The Obama administration’s electric-car fantasy finally may have died on the road between Newark, Del., and Milford, Conn.
The New York Times’s John M. Broder reported Friday that the Tesla Model S electric car he was test-driving repeatedly ran out of juice, partly because cold weather reduces the battery’s range by about 10 percent.
Broder’s trip turned into a nightmare, including a stretch with the conked-out car riding the back of a flatbed truck.
Read about the saga here. (h/t pkuster)
Like higher taxes and gun control, what the hell did these people THINK was gonna happen??
That is the problem. They don’t THINK; they FEEL. The real issue is how someone like Chu, the outgoing DOE Secretary, Noble Prize winner in physics, can simply ignore reality. Nothing new here. Look at the absurd things the truly accomplished have believed in the past. Faeries, Trutherism, Communism, Fascism, “Hiroshima-ism.” It just seems to be unusually wide spread.
Was it at least riding on the back of a flatbed ELECTRIC truck? I suspect the problem was that he had the illegal large soft drink and the extra weight was more than the poor car could stand.
You’d be better off sending your money to the “save an asteroid” foundation.
More bad news for Telsa: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/automobiles/stalled-on-the-ev-highway.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
So you mean a coal powered Tesla doesn’t do well in cold weather?
Suppose you could drive without heat, lights, wipers, sound system . . .
Notice that for Charles Lane it ONLY became news when a NY TImes reporter wrote it … until then, it was not even on his radar as possible, potential, rumored news. But after the NY Times officially blessed it THEN and ONLT THEN did “electric cars MIGHT not always work all the time as advertised …maybe” become news.
For the non-Fox and non-Sun media, it’s as if these interwebz blog thingies don’t even exist.
The agenda is to give the sycophant media and dumbed down public some meaningless feelgood utopian diversions to distract their attention while the Washington cabal dismantle the US economy for their internationalist masters.
Gun control? Can’t have a robbed, plundered and impoverished proletariat shooting at the super class as they drive their armored limos through their newly acquired holdings.
When America wakes up to the fact they have a criminal syndicate running things – plundering the treasury/mint/Ft. Knox then collapsing the economy to cover their crime then repossess the nation and install a martial regime to oversee their newly acquired assets, maybe Americans will do something before they are disarmed and herded into the planned re education centers.
http://www.newswithviews.com/Devvy/kidd534.htm
Lane should consider himself lucky to be alive after nearly forcing the batteries into a catastrophic failure. Li-ion batteries become highly prone to explosion and fire when used while low on charge. I am surprised regulators are not severely limiting the range of these vehicles for that very reason. The gov’t used to regulate safety, didn’t they?
Er, that should read; “Broder should consider himself lucky…”
Lucky it wasn’t a Fiskars. Would have burst into flame.
Would have made a better story of course, but not for the driver.
The model licenced for sale in Ontario features a Samsung wind-powered generator on the roof. So as you drive along, not only do you recharge the car’s battery, but you produce a surplus of power that you can feed back into the grid for mega-bucks at the end of your trip.
At 25,000 kilometers per year, at 50 k/hr, in 5 years you can pay for your car.
It’s true – Mr. McDinky told me so.
the perfect location for a sparky car.
http://boingboing.net/2013/02/10/timelapse-of-bostons-nemopoc.html
I used to have an under powereed car..
when there was one inch of snow, the effort was outstanding for that
little car
imagine electrics in that one inch fall..
Yeah well Dad wasn’t much of an engineer but he figured out without knowledge of the general rule…double the speed requires 4X the horsepower.
He realized the tractor had sufficient traction to pull a bigger plow, traded plows and found despite having to drop a gear got much more done in a day….and saved fuel/acre, plow shares etc lasted a lot longer.
These sparky cars are in principle just fancy golf carts with a high speed. Highway speeds their range/charge will drop predictably. It ain’t rocket science.
Back in the ’30’s nations such as Italy refurbished their WW1 capital ships rather than build new….much cheaper. Guns were bored out to avoid an increase of weight….One Italian battle wagon re-boilered/re-engined boasted 2X the shaft horsepower after the makeover and succeeded in increasing the top speed by about 2 knots….range dropped to about half.
The US IOWA class, in reality battle cruisers, were fast 32+ knots and had long range….postwar refueled their escorts during exercises…takes a lotta power and even more fuel.
Back to the future, again.
Electric cars were in competition with the Stanley Steamer and disappeared after Henry Ford got going, the problem then, the battery capacity and charging points .
The same problem now, until a battery competitive with a gallon of gas, for work capability versus weight is invented electric cars are losers.
And that battery will be a bomb. Yet the 4 flush twits throwing our money at this green fantasy will not admit this potential.
In this safety obsessed age, the regulators will shutdown any technology that works and protect miserable failures like those bird dicing, subsidy gobbling wind mills.
They should create teams of hippies, including Al Gorical and Suck-zuki, to drag these rolling idiot wagons to their destinations.
Elon Musk is starting to sound like Lance Armstrong.
It would not surprise me one bit if the mileage claims by Tesla are exaggerated – either that or they have a secret battery that no-one else in the world knows about. The energy calculations are not that hard to do….
But the Green business does not operate on facts. It operates purely on feel good stories and a willingness to con suckers.
Electric cars and Californians deserve each other.
did U hear the one about the lefty who invented a good electic car
his twin brother invented the 1000 mile long extention cord!!!!
Just imagine how far this intrepid driver would have got if he had gone at night and had to use headlights as well as heat…
Trying to imagine the hassle of making the small trip I made yesterday spur of the moment. I drove 200 miles out and 200 miles back with a 15 minute stop at my destination. A drive of about 6 hours. Didn’t stop to refuel or recharge. I wonder how long it would take me to do the same trip in a sparky car.
What was he thinking?
Teslas can only be driven in Southern California from your garage to the Starbucks down the street.