mh-z | web-log

My personal philosophy is, if I’m going to get somewhere by car, I’d rather be the one driving it.

It’s nice, then, that my passengers always thank me for driving, which is something I would have wanted to do anyway.

I did get a lot of exercise, walking around the massive Convention Center. But this was a sales event, and we all know from the volume of commercials in every single medium just how much car companies advertise, and of course they’re not going to miss an event like this nor shy away from blatantly marketing their vehicles to consumers. So although I felt like I was just in a giant showroom at a giant car dealership which carried every major make of auto, and although uncharacteristically there were no pushy salesmen hovering about and attacking, the labels and the atmosphere made this just one big magazine ad brought to life, which I mean in a negative sense — not that car ads are particularly annoying or obtrusive, they’re just pretty useless as far as I’m concerned, and we live in a sea of them. I did get to see a Tesla Roadster (see Tesla Motors), but it was just sitting there, sitting pretty, as were all the cars. What the event sorely needed were more things interactive. Sure, I could get into many of the cars, but so what? There was one small driving simulation (triple-head monitors hooked up to a computer), but nothing that fancy or interesting. Certainly nothing anybody would wait in line for. So I’m not really sure, after all this, what exactly the point was. But it was an interesting experience.

Check out Tesla Motors. Their FAQ is somewhat enlightening, and the specs behind their first car give me knowledge of what must lie behind the plot of the movie “Who Killed the Electric Car”, which I haven’t seen. And now I don’t really need to see it, because I understand the issues at stake here. Tesla is building a car, which is not some prototype showroom model but a real car you can order today (if you have enough money; it’s expensive!), with very compelling specs. (And things can only get better from here.) The Tesla Roadster is a completely electric car which goes from 0 to 60 in 4 seconds. It has a range of 250 miles between recharging, and a full recharge will take about 3.5 hours. They repeatedly make the point in their FAQ that charge time isn’t really the issue; you’ll use one of these in your daily commute and simply leave it plugged in at right, like a cell phone. For most commutes, forgetting to plug it in for one or two or even three nights won’t make a difference; the battery will be fine. The only issue is that you wouldn’t be able to use this car for long trips; drive to Vegas and you probably won’t make it the whole way. (Stop for a 1-hour recharging break over lunch? Pack in the “extended capacity” battery before the trip?)

It seems that an electric car ought to be superior to a gasoline-powered car in almost every way. No transmission is really needed, since an electric motor provides the same torque output no matter how fast it’s spinning. The car doesn’t even need a reverse gear; the motor just turns backwards. The Tesla Roadster nonetheless implements a two-gear transmission; one can leave the car in second gear and drive normally without thinking about things. The first gear seems to be there just so the car can achieve that impressive 0-60 time, but if you drive that way all the time you’ll eat the battery and the range’ll be a lot less than 250 miles…

Something Tesla downplays in their FAQ is the availability of a conversion kit to create a plug-in hybrid out of a car such as the Toyota Prius. I’d be interested to see a head-to-head comparison (in terms of range, recharge time, and power) between (1) a Tesla Roadster, (2) a plug-in Prius (with an empty gas tank), (3) a plug-in Prius with a full gas tank (for increased range, but would add weight), and (4) a plug-in Prius with its gas tank and gasoline engine fully removed (to decrease weight for maximal efficiency).

I was filling up my Accord’s 15-gallon tank last night, and thinking about how big a 15-gallon tank really is. 15 gallons takes up a lot of space! Three of those big bottles that go atop the water cooler. I wonder if the volume of space taken up by the batteries in an electric car such as this one are less than 15 fluid gallons of volume… And if that’s the case, it’s not like battery space should really be such a huge issue when it comes to electric cars, and so old battery technology ought to have been workable. Who killed the electric car?

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See my friend Tony’s Documenting the conversion of a Scion xA gas car (ICE) to a fully electric car (BEV) project blog for more fun than a barrel of monkeys (which costs more than a barrel of oil, but you get more fun out of it than barrels of oil and monkeys, or even oily monkeys).

On Monday, I took the bus to work. Just felt like doing something different. Busing it takes an hour whereas driving takes half an hour. I’d planned to spend as much of the time as possible reading, and got through 30 pages of “The Know-It-All”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743250621. Not nearly as fast as I hope I can read without jarring bumps as the bus goes over pot-holey streets, without distracting announcements by the driver as we pass each stop, without time spent squirming in uncomfortable seats and glances out the window to check my stop isn’t nigh, and this isn’t a particularly cerebral book either (despite the title), but it’s something. It was nice not having to pay attention to traffic, wait for red lights, shift gears or flip endlessly through radio stations. There’s also that element of connectedness, of being part of the life of working Los Angeles, going about its daily business, not isolated in my own box. I think I’ll do it again tomorrow.