I generally agree with David on the points below, but could think of a
few ways the Stella Lux could be brought to market:
1) A niche/specialty product, sold to a small number of (rich) early
adopters willing to pay $100,000 for a super environmental (and
exclusive) vehicle.
2) If Tesla (or any other automaker) wanted to, I think they could
manufacture and sell a very similar product at scale ("Tesla Lite") for
$35,000-$45,000. (All it would take is a way to mass-produce the carbon
fiber body with integrated solar cells, everything else in the vehicle
is COTS.)
However, Tesla is already selling the base model 3 in that price range,
and combined with the supercharger network, it is more capable, safer,
and has better performance than the Lux.
Jay
On 7/23/20 8:25 PM, EVDL Administrator via EV wrote:
Lawrence, you really seem to be pining for a Stella Lux. I've lost count of
how many times you've brought it up. Not that there's anything wrong with
that, mind you.
It's clearly a technical tour de force, and I'd love to see it go into to
production. However, I doubt very much that you or I will ever be able to
buy one, or anything similar.
Vehicle buyers' habits have been carefully sculpted over the last century,
especially the last 40 years, and those habits are the exact antithsis of a
funky-looking car with racing seat belts and a solar skin. It would take a
gargantuan advertising and PR blitz to develop any significant demand.
Then the vehicle itself, being so different from the mainstream, would need
years or maybe decades of subsidies from governments and the vehicle maker
itself before it could amortize its design costs and achieve economy of
scale. That's not going to happen in our libertarian capitalist system.
Governments are too intent on cutting rich folks' taxes to spend that way,
and a vehicle maker who carried a money-loser for that long would face a
stockholder revolt.
Someone with a Bezos- or Gates-size fortune might be able to do it, but Elon
Musk notwithstanding, people like that don't usually have enough interest in
EVs to put a big part of their fortune into one.
I just don't see a business case for a vehicle like the Stella Lux. I wish
I did. But the landscape is already littered with hundreds of brilliant EV
ideas that should have made production and couldn't get there, from the
Aptera to the Solectria Sunrise.
I think that if you want a Stella Lux or something similar, you're going to
have to build it yourself from scratch.
Or maybe you could hire a couple members of the Stella team to build you
one, if you have something close to Elon Musk's fortune. :-\
Or just do the sensible thing, and put the bloody PV on your house's roof.
That way it gets more sun more of the time, and you don't have to haul it
around on the car when it's not producing any significant energy.
David Roden, EVDL moderator & general lackey
To reach me, don't reply to this message; I won't get it. Use my
offlist address here : http://evdl.org/help/index.html#supt
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and [how] hard it is to undo that work again!
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