In 3 days the world will change.

Elon Musk who is being heavily ridiculed on the internet right now will succeed at producing 5,000 electric cars per week. It will be a serious death blow to the toxic sludge that the system has been running on for the past century also known as oil. Every time an electric car is bought will be like a giant middle finger to the current system with all it's wars, oil oligarchs and oppressive regimes. Hello future.

 

Without significant and immediate investment in sustainable electricity generation, I fear that we're just going to move from relying on oil to relying on coal and natural gas.

I really want to like Elon Musk, and I think he's generally doing things for the right reasons, but he also just seems like kind of an egotistical dick. When presented with evidence of the abysmal working conditions in his Tesla plant, he brushed it off as a reporter with an agenda to sell ads for big oil, even though the organization doing the reporting is a well respected non-profit.

 

We'll still rely on fossil fuels to a large extent for electricity, but with battery storage energy will be used much more wisely. The electrical grid capacity is actually double what it needs to be right now to accommodate peak energy usage between 4-8pm. Batteries will be able to store that needed extra energy every day. Also, when fossil fuels are used to produce electricity it's much more efficient. An internal combustion engine wastes 65% of the energy.

I think it's a good sign that Tesla has recently recieved so many negative news stories. To me it shows they're disrupting things.

 

Be a minimalist . You do not deserve energy entitlement . Get
down low , friends .

 

Is Elon Musk going to build charging stations across the continent? On a road trip will I have to wait around for hours while my car's batteries charge?

 

Yes...

Yes...

 

I'll be sticking to my diesel truck thanks. I'll see you eCar folks in a few hours after a recharge. If you can keep up with me.

 

And how many charging stations will there have to be anyway? To fill up with gas takes a couple of minutes and then the next guy pulls in. You can't have lines of people waiting for hours to pull up to a charging station. To offset the wait we'd need God knows how many stations. Not feasible for long distance travel I say.

 

What is the environmental fall out from building that many cars a week? What becomes of the millions of dead batteries?

 

WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!

 

I like what he's doing with the Boring Company and high speed transit myself

I like the idea of electric cars but the battery and of course the electricity have to be sourced somewhere, so I dont think they're the best alternative to traditional gasoline fueled vehicles. Not that there's really a better alternative right now.

Rapid mass transit is cool though

 

There's a car that runs on water man.......No! No! I'm tellin' you it runs on..........water man!

 

Some years ago The Science Channel showed a guy who had retrofitted a VW Bug so that it ran on compressed air. The exhaust was simply cold air. I can't remember if the show got into efficiency or how many miles between charges. It might be the thing for short jaunts around town.

 

Yes.


You can charge 250 miles of range using the superchargers in about 40 minutes and it's free if you have a model S or X. With a model 3 it costs about half the price of gas.

 

The Tesla roadster is the fastest production car ever built with a top speed of 250mph. It can accelerate to 60mph in 1.9 sec and has a range of 620 miles.

 

Looks like if you're in Arkansas, east Texas or New Mexico you're out of luck.

 

Underground tunnels make so much sense in cities like L.A. He wants to decrease the tunnel size to lessen cost, increase the speed of drilling to 1/3 walking pace so a tunnel from L.A. to San Francisco could be dug in a few weeks. More tunnels could easily be added to meet growing demand and there's no noise and pollution on the surface. I used the mass transit system in Boston before and was super impressed. It's the way to go.

The positive with batteries is that electricity can be sourced from anywhere. Here in Seattle it's 90% hydroelectric. In L.A. solar would make more sense. Plus, we wouldn't be so dependent on oil rich countries like Saudi Arabia or Russia. Also, electric cars don't emit carbon monoxide and other poisonous substances that people have to breathe everyday.

 

Here's a better map.

 

Yes we are.

 

They will just be replacing old gas cars. I actually think there will be less cars overall in the future as autonomous vehicles become more main stream and mass transit is expanded. It will be much cheaper to use cars as a service. The batteries can be recycled for their valuable materials ideally at one of the gigafactories. Also, lithium ion batteries have such slow degradation they can be given a second life as stationary storage.