Tesla Roadster runs 313 miles on a charge (new record)

[wtmusic]

"It's no secret that how you drive has as much – or more – influence on a vehicle's efficiency than any technology. Case in point is this week's Global Green Challenge in Australia. Simon Hackett shipped his 2008 Tesla Roadster down under for the event and proceeded to set a new world record for a production battery-powered vehicle. Hackett and co-driver Emilis Prelgauskas managed to squeeze 313 miles out of the lithium ion battery pack of the Roadster."

Pretty effin' amazing.

http://green.autoblog.com/2009/10/27/tesla-roadster-runs-313-miles-on-a-charge-in-global-green-challe/

[Sinti]

1. It's a beautiful thing - I would so love to have one of these. n/t

[Nederland]

17. A guy I work with is actually thinking about buying one

The Colorado legislature screwed up when it wrote a bill that was meant to subsidize fuel efficient cars. The formula they used to calculate the size of the subsidy includes a term for how much gasoline the car uses every month. Since the Telsa uses none, the subsidy goes through the roof and you can nab one of these for under 50k. That's half off the list price!

The legislature realized their mistake and fixed the formula for next year. If I had the cash I'd be tempted to buy one and sell it in January when the price goes back up. There's probably a rule against doing that, but who knows.

[Fumesucker]

2. The Money Quote...

""Emilis and I have decades of experience flying gliders competitively and we applied the same energy conservation techniques to our driving, with significant results! "

[zbdent]

3. I saw one of those last night on the way home from an errand ...

looked really nice and sporty ... damn ...

[joshcryer]

4. Hypermiling, a Toyota could get four times that using the same methods.

[wtmusic]

5. But be 1/6 as efficient and 1/10 as cool-looking. nt

[joshcryer]

7. Just saying, it's a fairly meaningless metric. Heck if everyone hypermiled or if we had automated...

...cars that drove themselves perfectly, then we'd be uber uber efficient. Of course, people would get dizzy driving in circles in their cars as they automatically adjusted for the most fuel efficient route, but yeah! ;)

[tinrobot]

11. Driving in circles is not efficient at all.

I think if my car drove itself, I'd be fine with it, particularly during commutes and freeway backups. I could use my laptop, take a nap, or do something else.

When I need the thrill of driving, I'd turn off the autopilot and head for the coast highway.

[joshcryer]

12. Hypermiling takes advantage of inertia, so making a right turn at a red light...

...rather than braking fully and stopping, can be much more efficient. However, here's the caveat, extreme hypermiling techniques break many road laws. You're supposed to *stop* at a red light, even if you're turning right (most people don't if the road is clear but I once got a ticket for doing this! Essentially empty road, too). But if you had automated driving systems, whole lines of traffic would move like trains, no 'brake lag' as the car in front of you speeds up, you speed up, next person speeds up, etc. Everything would move smoothly. So theoretically if you incorporated (currently illegal) driving techniques as used with hypermilers, your networked automated system would be very very efficient.

People have managed to get up to 200 MPG hypermiling. I think the record is closer to 250, actually. In a completely unmodified consumer car, even! Granted, simply automating the system so that traffic flow is smooth probably would do more than any hypermiling techniques could; hypermiling techniques are useful in an environment where traffic *isn't* intelligent.

If we have V2G (vehicle to grid; using car batteries to do load balancing), *and* automated driving AIs (not too far off), our vehicle efficiency would be crazy good! I can imagine actually people not even owning cars, they just belong to a car organization where you say "I need a car tomorrow," and the car drives itself to you, fully charged by the automated system, and you hop in and go. Pay $50 a month for the service.

The future looks bright. :)

[tinrobot]

20. Regenerative braking avoids that problem.

You put energy usually wasted by the brakes into the battery, where it can be used again.

[Nederland]

18. 1/10 as cool-looking?

You are being far too generous to the Prius :)

[tinrobot]

6. You can't plug a Toyota into the wall.

[joshcryer]

8. Once you can you can guarantee that they'll go a lot less further between recharges.

I like Leno's POV on it, though. The quicker we get electric cars the quicker car fans (like myself) can rest assured that our antique (40+ year old cars) are able to run on dirty fossil fuel. :)

[AtheistCrusader]

21. I've already updated one of my 'antique' IC cars from air-cooled to a modern water cooled engine onc

e, nothing stopping me from tearing all that crap out and putting in pure electric components, when this stuff is available off-the-shelf.

[ret5hd]

9. So if i stick a 100 gal tank in my trunk i can be REALLY efficient, right?

[Javaman]

10. What? nt

[ret5hd]

13. Well, if distance between refills/recharges is the yardstick, wouldn't a really huge tank...

be a winner?

[NNadir]

14. Let me see if I have this straight...

A super rich guy shipped his car across the Pacific Ocean on a diesel powered freighter to prove how green he is for driving 313 miles across a pristine desert on a dying continent?

The use of a single fuel load on this car is so amazing that loads of people who could never dream of owning this car - since it represents two or three times the per capita income of most Americans, never mind most people on earth - are posting on the internet about how beautiful this is?

If someone fills his or her gas tank, is that international news? If it was common of course, representing even one out of every, say, 1000 cars, even one out of every 10,000 would anybody care?

I must be missing something...

I think this is a horribly ugly tale. It is a precise measure of what is wrong with our mentality as we push over 300 ppm.

[wtmusic]

15. Stories like this help to dispel the "limited range" argument

against electric cars, which are cleaner than IC cars. Though most in the world could never dream of owning this car, the price of the technology is dropping and will continue to drop with investment in storage technology, which stories like this also foster.

The world would no doubt be a better place if we all chose to use public or alternate forms of transportation. For some it's not practical, many others will simply refuse. We can acknowledge that fact or pretend we can convert them, which does no one any good.

[Dreamer Tatum]

16. I just wish we had 313 miles of road in the US to do those tests here

One day, maybe we will have enough roads to see if a car can go 313 miles. We should dare to dream.

[Nederland]

19. Come on

Battery powered cars recharged by electricy coming from nuclear power plants represents the ONLY way we will see a reduction in greenhouse gases coming from transportation. Anything else is a pipedream by some anti-nuke fundy. I know, you want to see the carCULTure die. But be honest, it's not going to happen.

[AtheistCrusader]

22. You missed something.

He had to drive pretty much 32mph the whole 313 miles to do it.

An amazingly realistic example of the range of the vehicle, yes?