I feel like Tesla is poised to be the Apple of cars.
It's better than four hours (or 12) but it's several orders of magnitude (yes, I am using it correctly) worse than hitting a gas station. I want an electric car so I can burn Pennsylvania hydrocarbons and give the finger to the whackjobs in the mideast, but I live in a small town and drive a very predictable and constrained circuit. For most people it's not gonna work. -XC
I'd say it's about 10x faster. So isn't that one order of magnitude? Unless you are base 2 or something. :) Except for big city dwellers, for most single car households, I don't think it works yet. But we could easily get by with one electric car. One thing I like about electric cars and hybrids is that they are so much quieter. We live on a hill, and there is such a difference when cars are going up it.It's better than four hours (or 12) but it's several orders of magnitude (yes, I am using it correctly) worse than hitting a gas station.
I wasn't just calculating gas-up time, which would be about 5 minutes max for 150 miles (3-6 gallons at 2-3 gpm) but time to get to the station, etc. I figure that you're going to have 25x to 50x more gas than electric charging stations, even in a dense urban environment, so you'll have to fill up sooner rather than later, drive farther, etc. Don't forget, if there are three cars in front of you at a single pump you're waiting <10 minutes max, but if you're at a 45 minute "supercharge" station it's almost two hours. I didn't even try to run a "napkin" calculation in my head. So, yeah, several orders of magnitude I betcha. -XC PS - Wait until they put "gas tax" on the electricity you use. Remember, that's how roads are (mostly) paid for. A lot of the delta will disappear. As bio-diesel owners have found out the hard way.
So, I just ran some numbers in my head.... I drove SFO to IAD with a friend a few years ago - it's pretty mush a straight 2,800 mile shot. We did it in 40 hours, give or take, over 2.5 days. If you did that in a Tesla you'd make a dozen (minimum @ 240 miles range) pit stops of 45 minutes each. Forgetting everything else, that's 9 hours. Or a 25% time penalty. Assuming you could make through WY, etc.... -XC
A half hour can get you 150 miles. Not too shabby, a half hour isn't that much time these days. Especially when you consider that being stuck in Folsom recharging your battery no longer means you have to be inactive. I'm amazed at how much I can get done these days sitting at an airport gate waiting to travel. Sometimes a 30 minute break is much welcomed. I've never seen a Tesla car before in person, yet alone drive one. I'd very much like to. Have you?
I want this company to go-go-go. I have yet to see one in living color. It is an uneasy market: So I guess they had less revenue than everyone thought they should but still did well enough to push the new model year?Q2 revenue that was below consensus but beat on the bottom line, and reaffirmed its outlook for the year.
Sounds that way to me. More often than not the "consensus" is a number put forth to sure-up valuations at the time of announcement. Everybody wants double digit growth but in an industry like this, in an economy like this, avoiding the red should be applauded. If they're doing well enough to post those numbers and reinvest in things like charging stations across the country, they will be sitting pretty when the economy rebounds, the upper-middle class re-emerges and more people can afford a $60k car.