Tesla Motors' New Baby
2006-09-29 10:54PM PDT/Home
Tesla Motors came by Yahoo! last week to give a lunchtime talk about their brand spankin' new all electric sports car. So of course I had to go, and so did many of my coworkers, the room was packed.
Yes, yes, their two seat roadster'll do 0-60 in 4 seconds crushing nearly every other street legal car off the line. But more importantly, watching their presentation, it is pretty obvious all cars will be built like this in a decade or two. I'll say more about this in a bit.
To power the car, Tesla took ~7000 mobile phone/laptop battery cells and spent a lot of time building a custom housing for them that's safe. On the off chance one of them goes Sony, it just flames out in the casing and a little light goes off on the dash. It doesn't propagate to the next cell. The car doesn't catch fire. Keep in mind, we all drive around with a tank filled with a highly explosive liquid right now. So stop biting your nails already.
I'm guessing that they have about $15,000, maybe $20,000 worth of batteries in the car? And Tesla guarantees the batteries for 100,000 miles. You get a range of 250 miles on a charge, and after buying one of these $100,000+ babies they install a charger in your garage that can pull, ~70 amps from the main line in your house and will charge the "tank" in a few hours. It comes with a travel charger, but a typical outlet will take much much longer. At current electrical prices, charging at night (lower cost), they're quoting a penny a mile.
The whole power system is comprised of the battery "tank", an inverter which converts the direct current from the batteries into three phase power, a tiny little two speed transmission and the electric motor. The motor is a 250hp electric motor that's about the size of a small duffle-bag sized cylinder and sports one moving part. It also sports a nearly constant torque curve up to about 15,000 rpm. Maximum torque at 0. The brains of the system is what else? A stripped down version of Linux. Porsche should be very jealous, there's no slop in this system. The motor can be told to precisely put out whatever torque you want millisecond by millisecond.
So, about the future, the claim was that Li ion batteries increase in capacity at a rate of about 8% per year, and decrease in price about 5% a year. In 10 years that tank of $20,000 worth of batteries will be about $5,000 because you'll need less than half as many, and they'll cost almost half as much. At scale, and with 10 years of innovation behind it the inverter and motor will cost comparatively little. With few moving parts, this is a very simple car to repair. The only thing this electric car can't do is a road trip.
I think Tesla sees itself as the next Ford or GM. Their next model, which is in the planning stages will be a sedan. For this little lunchtime talk at Yahoo! they sent 6 people? Made me chuckle, because it said: too much VC funding.
The really funny part is that there's virtually nothing stopping, say Toyota, GM, Honda etc from building one of these cars, they could do it easily. They have done it, just not with Li ion batteries. In the end, Tesla Motors biggest competitive advantage is the almost total inability of large corporations to change who or what they think they are. Tesla should go far.