New Yorker article - "Plugged In"

[doug]

I read about this article a couple days ago but didn't want to pay the 5 bucks to actually read it. However I have found Tesla is providing it online in PDF form here.

Summary of the article here: Elon Musk and electric cars : The New Yorker

ABSTRACT: LETTER FROM CALIFORNIA about Elon Musk and electronic cars. In a dressing room above the “Late Show with David Letterman” stage, the electronic-car magnate Elon Musk sat on a sofa, eating cookies. Musk, thirty-eight, is the chairman, C.E.O., and product architect of Tesla Motors, and he was appearing on Letterman to show off the company’s newest design: a sleek sedan called the Model S...

The article's author, Tad Friend, talks about his piece here: Tad Friend: It’s Electric!: News Desk : The New Yorker

This week in the magazine, I write about Elon Musk and his company Tesla Motors, which last year began producing the Roadster, the only highway-capable electric car currently on the road. (Subscribers can access the full article.) In April, while I was reporting in Silicon Valley, where the company is based, I spent a few days test-driving the car, an experience both familiar and strange. Once you slide into the Roadster—which, for me, at six feet tall, required some forethought—you’re in a standard sports-car cockpit, one just large enough to fit two people and a loaf of bread. There is no video-game-style joystick or futuristic trackball; the car feels like a car. Only the lack of a glove compartment and the crappy, off-the-shelf JVC stereo-and-navigation system indicate that Tesla was hurrying to get the car out the door....

Slate discusses it here: The New Yorker Parachutes into Electric Car Country | The Big Money

This week’s New Yorker features, under the “Letter from California” rubric, a moderately well-informed yet snarky and borderline mean-spirited story on electric carmaker Tesla Motors and its CEO, Elon Musk. Segway-riding, latte-sipping, pen-gnawing, WASP memoirist Tad Friend wrote the piece, and while it’s a brisk summary of Tesla and the offbeat ascent of Musk, the overall impression is that electric cars are at best extremely dorky and at worst an extremely quixotic and possibly even stupid idea...

It's all very meta...



Again PDF of the original article as it appears in the magazine here.

 

[Arnold Panz]

Did Slate read a different article than me? I didn't see anything snarky or meanspirited in there. It was an article that was very complimentary of Tesla (and Elon) and what it's (he's) done so far, but that there are many challenges ahead, and building a sustainable mass-producing car company is still a ways away for TM. I'd say that's a pretty fair assessment of where things stand, all things considered.

Perhaps the snarkiness and/or meanspiritedness is the stuff about Musk and his other ventures, problems with "humans", and lack of charisma compared to Shai Agassi, but to me it just seemed like an attempt at an honest assessment of the guy, and he certainly gave Elon plenty of words to portray himself as he wished. Overall, I would consider it a net positive article for TM, and they probably agree which is why it went up on the website.

 

[vfx]

Tad wrote:

The car’s chief annoyance is its abounding N.V.H. and B.S.R. issues—industry jargon for “noise, vibration, and harshness” and “buzz, squeak, and rattle.” The Roadster feels stiff and jouncy, more like a garage-built kit car than like a gliding leather cocoon.

Either he had a particularly beat up roadster or he has never been in a kit car.

...after a few days of motoring around without recharging, I drove to San Francisco to conduct some interviews and suddenly realized that I had only forty miles left on the battery’s original two-hundred-and-forty-four-mile charge...

While I compliment him on his ability to totally ignore the car's new paradigm, driving it around without ever looking at miles remaining shown on two numeric readouts each with accompanying bar graphs, it seems like he did that to have something to write about.

 

[Serge]

This article is certainly a good read with [to my eyes] one big blooper

When I asked Musk how you could possibly get your Model S halfway across the country before dinnertime, we got into a back-and-forth that
included discussion of ... the daunting logistics of charging an E.V. in the five minutes it takes to gas up a conventional car (it would require an eight-hundred-and-forty-kilowatt connection, which would drain the grid as much as a one-hundred-unit apartment building does in the course of a day

Let's run some numbers here: 840 kW charger * 5/60 hr = 70 kWh; sounds about right with charger losses and whatnot.

According to 2001 DoE Report, an average home consumes 10,656 / 365 = 29 kWh/day. Assuming apartments consume 1/2 as much, 70 kWh will power 5 at most, not 100.

 

[Ben W]

From the article:

So far, Tesla has built just six hundred cars, or .000002 per cent of the country’s two-hundred-and-fifty-million-car fleet

Only off by a factor of a hundred. The correct figure is .0002 percent