Right, I did give allowance for the possibility of one more increase to cover "realistic" harsh conditions as you speak of. But this whole thing I believe was started by me asking for a quote of the statement which everyone keeps referring to of "Elon saying a bigger battery pack will come" (or if not, maybe I asked that in another thread). I do not recall it being in nearly so certain terms, and I believe it may well be wishful thinking by some people who heard it. Regardless, the comments I heard from JB in person last year was that he thinks there is possibly some room for range to go up from where it is now, but he sees no reason for it ever to go over 300-400 miles. If we are currently at 300 miles, this means a moderate improvement possibly. If we are currently at 265 miles, then this means one significant jump in the 20-30% range as you have mentioned. I think these things are possible. I do still think it's unnecessary, and that if Tesla does it then it will serve to feed those who think range should continually increase, and possibly serve to make some people delay their buying decisions, and that it might not be a great move overall strategically for them to do it. But the way I can see it happening is: bigger battery for the X, to make up for increased weight and drag and possible use in rougher conditions, and then the battery makes it's way to the S in a "super sport" AWD configuration which ends up giving the S more range. I do not believe they will improve range just to improve range.
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Elon in Munich on Jan 30, 2014
- Thread starter Johann Koeber
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- Elon Musk Tesla Inc.
Yeah, good luck convincing consumers that they don't need something they already have.
The most popular car in Europe is the Volkswagen Golf. The Gen 7 models have a range of 900-1500km (Mpg of 50-90). I've even read tests confirming the 1000+ km range. And that's a 15-25k EUR car. Granted those are in the 100-150 bhp range, not in the 300+.
I am sure Tesla will sell tens if not hundreds of thousands of premium cars. Certainly, Model S and X have nothing to fear, though a SUV could use a higher range than a sedan, not the other way around, because of the usage model. But these consumers will have garages at home so they always start with a full tank, and maybe even several other cars at their disposal, or will consider renting a car for really long trips.
However, if/when they will try and go down to the 30k and eventually (Gen 4?) 15-20k range, they will find that people buy cars for not 90% but 100% of their usage scenarios. That car may be the only car they own, and renting another one would make a vacation much more expensive, so that's not on their radar. Especially not when they just bought a brand new 20k car! Many of them will park on the street, with no HPWC, so buying a 200 mile car that can really only go 120 once it stood in the freezing cold over the night and you switch the heating on will not cut it.
I am not saying they have to reach parity with the most extreme diesels that go 1000 miles, but 350-400 "real world, all weather" miles should be their midterm goal.
The most popular car in Europe is the Volkswagen Golf. The Gen 7 models have a range of 900-1500km (Mpg of 50-90). I've even read tests confirming the 1000+ km range. And that's a 15-25k EUR car. Granted those are in the 100-150 bhp range, not in the 300+.
I am sure Tesla will sell tens if not hundreds of thousands of premium cars. Certainly, Model S and X have nothing to fear, though a SUV could use a higher range than a sedan, not the other way around, because of the usage model. But these consumers will have garages at home so they always start with a full tank, and maybe even several other cars at their disposal, or will consider renting a car for really long trips.
However, if/when they will try and go down to the 30k and eventually (Gen 4?) 15-20k range, they will find that people buy cars for not 90% but 100% of their usage scenarios. That car may be the only car they own, and renting another one would make a vacation much more expensive, so that's not on their radar. Especially not when they just bought a brand new 20k car! Many of them will park on the street, with no HPWC, so buying a 200 mile car that can really only go 120 once it stood in the freezing cold over the night and you switch the heating on will not cut it.
I am not saying they have to reach parity with the most extreme diesels that go 1000 miles, but 350-400 "real world, all weather" miles should be their midterm goal.
That work could be under way towards a 600m range battery was noted here: http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1044652_tesla-outlines-production-details-for-2012-model-s
Also the IBM battery project aims at 500m. Part of the logic is simply to cover a full day of driving around and to provide reasonable range in less than clement weather and at higher average speeds. The customer will decide what he is prepared to pay for.
Also the IBM battery project aims at 500m. Part of the logic is simply to cover a full day of driving around and to provide reasonable range in less than clement weather and at higher average speeds. The customer will decide what he is prepared to pay for.
Alfred, the article you linked to is dated April 2010. So tt is nearly 4 years old and contains a fair amount of speculation.
I'm confused by the units in this post. Mrdoubleb was a bit liberal about intermixing kilometers and mile, which was a bit confusing (to me at least). But here you seem to be referencing meters, and a 600 meter battery kinda sucks.
Sure, so I said "could". But I do not think that the author of that note speculated entirely on his own. Just a few weeks ago in an interview with an Audi executive about the future of electric cars and desirable range (sorry, link not recorded), if I recall correctly, 500Km of practical range (in Germany) was stated to be an absolute minimum. So there is some evidence for "industry thinking" of this type. Customer experiences with the Model S are now being followed closely by all interested parties to clarify these and many other questions. As Tesla has so far been able to keep well ahead of competition, I assume they are hedging their bets also in this respect.
Alfred, yes I agree. Surely companies like Audi and others are watching Tesla very very closely. As a first mover, Tesla is doing their market research for them. The danger is that Audi and others will never catch up...
Bingo. While a real 300 to 400 miles would be fine [means 300+ miles in the worst conditions]. 170 miles in the worst conditions is about half of what most folks expect. And because Texas is the second most populous state after California, I don't see how the needs of Texans can be brushed aside.
Yes, you are right I should have stuck with one unit or the other.
The point was, if average, low cost cars have a range 2-3x what Tesla has today, is the right approach trying to convince customers they don't need that much range, or should they try to close the gap as soon as they can? I vote for the second one.
I vote for the second one as well. Trying to convince customers that they don't need that much range just reinforces the "If you have an EV you give up functionality and you pay more" thinking.
I don't buy this argument at all. The typical 300 to 500 mile range in an ICE car has NOTHING to do with long distance travel, and everything to do with not having to go to a gasoline station every day.
Do not listen to a single word anyone at Audi says about EVs. They are at best incompetent, and at worst hostile to the idea of electric cars. This quote, all their quoting of range numbers for gas cars (irrelevant), all their made-up EVs which get announced and then cancelled, all of it is deliberate nonsense meant to hold back the automotive industry and maintain the status quo - because the status quo has them on top, and they don't want to see it shaken up. Their motivation is nothing more than that.
And as for everyone else, it seems that the problem is that the "infinite range" crowd thinks range can be added with zero downside to the rest of the car. If there were some magic button we could press for infinite range, fine, press it. But it is not the case now, nor will it ever be. No matter how many hundreds of times better energy density we get, there will always be weight cost efficiency and space penalties to adding more batteries. It may be that at some point they become irrelevant, but that will be long into the future, when the transportation paradigm has changed enough that any predictions are rendered moot.
Also, using the Golf as an example, a car from the only manufacturer who is pushing "range on a tank" and who, as mentioned above, is hostile to EVs, as some sort of "proof" that the only way you can make a car popular is by adding unusably huge amounts of range is simply wrong. The Golf sells well because it is a cheap car, made in Europe, which works well, looks good, and is in a very popular segment in the region.
The situation is not that you need to "convince" people they don't need that much range. The reality is that they don't need that much range whether they realize it or not (not to mention the other reality that it's hard to convince consumers to pay tens of thousands of dollars more for something they don't need). When EVs had 100 mile range, the people who thought they needed more said "get back to me when it's 200" - I experienced this plenty, driving a 100 mile EV in 2009. Now with a 265 mile range Tesla, you have yourselves saying "get back to me when its 400." For luddites, this behavior will continue. I use the word luddite in the most specific way possible - these are people who think the only product they can ever use is one which is exactly like the product they currently use. For people who are aware of their own driving habits, it won't. Because an extremely vast minority require anything more than the current range numbers on the Tesla. And that includes populations in Texas (note that the person above specified *West* Texas, Texas actually has many EVs, and the triangle is supercharged, and city-to-city distances are well within the S' range anyway).
Further, to correct the person talking about 90% of driving situations, the number is not 90%. It is over 99.9%, and that's *not* counting public charging or supercharging. I posted the statistics above. I can manufacture .1% situations where gasoline vehicles are suboptimal as well.
Anyway, you can argue all you want for infinite range EVs, but they won't happen. Not because they can't, but because they don't need to. Manufacturers won't make them because they do not make sense to make.
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People that live in Texas don't just drive the triangle. Sure Superchargers work great if there are Superchargers, but they don't work so well when they don't exist. Spending a minimum of ten hours charging to drive 650 miles isn't all that much fun. I do it because the rest of the year is far superior to a gas car--but I don't like it. You're right that in gas cars it's mostly about not going to the gas station every day. In EVs it's about trips, and not having to look for a charging station every other block the way you have to in all EVs but Teslas. Tesla is the first EV that's actually usable, but there is room for improvement as battery prices reduce and chemistry improves.
As far as the "no one needs" goes, sure no one needs a house, you can live in a one room furnished apartment and eat beans and it will be a lot cheaper, but there's more to life than that.
EVs will not catch on with the majority of the public if it's felt that EVs take away from their lifestyle. Here in DFW, 50 miles of range (Leaf) won't get my wife or myself to work and back (and forget about charging at work--most employers just won't do it).
And your 650 mile route will be covered by a supercharger in the long term, not a battery which would cost at least 3-4x what your current battery costs and make your car lousy for the 99.9% of the time you don't need it - which would take plenty from the user's lifestyle because it would be a bad and overpriced car. The focus will not be on huge batteries but quick charging. As it already is.
SebastianR
Active Member
I think the problem here is that we compare two seemingly same numbers when they mean something entirely different:
For all ICE cars, range essentially is measured in "days between re-fueling at a gas station" whereas for electric cars range is measured in "can I drive wherever I want without getting stuck".
Think about phones: Sure the old land-line phone never runs out of battery. But it is not as convenient as a cordless phone. As soon as the cordless phone allowed for longer calls than what typical people needed, they became successful. And still today, call center agents don't use cordless phones.
Same thing with laptops: I stopped caring about battery life as soon as a battery was good enough for a working day.
Now let's go back to cars. I don't care about range as long as the care goes longer than my 'worst case day'. Sure there are people out there who need unlimited range but they will always exist. The simple fact is, that once people see their daily range covered, they will not care about range any longer as every morning they have full range available.
Same argument also goes for charging times: In principle it is irrelevant how long charging takes as long as you can charge over night...
I was thinking about how people accepted that you have to charge your smartphone every day as opposd to once a week with your feature phone. But then I realized that the reason these are not good examples is that the amount of financial investment is very different.
For most of us, buying a brand new car is the second biggest purchase we'll ever make - second only to buying a home. People tend to be less forgiving of shortcomings when they buy something that big.
Imagine this: you live in a climate where it only gets to freezing temperatures for about a week every year. Would you buy a home with absolutley no heating at all over one that has? Would you be OK with people saying "well, you don't need heating for 98% of the year, why don't you just move to a hotel for that 1 week"? (I.e. why don't you just rent an ICE for those times you do a longer trip).
And as for picking the Golf as an example, I just simply took the most popular car in my region (which is in no way considered to be "cheap", BTW. It is expensive in its own class, cheap would be a Skoda sibling, a Kia or a Suzuki). But the rest of the top 10 are similar cars or 1 class lower and all do at least 2x the range of current Teslas. But as RobStark pointed out, even high performance BMWs and Audis do 1,5-2x more.
And I also think none of us arguing for a longer range was "demanding" unreasonable things. They keep saying batteries improve cost/performance by 6-7% every year. Well, the Model S battery went into production in 2012, and was designed, and priced, what, 1-2 years before that? So what they offer today is 4 year old tech, so it is not unreasonable to expect a 25-30% improvement in range or cost saving, or a a combination of the two.
Once again, all of us here drank the kool-aid a long time ago and we are fans of Tesla. That doesn't mean we have to turn a blind eye to areas that could still use some improvement.
For most of us, buying a brand new car is the second biggest purchase we'll ever make - second only to buying a home. People tend to be less forgiving of shortcomings when they buy something that big.
Imagine this: you live in a climate where it only gets to freezing temperatures for about a week every year. Would you buy a home with absolutley no heating at all over one that has? Would you be OK with people saying "well, you don't need heating for 98% of the year, why don't you just move to a hotel for that 1 week"? (I.e. why don't you just rent an ICE for those times you do a longer trip).
And as for picking the Golf as an example, I just simply took the most popular car in my region (which is in no way considered to be "cheap", BTW. It is expensive in its own class, cheap would be a Skoda sibling, a Kia or a Suzuki). But the rest of the top 10 are similar cars or 1 class lower and all do at least 2x the range of current Teslas. But as RobStark pointed out, even high performance BMWs and Audis do 1,5-2x more.
And I also think none of us arguing for a longer range was "demanding" unreasonable things. They keep saying batteries improve cost/performance by 6-7% every year. Well, the Model S battery went into production in 2012, and was designed, and priced, what, 1-2 years before that? So what they offer today is 4 year old tech, so it is not unreasonable to expect a 25-30% improvement in range or cost saving, or a a combination of the two.
Once again, all of us here drank the kool-aid a long time ago and we are fans of Tesla. That doesn't mean we have to turn a blind eye to areas that could still use some improvement.
I doubt that having a battery that gave 300 "real" miles (500 km) would make the car lousy. Especially as it's not likely to weight more than the current battery, and perhaps less, by the time it's produced. And yes, in ten years there might be Superchargers along my most traveled route. It's going to take two more years just to cover the Interstates if Tesla keeps to the plan and longer to get the state highways covered.
So what you're saying is that driving further than the max range of the car is impossible, and for that reason nobody will ever buy one. And tesla needs to focus on enormous batteries because there is no way whatsoever to go more than 265 miles on the car. Certainly not a thing they are already focusing on and will continue to focus in, which is not enormous batteries but quick charging. I feel like there was a media event related to this recently...
Electric cars will not get continually bigger batteries. It just doesn't make sense.
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I disagree somewhat. I mentally split driving into
a) daily - commuting and errands
b) weekend - regular weekend driving, which for us is eating out (105 miles, really), visit friends.
c) trips - longer trip to a special location, stay or vist somewhere
A BEV that cannot comfortably do (a) and (b) will not sell in large numbers. PHEV can fill that gap, which is where we could end up with moderately exoensive batteries.
A BEV that can do (a) and (b) could sell in significant numbers, but would have challenges in market acceptance because people hate renting and car manufacturers won't fix that because they want to upsell.
A BEV that can do (a), (b) and all or most of (c) could sell extremely well, and how well would just be a matter of price. This is he model Tesla is focusing on, because it's the only way to grow right now. If successful they would change consideration and they or other manufacturers would be able to sell more PHEVs and limited range BEVs.
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