A significant achievement today from Tesla Motors, as described over at their Blog:

"With this milestone, the Tesla Roadster is the only zero emission electric vehicle in production today"

If things go as planned, a trickle of Tesla Roadsters will start to make their way to all those celebrities trying to do good things with their wads of cash when they're not using their private jets to get around the world. A few well-placed news pieces and endorsements could kick things into overdrive.

Here's an article describing a paper which compares the various forms of automobiles in terms of their energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. This picture says it all. Battery-Electric Vehicles (BEVs) are the most efficient and cleanest means of locomotion when you compare end-to-end (well-to-wheel). Unremarkably, big automotive manufacturers have been focused on hybrids and hydrogen-powered cars as far-future fuel options - despite some of those technologies actually being worse compared to combustible engines when you consider the costs of producing and consuming the fuel. This is because fuel companies want to stay in business and they need time to convert their infrastructure from delivering petroleum-based fuel to delivering hydrogen fuel. They would hate it if a large percentage of households suddenly could power their vehicles with grid power. And the power companies would hate it if a large percentage of households suddenly got their power from the sun.

It's always scary when large and slow-moving industries are threatened like this. I fear for Tesla Motors.

§441 · March 17, 2008 · Life · Tags: , · [Print]

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