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On June 01 2013 17:32 micronesia wrote:Show nested quote +Let's not mention that not many people own Tesla's at this point... let alone go on daily road trips with them. I don't see the relevance, so it's a good thing you didn't mention it.
The supercharger network, due to its sparsity, is used for distance driving. Road trips. If you don't live near one, you don't need to drive to it unless you're taking a trip longer than the range of the car, in which case at least one of your waypoints needs to be a supercharger station. (In the future there will be more stations to meet a higher volume of Teslas being built, but charging should also get faster and range should improve. But the main point is distance driving and supercharging are related. In the near future the network will still be sparse, especially compared to gas stations.)
Remember the number 3-4 cars you came up with for being a station's daily charging capacity? That number - whatever your guess for it is - only makes sense if you have context for it. You have to compare it to how many people are really showing up at superchargers. It's not enough that the number seems low. It needs context, it's low relative to what? How many people use superchargers daily? Unfortunately, that number doesn't exist for people who don't work at Tesla. We don't have all the information. Now, when you don't have all the information, it's possible to make arguments for either (any) side because you can't resolve a question without all the information. That's fine, people disagree.
But you were not representing yourself as an open person when you said "what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense" (emphasis yours) "Something seems off entirely," "It is not a viable model at all. There is something wrong," or when you suggested either you were missing something or the CEO of Tesla was "completely full of shit."
Now, to really understand the situation, we have to estimate that other number. Wikipedia says a total of 9,650 Model S were sold by April. Tesla sells directly through reservations and it takes a little while, we'll say there are 10,000 on the road in the US and we know there's 8 charging stations. How many road trips does the average person take? Unfortunately, that information doesn't exist in general that I can find any more than it does for Tesla motorists specifically. I will give you 1 free novelty electric road trip on top of whatever other reasonable estimate we can think of. After that, keeping in mind the destination constraints of the 6 California SCs and the 2 East Coast SCs, how about 2 trips a year? So at 10,000 cars on the road we have an instantaneous average yearly road trips of 30,000. For one charge in either direction we'll say 60,000 charges a year.
What if we change the solar margins a little bit? Remember this is a growing infrastructure that Tesla will expand to accommodate demand. For instance, as 6 of the 8 charging stations are in California, we can bump up the solar figure to 5 kWh/m^2. What about the canopy, it looks like maybe 8 meters by 16 to me. Some are obviously bigger while some have no canopy. But let's just change the average guess a little bit. That's 8*16*5=640 kWh a day. The 20 minute charge is 50%. Some people have 60 kWh batteries and supercharging is standard for 85 kWh, so we'll say 40 kWh a charge. That's 640/4=16 charges per station per day. At 16 charges a day at 8 stations for 365 days that's 46,720 charges. I missed my goal of 60,000 charges and I won't change my numbers now, but do you see how being a little bit more charitable makes the margins plausible? Even 4 charges per day at 8 SCs is 11680 charges a year. That's less than an order of magnitude away from 60,000 charges. I don't see these numbers as negating the system's feasibility when we know the supercharger network is growing and considering we made up almost every one of these numbers (besides the battery capacity and the number of stations).
Remember, this is a company that when people said "your financing announcement is shit," they came back and said you're right, we've fixed it. They said people aren't buying our 40 kWh Model S, we're not going to sell an inferior product. They paid back their government loan what, 9 years early? When they announced the Model S, people said you won't be able to make that car. When they made the Model S, people said nobody will buy that car. When they bought the old Toyota factory to increase volume, people said you won't be profitable. When they became profitable and started building a supercharger network in secret... okay? When Elon Musk put his personal wealth behind the resale value of the Model S? This isn't a BP level company. There's very little to suggest this is all just a ploy to get Tesla to foot the bill for its customers' free supercharging. They only said they're going to size the solar systems to make more electricity than supercharging uses. That's admittedly a vague claim but it's about the long term plans of the company. So when we go to dig around with actual numbers to find out what he might specifically mean by that claim, we should be looking for specifics that make sense rather than jumping to the specifics that are least likely to be true and then saying Elon Musk's idea is impossible when it was really just a vague idea that we.
With the announcement of the supercharger network's tripling in size and their plans for further expansion I expect they can maintain electricity surplus, and if not they can come out and say "actually we fucked this up" like they have in the past.
On June 01 2013 22:40 viletomato wrote:
By looking at the long term plan for these types of stations in the video, it seems very impractical.
I live in Toronto Canada, the closest charging station looks like it's 150km away to the east and west. And you have to charge every 3 hours? How is that even useable in daily life? I have to drive for about 1.5 hours to power up and drive back 1.5 hours. That's 3 hours of driving to get a charge....the stations are way way too sparse.
They should plan to put all stations in urban areas first before going to a national level.
They're not charging stations. They're supercharging stations. When you own an electric car, any outlet is a charging station.
On June 01 2013 22:14 Feartheguru wrote:
Can someone explain to me how this would work when it's cloudy or at night? None of the stuff people have been saying makes any sense. There are no batteries that good (obviously, otherwise why even have the stations), there is no solar grid (huh?) and excess energy can't be stored in the main grid since solar energy companies are in direct competition with utilities companies.
Solar energy reservoirs have fundamentally different constraints than electric car batteries.Specifically, a solar energy reservoir doesn't have to power a motor to drive itself around. It doesn't have to be engineered to take a 50% recharge in 20 minutes. Further, almost all US states require power companies to buy your electric surplus. The reason is power companies are set up to be monopolies, and they're regulated accordingly. The only thing Elon Musk is claiming is that they are sizing the superchargers' solar systems to exceed charging demand.
The solar "grid" is so referred to I assume because it's a distributed way of harvesting electricity which is different from everyone being hooked up to a couple power plants. If your idea of a "grid" is having your own redundant and totally useless set of transformers and power lines, then no, there is no solar grid. All people mean by grid is it's a way of talking about the solar infrastructure.
On June 01 2013 23:52 Incognoto wrote:
That electricity is free at the moment because electric cars represent such a small portions of cars in the USA. Just you wait once more people start using them. ^^
The electricity is free for a lifetime as per the Tesla website (and probably the contracts).
On June 01 2013 10:59 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Too bad Tesla isn't working on battery swapping technology? As Better Place just went belly up.
On June 01 2013 22:11 Whitewing wrote:
This would be really cool if instead of doing a half hour car charge, they instead did a battery exchange station. You pull up, pay a small fee (and I mean small, they could even start out doing this for free until it becomes common) for a battery change, they replace your battery with a fully charged one, and you're off in a minute or two. They then take the battery you just dropped off and charge it with their solar powered station (it doesn't matter anymore if it takes them a full half hour to charge it).
I've heard it mentioned a few times but that amount of extra batteries probably requires a bigger infrastructure than they have right now. Swapping is supposed to be faster than filling a tank of gas. But the company probably needs a quick way to charge the spent batteries a la the supercharger network.
On June 01 2013 21:38 Dekoth wrote:
Talk to me when Electrics charge in the same time it takes me to fill up a tank of gas, get at least 400miles of range using AC/heat/Radio (you know normal things) and oh yea, Actually produce less pollution to create then they ever actually save. Until then, EV's are just for people who want to believe they are doing something good for the environment but actually aren't.
"Talk to me when cars cost less to fuel than it does to let a horse graze and get just as much range without me having to find someone who has petrol when I can just let my horse graze and oh yeah, can ford rivers and cross mountain ranges and still work in inclement weather and other bad terrain."
Okay, we will get back to you when the technology is just as convenient as it is now. In the meantime we are running out of fossil fuels so we have to make some kind of switch whether you're in the market for a new car now or not.
On June 01 2013 18:23 MrTortoise wrote:
the only problem with the investing money argument is that it doesn't really apply in tesla car case. Investing woudl be implying research .. which they are doing. But their main aim is to monetise electric cars.
the investment argument would go into funding companies that are researching materials directly. Personally id rather invest in some state run scheme or via awards program ... similar to space x program and competitions - not to a commercial entity whos mission is to make share holders happy.
No, it's investing money because it's a company. Of course they have to monetize the cars, they exist in a marketplace where all the other cars are monetized already. You cannot make a world breakthrough in R&D. Technology doesn't work that way. You can't give a few million dollars a year to a few universities and wait until they come up with the magic answer to how humans are supposed to handle their energy, and then the next day we all switch to that system. Electricity, oil, cars, these are all HUGE infrastructures. Imagine if 30 years ago we had said as a society nobody gets to have a cell phone until we've perfected the iPhone 10 design.
Elon Musk is the primary shareholder of Tesla so it's not really a factor. If he's only doing what makes shareholders happy then he's doing what makes him happy.
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I don't fucking understand how anyone can hate on this. It's fucking awesome, will decrease global warming by a ton in the future if everyone switches to electric cars.
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Elon Musk is a nerd baller beyond the extent that even SoulKey is a nerdballer. Just fax, broz.
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Pretty awesome, I watched his interview on CNBC and he sounded enthusiastic, if a little nervous. More interested in his ideas on the HyperLoop
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United States24741 Posts
On June 02 2013 00:47 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2013 17:32 micronesia wrote:Let's not mention that not many people own Tesla's at this point... let alone go on daily road trips with them. I don't see the relevance, so it's a good thing you didn't mention it. The supercharger network, due to its sparsity, is used for distance driving. Road trips. If you don't live near one, you don't need to drive to it unless you're taking a trip longer than the range of the car, in which case at least one of your waypoints needs to be a supercharger station. (In the future there will be more stations to meet a higher volume of Teslas being built, but charging should also get faster and range should improve. But the main point is distance driving and supercharging are related. In the near future the network will still be sparse, especially compared to gas stations.) Yes, I believe that is clear from the explanations in the video, the map, etc. The people complaining there isn't a station near them are forgetting they can always charge the car up overnight at their home.
Remember the number 3-4 cars you came up with for being a station's daily charging capacity? That number - whatever your guess for it is - only makes sense if you have context for it. You have to compare it to how many people are really showing up at superchargers. It's not enough that the number seems low. But it doesn't make sense to spend millions building stations if they are going to charge 3 cars per day, even if only 3 people want to use them each day. If it's a charitable effort coming from deep pockets... maybe it makes sense then.
But you were not representing yourself as an open person when you said "what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense" (emphasis yours) "Something seems off entirely," "It is not a viable model at all. There is something wrong," or when you suggested either you were missing something or the CEO of Tesla was "completely full of shit." I don't see this as not representing myself as an open person. I'm specifically asking for people to explain how this works so I can understand it better. You are arguably the first person (including information below) to try to attack the issue itself, with your most recent post.
Now, to really understand the situation, we have to estimate that other number. Wikipedia says a total of 9,650 Model S were sold by April. Tesla sells directly through reservations and it takes a little while, we'll say there are 10,000 on the road in the US and we know there's 8 charging stations. How many road trips does the average person take? Unfortunately, that information doesn't exist in general that I can find any more than it does for Tesla motorists specifically. I will give you 1 free novelty electric road trip on top of whatever other reasonable estimate we can think of. After that, keeping in mind the destination constraints of the 6 California SCs and the 2 East Coast SCs, how about 2 trips a year? So at 10,000 cars on the road we have an instantaneous average yearly road trips of 30,000. For one charge in either direction we'll say 60,000 charges a year. As I said earlier, even if the usage is very low, creating the network of gas-station-sized charging stations (land, construction, etc) still does not make any financial sense unless there is a huge amount of money to dump into this with no expectation of recovering it. That's not to mention that the whole point of endeavors like this is to grow the amount of people using these cars (and therefore going on roadtrips that require these stations).
What if we change the solar margins a little bit? Remember this is a growing infrastructure that Tesla will expand to accommodate demand. For instance, as 6 of the 8 charging stations are in California, we can bump up the solar figure to 5 kWh/m^2. What about the canopy, it looks like maybe 8 meters by 16 to me. Some are obviously bigger while some have no canopy. But let's just change the average guess a little bit. That's 8*16*5=640 kWh a day. The 20 minute charge is 50%. Some people have 60 kWh batteries and supercharging is standard for 85 kWh, so we'll say 40 kWh a charge. That's 640/4=16 charges per station per day. At 16 charges a day at 8 stations for 365 days that's 46,720 charges. I missed my goal of 60,000 charges and I won't change my numbers now, but do you see how being a little bit more charitable makes the margins plausible? Even 4 charges per day at 8 SCs is 11680 charges a year. That's less than an order of magnitude away from 60,000 charges. I don't see these numbers as negating the system's feasibility when we know the supercharger network is growing and considering we made up almost every one of these numbers (besides the battery capacity and the number of stations). Yea if the panels are significantly bigger than I estimated, and if batteries only require a chunk of their rated full charge, that helps. The real question would be, on average, what are the specifications of a charging station, including its solar charging capabilities.
Remember, this is a company that when people said "your financing announcement is shit," they came back and said you're right, we've fixed it. They said people aren't buying our 40 kWh Model S, we're not going to sell an inferior product. They paid back their government loan what, 9 years early? When they announced the Model S, people said you won't be able to make that car. When they made the Model S, people said nobody will buy that car. When they bought the old Toyota factory to increase volume, people said you won't be profitable. When they became profitable and started building a supercharger network in secret... okay? When Elon Musk put his personal wealth behind the resale value of the Model S? This isn't a BP level company. Personally I can't comment on the company as I haven't been following them in the headlines. I have nothing against them for what it's worth.
There's very little to suggest this is all just a ploy to get Tesla to foot the bill for its customers' free supercharging. They only said they're going to size the solar systems to make more electricity than supercharging uses. That's admittedly a vague claim but it's about the long term plans of the company. So when we go to dig around with actual numbers to find out what he might specifically mean by that claim, we should be looking for specifics that make sense rather than jumping to the specifics that are least likely to be true and then saying Elon Musk's idea is impossible when it was really just a vague idea that we. How do you propose we scale these charging stations to be able to handle more volume as these cars hopefully become more popular? The only thing I can think of is creating huge fields of solar panels near the charging station feeding electricity into the station with extra going into the power grid. If this is what he means, I would prefer he specify it, as it creates many new questions.
With the announcement of the supercharger network's tripling in size and their plans for further expansion I expect they can maintain electricity surplus, and if not they can come out and say "actually we fucked this up" like they have in the past.
It would be great if they can accomplish what they said in the OP's video, but I think it's okay for us to question it. I don't like the attitude that we should just "wait and see if the fucked up or not, because they will admit it if they fucked up" when having a discussion about a new technology proposal on a forum. At least you (unlike some others) have tried to continue the discussion by pointing out ways the proposal can be viable.
If anyone has more information about the specifications of supercharging stations, please share them.
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On June 02 2013 00:47 oBlade wrote:
Remember the number 3-4 cars you came up with for being a station's daily charging capacity? That number - whatever your guess for it is - only makes sense if you have context for it. You have to compare it to how many people are really showing up at superchargers. It's not enough that the number seems low. It needs context, it's low relative to what? How many people use superchargers daily? Unfortunately, that number doesn't exist for people who don't work at Tesla. We don't have all the information. Now, when you don't have all the information, it's possible to make arguments for either (any) side because you can't resolve a question without all the information. That's fine, people disagree.
But you were not representing yourself as an open person when you said "what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense" (emphasis yours) "Something seems off entirely," "It is not a viable model at all. There is something wrong," or when you suggested either you were missing something or the CEO of Tesla was "completely full of shit."
Now, to really understand the situation, we have to estimate that other number. Wikipedia says a total of 9,650 Model S were sold by April. Tesla sells directly through reservations and it takes a little while, we'll say there are 10,000 on the road in the US and we know there's 8 charging stations. How many road trips does the average person take? Unfortunately, that information doesn't exist in general that I can find any more than it does for Tesla motorists specifically. I will give you 1 free novelty electric road trip on top of whatever other reasonable estimate we can think of. After that, keeping in mind the destination constraints of the 6 California SCs and the 2 East Coast SCs, how about 2 trips a year? So at 10,000 cars on the road we have an instantaneous average yearly road trips of 30,000. For one charge in either direction we'll say 60,000 charges a year.
What if we change the solar margins a little bit? Remember this is a growing infrastructure that Tesla will expand to accommodate demand. For instance, as 6 of the 8 charging stations are in California, we can bump up the solar figure to 5 kWh/m^2. What about the canopy, it looks like maybe 8 meters by 16 to me. Some are obviously bigger while some have no canopy. But let's just change the average guess a little bit. That's 8*16*5=640 kWh a day. The 20 minute charge is 50%. Some people have 60 kWh batteries and supercharging is standard for 85 kWh, so we'll say 40 kWh a charge. That's 640/4=16 charges per station per day. At 16 charges a day at 8 stations for 365 days that's 46,720 charges. I missed my goal of 60,000 charges and I won't change my numbers now, but do you see how being a little bit more charitable makes the margins plausible? Even 4 charges per day at 8 SCs is 11680 charges a year. That's less than an order of magnitude away from 60,000 charges. I don't see these numbers as negating the system's feasibility when we know the supercharger network is growing and considering we made up almost every one of these numbers (besides the battery capacity and the number of stations).
Let me rephrase the issue a bit:
I grow strawberries in my garden and I'm offering a basket of free strawberries to people who walk past my house. Since I have magic strawberries I grow 5 baskets per day.
First of all by giving them away for free instead of selling them, I'm essentially losing money by simple opportunity cost. I could have sold those strawberries after all. Now in this specific case I'm not just offering 5 baskets per day, I'm saying: "I offer a free basket of strawberries to everyone who wants one and walks past my house" - If the number of strawberry baskets exceeds 5 I go beyond just losing money because I could have sold them instead but now I lose even more money per basket than before because I have to buy up strawberries somewhere else.
THAT'S what doesn't add up and makes zero sense. It's a business model that is unsustainable, even when I make the horribly wrong assumption that my first 5 baskets are "free" just because I'm too dumb to sell them. I still payed for the seeds, I still payed for the water, etc.
It's utterly irrelevant if 1 person, 10 person or 100 persons walk past my house and want strawberries. The only difference is that more people make me lose more money but there is never a point where I profit from it. The only possible scenario of profit is because I also sell a "strawberry eating machine" (the car) but then I'm trading one-time payments (buying the car) against a lifelong supply of a finite resource (energy).
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On June 01 2013 11:49 SnipedSoul wrote:
Doesn't really fast charging completely ruin battery service life? It would suck if you needed a new set of batteries every couple of years.
Not really mayne, if you consider all the gas savings. What turns me off (he he he) is the fact that the dang things cost 80k up front/pay plan, which means id be tempted to grab some kind of sweet Audi rs4 or something for that kind of cash, saying fuckit to the long term investment via gas savings.
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On June 02 2013 01:21 r.Evo wrote:Show nested quote +On June 02 2013 00:47 oBlade wrote:
Remember the number 3-4 cars you came up with for being a station's daily charging capacity? That number - whatever your guess for it is - only makes sense if you have context for it. You have to compare it to how many people are really showing up at superchargers. It's not enough that the number seems low. It needs context, it's low relative to what? How many people use superchargers daily? Unfortunately, that number doesn't exist for people who don't work at Tesla. We don't have all the information. Now, when you don't have all the information, it's possible to make arguments for either (any) side because you can't resolve a question without all the information. That's fine, people disagree.
But you were not representing yourself as an open person when you said "what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense" (emphasis yours) "Something seems off entirely," "It is not a viable model at all. There is something wrong," or when you suggested either you were missing something or the CEO of Tesla was "completely full of shit."
Now, to really understand the situation, we have to estimate that other number. Wikipedia says a total of 9,650 Model S were sold by April. Tesla sells directly through reservations and it takes a little while, we'll say there are 10,000 on the road in the US and we know there's 8 charging stations. How many road trips does the average person take? Unfortunately, that information doesn't exist in general that I can find any more than it does for Tesla motorists specifically. I will give you 1 free novelty electric road trip on top of whatever other reasonable estimate we can think of. After that, keeping in mind the destination constraints of the 6 California SCs and the 2 East Coast SCs, how about 2 trips a year? So at 10,000 cars on the road we have an instantaneous average yearly road trips of 30,000. For one charge in either direction we'll say 60,000 charges a year.
What if we change the solar margins a little bit? Remember this is a growing infrastructure that Tesla will expand to accommodate demand. For instance, as 6 of the 8 charging stations are in California, we can bump up the solar figure to 5 kWh/m^2. What about the canopy, it looks like maybe 8 meters by 16 to me. Some are obviously bigger while some have no canopy. But let's just change the average guess a little bit. That's 8*16*5=640 kWh a day. The 20 minute charge is 50%. Some people have 60 kWh batteries and supercharging is standard for 85 kWh, so we'll say 40 kWh a charge. That's 640/4=16 charges per station per day. At 16 charges a day at 8 stations for 365 days that's 46,720 charges. I missed my goal of 60,000 charges and I won't change my numbers now, but do you see how being a little bit more charitable makes the margins plausible? Even 4 charges per day at 8 SCs is 11680 charges a year. That's less than an order of magnitude away from 60,000 charges. I don't see these numbers as negating the system's feasibility when we know the supercharger network is growing and considering we made up almost every one of these numbers (besides the battery capacity and the number of stations). Let me rephrase the issue a bit: I grow strawberries in my garden and I'm offering a basket of free strawberries to people who walk past my house. Since I have magic strawberries I grow 5 baskets per day. First of all by giving them away for free instead of selling them, I'm essentially losing money by simple opportunity cost. I could have sold those strawberries after all. Now in this specific case I'm not just offering 5 baskets per day, I'm saying: "I offer a free basket of strawberries to everyone who wants one and walks past my house" - If the number of strawberry baskets exceeds 5 I go beyond just losing money because I could have sold them instead but now I lose even more money per basket than before because I have to buy up strawberries somewhere else.THAT'S what doesn't add up and makes zero sense. It's a business model that is unsustainable, even when I make the horribly wrong assumption that my first 5 baskets are "free" just because I'm too dumb to sell them. I still payed for the seeds, I still payed for the water, etc. It's utterly irrelevant if 1 person, 10 person or 100 persons walk past my house and want strawberries. The only difference is that more people make me lose more money but there is never a point where I profit from it. The only possible scenario of profit is because I also sell a "strawberry eating machine" (the car) but then I'm trading one-time payments (buying the car) against a lifelong supply of a finite resource (energy).
One of Tesla's obstacles is infrastructure. People are hesitant to buy electric cars while there aren't a lot of charging stations around. On the other hand, businesses are hesitant to build charging stations until there are a lot of electric cars around.
It's a catch-22.
So Tesla is trying to go around that by building a few charging stations themselves. You're right that they'll lose money on those stations, but they figure the confidence that the stations will provide consumers, along with the publicity will result in enough sales to offset those losses.
No one really knows if it will be worthwhile or not, but doing something at a loss to do more of something else at a profit is pretty common (see 'loss leader').
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On June 02 2013 01:16 micronesia wrote:Show nested quote +Now, to really understand the situation, we have to estimate that other number. Wikipedia says a total of 9,650 Model S were sold by April. Tesla sells directly through reservations and it takes a little while, we'll say there are 10,000 on the road in the US and we know there's 8 charging stations. How many road trips does the average person take? Unfortunately, that information doesn't exist in general that I can find any more than it does for Tesla motorists specifically. I will give you 1 free novelty electric road trip on top of whatever other reasonable estimate we can think of. After that, keeping in mind the destination constraints of the 6 California SCs and the 2 East Coast SCs, how about 2 trips a year? So at 10,000 cars on the road we have an instantaneous average yearly road trips of 30,000. For one charge in either direction we'll say 60,000 charges a year. As I said earlier, even if the usage is very low, creating the network of gas-station-sized charging stations (land, construction, etc) still does not make any financial sense unless there is a huge amount of money to dump into this with no expectation of recovering it. That's not to mention that the whole point of endeavors like this is to grow the amount of people using these cars (and therefore going on roadtrips that require these stations). Show nested quote +What if we change the solar margins a little bit? Remember this is a growing infrastructure that Tesla will expand to accommodate demand. For instance, as 6 of the 8 charging stations are in California, we can bump up the solar figure to 5 kWh/m^2. What about the canopy, it looks like maybe 8 meters by 16 to me. Some are obviously bigger while some have no canopy. But let's just change the average guess a little bit. That's 8*16*5=640 kWh a day. The 20 minute charge is 50%. Some people have 60 kWh batteries and supercharging is standard for 85 kWh, so we'll say 40 kWh a charge. That's 640/4=16 charges per station per day. At 16 charges a day at 8 stations for 365 days that's 46,720 charges. I missed my goal of 60,000 charges and I won't change my numbers now, but do you see how being a little bit more charitable makes the margins plausible? Even 4 charges per day at 8 SCs is 11680 charges a year. That's less than an order of magnitude away from 60,000 charges. I don't see these numbers as negating the system's feasibility when we know the supercharger network is growing and considering we made up almost every one of these numbers (besides the battery capacity and the number of stations). Yea if the panels are significantly bigger than I estimated, and if batteries only require a chunk of their rated full charge, that helps. The real question would be, on average, what are the specifications of a charging station, including its solar charging capabilities. Show nested quote +With the announcement of the supercharger network's tripling in size and their plans for further expansion I expect they can maintain electricity surplus, and if not they can come out and say "actually we fucked this up" like they have in the past. It would be great if they can accomplish what they said in the OP's video, but I think it's okay for us to question it. I don't like the attitude that we should just "wait and see if the fucked up or not, because they will admit it if they fucked up" when having a discussion about a new technology proposal on a forum. At least you (unlike some others) have tried to continue the discussion by pointing out ways the proposal can be viable. If anyone has more information about the specifications of supercharging stations, please share them.
I am definitely in favor of questioning, but from the perspective of Tesla it might seem like they aren't releasing information when to them it's just not that mysterious so they're not thinking about it.
The reason I halved the charge capacity in my estimate is that when you supercharge, the battery charges the first 50% faster, which is where the convenient 20 minutes number comes from. And also, charging is supposed to be most effective from around 25% to 75% I think. I think that's analogous to gas cars, you don't need to fill her all the way to the F when it's just making the car heavier but at low levels there are also factors of maybe traction and eventually fuel starving? I don't know. I know it's not recommended to charge to 100% because the car uses regenerative braking and also the battery health a little bit comes into play, but of course you can do it to 100% every time with no effect on the warranty.
On June 01 2013 11:49 SnipedSoul wrote:
Doesn't really fast charging completely ruin battery service life? It would suck if you needed a new set of batteries every couple of years.
Batteries are under warranties that aren't affected by how much you use the superchargers, and the batteries themselves are proprietary like the supercharging technology. It's not like your run of the mill laptop battery. They're really trying to optimize batteries for cars.
About the money questions that I now see might be causing suspicion or maybe seems weird (micronesia and r.Evo): Again, we don't have access to Tesla's books. I do know there is a $2,000 fee for supercharger access in a 60 kWh Model S. Access is included for an 85 kWh Model S, so I assume the fee is also included in the price. Those revenues are probably stamped for the supercharger network. Buying a car now will help pay for the infrastructure to support the maybe $30,000 cars that we'll hopefully be seeing in a few years. It should also help demand. The other factor I know is that this guy isn't a 4pooler, he's a bona fide management zerg, and he really has long term strategies. You can't get people to stop buying Hondas if the only electric option you're offering them is a golf cart. The supercharger network, and range in general, is Tesla's contribution to a paradigm shift in the auto world. That's a shift that the CEO personally wants our species to have in his lifetime, and one that would be favorable to the company.
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On June 02 2013 01:22 FallDownMarigold wrote:Show nested quote +On June 01 2013 11:49 SnipedSoul wrote:
Doesn't really fast charging completely ruin battery service life? It would suck if you needed a new set of batteries every couple of years. Not really mayne, if you consider all the gas savings. What turns me off (he he he) is the fact that the dang things cost 80k up front/pay plan, which means id be tempted to grab some kind of sweet Audi rs4 or something for that kind of cash, saying fuckit to the long term investment via gas savings.
Yeah...I could almost buy a ZR1 for the price of a Model S.
Tesla cars are cool and all, but I wouldn't buy one. Not yet, anyways.
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United States24741 Posts
If the purpose of the stations is mainly to provide high-speed charging access in between major cities and the like, then that's fine, although the video is misleading if the solar power aspect of it isn't covering most/all of the charging now, or in the near future (car manufacturing aside, the power grid provides energy more efficiently than individual car engines). If they have figured out how to actually fuel all of this over solar power in a reasonable way, then that's awesome and I support them in growing this. I really do hope they come out with more particulars about their long-term plan with this.
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On June 02 2013 02:25 micronesia wrote:
If the purpose of the stations is mainly to provide high-speed charging access in between major cities and the like, then that's fine, although the video is misleading if the solar power aspect of it isn't covering most/all of the charging now, or in the near future (car manufacturing aside, the power grid provides energy more efficiently than individual car engines). If they have figured out how to actually fuel all of this over solar power in a reasonable way, then that's awesome and I support them in growing this. I really do hope they come out with more particulars about their long-term plan with this.
I totally agree that the charging stations solar arrays aren't big enough to supply all the electricity consumed by the Teslas if they were the sole way the vehicle's recharged.
I guess that presenter's announcement may be valid (though misleading) because the average Tesla driver won't need to use the supercharging stations on a regular basis (unless they happen to live conveniently near one.) With a 260 mile driving range it seems much more convenient to go about your day and plug it in at night, losing yourself no time throughout the day.
So, the Teslas still consume more power than is produced by the supercharging stations, but that power mostly comes from the grid via their home garage plug while the supercharging is used on the rare occasional distance drive.
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I really like this idea. It is nice to see more car companies to be thinking outside of the box and developing something that can run a car without using gas.
I would love to see a world where we are not so depended on oil and gas... think of how many issues/events could have been avoided world wide if we didn't need oil... On the other hand i wonder how the oil companies feel about this... "free to drive anywhere", seems legit.
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United States7483 Posts
For the record, all technological development that requires infrastructure of any kind follows an S shaped curve: people want technology X that happens to require infrastructure Y. However, they can't use X without Y, and Y doesn't exist yet, and people don't want to pay for a costly investment into Y until people are using X so they don't have an absurd time lag scale on a return on their investment. So it starts off ridiculously slow, then picks up massive speed as X and Y really get going, then eventually it peters out as it becomes commonplace.
Electrical cars and battery/charge stations are just one example of this.
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On June 02 2013 01:21 r.Evo wrote:Show nested quote +On June 02 2013 00:47 oBlade wrote:
Remember the number 3-4 cars you came up with for being a station's daily charging capacity? That number - whatever your guess for it is - only makes sense if you have context for it. You have to compare it to how many people are really showing up at superchargers. It's not enough that the number seems low. It needs context, it's low relative to what? How many people use superchargers daily? Unfortunately, that number doesn't exist for people who don't work at Tesla. We don't have all the information. Now, when you don't have all the information, it's possible to make arguments for either (any) side because you can't resolve a question without all the information. That's fine, people disagree.
But you were not representing yourself as an open person when you said "what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense" (emphasis yours) "Something seems off entirely," "It is not a viable model at all. There is something wrong," or when you suggested either you were missing something or the CEO of Tesla was "completely full of shit."
Now, to really understand the situation, we have to estimate that other number. Wikipedia says a total of 9,650 Model S were sold by April. Tesla sells directly through reservations and it takes a little while, we'll say there are 10,000 on the road in the US and we know there's 8 charging stations. How many road trips does the average person take? Unfortunately, that information doesn't exist in general that I can find any more than it does for Tesla motorists specifically. I will give you 1 free novelty electric road trip on top of whatever other reasonable estimate we can think of. After that, keeping in mind the destination constraints of the 6 California SCs and the 2 East Coast SCs, how about 2 trips a year? So at 10,000 cars on the road we have an instantaneous average yearly road trips of 30,000. For one charge in either direction we'll say 60,000 charges a year.
What if we change the solar margins a little bit? Remember this is a growing infrastructure that Tesla will expand to accommodate demand. For instance, as 6 of the 8 charging stations are in California, we can bump up the solar figure to 5 kWh/m^2. What about the canopy, it looks like maybe 8 meters by 16 to me. Some are obviously bigger while some have no canopy. But let's just change the average guess a little bit. That's 8*16*5=640 kWh a day. The 20 minute charge is 50%. Some people have 60 kWh batteries and supercharging is standard for 85 kWh, so we'll say 40 kWh a charge. That's 640/4=16 charges per station per day. At 16 charges a day at 8 stations for 365 days that's 46,720 charges. I missed my goal of 60,000 charges and I won't change my numbers now, but do you see how being a little bit more charitable makes the margins plausible? Even 4 charges per day at 8 SCs is 11680 charges a year. That's less than an order of magnitude away from 60,000 charges. I don't see these numbers as negating the system's feasibility when we know the supercharger network is growing and considering we made up almost every one of these numbers (besides the battery capacity and the number of stations). Let me rephrase the issue a bit: I grow strawberries in my garden and I'm offering a basket of free strawberries to people who walk past my house. Since I have magic strawberries I grow 5 baskets per day. First of all by giving them away for free instead of selling them, I'm essentially losing money by simple opportunity cost. I could have sold those strawberries after all. Now in this specific case I'm not just offering 5 baskets per day, I'm saying: "I offer a free basket of strawberries to everyone who wants one and walks past my house" - If the number of strawberry baskets exceeds 5 I go beyond just losing money because I could have sold them instead but now I lose even more money per basket than before because I have to buy up strawberries somewhere else.THAT'S what doesn't add up and makes zero sense. It's a business model that is unsustainable, even when I make the horribly wrong assumption that my first 5 baskets are "free" just because I'm too dumb to sell them. I still payed for the seeds, I still payed for the water, etc. It's utterly irrelevant if 1 person, 10 person or 100 persons walk past my house and want strawberries. The only difference is that more people make me lose more money but there is never a point where I profit from it. The only possible scenario of profit is because I also sell a "strawberry eating machine" (the car) but then I'm trading one-time payments (buying the car) against a lifelong supply of a finite resource (energy).
Progress of humanity, stifled by greed.
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To get the strawberries you gotta buy a car that costs nearly ~100k and you will be using your garage charger 95% of the time.
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On June 02 2013 03:56 Wrongspeedy wrote:Show nested quote +On June 02 2013 01:21 r.Evo wrote:On June 02 2013 00:47 oBlade wrote:
Remember the number 3-4 cars you came up with for being a station's daily charging capacity? That number - whatever your guess for it is - only makes sense if you have context for it. You have to compare it to how many people are really showing up at superchargers. It's not enough that the number seems low. It needs context, it's low relative to what? How many people use superchargers daily? Unfortunately, that number doesn't exist for people who don't work at Tesla. We don't have all the information. Now, when you don't have all the information, it's possible to make arguments for either (any) side because you can't resolve a question without all the information. That's fine, people disagree.
But you were not representing yourself as an open person when you said "what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense" (emphasis yours) "Something seems off entirely," "It is not a viable model at all. There is something wrong," or when you suggested either you were missing something or the CEO of Tesla was "completely full of shit."
Now, to really understand the situation, we have to estimate that other number. Wikipedia says a total of 9,650 Model S were sold by April. Tesla sells directly through reservations and it takes a little while, we'll say there are 10,000 on the road in the US and we know there's 8 charging stations. How many road trips does the average person take? Unfortunately, that information doesn't exist in general that I can find any more than it does for Tesla motorists specifically. I will give you 1 free novelty electric road trip on top of whatever other reasonable estimate we can think of. After that, keeping in mind the destination constraints of the 6 California SCs and the 2 East Coast SCs, how about 2 trips a year? So at 10,000 cars on the road we have an instantaneous average yearly road trips of 30,000. For one charge in either direction we'll say 60,000 charges a year.
What if we change the solar margins a little bit? Remember this is a growing infrastructure that Tesla will expand to accommodate demand. For instance, as 6 of the 8 charging stations are in California, we can bump up the solar figure to 5 kWh/m^2. What about the canopy, it looks like maybe 8 meters by 16 to me. Some are obviously bigger while some have no canopy. But let's just change the average guess a little bit. That's 8*16*5=640 kWh a day. The 20 minute charge is 50%. Some people have 60 kWh batteries and supercharging is standard for 85 kWh, so we'll say 40 kWh a charge. That's 640/4=16 charges per station per day. At 16 charges a day at 8 stations for 365 days that's 46,720 charges. I missed my goal of 60,000 charges and I won't change my numbers now, but do you see how being a little bit more charitable makes the margins plausible? Even 4 charges per day at 8 SCs is 11680 charges a year. That's less than an order of magnitude away from 60,000 charges. I don't see these numbers as negating the system's feasibility when we know the supercharger network is growing and considering we made up almost every one of these numbers (besides the battery capacity and the number of stations). Let me rephrase the issue a bit: I grow strawberries in my garden and I'm offering a basket of free strawberries to people who walk past my house. Since I have magic strawberries I grow 5 baskets per day. First of all by giving them away for free instead of selling them, I'm essentially losing money by simple opportunity cost. I could have sold those strawberries after all. Now in this specific case I'm not just offering 5 baskets per day, I'm saying: "I offer a free basket of strawberries to everyone who wants one and walks past my house" - If the number of strawberry baskets exceeds 5 I go beyond just losing money because I could have sold them instead but now I lose even more money per basket than before because I have to buy up strawberries somewhere else.THAT'S what doesn't add up and makes zero sense. It's a business model that is unsustainable, even when I make the horribly wrong assumption that my first 5 baskets are "free" just because I'm too dumb to sell them. I still payed for the seeds, I still payed for the water, etc. It's utterly irrelevant if 1 person, 10 person or 100 persons walk past my house and want strawberries. The only difference is that more people make me lose more money but there is never a point where I profit from it. The only possible scenario of profit is because I also sell a "strawberry eating machine" (the car) but then I'm trading one-time payments (buying the car) against a lifelong supply of a finite resource (energy). Progress of humanity, stifled by greed.
A company that goes broke over trying to achieve "progress" isn't worth it either. Goodness of heart doesn't make investors happy nor does it let you expand properly to actually force big changes.
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On June 02 2013 05:42 axgxFighter wrote:Show nested quote +On June 02 2013 01:21 r.Evo wrote:On June 02 2013 00:47 oBlade wrote:
Remember the number 3-4 cars you came up with for being a station's daily charging capacity? That number - whatever your guess for it is - only makes sense if you have context for it. You have to compare it to how many people are really showing up at superchargers. It's not enough that the number seems low. It needs context, it's low relative to what? How many people use superchargers daily? Unfortunately, that number doesn't exist for people who don't work at Tesla. We don't have all the information. Now, when you don't have all the information, it's possible to make arguments for either (any) side because you can't resolve a question without all the information. That's fine, people disagree.
But you were not representing yourself as an open person when you said "what is being presented (unless I made a mistake somewhere in my rudimentary analysis) does not make any sense" (emphasis yours) "Something seems off entirely," "It is not a viable model at all. There is something wrong," or when you suggested either you were missing something or the CEO of Tesla was "completely full of shit."
Now, to really understand the situation, we have to estimate that other number. Wikipedia says a total of 9,650 Model S were sold by April. Tesla sells directly through reservations and it takes a little while, we'll say there are 10,000 on the road in the US and we know there's 8 charging stations. How many road trips does the average person take? Unfortunately, that information doesn't exist in general that I can find any more than it does for Tesla motorists specifically. I will give you 1 free novelty electric road trip on top of whatever other reasonable estimate we can think of. After that, keeping in mind the destination constraints of the 6 California SCs and the 2 East Coast SCs, how about 2 trips a year? So at 10,000 cars on the road we have an instantaneous average yearly road trips of 30,000. For one charge in either direction we'll say 60,000 charges a year.
What if we change the solar margins a little bit? Remember this is a growing infrastructure that Tesla will expand to accommodate demand. For instance, as 6 of the 8 charging stations are in California, we can bump up the solar figure to 5 kWh/m^2. What about the canopy, it looks like maybe 8 meters by 16 to me. Some are obviously bigger while some have no canopy. But let's just change the average guess a little bit. That's 8*16*5=640 kWh a day. The 20 minute charge is 50%. Some people have 60 kWh batteries and supercharging is standard for 85 kWh, so we'll say 40 kWh a charge. That's 640/4=16 charges per station per day. At 16 charges a day at 8 stations for 365 days that's 46,720 charges. I missed my goal of 60,000 charges and I won't change my numbers now, but do you see how being a little bit more charitable makes the margins plausible? Even 4 charges per day at 8 SCs is 11680 charges a year. That's less than an order of magnitude away from 60,000 charges. I don't see these numbers as negating the system's feasibility when we know the supercharger network is growing and considering we made up almost every one of these numbers (besides the battery capacity and the number of stations). Let me rephrase the issue a bit: I grow strawberries in my garden and I'm offering a basket of free strawberries to people who walk past my house. Since I have magic strawberries I grow 5 baskets per day. First of all by giving them away for free instead of selling them, I'm essentially losing money by simple opportunity cost. I could have sold those strawberries after all. Now in this specific case I'm not just offering 5 baskets per day, I'm saying: "I offer a free basket of strawberries to everyone who wants one and walks past my house" - If the number of strawberry baskets exceeds 5 I go beyond just losing money because I could have sold them instead but now I lose even more money per basket than before because I have to buy up strawberries somewhere else.THAT'S what doesn't add up and makes zero sense. It's a business model that is unsustainable, even when I make the horribly wrong assumption that my first 5 baskets are "free" just because I'm too dumb to sell them. I still payed for the seeds, I still payed for the water, etc. It's utterly irrelevant if 1 person, 10 person or 100 persons walk past my house and want strawberries. The only difference is that more people make me lose more money but there is never a point where I profit from it. The only possible scenario of profit is because I also sell a "strawberry eating machine" (the car) but then I'm trading one-time payments (buying the car) against a lifelong supply of a finite resource (energy). This guys is a billionaire and owns another company that he is using to do the solar bullshit (pretty sure, too lazy to confirm that again) also using property already owned by other companys that allow him to use the area. When you are selling cars that can cost 100k, it is okay to set up an infrastructure that will allow you to sell a lot more of these babies. He also said somthing about making more energy than the cars would use, i wonder if he is going to sell that to the power company?
Look at micros short math on that last part. What I'm getting at is that it doesn't matter if he produces more or less than the cars use, he's making a net loss. Hell, it would be more profitable (and "green") to build a giant solar plant somewhere in a desert, feed that power into the grid and use the grid to power your "electric gas stations".
However, what they're trying to say in the video in the OP isn't that, they're trying to be like "Free energy look how awesome we are for the environment!" =/
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EPT
