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Tesla
If you live in Ohio, your lawmakers are poised to allow you to purchase a Tesla from a sales center — without forcing you to drive outside the borders of the Buckeye State to do your eco-friendly spending.
But legislative efforts to placate the Ohio Automobile Dealers Association will nonetheless cap the number of sales offices Tesla is allowed to operate inside the state at three – and other auto manufacturers will be barred outright from hawking their wheel-spinning wares direct to buyers. Here’s the news, courtesy of NJTV:
An Ohio Senate committee approved a bill formally barring automakers from selling directly to consumers except for a maximum of three outlets for electric-car builder Tesla Motors Inc.
The measure was a compromise between the company and the Ohio Automobile Dealers Association, which had sought to block Tesla from selling without a middleman, according to state Sen. Scott Oelslager, the committee chairman.
Tesla, based in Palo Alto, Calif., operates Ohio stores in Columbus and Cincinnati and will be permitted to add a third as long as the company isn’t sold or acquired and doesn’t produce anything other than all-electric vehicles, under the legislation worked out yesterday.
Why are states getting into the strange business of banning a wildly hyped, pretty cool, awfully expensive electric car manufacturer? Tesla’s direct sales model has drawn opposition from car salesmen — middlemen who fear becoming superfluous as Tesla champions a direct-to-consumer auto-marketing model. That opposition has led to sales bans in five states and restrictions in two others.
In New Jersey, for example, Grist’s Ben Adler explains that Gov. Chris Christie’s administration is forcing the electric automaker to shut down its two sales offices. The promising news there is that a Democratic assemblymember recently introduced a bill that would unshackle Tesla from Christie’s new ban on its sales model.
Source
Tesla may be nearer to a compromise in Ohio, NJTV
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Ohio lawmakers: All right, folks, we guess it’s OK for you to buy Teslas
Mother Jones
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Tesla is having a lot of well-publicized problems selling its cars direct to the public. Most states mandate that cars can only be sold through independent dealers, and that’s shut Tesla out of the market in plenty of places, including ultra-free market bastions like Texas. Paul Waldman comments:
You’d think that if conservatives really believed all their rhetoric about the value of unfettered free markets, they would be all over this issue, advocating for Tesla’s side of the controversy and campaigning to break up the anti-free-enterprise car dealer oligopolies. But of course, we’re talking about Tesla, and liberals like electric cars, and therefore conservatives feel obligated to hate electric cars, so that probably won’t happen.
OK, sure, but here’s the thing: Teslas are also really expensive. That means they can only be purchased by rich people, and conservatives really like rich people. So this is a dilemma, no?
Now, I suppose that in Texas they don’t think much of any car that doesn’t run on refined hydrocarbon products, so maybe the cognitive dissonance there is less than I think. But North Carolina doesn’t have any oil. So what’s the deal there?
In any case, I want to know who’s buying these cars, anyway. Last Halloween, Marian and I decided to escape the house and eat out. In order to kill time, we walked around the shopping center we had gone to and I spied a Tesla store there. So I popped in and sat down in a Roadster. I didn’t even come close to fitting, and I’m only an inch or so taller than six feet. Am I just pickier than most tall people? Do tall people who buy Teslas slouch a lot? Or has Tesla simply abandoned the quarter of the market over six feet?
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In the wee morning hours on Thursday, just a few days after Tesla had installed its 70th Supercharger (it’s pretty much what it sounds like — an electric-car charger that works super fast), a team of the company’s employees departed from Los Angeles for an epic drive to New York City.
By Sunday morning, despite snow and freezing conditions, both Tesla Model S electric sedans had reached their destination.
The Tesla team was aiming to break a world record — not a record for speed, but for shortest charge time for an electric vehicle traveling across the U.S. Guinness officials have yet to rule on whether the team succeeded. While awaiting that verdict, Tesla found other things to brag about.
“By normal standards, most people would have considered the conditions that the Model S cars faced [on] Day Three as extreme,” the company wrote on its blog. “Heavy snowfall turned to sleet; morning ice gave way to afternoon slush; fog restricted visibility. In Ohio, the cars sped on in driving rain. In all cases, the Model S prevailed with ease, as did the newly installed Superchargers along the way in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Ohio.”
Maybe Consumer Reports was right.
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Cross Country Rally, Tesla
Cross Country Rally: Day Three, Tesla
Tesla stays chill to finish 3-day cross-country rally, CNET
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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Mother Jones
Yesterday afternoon, a Tesla Model S burst into flames on Washington State Route 167 outside Seattle. The auto blog Jalopnik quickly posted a video of the luxury electric car engulfed in a ball of fire and smoke. Tesla later noted that the fire hadn’t been spontaneous; the car had been hit by a metal object that damaged the battery pack. The car’s alert system detected a failure and told the driver to pull over, the driver wasn’t injured, and the fire never spread to the passenger compartment. Even so, at the close of the stock market yesterday, Tesla’s share price had fallen more than 6 percent (UPDATE: It dropped another 5 percent this morning).
The sell-off may have resulted from the video, from a ratings downgrade released the same day by an R.W. Baird stock analyst, or both. Either way, the experience shows how hard it can be for companies to stake their success on radical innovation. Behind investors’ (unfounded) hand-wringing over electrical fires or production hiccups is their unease over the basic fact that nobody has ever built anything like a Tesla before.
That Tesla has come this far—the value of its stock has increased six-fold since the Model S was named Motor Trend’s Car Of The Year—partly reflects the savvy of its co-founder and CEO Elon Musk. But it’s also a classic illustration of the value of federal subsidies, such as the $465 million loan that Tesla received from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2010. When you’re trying something really awesome and new, sometimes you need a little help from taxpayers. Just look up the early history of Google and Apple. Yet Musk, a self-described libertarian, has loudly criticized federal subsidies. I take a closer look at this sort of disconnect, which is pretty common in Silicon Valley circles, in my story in the September/October print issue, now online.
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Tesla MotorsCan’t afford to buy a Telsa Roadster? Head over to California and rent one.
Next time you’re visiting California, you can race along famous Highway 1 without making a sound: Hertz is adding electric vehicles manufactured by Silicon Valley-based Tesla Motors to its fleet. (Catch: You can only rent them from San Francisco and Los Angeles.)
You might want to book in advance, though. Hertz is starting with just five vehicles and two models: the Model S sedan and the Roadster.
Rentals start at $500 a day, plus extra for mileage over 75. From CNN:
“[S]hould customer demand warrant it, we will consider expanding availability to other locations,” Hertz spokeswoman Paula Rivera said in an email. …
The plug-in Model S has garnered rave reviews in recent months. It aced its first crash test last month, and Consumer Reports called the Model S the best car it had ever tested.
A Tesla spokeswoman said the automaker had “seen interest from rental car companies and fleet buyers who want to provide their customers access to a high-performance sedan, which also happens to be electric.”
You can be sure that a car has gone mainstream once Hertz offers it — though it should be noted that the Teslas are being offered through the company’s ”Dream Cars” line, which also offers Ferraris. But at least dream plug-ins are one step closer to becoming standard fare at rental car outlets across the country.
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Business & Technology
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A Better Place electric car. Photo: Rosenfeld Media
Better Place, an electric car startup backed by $850 million in private funding, has filed for bankruptcy. The company aimed to have 100,000 electric vehicles on the road in Israel and Denmark by 2010, but had deployed fewer than 1,000 of the Renault Fluence Z.E. cars in Israel and just 200 in Denmark to date. IEEE Spectrum reports:
Better Place’s bankruptcy filing this last weekend is a blow not merely to the company itself and its influential backers, but to the vision of an electrified automotive future. This is because Better Place had what seemed an extremely persuasive business model and a sensible plan for developing the plan in the marketplace.
Israel and Denmark were the first testing grounds, and Better Place had already built 21 battery swapping stations in Israel, which is about the size of New Jersey. With Israel’s small size, high gas prices and start-up friendly atmosphere, the country seemed like the perfect testing grounds for introducing Better Place, the New York Times writes. But while Better Place did contend with some delays, ultimately it seems that people simply were not interested in buying the cars.
The company filed for liquidation on Sunday, citing financial difficulties. Better Place’s chief executive, Dan Cohen, spoke with the Times:
Mr. Cohen said on Sunday that the vision and the model had been right, but that the pace of market penetration had not lived up to expectations. Without a large injection of cash, he said, Better Place was unable to continue its operations.
Meanwhile, Fisker Automotive, another significant player in electric car ventures that received significant U.S. federal backing, appears to be on the edge of collapse. The Times reports, in a separate story:
On the surface, Fisker had all the trappings of a potential player in the emerging electric car industry.
Serious problems emerged almost as soon as the car hit the market.
Fisker, with its technical problems, management turmoil and mounting losses, offers a cautionary tale in the fiercely competitive arena of alternative-fuel vehicles and of government subsidies for start-up businesses.
Bankruptcy now appears unavoidable, and a political reckoning is coming.
Not every electric car is crashing, however. Tesla, whose Model S won MotorTrend’s 2013 Car of the Year award, continues to shine. The company recently paid off its Department of Energy loans nearly 10 years early, had its first profitable quarter and is enjoying skyrocketing stock prices.
More from Smithsonian.com:
Seven Reasons to Believe Electric Cars Are Getting in Gear
Electric Cars Won’t Save Us From Climate Change
Originally posted here –
One Ambitious Electric Car Venture Just Tanked, But Zero-Emissions Vehicles Aren’t Dead
Here’s the latest installment in the great war between Tesla Motors and The New York Times, launched after a Times reporter chronicled a troubled test drive of Tesla’s all-electric sedan. For background, see here; for additional commentary, just turn on your computer. There have been dozens of posts on the subject, from the Times’ public editor, GigaOm, Gawker, MIT Technology Review, Jalopnik. But the place to start is where our previous piece left off: with a post on the Tesla blog responding to the Times’ claims, written by chair Elon Musk.
You may have heard recently about an article written by John Broder from The New York Times that makes numerous claims about the performance of the Model S. We are upset by this article because it does not factually represent Tesla technology, which is designed and tested to operate well in both hot and cold climates. …
When Tesla first approached The New York Times about doing this story, it was supposed to be focused on future advancements in our Supercharger technology. There was no need to write a story about existing Superchargers on the East Coast, as that had already been done by Consumer Reports with no problems! We assumed that the reporter would be fair and impartial, as has been our experience with The New York Times, an organization that prides itself on journalistic integrity. As a result, we did not think to read his past articles and were unaware of his outright disdain for electric cars. We were played for a fool and as a result, let down the cause of electric vehicles. For that, I am deeply sorry.
It is not clear for whom Musk feels sorry, but it is quite clear whose feelings have been hurt: his own. It’s clear in the emotion behind his post, emotion that he bolsters with nine bullet-pointed counterarguments, five graphs of data from the car, two Google maps, and one annotated graphic from the Times article.
The Tesla Model S, in a sunnier climate.
Those reading Broder’s review were given the impression of a vehicle not ready for the rigors of highway travel — if not of a vehicle that had a flawed power-management system. Both Broder and Musk suggest that the cold weather during Broder’s journey from D.C. to the Boston area reduced its range, but Broder suggests that the car failed to give him accurate information about that reduction.
Oddly, this central premise is only a small part of Musk’s response — a response that, as the above-linked Gawker article notes, has been seen by many as definitive, a data-based refutation of Broder’s claims. After all, look at this chart:
Broder’s article claims he set his cruise control at 54; it was actually at 60. He said he was driving 45 on the highway; it was more like 53. At one point he exceeded 80 miles an hour! The impression you’re meant to get here is that Broder misled his readers into thinking he took extreme measures to avoid draining the car’s battery and still it failed. Nope, says Musk, pointing at the chart. His numbers were off!
What’s missed, though, is the implication of that data for an objective reader. Broder did set his cruise control at about 60 mph for about 100 miles. He spent another 50 driving at just over 50 mph. Almost all of Broder’s driving was on highways, as was intended in the test drive. Is it actually a win for Musk to show that Broder drove at 50-60 mph on the interstate instead of 45-54?
Musk’s post uses a common rhetorical tactic: overwhelming the audience with small refutations of unimportant points to give an impression of overall victory. The Atlantic Wire has a graph-by-graph breakdown of how strong and important each point is to Musk’s case; on the whole, they aren’t that important.
One commonly cited point from Musk’s post suggests that Broder drove in circles at a rest-stop charging station. “When the Model S valiantly refused to die,” Musk writes, Broder “eventually plugged it in.” Musk offers a graph that shows no circling, no distance, just faster and slower driving. Broder has already responded to this claim: He was circling the rest stop trying to find the charging station. The graph loses.
Elon Musk is a smart man. He understands the damage the Times review did to his company’s reputation. He’d hoped, as noted above, that the paper would report “on future advancements in our Supercharger technology,” those free charging stations that Broder tried to reach — not do a trial that Consumer Reports had already completed to his satisfaction. When Broder and the Times didn’t comply, Musk responded forcefully and, if the online sentiment is any gauge, successfully.
Even by the standards of Musk’s data, the problem lies with Broder’s experience, not his reporting. It’s not a driver’s job to make sure the car works perfectly; it’s Musk’s job, Tesla’s. The problem isn’t whether Broder spent 47 minutes charging the car instead of 58, as Musk ridiculously suggests; it’s that electric vehicles are competing with perceptions and infrastructure determined by traditional cars.
Broder is expected to release a response to Musk’s criticisms this afternoon. It will once and for all clearly settle who the winner is in this fight: gasoline.
Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.
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Tesla offers incomplete, misdirected response to New York Times critique
About a third of the electric cars in the U.S. are spinning on California roads, but the state still has much work to do to build the charging infrastructure to support them.
There are about 1,000 public chargers in the state right now, and New Jersey-based NRG is poised to install 200 fast chargers and the wiring for 10,000 more regular chargers throughout the state by 2016. A fast charger can juice up a vehicle in as little as 15 minutes, while the regular kind can take hours. But building up the infrastructure isn’t simple, as KQED reports:
Still, a multitude of challenges face NRG and other charging companies, like Bay Area-based ChargePoint andEcotality. Fast chargers produce very high voltage. They require complicated permitting. And they cost upward of $40,000 each.
Right now, the financials don’t add up says NRG’s Terry O’Day.
“The public charging infrastructure is extraordinarily expensive and there aren’t enough cars right now so there isn’t an effective business model to make the investment work,” he says.
But that charging investment is vital if more Californians are going to start buying and driving electric cars.
John O’Dell, Senior Editor at Edmunds.com says for electric cars to catch on its vital to have a reliable charging network.
“Public charging infrastructure is critical to the widespread acceptance of plug-in and particularly battery electric vehicles. Because without public chargers you basically have a fairly short leash on your vehicle and you are not going to be willing to drive it long distances.”
To complicate matters, companies have developed competing charging standards. E.g., you can’t just charge your Tesla at any old charger — it has to be a proprietary Tesla charger. The CEO of one Silicon Valley charging company describes the whole situation as “somewhat of a mess.”
Still, what the state might lack in competence in makes up for in enthusiasm. Despite all the problems, the number of fast chargers is California is expected to quadruple over the next year.
Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for
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