[jdietrich]

Tesla are a sideshow and we desperately need to stop talking about them, because they're harming efforts to improve energy efficiency.

Nissan are now in full production of the Leaf, a practical electric car that's half the price of the Model S. Renault have the Fluence ZE on sale in Israel and ready to go internationally this year. Mitsubishi are selling the i-MiEV in quantity in Hong Kong and Japan.

All of these big, established car companies are doing it The Right Way - targeting customers who already drive highly efficient city cars. These are customers who predominantly drive short distances and who are used to driving a small car with few luxuries and a relatively low-powered engine. They understand the compromises necessary for efficiency. They're part of a car culture that sees nothing unusual about a 1.2 litre diesel engine or a turbocharged 900cc two-cylinder petrol engine. You can build these people a lightweight, efficient car that they can afford and that they'll be happy to drive.

Tesla are amongst the many upstarts who are doing it The Wrong Way. They're trying to skip the necessary evolutionary steps a customer needs to make before they will be happy with a battery electric car. They're trying to lure people straight from heavy midsize cars and SUV crossovers, which is doomed to failure. These customers just haven't entered the efficiency mentality. They don't realise that efficient cars are noisier because they're not carrying the weight of sound insulation. They're not ready to wind down the window on a hot day to save the energy that AC would use. Tesla are trying to engineer around culture and it's an expensive, flimsy mistake.

Sit it out, lobby congress to mandate improvements in diesel fuel quality and higher fleet efficiency standards, beg manufacturers to send over the clever little engines. Tax or shame SUV drivers into station wagons. Once you hear people describing the Ford Focus as a large family car, you'll know you're ready.

[SeanLuke]

> Tesla are a sideshow and we desperately need to stop talking about them, because they're harming efforts to improve energy efficiency.

Completely disagree. Tesla is, I think, unquestionably the most impactful company in the game, including GE and Nissan. For two reasons.

First, before Tesla people thought of electric vehicles as ridiculous DIY golf carts driven by treehuggers. They were utterly uncool and stupid. Post-Tesla, electric cars are among the very coolest cars in the world. GE didn't do that. Nissan didn't do that. Toyota didn't do that. Tesla did. I think fundamentally changing people's perceptions of what an electric car is and what it can do is the single most impactful action in the industry so far.

Second, Tesla's critical product isn't their cars. Their critical product is their battery technology. It is second to none, in a business where the battery is everything. This is the reason that both Daimler and Toyota have invested in the company. I think you are seriously underestimating how important this is.

As to the article proper: it seems to me that running down your car is a pretty simple problem to engineer away. This might be an issue, perhaps a burp that Tesla has to get fixed pronto. But it's hardly, to use the breathless headline, devastating.

[jdietrich]

> First, before Tesla people thought of electric vehicles as ridiculous DIY golf carts driven by treehuggers. They were utterly uncool and stupid. Post-Tesla, electric cars are among the very coolest cars in the world. GE didn't do that. Nissan didn't do that. Toyota didn't do that. Tesla did. I think fundamentally changing people's perceptions of what an electric car is and what it can do is the single most impactful action in the industry so far.

Amongst technology enthusiasts in the US.

Here in The Soviet Republic of Yurop, gas is $8 a gallon and is only going up from there. If people know the name Tesla, it's probably because they've seen the Roadster lampooned on Top Gear. However, people are talking about Renault and Peugeot and Nissan's EVs. Not car enthusiasts, but ordinary people who've seen the cost of fuel more than double in 10 years. They're talking about Volkswagen Bluemotion, they're talking about Fiat Twinair. They're talking about fast charging and battery swaps and series hybrids. They're talking about folding bikes and multimodal commuting. They're talking about these things because they're being priced off the roads.

I have heard a middle-aged woman with no interest in cars or the environment say at a dinner party "I bought a Toyota iQ because it only emits 99g/km of CO2, so I don't have to pay road tax or the Congestion Charge.". For her, like many others, the efficiency of her car wasn't a side issue, but integral to whether she could afford to drive at all. Energy efficiency might not be on the agenda in the US, but it very much is in Europe.

[Dinoguy1000]

Depending where in the US you look, the price of gas has done anything from less than doubling to increasing more than five-fold over the past decade.* It's not $8/gallon, but there are definitely places where you'd have to pay $4-6 per gallon, and it's only becoming more widespread. If there's one thing US citizens have shown, though, it's that they're perfectly willing to continue shelling out more and more money to drive ridiculously inefficient vehicles, even while they grumble about the spiraling price and (depending where you look) speak of mythical, massive reserves of oil the US supposedly has that could last the US anywhere from decades to centuries, depending who you ask.

Simply adding more costs onto gas is going to do nothing more to change what the average US citizen drives then what the past decade of price increases have.

* This is based on anecdote and recollection; I don't have any sources to back it up, but if it's wrong one way or the other, more than likely it's conservative.

[runako]

This doesn't really match with the data collected in the 2007-2008 price spike. While the price of oil was peaking, US drivers demonstrated that they will change their behavior somewhere on the curve. Notably, miles driven started dropping well before the recession hit. I'm not sure what the breakpoint was, but I believe it was around $4/gallon. (Yes, gas cost much more in some places and is still above $4 now, but the relevant number is the national average, currently about $3.60).

So you're right that the rise in prices from ~$0.90 in 1999 to multiples of that do not impact demand significantly. However, there is a threshold above which American drivers will react.

[bostonvaulter2]

I really wish the US would implement similar taxes. I know it'll hurt in the short term but it'll be great in the long term and would benefit the economy overall and help wean our huge car industry off of oil.

[arjunnarayan]

> First, before Tesla people thought of electric vehicles as ridiculous DIY golf carts driven by treehuggers. They were utterly uncool and stupid. Post-Tesla, electric cars are among the very coolest cars in the world. GE didn't do that. Nissan didn't do that. Toyota didn't do that. Tesla did. I think fundamentally changing people's perceptions of what an electric car is and what it can do is the single most impactful action in the industry so far.

Sure, but that's the same as saying that Sun Microsystems changed the world. Before Sun, people thought of C++ as the be all and end all of programming and we were stuck without decent typesystems and helpful compilers. Microsoft didn't change that. Nobody changed that. Sun did.

Look where they are now. Sure Tesla might have changed people's worldviews and I'm grateful for that. But moving forward, that counts for nothing. I just want the best damn electric car there can be. I'm not paying for changing the narrative.

[potatolicious]

And that's the genius of it. You are not paying to change the narrative - but lots of other people are. Even if Tesla ends up a footnote in the history of automotives, their impact will be felt for decades, just like Sun.

Whatever happens to Elon Musk's company, we are all better off, and for that I wouldn't consider the money wasted.

And I don't think Tesla's death is really that certain. Remember that Apple pioneered the unibody laptop chassis on the backs of wealthy early adopters with the (ludicrously priced) MacBook Air, and now this technology is available at commodity prices to everyone. The same model can very well work here.

[chucknelson]

> Remember that Apple pioneered the unibody laptop chassis on > the backs of wealthy early adopters with the (ludicrously > > priced) MacBook Air...

Wow, I don't know if that is a good comparison. It's not like they were $5k-$10k laptops or anything. "Ludicrously priced" seems a bit strong here..

[shinratdr]

You're both right, in a way.

It was priced closer to cost than most imagine (SSDs were still very expensive at the time and it used much more expensive parts that were underclocked to reduce heat buildup before Intel had good ULV processors) so a top of the line 1st generation MacBook Air ordered in the first three months of release would cost you $5500. I know because I bought one for someone.

It was very expensive, but it wasn't ludicrously priced. Pioneering that CNC technology wasn't cheap and if it didn't work out, that loss would have been all because of the Air. You can consider it putting the burden on early adopters, I see it as more people paying the actual product cost plus profit like Apple always prefers. They aren't ones to launch something at cost if they don't have to. They would rather move less units and instead make a profit from day one.

[eropple]

> I wouldn't consider the money wasted.

I wonder if the people shelling out $40,000 for a battery replacement agree with you.

[chc]

Even if all five or so became violent opponents of Tesla (which seems plausible enough, I guess), that would be greater than 99% approval among users. I don't mean to downplay the severity of that issue, but I feel like this comment is more of a cheap shot "zinger" than a legitimate attempt to show that Tesla's efforts are wasted (especially given that the problem seems to be endemic to modern battery technology, not specifically Tesla's line).

[eropple]

It's endemic to modern battery technology, but not modern battery implementations. Tesla's technology is unquestionably excellent. Consideration of use cases--or, you know, consideration of the customer forking over a ton of money for their vehicles--not so much.

If there is a case where you can, by design, cause somebody who just bought a ridiculously expensive car to incur a $40,000 battery replacement bill, you'd better have ways to counteract the problem. They apparently don't (aside from "stalk your car and charge it"); it doesn't sound like they even warn purchasers about the danger of flatlining the battery.

[fab13n]

Remember: the original question was whether Tesla was a sideshow; the comment you responded to argued that it wasn't, quite compellingly IMO. Similarly, Sun and Java certainly weren't sideshows either.

You're wondering about Tesla's commercial success, which is an interesting but very different question.

[forgottenpaswrd]

"But moving forward, that counts for nothing."

Sure it does count when you have patents over a new technology. Real patents of physical objects that work.

"I just want the best damn electric car there can be. I'm not paying for changing the narrative."

So? People want to benefit over things they do not contribute with. People want a pill that gives them everything they want without effort and NOW!!

It does not works this way.

[nandemo]

> First, before Tesla people thought of electric vehicles as ridiculous DIY golf carts driven by treehuggers. They were utterly uncool and stupid. Post-Tesla, electric cars are among the very coolest cars in the world.

Really? I never heard of Tesla outside of HN. I think a large proportion of the 10s of thousands who have bought electric cars in Japan don't know of Tesla either.

No doubt the very existence of Tesla might have accelerated the development and actual production of electric cars by other makers. But I suspect they aren't that well-known by the general public.

[kerryfalk]

Neither is Aston Martin, but they're a profitable and successful UK based auto manufacturer.

There are many successful companies that never achieve the kind of brand awareness that you are identifying. It's generally not a condition for success.

I am an auto enthusiast and Tesla is very well known among enthusiasts. Appealing to enthusiasts (Early Adopters) is an acceptable business strategy. Tesla doesn't need to market to a wider audience yet.

I fail to see the issues that others are claiming here. Assuming they can meet demand (last I heard there is significant demand for the Model S, I don't have data to cite at the moment) and are profitable with at that volume their risks seem to me to be more of the typical manufacturer's risk. Quality and warranty issues, aftermarket support, production costs, etc. Not so much from weak market demand.

EDIT: HN won't let me reply to your comment yet so I'll do it here.

I'm disagreeing with what I feel you're implying with this:

I think a large proportion of the 10s of thousands who have bought electric cars in Japan don't know of Tesla either.

But I suspect they aren't that well-known by the general public.

I read that as "This is Tesla's market, they're not known in this market, this is a risk to their business". I disagree with that. That is not their market and that market (general public, 10s of thousands of electric car buyers in Japan) is unimportant at this time because they're very well known within their target market.

[nandemo]

Sure, I agree with you. What part of my comment are you disagreeing with? Previous comment says that Tesla changed the image of the electric car, I'm skeptical of that.

(except that I don't get your example of Aston Martin as not well-known brand. It's James Bond's car!)

[donteflon]

>First, before Tesla people thought of electric vehicles as ridiculous DIY golf carts driven by treehuggers. They were utterly uncool and stupid.

Absolutely not.

http://www.gizmag.com/go/3889/

Tesla just had the Silicon Valley hype machine on its side since inception, a super-wealthy owner proclaimed the next Henry Ford, and hundreds of millions of dollars from American taxpayers.

[vacri]

Their critical product is their battery technology. It is second to none, in a business where the battery is everything.

vs

As to the article proper: it seems to me that running down your car is a pretty simple problem to engineer away.

So, on the one hand you say that their battery technology is in advance of everyone else... and on the other hand, you say that these fine engineering minds... haven't been able to come up with a 'pretty simple' solution yet.

[talmand]

That doesn't necessarily mean their technology isn't second to none. Say, I built a instantaneous teleportation device but it sucks because I haven't figured out a simple solution of how to jump more than one person at a time.

[sopooneo]

Using up all our fossil fuels and leaving the world a crisp wasteland is one thing, but using the word "impactful" is another. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=impactful

[SeanLuke]

I know, I know. I wasn't proactive enough.

[functionform]

Potentially losing the car after a week of NOT using it qualifies as devastating to me.

[rplnt]

> GM didn't do that.

Interesting documentary - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

[SeanLuke]

Er....

GE -> GM

It's late at night. :-)

[3am]

You are precisely wrong. Targeting people that already buy into energy efficiency has low payoff.

Say you have your enlightened urban dweller, getting 50mpg. With the fancy new hybrids, let's say they double that and get 100mpg. Given 100K miles of driving, that saves 1000 gallons of fuel.

Now, take your suburbanite SUV driver getting 20mpg. You only have to get their mileage to 25mpg to save the same amount of fuel over 100K miles. Get them to 40mpg, and the improvement is 150% greater than the urbanite's.

Further, only electric vehicles are can realistically be 100% powered from renewables with current technology. Biofuels are in their infancy vs solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear.

Thank goodness for Tesla trying to push boundaries and for the early adopters that are buying them. Also, thank goodness for the Nissan Leaf, the Honda Civic GX, the Prius, and all the people making a difference and buying fuel efficient cars. It's a big problem and there's no "Wrong Way" to be helping.

[pclark]

The point OP is making is that these SUV people fundamentally do not care about efficiency - if they do not care, they have no interest in optimising their milage. The messaging is mostly wasted.

[potatolicious]

> " if they do not care, they have no interest in optimising their milage. The messaging is mostly wasted."

Right, and Tesla's messaging is not about efficiency. Their messaging has overwhelmingly been "holy shit this thing is fast! And green! And exclusive and the crowning achievement of our conquering of science and technology!"

Which isn't that different from traditional sports car marketing, except the green part.

Getting people to be more efficient does not necessarily mean selling efficiency to them and rallying them around it. CFLs and energy-efficient lighting has essentially become commonly as a fashion, as opposed to any significant increase in people's desire to be green. But I couldn't care less - if people are installing CFLs in their homes I don't really care how much they care about their electrical footprint.

[lotharbot]

> "CFLs and energy-efficient lighting has essentially become commonly as a fashion"

I don't think fashion was a big contributor to early adoption. It was mainly the perception of saved money and frustration. Early CFL packaging often had a comparison chart showing the $30 you'd save on electricity versus using incandescent bulbs, and the 6-10 fewer times you'd have to change a burned out bulb over the next 3-5 years. It's not specifically that people care about "being green", but they do care about saving money and effort.

[richardw]

I strongly suspect it's not a binary market with people that care about efficiency on the left and those that don't on the right. There'll be those that care, but prioritize higher performance. Those that want a bigger car due to safety reasons. Combinations thereof.

The market likely maps onto the technology adoption life cycle, and the hardcore SUV petrolheads are likely the 'late majority' or 'laggards'. That leaves a lot of room for market development before even considering those people. They'll take years or decades to change, so ignore them and focus on the customers in the early majority. That includes SUV or sportscar drivers who would like to save money, who do care about the environment, who have moved to a city, etc.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

This is a fallacy that is perpetuated all over the place, not just on HN. It's not that many SUV drivers don't care about efficiency; rather it's not a primary concern. The primary concern is having a vehicle large and powerful enough to do what they need to get done. Sure, for a percentage, that's just hauling their single fat ass to the mall. But for many more they need to haul a boat, or a pack of kids and all the associated stuff without tying it to the roof of the car, etc.

Have you even noticed how many hybrid SUVs are on the market? Who do you think is buying them?

[TechNewb]

>The point OP is making is that these SUV people fundamentally do not care about efficiency - if they do not care, they have no interest in optimising their milage. The messaging is mostly wasted.

I disagree. SUVs are a very common commodity in America, and there are many people whom acquired them for various practical reasons. I've had the same compact SUV since high school, over 10 years, and would love to 'upgrade' to an energy efficient electric car, I just can't afford it now, or any other car at this point in my career. Although I dream of the Model X, and think it's a great idea. I would rather take a train everywhere, but given America's infrastructure, currently a Model X is the next best thing.

[rbanffy]

Biofuels are definitely not in their infancy. My first car ran on ethanol and it was in the mid 80's. The technology in very mature.

[3am]

But most ethanol is net energy negative. Brazilian sugarcane is an exception, but it loses some of its advantage when it's shipped to the US in tankers. Even then, sugarcane requires non-renewable inputs (just not as much as corn). Cellulosic ethanol (from plants that can grow well on marginal farmland, like switchgrass) _is_ still in its infancy. Also, most current engines would need to all be retrofitted to run on anything much greater than E85 because of the greater corrosion.

You're right, though, I should've said something like 'practical biofuels' are in their infancy. I was really more referring to algae oil based petroleum or butanol, as they seem like the most promising candidates for a net-energy positive and high energy density renewable fuel.

(also, it's very cool that you ran on that in the 80s, mind if I ask what kind of car it was, or if you'd had it customized?)

[rbanffy]

> Even then, sugarcane requires non-renewable inputs (just not as much as corn)

I'm not aware of any. Fertilizers?

> most current engines would need to all be retrofitted to run on anything much greater than E85 because of the greater corrosion

OTOH, once the engines get retrofitted (mostly a surface treatment, IIRC), ethanol burns much more cleanly, with much less combustion residue buildup. The early engines had corrosion problems, but once the surface treatment problem was solved, they enjoyed longer active life than their hydrocarbon-burning counterparts.

> mind if I ask what kind of car it was, or if you'd had it customized?

It was a stock Volkswagen Gol (a project derived from the 1st-gen Passat). You can see a couple pictures here: http://carros.uol.com.br/album/volkswagen_gol_historia_album.... At the time, my aunt worked at their engineering department and got one for me as a gift. Mine was a third-generation ethanol engine. She was involved in the ethanol vehicle project.

Most cars you can buy in Brazil today are bi-fuel and can run with any mix of ethanol and gasoline. It's often a good idea to run the car with ethanol from time to time to clean the engine, as ethanol actively removes residue buildup.

[3am]

That is very, very cool. Thank you for posting the link and for the details on retrofitting the engines. I don't know if you're in Brazil, but my understanding is that they are way ahead of the US in renewable fuel usage. Most of our ethanol is corn based for technical and political reasons, and corn is a worse feedstock because it's more difficult for yeast to metabolize and it requires more fertilizer. So it's not nearly as economical here. And you are right, fertilizer is the non-renewable input. Most of the N (nitrogen) in NPK (nitrogen/phosphorus/potassium) is ammonia or urea derived from natural gas via something called the Haber Process.

[onemoreact]

It's the fuels that are in their infancy not the car's. Design a cheap energy efficient way to to turn cellulose into something close to gasoline and you will be able to make more money than Bill Gates. Theoretically it's possible, but nobody has gotten there yet.

[rbanffy]

After driving ethanol-running cars for more than 25 years, I must disagree. If you can't drive ethanol-running cars in your country, be assured it's not really a technical issue.

[onemoreact]

I often fill up with 10% ethanol gas which most cars can burn just fine, but the entire world's supply of ethanol is not enough to replace 10% of total demand with ethanol. We throw away enough feed-stock in the US to double world wide ethanol production, but it's simply not cost effective process it yet.

PS: It's not that far off though the US accounts for ~44% of the world’s gasoline consumption, but it's would take ~57% of the world's ethanol to switch every gas pump in the US to 10% ethanol.

[finnw]

> Design a cheap energy efficient way to to turn cellulose into something close to gasoline

The closest match is probably thermal depolymerization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization)

[alephnil]

In fact it is so mature that what we today call biofuels was what e.g Rudolf Diesel envisioned that his engines would run on, and the prototypes used for fuel. (He also thought of coal dust)

The problem is not the fuel itself, but the possibility to scale up production. Petroleum is available in vast quantities compared to all biofuel feedstocks. Most biofuels today compete with food production, or are not very developed, like cellulose. Even cellulose would have a hard time scale to the sufficient quantities if all the technical problems were solved.

[bane]

I think you and Tesla are not having the same conversation. They are doing it The Wrong Way if the conversation is efficient commuter/city cars. But tanks are doing it The Wrong Way if you're talking about space launch vehicles too.

Tesla doesn't market or really care about efficiency -- and Tesla buyers don't really care about efficiency (or at least not as their #1 priority, if they did there are plenty of high efficiency 3 wheel'd electric solar powered bio-diesel gold carts sitting in junk yards that they could have been buying).

Tesla cars are about instant torque and speed, offered only by electric motors, without all the baggage and compromise that comes from an efficiency econobox (read: nerdmobile).

Nobody else is doing that. People who buy Teslas, and who are interested in Teslas, don't want 0-60 in 14 seconds but great gas mileage, they want it in 2 seconds and great gas mileage.

Now if you want to talk about a family sedan that can smoke a Ferrari, has room for golf clubs, and is practical enough to take to the beach, grocery shopping and carry 3 or 4 of my friends to a movie, regardless of the how it spins the tires? Then you are in the right conversation.

[atourgates]

Precisely.

The Leaf and other small commuter cars are fantastic for people who don't give a shit about cars, and really care about the environment / gas prices. That's a great market, but it's a completely different market than the one Tesla is going after.

The Roadster is basically an electric Lotus. And there's no-one that's going to say to themselves, "You know what would make good financial sense? Replacing my Civic with a goddamn electric race car." It's not about price or energy or the planet, it's about something unique and fun, a luxury good. I expect that there is close to zero overlap between potential Tesla Roadster and potential Leaf buyers.

The Model S changes the dynamic a bit, but it's still not competing with the Leaf and other city cars. And most importantly, it will appeal to people (like me) who love cars. It's unsual, but extends beyond sports-car novelty into something that could easily be the primary vehicle for a family of 4 - or even more with the rear-facing 3rd row seat. Hell, if I was in the market for a high-end sedan, the Model S would be far and away my first choice. For about the price of a 7-series, you get something entirely new and unique in the automotive world.

Both Nissan and Tesla's attempts at popularizing electric vehicles have sensible business models behind them, they're just very different vehicles aimed at very different demographics.

[sek]

These arrogant posts like OP really annoy me, they don't even try to understand why Tesla does things like it does. No, Elon Musk is stupid, he makes the wrong cars and we should stop talking about it.

They have to create a totally new production chain and make high quality cars. This is impossible with low margins, there is no way they can compete on price against this gigantic industry.

[krschultz]

I feel like you can answer nearly every post like the OP's with "Go read The Innovator's Dilemma and then come back and talk about what metrics this disruptive company is competiting on rather than talking about the old metrics of the industry". Every one of them is making the argument that hard drive makers made each time a newer size came out, except with miles of range instead of Gigabytes.

[cube13]

The model S is somewhat disruptive. It's closer to almost affordable(around $50,000 base price after US tax breaks) than the Roadster(which was $109,000 base). Very few people could afford roadsters. More people can afford Model S', but it's still out of reach for the vast majority. I would argue that the Nisan Leaf is MUCH more of a disruptive force, because it's relatively affordable(starts at $27,700), and is available everywhere.

The problem is that Tesla isn't trying to make a green box for the masses. They're making luxury cars, and charging luxury prices for it. That puts them in direct competition with companies like Porche, Mercedes, BMW, etc. It's not an easy market to get into, considering the competition, and the fact that the customers who can afford their products, by and large, aren't concerned about efficiency as much as they're concerned with luxury or power.

[sek]

This is so funny, did you even read the post you responded to?

You make the same mistake, you think in a feature spreadsheet category. Efficiency, Luxury, Price and Power.

In these categories was the first iPhone a joke and every competitor made fun of it.

Get the book and then you understand why many people here are talking about Tesla and not Nissan.

[cube13]

The iPhone, when it was released, was something completely new, though. There was literally nothing like it on the market at all. Almost nobody had multitouch functionality. Nobody integrated a content market in the same way Apple did. And nobody made a smartphone as easy to use as Apple.

Tesla is targeting existing markets, making a product that looks pretty damned similar to other available products. They're not targeting the general public(like Apple). To compete on this level, their features are exactly what people talk about.

Also, the Roadster IS disruptive in one of those. Efficiency.

[salem]

Exactly right. To get that performance from a gas powered car would not only cost a lot more than a tesla, but you'd easily drop $40k of value on the car by driving it out of the lot, let alone by killing the battery.

[rdl]

I disagree.

Based on time in a Roadster, and what I've seen of the model s, I would be totally happy with the S in the bay area, and either rent or keep a second car for trips out of the bay. With a constant level of tech, sure, the city car makes more sense, but assuming you can afford the high tech batteries, the tesla seems like a great car for how Americans use cars.

If I weren't getting a model s, I'd probably get an Audi S5 or S7, so you are taking a 25mpg or less car off the road for an incremental cost of $30k. For me, the carpool benefits make it worthwhile alone (I wasted 1.5h driving to SF today, which would have been 30min in the carpool lane, but I only had one rather than 2 companions).

Making big trucks, SUVs, etc fuel efficient IS the low hanging fruit, followed by cars like taxis and police cars which drive lots of miles and idle a lot. Taking a 50mpg city car to 100mpg, driven 5 miles a day, isn't much savings by comparison.

[salem]

Regarding the taxis, just about every taxi in Australia runs on LNG these days. It's widely available, and aside from the benefits on somewhat cleaner emissions, you can easily make the money back on the conversion for the number miles they rack up. I'm surprised this is not subsidized in the USA, especially now that the reserves of gas have been revised up so much.

[tjmc]

You're off by a carbon atom. The taxis here run on LPG not LNG. In other words - propane rather than methane. Australia still produces more LNG than pretty much anywhere, but it's all shipped off to China, Korea and Japan.

[riffraff]

FWIW, taxis in italy have massively migrated to hybrid cars (noticeably, prius)

[Tossrock]

Carpool lanes are two people in the Bay Area. Did you mean you had zero rather than one companions, or were you unaware of the law?

[d2vid]

If you have an electric car and get a permit you can drive in the carpool lane alone: http://www.arb.ca.gov/msprog/carpool/carpool.htm

[Domenic_S]

Huge swaths of 80 and 880 are three-person HOV lanes. Take a look at the interactive map here: http://rideshare.511.org/

[Tossrock]

Well, I'd quibble about 'huge swaths', but I was in the wrong, so my mistake. I guess this is what I get for going to Oakland once per year.

[rdl]

Yeah, it's specifically the Bay Bridge; since they did work last weekend, it seems to have become a parking lot all morning. Not sure why. It's HOV-3.

[spankalee]

Tesla is trying to run and end around on the entire auto industry while trying to turn a profit as a car manufacturer startup. I can't imagine many more difficult markets to break into. Can you blame them if they're trying something different? By aiming for the luxury market, they're going for lower-volume, higher-margin products, building a coveted brand, and are able to offer longer ranges than Nissan. Sounds like a good strategy to me.

They don't have time to "sit it out", or money to lobby, they need to become established in brand and sales as quickly as possible. If they wait till electric cars are mainstream, it'll be too late to break the stranglehold that large car companies have on the market.

[krschultz]

I think you are right about the major car companies - Nissan, GM, Mitsubishi, et al. They are definitely doing it right and aiming at a good segment.

I think you are wrong about Tesla's segment. I know a couple of Tesla owners. All of them have a stable of cars. I would bet the average Tesla owner has >2 sports cars, and absolutely has more cars than the number of drivers in the family.

The whole idea of 'range anxiety' is BS when applied to someone who owns a Tesla as a fun car they drive on the weekends.

I was at a racetrack a few years ago and there were quarter million dollars cars literally littered across the place. Ferraris, high end Porches, etc. You know what car had the most people standing around it? The Tesla roadster. At the time it was new, it was hard to get, and it was a prestige symbol.

Tesla is is getting car collectors to subsidize their R&D. And their R&D is going to be a big reason why in the future mainstream electric cars are succesful. Ultimately Tesla's tech is about batteries and efficient motors - the car itself is an afterthought.

That said, it makes this problem EVEN WORSE. If it is a daily driver, there is no way it will ever sit unused for 11 weeks. But as 1 of 10 cars in a collection, it absolutely can sit there for weeks on end without being charged. So I think this is a huge problem for Tesla and probably less so for a daily driver like the Leaf.

[onemoreact]

If it's sitting there for weeks why not just leave it plugged into an extension cord? In a collection a Tesla can sit plugged in for longer than a combustion engine can sit with a full tank of gas so it's really a question of slightly different needs for long term storage.

[krschultz]

That's certainly true, there is not reason the cars can't be properly stored. I'm just saying it's easy to forget about it. A lot of people don't touch the sports cars during the winter and if you forget to plug it in, you won't notice for months (and at that point it is too late). A daily driver will never be forgotten about for months on end.

[haberman]

Who said that electric cars have to be about energy efficiency? To me the primary reason to move to electric are to ditch petroleum and its associated problems (pollution, oil spills, foreign energy dependence).

The way to the future is to convince people that new technology is better for them. If the message instead is "you need to give up things you like for the greater good," people will oppose you at every move, and rightly so; do you really want to live in a world where computer screens are just barely bright enough to see, where buildings are sweltering on hot days, freezing on cold days, showers are cold, and the speed limit is never higher than 55mph?

[TeMPOraL]

> The way to the future is to convince people that new technology is better for them. If the message instead is "you need to give up things you like for the greater good," people will oppose you at every move, and rightly so;

While I agree in principle, ...

> do you really want to live in a world where computer screens are just barely bright enough to see, where buildings are sweltering on hot days, freezing on cold days, showers are cold, and the speed limit is never higher than 55mph?

Alternative is unfortunately having no computers, no air conditioning and no cars at all. Current energy consumption is too high to sustain even if we go all electric and switch to nuclear + renewables[1]. We need to think about energy efficiency at least a little bit more than we do now.

[1] - this book works out all the numbers: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/

[yew]

Reading their analysis of nuclear power (which is, by the by, about as renewable as solar power; we'll run out of fissionables around the time the Sun goes out), I'm not seeing any reason you couldn't run things just on that if you solved the political problems.

Unless I'm missing something (always a possibility, of course) their later comparisons are all to a "green stack" that doesn't include nuclear.

[TeMPOraL]

Yes, you're right, my mistake. I expressed myself wrong (thought one think, wrote another...). We can live on renewables + nuclear (if we get there, which would be a monumental task - both politically and in terms of building necessary infrastructure, not to mention electrifying pretty much everything that now burns fuel), but definitely not on renewables alone. And this transition needs to be started ASAP.

The final comparisons of stacks were against electrified and reduced consumption (author started by pointing out how to reduce overall energy use to little more than 50% of the base value). There are many easy tricks that can help with this reduction - like better home insulation, keeping heating few degrees lower, using heat pumps for air conditioning, etc. - that don't mean one has to live without hot water & computers. But people need to start implementing those measures if we are to have any chance in transitioning to a sustainable energy economy.

[yew]

Sure. Efficiency is important, not to mention cheaper in the long run. And if nothing else, we should at least be saving the hydrocarbons for industrial chemistry where they're actually hard to replace.

Convincing people to pay for the switchover is going to be a long, slow process though. And in most cases it boils down to major building renovation; people are famously reluctant to try that sort of thing.

[rue]

I might have to read that at some point. Offhand, it would seem that carpeting Sahara and comparable areas would give quite sufficient yields of solar energy, especially combined with nuclear. Feasibility is another matter, naturally.

[TeMPOraL]

The book suggests it might, but in general getting sufficient quantities of energy from renewables would require country-sized facilities.

[rue]

There's a lot of unused land around, if circumstances ever get that dire.

[mansolo]

If someone really wants to stop contributing to pollution, oil spills, energy dependence etc - don't buy a car. Any car.

Manufacturing cars requires a tremendous amount of energy and natural resources. Everything we manufacture and consume punishes the earth.

Myself, I've decided to eschew driving. Our perceived dependence on automobiles is insane. The roads are insane. No car is going to make me cool. I want no part of it.

[fryguy]

I think you're looking at this the wrong way. Let me make an analogy to a different market - hobby r/c aircraft. 10 Years ago, the only practical way to get certain sizes of aircraft was to use gas powered engines. Nowadays most people use brushless motors for everything, not because they think "hey these are better for the environment" or "these are more efficient", but because they are much more convenient and much more powerful. That is what Tesla is going after - more powerful. Their target market is people that have tiny sports cars and saying "electric motors have an insane amount of torque at low rpms", and then as this other thing, way over there - by the way, they don't use as much fuel too.

There is a whole another ideology that the "green" movement is, which is saying we need to get people to drive less, and when they drive, they should use the most fuel efficient car they should, because you know, the environment and stuff. Generating power at a central power plant (which can happen to be solar/wind/other renewable method rather than coal) and using that energy to power cars is much more efficient than having thousands of miniature power plants burning gasoline/diesel carrying people around town. However, most people don't care about the environment the way that people that want to push everyone to drive electric vehicles. I certainly don't.

A year or two ago, I wanted to get a new car, from my 1998 ford mustang. I had two desires, one was to get a more powerful car. The other was to spend less money on gas. My friend had bought a Prius recently and I liked the features of it, so I went to the Toyota dealership and took one for a test drive. When I finally got to do it (I would not recommend the Rosevilla Toyota to anyone, for the record), the power was completely unacceptable to me and there was no way I was buying that car. I ended up buying a Mini Cooper S, which was more powerful, and had better gas mileage. I think that is the goal of Tesla, to get cars which are more powerful than the gasoline cars, and cheaper to operate.

Do you really think that the customer needs to adapt to the car, rather than the car adapting to the person? Isn't that like the opposite of everything Hacker News stands for?

[dnissley]

Generating power at a central power plant (which can happen to be solar/wind/other renewable method rather than coal) and using that energy to power cars is much more efficient than having thousands of miniature power plants burning gasoline/diesel carrying people around town.

Here's the thing: this is bullshit.

Did you know that only about a third of the electricity produced at an electrical plant ends up making it to our wall sockets? (And that's not even calculating the efficiency of the appliances that use that electricity!) Compare that to an internal combustion engine (~1/4 of the energy getting converted into a mechanical form) and we're not really looking at much of an efficiency gain.

Proponents of electrical vehicles have simply not done the math.

[fryguy]

Well, electricity is certainly cheaper to charge a car battery than it is to buy gasoline to travel the same amount, and cheaper price for a commodity generally implies uses less energy. Does your gallon of gas take in to account the cost of driving it around the country instead of being transmitted over power lines? A quick google search found that there's only a 6-8% loss in power in transmitting the energy across the power grid, but only 30-40% of the energy contained in coal can be turned into electricity. That is more telling of coal power plants than the general principle of charging cars off the grid.

[notatoad]

Tesla are targeting the customers willing to spend upwards of 50k on a car. The other people selling electric cars are targeting the people who would normally spend less than 20k on a car. An electric car is the features of a small city car, but not the price. There's something to be said for targeting both sets of potential customers.

[forgottenpaswrd]

We would not be talking about the Leaf, the Fluence or the iMiev if there was not for Tesla. Remember that some of these companies use technology from Tesla(Tesla is licensing it to major players).

Tesla is doing what it knows to do best, innovate and take risks. This is what startups are for. Once it is proven that works the big companies will follow.

[drucken]

I am not aware of a single car or even motor manufacturer for car makers who licenses Tesla technology.

Car makers have long had hybrid cars well before Tesla even existed. Some even had prototype pure electrical cars before them too. After all, Tesla was only founded in 2003!

The only technology link is back to AC Propulsion who's founder made the controller that went into the first GM pure electrical vehicle. However, Tesla stopped using AC Propulsion technology long ago (it may even have been during the year of their founding).

So, who exactly are you talking about? It is highly unlikely to be any Japanese manufacturer, for example, due to their existing leadership in hybrid technology...

[pingswept]

From what I understand, Toyota is using Tesla's motor and battery technology in the new electric RAV4: http://wot.motortrend.com/toyota-tesla-come-together-compani...

[spenceyboi]

How is Tesla trying to engineer around culture? If anything, they are engineering for our culture that is fascinated with high speed performance cars(Lamborghinis and Ferraris an example) and luxury cars(Bentleys and Lexus an example). Their models are giving what the customer wants. An electric car that is still fashionable in today's taste of cars. Of course the early models will have a few problems, but their widespread popularity after such a limited existence as a car company shows that Tesla is exactly what the consumer wants.

[regularfry]

Automotive PR departments have been engineering around culture for decades - why do you think you associate "luxury" with Bentley and especially Lexus?

[philwelch]

I'd go even further and say that energy efficiency fundamentally can't be reached by carrying individual 100-300 pound humans around in 1000-2000 pound vehicles.

[schiffern]

Unfortunately people aren't very inclined to ride velomobiles on the same roads as Hummers and Escalades.

[rwallace]

Which makes it all the more important to find a way to get the Hummers and Escalades off the bloody roads.

[cobrausn]

Then the same roads as 18-wheelers and buses. Good luck getting those off the bloody roads.

[rwallace]

18-wheelers and buses are fewer in number, highly visible and driven by professionals. They're a much smaller problem in practice.

[cobrausn]

In the city I live there have been a number of high-profile accidents involving buses and trains, buses and other buses, and buses and other traffic. The drivers may get an extra couple week course, but they are still driving a giant vehicle, and I don't even think many of the drivers are necessarily 'better' - if your entire population drives pretty much every day, then they are all effectively 'professional'.

The same goes for the 18-wheelers, as we often see quite a few accidents involving those on the highways. Sometimes people even walk away from these accidents when they are driving the bigger cars. The smaller ones... not so much. The fact remains that the larger, heavier cars are much safer when involved in accidents with cars even larger and heavier than they are - in most cases. There exist very well engineered and safe smaller vehicles, but that will only get you so far. I hope it gets better over time.

[philwelch]

Fortunately, no one suggested velomobiles as a solution to this problem.

[admiralpumpkin]

So your argument boils down to: Tesla would be a true innovator if they only tried to convince us hedonist Americans that we should drive loud, uncomfortable vehicles?

Gotcha.

Count me on the other side. Tesla is slowly moving down market, and at the same time (hopefully) the technology will improve so that we can easily convert over to electric without compromise.

I do grant you your point on range though. If the average person drives 10 miles, then I don't think our goal should be a 300 mile range car. That's pointless engineering. I do not grant quietness or AC or build quality or style or safety.

[riffraff]

I guess the problem is that the target you envision (people conscious of car consumption who drive small cars) does not exist in the united states.

Good or bad, this creates a market for someone selling them the same massive cars americans like, but with an electric engine.

[grannyg00se]

I don't see how anything you said indicates that they are harming efforts to improve energy efficiency. How is what they are doing harming what others do?

They're hardly a side show. They produced an all electric vehicle that costs over $100,000 to purchase. In decent quantities. With great reviews. And they're still in business.

I see your point about the SUV mentality but it's perfectly reasonable to have some businesses working against that mentality while other businesses try to work within that mentality. I don't think you can call either way The Wrong Way unless you can show persistent failure (or any failure at all).

[ta12121]

The Leaf's range is pathetic compared to the Tesla's. And that makes it much less practical for anyone who only owns one car.

[pbreit]

Thank goodness this sentiment is not widely preached in silicon valley.

[earl]

since I was unaware:

Tesla S seems to practically cost (with the large battery that still only gets you 300 miles) $70K after a $7.5k tax credit [1] and the Nissan leaf costs $35K but that seems to be before the $7.5k tax credit.

[1] http://www.teslamotors.com/models/options

[2] http://www.nissanusa.com/leaf-electric-car/index#/leaf-elect...

[chc]

The Leaf claims 100 miles on a charge, making its range a little less than the base Model S. That means that the Tesla costs about $19k more in practice. Considering it's supposed to be a "nicer" car in general, that doesn't seem too unreasonable.

I don't think Nissan genuinely expects anyone to buy the base model Leaf. For $2,000, you give up the ability to charge your car in minutes rather than hours (and, apparently, to use any of the charging stations that are supposed to materialize in the near future).

[ta12121]

The Leaf's claimed range is based on an urban driving cycle, and its numbers are not comparable to the numbers Tesla publishes.

[prostoalex]

Correct, on the page you linked there's a 'view pricing details' link at the bottom.

For base model it's $27,700 net value*, after tax savings; starting at MSRP $35,200, with federal tax savings from 0 to $7,500.

[lhnn]

I enjoy my Ford Bronco. I also enjoy my 35+ mpg V-Star. When a new, 30+ car comes out under $10k, pm me.

[protomyth]

I drive a 2008 Kia Rio which gets 40mpg (100,000+ miles). The 2012 gets 30/40 and cost $12K. I am waiting for a hybrid that beats the Rio by a amount needed to justify the price difference. I look at the all electrics, but I cannot buy one because I live in an apartment with no plug-ins (kinda annoying in the winter) and travel 34 miles to work (one way).