I don't understand why we're not trying to run our cars on natural gas.
Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway
101–104 of 104 posts
Re: Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I can glean from the article, it may not be possible to completely address the problem in software, because weather prediction is inexact, and it's hard to account for all eventualities. The software can say, "100 miles of range unless the temperature drops more than 5 degrees from forecast, or unless it turns out your hotel has no indoor parking, or if you have to stay late at work and your car spends an e…
because weather prediction is inexact, and it's hard to account for all eventualities. -- why not engineer a stable micro-climate for the battery?
I was thinking of software only solutions, but I think a hardware fix may be best.
I wonder if Tesla chose to optimize for other scenarios in the design of the car: Tesla distributes the battery across the entire body, which makes for great handling, fault tolerance, and safety, but may make it more difficult to insulate than in other cars, which typically just lump the battery in the back, surrounded by insulation.
An "inside" battery also takes advantage of the solar greenhouse effect from the glass-enclosed interior. On cold-but-sunny day, a parked car will heat up substantially simply due to the ~1kw/m^2 of solar energy delivered to the vehicle. Of course, you don't want the battery getting to hot, either. In addition to better thermal insulation, perhaps Tesla could add solar panels to the roof to aid in heating and cooling.
I hope this problem is solved, as it would be a bummer not to be able to take a Tesla on a ski trip.
Re: Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway
#103Filling up a Toyota Camry with gasoline (say 15 gallons) adds about 90 pounds of fuel. A lithium-ion battery with the same energy content would weigh about 5,800 pounds. Clearly electric vehicles will have a difficult time competing with gasoline vehicles no matter how much charging times are reduced or how much better the software gets. It seems that without some breakthrough the sweet spot for battery-electric vehicles is urban driving done after charging overnight at home.
Re: Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway
#104Elon musk is claiming that the article is misleading:
NYTimes article about Tesla range in cold is fake. Vehicle logs tell true story that he didn't actually charge to max & took a long detour.