Will this be tomorrow's transportation?

Thomas · Dec 4, 2016

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

jerrybob · Dec 4, 2016

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

adventure bob · Dec 4, 2016

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.

dickfoster · Dec 4, 2016

adventure bob said:
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.

I don't see where the stretch is. I don't think Elon Musk is that much of an idiot, he knows exactly what the score is but is simply taking advantage of the fools in the buying public and the fools in government to his own advantage, like any good con artist would.

What the real crime here is is that there is now an existing technology to supply clean power for the grid but we won't do anything with it. Spending tax money to engineer yet another silly electric car that run from a largely a fossil fueled grid is putting the cart before the horse. Heck we can't even run the grid on a hot day now so why strain it further?
Ever hear of this thing called conversion loss? Not that hauling heavy batteries around is such a great idea in the first place. Give us a good power grid then you could even run cars, planes and the like on hydrogen. Yeah we have technology to use hydrogen in fuel cells and you can even burn the stuff cleanly but today the source of all that hydrogen it right back at the oil well so what's the point.
Until we have a decent way to power the grid, everything else is moot. And no solar and wind ain't gonna do it either. It's either a real problem or it isn't but they sure aren't acting much like it's a real problem so maybe it's just a case of the boy who cried wolf and using it to run a scam on the public.

BTW there is nothing new about electric cars, they've been around forever and yes I am well aware of the characteristics of electric motors. If I were to design an electric car, I'd be inclined to use four motors, one in each wheel and do away with a lot of the moving parts in stuff like the steering etc. that you wouldn't really need. Maybe fuel cells to produce the electricity and a small battery for to store braking energy and to provide short periods of extra boost. What Tesla is doing really isn't all that sophisticated and nothing new.

adventure bob · Dec 4, 2016

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 · Dec 5, 2016

N80 said:
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 · Dec 5, 2016

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

Egon · Dec 5, 2016

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 · Dec 5, 2016

N80 said:
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 · Dec 5, 2016

STx said:
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