Tesla Master Plan part deux
Discussion
Having had an EV for a few years, and now got a PHEV, I aspire to get a Tesla Model S when I can afford it. If it suits your driving purpose (mine is driving into London every day) then they are amazing vehicles which are a lot of fun to drive. Total non fuss - just a motor and a battery at it's core and modern electrics to keep you comfortable. Compare that to the smoke-trikery and complexity in a modern combustion engine and you can see why EV's are the future as long as battery tech keeps innovating (become lighter with a longer range).
s1962a said:
Having had an EV for a few years, and now got a PHEV, I aspire to get a Tesla Model S when I can afford it. If it suits your driving purpose (mine is driving into London every day) then they are amazing vehicles which are a lot of fun to drive. Total non fuss - just a motor and a battery at it's core and modern electrics to keep you comfortable. Compare that to the smoke-trikery and complexity in a modern combustion engine and you can see why EV's are the future as long as battery tech keeps innovating (become lighter with a longer range).
They are the future for a niche market. Short journey's, city driving, commercial driving (taxis, buses, city-couriers etc). The elephant in the room though is the electricity production required to switch 35m vehicles from combustion to battery. That's a long, long way off and is not even in the hands of Musk or any other of the EV companies. Then you look at the environmental benefits/impacts. Not burning fossil fuels is all well and good but you have find a way of producing electricity somehow. And the UK or even the whole of Europe switching to EV will have only a tiny impact whilst India, China and South America continue their rapid growth. Cadmium mines are hardly environmental and what to do with all the exhausted batteries?Until we come up with clean, cheap, mass energy production, this all seems a lot like putting the cart before the horse. As I said earlier, Musk would be better off concentrating all his business talent and resources at cracking nuclear fusion first.
TEKNOPUG said:
Until we come up with clean, cheap, mass energy production, this all seems a lot like putting the cart before the horse. As I said earlier, Musk would be better off concentrating all his business talent and resources at cracking nuclear fusion first.
Whether you want to believe it or not, it sounds like you haven't actually read Master Plan 2...TEKNOPUG said:
Cadmium mines are hardly environmental
Good job they moved from nickel/cadmium chemistry to lithium then.TEKNOPUG said:
and what to do with all the exhausted batteries?
Recycle them for the minerals you would otherwise mine?https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/blog/teslas-closed-loo...
How long until we see a shift from outright ownership to a "mileage as a service" model I wonder? Rather than buying the car, you buy miles on contract. The vehicles itself shifts from being the end product to simply a way of mediating other services. I believe Rolls Royce already operate that model on their aero engines, so it's not crazy to think motor manufacturers will adopt it. I actually wonder if we'll see mileage itself become a tradable commodity? You already have companies looking at using cryptographic tokens and smart contracts to build a distributed sharing economy, and I can see it happening to vehicles at some stage. No reason why you couldn't have a fleet of autonomous vehicles existing as distributed organisations on a blockchain and using smart contracts to negotiate for passengers or to carry deliveries. No idea when, but the genie is definitely out of the bottle. God alone knows what that'll do to the transportation industry. You already have automated ports run by a handful of people in a control room, so the implications for job losses and social change are massive.
hornet said:
You already have automated ports run by a handful of people in a control room, so the implications for job losses and social change are massive.
maybe the two go hand in hand. with the amount of automation and reduction in need for things like car repairs mentioned in this plan there will be a lot more people unable to afford vehicle ownership.TEKNOPUG said:
s1962a said:
Having had an EV for a few years, and now got a PHEV, I aspire to get a Tesla Model S when I can afford it. If it suits your driving purpose (mine is driving into London every day) then they are amazing vehicles which are a lot of fun to drive. Total non fuss - just a motor and a battery at it's core and modern electrics to keep you comfortable. Compare that to the smoke-trikery and complexity in a modern combustion engine and you can see why EV's are the future as long as battery tech keeps innovating (become lighter with a longer range).
They are the future for a niche market. Short journey's, city driving, commercial driving (taxis, buses, city-couriers etc). The elephant in the room though is the electricity production required to switch 35m vehicles from combustion to battery. That's a long, long way off and is not even in the hands of Musk or any other of the EV companies. Then you look at the environmental benefits/impacts. Not burning fossil fuels is all well and good but you have find a way of producing electricity somehow. And the UK or even the whole of Europe switching to EV will have only a tiny impact whilst India, China and South America continue their rapid growth. Cadmium mines are hardly environmental and what to do with all the exhausted batteries?Until we come up with clean, cheap, mass energy production, this all seems a lot like putting the cart before the horse. As I said earlier, Musk would be better off concentrating all his business talent and resources at cracking nuclear fusion first.
FurtiveFreddy said:
TEKNOPUG said:
Until we come up with clean, cheap, mass energy production, this all seems a lot like putting the cart before the horse. As I said earlier, Musk would be better off concentrating all his business talent and resources at cracking nuclear fusion first.
Whether you want to believe it or not, it sounds like you haven't actually read Master Plan 2...otolith said:
TEKNOPUG said:
Cadmium mines are hardly environmental
Good job they moved from nickel/cadmium chemistry to lithium then.TEKNOPUG said:
and what to do with all the exhausted batteries?
Recycle them for the minerals you would otherwise mine?https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/blog/teslas-closed-loo...
98elise said:
TEKNOPUG said:
s1962a said:
Having had an EV for a few years, and now got a PHEV, I aspire to get a Tesla Model S when I can afford it. If it suits your driving purpose (mine is driving into London every day) then they are amazing vehicles which are a lot of fun to drive. Total non fuss - just a motor and a battery at it's core and modern electrics to keep you comfortable. Compare that to the smoke-trikery and complexity in a modern combustion engine and you can see why EV's are the future as long as battery tech keeps innovating (become lighter with a longer range).
They are the future for a niche market. Short journey's, city driving, commercial driving (taxis, buses, city-couriers etc). The elephant in the room though is the electricity production required to switch 35m vehicles from combustion to battery. That's a long, long way off and is not even in the hands of Musk or any other of the EV companies. Then you look at the environmental benefits/impacts. Not burning fossil fuels is all well and good but you have find a way of producing electricity somehow. And the UK or even the whole of Europe switching to EV will have only a tiny impact whilst India, China and South America continue their rapid growth. Cadmium mines are hardly environmental and what to do with all the exhausted batteries?Until we come up with clean, cheap, mass energy production, this all seems a lot like putting the cart before the horse. As I said earlier, Musk would be better off concentrating all his business talent and resources at cracking nuclear fusion first.
Do we have plenty of spare capacity or sufficient spare capacity? And is the 5% of total tax receipts that fuel duty represents, going to be recouped by increasing the price of electricity?
fblm said:
TEKNOPUG said:
...Musk would be better off concentrating all his business talent and resources at cracking nuclear fusion first.
I suspect he would argue they already have. It's big and orange and where he lives you just have to look up to see it.TEKNOPUG said:
fblm said:
TEKNOPUG said:
...Musk would be better off concentrating all his business talent and resources at cracking nuclear fusion first.
I suspect he would argue they already have. It's big and orange and where he lives you just have to look up to see it.(reading your replies certainly is)
JD said:
TEKNOPUG said:
What has the energy consumption of petrol refinery got to do with anything?
Not sure if serious?If you don’t need the petrol to burn in a car, then you don’t need to use the energy to refine it in the first place.
Providing of course that every country has enough oil refineries to turn into oil power stations to generate sufficient electricity to power all their electric vehicles.
fblm said:
TEKNOPUG said:
They are the future for a niche market.
Like computers? Have you driven a Tesla S? EV's are the future, absolutely no doubt IMO.ikarl said:
Is replying to this thread not becoming a bit tedious yet?
(reading your replies certainly is)
I'm not sure how you can have a discussion about EV's being the future of transportation without considering the implications of the energy requirements. Others seem to think otherwise.(reading your replies certainly is)
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