JB gives CarLab talk at Stanford

[doug]

Well, really late notice, and I probably won't go but anyways:

Tuesday, January 20th from 4:15 to 5:15 p.m.
in the Durand Building,
room 450, Stanford University
Stanford University Campus Map

Speaker: JB Straubel, CTO of Tesla Motors, Inc.
Topic: "The Tesla Roadster and Tesla Motors"

 

[TEG]

Wish I knew that a couple days ago...

 

[doug]

Yeah, me too... I just found out about it. A MechE friend let me know.

 

[dpeilow]

Doug,

Sounded interesting. It would be good if you could get someone to do a brief write up, or better still find out if a transcript or recording was made :smile:

 

[Rarity]

Audio only

Pattern Recognition JB Straubel, CTO of Tesla Motors talk

 

[doug]

Pattern Recognition JB Straubel, CTO of Tesla Motors talk

Jeebus, that's hard to read! Thanks for the link. Hope you don't mind that I just quote it here.

JB Straubel, CTO of Tesla Motors talk

January 22, 2009 @ 6:51 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
JB Straubel, the CTO of Tesla Motors, gave a talk to a packed Stanford CarLab forum a few days ago. Some of the interesting tidbits from his presentation:

• the battery pack in a Tesla roadster costs around $25,000
• battery technology is improving at 8% per year in terms of gravimetric or volumetric energy density
• there are approximately 12,000 fuses in the battery pack
• in terms of well-to-wheel efficiency, electric cars can currency reach 85% efficiency.
• hydrogen systems eke out 32% efficiency, through combined losses from electrolysis (70% efficient), hydrogen compression during storage (90% efficient), and fuel cells (50% efficient)
• an acre of solar cells can take a car 36x the distance than an acre of ethanol
• quoted Sheikh Yamani, a former Saudi oil minster stating “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.”

or download the MP3 here.

 

[TEG]

the battery pack in a Tesla roadster costs around $25,000

Seems like the price of the pack has gone up even though they expected it to go down...

 

[Kardax]

Seems like the price of the pack has gone up even though they expected it to go down...

That's almost certainly due to currency exchange rates. The Yen has been quite strong lately, which makes Japanese exports (like battery cells) expensive to American customers. This is actually a really big problem for Japan right now, since the U.S. buys so many things from.

-Ryan

 

[TEG]