I'm surprised to see one with that high of miles to be honest, but hopefully the higher miles and frequent use has been a good thing for the batteries.
There's a company out in LA that drives people between LA and Vegas with them (Tesloop). I'm not sure if they've hit 500,000 with any of them yet, but they've definitely got a few of their early cars up to 400,000. There are various articles around the web about it.
There are/have been cheaper electric cars out there that are closer to the price of their ICE equivalents (Nissan Leaf, Chevy Bolt come to mind).
Well... Closer in dollars, maybe, but not percent. The Bolt is kind of a **** car aside from being electric. I didn't realize how bad it was until I got the Tesla and all of my back problems vanished. GM is not good at ergonomics!
But the Bolt is somewhere between a Spark (starting price $13,600) and a Trax (starting price $21,400), yet its starting price is $31,500. So, approaching double what it would probably be as a gasser.
With most automotive technologies (and really most technology in general if you look at history), they start out at the high end models of that manufacturer's market and trickle down from there as the bugs get worked out and they can be made for cheaper. So the fact that the current successful EVs are more on the luxury end doesn't surprise me. As I recall, Tesla started out with the S and then the X, and then made the more affordable 3. It wouldn't surprise me if they start to move more into the compact segment later.
They've already said that they will... But there hasn't been a design reveal, and probably won't be for a little while. They're spinning a lot of plates right now.
And they started even before the S - The S was their first step "downmarket". Their first vehicle, only 2500 or so produced was the original Tesla Roadster. It was a Lotus Elise glider with a Tesla drivetrain. There was another vehicle before that but it was a proof of concept and only 4 were produced, none sold.
There's a lot to be said for this model and doing it intentionally. Having a small volume makes it easier to handle repairs if there's a problem and gives you a platform to learn on while you work on the mass market items which need to work for millions. In Tesla's case, this is compounded by needing to build/drive demand to build a nationwide infrastructure of charging stations that doesn't happen overnight. Really, it's not a bad way to go.
Yup. It's why Tesla is the first to go from zero to major manufacturer in the last 100 years or so. I hope some of the other upstarts make it too.
I'd say that is likely reasonable. But I think the more likely direction in my lifetime would be similar to having a car today that's either diesel or E85 - harder to find, fewer stations, but still perfectly usable.
I would definitely buy that... And I hope we never get to the point where it's no longer practical to own an ICE vehicle, because that would wipe out the classics. I may not need a throaty monster under my hood like
@Ted but that doesn't mean I don't like it occasionally!
Speaking of which, Ted, I finally found a scenario where something electric drove me nuts because it was too quiet. I bought an electric snowblower, and I ran it right through a big pile of snow I had shoveled together and it just went right through it like it was nothing. I was thinking, "Oh, come ON! At least pretend like you're making an effort here!"
Unfortunately, in the process I also discovered that I freaking hate walk-behind snowblowers. So now I'm looking at fixing an old tractor up that I'm already kinda fed up with, or spending a bunch of money I don't really want to spend on a newer one. I hope John Deere brings their 1RE to market, and soon! I'd be all over that.
I think that's part of where I see the infrastructure issue. Anyone with a garage attached to their home will have an easy time... People without garages who park outside of their houses will be one step down, since they'll both have the outside weather to deplete charge and need to do something for power (and most houses only have 110 outlets outside). Thinking about the dense urban areas with street parking (like NYC where I grew up), people who pay for parking garages will probably be able to have this accounted for as those can work to add power, but I don't see parking on the street having that option in the near future. Big city infrastructure is the biggest and also in many ways hardest to change.
Agreed. Charging in my garage is one of the best parts about having an EV. I do NOT miss going to the gas station, and about a year ago when we were in my wife's car to go somewhere and I had to fuel it up, I was surprised at how much it annoyed me.
It's going to take some time before landlords put in or even allow EV charging outside of the extremely liberal markets like CA, NYC, and MA. Even there I don't think it's anywhere near a majority yet.
Street parking in the city might not be so bad, though. Some European cities just put a pair of EVSEs on each street light. As long as they ran big enough wires and can maximize the use of those wires with a smart network of EVSEs, it could be done without a ton of construction.
Then you have the other extreme of applications like over the road trucking. Trucks could definitely benefit from a hybrid setup (replace Jake brakes with regen braking), but that's a big challenge. Farming, similar - big tractors running all day burn a lot of fuel, hard to deal with charging in the literal field quickly during planting or harvest season.
I wonder how big the battery would have to be to actually recapture all of the energy that one often sees with a truck going through hilly/mountainous areas. If you're using it not only as a method for energy recapture but also for assisting the friction brakes, you don't want it losing effectiveness toward the bottom. Probably the maximum necessary battery size for a hybrid truck, provided it's "smart" and knows how much potential energy it may need to absorb soon and manages battery state of charge correctly, would be one that could absorb the amount of energy a fully loaded truck would have descending from Donner Summit to Sacramento on I-80, times 1.25 because it will absorb less as it gets full, * 1.25 again to account for degradation. That comes out to about 340 kWh. (7200 feet of elevation * 80,000 pounds both converted to metric and multiplied by 9.81 m/s^2 earth gravity and the aforementioned double 25% factors).
It's rumored that the 500-mile Tesla truck will have a 1MWh battery, so presumably that hybrid's battery is good to drive a truck around 170 miles on level ground, which means it's probably too big for a true hybrid. I suppose if nothing else, they could use a giant resistor pack and start redirecting energy there if necessary, which would also eliminate the need for the battery to be so big. Then, you'd just need to collect a bunch of data on how much elevation change is seen how often by semi trucks and it becomes an optimization problem.
