Will this be tomorrow's transportation?

[Thomas]

Not fond of the looks...guess Iam to old fashion.

 

[jerrybob]

Somebody should make a coal burning big rig.........forget this electric junk!:thumbsup:

 

[adventure bob]

Wow
"Tesla is a stupid joke who takes money from fools with liberal arts degrees who don't know diddly squat about science or engineering. Any high school science student can tell you that the tooth fairy doesn't put the electricity in the socket to charge those idiotic things so all they end up doing is burning coal in the most inefficient manner possible."

Blaming tesla for the antiquated state of the US power grid seems a stretch. At this point the car itself is grid agnostic: it doesn't care if its coal powered, wind powered or nuclear powered. The fact that were still burning coal as a jobs program for certain coal producing states is the crime here, not that tesla has a car that from a pure performance standpoint is pretty cool. The tesla S will stomp a challenger hellcat into the ground and not break a sweat is pretty awesome. And if you compare it to dollars for energy per HP the tesla way outshines any gas powered car. If your gonna blame tesla for the way we produce power then you have to take some responsibility cuase your house is powered the same way.

From an engineering perspective electric motors are the engineering choice to move a vehicle, combustion is an engineering throwback to steam engines. Extremely inefficient.

 

[adventure bob]

Batteries have the same forward engineering thinking as combustion engines. While they did the trick when invented, they are centuries old technologies that aren't really efficient or useful in todays want for a power storage device that's clean and efficient. Liquid fuels are about the most efficient thing weve come up with to date for the storage and transport of energy. Problem is the conversion from energy storage to work, the combustion engine or some derivation thereof, is way inefficient and now, too polluting.
Id agree that tesla is just creating a better buggy whip. Musk applying some cool thing to age old technologies and incrementally improving them. Its not revolutionary. People came up with great improvement to the ice process, just before the refrigeration became widespread. That's where we are with the combustion engine.

 

[turnkey4099]

I have the solution to the range problem. The problem is infrastructure. Where do you go when your batteries are low? Where can you go to get energy for your vehicle quickly?

Well, to me it seems obvious: Standardized batteries. All cars will have the same batteries. There will be "filling" stations everywhere just as there are gas stations everywhere. You pull in and they remove your batteries and replace them with freshly charged ones. Yes, cars will have to be designed so that the battery packs are easy to remove. Yes, it will take some sort of standardized machinery to lift and insert the batteries in the car. Yes, at least at first, this may require an attendant to assist the motorist. Problem solved. You're welcome. ;-)

Same thing for trucks and truck stops. But, as mentioned above, why do the trucks need batteries? Why not a high efficiency diesel running at a constant RPM turning generators that turn electric motors just like the trains mentioned above. Yes, it will take significant downsizing, weight saving etc. Aren't we for to that?

Replacing batteries does not fix the range problem. YOu would still need to make frequent stops (as in 'every 100 miles' at least) -that kills over the road trucking..

 

[sseelhoff]

A startup just showed why hydrogen vehicles are better than electric — but there's a catch - Yahoo Finance

 

[Egon]

Hydrogen fuelled was also mentioned in the first post attachment but seems to have been missed by some.

The entire concept is intriguing. There are some submarines that use hydrogen fuel cells for extremely quiet submersible operation. Add to this that hydrogen could be produced using green energy at those times there is overproduction of electricity.

 

[STx]

We found it 50 years ago. It is called nuclear. The same people who brought us Solyndra effectively condemned nuclear to obsolescence. We had a new plant going in here locally. One of the first and only new ones in a long, long time (I've been told). Something, I'm not sure what, has stopped its construction. There is an active one near my house. Great local employer and you wouldn't ever know it was here except for the cooling tower plume.

The Fukushima accident killed nuclear power plant construction. They were just about to start construction on a second reactor in Texas when that happened as well, that project has also been scrapped.

 

[jerrybob]

The Fukushima accident killed nuclear power plant construction. They were just about to start construction on a second reactor in Texas when that happened as well, that project has also been scrapped.

They just finally capped Chernobyl......

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/world/europe/chernobyl-disaster-cover.html?_r=0