Yes, this got a bit out of hand...
But the criminal would still get away in those 4 minutes, so is the electric car really to blame or is it the officer for letting the "fuel" get so low? The Model S can offer a range similar to gas-powered cars (370 miles for the long range version, but 250 miles for the base model), so this story is really no different than if the officer had run out of gas in the middle of a pursuit. Sure, the gas cruiser can be refilled easier and faster, but the bad guy gets away regardless.
Or....
They do what Police are supposed to do and start intercepting getaway vectors until they can roadblock or spike strip the runner :) . A single pursuing officer isn't the best strategy even if they've got 100 gallons of gas in the tank.
In fact, that's what happened here. Other units were called to intercept, the chase was called off for public safety, and then the culprit crashed and was captured. The
Low Battery story (the OP link didn't work for me) was actually quite positive about the Tesla police cruiser, suggesting that this particular situation was rare since the cruiser was normally charged to a higher level before a shift and that they normally lasted an entire 11-hour shift with capacity to spare. Their words, not mine.
Some of the comments above suggest that some of you are not familiar with Teslas in the same way that many consumers are not yet familiar with modern LED flashlights.
Electric cars may not be the best choice for
every police force, but wouldn't it be nice to have a car that's more powerful than pretty much
every gasoline car on the road.
A high-end Model S can overtake pretty much any gas automobile in the world, including many race cars. They're fast as f*ck :STEVE: . In fact, many police departments are interested in electric cars
because they're so fast; they make excellent interceptors. And, since the police drive their cars so much, they can actually
achieve the savings promised by electric vehicles; most consumers would have to drive a Tesla for a decade just to break even.
Yes, it's true that electric vehicles have to "consume" their range in order to cool or heat the vehicle occupants or even to cool or heat the
battery itself (yup, it will even sit and cool or heat itself all day in the parking lot), but they are
still more efficient than any gasoline vehicle, even in cold or hot climates. That "waste heat" that you recover to heat the occupants in a gas vehicle represents more energy than is used to move the vehicle and its occupants.
If you lose a dollar per minute out your car window, is it a superior technology if you can recover 10% of that for some useful purpose? The electric car simply closes the window. Unfortunately, the electric car costs substantially more and takes hours to refuel. Those are downsides, but they do not make electric cars "stupid" or some sort of hoax.
A Tesla Model 3, for example, is eventually cheaper to own than a comparable gasoline car, but "eventually" here means possibly 9-10 years for the average driver :( .
I'm no electric car nut, but I do try to be objective about them. The reality is that we should have built cities that required less driving around in the first place ;) . Moving workers out into suburbs was a stupid move brought about by savvy marketing of the "English country estate", though our version is of course just a tiny border of lawn surrounding a vinyl-covered house sitting alongside a hundred identical houses, each with their own borders of lawn. Americans feel
entitled to their ever-growing automobiles and the fuels that power them. I've adored cars, especially fast ones, my entire life, but I'm still willing to admit that cars are probably the most destructive technology ever invented.
To my knowledge, we've yet to see compressed air vehicles with viable range, though I'm always interested in these technologies. Personally, I liked the concept of
Elio Motors (way more practical and also more ecologically-friendly than a Tesla), but they made a lot of mistakes (like having 3 wheels instead of 4, thus requiring a motorcycle license) and never got the car onto the market while it was relevant :( . Rather than try to start a million-unit-per-year car company from scratch, I think that a boutique company might eventually grow large enough to offer Elio-style vehicles. Some electric bicycle companies are now producing enclosed vehicles with space for passengers and cargo, for example.
Unfortunately, consumers are still being told that heavier vehicles are safer for their children (and thus a threat to me and mine as a I drive a small car). While
size can add safety thanks to larger crumple zones, increased
weight is actually more dangerous, both for people inside and outside the vehicle. It's downright stupid to be in an arms race where those that can afford larger vehicles are safer than those who cannot, yet even <<
a top U.S. leader>> has recently been telling people that they should drive "tanks" in order to protect their families. Tell that to Formula One drivers, whose cars are the lightest they can possibly be while also protecting them from injury in incredibly violent crashes.
I'll drive a small vehicle until I'm too old to drive and my small vehicle is metaphorically a huge middle-finger to all of the massive vehicles around me on the road which I cannot see around and which will easily kill me in a collision. I simply won't play their game.
I do drive a pickup truck as well, but it's
actually for farming, not for making me feel more secure as I drive around the urban jungle. I can't take cattle to market with my car ;) . The truck guzzles gas like crazy, so I have zero desire to casually drive it around. I certainly
wish it were electric. That would be useful, actually, since farmers don't typically drive trucks for super-long distances; they usually do daily chores with them.
Though they are now seen as "old-fashioned" to the Tesla crowd, Hybrids are actually the best combination of efficiency, cost, and reliability of available full-size-vehicle technologies. Hybrids are effectively
twice as efficient as any gasoline car on the road, which also means that gasoline cars would be just as efficient if they contained twice as many passengers (ride-sharing is more efficient than
any technological solution and walking or biking
effectively an
infinite improvement beyond that).
For example, the Toyota Prius has been around for a long time and has proven to require almost no maintenance and have the
lowest long-term ownership cost of any automobile on the market. People initially warned that the batteries would need replacement every few years, but in reality the battery packs typically last longer than the cars themselves. In other words, the car will rust apart before the battery pack is dead.
The current Camry was designed as a hybrid and they merely leave out the hybrid parts to make the non-hybrid Camry, so I don't understand why people even buy the non-hybrid version; the hybrid pays for itself rapidly in typical urban driving
and REDUCES vehicle maintenance. No-brainer, IMO. The only reason Toyota sells non-hybrid Camry's is because consumers aren't very bright and can't do basic math. Oh, and my sister just bought a non-hybrid Camry :FACEPALM: .
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Electric cars are also seeing excellent battery life, mainly because those cells are treated
far better than those in phones. (I
despise the total sacrifice of battery life in order to get an extra 15 minutes of runtime. I'm disgusted that consumers accept and even
prefer that tradeoff, as it means that my many-hundred-dollar phone, which of course has a non-replaceable battery, is basically designed to fail after only a few years. If they charged to only 4.10V or something, our phones would last 2-3 times longer.)