Electric cars
Not so shocking
Jul 27th 2006 | SANTA MONICA
From The Economist print edition
From The Economist print edition
High-tech entrepreneurs unveil a sporty electric car
ASK people if they would buy a new electric car and most will respond blankly. After all, electric cars have not been seen in large numbers for nearly a century, and the golf carts and milk floats that represent electrified transport today are hardly the sort of vehicle to win many people over.
Tesla Motors aims to alter that perception. The venture, based in California and financed by Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google, has unveiled a
two-seat sports car. It will cost $89,000, and Tesla aims to sell a couple of thousand of them before introducing a cheaper, four-seat version.
The car's design alone is likely to turn old-fashioned notions of electric vehicles on their head. Beyond that, Tesla makes three audacious claims. The first is that the vehicle accelerates from nought to 100km (60 miles) per hour in just four seconds. That is faster than a Ferrari. The second is that it can travel 400km on an overnight charge from an ordinary 240 volt socket. The third is that it is more environmentally friendly than a petrol-driven equivalent.
There is no doubting its breathtaking quickness. And the range of 400km is a heroic accomplishment, made possible by the use of advanced lithium-ion batteries and lightweight carbon-fibre bodywork. Dr Musk, the firm's chairman, concedes that racing Ferraris all the time would reduce the range somewhat, but points out that, using the American
government's methodology, the car's fuel efficiency is the equivalent of 52.5km per litre of petrol (135 miles per American gallon). The average new American car gets less than 12km per litre.
The grand claims of greenery might sound a bit fishy, given that most electricity is made
from fossil fuels, but several studies have shown that electric vehicles which draw their power from a grid that is itself half coal-fired (as America's is) produce less in the way of greenhouse gases than an average petrol-driven car.
Tesla, though, aims to be even greener than that, according to Dr Musk. The firm plans to offer optional solar-photoelectric systems, to be set up as a car port at home, that will be able to power the cars for 80km a day without having to draw on the grid. Given that the average driver travels less than this, the idea promises, as Dr Musk puts it, to make our cars energy positivefor those with Santa Monica's reliable sunshine, at least.
There was one gripe, though. Some of the petrolheads at Tesla's launch party complained that the silence of the electric motor was too alien. They missed the grunt and growl of an internal-combustion engine. A Tesla engineer nearby came back with an idea: We'll program the
software to have a variety of engine roars, just like ring tones on mobile phones.
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