TheHarrisburg station mentioned above has 8 superchargers, Somerset has 6.
From what I know, most superchargers rarely get more than 1/2 full, with the exception of a few high traffic locations in California, especially during holiday weekends. Once the model 3 starts ramping up, all the superchargers are obviously going to see a lot more congestion, which is why Tesla has stated that they’re planning on doubling their supercharger network within a year. I’m personally skeptical that they can keep up with demand, but hopefully converting from the currently free charging system to a pay-by-the-drink method will discourage abuse of the chargers.
Right now it seems like you just wait in a queue until there’s a spot available. With future autonomy, you’d just have your car drop you off and get it to charge itself, then come back an pick you up, but that depends on how much you believe Musk’s rather optimistic timeline for self-driving capabilities.
Volt owner here so I can shed some light on this. $46k is what the Volt used to cost, now they vary between $35k and $38k, and that is before the $7,500 rebate. I personally don’t buy cars new because of how fast they depreciate. I bought my 2012 Volt for $18K with 30,000 miles on it, not a stripped down one either, it has all the options.
25 miles on a charge is a worst case scenario (maybe driving over 80mph with the heater on full). I average about 35 miles on a charge. It worth noting that the new Volts get 54 miles on a charge. Like the others have said, I only charge the car overnight and on long trips I use gas like normal. As such I’m averaging 138 mpg. It cost me about 50 cents to charge my Volt overnight to get 35 miles of range. As you said that electricity has to come from somewhere. The Union of Concern Scientists published a map that shows how much CO2 released by charging an electric vehicle relative to where they charge. In most cases the worst is equivalent to a car getting 35 mpg, and in some places better than 85 mpg. In my area I have a rating of 52 mpg, but I offset half my energy consumption with solar.
See: http://www.ucsusa.org/publications/catalyst/winter16-electric-vehicles-just-how-green-are-they#.WYNC84jyuUk
There’s been quite a few studies on your question, with each study taking a slightly different approach. I think the most straightforward question is: if an electric car uses “x” amounts of electricity, and that electricity has a certain impact on the environment, how efficient does a conventional car have to be to produce the same impact on the environment?
So basically, once you include the environmental impact of batteries and stuff that go into electric cars, and make similar calculations for conventional cars, the nationwide average is that an electric car has a similar environmental impact as a conventional car that gets 68 mpg. In certain regions that have cleaner electric power, that mpg number goes up; in other regions with more coal or petroleum use for electricity, that number goes down.
So if you compare a Model 3 to the BMW 3 series or Audi A4s, we could expect the environmental impact of the Tesla to be roughly half of its conventional competition.
Hydro is just a Canadian term for electricity, since that was the original power source in most provinces. In Ontario, the provincially owned generation company used to be called Ontario Hydro. When they split up transmission and generation, we ended up with Hydro One and Ontario Power Generation.
Yes, it is convincing because it’s a poll of a group of people versus your singular opinion of a car you threw money down on sight unseen.
I don’t now where you get increased visibility with the Model 3 but we’re specifically discussing the inherent problem involved with a display that’s offset from the driver’s forward vision. You can’t read the words “the straight dope” at the top of your computer screen while reading this sentence because it’s out of your visual range. That’s not an opinion.
Also, I can only get the vaguest sense of my speed in my peripheral vision–vague enough to be worse than my innate sense. Actually reading my speed to within 2 mph requires looking directly at it and ~1/2 second to refocus.
The offset display is never blocked by an arm or the wheel, and is large enough that it probably doesn’t require a total refocus. It may actually be readable purely from peripheral vision, unlike the gauge where any kind of precision requires looking at exactly which tick it landed on. I tried some experiments on my computer and there’s definitely a size threshold where I can easily read a 2-digit number out of the corner of my eye; it remains to be seen if the speed is that large but I suspect Tesla will do the right thing.
As for the money, the worst-case scenario is that I give Tesla an interest-free $1k loan for about 1.5 years. I get it back if I cancel. Not exactly gonna break the bank.
There’s no doubt that center speedos are polarizing, but your first post on this made it out like it is a threat. There are 6 million Priuses on the road with center speedos, and it has the lowest rate of accidental deaths in its class.
If you don’t like it, fine. I’m not really a fan either. Just don’t exaggerate so much.
One other benefit of center display - anyone in the passenger seat can easily tell how fast you’re going and let you know about it. Wait, is that a benefit?
“oh, yeah it only looks like I’m going that fast because of your angle”*
I’m not sure how this proves your point. If anything it argues for the opposite - the vertical angle between the words “the straight dope” at the top of the computer screen relative to this comment is about the same angle that you’d have between concentrating on a car ahead and a standard speedometer location below it. Next time you get in your car, try looking straight ahead, concentrating on the road, and then glean how much of your speedometer you can pick up in your peripheral vision without moving your eyes. I can tell you how much I can see with my speedometer in the “standard” location - none. I have to glance down to look at the speedometer, then back up at the road.
The model3 has speed information in large font size on the upper left corner of the display, which places it immediately to the upper right of the steering wheel. I’d have to sit in the driver’s seat to really know, but it’s probably close to a wash in terms of visibility, at least relative to my current car. It may even be better, due to the font size.
This videofrom a test ride at the delivery event goes over a lot of the interior features. 4 cupholders, two in the front in the center console, and 2 in the back on the pull-down center armrest. Door pockets that look shaped to fit a water bottle. Coathooks, individual rear reading lamps, etc. Some stuff that was “missing” from the S/X.
you left e out the glove compartment and adjustable mirrors. Motor Trend said it all, it is the most important vehicle of the century. I mean, coat hooks AND a glove compartment. I was a little confused about the windshield wipers. The stalk on the column gives you one swipe but you have to use the display to run it?
At some point in the near future we’re going to be reading about people unconsciously grabbing the display for support and snapping it off or cracking it.
The Model S/X had adjustable mirrors and a glove box.
I’m curious how the software will end up, but I anticipate they’ll use the steering wheel scroll wheels for a number of things, like wiper speed, sound volume, climate control, etc. A touch-only button for the glovebox seems ok to me. Probably shouldn’t be digging around in there while driving anyway…
Everything controlled from a central processor is the general direction automakers have been taking for years. It means they can build cars with only 1 windshield wiper motor for both wipers and use it on every model. It greatly reduces design costs. I suppose someone will come up with a stick-on set of switches that blue tooth into the computer.
As a point of comparison, the wiring harness on the Model 3 is 1.5 km, while on the Model S it’s a 3 km. Probably a huge chunk of that is a direct result of reducing the button count. They want to reduce it to 100 m on the Model Y; they can probably achieve that if the whole system is based on digital comms and power. And they’ll probably want to reduce the power wires by using a high voltage (36 v) system.
I don’t quite get the analogy, but a lot of people liked trackballs despite them never quite taking off. If anything, I see it more like trackpads, which have more or less taken over given that laptops outsell desktops. They aren’t superior to mice in every way, but they certainly have a form factor advantage and are good enough for most purposes.
In other news, the EPA report for the Model 3 is available. It has some interesting tidbits, such a that they’re now using permanent magnet motors (the S/X used induction motors), and that the long range model has a max energy capacity of ~80 kW-h.
I’ve heard through the grapevine that the Model 3 motors are a big improvement over previous ones, and I guess they finally decided that permanent magnets are overall superior to induction. There’s a set of tradeoffs but apparently PM is relatively higher efficiency at high speed, which is where the car is least efficient to start with.
