Electric Car every one will want!

Handyman · Last edited by Handyman on Tue Aug 08, 2006 10:42 pm; edited 1 time in total

Have you heard of Tesla Motors? It looks like they have solved the performance issues with fully electric cars. 0-60 in 4 seconds. A top speed of 130 and a 250 mile range between battery charges. Witch by the way is 3.5 hours for a 0-100% charge. Initial price looks to be around $85,000. I hope that this little start-up company in California can inspire some of the big autos to do the same. I know that in essence that electric is just a costly to produce with fossil fuels but with nuclear technology becoming safer and more practical this could be a temporary solution for the rising prices of petroleum. I think that it is a good looking car. A little pricy but that is the cost for new technology. Laughing

tomahawk19

I didn't see the "other" selection on there, but honestly I would have to say that a hybrid diesel would be able to produce immense amounts of power, while adding massive gas mileage due to diesel getting good gas mileage, and with the electric motors it would create immense amounts of torque. This would prove useful on large trucks that don't get that great of gas mileage, while increasing their possibility of towing more. However, for producing power and still getting good gas mileage hydrogen would be a good alternative. However in the same respects, a hybrid diesel would be much more cost effective.

Pablo Diablo

Is Testla owned by Porche? That badge looks awfully close.

If it wasen't 80k I'd buy that car in a second. I love tiny cars, and can't stand fuel-inefficient gas hogs.

Vanquish

It's closer to a Lambourghini badge than a Porsche, maybe that's what you were thinking? I doubt it would be owned by Lambourghini though otherwise it would actually be called a Lambourghini. If I could choose an engine to run on anything, it would probably be junk, as not only would you be using it up in your engine and recycling it, but you would be saving the space in land fills. You'd also pretty much have a continuous supply of it, so therefore it would also be cheap.

Neal

tar-xzv

Hi,

Garbage as fuel? Awesome! How about my kids diapers and brownies in them? d'oh!

hahaahah. Gross? I'd feed that to my car, but I'd do that ONLY if the car would not pollute the city *cough cough*.

5ani

Rejoice44

isnt there an x prize to who builds a car that has over 100mpg and can make it into production?

drag0n

Cars on compressed air are the way to go!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_car

The air engine is an emission-free piston engine using compressed air. The engines are similar to steam engines as they use the expansion of externally supplied pressurised gas to perform work against a piston. Small single cylinder engines are incorporated into small toy flying airplane models.

The principle advantages for an air powered vehicle are:
Fast recharge time
Long storage lifetime (electric vehicle batteries have a limited useful number of cycles, and sometimes a limited calendar lifetime, irrespective of use).
Potentially lower initial cost than battery electric vehicles when mass produced.

(taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_engine )

SteveoSupremo

the only reason that I am for hydrogen and not electricity is that here in pa some idiots decided to be shortsited and say that PPL if you dont raise your prices for the next x years so we can introduce some compition and see if we can get better prices for electricity we'll let you rase them to whatever you want when the time period is done.

well all that said the electric companies in and arround PA are planning to rais the price somewhere between 25% to 75%!!!! so in the near future electricity won't be as cheep as what it is now.

any way.
Thats why i'm all about Hydrogen. I think a small bottle of compressed hydrogen would work really well. You can buy in bulk and fill at home put it into an IC engin and then run the way you are used to.

any way that is my 2 cents for all its worth.

Steve

paulbarter

I think that the imporvements in the electric car are great, unfortunately it seems that there is a drive towards using the existing technologies and it is very expensive to change from petrol/diesel to electrical. So motor companies may be stalling the progress of electric cars, in order to make more money off the petrol designs. However when electric designs get more efficient, they will be forced to follow suit and make it more mainstream or else they will lose their market share when other companies take start producing. It will just take more time than it should!

briancoit

personally... i cant imagine eletric cars being the way forward - 3.5hrs to wait between 250mile trips... that means that from where I am to london would now take about 10-12hrs, almost half of that journey time caused by charging.

I've always been a fan of the concept of fuel cells - havent read into it for a few years now, so not quite sure what stage their at, but the idea seems spot on.

I dont think eletric cars will be successful enough for everyone to have one, even if the technology moves forward - and thats not even mentioning the energy used to charge millions of these every day...