Fremont isn’t that big a city and I can easily see them driving less than 100-150 miles per shift. And that’s if they’re using it for patrolling rather than less driving intensive duties.
I like what Tesla is doing more than most posters here, but even I raised my eyebrows when I heard that Teslas were being purchased as police cruisers. At 200 km/hr, you're gonna burn through you batteries lickity split.
It makes a lot more sense to use EVs for delivery trucks, where you can predict the range, drive all day, and charge every night. Amazon recently announced that it is moving to this model. Amazon expects to make money on the changeover to electric delivery trucks. Anyone here think the hard-boiled business people at Amazon are dizzy? Not me.
BTW, have you heard Elon's latest "vision" for Tesla? He is pushing hard for full self-driving. He thinks he'll get there long before others. If that happens, there will be a window where Tesla has a monopoly on self-driving while other companies are catching up. At that point, Tesla is planning to create a robo-taxi fleet, and become a competitor for Uber and Lyft, with a cost structure that is something like 1/10th (or less) of what those companies will have to pay. Drivers cost money.
For the past three years, sales contracts for Telsa vehicles have included language prohibiting purchasers of self-driving Tesla vehicles from using their cars as self-driving taxi's for Uber, Lyft or anyone else except Tesla. In addition, leases for the Model 3 prohibit lessees from buying their cars at the end of the lease. Tesla plans to take them back,and use them in its robo-taxi fleet.
All of this is very interesting, of course, but that doesn't mean it will happen.
Source:
Tesla Autonomy Day - Robo Taxi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE&t=3h5m25s
Tesla Autonomy Day - Cost Structure
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE&t=3h12m11s
I seen that on the news, its discovered that their electric Tesla models they are using have Ultrafire batteries in them instead of good cells to cut & save costs.
I think it was the autonomy video I linked above where Elon admits that Tesla has used third-party batteries for the Tesla Powerwall, but not for its cars.
Edit – Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE&t=3h38m32s
You are right. I guess driving in a smaller are inside of a city wouldn’t use as much juice. I guess I don’t think about those things out where I live. Our entire county has maybe 8 officers patrolling a entire county. There are only 4 small cities in our county. The largest is less than 5,000 people and the smallest is less than 150. Only one has a 24hr police department. The other ones shut it down about 11pm or midnight.
So maybe not too good in a large county with a large area to patrol but perfectly acceptable in cities with smaller zones to patrol.
Must admit that I’m not particulary fond looking forward to drive a golf cart with a fixed roof.
But I came a long way in the technical evolution since both my grand dad’s were engine driver on steam loc’s.
Energy consumption (gas or E) is much higher at a steady 120mph than at a steady 30mph.
Even more if you are persuing a fast driving car while trying not to hit too much innocent bystanders.
I don’t really see what happened as a problem.
Sure the Tesla ran out of juice. But there were other police vehicles present to continue the chase.
And suppose the Tesla had been a gasoline vehicle that ran out of gas. Taking 4 minutes to refuel during a 120 mph car chase means you’re out of the chase anyways. You’re never going to catch back up after refueling so the end result is the same.
primetime is when the earth is finished?
Please. Remember. No. Politics. :innocent: :innocent: :innocent:
OMG. That’s great! :laughing:
Unless those problems are addressed and fixed, maybe.
Everyone seems to think that “alternative energy” is pristine and harmless, but it’s not. Wind turbines are bird-blenders that kill by the tens of thousands per year (addendum: each), and change wind patterns (and thus weather downstream). Geothermal sucks heat out from underneath and leads to contraction, causing (for now, small) earthquakes. Water power disrupts marine life, sometimes catastrophically. Solar uses noxious chemicals (and lots of energy) to produce the cells, and changes local weather and habitat (shading, heating, etc.). I won’t even get into solar-towers that instantly fry birds in midair if they happen to fly into any of the beams.
So wherever it comes from, electricity has its environmental costs, but it’s just trading one set of problems for another.
Here’s a bonus, though. All those “clean air” laws? They’re working! No more pea-soup fog in London, smog is dramatically clearing worldwide (except China and anywhere downstream), and the air is lots cleaner overall. The drawback, though, is what happens when you clean dirty windows that are covered with caked-on pollen, dirt, etc. It lets in lots more sunlight. You can see that before’n’after in your living-room, or just cleaning dirty headlights on your car. So sure, all that extra sunlight reaches the ground and… omgwtf… heats up the ground and oceans, raising temperatures! I can personally feel the difference on even cool days, being in shade and then in sunlight. I feel like an ant under a magnifying glass.
Frankly, the best solution would be nuclear, but not the old traditional way that leaves tons of radioactive ash, but IFRs (integral fast reactors) that can wring out most of the stored energy leaving almost low-level waste that doesn’t need excruciatingly hazardous handling and storage afterwards. In fact, IFRs can burn as fuel what’s now being dumped as waste. Ah, but that’s not “green”… :confounded:
Obviously it’s not pristine and harmless.
However, 6/10 is still better than 2/10, yes?
Wind turbines kill less birds than cats, and buildings, and planes. They kill 8.2 birds per turbine, not ten thousands:
https://naturecanada.ca/news/blog/wind-turbines-vs-turtles/
Solar is still way better than any other fossil fuel energy source.
Coal is radioactive and produces lots of dirty stuff from combustion, and probably kills a lot more things than solar, wind, and nuclear ever did.
A petroleum leak is way more damaging than a single concentrated source of solar panels from a manufacturer.
There’s saying truth, and serving some uninformed lies sprinkled with truth.
For a forum populated with people who dive into the details on cells on a regular basis, pretty amazed at the astonishing amount of incorrect information in this thread 
It’s not even worth de-bunking what’s been said in the first few posts as for people to be here in 2019 and still believing some of this tired old crap shows either:
- A total unwillingness to accept something new even in the face of overwhelming evidence
- Stupidity to the level that cannot be argued with.
Electric cars are our future, like it or not!
Yeah, my bad, I misremembered an article about birds in some migratory path going through those bird-blenders. People in the area were scooping up small piles of dead birds each day (>10k/yr), but that was one wind-farm. Overall, numbers vary (Audobon, USAToday, etc.), but it’s still a fractional-million per year.
Solar is great if it’s used on roofs, carports, other dead-space, but not so great on “solar farms”, where acres of greenery (which sucks in that bad ol’ CO2) is plow- or paved over to install them.
+1
In relation to electric cars, I’d love to see a Tesla Model 3 with a 100kWh battery pack.
Due to being slightly more energy dense than the 18650 Tesla S 100kWh battery pack, and being quite a bit more efficient, I’d be willing to bet we could get even closer to 450 miles.
I just looked up the conversion efficiency of chlorophyll (you can tell this is BLF) and got:
from Wikipedia:
Commercial solar cells routinely achieve 20% these days, so the solar panels could actually be better for the environment than the plants they displace, as long as the power they produce is displacing power from sources that emit carbon dioxide.
I do agree that it’s better to put solar panels on dead spaces like rooftops, though - that’s a win-win for power and plant life.
Much of the money, time and effort going into solar, wind, etc. power recently should have been put into nuclear fission 30 years ago. Unfortunately there was a concerted misinformation campaign and extensive lobbying to kill it. Current nuclear tech is leagues beyond what was available for most of the 20th century but now its been made too expensive to really switch in that direction in the US.
There is a reason most of Europe and China have already made a significant switch toward it, its the only power source remotely close to be able replacing our dependence on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.
Other renewable sources are a great supplement but they will NEVER achieve what the world needs on their own, even if tech advances in rapid leaps and bounds.
There have been too many highly publicized nuclear incidents for people to feel comfortable with fizzy power in their local neighborhood.
Maybe iffn it were Way Far Away they might get more comfortable….after awhile.
Same thing here, but for renewables.
Why did we throw money into fossil fuels when we could’ve developed better batteries, better storage methods, much more efficient vehicles, a better VHV infrastructure(750-1000kV), distributed country power generation, etc.