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ilkhan posted:I wonder how much of an issue sustaining half a million cars per year worth of demand will be. Pricing, model Y, incentives, something is gonna have to give. There aren't a lot of car models that sustain half a million sales per year. Maybe not the Model 3 in its current form, but don't forget that this is simply the next step towards Elon Musk's goal of rendering fossil fuels obsolete. Tesla is most likely going to continue working on delivering more range for less money (as well as expanding their Supercharger network) until anyone in the market for a new car would have little reason not to go electric. At that point, half a million cars per year would be pretty feasible.
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May 9, 2016 02:20
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Well obviously Tesla will continue trying to drive down cost and increase range. Finding half a million people to buy any specific vehicle is tough. Toyota doesn't sell half a million Camrys per year. Ford sells 750-800k F-series per year, but those are trucks and used in massive numbers by businesses. Tesla will pick up a lot of uber and rental type sales (uber quickly, rentals eventually) but not as many as Ford sells to businesses. Model Y will definitely help, but the use case will need to get a lot more compelling to the average joe if Tesla wants a million sales a year by for 2020-2022 (IIRC that was what Musk mentioned on the conference call). A million cars per year is a hilariously huge number for a 5 year plan on a manufacturer selling 5% of that right now. The 3 and the Y might combine for a million sales, but I wouldn't want such a quick time frame on it. 2025, maybe. We'll need a massive improvement on energy infrastructure to accommodate EVs in those kinds of numbers.
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May 9, 2016 02:34
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I always assumed the first prius looked like it did to save money by reusing an existing vehicle.
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May 9, 2016 02:47
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Don Lapre posted:I always assumed the first prius looked like it did to save money by reusing an existing vehicle. I think it shared platforms with the Echo. Maybe body panels too? OXBALLS DOT COM fucked around with this message at 03:08 on May 9, 2016 |
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May 9, 2016 03:05
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Speaking of Tesla's, I saw a Model S today in between Las Vegas and Kingman. First time I've ever seen one that was obviously on a long distance leg. The plates were from Ontario, so that's a pretty nice road trip for an electric car.
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May 9, 2016 03:16
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Man the thing about teslas are that they need I dare say it 5 times the superchargers to even be viable. I have had my plug in hybrid for a year and change now and if I could not plug in at work it would be garbage. In my major metro area there is 1 supercharger in an non major road area, far away from the tourist or major work centers. I mean, I just drove from Virginia to New Jersey via a standard route (Chesapeake bay bridge) and there were no superchargers or for that matter, non car dealership chargers. This means a major bypass around DC is now non usable. Hell, on the NJ turnpike there were no apparent chargers (I charged at my hotel because I called and got permission to use an outdoor outlet.) That is my current major concern about pure Evs, they depend on a non sustainable everyone has a house model, which for a radical environmentalist makes no sense.
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May 9, 2016 03:51
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Why do they depend on everyone owning a house? You can often install a charger in an apartment building or rental unit. In California the landlord is required by law to let you, in fact. I live in an apartment, and 200mi of range is plenty to get to work, errands, nearby cities. The supercharger network will grow, but it's also not really designed to take the place of charging at home and running on that for the day. 200mi of range is what solves that problem.
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May 9, 2016 04:00
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Subjunctive posted:Why do they depend on everyone owning a house? You can often install a charger in an apartment building or rental unit. In California the landlord is required by law to let you, in fact. That's California. Where I live, most downtown residential parking is multi-storey underground garages in condo buildings (sometimes barrier separated from the commercial/public use sections). Now, low rise, street level multiplex parking, maybe you can get away with getting an electrician to install a charger at your spor, but dealing with a condo board, building managers and a building that wasn't designed for it in the first place means you're going to need some engineering to get chargers installed, which is not going to be cheap. Yes, you probably can do it, with enough money and perseverance, but your efforts would probably be better spent trying to get a solar+wind power+green roof installed on the building instead.
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May 9, 2016 04:31
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Ryand-Smith posted:Man the thing about teslas are that they need I dare say it 5 times the superchargers to even be viable. I live about 15 minutes from the gigafactory, but the nearest supercharger is about a half hour further away.
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May 9, 2016 04:36
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Stefan Prodan posted:Even though I don't drive at excessive speeds off ramps, this is exactly the thing that will probably end up letting me rationalize actually spending the money on an S sooner or later instead of going "well that would be a cool thing to have but I certainly don't need one" Hold on, are you saying the S is superlatively safe over other 5 star rating cars?
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May 9, 2016 05:33
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Linedance posted:That's California. Where I live, most downtown residential parking is multi-storey underground garages in condo buildings (sometimes barrier separated from the commercial/public use sections). Now, low rise, street level multiplex parking, maybe you can get away with getting an electrician to install a charger at your spor, but dealing with a condo board, building managers and a building that wasn't designed for it in the first place means you're going to need some engineering to get chargers installed, which is not going to be cheap. Yes, you probably can do it, with enough money and perseverance, but your efforts would probably be better spent trying to get a solar+wind power+green roof installed on the building instead. Eh, you only need a couple outlets in the corner for now. The ones in my parking garage are next to the maintenance room so the power lines didn't have to be run very far. Of course that means you'd only have a couple outlets period, but it's a start. All the parking garages around me only have 2-4 charging spots and those were probably retrofits. Hopefully new garages are being build with an eye to easily adding more charging stations over the next decade.
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May 9, 2016 05:50
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In my dense urban neighborhood probably 65% of parking is street parking, so it's not like it's even feasible to install a charger even at your own expense.
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May 9, 2016 12:54
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kimbo305 posted:Hold on, are you saying the S is superlatively safe over other 5 star rating cars? Reality distortion field
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May 9, 2016 13:03
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Mange Mite posted:Reality distortion field The cult of Tesla really is something to behold. There was a discussion somewhere on how safe they are and someone brought up the fact that no one had ever died in one. When someone posted some stories of people dying in them they decided they shouldn't count since they were things like people driving off cliffs or into poles at high rates of speed.
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May 9, 2016 13:36
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:In my dense urban neighborhood probably 65% of parking is street parking, so it's not like it's even feasible to install a charger even at your own expense. http://articles.philly.com/2015-05-07/business/61869234_1_martin-o-rourke-electric-vehicle-electric-vehicle Still need to be a homeowner though.
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May 9, 2016 14:46
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kimbo305 posted:Hold on, are you saying the S is superlatively safe over other 5 star rating cars? I don't think it's like exceedingly safer but I think it is objectively safer to some degree due to the extra distance the car can decelerate over in a frontal crash due to the empty front of the car, I dunno what's reality distortion field about that?
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May 9, 2016 14:57
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To be fair, when the rating goes to five stars, how can you tell the difference between a car that just made five stars and a car that could have made six or seven stars if the ratings existed? It's only to be expected that fans of car brands start creatively interpreting statistics to justify their favourite car being safer than other five star cars. Detractors will also do it, in the opposite direction. To get at the truth we'd need dispassionate analysis, which is going to be hard to find on a site like the one the article came from - one dedicated to electric stuff with a huge Tesla article ratio.
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May 9, 2016 15:04
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fordan posted:http://articles.philly.com/2015-05-07/business/61869234_1_martin-o-rourke-electric-vehicle-electric-vehicle I like how the article goes to some length to denote that the two people with the e-Golf are Foreigners. Stefan Prodan posted:I don't think it's like exceedingly safer but I think it is objectively safer to some degree due to the extra distance the car can decelerate over in a frontal crash due to the empty front of the car, I dunno what's reality distortion field about that? By objectively, I think you really mean theoretically. Assuming all other factors are equal (which they aren't, ever), you might have slightly better performance in a very high speed frontal low-offset collision, which is both an extremely rare type of collision and also a relatively safe type of collision in all cars. Rollovers, high-offset, and side impacts are what kill people.
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May 9, 2016 15:05
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I'm not really a huge cult of tesla person I'm just someone who's considering one and a part of it is the safety thing which I've never seen anyone actually dispute before that they are at least to some degree safer than any ICE sedan?
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May 9, 2016 15:06
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I like how the article goes to some length to denote that the two people with the e-Golf are Foreigners. Clearly to show their purchase of an electric car was about the car and not just getting a semi-reserved parking space like dirty native Philadelphians would.
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May 9, 2016 15:59
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Why would the front being empty help crash safety? In modern (front engine) cars the stuff under the hood is deigned to go under the occupants in a front crash. If anything not having there would be worse. Just intuitively, a very heavy car with a large amount of the weight at the bottom of the floorpan would be more dangerous on average in a rollover, because now all that weight is being put on the roof pillars, add in the force of the crash and it would be easy to pancake the occupants. Although in fairness since the Tesla is a fairly long slung car the weight on the bottom would help it avoid a rollover in the first place, unlike a body-on-frame truck which would have the same problem and also be more prone to rollover compared to a car. BOF trucks are quite dangerous in terms of occupant fatalities per vehicle mile.
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May 9, 2016 16:03
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I don't have anything to add because I am dumb about cars, but are you serious with the fact that if I get into a crash my engine will go underneath me? That sounds... not possible.
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May 9, 2016 16:38
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Throatwarbler posted:Why would the front being empty help crash safety? In modern (front engine) cars the stuff under the hood is deigned to go under the occupants in a front crash. If anything not having there would be worse. More room for crumple zones, i.e. things added specifically for impact absorption. It's not just an empty coke can, and they don't just throw out an ICE and leave an empty engine bay. The crumple zone is deliberately more substantial because there is room for it. Less so in the case of AWD models I would guess, because having to channel that mass out of the way is a disadvantage, not an advantage, to overall safety. I'm a rabid Tesla fanboy but even I know how fellow fans would say that the German crash "didn't count" if they had died, because of the extreme situation. But it's a testament to the excellent safety when they didn't die. Internet cherry pickers gonna cherry pick. And there's only so much you can do to quantify safety, nothing is guaranteed, it doesn't account for all scenarios etc etc. But obviously this is a pretty good result and it obviously accounts for more than simple head on, low offset. quote:NHTSA does not publish a star rating above 5, however safety levels better than 5 stars are captured in the overall Vehicle Safety Score (VSS) provided to manufacturers, where the Model S achieved a new combined record of 5.4 stars. https://www.teslamotors.com/blog/tesla-model-s-achieves-best-safety-rating-any-car-ever-tested
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May 9, 2016 16:39
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Throatwarbler posted:Why would the front being empty help crash safety? In modern (front engine) cars the stuff under the hood is deigned to go under the occupants in a front crash. If anything not having there would be worse. That may how it's designed, but the effect is still quite limited. If you look at the EuroNCAP photos who hardly see any evidence of it. The engine and other equipment is pretty much pushed straight towards the legs and front occupant legs are one of the most likely body parts to get hurt. It's much easier to design a safe frontal crash car if you only have to consider crumble zones and empty space. Admittedly Tesla didn't fare as well as it could have in the EuroNCAP test. The experience and resources of larger manufacturers probably could have helped.
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May 9, 2016 17:03
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Internet Explorer posted:I don't have anything to add because I am dumb about cars, but are you serious with the fact that if I get into a crash my engine will go underneath me? That sounds... not possible. Yes, that's what happens. The engine is mounted in such a way that the mounts will break and the block will go underneath the car. Although a crash where that happens will be a fairly serious one. A coworker of mine driving a Cobalt drifted into the other side of the road and hit a loving Ford Explorer head on. The aftermath pics did clearly show the engine start getting forced under the car. It looked horrific but he got away with a broken leg and was back at work on crutches within 2 weeks.
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May 9, 2016 17:03
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Internet Explorer posted:I don't have anything to add because I am dumb about cars, but are you serious with the fact that if I get into a crash my engine will go underneath me? That sounds... not possible. This is a pretty decent view of it happening in a truck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0hI85R-0aE
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May 9, 2016 17:06
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This isn't the best cite but a quick search turns up GM's press release for a new car that indicates this is a thing that they design for, http://media.gm.com/media/th/en/chevrolet/news.detail.html/content/Pages/news/th/en/2013/Apr/0430_Cruze_Factsheet.html quote:The engine features collapsible mountings that give way and guide the engine underbody to prevent passenger-cell intrusion. This is on a GM compact car so you can assume it's something the rest of the industry has adopted 20 years ago.
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May 9, 2016 17:08
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Throatwarbler posted:Yes, that's what happens. The engine is mounted in such a way that the mounts will break and the block will go underneath the car. Although a crash where that happens will be a fairly serious one. A coworker of mine driving a Cobalt drifted into the other side of the road and hit a loving Ford Explorer head on. The aftermath pics did clearly show the engine start getting forced under the car. It looked horrific but he got away with a broken leg and was back at work on crutches within 2 weeks. Godholio posted:This is a pretty decent view of it happening in a truck: That's really amazing. Thank you for the info!
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May 9, 2016 17:16
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For what it's worth, the whole "engine goes under in a wreck" is not some new idea - Volvo was doing it on the 240s ages ago.
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May 9, 2016 17:20
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It works significantly better with fewer compromises now, though. Crash engineering is pretty incredible. It involves designing the right things to be quite malleable, and the right things to be extremely strong. Tesla's performance in the crash tests is commendable because they really haven't been doing this for all that long, but the car isn't really safer than the best other $100k cars. The question is whether or not the fundamental design of an EV is inherently safer due to packaging, and I don't think anyone has the answer to that just yet. edit: this is an incredible classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g
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May 9, 2016 17:25
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Also worth reiterating that the NHTSA, EuroNCAP and IIHS crash tests are completely voluntary marketing exercises for the carmakers and have nothing to do with whether the car can be sold/driven on roads. There are no current NHTSA or IIHS test results for any current Land Rover/Range Rover vehicles, for example, because JLR simply chooses to not participate. Those new Range Rovers could all be cardboard accordions no better than a Cavalier for all we know, as long as they have EPA certification and DOT approved headlights and ABS/ESP and backup cameras and whatever other minor poo poo they require new cars to have. Similarly all those Chinese cars that did poorly in EuroNCAP were still bought and sold in Europe, because those results have nothing to do with nothing. EDIT: OK well I guess the IIHS one probably isn't voluntary for the car makers. Throatwarbler fucked around with this message at 18:23 on May 9, 2016 |
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May 9, 2016 18:17
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Throatwarbler posted:There are no current NHTSA or IIHS test results for any current Land Rover/Range Rover vehicles, for example, because JLR simply chooses to not participate. So Land Rovers do have IIHS ratings.
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May 9, 2016 19:58
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Ive heard thay one of the problems midengine cars have that makes them expensive and thereby rarer is thst without the engine and its associated supports you have to spend more money/ weight budget on front crash structures. I would assume EVs have similar issues. This is also probably why the frunk on the model s is so small.
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May 9, 2016 23:15
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Frunks are small because the front wheels need space to steer both in terms of the steering rack hardware and also the wheels themselves have to go somewhere when they turn left nd right, and the driver needs to be able to see over them, both problems that the rear wheels don't have.
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May 9, 2016 23:28
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:In my dense urban neighborhood probably 65% of parking is street parking, so it's not like it's even feasible to install a charger even at your own expense. In my semi-dense neighborhood probably 60% of parking is street parking, but I pay extra for my garage and might even install a charger? I don't understand your post's logical jump.
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May 10, 2016 01:11
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Mandalay posted:In my semi-dense neighborhood probably 60% of parking is street parking, but I pay extra for my garage and might even install a charger? I don't understand your post's logical jump. What? His post is clear, did you miss a word?
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May 10, 2016 02:05
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ilkhan posted:Tesla will pick up a lot of uber and rental type sales (uber quickly, rentals eventually) but not as many as Ford sells to businesses. This doesn't make sense to me. If I were a full-time Uber driver or taxi driver, I wouldn't buy an electric car until the charging structure were to be greatly improved and the charging times were to improve. I've never actually been a taxi driver, but I imagine that uptime is way more important for them than for commuters, and the best-case 30 minutes that it takes to half-charge your car with a Supercharger is time wasted which could have been put to use picking up fares. The often-touted 'lower maintenance costs' still remains to be seen in the case of electric cars. They are still working out the bugs in the new electric car models, and there is plenty of stuff in electric cars which is not the often-touted high-reliability electric drivetrain which still can break. Mandalay posted:In my semi-dense neighborhood probably 60% of parking is street parking, but I pay extra for my garage and might even install a charger? I don't understand your post's logical jump. Until the charging infrastructure greatly improves, electric cars will keep on being toys for the rich, even if they are to drop in price to be competitive with normal cars. Normal people who live in cities have more important stuff to spend their money on, like rent, and aren't willing or maybe even able to pay for a private spot where they are able to put in a charger at their expense. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 03:39 on May 10, 2016 |
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May 10, 2016 03:02
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Crash engineering is pretty incredible. It involves designing the right things to be quite malleable, and the right things to be extremely strong. Tesla's performance in the crash tests is commendable because they really haven't been doing this for all that long, but the car isn't really safer than the best other $100k cars. The question is whether or not the fundamental design of an EV is inherently safer due to packaging, and I don't think anyone has the answer to that just yet. I mean, in a head on 50mph each collision between a 4700lb Model S and 3800lb Jaguar F-Type R Coupe (picking another car at random by similar price range), the Jaguar's velocity changes by 55mph and the Tesla's velocity only changes by 45mph over the same collision-squashing time period. That's their equivalent "crashing into an immovable object" speeds. All else being equal, you'll experience less force in the heavier car. Edit: of course, this also makes them less safe for whoever you're crashing into.
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May 10, 2016 03:09
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Companies with fleets could budget to have x% of cars charging and have drivers swap cars when they’re near the depot, but that put geographic constraints on their routes. And that’s only if the city’s licensing system allows it. Having x% extra medallions sitting idle in charging cars would be a dealbreaker when they cost tens– or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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May 10, 2016 03:10
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kimbo305 posted:So Land Rovers do have IIHS ratings. IIHS has a couple of scores from Land Rovers from 10 years ago, it's usually just one type of crash. There is no information on any of the current LR products. FWIW the LRs that the IIHS have tested all tended to score very poorly. What I meant is that the IIHS actually goes out and gets the cars to test themselves, so it's not a voluntary thing from the mfrs, unless Chrysler is voluntarily giving the IIHS test cars just to prove that they are deathtraps in a crash.
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May 10, 2016 04:03
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