Unrelated: That pond / front water thing on http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger seems like it would be unnecessarily easy to drive or walk into.
Tesla Completes L.A.-to-New York Electric Model S Drive Chargers
81–90 of 196 posts
Re: Tesla Completes L.A.-to-New York Electric Model S Drive Chargers
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
After moving to California 3 years ago I've seen stretches of Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, and of course California I'd never have seen without a car. Gotten to go to places impractical with any other transportation. I can't really imagine not having a car for my weekend trips. I get not wanting to stay in a car for 40 minutes each way on a weekly commute, but being trapped in a city like LA or San Francisco with no…
I'm not saying you shouldn't drive your car everywhere. I am saying, you shouldn't be doing it every day. That, right there, is one of the unhealthiest lifestyles, for everyone. The average American spends an hour a day in their car. This number changes over the years, of course, but generally Americans spend a large portion of their lives, consuming gas. Its just built into the nations life-lines at this point. Week…
Can you share the source for the data on how much time the average American spends in a car?
Re: Tesla Completes L.A.-to-New York Electric Model S Drive Chargers
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
After moving to California 3 years ago I've seen stretches of Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, and of course California I'd never have seen without a car. Gotten to go to places impractical with any other transportation. I can't really imagine not having a car for my weekend trips. I get not wanting to stay in a car for 40 minutes each way on a weekly commute, but being trapped in a city like LA or San Francisco with no…
I'm not saying you shouldn't drive your car everywhere. I am saying, you shouldn't be doing it every day. That, right there, is one of the unhealthiest lifestyles, for everyone. The average American spends an hour a day in their car. This number changes over the years, of course, but generally Americans spend a large portion of their lives, consuming gas. Its just built into the nations life-lines at this point. Week…
The thing is the infrastructure has been long established where the transition to more commuters using public transit is going to take a long time. In LA, they are putting in more public transit options, but the reality is most people commute too long of distances to their jobs for it to be practical to utilize it. So, these options will only be practical for a small population. Otherwise, your options are: 1) Drive an hour in traffic or 2) Spend 3+ hours on public transit (but in a cramped bus). What's your pick for the daily? This also limits your freedom (yep I said it.) to get groceries or do other errands with the little time you have after work which would add additional time to your commute.
Are you American? Your perspective seems a little overgeneralized than reality. Don't get me wrong gas consumption is certainly an issue here. Hopefully Tesla drives the auto industry in the right direction.
Re: Tesla Completes L.A.-to-New York Electric Model S Drive Chargers
#84Not the most direct route between the two cities [1]. It looks like there are at least two parts of the route that don't follow interstates. The excursion up to South Dakota to go past Mt. Rushmore makes sense, but I can't figure out the jog into New Mexico. Unless someone's really interested in a couple of National Monuments in that corner of NM, it looks like the only reason for that jog is to go to the Four Corner…
> I can't figure out the jog into New Mexico
It looks like the two charging stations in northwest New Mexico are in Gallup and either Shiprock or Farmington, which are just about the only towns in that region of the country. A more direct route between I-40 and I-70 would be to turn north a bit further west, on US-191, but there aren't any towns on that route.
Re: Tesla Completes L.A.-to-New York Electric Model S Drive Chargers
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, if you leave out the reality that the US had already expanded to the west coast by the time the car was invented.
So? They went straight for the west coast and skipped all the barren nonsense in the middle. In most every vast country, population density is a function of distance to water.
Kansas had a million people in it by the time the car was invented, the middle was not skipped.
Re: Tesla Completes L.A.-to-New York Electric Model S Drive Chargers
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Distances aren't big because gas is/was cheap, they're big because nobody wants to pay $2,000/month for a crappy one-bedroom apartment within biking distance of their job. Distances ARE big because America is so big, and even now there's still plenty of land to be cheaply bought and decently priced housing built upon. For the past decade everyone's been balking at the rising gas prices, and so far as I know no two pl…
Yeah, nobody wants to live in those apartments, that's why the rents are so high!
Nobody, with a ±1% margin of error.
Re: Tesla Completes L.A.-to-New York Electric Model S Drive Chargers
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sporty behavior not on a highway is still going to get better consumption than extremely high speed driving, because wind resistance rises as the square of the velocity. If you double your velocity, then air drag increases by 4x, so if users are quoting 8L/100 on 120-130km/h then you can expect to get about 32L/100 going 250km/h. With a 70L tank at 250km/h you may well exhaust the tank in under an hour. These are wor…
> Sporty behavior not on a highway is still going to get better consumption than extremely high speed driving, because wind resistance rises as the square of the velocity. It's a heavy car, and one built for highway, ramping up and slowing down all the time is extremely expensive. > With a 70L tank at 250km/h you may well exhaust the tank in under an hour. No. That would be a fuel consumption of above 28L/100, that's…
Calling my numbers "lunacy" will, unfortunately, not change the laws of physics. If you drive twice as fast, air drag multiplies by four, and the energy to overcome that air drag has to come from somewhere. At highway speeds air drag is the only appreciable force at work. Tire drag makes a little bit of difference too, but that will be more than canceled out by the fact that ICE efficiency drops at higher RPMs.
Your "long-haul truck" citation is irrelevant to this discussion because those numbers are for drastically slower speeds than the ones you're talking about.
Re: Tesla Completes L.A.-to-New York Electric Model S Drive Chargers
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the speed limit is 70mph or 75mph, it is less than every three hours.
Isn't it counterproductive to drive a model s at high speeds cross-country? You get an extra ~40 miles of range by going 65 instead of 75.
Its pretty much a wash on the math. you save 400 miles of navigation when you gain 10/mph for 40 hours (a typical navigatin time). This probably costs you 1x extra stops, if you are stopping every 280 miles (=10 stops in 2800 miles). If you are getting 240 you are stopping = 11 times), but you are taking 1 extra hour for that stop. You would have to drive the 400 miles in that one extra hour to make up the difference. At least on my napkin, maybe I am wrong.
Re: Tesla Completes L.A.-to-New York Electric Model S Drive Chargers
#89>> provide 170 miles of range in a 30-minute charge That would have still sounded impractical to me when I was still able to just drive through the night to get where I needed to be. Now that I travel with a young baby and a dog, that's about how often and for how long I have to stop for breaks anyway. This is impressive progress anyway, but I'm especially impressed now that it really wouldn't alter my own schedule m…
Just doing some quick numbers (not related to current specific locations of quick chargers and gas stations), stopping 30 minutes every 170 miles would add a bit over 6 and a half hours of stopping to a LY->NYC trip.
LA -> NYC is about 2,800 miles. If you had to stop for 30 minutes every 170 miles, that'd be 16.5 stops, for a total of about 8.25 hours of charging stops.
If you assume 25mpg in a car with a 12 gallon tank, and 10-minutes per gas station stop, the same 2,800 mile trip would require about 9.5 gas stops, or about 1.5 hours worth of total gas stops.
In the real world for drivers not going straight through, you're going to be spending at least a couple nights in a hotel when you could (assumedly) plug your car in overnight, as well as starting out with a full charge and more like 240 miles of range in the mornings. So I expect the real world difference would be about 4-5 hours of additional time waiting around for your car to charge in a Tesla vs. a traditional gas car. Not a huge difference on a 46 hour drive.
However, the mental difference of being forced to stop 30 minutes every 170 or so miles might make it feel like much longer than an additional 4-5 hours.
You'd also save about $365 in fuel costs in a Tesla vs. a gas car, but that's probably not a huge concern when you've already purchased a $75K+ car to begin with.
Re: Tesla Completes L.A.-to-New York Electric Model S Drive Chargers
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sporty behavior not on a highway is still going to get better consumption than extremely high speed driving, because wind resistance rises as the square of the velocity. It's a heavy car, and one built for highway, ramping up and slowing down all the time is extremely expensive. > With a 70L tank at 250km/h you may well exhaust the tank in under an hour. No. That would be a fuel consumption of above 28L/100, that's…
Calling my numbers "lunacy" will, unfortunately, not change the laws of physics. If you drive twice as fast, air drag multiplies by four, and the energy to overcome that air drag has to come from somewhere. At highway speeds air drag is the only appreciable force at work. Tire drag makes a little bit of difference too, but that will be more than canceled out by the fact that ICE efficiency drops at higher RPMs. Your…
> Calling my numbers "lunacy" will, unfortunately, not change the laws of physics. If you drive twice as fast, air drag multiplies by four, and the energy to overcome that air drag has to come from somewhere. At highway speeds air drag is the only appreciable force at work.
As you will. Not that this changes a thing, the Model S's efficiency will also drop further, thus further lowering its range. The issue remains, even driving at inane speeds, the Tesla will have a significantly lower range than the 535d.