While visiting the San Francisco Bay area I talked to a woman who had gotten there from Boston in a Tesla X. Most of the time she enjoyed a comfortable battery charge margin. However, on one of the trip days she arrived at a charging station in Nevada and it was out of service. She called Tesla and they directed her to the next one along her route. She arrived there with a 3 percent charge.
Once in the Bay Area she arrived at a supercharger station to find all spots occupied and three cars ahead of her in line. “It was like the 1970s with gas lines.”
Related:
Not a happy story – I guess it’ll take a little while to unfold an array of charging stations equal to gas stations. But thank god some of those gasoline tankers will be off the roads!
If you do run out of charge, how do you charge it? I would assume charging via battery boost cables would take forever.
Have never seen a woman driving a Tesla. They’re still exclusively toys for nerdy men around here. She probably didn’t want to drive it in the 1st place, so just ran it empty before charging it. To account for reliability problems of the charging network, you need to subtract a few miles from the range. They need to factor in charging network outages on their telematics software. Perhaps it can make a smarter range calculation based on the availability of chargers.
Paddy,
It’s not a 12V system like a gas powered car – booster cables wouldn’t work at all. A car battery puts out a lot of current but only for a few minutes – just long enough to crank the engine until it starts. It’s not meant to power you down the road for miles and miles.
However, you can charge somewhat from an ordinary 120V outlet. But that is a VERY slow process – you only gain maybe 4 or 5 miles of range for every hour on a 120V outlet – even less if it is cold. But if you were staying overnight at a friend’s house, by the morning you might have 40 or 50 miles of additional ranges to get you to the nearest Tesla charging station.
The Tesla superchargers feed around 60 times as much power to the car – enough power to run two houses. So they can fully charge a Tesla in a little over a hour.
Re: JC – my wife has trouble keeping her car filled with gas, despite the fact that we live in an area with plenty of gas stations. She tends to drive it until it is totally empty because she is “too busy” to stop for gas. She then parks it in our driveway because she is afraid to drive it any further and starts driving mine. I can only imagine how much worse this would be if she had a Tesla.
I am not at all sure long road trips are all that great of an idea for an electric car. Anyone who can afford a Tesla can certainly afford to rent an SUV when they are traveling long distances by car. Come to think of it, they’d probably fly anyway. I know I would. Driving across the country is a pretty unusual use case, as well. Net-net, if you do a lot of long distance driving, just stick with gas for now. Preferably a hybrid.
re: Robert Pinder
“I guess it’ll take a little while to unfold an array of charging stations equal to gas stations.”
Once the demand is there wouldn’t this happen pretty fast at existing infrastructure: Gas stations? My understanding is profit margin on gas is pretty thin to begin with, so turning over a row of pumps to electric would seem to be a viable revenue stream.
Is there a hazard to having rapid charging near gas fueling?
G C – Hybrids are for short city trips. Diesels are for long-distance.
Edmunds website had a real life test of using the Tesla X to tow a trailer. Interesting read, but I think his conclusion was “never again”. (lots of SUV usage here in Michigan to tow a boat or camper)
I’m here in East Lansing and have yet to see a Tesla in the wild.
Electric cars are not going to happen. It’s a huge tax subsidized scam that currently produces toys for rich people. You can’t run cars on batteries for the masses because of the capital costs and the obvious energy density problems. We can’t even keep running the cars we have because we are obviously running out of cheap energy. The fantasy is that as people get poorer and energy gets scarcer mass motoring business will continue as usual because Elon Musk, I guess.
What’s going to actually happen is the ridiculously stringent federal safety requirements will be relaxed so cars don’t have to carry an extra ton or two of steel and a mess of expensive air bags. Something analogous to the original VW Beetle will be produced again, but with modern tech it will sip gas. Imagine a carbon and aluminum car two men can pick up and carry. It’s got a two cylinder air/oil cooled engine. 80+ mpg is probably easy. Hell, bicyclists in modern velomobiles putting out 350 watts can hit 40+ mph. Just throw a carbon shell over a three wheeled motorcycle and you’re half way there.
we are obviously running out of cheap energy…
We’ve been running out of cheap energy since at least 1973 but we never seem to actually run out. Every run-up in oil prices seems to collapse after a few years.
> We’ve been running out of cheap energy since at least 1973 but we never seem to actually run out
Yes it’s true. Per household energy expenditure has been slowly falling since the 90s and will keep falling. It has tracked pretty well with real median household income.
Unfortunately “run out” turns into lifestyle changing shortages in a matter of a decade or so. The fracking thing is about over. Fields are peaking now. The major global oil fields were over ten years ago. Despite the noise solar/wind/nuclear simply isn’t happening in a meaningful way.
Over the next 30 years we will be figuring out how to live OK with much less energy. Electric cars are not going to enter into it. It’s probably going to be mostly diesel buses.
It’s probably going to be mostly diesel buses.
I doubt it. While diesel buses are a cheap, well proven technology, no one really likes them. People ride them because they have to, not because they want to. Maybe the situation will deteriorate to the point where that’s all people can afford.
Once cars become driverless, that takes the cost of the driver out of the Uber equation, which is the biggest expense. Already you can take a shared Uber ride for around $2.50, around the same as city bus fare and the uber takes you door to door. Uber doesn’t have its cost structure inflated by government bureaucracy . It doesn’t have to pay its drivers union wages and benefits and soon it won’t have to pay them anything.
@John, I was in East Lansing just last week and saw a Tesla Model S! I frankly was amazed to not see them everywhere on the MSU campus… in Ann Arbor they’re becoming much more common, even with the crazy Tesla restrictions in Michigan.
Electric cars are one thing but I have to assume that in the next decade the auto companies are going to have to land a strategy to lobby and then pay off the dealer laws and networks, the whole car dealer death in the US thing might be the first real thing to change because of Tesla, not EV technology.