My Wife and I each have a car. Neither one is a second car. We regularly do 200 mile trips in our own first car. We don’t trade off vehicles. I suppose we could, but we are in a bit of a special circumstance where we both need mid-sized SUV’s with good 4x4 and ground clearence. So it’s pointless to trade.
For long road trips, we take the newest one. Currently mine.
I guess you could consider the plow truck a second car. We use it if one of the first cars is in the shop.
I see on the link that you get 170 miles on a half hour of charge (I wonder how optomistic that is). That would frustrate the hell out of me. We don’t do long road trips that often, but 1000 miles straight is not at all unusual for us. Lot’s of folks do that.
Yes, recharging is a big hassle - but $35,000 electric cars? You’ll see a lot more recharging stations.
For me, the gas savings would be simply incredible. I drive a lot; my best guess is I’m spending about a hundred bucks a week on gas. The cost of fully charging a Tesla, on home electricity prices around here, is presently about 75 cents. So that $35,000 car, if it can actually give me a practical range, could save me about $5000 in** after tax income **every single year. (I am paid fr milage so I don’t presently lose money on most of that - but, of course, I still get paid milage even if I’m in a Tesla.) It would, in any sense that matters, be cheaper than a Kia for me.
The key is range. 200 miles (320 KM) is very short and would be impractical without superchargers being much more common than they are. 300 miles, well, that becomes a bit more practical; from my home I can now reach most places I have to go in a single charge. But range is everything.
The average new car sales price is about $33,500, and most people spending more than that are either getting a higher-end luxury car or a truck/SUV. The Model 3 is neither of those things. It’s going to be competing on features with $25,000 mid-level Ford Fusions and the like. 10 Gs buys a lot of gas.
Which isn’t to say they’re not going to sell every Model 3 they make, just that they’re not going to be making them in Fusion numbers if they want to keep selling them for 35 grand. It’s going to be a niche product for people who want to make a statement, just like the Prius was for close to a decade.
That’s the rate at a supercharging station; they charge from “empty” (20% charge remaining) to “full” (80% of maximum capacity) in about 40 minutes. You can override the 20% pad at each end of the charging range to give it an extra 100 miles of range if you don’t mind playing chicken with a dead battery, but if you do it often enough, that will impact battery life.
However, if we’re talking about whether or not these cars will revolutionize things, I don’t see most people going on 1000-mile trips consistently enough, even if they don’t have to pay for the electricity. The usual charging time for most drivers is just a few seconds–they plug it in when they get home, and unplug it before they leave, and between those two times (even with just a 110v line), it charges up 60 miles or so of drive time, which is fine for most daily drivers. Also however, bear in mind these numbers are all for the Model S, which is certainly not going to revolutionize things. We don’t have any numbers yet for the Model 3 except guesses. The vehicle doesn’t even have a page on the Tesla website yet.
I live in the San Francisco area, and Teslas are very common. My kids like to point them out when we are driving, and it’s gotten sort of annoying as they become more popular.
They have a fantastically weird design that allows a car seat (backwards) in the trunk area. It seems odd till you see it in action, and then it seems obvious and kind of awesome.
Ditto. But I drive past the Tesla plant on the way to work. Four or five people in my department have electric cars, Leafs or Fiats. Most companies around here have charging stations.
When I went back to New Jersey I was surprised that there were few Priuses. Here just about every other car on the freeway is a Prius. Helps to have high gas prices.
But 95% of my driving is to and from work, and I could easily use an electric car for it.
And we all have garages so charging is not a problem.
But lots of single people only have 1 car and there are LOTS of single people and LOTS of single parent households. Having a car with limited range is a big downer.
Sure, they aren’t like gas stations, on every block like today. But the Model S was introduced three years ago, and before that, electric cars just weren’t a thing. But what would a map of US gas stations have looked like in 1911, three years after the Model T was introduced?
Geez, I don’t wanna make a statement. I wanna save thousands of dollars in gas. If it has enough range, it’s basically a car that runs for free. Who DOESN’T want that?
Again, you have to drive a lot, like I do, to get max value out of it. But a lot of people do drive a lot.
In 2008 I bought my first Prius from a friend who paid $34,000 for it in 2005. Demand was high, and he could get it sooner if he got all of the options. ISTM that with higher production and more non-Toyota alternatives, the price has come down a bit. Get enough people to buy a Tesla for 35 kilobucks, and the price will probably come down to a point where more people will buy them.
Range has always been an issue for me, since I’ve always done a lot of driving. It’s about 110 miles from my house to the office. Two hundred miles range might not be enough for me. Of course if there were a charger at the office, then I wouldn’t have to worry about it. A 300-mile range would give me confidence to use an all-electric car to go to the office twice a week. But ranges, I think, tend to be reported ‘optimistically’. Winters here are dark, wet, and cold. With my long commute, I’d be using headlights, heater, defogger(s), and wipers most of the time. In Summer I use air conditioning. Those things have got to reduce range.
Tesla reports that you can recharge to 50% in 20 minutes using a ‘Super Charger’. Almost not bad. A 100% charge in 20 minutes would be better. Their ‘Wall Connector’, a home charger wired to 220 v, will give you ‘58 miles of range per hour of charge’.
I drive a lot. To be attractive to me, an all-electric car should have a range of 300 - 400 miles with the accessories I mentioned earlier, and a 100% recharge time of 30 minutes or less. As it is, the Prius is better suited to me needs.
I just ran some numbers using the average price of a kW/h in Ontario and an average driving distance of 50 miles/day and came up with a break even point of just under 15 years if you buy a Model 3 vs. a Prius. That’s assuming you either don’t buy a home charger or you already have one.
And of course, the Prius itself has a pretty lengthy break even point when compared to, say, a Yaris or a gently used late model Corolla. $35k buys a lot of gas is all.
(Here in the states where gas is still stupid cheap the break even point came out to something like 32 years.)
The other great attraction – unfortunately with the rather significant caveat about the cost of battery replacement eventually – is the reliability and freedom from most normal maintenance. The engine and conventional power train of normal cars is so freaking complex that it’s only through a century of engineering refinement that the damn things work at all, whereas the Tesla is basically an electric motor and a battery – and lots of computers. Musk likes to say that a Tesla is the only car you can own that actually improves while you sleep, since it gets periodic software uploads and starts to do new things, or old things better. Not to mention the silence, the environmental sensibility, and that amazing zero-RPM torque.
I believe Musk regards the Tesla as still kind of a proof of concept. He characterized the Roadster as high cost, low volume, the Tesla (and the Model X) as medium/high cost, medium volume, and the Model 3 as the end game of low cost, high volume. IIRC he’s building an enormous plant just to produce batteries in the needed quantities. Assuming it can be built to the target price/performance objectives, I honestly don’t know if it’s going to revolutionize American driving, but I think Musk would regard it as a failure if it didn’t. But if it doesn’t, perhaps it will take Generation 4 or 5 to do it. And it may even be someone else that does it first. But it’s going to happen.
I think there must be something wrong with your math. Per the Tesla’s website, the cost to charge for 300 miles at a cost of $0.12/kwh (their stated national average) using a standard 110 volt wall outlet would be $15.91. Maybe I’m not understanding you correctly?
There’s also a liquid cooling system for the batteries and a giant honking motor controller. The two major benefits are not having to do oil changes (a pretty modest saving in the grand scheme of things) and not having a transmission. But they do still of course have brakes and tires that will wear out.
What is servicing like for Teslas? Can maintenance and repairs be done at any generic garage?
Over the years, I and various family members were dissuaded from buying certain foreign makes because we knew servicing would be a bitch - we figured most garages would be unfamiliar with the make; and/or wouldn’t have access to the replacement parts; and/or claim “we don’t touch those”.
I would prefer to say “the two major benefits are not having an internal combustion engine and not having a transmission”. In terms of overall reliability and freedom from maintenance, not having a conventional engine equates to a hell of a lot more than just not doing oil changes!
What would a map of US gas stations look like if every house was equipped with a gas pump?
If my house had a gas pump, I don’t think I would have gone to a gas station more than 10 times in the last 5 years. That’s the economic reality of roadside charging. It’s inconvenient, requires significant technical investment, and every home has an alternative source built in.