Tesla CyberTruck

n2o

WetGeek I agree. But as @kyrios already said just handing everyone a Tesla and charging them over night with 500 kW is not really going to make us become unicorns. But if the 50% of us that have their cars idle around most of the time have a self-charing car most of the time, it might help.

brent

Bruce-McL n2o WetGeek
Solar still not efficient for autos, it's sounds cool. and I harbor hope that this is mankinds's future. Nuclear is clean and powers many cities (and all of France I read?) but the uncomfortable spent rods and debris are never talked as well as uranium half life etc.
That being said the united states administration before this current one funded my friend 50% (a solar incentive program) of the $500,000 investment cost to make his roof covered in about 25-30 solar panels. The whole thing. He's wealthy,
Half a million dollars to escape the power company.
Still....
...solar, wind, hydrogen. Where are our brilliant minds to make these affordable and renewable for all? For some reason in 2019 I thought we'd be here by now.

You have to pulverize, frack, and use incendiary devices into the earth to create electricity.
You have to pulverize, frack, and use incendiary devices into the earth to extract crude ( petrol).

Which has the moral high ground?
He who contributes the least to climate change? Probably electricity. I am so confused about that, for sure.

edit: added crude for clarity, put petrol in italics

Bruce-McL

WetGeek It does sound cool. Instead of being installed on a truck though, it may be better to have those solar panels fixed to your roof and to buy a few extra batteries. That way the panels would be used optimally and the power they provide could help smooth out the demand for power on the power grid.

A guy with a family, two Teslas, and a Powerwall describes a typical day of his power generation and consumption here:

Of course other people's circumstances could be a lot different: weather, electricity use and costs, etc.

DataDrake

kyrios I never said there weren't issues with old and aging nuclear plants. Fukushima, for example, was the result of negligence, not poor design. Those reactors were well-designed to account for earthquakes and tsunamis. The issue was the greedy bastards running them not keeping them up to spec and that's why they failed in the first place. Nuclear needs more regulation, but is still the highest density energy source on the planet. Nothing else will come close for many many years.

Recycling needs more regulation, no surprises there. But this is just another problem we ignored for too long. Hybrids suffer from the same battery issues as electric vehicles, they are just smaller batteries. Also, aluminum air batteries are fully reusable and show a lot of promise. The only caveat is that they have to be replaced and refurbished to be recharged, which isn't quite feasible yet.

Hydrogen powered vehicles are a farce. They only exist because the fossil fuel industry knew that we would still use the most cost-effective means of producing hydrogen: steam reforming. This keeps us dependent on fossil fuels and helps them save face with the public, fooling us into thinking it's a better solution. And cobalt is another one of the rare-earth metals that you don't want to see us strip mining to acquire either. Most fuel cells use platinum in the catalysts which is just as bad. Today's designs just aren't any good and I don't see any of the research focused on solving these problems.

sgvd

@DataDrake Electric cars are not perfect, it is still a car and a waste of resources/energy if not really needed. But as a cyclists who has to ride behind them, I prefer any electric car for the smell 😁.
But to respond to one of your points, I think your point about peak demand is too harsh. Currently there are too few EVs to really impact the peak and when there are more it is expected they actually benefit the peak demand, as they can be used to supply in that time. Ideally we can use them for regulating most of the non-periodic changes, which fossil-fueles are incredibly bad at.
Since the bulk of the cars are used for relatively small distances, it is not logical to think that most would be non-stop charging whenever they are parked. My car has 40kWh and can do almost a week of driving for the average distance in my country. That can easily be done in off peak hours with room to spare to give back when the grid requires it.
(My opinion is mostly based on what I hear from the quasi-governmental grid companies, as they probably know best as they are directly affected. In my country they don't supply power, they just manage the grid and thus supply/demand matching.)

My car doesn't participate with the grid for two reasons, which are in my opinion the reasons why electric cars are still seen as a problem for the grid:

Technical: My car and charger are dumb. This is unfortunately the case for most cars and (home) chargers. Still looking for a cheap-ish way (e.g. raspberry pi) to make them smart.
Policy: My energy provider (and the government in my country) doesn't allow variable pricing. So there is 0 incentive to invest to make my car smarter and give back to the grid when demand (and hence price) is high.

DataDrake

sgvd I never said anything about peak demand. Maybe you have me confused with another poster. Nuclear power is baseline energy, as is coal, and in some places in the US, hydropower. Peak shaving is done with mostly natural gas, but is starting to be offset with renewables. As the number of EVs grows, the more the baseline energy matters because, on average, more power will be consumed constantly. Peak use can be offset by using high-power devices during off-peak hours. This also includes electric washers and dryers, not just EVs.

sgvd

@DataDrake You are right, I mistook you for @kyrios apparently. I will conveniently blame it on the lack of coffee if you don't mind 😅

Bruce-McL

We are getting away from the Tesla truck, thanks in part to me I'll admit.

People make mistakes. As a group, they make the same kind of mistakes over and over. One very human thing to do is make poor decisions about events in the future. A guy named Amos Tversky won a Nobel prize demonstrating this. Or you could just ask anyone who works in Advertising and Marketing.

This is one thing that bothers me about nuclear. "If everyone who runs this nuclear plant makes really good decisions and performs very well for the next 100 years or so..." Well, no. That's not going to happen. Building something (with a very high cost of failure) that requires that much discipline from human beings is not a good idea.

We wouldn't be here if another species didn't cause an environmental disaster a long time ago. I'm talking about those dumb anerobic bacteria that went and polluted their perfectly good methane atmosphere with all of that toxic oxygen. We're a lot smarter than anerobic bacteria. In order to create a sustainable economy and society, whatever comes after us may have to be a lot smarter than we are.

DataDrake

Bruce-McL Nuclear doesn't have to have an inherently high cost of failure. It's our fault for building large reactors that have unnecessarily large fallout zones. We should be building many, smaller, reactors based on modern nuclear reactor architectures that are significantly safer and cheaper than the old guard. These newer reactors are designed to stop running altogether, without electricity or human intervention, in the event of a potential meltdown. And I would say global warming is far more likely to be the environmental disaster that wipes us out than any potential fallout from nuclear reactors.

brent

Bruce-McL We are getting away from the Tesla truck, thanks in part to me I'll admit.

I'll own my share of getting away as well. Seems like a thread born to be gotten away from, though.
Panspermia was the first thing I thought of with your last paragraph. Which can't be proven or dis proven, and doesn't change a thing about your last paragraph, but fits for me..

To bring back to tesla again, I posit to you and DataDrake this: is nuclear possible to capture and implement in individual power plants (cars and trucks)? I don't keep up with the literature and clueless if this is even conceivable.

DataDrake

brent Nuclear powered vehicles? Feasible. It's more a question of safety and not putting uranium in the hands of bad people. I'd settle for burying one in my backyard though.

brent

DataDrake I know some defense crafts have their own power plants, and even more astonishing to me is desalinization capabilities. Electric cars need a charge. An ICE is self contained, just pour gas on it, engage starter, spark plugs do the rest. Even CNG needs an external source. If nuke required an on-board power plant with uranium for cars, I'd be scared too of the bad guys. Just wondering if it is a transferable energy like cng or electricity? Or could it be? The thought of a nuclear-charged tesla suv is a amusing to me. Like your backyard donor there...🙂

DataDrake

brent Nuclear power is usually leveraged by either directly converted thermal energy into electricity (RTG) or indirectly by boiling water to super-heated steam that runs generators. Nuclear vehicles would likely employ the former. NASA / JPL have already proposed using RTGs on space missions. So much so, that the recent novel-turned-film "The Martian" featured one prominently.

brent

DataDrake Appreciate your responses, thank you sincerely. There are obvious gaps in my research of nuclear in the context of being a consumer item or it's feasibility. Heck of a weird thing to google and not sure I'd trust the first of page info..

davidjharder

In an attempt to bring this back around, has anyone tried chucking steel balls at their car windows recently?

Bruce-McL

Justin 146,000 sales so far. Far more than I anticipated. At least that means 146,000 less ICEs on the road.

Tesla announced that the total is up to 200,000 deposits so far. On way of looking at this is as a twenty million dollar interest free loan. And it was generated by a preview party two years before deliveries start. Try doing that with your Kickstarter project!

caesar96

John-Poot

caesar96 Now that is an extremely disturbing picture.

bvdlingen

EbonJaeger is has hardly any moving parts, and there is less cabling compared to normal cars. Furthermore Tesla has an integrated cooling and airco system. All in all the tco should be a lot lower

EbonJaeger

bvdlingen is has hardly any moving parts, and there is less cabling compared to normal cars.

Citation needed, imo. Especially because damn near everything in that thing is electronic. Have fun when your electronic rear-view mirror stops working. On top of that, the entire body is steel plating, so when you do have to do work in there, have fun with that bit. And when that thing gets into a motor vehicle collision... whoo boy, that is not going to be a good day for anyone involved.

sgvd

bvdlingen I have to agree with EbonJaeger here. Just an example from my own experience; My current electric car's converter died (AC of the net to DC for the battery), which was a nice €2900 repair.
That it is not moving, doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't wear out. Also the engine is starting to misbehave (stops for a second every so often, which is quite long on the leftmost lane), so will probably have an expensive replacement of that as well somewhere soon.

Maybe in the grant scheme of things an electric car might be cheaper (the regular servicing is indeed way cheaper), but I am not experiencing it. Maybe someone has some trustworhy numbers on this, but I haven't seen them yet.

Edit: car is of 2013.

WetGeek

I'm really amused by Tesla's marketing, especially the video that shows the Tesla pickup pulling a Ford F150 around. It's pretty dramatic until you realize that it's NOT an indication of which truck is more powerful. It may simply be an indication of which truck is heavier.

The Ford truck has an aluminum bed that's designed to save weight. The Tesla is claimed to be made of bulletproof steel.
Rated towing capacity would probably be a better indication of which truck actually pulls harder. Or is more heavily loaded. I believe that such a demonstration could be easily modified to show the Ford pulling the Tesla around.

But you have to admit, it's a great advertising stunt!

WetGeek

WetGeek
I just found out another advantage that was given to the Tesla. It's not very apparent from the video that Tesla produced, but today I learned that the road was uphill. That applied even more weight to the Tesla's rear wheels, and removed it from the Ford's.

John-Poot

WetGeek Load up a Ford F350 4WD (the actual equivalent of Tesla) AND the Tesla, pick a freezing cold day, and then we'll see some vehicular combat:-)

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