doug

Sports car with a spark: Waiting buyers get taste of Tesla - The Advocate


Some more photos:
Greenwich Time Photos

doug

Below are some posts (with sensationalistic headlines) based on the article above.

Tesla Death Watch 9: 8-Hour Recharge Time. In Theory | The Truth About Cars

Charging a Tesla roadster from household outlet could take 30 hours! - AutoblogGreen

dpeilow

The current last reply (#24) is interesting, though.

doug

This is just ridiculous:

"32 Hours Needed to Charge a Tesla Roadster Using Common Electrical Outlet" Green Car Advisor
The news should be that people don't know the basics of electricity and arithmetic.

pgwoosley

Only one of the early articles that I read had anything about the 30+ hours to recharge on a regular household circuit.

There has been a little bit of discussion on this board, but not much.

Obviously, most owners will want to install a high amperage circuit.

malcolm

A slightly less non-story is that a complete zero-to-full recharge can't happen in 3.5 hrs, even with the 220V 70A domestic fast charger because the car needs to consume a further 17kWh running the cooling system in addition to the 53kWh transferred into the battery.

I make it 4.5 hrs minimum. But so what? Who's going to limp home with an exhausted battery and then insist on a 3.5hr turn-around before having to drive a further 220 miles?

Most service stations will only want to install slow chargers as it will encourage EV owners to stop longer - have lunch - buy stuff etc. Commercial fast chargers will have to pass on higher electricity prices compared with domestic recharging, so EV owners will modify their habits in order to avoid them.

WarpedOne

Well, 3.5 hours full charge is the system capability if you happen to have required power at your disposal. 53kWh + 17kWh = 70kWh in 3.5 hours translates into 20kW power line. At 230V that is 90A. If you only have half of that, your fullcharge time doubles etc.

The real news here is general illiteracy when it comes to basic phisycs. Energy, power, voltage, amperage etc are concepts that few ever learned at all and most of them forgot about soon after.

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SByer

I think what most people miss is that this isn't a gas auto - you don't run it until you're down to 1/4 tank (or, for some of us, until the idiot light comes on) before expecting to be able to fill it on the way to work.

Instead, you plug it in every night. If you can get 40 miles of charge in 8 hours, what's the big deal? Most cars are rarely driven more than 40 miles in a day. The EV1 charged slower than that, and I don't remember that being a huge problem for people.

Look, this is a beginning. You can't expect electric cars to jump in at full equivalence immediately. How many years of the ICE auto before you could even conceive of taking a longer trip without serious planning?

tonybelding

One reason why electric cars were competitive in the early days is because road conditions between cities were so awful, they where often impassable to any kind of automobile. And if you were effectively restricted to driving around city streets, range wasn't so much of a problem.

Then you also had to worry about finding a hardware store with cans of gasoline for sale along your route. . .

Iz

Back to the original posting...

The article indicates there are 30 people in the NY Metro area that have put a down payment on the Roadster. What I find interesting is that Tesla had the test drive in Greenwich. Hope that is a sign they will consider building the Telsa store outside of Manhattan in the northern suburbs.