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Tesla Unveils $35,000 Model 3 Electric Car, Shipping Late 2017
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You should remove the "residential chargers" from that map, unless Tesla owners are happy to pay for someone else's electricity. I need to research the recharge costs vs petroleum fuels and cost of acquisition. IOW, total cost of ownership over something like a Mazda CX3 with it's high mpg Sky Active engine.
At first blush, it looks like Tesla owners will have to make their restaurant and hotel reservations based on the availability of recharging stations? Is data typically available for charging availability at retailers?
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Thank you. Looking for data on reduced range with loads. I have a fairly lightweight towing requirement, around 1000 pound of performance sailboat and trailer.
At first blush, it looks like Tesla owners will have to make their restaurant and hotel reservations based on the availability of recharging stations? Is data typically available for charging availability at retailers?
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Thank you. Looking for data on reduced range with loads. I have a fairly lightweight towing requirement, around 1000 pound of performance sailboat and trailer.
That would be a plus, and I bet as cars get more connected gas warnings will occur automatically as well.
We very well could be; but until Tesla's tax credits to purchasers (7.5K) run out we won't know if 35K is the right price point for adoption.
IfEV's experienced the type of price drop TV's did we'd see them sell like hotcakes but I doubt they can sustain the same % price decline; I do agree eventually ICE will command a premium.
That is actually a good analogy, since drug stores simply switched to digital printing to provide the same service for anew technology. I suspect gas stations also become EV charging stations and you pay at the charger like you do now at the pump.
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In addition, how fast do those non-supercharger public power stations charge?
Let's for a minute ignore the question whether hundreds is a large number in a metro area of 5.5m people. If Tesla 3 gets 80% Charge in 30 Minutes with Supercharger, how long with Ordinarycharger?
That would be a huge advantage if ICE cars took an hour to refuel. They don't. But yeah, if you only use your car for relatively short trips & return home its a killer feature.
Some people make 200 mile+ trips several times a year, sometimes at short notice, stay overnight with no guarantee of an overnight charging point, also need some juice to drive around while they're there, and maybe then drive on somewhere else starting with a partial charge. YES it's do-able, if you plan your stops in advance, pick only hotels and restaurants with chargers or devote the first hour of your holiday/business trip to hunting for a charger, or give up and rent for long trips. OR you can buy an ICE, spend 50% less for a comparable class of car and never worry about any of that - at the small inconvenience of a 5-minute refuel tagged on to your supermarket grocery shop every week or so.
Cheaper EVs - where you might stand a ghostly of saving money on fuel long-term - will sweeten that deal, but don't mistake the Tesla 3 for a cheap car for the masses: its up there with the small Mercs and BMWs. ignore the nonsense about the meaningless 'average price of a new car' (distorted upwards by a minority of rich folk buying 6-figure luxury cars) until someone comes up with a figure for median price of a new car and takes optional extras into consideration).
I'd actually like an EV but I've thought quite hard about it and the next time I have to dash off for a family emergency I still want to be able to hop in and drive without researching my pit stop strategy.
Well, yes, they'd have to outnumber gas stations several times over for mass EV adoption, seeings as a single gas station pump can probably fully refuel 10 cars in the time it takes to charge one Tesla (and that's a supercharger - the article refers to "the 4-hour chargers in Manhattan" - then there's the danger that owners leaving their Teslas occupying the spaces while they have lunch will linger over the coffee and petits fours)...
Also, I smell spin, and strongly suspect that they're comparing the number of gas stations (with, what, at least 4 pumps for a small station?) with the number of 1-2 bay "destination" charging stations (that's putting optimism before experience and assuming they're not comparing individual charging bays with whole gas stations).
Also, Tesla are building their superchargers as a loss-leader/altruistic gesture, while hotels, restaurants and luxury apartment purveyors are motivated to install chargers as a way of attracting the high rollers who can afford the Tesla S. Will this scale to a situation where the hoi polloi who can only afford $35k for a car are driving around in Telsa 3's and Chevy Bolts?
Yes, of course they have a loss - because they're investing their profits and more into future production capability. This has nothing to do with the profitability per car sold. Come on now, don't try to FUD people with this BS.
They have a loss because they're selling their cars below break even. Because if not, they would sell (even) less.
Actually, its not such a good analogy.
First, I'm pretty sure the photo printing industry was decimated* by the arrival of digital - and then hexidecimated by phones and social networking (although maybe that holds sound: the gas business will be decimated by home charging which will always be the first choice for EV users who can take advantage of it).
Second, digital printing works great for film, too: you just have to develop and scan the negatives first & you can offer all sorts of digital services. Processors were already "going digital" with schemes like APS (chemical film with digital metadata) and PhotoCD (get your film turned in to a CD of high-quality images - I don't think this took off with consumers the way Kodak hope, but I was into multimedia production at the time and it was a brilliant service - also ISTR it was part of a whole digital processing system that Kodak was rolling out).
Third, its a similar business model which works well in a similar setting - you have a machine, customers bring in films/memory cards, you plug the film into the machine, the customer comes back an hour later and collects their prints.
Car charging and gas refills are not the same model. Gas: people drive to a pump, spend a few minutes filling, maybe pay at the pump, maybe go to the kiosk, or maybe earn themselves a place in the special hell (along with the idiot who thought of putting more than a rack of snacks or maybe a fridge full of milk in a gas station) by doing their shopping and browsing the magazines while people queue for the pumps.
Charging: people plug their car in and then need to kill an hour while it charges, occupying a bay all that time. The magazines and groceries aren't going to hold their attention that long, and with 1-hour charges the 4-12 bays on the forecourt won't cut it: once more than a few % of cars are EVs you won't need a gas station, you'll need a parking lot with dozens of bays.
(I think this is where the FUD from the hydrogen lobby comes from - the gas production & distribution companies would have to extensively re-fit for hydrogen, but the basic business model is the same, whereas electric would be highly disruptive).
(* certainly by the pedants' definition of 'decimated' and probably by common usage, too).
Sure, believe whatever you want, but:
http://www.autoblog.com/2015/08/10/tesla-does-not-lose-4000-each-model-s/
I don't have the actual numbers in front of me, but I'm sure the overwhelming majority of car use is local/commuter based. Seems like a pretty good sized market to me.
It's the right price point for a breakout.
It's not the right price point for taking over the market. That price point will come in a few more years.
With Gas, you drive to a pump at least once a week, sometimes, two. With charging, you mainly plug it in when you get home, and then spend the next 14 hours having dinner in your own dining room, bathing the kids, and reading them bedtime stories as you tuck them in for the night. Then you watch the Daily Show or some other TV, turn off the lights and go to sleep. Those neighborhood convenience stores built around gas pumps are a little bit of hell that will be going away. They'll change form, or disappear when they no longer have a captive audience of Petrol-addicts who don't have the sophistication to cook their own gasoline at home in their bathtubs.
If you've driven across Texas recently, you've probably seen mega-travel centers like 'Buckee's'. It's like a Super Walmart of a gas station, with food options and ultra-clean restrooms. They'll have to reconfigure their fueling stations when their clientele is mostly electric, but you can while away a half-hour in there pretty easily on those occasions when you have to drive across country. And you'll leave with some tasty "beaver nuggets" or beef jerky and a 44 oz diet soda for the road as you return to your fully-charged vehicle.
Don't make predictions based on it taking an hour to charge up a Tesla. That's like claiming that no one will replace their incandescents with LED bulbs because the LED bulbs cost $40 each. It seems to make sense when you're saying it, but the reality a couple of years later is that LED bulbs can be had for well under $10, last for 20 years, and use a fraction of the energy. The writing was on the wall for chemical photography when consumer digital cameras were still fairly expensive and only took images a few megapixels in size.
The EV revolution is underway, already but by the time it is complete, there will be changes in battery tech, much better economies of scale, and convenience that surpasses ICE vehicles. You'll be able to refuel to 1000 mile range in less time than it currently takes to fill a 17-gallon tank. The only reason you'll buy beaver nuggets is that they make you walk past the display to get to the ultra-clean restrooms.
95% of trips are made within a very small radius of home. As you leave home each morning (should you wish) with a full battery, it's no issue.
For road-trips, you use the Tesla GPS - which is utilising both Google maps on the main-screen and Navigon for the turn-by-turn on the drivers binnacle - it calculates the routes taking into account charging needs and the Superchargers on-route and calculates the optimum route based on distance, elevation changes, traffic conditions and weather - it tells you how long to charge at each stop and sends notifications to you smart-phone when the car's ready to go.
If you're in danger of not reaching the next stop then the car advises you while you're driving - it will re-route as necessary or tell you to keep to a certain speed limit to increase efficiency. You also have some tools on the main-screen that estimate you battery %age on arrival which compares this with an "ideal" graph of consumption versus the actual rate.
It all sounds a bit complicated, but in reality it's quite intuitive and I haven't has "range anxiety" for quite a long time now. Granted, in areas without Superchargers, this kind-of falls down, but as Tesla are the only manufacturer with such a network...
You see the Tesla available chargers in the car. I've never based a restaurant on the availability of charging, but as destination-shargin becomes more common then it can be a basis for chasing a hotel. But as all you need is a standard power-outlet, it's not an issue.
Note that Tesla tend to place their Superchargers next to restaurants and facilities as opposed to regular service stations. In Europe, where I'm living, they're often next to very nice hotels with great rest-rooms, wifi, and restaurants.
The challenge is to develop a battery that can charge more rapidly than current ones; or a replaceable set of cell start are pre charged. In the end, there will need to be a broad network for charging, much like there is for gas today, and gas stations are natural place to start building out that network.
Without getting too pedantic: Clearly this is an interesting article but I'm wondering how far afield from a "Mac" rumor this site is willing to go. Clearly MacRumors became AppleRumors( i.e. iPods, iPhone, iWatch etc. ) in fact, if not in name, long ago but I didn't think it was VehicleNews/Rumors.
But the price right now is 27.5K since each car up to 250K get a 7.5K tax credit; which is why I wonder if 35K is a sustainable price.
Correct, except that Big Oil and their cronies are doing all they can to stall the advancement of electric vehicles, so in Europe, at least, you see very little charging infrastructure at gas stations. Mostly it's *near* gas stations, but often located in the parking areas of hotels, restaurants, shopping centres, Burger King and McDonalds.
And, of course, the only manufacturer with a rapid charging network is Tesla. Now what's curious is that Tesla have invited anyone to partner with their Supercharger network on the basis on their model, i.e. the charing is free (albeit with a "buy-in" price, which was $2000 for Model S), and they have to invest in the network. To date, no other manufacturers have taken-up on this.
They are so abysmally stupid, it beggars belief...
No it isn't. Every other small electronic appliance in the history of small electronic appliances has started out expensive and then plummeted in price as production ramps up and the economies of scale (which are particularly dramatic for electronics) kick in, so its no great revelation that LED bulbs will go the same way. Banning incandescents (in many countries) kinda helped, too.
Economies of scale might bring down the price of batteries (not as much as small electronics, I suspect), but that won't help charge times. Will charge times improve? Probably yes - but without a major technology change, only incrementally. Will there be a major technology change? Quite possibly, but its not a certainty.
I absolutely agree that home charging is one of the great features of EVs - in scenarios where it is feasible.
What!? I am not going to Google for "beaver nuggets"...
...but seriously, the chargers at large service stations will need to be in the parking lot, not on the gas forecourt, and there will need to be a lot more of them than the current number of gas pumps (or the current 2 chargers, usually of different types, that you typically find in UK service areas) to support mass uptake of EVs. And then... currently the spaces with chargers are "for EVs only" - are you going to keep enforcing that when 10% of the spaces have chargers... 25%.... 50%...? Its not like there's a huge surplus of parking spaces.
The trick will be rolling those out in line with demand, and keeping that going when EV drivers are no longer exclusively deep-pocketed.
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Reputedly, Apple are working on a car. If so, Telsa will be their #1 competitor (and, as a disruptive upstart trying to break into the auto industry, an interesting compare/contrast with what Apple might do).
Also, there's clearly huge interest - so is it the end of the world if it gets discussed here?
Musk's promise when he unveiled the Model 3 is that the base model would be as good a car as you could get for $35K, with 5-star safety ratings in every category. We'll have to wait and see how well he keeps that promise, but I wouldn't count on it being a $28K car that they just happen to be selling for $35K.
It's not that their are selling a 28K car, it's that the purchaser is paying 28K thanks to government rebates; so in their view they are paying 28K regardless of the sticker price. That is why it will be interesting to see demand at 35K when it is the true price.
I guess you could look back at how the demand for hybrids reacted when the government rebates for them ran out.