound Energy, it cost me about $4.50 to drive 168.8 miles, or about 37.5 miles per dollar of green electricity.

My take-away from the drive:

• The roundtrip can be done on a single standard mode charge, but if you have a passenger or are farther away than Sammamish, I'd recommend a range mode charge.
• If you do it on a weekday, start early enough to avoid the evening rush hour.
• Take a credit card: it costs $15 to get into the park via the automated kiosk. Cash might also work.
• Driving through the woods at sunset on a warm day leaves the front of your car covered with a thick layer of bugs.
  

I joined four other Seattle-area Tesla owners in driving down to Portland for the NEDRA Wayland Invitational IV electric vehicle drag racing event at Portland International Raceways on July 24th and 25th. My friend Richard wasn't due to receive his 2010 Roadster for another week or two, so he and I shared the driving and the racing in my car.

None of us had any previous drag racing experience, we were just doing it to promote electric vehicles by showing a bunch of people that EVs can be as fun and powerful as gas-burners without sending a bunch of our our dollars overseas or dumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

Over the two days, thanks to Northwest Handling Systems, John Wayland, James Morrison, and several others behind the scenes, who arranged charging both on and off the track, I was able to post the best time in a 2008 Roadster: a 12.982 second 1/4 mile ET at 103.48 mph. The best Roadster time was set by Scotty Pollacheck (the professional driver/rider of the famous Killacycle) in James Morrison's freshly-delivered 2010 Roadster sport: 12.643 second 1/4 mile ET at 102.89 mph.

At the Wayland Invitational, I got to race head-to-head against other 2008 Roadsters using the same driving technique and as well as controlling other parameters. Having Richard racing in my car allowed me to compare how weight changed times with other parameters held constant. Also got to race against the famous White Zombie. We had two nights there, one with charging at the track and one without. My YouTube channel has some videos from that weekend.

Two weeks later, the same group of owners spent another evening at Pacific Raceways in Kent, WA this time with Richard driving his shiny new 2010 Roadster. I was able to do some more experiments there.

Based on what I've seen so far, it breaks down like this:

13.40 seconds: 2008 Roadster, medium weight driver with a cool battery pack, single foot start, traction control on, racing in warm weather at sea level.

0.32 seconds - having a warm battery pack from a recent 240V/40A charge
0.10 seconds - traction control off
0.07 seconds - lose 20 to 30 lbs of driver weight
0.07 seconds - two-footed start (indirect estimate)

I didn't compare single foot launch and two-foot launch with all other parameters controlled. From otherwise similar runs in Portland and Kent, I saw a difference of about 0.07 seconds, but that was different tracks, different charge profiles and different ambient temperatures. The other delta were pretty well controlled.

One owner in Portland increased tire pressure to 40 psi all around trying to shave off a few hundredths to break into the high 12's and didn't get any benefit.

There's also some variation from car to car depending on how well the motor was wound, etc. While there was about 0.07 seconds difference between Richard and me in my car (presumably due to weight), there was a much smaller difference between Scott in his car and me in mine (0.04 seconds) even though I would guess the weight difference to be similar.

I didn't sense the stock tires spinning even with a two-foot launch and TC off, so I don't see how sticky tires would help on a 2008 Roadster. I have confirmation from Tesla to not expect the 2008 Roadster to spin the stock tires with TC off when on dry pavement and driving in a straight line. (That said, I am not recommending turning off TC in any other circumstance.)

I didn't get a chance to try all of the optimizations on the same run. It was only on the second day of the Wayland Invitational that I had a chance to charge up at the track and that was before I learned about the two-foot launch technique in detail, and also before I had the nerve to turn off traction control. So, I don't know what happens when you stack up all of the techniques together.

According to my data, getting a stock 2008 Roadster under 12.8 is going to take a trick I don't know about. Perhaps a driver under 100 lbs, or driving at higher altitude could do it. It might also help to fold back the side mirrors to reduce drag. It will be interesting to see what happens at the NEDRA nationals in Denver in September.

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.

Gas/Electric Hybrid Vehicles

About ten years ago, the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight entered the US car market and have grown to change the way we think about automobiles, the environment, and energy efficiency. Starting slowly at first, sales of the Prius took off and now they are one of the most popular models sold in the US.

These hybrids are simple to understand: they run on gasoline just like every other car on the road, but they have a battery pack and electric motor that makes them more efficient: they get very good gas mileage.

But it's an odd design to meld two drivetrains into a single vehicle. Why is it more efficient to make a gasoline engine push around an electric motor and battery pack, and also make an electric drive push around the gas engine and fuel tank? It's not clear to me that it is that efficient. If you look at the top fuel efficient 2009 vehicles according to the EPA, you'll see that the top vehicles are hybrids, but their advantage is mostly in city driving. The diesel Jetta is just 10% less efficient than the Prius on the highway. In Europe, there are even more efficient diesel vehicles.

Hybrids work well for city driving because they use regenerative braking to capture some of the energy that is normally just dumped into wearing out your brakes when you slow down for a stop light. Even though only a portion of that wasted energy gets stored in the battery pack, it's enough of an improvement to make the double-drivetrain vehicle more efficient.

Hybrids are able to offset some of the weight of the electric drive by using a smaller gas engine. The electric drive can help push the vehicle up a hill, and get some of that charge back on the down slope.

Gasoline engines are only about 25% to 30% efficient. That is, only about 25% of the energy contained in a gallon of gas makes it to the wheels to propel the car. The rest of that energy is wasted as heat and mechanical inefficiency. A good part of that gets wasted in the transmission because a gas engine only produces high power/torque in a narrow band of RPMs, so multiple gears are required for good acceleration at a wide range of speeds.

An electric drivetrain can be over 80% efficient. There's no heat wasted in exhaust and no reciprocating pistons. Also, an electric motor can deliver high torque and power over a very broad RPM range, so there's no need for a transmission and thus no mechanical losses there. That's how adding the weight of a second drivetrain that is just fed with a fraction of the kinetic energy normally wasted by braking can improve the efficiency of a gas engine in city driving.

Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles

If that little bit of saved energy can be used to create a more efficient vehicle, wouldn't it be even better to use some grid electricity to further increase vehicle efficiency? Power plants generate electricity more efficiently and cheaply than using a gas engine to generate electricity indirectly through regenerative braking. So, maybe we should further augment a hybrid's power with grid electricity.

That's a promising idea, and is the basis of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, or PHEVs. There are actually two PHEVs that are generating a lot of buzz now: the Hymotion Prius upgrade and the Chevy Volt.

Hymotion created an after-market upgrade that turns a standard Toyota Prius into a PHEV by giving it an additional battery pack that can be charged from an ordinary outlet.

The Chevy Volt has an even more innovative design: it has a pure electric drive, only the electric motor is connected directly to the drivetrain. It also has a small, gasoline-powered generator that is only used to recharge the battery pack. Because the gas engine is only used as a generator, it can run at its most efficient power level and avoid the gross inefficiencies associated with a car's engine that has to run a wide variety of RPMs and load levels outside its most efficient power range.

Lying about Efficiency

The PHEV is a surprisingly more complicated solution in part because we have no way to talk about the efficiency of this type of vehicle. We're used to evaluating vehicle efficiency by looking at miles per gallon. That works great with a hybrid, because the only energy input is gasoline, but what about a PHEV? The easy thing is to just quote an MPG number and move on, but that doesn't tell you anything.

Consider a different case. Suppose I invent a new kind of hybrid vehicle: gas and propane. It has two engines, a conventional gasoline engine and a propane engine. Together, they power the vehicle's drivetrain. When I take my new model into the EPA to get its fuel efficiency rating, I fill up both tanks. The EPA drives the vehicle on their standard course and find that the car traveled 200 miles and used two gallons of gas, so it gets an EPA rating of 100 mpg.

But what about the propane? How much propane did the car use up? How much does that propane cost? How does the use of propane and gas change with different driving conditions? We already have city and highway numbers, but maybe this new hybrid is even more complicated. How does the hybrid bit work, does it burn propane until it runs out, then switches to gasoline, or does it burn both equally over the entire range? How are consumers going to evaluate what it will cost them to drive this vehicle on their daily commute. How will environmentally-minded consumers evaluate its overall energy efficiency and carbon footprint?

Obviously, was can't just quote an MPG number for a hybrid vehicle that takes in two different fuel/energy sources. That would be misleading. In fact, unless the MPG number works in all driving scenarios, it would be fraudulent.

The same issue applies with PHEVs. If we just get an MPG number, that tells us nothing useful unless we understand how the trade-off between gas and electricity works under our individual typical driving conditions.

The Volt and the EPA

Consumers will want some sort of fuel efficiency number and consumers understand MPG, so GM talked to the EPA and argued that the EPA should use a testing regimen that will give the Chevy Volt a rating of over 100 MPG. The problem is that if the EPA allows the Volt to use the battery pack without accounting for the extra energy input, it gets over 100 MPG, but only about 48 MPG if they don't allow it to deplete the battery pack. The truth perhaps lies between these two numbers and depends on an individual's driving profile.

It's really important that the conversation doesn't stop with this one deceptive measure of fuel economy. The Chevy Volt can go 40 miles on just electricity. That's great if my daily commute is under 40 miles (and that's true for 78% of personal travel in the US according to a 2003 Department of Transportation study), but if I go over that, is it the same as driving a Prius? Unlike the Prius, the onboard engine isn't powerful enough to power the car, it can only add charge to the battery pack. If you just keep driving, eventually the battery pack will run out, and simply filling up the gas tank doesn't refill the source of power that drives the wheels. So, how far can you go? The answer is going to be complex since the gap between what the car pulls from the battery pack and what the generator puts in depends on the speed you're driving. That's not an issue with the Prius, but it's something potential Volt buyers need to understand.

The same issues apply to any PHEV that uses a small gas engine only as a battery-charging generator.

The Hidden Cost

Not only does MPG not tell us enough about how much gas the car uses, while also skipping over the cost of electricity,* it completely hides the cost of the huge compromise built into a PHEV.

The very best battery technology available today is called lithium-ion. This battery chemistry has the best balance of cost and energy density. For a given weight in batteries, lithium will allow you to store the most charge at a reasonable cost. And the cost isn't cheap, either. Lithium ion batteries are more expensive than lead-acid (like your regular car or boat battery) or the nickel metal hybrid batteries used in hybrids like the Prius.

None of these battery chemistries used in vehicles like to be overcharged or fully discharged. If you've ever left your lights on overnight and not only drained your battery, but also ruined it, you know what I'm talking about. With an electric vehicle, there's a computer that monitors battery charge state and keeps you from damaging the batteries, so you don't have to worry about it, but it does have performance implications that prospective buyers need to know about.

Consider a pure electric vehicle like the Tesla Roadster. It has a large pack of lithium ion batteries, big enough to support an EPA verified range of 244 miles (mixed city and highway). Since most commutes are far less than this, 78% under 40 miles and 92% under 70 miles, this means most driving in the Roadster will only need to use the middle of the charge range: it doesn't need to be fully charged nor fully discharged to handle daily driving. This is the best way to ensure maximum battery life. If a Tesla driver frequently uses the entire maximum range of the battery pack, the lifetime of the battery pack will be shortened. The Roadster is not your best choice as a road trip car. Fortunately, road trips represent a small fraction of travel in the US, so this isn't a problem, just something to think about when you're choosing between the Prius and the Roadster for that big road trip.

But what about a plug-in hybrid, like the Chevy Volt with a 40-mile electric range? Obviously, GM has to keep the battery weight down since the car is already packing two power plants. The Volt is designed and marketed as being pure electric for a 40-mile daily commute. If GM were to put in a battery pack that could just barely manage the forty miles, then drivers would put a full charge cycle on it every day. That would kill a lithium ion battery pack in about two years. Let's assume they want their product to last longer than that.

Since the car is designed to be gas-free for a 40-mile commute, that battery pack has to be capable of much more than just 40 miles while also bearing the burden of pushing around a gas engine, generator, fuel tank and exhaust system. So, GM decides what an appropriate charge capacity margin is, and puts in a battery pack that large.

Let's suppose they only want to use the middle 50% of the charge range, so the battery pack is only charged to 75% and only discharged down to 25% (which is about what Toyota uses in the Prius). Based on that assumption, if you drive a Volt on your 40-mile commute, you're going to use half a discharge cycle every day. You bought a battery pack that is capable of an 80-mile trip if you are willing to compromise battery life for an occasional long trip. In fact, if you could pull out all the extra weight of the gas generator, your battery pack could maybe handle a 100-mile trip. Instead, you only get the 40 miles, while still also hammering the battery pack pretty hard, and dealing with all the maintenance hassle of maintaining the gas engine.

Maybe 50% charge buffer isn't the choice that GM makes. If they pick a smaller charge buffer, the battery pack wears out sooner. If they pick a larger buffer, then they are just wasting more battery pack on a hobbled electric drive that could handle even longer occasional pure electric trips. Not matter how you slice it, trying to drive a daily commute with a small battery pack burdened by extra generator weight wastes the full electric potential of the vehicle.

Driving Pure Electric

Compare that to a pure electric vehicle with a 240-mile range. You can do your 40-mile commute with just one sixth of the battery pack's charge cycle, and you have a car that can go over a hundred miles with less impact on battery life than your daily commute in a Volt. Even a 200-mile trip is possible while leaving 20% of the charge range untouched. That's excellent battery life in a vehicle that never burns any gas and is capable of a good long drive, especially if you can get access to an outlet at your destination.

Right now there aren't many choices when it comes to driving pure electric, but that's changing. Just like when any new technology is introduced, initial models are expensive and produced in low volumes. Even the Model T was viewed as a rich man's toy when it came out. With higher production comes both better availability and lower prices. Although electric vehicles have been around longer than gas-powered vehicles, the production electric vehicle market is in its infancy, but is about to get far more interesting.

Today, you can buy a high-end, pure electric sports car with a top speed of 125 mph and an EPA-certified range of 244 miles: the Tesla Roadster, available in limited quantities for a mere $109,000. If they cost less, you probably still wouldn't be able to get one because demand would far outstrip the production rate of about 1200 per year.

But Telsa isn't in the business of solving a shortage of expensive sports cars. Their mission is to get lots of affordable electric cars on the road, the Roadster is just the start. In 2011, just months after GM is expected to start producing the Volt, Tesla Motors expects to start delivering their $60,000 Model S, a luxury sport sedan with a range of about 240 miles. By 2012 or so they expect to deliver their third model, a $30,000 all-electric economy sedan.

But Tesla Motors isn't the only one in the game. Lots of companies, both big auto makers and daring start-ups are promising electric vehicles in the near future.

Aptera expects to start producing their Typ-1e, an EV with a 120-mile range in late 2008, available initially in California for $27,000. BMW is working on an all-electric Mini-E version of the Mini Cooper, available for lease through a pilot program this year in California, New York and New Jersey. In 2009, Miles Electric Vehicles expects to begin delivery of their highway speed sedan, cleverly called the "Highway Speed Sedan," with a top speed of 80 mph and a range over 100 miles for about $40,000. Daimler has plans to introduce electric versions of both a Smart car and a Mercedes in 2010.

Brother, Can You Spare a Trillion Dollars?

Meanwhile the big Detroit automakers have resisted years of pressure to produce more efficient vehicles, instead betting their profitability on giant gas hogs. Who could imagine that either environmental or national security concerns could sour the American public on huge gas guzzlers? Combine that with the brutally obvious result of global oil production leveling off while demand has continued to grow, literally exponentially. Is it any wonder years of short-sighted profiteering have put the big American automakers on the edge of bankruptcy? All of their lobbying to prevent more stringent domestic fuel economy standards while also locking  more efficient diesel fuel vehicles out of the US market has destroyed their competitiveness overseas, and now the American buyers aren't interested in their bloated product lines either.

Their solution is to have the US Government pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the ailing US auto industry to pay for their past mistakes, while they try to retool to build incrementally more efficient vehicles based on a compromised PHEV design, hiding behind inflated and misleading MPG numbers.

That's not how I want my tax dollars spent.

---

*The cost to drive a car on electricity is generally really cheap, due to the superior efficiency of an electric drive, even taking into account power plant efficiency and transmission loses. But, the cost does depend on where you live. Also, the emissions associated with the energy used in an electric vehicle vary widely depending on how electricity is generated in your area.

The good news is that we are already motivated to green up our electrical generation and EVs benefit from that without changing the car at all, while their gas-powered peers get dirtier with age. Oh, and gasoline prices can only go up, give or take short term fluctuations: global production is flattening out while worldwide demand is increasing.

Tesla Motors Announces Some News

On Wednesday, Tesla Motors Chairman Elon Musk announced some changes at the company. In a nutshell, they are going to:

• Work to be cash-flow positive within six to nine months.
• Ramp up the delivery rate for pre-sold Roadsters.
• Build revenue from powertrain sales to other car companies.
• Musk will replace Ze'ev Drori as CEO.
• Drori will remain as vice-chairman of the board.
  
• Scale back Model S work until their assembly site passes the environmental review.
• Delay the production target for the Model S by six months.
• Finance Model S production primarily with a low-interest DOE loan.
  
• Implement a modest reduction in near-term headcount.
• Survive the economic turmoil on Musk's dime for as long as it takes.
  

The media and blogosphere as been laser-focused on writing copycat stories on how the current economic problems have led Tesla to layoffs and the Model S delay. That generates eye-catching headlines, but it misses the real story.

Building a New Car Company

In February of 2007, Tesla announced their assembly plant would be in New Mexico. After over a year of silence on that, they announced a new plan in September: assembly plant in California. Clearly things aren't going as smoothly as Tesla had hoped.

Of course the Model S got delayed. They were running on a very tight schedule to deliver the Model S in late 2010. To get to that point, there's an incredible amount of work for them to do. Apparently they have made good progress designing the sedan, both inside and outside, but that's just the beginning. They also have to design and build a production facility and the assembly line tools and process, and create supplier relationships that will be 100% reliable. There's a lot of that work that depends on knowing when and where they are going to build their assembly facility. If and until they get the environmental approval for the San Jose site, they don't know either.

Also tied to the environmental approval is the DOE loan. If they wait for the loan to provide the majority of funding needed to develop the Model S, the Tesla investors can avoid giving up equity in another round of financing, e.g. an IPO. Right now, raising money from investors is more expensive, which further increases the appeal of the DOE loan. So of course they need to delay spending money unnecessarily until they can get the DOE funds.

Thus, cost cutting and modest layoffs. Now that they expect to have their headquarters located at their production facility, they want to consolidate operations. Combine that with Roadster design work being finished in Hethel, and some general belt-tightening and you have some layoffs. That's bad news for the Tesla people who will lose their jobs. I've met a number of Tesla employees and I've been universally impressed. They are a bright, enthusiastic bunch doing amazing and important work. I hate to think of people of that caliber losing their jobs. I hope they are able to quickly apply their talents to new jobs. It's bad news for those people, but it's not bad news for Tesla. It's just a matter of Tesla staying lean until they know when and where their Model S production facility will be built and can get working 100% on that huge effort.

The Real Risk

Here's the scariest part of Musk's announcement:

If all goes reasonably well, we will receive [the environmental] approval in Q2 next year.

Have you ever heard of an environmental approval going smoothly? If something kills Tesla Motors, it's not going to be the Wall Street fiasco, it's going to be some wet patch of dirt or an endangered species we've probably never even heard of. It's ironic that a company trying to develop technology to help save the global environment from man-made disaster is at risk of failure because of one of the literally millions of species that are threatened by the problem that Tesla would like to help solve.

But the media is having lots of fun writing about the subprime loan mess, reckless unregulated banking, and the resulting panicked federal intervention spending spree, so that's what they are writing about.

The Good News: Profits

There's even another thread to this story that has been completely missed:

Our powertrain business is profitable today and is also growing rapidly.

What is that all about? We've heard rumors that Tesla is working on an electric powertrain for another auto maker, but nothing has been confirmed. Now Musk tells us that not only are they doing it, but that it's already profitable. That's real news! That could be the single most important thing that Tesla has announced all year. It could be the beginning of a business model that puts Tesla's technology into vehicles in quantities that will show the world that the Roadster was just a successful gesture to get people thinking about electric vehicle technology.

It could well be the direct path to achieve Tesla's goal to reduce our global dependence on burning petroleum which is damaging our global climate, funding horrible governments around the world, and betting the entire free world economy on the whims of those undemocratic governments.

But how is the media going to work that into a story about today's immediate financial crisis? Especially if we have to ask questions and do research instead of just writing the same story everyone else is writing; that's just too hard.

Tesla Motors kicked off their first visit to Seattle with an owners Town Hall meeting last night. It was an informal Q&A discussion. In attendance were about a dozen of the thirty-something Washington state Tesla owners and a half dozen Tesla representatives. We chatted about all things Tesla, from production status to possible Seattle store locations. Here's my summary.

Production Status

Signature #38 has entered production and they have delivered into the first few Signature 100 owners. The production rate is about ten per week. They expect to step that up to twenty per week by the end of this year. The first batch of the 10-per-week production will arrive in California next week and they will begin installing drivetrain 1.5 in those vehicles.

Ramping up production turns out to be very complex. It's not just about the assembly process in Hethel, but also about coordinating all of the parts suppliers. For some suppliers it's easy to increase delivery rate, but it's more challenging for others and everyone has to be on board to meet the production rate.

The production rate is impacted by a variety of things, some planned, some not. The Hethel plant shuts down for two weeks in August and for another two weeks around Christmas. There are other scheduled stops. If there's a problem in any stage of the assembly process, output stops until the problem is resolved. Depending on the nature of the problem, they might be able to process the backlog, increasing the output rate to maintain the average rate, or time may be lost.

The Production Timeline

Starting when a car enters production at Hethel, it takes about three weeks to finish the glider. There is approximately one week of painting, one week of assembly line, and one week of interior, testing, and finishing. Right now, it's actually taking about four weeks for the whole process, but three weeks is the goal.

Then there is shipping. It takes about six weeks to transport by ship from Hethel to Menlo Park. Air freight is much faster and much more expensive (and burns more carbon which may be an issue for many Tesla owners). Right now, all of the gliders are being airfreighted and when they switch to ships they may offer an airfreight option at additional cost. (Maybe somewhere in the $4,000 to $7,000 range, TBD.)

When the glider gets to Menlo Park, the motor, ESS, and PEM are installed and the whole car is tested, then prepped for delivery. This takes two more weeks.

So, right now it's about six weeks plus shipping time from start of production to delivery, with a goal of getting that down to five weeks plus shipping time. That's eleven weeks, nearly three months, when the cars are shipped by boat, assuming no problems with suppliers or the assembly process.

Seattle Tesla Store Location

Darryl Siry spent the day scouting store locations and found three promising locations in Seattle, two in the South Lake Union area and one on Capitol Hill. There was vocal support for finding a suitable Bellevue location, but their real estate agent didn't show Darryl anything good there.

The greater Seattle area is split in half by Lake Washington, creating a commuting nightmare between Seattle and "the Eastside." Seattle is the big city with high population density, a big downtown area and many businesses, including Amazon and Starbucks. Bellevue is a growing city with its own downtown area. Surrounding that are the suburbs and the area's largest employers: Microsoft (in Redmond) and Boeing (in Everett, Renton, and Kent). Google has a small presence on both sides of the lake.

Crossing the lake during morning and evening rush hour is terrible, as traffic across the two bridges clogs up and slows to a crawl. So traveling the few miles from Seattle to the Eastside can be a big pain and will be a barrier to making a casual trip to the Tesla Store if you're on the wrong side of the lake.

Tesla has a tough choice in finding a location that stands out, isn't crazy expensive and is convenient for both current owners and prospective Roadster and Model S owners. Eventually, they will have a presence on both sides of the lake, but we all want a visible, accessible location on our side. The conversation was pretty similar to the discussions on the owners forum for New York, Chicago and Miami.

The Mobile Connector

If the mobile connector is powered with a standard household outlet (120V/15A circuit, drawing 12A) the Roadster charges at a rate of about 8 miles of range per hour of charging, or more than 30 hours to charge a fully depleted pack. Connected to a 240V/50A circuit, drawing 30A, the rate jumps to about 40 miles of range per hour of charging, or about 7 hours to charge a fully depleted battery.

However, it turns out that there are regulatory roadblocks to Tesla Motors selling an EV power cable with a 240V/50A connector. Basically, it's illegal.

The existing EV owner community knows that the best way to charge their car on the road is to find an RV park and use one of their 240V/50A plugs, so obviously RVs have these types of connectors. When we had our RAV4-EV charger installed in our garage, we had the electrician install a 240V/50A outlet and put the corresponding plug on the charger. So, if we ever want to take it on the road, we just unhook the charger from the wall, put it in the back and map out stops at RV parks. No problem.

Unfortunately, there are laws that restrict the types of plugs that EV manufacturers can sell, but these laws don't apply to RVs. Tesla Motors considers it absolutely essential that owners have a way to charge from these 240V/50A sources and will find us a solution, but it's not here yet.

Realistic Range

The range for the Roadster with drivetrain 1.5 is 240 on the highway EPA cycle, 250 on the city cycle and 244 for the mixed city/highway range. The EPA highway range uses a 55 mph cycle with a 10% allowance for A/C.

There's been a bunch of discussion about the real-world range when driving the Roadster at actual freeway speeds. Martin Eberhard got a lot of owners nervous by noting that he drove it aggressively for 125 miles and had 30 miles of range left. The firmware in Martin's Roadster uses a very conservative estimate for remaining range, so the actual range would have been higher than 155 had he kept driving.

Tesla is continuing to improve the firmware and the range estimate. Newer firmware will show three range estimates based on (1) your current instantaneous power usage, (2) average power usage over the past 30 miles, and (3) expected power usage by the EPA highway cycle.

Obviously, it's important for Roadster drivers to have a good idea of how much charge remains in the car. Having an overly conservative estimate isn't much better than having an overly optimistic estimate, and the fact is the remaining range depends on how you are driving. By providing the three numbers, drivers get an idea of how far they can go if they keep driving the way they have been, or if they drop down to more conservative EPA-style driving.

In addition to the remaining range estimate, there are multiple levels of low battery warning. The first level puts a limit on torque, which will limit acceleration but not speed. In the last warning stage, a limit will be placed on top speed. When the battery is nearly depleted, there will be a warning of imminent power loss and you'll need to pull over and stop before the car just stops. At that point, you can turn the car off then back on again to enter "extended range" mode. Doing that will discharge the batteries low enough that battery life may be impacted, but there will be plenty of warning before things get to that stage.

Extrapolating from their personal experience, they estimate a range of about 200 miles driving at a sustained 75 mph, and a range of 150 miles driving very aggressively. They will be doing some more methodical long-range testing with the new drivetrain and will let us know what they find out. (They were planning to do some long range testing during the drive up to Seattle, but the car left later than expected and may not have had a chance to do so.)

On a personal note, Cathy and I have been driving our RAV4-EV as our primary daily vehicle for about two months now. At first we were nervous about its 100-mile range (80 miles without getting into the yellow warning level on the charge gauge.) After getting used to driving an EV, even that short range is way more than we need for daily driving. We don't even bother charging it every night unless we're below 50% charge or we expect to travel farther than our usual trips into Issaquah and Bellevue. We've only had one time when we didn't charge overnight and had a surprise trip the next day and couldn't take the EV.

The only reason we don't charge it every night is because the RAV4-EV charger isn't so smart and fills the battery pack all the way up, which causes excess heating, thus potentially reducing battery life. The Tesla Roadster has a much smarter charger that allows you to choose between a charge level that's the best for long-term battery life, or a full charge for maximum driving range. With the Roadster we'll charge it every night and have way more range than we'll ever need, and we'll only charge it all the way up on the rare occasion when we drive to Portland or eastern Washington.

Some people have long commutes, but for our fairly typical needs, an 80-mile range is plenty, and a 244-mile range will be total overkill. We really love not having to go to the gas station, we just charge overnight and have the full range in the morning.

Model S

The Model S will be a pure electric vehicle, not a range-extended serial hybrid. There was a brief period when they were planning to offer an RE-EV option, but that passed and they are back on the pure EV track.

They have the exterior design and Darryl says it looks great. It is technically a hatchback design, but in a good way, perhaps something along the lines of the Mercedes-Benz CLS-Class. (They in fact have a Model S test mule based on a CLS.) It will have a flat battery pack, as opposed to the Roadster's boxy ESS. Their production goal is 20,000 per year, worldwide.

When pressed about when we would get to see it, they only say it will be "soon." The plan is to show it first to existing Tesla customers, then the press, then the public by spring of 2009.

The Model S factory location isn't final yet, it still has to go through the environmental impact study and approval process. There are the usual wildlife issues that happen pretty much everywhere. Their goal is to have cars rolling out by late 2010, but that's an aggressive schedule that is vulnerable to various issues including delays resulting from the environmental impact study.

Current customers will get the first opportunity to order the Model S, with multiple slots open to each Roadster owner, including a way to give a slot to their closest friends.

My thoughts on Joe Nocera's uninformed rant on Tesla Motors.

Disclaimer: My wife and I are a customers of Tesla Motors. You might think this means I want Tesla to succeed because they have a chunk of our money, but I think it's the other way around: Tesla has a chunk of our money because we believe in their vision and strategy for making it happen. We also own a RAV4-EV.

OK, enough about me. Let's get straight to Nocera's article and learn why Steve Jobs recently described him as "a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong."

[Elon Musk] is using [his] wealth to finance two quixotic efforts.

Don't mince words, tell us what you really think.

I'm no auto expert...

Well, at least we can agree on something!

Tesla expects to be delivering four cars a week soon, a number it eventually hopes to double.

Actually, they hope to get to about 35 a week within 6 to 12 months, but maybe math isn't his area of expertise, either.

By the end of 2010, Mr. Musk and his executive team expect to be manufacturing a five-seat, all-electric $60,000 sedan. This, however, will be a much more expensive and difficult task -- and many auto experts doubt that Tesla can pull it off.

What auto experts? Does he mean auto experts who make their living off of the big auto makers? Would they really be expected to say they think this tiny upstart company can easily do what the big guys have been whining can't be done for 10 years?

Among its flaws, the EV1 used a nickel metal hydride battery that couldn't get more than 75 miles before needing a charge.

Now he is getting the facts totally wrong. The first version of the EV1 used lead-acid batteries, 19th century technology, and had a range of 75 miles. The second generation EV1 used NMiH and had a range of over 100 miles.

"My daily commute was 37 miles one way," wrote a man named Michael Posner on a Web site called The Truth About Cars, who drove an EV1 for several weeks back in 1997. "Every trip was loaded with drama," he added. "If I went to lunch, I gave up a few precious miles. That could mean disaster." At General Motors, they took to calling this problem "range anxiety."

99% of all travel is less than 100 miles, so there's 1% of travel that couldn't be done in a second-generation EV1. This one guy tried to do his 74-mile commute in a first generation EV1 with a range of 75 miles. It didn't work out for him. Duh.

Is it any wonder the car didn't catch on?

Who says it didn't catch on? GM only leased 800 of them, but they never mention the waiting list of 4,000 more people who wanted to buy one. This happened with not only no promotion of the vehicles, but with ads clearly designed to dissuade potential customers from considering EVs. One can only guess what would have happened if the car companies actually promoted the strengths and benefits of EVs. When the big auto industry got the California Air Resources Board to eviscerate their Zero Emissions Vehicle mandate, they took back all of those leased cars from their passionate owners, despite offers of cash for the cars and organized public protests. Then they crushed the cars. If you haven't already seen Who Killed the Electric Car, I highly recommend it.

Jump ahead a decade. Oil is so expensive that everybody is thinking about alternatives to $4.50-a-gallon gasoline. At the same time, the technology that makes electric cars possible has greatly improved. The development of lithium ion batteries, in particular, was such a great leap forward that it has made it possible, with enough additional innovation by electric car companies, to produce vehicles that get more than 200 miles. Suddenly, an electric car seems viable.

Wow, that sounds cool.

And yet, and yet. Despite all this progress, we're not close to being ready to mass-produce an electric car. For starters, everyone trying to build an electric car is coming at it from different directions.

Lots of companies are trying to do something that's never been taken seriously, and they all have different approaches. That sounds like innovation. I'd be more worried if they were all doing the same thing.

For instance, while the Tesla has a 1,000-pound battery pack, consisting of over 6,800 cells (at an estimated cost of $30,000) ...

Whose estimate is the $30,000? If that's true, how could Tesla Motors be promising an EV for less than $30,000 by 2012? Maybe the estimate is wrong. Maybe the cost comes down with economies of scale.

...the new Aptera Typ-1 -- a Jetson-mobile if ever there was one -- uses a much smaller battery; its secret sauce is its aerodynamic shape, which greatly reduces drag.

Sure the Aptera has a smaller battery: it's not an electric vehicle, it's a gas/electric hybrid.

Bill Gross, the head of Idealab, which is behind Aptera, told me that he believes that when the car comes on the market late this year, it will sell for around $29,000 -- meaning of course that its business model is the opposite of Tesla's.

So Aptera is making a hybrid, hasn't passed crash testing, and is promising a car this year. That's why he's comparing them to Tesla, because they are where Tesla was two years ago, except they are trying to do something completely different.

Meanwhile, a third company, Phoenix Motorcars, is hoping to make traditional cars, like S.U.V.'s, that just happen to run on electricity.

Wow, that sounds crazy, sort of like the RAV4-EV and the Chevy S-10 EV. Oh, wait, it's already been done, and quite successfully considering how well-loved the few RAV4-EVs are.

It will take years, if not decades, for the marketplace to choose a winner, which, in turn, will keep consumers from committing to an electric car.

Why do all electric vehicles have to be the same in order to be popular? The Honda Insight and Toyota Prius have pretty much opposite strategies, and yet the Prius is wildly successful and our local Honda dealer keeps sending us letters begging us to trade in our Insight because they are in high demand but Honda stopped making them.

Secondly, even though the range of an electric car can extend to 200 miles or more, that is still not enough for people to abandon internal combustion engines. Surveys have repeatedly shown that the vast majority of people drive 50 miles or less a day -- and the nascent electric car industry takes great comfort in those numbers.

Who said everyone has to give up ICE vehicles for EVs to be successful? How about if every household in the US that currently has two ICE vehicles replaced one with an EV? It seems like that would make a successful business.

But what happens when you want to take a longer drive?

How about a hybrid? See how handy it is that we don't have everyone building the same vehicle?

For an electric car to truly take hold, the country will need some kind of national electric car infrastructure -- either a place where people can stop to charge the battery (although that still means waiting hours to get a full charge) or a system in which batteries can be exchanged like propane tanks.

Gosh, how could we possibly create a national infrastructure for charging electric vehicles? We'd have to build power plants and string wires across the entire country, then put outlets on the ends of those wires. Sounds prohibitively expensive, except for the fact that we've already done it.

According to Tesla, a high current charging station could charge the Roadster's battery pack in less than an hour. So, stop for lunch, plug in your car in the parking lot, and an hour later your EV is fully charged.

Then there are the manufacturing problems. Just because Tesla has succeeded in making an expensive electric sports car does not mean that it will be able to make a moderately priced five-seat sedan. The latter is a quantum leap more difficult. "If the Roadster costs $100,000, how much will the sedan cost?" Mr. Sherman of Automotive magazine said. "It will have more doors, more seats, more metal, larger brakes. The operative word here is 'more.' "

Gosh, maybe they could lay off the carbon fiber and find some savings in economies of scale. I wonder what it cost Henry Ford to make the first 2,000 cars in inflation adjusted dollars. More than a Tesla Roadster, I'll bet.

David Cole, the chairman of the Center for Automotive Research, is another Tesla skeptic. For one thing, he says, the battery solution in the Roadster probably won't work in a heavier car. "Lithium batteries are going to change the world," he said, "but they are not ready for prime time." Tesla's solution in the Roadster -- tying together thousands of small batteries into one giant one -- is "suboptimal." He added, "On a degree of difficulty scale, building a sports car is a 2. Building a high-volume affordable car is a 10."

Ah, so he did find a big auto industry wonk that will put his name on a statement that says starting a new car company is hard. Wow! Fortunately, Tesla Motors figured this out all on its own and is working slowly toward mass-producing EVs while taking advantage of the growing demand for efficient, clean, fun electric vehicles. They sold around 1,000 before delivering a single car. What do you think the demand will be like when they are cranking them out and they are no longer an unproven car company?

Tesla, of course, insists that it is well aware of the difficulty, but remains confident it can succeed. Darryl Siry, the Tesla marketing chief, argues that the company has access to all the capital it needs, that it has just hired a manufacturing expert from Chrysler and that it has a hard-headed chief executive, named Ze'ev Drori, who has a reputation for getting things done. The more I prodded, though, the more skeptical I became.

In other words, Drori is a big auto industry guy who thinks it can be done, therefore he must be high.

For instance, what Tesla doesn't say, unless you really push, is that the sedan it hopes to sell for $60,000 will not get 200 miles per charge but closer to 160.

That's a big problem because 99% of all travel is under 100 miles, and apparently the cheapest Tesla sedan only goes an extra 60 miles of top of that.

It will cost considerably more to get 200 miles per charge -- which of course makes it an awfully costly car even for the moderately wealthy.

Yeah, cars that cost over $60,000 don't sell at all. Well, except for high-end sports sedans. Do you think Tesla can sell 20,000 high-end electric sport sedans? I sure do. 6-year-old RAV4-EVs sell for over $60,000 on the rare occasion when a lucky owner of one decides to sell. (The linked eBay item #230254014549 shows a RAV4-EV auction which closed at $89,200 but the top bidder flaked so it sold to another bidder for $69,850.) Could Tesla sell a million sedans at that price? Probably not. Given that they are only going to make 20,000 a year, it seems highly likely to me they could sell them at $60K even if they can get the cost down well below that.

I also don't see any problem with Tesla's plan to sell 200,000 EVs per year at less than $30,000 each. The only problem I can see with that is the length of the waiting list. They might need to sell them for more so their supply can meet the demand.

And that kind of petty dissembling on Tesla's part doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Tesla said the sedan starts at $60,000, but they have never said the cheapest model will have a 200-mile range. In fact, they have not announced the specs for the sedan at all. It is somewhere between naive and disingenuous to connect the dots incorrectly and call Tesla liars.

So where should we pin our short-term electric car hopes? Andrew Grove, the former chief executive of Intel, has lately been pounding the table on behalf of something called a plug-in hybrid -- which uses a far more energy efficient design than the Prius, Toyota's popular hybrid. The Prius is powered both by batteries and an internal combustion engine, but essentially they are both working at the same time, so it is always consuming gas.

Well, except for the fact that a Prius has a small range that it can drive on pure electric. It's a small matter of installing and flipping a switch to give the US version of the Prius an extended pure electric range like the model sold in Japan. Then, for under $10,000 you can increase that range to over 40 miles.

A plug-in hybrid would drive completely on electricity until the battery runs down -- after about 40 miles or so -- and only then would the car switch to internal combustion.

A plug-in hybrid can go either way. It can have the design of a Prius (a parallel hybrid) with a larger battery, or it can be a serial hybrid like the Aptera or Chevy Volt.

Such a solution has the potential to cut the nation's gasoline bill in half.

That sounds a lot like what replacing half of the ICE cars with EVs, except with the hybrid strategy, everyone gets to keep paying for maintaining their internal combustion engines, catalytic converters and mufflers. I wonder why the big auto companies are doing everything possible to stall the adoption of pure EVs?

Mr. Grove believes that big cars like S.U.V.'s can be retrofitted to become plug-in hybrids, and he's right. But it is also expensive; Martin G. Klein, the founder of the battery company Electro Energy told me that it costs $50,000 to turn a Prius into a plug-in hybrid. (He's done it.) "But in a future scenario," he added, "it would cost a few thousand dollars."

So, it's wildly expensive, except that it isn't. In fact, companies like HyMotion are doing it today for about $10,000.

So where should we look, realistically, for a mass-market electric vehicle? Believe it or not, Detroit. In fact, the quick-fix approach that strikes me as the most promising comes from -- surprise! -- General Motors, the chief villain of "Who Killed the Electric Car?" The Chevy Volt, which the company wants to bring to market in 2010, is a plug-in hybrid that aspires to be able to travel 40 miles before switching to gasoline power. But the best part is that the combustion engine will automatically recharge the battery -- so it can switch back even while you're driving.

Yes, that's right: we should look to Detroit to do what small companies are doing today, while also not actually producing pure electric vehicles and protecting their ICE maintenance revenue stream. It's amazing how unattractive EVs look when you can just keep doing the same old thing, with a twist. They want to create a more efficient ICE vehicle by burdening a perfectly good EV with the weight and hassle of the ICE engines they have built their business around. Go Detroit!

It's not sexy like the Tesla, and it's not aerodynamic like the Aptera Typ-1. But for a mass-market solution in the here and now, that's the one to root for.

Except for the part where it's neither here nor now, it's set to match Tesla's Model S time frame, and it isn't an electric vehicle. But other than those things, it's great. So, let's all kneel and bow toward Detroit and hope that we can get in our reservations for Tesla's Model S and the 2012 sedan before they are sold out as far as the Roadster is.