Repair-It

There's an earth-rape for the rare metals needed for the cars’ battery packs

“One thing odd tick (sic) we did encounter, however, is what happens to a Tesla battery if you leave it unplugged overnight… on a cold night, you can see a drop of up to 40 miles from where you left it.”

So, you’ve got a $35,000 car that loses 40 miles of range just because you left it sitting. Isn’t that like having an old gas-engined jalopy with a pinhole leak in its gas tank? Except, of course, you didn’t have to spend $35,000 on the leaky jalopy. And even if the tank leaks dry, you can still pour in a 5 gallon jug of gas in about 5 minutes or less.

Fast_Ed wrote:Also, why does it have to be left wing? Can't it just be a car that thousands of people want to buy because it's interesting? Must we fear science to avoid being labeled a liberal?

I personally feel great about the Tesla. I don't know how electricity is created, and I don't care to know. All I do know is, it doesn't burn evil gasoline, and I'm not contributing to climate change. I don't need to drive more than 20 miles a day. Are there actually people on this planet who drive further than that? I thought everyone lived in cities? I am SUCH a wonderful person, I care, and I'm better than you. My self esteem is at an all-time high!!!

Like it or not, at the end of the day every trendy Tesla is powered by coal, natural gas, fuel oil and/or nuclear energy. If everyone plugged an electric car into the grid on a hot summer night, we'd have massive rolling blackouts.

While this is true? The principal difference is that the electricity generated to charge the car can be generated far away from where anyone lives. Whereas the fuel burned in a conventional car is burned right in people's faces, as it were.

My gripes about the Tesla:

1) Lithium-Ion batteries.

They suck. Period. Lithium-ion batteries have a specific voltage that they leave the factory with. With every single charge and discharge, they lose a little bit of their peak capacity and their ability to transform that capacity into energy. Lithium Ion and Lithium Polymer batteries are the same in this sense. Even if they are perfectly conditioned, they will not offer linear performance over their entire lifespan. Your 1st full charge will not be the same as your 10th full charge and over the life of the battery, you will experience less power and less runtime. This is just the nature of the batteries and there's no way around it. Even if perfectly conditioned all the time. Then you factor in the extremely volatile nature of Li-Ion and Li-Poly packs...Yeah that seems safe to put in a vehicle. You can't ship them in a passenger plane, but hey! Let's put them in a passenger car! Then, let's expose them to extremes of heat and cold, along with inconsistent charges and discharges...This is surely going to end well!

And the warranty on the battery.

"We'll provide you with a reconditioned battery with performance at least as good as it was before the failure!"...Meaning you don't get a *NEW* battery if your battery fails under warranty, you get a referb that's only as good as yours was before it failed...

And don't have the battery exposed to temps over 140*F or -22*F!! Meaning...don't have it exposed to a Southern California summer or a New England winter!

The gradual loss of power and capacity is not covered by the warranty.

Amazing.

2) Recycle-ability.

All the "Green!!" nonsense goes out the window when you realize how heavily this car relies on composite materials that cannot be recycled. A traditional car body is mostly aluminum or steel which can be melted down and recycled after the car reaches the end of it's life.

How do we deal with composite structures at the end of their life?

We ground them into shreds and burn them!

So now we have all that epoxy and fiberglass and carbon fiber being puked out into the atmosphere. Isn't that nice?

I'm sorry. Tesla had a neat idea when they took an ultra-light Lotus Elise and made a street-legal electric go-kart out of it. That was cool. It wasn't practical and we all knew it wasn't. But now they're trying to pass the Model S off as a practical electric solution and it just isn't.

kevm14 wrote:

My gripes about the Tesla:

1) Lithium-Ion batteries.

They suck. Period. Lithium-ion batteries have a specific voltage that they leave the factory with. With every single charge and discharge, they lose a little bit of their peak capacity and their ability to transform that capacity into energy. Lithium Ion and Lithium Polymer batteries are the same in this sense. Even if they are perfectly conditioned, they will not offer linear performance over their entire lifespan. Your 1st full charge will not be the same as your 10th full charge and over the life of the battery, you will experience less power and less runtime. This is just the nature of the batteries and there's no way around it. Even if perfectly conditioned all the time. Then you factor in the extremely volatile nature of Li-Ion and Li-Poly packs...Yeah that seems safe to put in a vehicle. You can't ship them in a passenger plane, but hey! Let's put them in a passenger car! Then, let's expose them to extremes of heat and cold, along with inconsistent charges and discharges...This is surely going to end well!

And the warranty on the battery.

"We'll provide you with a reconditioned battery with performance at least as good as it was before the failure!"...Meaning you don't get a *NEW* battery if your battery fails under warranty, you get a referb that's only as good as yours was before it failed...

And don't have the battery exposed to temps over 140*F or -22*F!! Meaning...don't have it exposed to a Southern California summer or a New England winter!

The gradual loss of power and capacity is not covered by the warranty.

Amazing.

2) Recycle-ability.

All the "Green!!" nonsense goes out the window when you realize how heavily this car relies on composite materials that cannot be recycled. A traditional car body is mostly aluminum or steel which can be melted down and recycled after the car reaches the end of it's life.

How do we deal with composite structures at the end of their life?

We ground them into shreds and burn them!

So now we have all that epoxy and fiberglass and carbon fiber being puked out into the atmosphere. Isn't that nice?

I'm sorry. Tesla had a neat idea when they took an ultra-light Lotus Elise and made a street-legal electric go-kart out of it. That was cool. It wasn't practical and we all knew it wasn't. But now they're trying to pass the Model S off as a practical electric solution and it just isn't.

I agree with a lot of this. I don't think Li-Ion batteries are where it's at. But it's not like we have a better option at this exact moment, sadly.