Tesla reveals Supercharger network, Free Fill Ups • Hacker News Board

Re: Tesla reveals Supercharger network, Free Fill Ups

#221

Post by chiph » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 2:14 PM UTC

ericd wrote: post #105

lgbr wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the number of people needing to fill up at this station and others just off of major freeways wont change. The people filling up/charging at these stations are in the middle of a trip and probably did charge while they were at home. Furthermore, the range on even the Tesla Model S is half that of your typical car, so fillups are even more frequent. This could mean that highway stops have twice as many people need…

Yeah, that's a good point. Fortunately, I think it will be fairly cheap to make a large number of plugs, except for maybe the beefed-up electric infrastructure. There aren't too many rest stops right now with an industrial-sized electric feed :-)

The Santa Fe railroad had a similar problem - how to feed an entire train of passengers in the 30 minutes it took to take on water (steam locomotives typically run out of water before running out of coal).

Their solution was to partner with a restaurant operator, supplying his restaurants with fresh produce & refrigerated meat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Harvey_Company#History

If McDonalds was smart, they'd sponsor charging stations at their restaurants. Park your electric car, swipe a credit card, go get your McMeal, use the bathroom, etc.

Re: Tesla reveals Supercharger network, Free Fill Ups

#222

Post by Hannan » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 2:15 PM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #166

jlgreco wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It's about the same shape and size as New Jersey (smaller actually). I can't count the number of times I've driven across the entirety of New Jersey without a second thought because I wanted a cheeseburger.

One poster says Israel is around 263 miles north to south. So you drove ~250 miles many times just to get a cheese burger? Seriously?

New Jersey is about 170 miles North to South from the tips. But parent said "I've driven across New Jersey," which can be as little as 40 miles East to West depending on where you measure from.

Re: Tesla reveals Supercharger network, Free Fill Ups

#223

Post by mikeash » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 2:16 PM UTC

base698 wrote: post #214

kamaal wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Well, how are you going to make the airplanes fly? Battery. Batteries are pretty heavy. "Heavier than air flying machines are impossible" -Lord Kevin. Yet we have them today, thanks to a phenomenon in physics called Bernoulli's principle- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them" - Albert Ein…

That's actually not how airplanes fly at all... http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=22977

Bernoulli's principle is indeed how airplanes fly. Your link shoots down the silly equal-time theory, not Bernoulli's principle.

Basically, airplanes fly for three reasons:

1. The wing deflects air downwards. 2. Air moves faster over the top of the wing than over the bottom. Much faster than the equal-transit theory indicates. 3. Air pressure is higher on the bottom of the wing than on the top.

The important thing that few people seem to grasp is that all three are equivalent statements. They aren't additive. There aren't three different reasons airplanes fly, there's one reason airplanes fly, with three different ways to look at it.

Re: Tesla reveals Supercharger network, Free Fill Ups

#224

Post by warfangle » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 2:20 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #207

adriand wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, if I can't get there in less than 1/2 an hour on my bicycle, I don't think I'm interested.

Try doing that in the midwest. Finding jobs gets hard and apartments are rare and low quality, so it's not uncommon to have to settle on a 20 minute (or much more) commute by car on the freeway. There are also no bike lanes. Commuting long distances isn't great, but moving more people into the city isn't always the best option either. We learned that in the 1900's

Moving more people into an _early 1900s_ city wasn't the best option, unless you wanted a non-farm job. And then the GI bill (given predominately to white veterans over black veterans) jumpstarted white flight and the beginnings of suburbia.

Re: Tesla reveals Supercharger network, Free Fill Ups

#225

Post by warfangle » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 2:25 PM UTC

marshray wrote: post #125

lollerpops wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $2/W, filling up a roadster would require $106,000 in solar panels. More if you anticipate more than one fill up per hour.

Probably much cheaper than installing tanks in the ground and pumps on the surface to handle gasoline. Not to mention remediating the site when the tanks eventually start to fail.

There's an old service station near me. It was once a fuel station, but was eventually turned into just-a-repair-garage. Transmissions, mainly. But they didn't remove the tanks when the locale switched gears. That garage is now defunct; there are potential entrepreneurs who want to use the space, but the cost of removing the old tanks and cleaning up the site for alternate zoning (one of the people looking at it was thinking about opening a cafe) is going to be prohibitively expensive.

Re: Tesla reveals Supercharger network, Free Fill Ups

#226

Post by warfangle » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 2:33 PM UTC

eps wrote: post #152

sbierwagen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

generate as much energy over the course of the year as the vehicles consume Yeah right. At what utilization rate? A single charge is ~90KWh, and takes half an hour. Two charges back to back are 180KWh. jws guesses that each slot generates 28KWh/day. A ten slot charging station would only be able to charge three cars without going into the red. Tesla would have to build a lot of very oversized installations in a lot o…

So you are basically saying that Musk is lying. This doesn't sound too much like him, does it? A simpler explanation would be that he's not telling the whole story, and that perhaps they have dedicated solar farms in development/deployment or something to that effect. Don't afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.

Sure doesn't sound like him. He's headed up the first company to commercially resupply the International Space Station, for pete's sake.

You bet your ass he quadruple checked those numbers.

I'm guessing that the supply at these stations will be much higher than the demand for charging, so they'll make up the cost of "free" by selling wh's back to the grid.

Re: Tesla reveals Supercharger network, Free Fill Ups

#227

Post by jlgreco » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 2:38 PM UTC

Hannan wrote: post #222

kamaal wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One poster says Israel is around 263 miles north to south. So you drove ~250 miles many times just to get a cheese burger? Seriously?

New Jersey is about 170 miles North to South from the tips. But parent said "I've driven across New Jersey," which can be as little as 40 miles East to West depending on where you measure from.

It was about a 75ish mile trip now that I look at it on on google maps, that was the closest White Castle there was. ;)

In any event, New Jersey would make a really small country. I know of people in this country who have to drive further to do their shopping.

Re: Tesla reveals Supercharger network, Free Fill Ups

#228

Post by loceng » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 2:41 PM UTC

sixQuarks wrote: post #121

I would say Elon Musk is the greatest entrepreneur of the past century - even more so than Steve Jobs. He simultaneously created three separate companies, all in extremely complex industries, and combined all of them into one overall strategy. The precision manufacturing they learned with Space X is incorporated into the Tesla S. Their aim is to make the Model S the most reliable and problem-free vehicle due to this…

It's synergy. I am working the same way with my own plans.

Re: Tesla reveals Supercharger network, Free Fill Ups

#229

Post by ZoFreX » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 2:57 PM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #82

Osiris wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $0.11/kWh, the Roadster at 53kWh would take almost $6 to completely fill. Though if these stations charge using solar power and store the power in a battery pack to discharge when a car hooks up, it could potentially cost them a lot less than $0.11/kWh, depending on the cost of building the station itself.

Tack on to that the increased capacity electric vehicles are going to have to have, as well as the increased electricity prices I am expecting when ten million Americans are charging their cars.

Surely increased demand for a resource should, long-term, drive the price down and not up?

Re: Tesla reveals Supercharger network, Free Fill Ups

#230

Post by ZoFreX » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 2:58 PM UTC

confluence wrote: post #184

This is it - the tipping point has finally arrived. This is a killer combination of rapidly falling prices in solar PV (thank you China/Kyoto protocol/Global warming), meeting the falling prices of Li-ion batteries (thank you astonishingly successful decade of laptops/smartphones/tablets), meets a cyclic economic boom (thank you GFC), meets rising gas prices (thank you OPEC/cheap oil/peak oil), meets anti-carbon ince…

So why wasn't the 2 minute full charge time that Better Place unveiled several years ago the tipping point?

This is an incremental development and nothing more.