What do you think about the electric car The Tesla now selling?

Question

Do you think this is a step toward the future or are we still using natural resources to create energy. Should we be focusing on Hydrogen fuel cells or electric cars. I think we all know hybrid gasoline cars will be an obsolete technology in 10 years. So what do you think of the choices we have?

Answer 1

Everything needs to start surfacing(Solar, green, nuclear, fission, clowns, etc.), the public will decide which tech rules supreme!

Answer 2

Not as good as the "World's Cleanest Car" that runs on compressed air.

"French engineer Guy Negre has designed a car that runs on compressed air, produces no emissions on short trips, and can be refueled in three minutes flat.

Called the OneCAT (CAT stands for compressed air technology), the new compressed-air powered car is a lightweight five-seat vehicle that is expected to sell for about $5,000 when it hits the market. With the backing of Tata Motors, which just last month introduced the world’s cheapest car—the $2,500 Tata Nano subcompact—Negre plans to start selling the first models in India within a year. "

Answer 3

In my opinion, the EV is doomed. It is a nice toy for the wealthy to play with. Most people will want a much less expensive car and more range. People like myself that drive over 20,000 miles a year also would not like the added expense of replacing batteries every 4-5 years.

Yes, I know they will "Soon" have much cheaper ones and better batteries. I have been hearing that for many years. I think by the time they can develop an EV with more range and low cost, the Hydrogen cars will be coming on strong and again, they can blame the car companies and oil companies for killing the Electric Car. Actually it will have just killed itself again.

The car companies are spending Billions on Hydrogen cars, and they will be here soon.

Answer 4

It's a great car, but there was an even BETTER vehicle that came out about 5 years ago by Opel (now owned by GM).

It's called the Opel Eco Speedster, and uses very little technology from the past decade to get a 1.3L diesel engine to run at 100+mpg.

There is not a market for these cars yet; two decades from now cars will not be static in their need for a certain fuel.  Engines will be able to use ydrogen, diesel,  and electric as fuel.

Answer 5

It's great as a rich man's toy, but it also shows that it's going to take people outside of detroit to make the electric car become a true reality.  It's a sports car and a darn good one at that, but it's not applicable to a passenger car or suv.  You can find out more about electric cars at http://GoElectricNow.com.

Answer 6

I would love to have a Tesla.  I read it was pretty fast too, and all wheel drive I hear?  I wonder how that would do in the snow, it might be too light.   Either way, that would be awesome to speed all over the place and not make any noise.  But its like $90,000

I was thinking to myself, I wonder if they could find a way to just change the battery when you need "fill up".  Batteries of EV's would have to be universal though, and easily accessible in the vehicle, but that would fix the range problem, eh?  You could just exchange the battery at a battery station.

Answer 7

Overpriced for what it does.  I can buy a gasoline powered sports car that will run rings around this toy for about $80,000, and with the $20,000 I save, buy enough fuel to power it for its normal life.

Answer 8

The Tesla Roadster is being made with a temporary one speed transmission, that raises the 0-60 mph acceleration time. As of now the original two speed transmission can not handle the low end torque, which is also its peak torque.

Answer 9

The Tesla Roadster was a good first step, but really expensive.  Some more affordable EVs will be available in the next year or two.

Available in California in October 2008, the Aptera typ-1e will cost about $27,000 with a top speed of 95 mph and range of 120 miles per charge.

http://www.aptera.com/details.php

Soon thereafter Aptera will introduce the typ-1h, a plug-in hybrid version of the typ-1e with a 40-60 mile range on purely electrical energy, and a range of over 600 miles total when in electric/gas hybrid mode, for around $30,000.  On a 120 mile trip, the typ-1h will get 300 miles per gallon.  The shorter the trip, the higher the efficiency.

http://www.aptera.com/details.php

Available in late 2009, the ZAP Alias will cost $30,000, have a top speed of 100 mph, and a range of 100 miles per charge.

http://zapworld.com/electric-vehicles/el...

Soon thereafter the ZAP-X will be available at a cost of $60,000 with a top speed of 155 mph and a range of 350 miles per charge.

http://zapworld.com/electric-vehicles/el...

Available in 2009, the Miles Javlon will cost $30-35,000 with a top speed of 80 mph and a range of 120 miles per charge.

http://www.milesev.com/index.asp#hsv.swf

Phoenix Motorcars will start selling their SUT to individuals in late 2008 or early 2009.  It will cost $45,000 and have a top speed of 100 mph with a range of 100+ miles per charge.

http://phoenixmotorcars.com/

Hydrogen won't be an option for quite a while.  We currently have no environmentally friendly and efficient method of getting the hydrogen fuel, and even if we do there's no transportation and storage infrastructure for the hydrogen fuel, unlike for electric cars (the power grid).

Some people mentioned the Air Car, but that's basically just an inefficient electric car.  You have to use electricity to run the air compressor, then the compressed air pushes a piston mechanically.  The process is much less efficient than an electric motor, so they have to make the Air Car extremely light, and so it won't be able to pass the US crash tests.

Answer 10

Holy c**p..Im not even gutta try to top what dana posted.. well done!

Answer 11

Have to look more into it. Problem with Hydrogen is if some idiot isn't watching what he is doing and hits something and damages the engine....BOOM! So much for that intersection.

Also, no one has discussed how often you need to refill the water.

Problem with hybrids is that we already used half of the worlds oil reserves, now what?

I think its going to take a combination of many different type of technologies to bring us into the next century. With Hydro and Solar leading the charge. If we as America don't lead the charge, we will fall.

Answer 12

Electric car's

      The battery does not have the range and are slow to recharge. U need a range of about 600 miles.

    Hydrogen is not for the armature. Hydrogen is the most explosive gas there is. Its atoms are so small it will leak through most hoses and connectors. Then what if u have a wreck ,the explosion could wipe out the whole block.

Answer 13

Electric cars are good because they are usually charged at night, when elecricity usage is down.  The power plant's don't decrease power production, as ramping it back up in the morning would waste even more money, so power is simply grounded off and wasted.  The problems with hydrogen are 1)it is incredibly difficult and expensive to store and 2) itis usually made by burning coal, so it is no better that oil (gasoline).

Answer 14

Tesla is great, great marketing scheme.

The U.S. of A faces 2 problems now. Oil dependency and green house gas emissions. Using electric cars doesn't mean we are eliminating emissions. We still have to burn coal (most power plants are coal burned still in U.S) to produce the electricity to charge these cars.

But it will free us from having to depend on oil from a very politically unstable part of the world which is middle east. This problem is more urgent. The electricity generation part is easier to take care of because we have the best engineers and scientists in this country.

Hydrogen cars are great, but hydrogen is also not available in a pure form, it still has to be extracted too. So we still use natural resources but once we become energy independent, we can fix other problems.

like the guy above said, compressed air technoloby is intriguing and it just might work.