Results matching “roadster”

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.

The California Air Resources Board seems poised to cave into big auto pressure and gut their mandate for zero emissions vehicles. This blog from Tesla Motors that explains the situation.

Basically, the staff recommendation is to lower requirements on the big auto makers to levels that are likely to be met by tiny Tesla Motors all on their own, and likely to be blown away if any of the other promising ZEV startups deliver a small fraction of what they are promising.

You can express your opinion to the CARB through this web form.

Here's the letter I sent them...

To the California Air Resources Board

The big auto companies have no excuse for not developing vehicles which are more friendly to the environment.

Energy efficient vehicles are popular with consumers. Next time you go for a drive, just count how many times you see a Toyota Prius.

ZEV vehicles are technologically viable today. In response to previous CARB mandates, the big auto makers proved that ZEV vehicles can be developed and sold in quantity to consumers who want them. Witness the GM EV-1, the RAV-4 EV and the Chevy S-10 EV. The big auto companies produced these cars, sold them to a fraction of the consumers who wanted them and did everything in their power to hide and un-popularize them. This is well documented in the film "Who Killed the Electric Car." I personally know people who are still using the RAV4-EV and S-10 EV without any manufacturer support. These are awesome vehicles, loved by their owners and in high demand, with used vehicles selling for more than their original selling prices in many cases.

Recently Tesla Motors has started regular production of a fully safety-approved, highway-capable EV that has pre-booked orders approaching the numbers mandated by the watered-down CARB ISOR for the time period 2012-2014.

   http://www.teslamotors.com/

That a tiny startup company can be ready to produce 1800+ ZEVs in 2009 proves that the big auto companies can easily produce far more in the 2012-2014 timeframe, even 25,000 seems like too low a number to really push the auto industry to do their part to improve air quality and reduce CO2 emissions.

My wife and I will be Tesla owner number 241. We have driven one of their late evaluation prototype vehicles, and I assure you this vehicle is quite real. We will gladly replace our Acura NSX-T with the Tesla Roadster, a high-end sports car that is cost competitive with gasoline-powered vehicles in the same performance category.

Tesla Motors will use the experience gained from producing this expensive, low-volume vehicle to design and produce their next vehicle in the much larger $50,000 to $70,000 sports sedan market in 2010. I expect they will have a ZEV in the $30,000 price range shipping upwards of 300,000 vehicles by 2012.

Tesla Motors alone is likely to far exceed CARBs embarrassingly small demands on the big auto makers. Now is the time to increase the pressure on the big auto makers rather than reduce the CARB mandate to less than what the market is clearly already demanding.

Tesla Motors is just the first of several promising companies to start regular production of ZEVs. Aptera, Miles Electric, and Phoenix Electric all have credible plans to produce safe, highway capable ZEVs in the 2009 to 2010 time frame.

    http://www.aptera.com/details.php
    http://www.milesev.com/
    http://www.phoenixmotorcars.com/

Many other companies are working in ZEV market segment, as are many dedicated enthusiasts who are converting ICE vehicles to ZEV electric vehicles.

The California Air Resources Board has an opportunity to push the auto industry toward reasonable environmental progress. Please do so.

Tom Saxton

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.