In September 2008 I first wrote here about electric vehicles and my plans to make my next car an EV. After over a decade of pining for one that was good enough, the market is finally coming around and within a year or two there should be lots of choices.
The 800-pound gorilla is Tesla Motors. They are a pure EV company, which really isn't quite what I'm looking for -- the systems engineer in me really likes the redundancy aspect of having a gasoline generator in a hybrid vehicle (aka an REEV), so that I can plug-in normally but in a pinch I can gas up. Especially for long trips. On the other hand, it's kind of silly to make a purchasing decision based on the 2% usage scenario. For long trips, rent a car! Anyway, this is all kind of pointless handwringing right now.
The Tesla Roadster is a slick, beautiful machine, and after 3+ years of salivating it is f i n a l l y reaching the streets. In the last few months they've finally started delivering units to their long-suffering customers, and they're now up to about a 100 deliveries per month. With each unit getting them over $100K in revenue when they deliver, that's going to very quickly get them in the black, and suddenly Detroit will have a real problem developing for them in sunny California.
Earlier this month I visited family in the San Francisco area and I decided to try to get down to the Tesla dealership (in Menlo Park) to get a look in person. Actually I wanted to see the Model S (more on that below) but I knew they wouldn't have any so I settled on just looking at a Roadster. Since they've finally cranked up the volume on production, they have more units to set aside for sales ops so there was a chance I'd be able to actually sit in one and maybe drive it around the block.
So I gave them a call and made an appointment. We showed up (thank you family :) ) right on time, the salesman had me sign a waiver, gave me a map and the keys, and said "have fun". Wait, what? Yes, he was letting me just take it out on the road by myself. Uhhhhhh ... OK!
I quickly snagged my brother-in-law for passenger seat ballast (kidding!) and we got familiar with the vehicle. You can read all about it everywhere else, but it definitely is a pocket rocket. Bolting from 0 to 60 MPH in four seconds, it's like acceleration isn't an issue anymore -- you just decide on a speed and BOOM you are there. One thing I had wondered was how annoying the braking feel woiuld be, since it uses regenerative braking for light to medium braking effort, and it was suprisingly unobtrusive. It just didn't bug me. What was noticeable was the coasting behavioir, because they have it dialed in to brake slightly when you take your foot off the accelerator.
I actually fit in it, too, (I'm 6' 2") which was a nice surprise. But visibility was pretty rotten -- I kept having to duck to see traffic lights. Anyway, at $109K it's not like I am seriously considering one of these, but it was really nice to get actual experience. Because I am quite serious now about making my next car an EV.
Which Tesla will be happy to supply. On March 26th they announced their second design, the Model S. Instead of a tiny sports car, this will be a sports sedan that can carry 4-5 adults, basically competing with luxury sports sedans like the BMW 5-series. It's also priced in that category at $57K, a number which will certainly get "refined" as they get closer to production. It got lots of attention:
But what was unveiled was just a prototype -- literally, there is ONE of these on the planet. Really what they are doing is getting the prototype out there so that the federal government will be unable to ignore it and will have to release some funds from the advanced car tech program that Congress approved last fall. I mean, if Tesla doesn't qualify for this, I don't know what does. Update 23-Jun-2009: Tesla has indeed today received the ATVM funding, all of the funding they requested! See press releases from DOE and Tesla. I love Steven Chu.
New Roadster owner Scott Painter wrote recently about Tesla's distribution model:
"[Tesla] also shirks all the traditional industry baggage by deciding to sell directly to buyers, rather than through independent dealers. Tesla owns its stores in Menlo Park and West Los Angeles, and everyone who works in the stores is a Tesla employee – no one works on commission. Although this doesn’t allow Tesla to open locations as fast as through a franchise dealership, it does allow Tesla to own 100 percent of the customer experience. This is one of the biggest frustration of traditional auto industry executives – they can build great products, but if customers have a bad experience at their local dealer, they often blame the automaker."
Very true! This is the #1 reason why I've ignored GM/Ford/Chrysler for all of my car purchases up to now. No matter how good the car is, I'm still going to have to deal with the local dealership, at least through the warranty period, and that's a deal breaker right there.
And it'll be a major hurdle for me to get over if I'm faced with choosing a domestic model (e.g. the Volt). I wonder if GM might try to handle the Volt at the corporate level like they did with the EV1 a decade ago, bypassing the dealers ...
Here's an interesting blog post by a Tesla VP summarizing all of the tax incentives in place (from both the federal and state governments) for people considering purchase of EV/hybrid vehicles. And here's a Georgia EPD page detailing one particular tax credit for ZEV's, including contact info for the guy at EPD who probably knows the most about that and any other tax credits available.
This past weekend the very first public charging station for Tesla opened up in Northern California. Here's a local newpaper article about it. It's probably going to take a decade before this is widespread, but it's a start.
If anyone here lives in the New York area, the Model S prototype is debuting in Manhattan on Thursday morning April 30th at the Plaza hotel (5th Ave and Central Park South). And Elon Musk is appearing on David Letterman on Wednesday night!
In the end, though, I'm still not sure if I want to go with a pure EV. I really wanted my next car to be a hybrid, so that I can gas up if needed and won't have problems with a long road trip a couple times a year. In another few years I think the technology will be there to support pure EV for long haul trips (better battery tech, battery swapout standards and stations, public charging stations, high voltage fast charging, etc.) but we're far from that right now. So I'm still going to be looking at the other hybrid options that start coming to market late this year and next. But I'll probably continue to spend far too much time keeping up with the news at the TeslaMotorsClub forum.
I leave you with two entertaining little nuggets:
