I know, right? Who could have seen that coming?
Of course, once you get past all the he-said-she-said drama of their alleged Tesla S test, we're still talking about a brand new $60,000 car that I can't even jump in and drive to Knoxville the way I could in a thirteen-year-old sub-$3k Subaru with
And you thought little electric urban commuter pods had a small viable market niche! In terms of the breadth of its target demographic, this thing makes the Nissan Leaf look like the Ford F-150.
*Math is hard!
"...with fifty earth circumnavigations already on the odometer."
ReplyDeleteUh, Tam. Check your math. I make that to be 1.25 million miles.
But the rest of the rant is spot-on as usual.
The NYT printed something that was less than factual? Well, I never! Next thing you'll be telling me that the government doesn't actually care about me, or that a ShakeWeight won't really tone my arms in one session!
ReplyDeleteYup, you gotta move that decimal place over one notch.
ReplyDeleteThat's what comes of using your slide rule instead of one of those new-fangled "calculatoricals".
John Broder is not Jermey Clarkson even though he tries his hardest to copy everything The Mad Brit does.
ReplyDeleteGerry
Next you'll tell me my .357 won't blow an assailant 15 feet backwards.
ReplyDeleteReminds me of the Consumer Reports and the Suzuki Samurai.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.aim.org/aim-report/aim-report-a-black-eye-for-consumer-reports/
Just wait until they start lighting 'em on fire...
ReplyDelete( snicker )
ReplyDeleteWe aren't allowed to use the only thing that packs more energy into a pound and or gallon than high octane gasoline ... a small nuclear pile.
Scott: It will, if you're being attacked by a small rodent...
ReplyDeleteI agree with one of the comments.
ReplyDeleteThe author was being less that truthful ( let's put it tactfully )
But some of the "he LIED!" is a little lame: sez 54mph really drove 60mph... , ooooh, he peaked briefly at 80mph... really?! he had to pass? Shocker. I certainly do not care
It's unfortunate really.
I like the Tesla.
I like electric cars - for the little they are good at.
I think some of his criticisms of the Tesla are 100% valid
(that is it NOT for everyone, that it has serious limitations.)
And then the dummy goes and lies? Sigh.
Yeah, it wouldn't be hard to put a black eye on Tesla; just participate in a cross-country race. New York to LA would take what, 12 days in that thing?
ReplyDeleteI wonder, since when did every product have to be for everyone?
ReplyDeleteWhen the horseless carriage first came out I'm sure people were incredulous at the short range, and how much you had to put in and take out, and move around, and "Damn, Bessie knows how to get home from the bar better than I do!?
The problem is the people that are crying for EVs as the second coming of Cripes. You know, if I had too much money, and I had my current commute, I'd get one of these. It's cool, it's different, and, like I said, I have too much money. The Taureg is for long trips anyway.
A car like this isn't any worse than that corvette in someone's garage they can't drive when the road is wet, or it's too cold, or too hot, or it might snow that week, or you want more than 1.5 people in it.
Cross country driving is not what the tesla is for. That's not really a fair comparison. if you're driving cross country all the time and buy a Tesla, you deserve what you get.
ReplyDeleteIf, on the other hand, you're like 90% of Americans, you're driving the same route every day, and it's less than 40 miles round trip...
Not to say that a $60,000 car is a good way to save money on gas...
But one of the reasons that the Tesla is so expensive is because the technology hasn't broken into the mainstream yet because it sucks ass. Tesla is literally the only company on Earth that is doing something about that (all the other company's electric offerings are horrid, tiny little anemic piles of low-range crap), and their technology is actually pretty damned impressive. If they can get the price point down to more like sub-35K, I'll bet they start selling like hotcakes.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/electric-cars-extraordinarily-bad-idea-191702346.html
ReplyDeletehttp://engineeringthinking.wordpress.com/2012/04/28/thinking-of-an-electric-car-bad-idea/
ReplyDeleteGoober,
ReplyDelete"If, on the other hand, you're like 90% of Americans, you're driving the same route every day, and it's less than 40 miles round trip.."
Like 90% of Americans, my daily driving is just a few miles.
Also like 90% of Americans, every couple months, I take a roadtrip.
Also also like 90% of Americans, I don't have a ten car garage I can stack with options like it's a bag of golf clubs.
This is why the single person who's working on the occasional remodeling project, takes their friends to the bowling alley every now and again, lives in snow country, and sometimes drives to visit Grandma owns an extended-cab F-150 4X4 instead of an AWD Subaru Impreza, and a Smart, and a standard cab F-150.
But, a large percentage of Americans do live in two car households. I could easily see my wife in the Tesla and me in my mini van. Or whatever combination.
ReplyDeleteAdd better brakes and some other safety gear to, say, a 1914 Ford Electric. Sell for about $25k? Profit. Note: rechargeable via battery [trickle] charger connected to standard outlet...
ReplyDeleteAs I have been given to understand, the several electrics went away for much the reeasons cited here. Not bad for most daily use, but no good for going over the river and through the woods to Grandma's house on the weekend.
Scott J:
ReplyDelete"Next you'll tell me my .357 won't blow an assailant 15 feet backwards."
You need to rack a 12 gauge for that
Rich
What woodman said
ReplyDeleteI read that article long before seeing the reply from Fisker. The two items that really let me know he was sandbagging were these:
ReplyDeleteHe parked for the night, knowing that the overnight temperature would be 10F, and knowing that he was already at very low charge. Yet he didn't pull that little 15A/120V adapter out of the trunk that would have fully charged the thing by morning.
At one point the car shut off the heater on him in order to save electrical power. Excuse, me, but an electric heater as good at heating the cabin quickly as the reviews tell about the Fisker MUST draw about 5 kW at max. He admits that he was running the heater when his required range was already lower than the car's predicted range. That wasn't flirting with a breakdown, asking for a breakdown, or even courting a breakdown. That was begging and pleading for a breakdown.
It's rather like complaining that your UPS didn't give you the advertised 20 minutes of computer uptime when the power failed. And there was noting plugged into it except the computer and three hair dryers, because we were getting ready to go out...
I do understand what you're getting at tam. I have a diesel VW golf for my commuter and a 2500 HD Chevy pickup for those occasional remodels you speak of (and if you've ever read my blog you know I have other outdoors related hauling needs also) . Once electric technology gets cheap enough and good enough I expect to replace the golf with one once the golf gives up. Electric cars fit a niche market just like any other car. Folks in the city would likely consider my truck to be useless. But that Tesla just might be the ticket.
ReplyDeleteTam,
ReplyDeleteCircumnavigating the moon would be about 6783 miles, not counting pit stops and burger calls. Which would make "almost eight" earth trips into 29 or so moon loops. And NASA gave up on the moon. I guess Werner Von Braun was right, when he states that NASA created the Space Shuttle program with the sole (and immediately realized) goal of employing the thousands of Apollo program engineers and scientist. Space work sure wasn't on their agenda, let alone lunar jaunts.
@ Goober,
"selling like hotcakes" makes a couple of assumptions that I don't think are warranted. First, our "modern" economy is based on cheap energy. Gas at $3/plus a gallon, coal and natural gas under EPA regulations -- these aren't the cheap energy that built America, we can't expect runaway economic growth (as opposed to financial-tricks balloons, like the housing bubble) to return. Then, too, Obama and his administration, with the collusion of Congress, seems bent on "redistributing wealth" -- that is, reducing the number of people that can *afford* a new car, let alone the $35k range. Lastly, with the end of cheap energy, at some point it is going to become clear that the energy that it takes to re-charge electric cars, is inefficient, at mass scales. There is tremendous loss of energy transforming wind or solar to electricity, losses again in the national grid getting the electricity to the receptacle, losses again getting electricity converted to battery charge -- and batteries leak off charge even when not in use.
The sun isn't any brighter than it was, which limits the total energy the Earth receives, and gathering enough together to power industrial and residential uses takes a *lot* of stuff and space -- again, less than ideally efficient. And we haven't *begun* to assess what increasing the number of solar cells does to the climate. It might be a smaller order of effect than the carbon dioxide (that plants take up more quickly, when it gets more abundant) the tree-huggers are so worried about, but it likely isn't. The extra, new equipment, especially including wind turbines, takes a *lot* of energy to make, erect, field, erect, and maintain. And *sustainable* solar and wind, both somewhat *mature* projects, cost a *lot* more than petroleum, coal, natural gas. Essentially, decades after they were "experimental", solar and wind power still run on tax dollars.
Cheap energy, that is, easy wealth, is pretty much gone for the masses. An actually forward-looking project would be to bring the International Scout back into production, and double the mileage of every gasoline engine on the road today.
Oh, and change zoning laws, to encourage people to live within walking/bike distance of shopping and work. Today's Urban Sprawl has tens of millions of Americans commuting more than a few miles each day. But that would conflict with realty and housing development special interests.
But without urban sprawl we would have no housing construction business, which, from what I see on the boob tube, would mean that the Chinese would stop sending us their pension money, and the world would end.
ReplyDeleteAbout a week ago, I heard a quote on TV news concerning the supposed Japanese "Father Of The Electric Car", saying it all was a mistake and we should just go back to gasoline. Anybody catch the gentleman's name? I'd like to read up on him.
I like our hybrid and would consider getting an electric. I just can't justify the extra expense for a toy.
ReplyDeleteBut then again, we have 3 going on 4 cars for just two drivers with one hybrid.
My commute is 5 miles to/from work and an electric makes sense. Just not for $60k. I much prefer my 5L Mustang for the commute since the price differential will make up for any gas savings during the life of the car.
When I read the original article, I though immediately "this can't be right, anyone who own's an electric for any length of time knows he is BS-ing us". It was interesting to see we were right after the review of the logs.
That Tesla does look sweet. I wonder how long the batteries will last, and what replacement costs will be?
ReplyDelete