For charging overnight, my concern is that (A) if drive very much during the day and (B) the house has only a 100 A circuit breaker box, then the charging time will still be too long, that is, that overnight is not long enough. The back of the envelope arithmetic I did on overnight charging at 100 A boiled down to driving a relatively large golf cart not very far or fast. I could be wrong. Yes, a Tesla is a lot bigger than a relatively large golf cart.
> Have you ever driven a Tesla?
No, but I fully accept that a powerful electric car would be a total hoot to drive. So, it would be quiet, smooth as silk, and be the fastest accelerating wheel driven vehicle so far. The key, of course, has been known for 100+ years: A series wound electric motor has, from the view of the math, infinitely large torque at stall, that is, before the armature has started to rotate. Then, before the armature is rotating very fast, the torque is still very high.
Also, get to put a separate motor at each wheel and do without a transmission, drive shaft, differentials, etc. So, get rid of a lot of mechanical parts. Also get rid of the often corroded exhaust system.
The torque and power can get from a carefully designed electric motor now is astounding.
Moreover, there may be some good opportunities to adjust dynamically, many times a second, the motor torque separately at each wheel to eliminate wheel spin, which actually hurts acceleration.
Again, my main concern is charging time: E.g., for summer driving, will want A/C, and that can take a lot of power; in the winter, want heat, and that also takes power.
Do a lot of high performance driving, and a Tesla is to be regarded as a high performance car, accelerating onto Interstate highways, passing cars, trucks, farm equipment on two lane roads, driving at 90 MPH, etc., can use a lot of battery energy. Once when I drove from my home in Maryland to my office at FedEx in Memphis, I drove my Camaro nearly the whole way at about 90 MPH -- didn't get stopped. Once when I was driving at night from Maryland to Indiana to see my fiance, I drove my Firebird nearly the whole way at 90 MPH -- didn't get stopped. I was lusting for pencil beam high speed driving lights, an air horn that could be heard for miles, and a more powerful fuel pump for pulling long hills at 100 MPH at full throttle at about 5000 RPM (Camaro 396, Turbo 400 transmission, second gear, 2.56 rear axle ratio) -- did that daily driving home from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab!
When Dad and I went fishing in Arkansas, I did the driving, before dawn, while he slept, and I put our Buick on 100 MPH and kept it there. For people driving near the Rocky Mountains, they can want a lot of battery energy to climb hills.
Mostly just for commuting to work, I've put 200,000+ miles on each of three cars, a high end Camaro, a Buick Turbo T-Type, and a slow one, an SUV.
So, to me, a car means a lot of driving, maybe fast driving. So, that would make me concerned about Tesla charging time. That a Tesla can be considered a high performance car gives me more concern about charging time if that performance were used very much, e.g., as I have used high performance cars in the past.
My other concern about a Tesla would be the lifetime of the battery after a few thousand full rechargings as might be needed for 200,000+ miles of high performance driving.
For high performance driving,
I'm lusting for a supercharged Corvette, and I'm happy that all
it needs for energy is premium gasoline! :-)!