Panasonic Invests/Buys Into $30 Million in Tesla

Great news! I'm hoping to buy a Tesla sometime in the future. The new Model S looks amazing as well! As long as they do things like this, work on improving battery performance etc. then it's great! Sooner or later the batteries will get the car to go for 400+ miles a charge. That is what I'm waiting for! Electric cars ftw!

On a side note, has anybody seen the documentary about the death of Electric cars in the 90's?

@ivan, yes that documentary is very good.
@article: I freaking love Tesla. I hope they do well, they are pioneers in certain areas, but I feel as though if the electric sports car market really begins to have a growing demand, competition from other, more established car makers could put a hurting on Tesla if they do not continue to innovate and stand out from the crowd. On the other hand, competition is great for us, and hopefully these style of electric cars begin to decrease in price as more companies begin producing similar models.

Can I have a floating car on magnetic roads before I die please? That would be awesome.

I must ask however, if even a laptop battery can be extremely dangerous, how dangerous can these cars be? To turn a car into a high explosive bomb would someone only need to overvolt the cells?

While the Tesla certainly is an impressive car, after the top gear review I won't be buying one. Not until reliability is sorted. Over all tho you wonder is this tech will be licensed out to other manufactures also? Future is looking good for Tesla especially as an independant company

In America, we should really focus on natural gas to power our future... we have the resources here to do so for the next 100 years. With batteries, we are going to be dependent upon other nations for the resources much like we are with oil currently. Push natural gas, work on developing our own resources of rare earth minerals and then, maybe, we push this whole electric position.

I did and it was amazing the performance those cars had, too much of a pity that GM closed the plants, and the petroleum companies lobbied against it.
the documentary is called: Who Killed the Electric car?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6G [...] re=related

For a second, I thought Panasonic bought $30 million of nVidia Teslas.

As a whole, Tesla is not doing very well as a company. I really hope they turn things around though, as I am graduatign college with a BS in Mech E in the spring and wouldn't mind applying for a position there...

Kudos to Panasonic. Kudos to Telsa. Also it is probably a good thing that Panasonic as a 3rd Party powerpack supplier is involved since it would be beneficial to them to try and standardize the packs as much as possible.

@Travis: According to Tesla, they've done extensive testing on the safety of their battery packs. To give you an idea, one test was setting one of the cells on the very inside of the pack on fire and watched what happened. It was completely fine. The pack is designed in such a way that even if it lights on fire, gets hit in a collision, etc. there won't be any massive explosions or fires. Granted, this is what they are telling people, but I haven't heard of any horrific Telsa car collisions.

I agree the Model S does look like the killer electic car! my only concern is where do i get it fixed is Alabama?

"something that looks like this" (caption)...

Sports cars look great, and are completely impractical. They are going to need a minivan and sedan version before people will buy into it. Make one of these things survive a week of back an forth to work, add baseball/soccer practice for kids, and a trip to Costco on the weekend. Make everything fit, and comfortable for a mother with kids to travel in.

i love the concept and everything, but have any of you seen the price tag for a tesla...... even the more affordable (to be manufactured) model T would make Mr Job smile

Tesla is not doing well because no one sensible could afford to buy their cars, i dont mind pay a little extra for green tech but the price tag on those things are beyond extra, guess i'll settle for a Leaf....

Apperently you haven't seen the Model S. It's not a minivan (which honestly most people DON'T want) but it IS a sedan and a step in the right direction. FYI, most people prefer SUV's over minivans.

Not... really...
Many of the materials in batteries can be reclaimed/recycled, and there's many different ways of making batteries with various materials. Natural gas is non renewable and will run out eventually - and very quickly if we decided to use it to replace gasoline.

Let's take a quick chemistry lesson. Natural gas and gasoline are both a collection of various chemicals made from carbon and hydrogen. By breaking the bonds between carbon and hydrogen, energy is released, which we use. So the more hydrogen, the better. Here are the normal chemicals gasoline is made of:
C5H12 (Pentane)
C6H14 (Hexane)
C7H16 (Heptane)
C8H17 (Octane)
Everything there has a lot of hydrogen. Ever wondered why octane is always listed at a gas station? It holds the most energy (in the form of hydrogen), so having more of it in your gas means your gas has more energy.

Now lets look at the chemicals making up natural gas:
CH4 (Methane)
C2H6 (Ethane)
C3H8 (Propane)
C4H10 (Butane)
Understand now? That's a lot less hydrogen. Less hydrogen means less energy. Which means you need more of the stuff to get the same amount of energy. Which means we'll use up natural gas twice as fast as we use up gas. Gas is just another fossil fuel, which means we'll run out in the future again, and faster than we ran out of gas. It's just not feasible. It's a stop-gap measure at best.

Not quite related, but I think as long as I'm bringing up chemistry, I'll show why ethanol is so inefficient. Ethanol is C2H6O. It has a hydroxyl (OH) group in it. Breaking this off the carbon doesn't give off us any energy. The thing that makes us want to use ethanol so badly is the fact we can grow it in a field. Inefficiency doesn't matter as much if it gets the job done and you have an unlimited supply.

Wow I have never seen this argument made so clearly I've made it a thousand times with out much results, but seriously nicely done. I don't want to hijack the thread but why does Ethanol burn if breaking the bond doesn't work?

I'll admit too, that post was top notch. +1

Great comment supertrek, but I'd like to point out one other thing about ethanol - there's a catch: According to scientists in New York and California, it takes more energy to make ethanol than you get back in fuel savings. According to David Pimentel of Cornell University, it takes the equivalent of 1.29 gallons of gasoline to produce enough ethanol to replace one gallon of gasoline at the pump. Instead of making the nation more energy self-sufficient, ethanol production actually increases our need for oil and gas imports. Not to mention driving up food costs, etc.

But a current car, full of... you know, gas... doesn't concern you?

Big fan of Tesla and glad to hear that they are making strides to secure themselves.

The Model S looks amazing and has some great specs. I could easily replace my Toyota Camry with a Model S and the 300 mile battery pack option.

Oh how times have changed. Back in the 60's the top three automakers wanted to join forces to tackle the emissions problem. They wanted one universal solution that would keep cost super low and would have advanced emission control considerably. The government stepped in and said NO...

With current technology and especially if corn is the base material, it's absolutely true. Corn-based ethanol should be nothing more than a research tool; using corn for fuel will not be viable long-term. Even if we ignore the food issue, farmers have told me that corn is one of the least efficient output-per-acre crops. Switchgrass would be better (I'm going to leave hemp out of this for now), and the algae-based production that's being researched will be far and away the most cost-effective if it plays out.

Point is, whether electric or ethanol, relatively new technologies tend to be less efficient. As computer nerds we all know this. I hope Tesla can make it work; I dream of building a custom solar garage to go with a Tesla so that at least some of its power consumption is off the grid.

@chunkymonster

Camry decked out sets you back $28k (at max)
Model S $49k

$22k can be classified as easy.......

So wrong on so many levels. Where to start?

First of all, Octane as in CH3(CH2)6CH3 has no direct relation to the Octane Rating which is the numbers ranging from 85 to 92 at the pump. Octane Rating is a measure of resistance for all fuels to autoignition. Also, Octane does not hold the most energy. Decane CH3(CH2)8CH3 is even larger than Octane. There are probably even larger alkane hydrocarbons out there. Main point to take away here is that Octane =/= Octane Rating. For example Natural gas has an Octane Rating of 120-130, far in excess of that of petrol from the pump.

While you are correct that conventional gasoline has more energy content than natural gas, it is not double. The energy content of Conventional gasoline is 34.8 MJ/L, LPG (Liquefied Propane Gas) is 26.8 MJ/L, and LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) is 25.3 MJ/L. That means you have about a 25% loss of engine power and mileage using LPG or LPN over convention gasoline in an engine. Ask anyone who has converted their vehicle and these are pretty close to the real world results. Actually, due to the fact that LPG and LPN burns cleaner and more efficiently than conventional gasoline you get closer to a 20-15% loss. Consider that LPG is $1.50 per gallon, and it looks much better.

Where LNG and LPG truly win over conventional gasoline is the energy content by unit of weight. Conventional gasoline being 44.4 MJ/kg, LPG is 46 MJ/kg, and LNG is 55 MJ/kg. This is more important than volume because the same mileage of fuel weighs less if it is LPG or LNG over conventional gasoline.

Lets not also forget that LPG and LNG both have significantly less emissions than conventional gasoline.

Is LPG and LNG a replacement for conventional gas? As of today, its not, but having more LPG and LNG vehicles on the road today would be nice. Right now you have to convert your vehicles aftermarket, and you sometimes have to go to the next gas station to get LPG as not every station has it.

YES! ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3A [...] r_embedded )

Any good news for Tesla makes my day!

A couple points:
1)Lithium Battery energy is horribly heavy. Hydrocarbons are as previously stated are about >40 MJ/Kg. Practical Lithium batteries are

Lithium Ion Polymer Batteries are about 0.9 to 1.3 MJ/kg. That number may double in the next decade.

But you can recharge those 0.9 to 1.3MJ/Kg batteries at least a few hundred times, whereas the hydrocarbons becomes CO2.

As long as there doesn't happen an absolute surprise miracle in battery developments (something that isn't visible on the horizon, despite considerable research investments, not the least military, for many decades now) anybody that considers battery-powered electrical cars as the future, hasn't got his paddle in the water.

I like electric cars, i just don't think it's gonna work. They may claim the batteries are safe now, but I'm sure that's what laptop manufactures and apple thought about their products when they were first released. Also once demand for electric vehicles increase the resources for batteries are going to wain and prices will go up.

What of home electricity bills? People claim they barely increase, but that little increase in more homes over a period of time only increases demand from the power company who then will jack up the prices of their coal based power. I'm also sure those "free" charging station won't be free for very long.

Oh and god forbid if you forget to plug you car in, or run out of charge on the freeway due to faulty range meter.

BTW ethanol should not be mad from corn as corn is a valuable food source and ethanol production from corn only raises prices. Now if more companies do what Coors does with their left over beer manufacturing to make ethanol then we might have more of a solution. Bamboo is something we need to also look into for fuel production as well.

nice.