Tesla wouldn't have existed if it were not for the mortgaging bubble. $100,000 super electric car for investment bankers, LOL. The Fed should nationalize Tesla and transfer the battery research department to GM; enough resources has been wasted on building a car for the rich and not one that can make electric bus more common place.

@pei-chen
LOL... Tesla came from nowhere and built that car from the ground up (using cells from laptop batteries and custom designed computers to manage the cells) while Detroit sat on their collective a**es and kept pushing suvs and the same old 20-25mpg sedans. Detroit kept claiming it couldn't be done (even with all their cash at the time) and one man manged to do it. the plan from the start was build the roadster, collect capital from the rich eco friendly people and dump it back into the development of cheaper even more advanced models...lets see where did gm's money go? ceo's pocket books? private jets?

What, birkenstock-wearing malnutritioned greenies don't have $100,000 to buy a car from their barrista jobs?

Whaaaat?

Yes, Tesla's are expensive and for the rich.
The latest and greatest technologies always find themselves in expensive products first. However, as production picks up and cash flow increases manufacturings and engineering obstacles to low cost are eventually solved.
GM, Ford, Chyrsler wasted over $6 billion of the tax payers money in a joint venture with the govt. to build an electric car. When their lobbying efforts to kill the project finally succeeded, GM couldn't ship all those hundreds of EV1's to the crusher fast enough. Toyota Honda, however, panicked about an impending domination of the big three in alternate technology vehicles and raced to bring their hybrids to the market.
That such a small firm like Tesla could make an ecomomically viable electric vehicle speaks volumes about the big-3's lack of foresight, and unwillingness to change from making gas guzzling SUVs.

I guess Pei-Chen would prefer GM take over so that they can outsource the assembly line to Mexico to save money, and still charge $100k. Let's bailout Tesla, Honda and Toyota, all 3 are far more American than the big 3s 50% American parts + assembled in Mexico/Canada P.O.S. vehicles. Some Honda/Toyota vehicles have 90%+ American made parts, and are assembled here, the big 3 are just an epic fail.

Tesla's car was only so expensive because of the materials that needed to be used in it. And GM canceled their electric car, because of the same problems: it would have been E X P E N S I V E, underlined and bolded 3 times.

The way GM handles their finances, they'd probably end up spending more money on each car built than vw does when building a veyron (which is excessive) .... If GM is to make an alternative car, they should buy a license to produce cars based on Honda's fcx. GM makes a lot of brilliant cars, but their management has always been poor at best. And somehow they always end up making the wrong choices, so even their most brilliant cars are somehow mundane, breaking down, ugly or simply too expensive.

the future is in on demand hydrogen from water, not electricity...think long term...

I wrote my thesis on building a hydrogen economy. It can be done. For all those touting how inefficient it is to procure usable hydrogen, how efficient are automobile combustion engines at extracting the energy from the fuel? It would be far more efficient to use electric generators who specialize in energy efficiency to produce the electricity to power electric vehicles, or produce hydrogen powered vehicles. Pure electric vehicles would be the best with regards to efficiency, but they are very cost prohibitive for the average consumer. Building a Hydrogen powered vehicle would only require a need to make a few modifications to existing combustion engines (lubrication systems because gasoline acts as a lubricant whereas hydrogen gas does not). You could even have dual fuel, switching from hydrogen to regular gasoline if you run out of either. It can be done, unfortunately the powers that be will not let that happen. The best containers for stably storing hydrogen (metal hydride) are for some reason, nearly impossible to acquire for consumer use. Google Jack Nicholson and hydrogen. This concept perfectly displayed in the 70s...

Nuke plants + water = abundant hydrogen = cheap, portable power So, ya, i agree... it is possible.

The problem is getting the greenies to wrap their un-open minds around the fact that nuclear (pronounced nuke-you-ler for Bush fanatics) is actually far less polluting than any other source of energy.

Conservatives love nuclear because the majority of the contracts would go to the arms industry. They are too close-minded with their love of nuclear powered supercarriers and submarines to consider the disadvantages.

Nuclear power is less polluting than other sources IF you ignore the fact that there is no good way to dispose of the waste and old reactors, some of which has a half-life in excess of 100K years. Dismantling old plants is also extremely expensive. Does the construction/disassembly costs really justify the benefits? Hard to say.

A far better solution is solar and bio-algae. Solar cells are making huge leaps in cost reduction and longevity. Bio algae (theoritically) has a very good fuel yield, has a staggeringly high growth rate (so it doesn't take up valuable farm space) and what can not be turned to fuel can be used to make plastics, fibers and even food. Also it is carbon neutral. What ever CO2 is generated by burning the derived fuel is soaked back up by the algae.

Wind power is an excellent short term solution for decreasing our dependence on foreign oil.

But how large a panel do you need to produce the voltage required to make a solar powered vehical viable.

And you're talking about dismantling a nuclear power plant. 1) We're not talking about plants. We're talking about nuke powered cars. And 2) How long is a nuke plant supposed to last? Why would you dismantle it and not maintain it? Waste, yeah, that's another issue, but not one that can't be addressed.

That's vehicle...sorry about that.

By solar power I meant solar farms, not solar powered vehicles. They can be used to produce the hydrogen or power up the Li-ion batteries (when they soon become commercially viable).

Nuclear powered vehicles? That brings me back to a discussion I had recently...
I have several relatives working in the shipping industry in both the economic and engineering aspects. I was asking about nuclear powered tankers and container ships. They said the idea was once considered and has been seriously evaluated. Even if you put aside the red-tape, the economic costs of contruction, decommissioning and maintenance are huge and simply do not justify the fuel savings. Even the French are abandoning their nuclear powered aircraft-carrier for cost reasons. It's replacement is of the same size but will be conventionally powered. If ships can't be economically nuclear powered I don't see what chance road going vehicles have.

A nuclear power plant last 30 to 40 years. Why dismantle and not maintain it? A nuclear reactor is not like an office building. You just can't send people inside and fix all those pipings, replace worn out graphite, cadmium and lead shieldings etc. Nuclear fusion, however, is the holy grail of power but we simply are not there yet.

Another aspect is that Uranium is a finite resource. Some say we have already reached the half-way point in amount that is left to mine.

We haven't even discussed the sabotage/terrorism aspect yet. Nuclear plants are costly to guard and protect. Fuel, waste and other contaminated items have to be carefully accounted for each step of the way. Even numerous alloys, metals parts must be carefully protected and accounted for since they can be used by rogue states to build weapons production fascilities. Even when a plant is decommissioned it must be tightly guarded as it is a giant "dirty bomb" weapons stockpile to the eyes of terrorists.

Want efficiency, ditch the conventional electricity generators and hydrogen converters, and go for something based on zero point energy. An electric powered generator extracting zero point energy from water would deliver some 500% the power output of a conventional generator using oil (or e85, coal etc) or converting force (windmills, hydrodams etc). The technology has been available for more than a decade so far, it's just not in the public eye as most trained labrats ignore stuff they don't understand.
Anyway, I only know what I've read, so I'm not sure how it works either. I just know it does.

Energy from water? Sounds fishy to me. Water is a pretty stable compound. The amount of energy released from a chemical reaction is the same as the energy required to undo the process. The only way I can see getting meaningful energy from water is by mixing it with a highly reactive substance (none of which exist in nature) like Lithium, Potassium, Sodium, Flourine, certain acids, etc. All of these are highly energy intensive to produce.

Check out this amazing technology: Air power! Very cheap to produce for third world countries:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq8 [...] re=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-A [...] re=related

Another form of energy that hasn't been discussed is gyroscopic power (like those little toy cars with fly-wheels inside). Power plants already use this technology for backup power. There are several experimental buses in Europe using it. The technology is especially well suited to refuse/garbage disposal trucks.

UPS is retrofitting trucks that will be using nitrogen recirculation hybrid trucks. They use nitrogen compression/decompression instead of batteries.

@ blackbeastofaaaaagh : Water contains an enormous amount of energy. You may think it's stable, but it isn't nessecarily. Some dude came up with a technique a year or two ago, that enables water to burn if exposed to a particular radio frequency. That technology was a bit costly to use though, as the energy released was less than what it cost to send the radio waves. But the point is, water isn't as stable as it appears.

And in the early 90s some dude invented a sort of turbine that would 'smash' water and create zero point energy with an efficiency rating of almost 200%
Zero point energy devices running at up to 600% have been seen in the wild.

I've got a documentry dated 1994 or 1995 at home briefly explaining the turbine setup amongst other things. Once I get home some time tomorrow, I might post the name of it. I don't recall it off the top of my head.

Point is - water is potent

To neiroatopelcc,
I will have to check it out. On the surface it does sound like an investment scam. When water burns, what does it become? How do you add an extra oxygen molecule to water and end up with a new molecule with more chemical entropy (i.e. more stable)? I have read many scams that explain amusing and overly complex ways to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen while consuming little energy and then burning the hydrogen (or using in a fuel cell) with oxygen to get a lot of energy. This violates basic thermodynamics and is a variation of the "perpetual motion machine". I don't think any of these scemes ever claimed to be "fusion in a test tube." so we can forget about E=MC².

Another variation is the burning of salt water (I think this is what you were refering to). An RF wave causes the hydrogen to be released and then it is burned (or reacts with the liberated Sodium, in some way I don't remember) for energy. So what are the end compounds of this reaction? H20, and dissolved salt? The only other possiblities I see are (HCL and Na2O) or (NaOH and HCL). All of these are are highly unstable pairs compared to saltwater and oxygen molecules.

Now it is possible that it could be used as an energy storage medium like hydrogen fuel. However HCL is a pretty hazardous/reactive compound and so is Na20. NaOH is a powerful alkali.

I'm home now. The documentry I was referring to is this one : http://www.documentary-film.net/se [...] .php?e=195

As for the water burning stuff, look up John Kanzius on google or some place. That's the name of the guy that made the device to ignite it. But appearently it's quite a common system now. So common that some company even made fireplaces run with water and using electricity to make it burn. But as I said earlier, that technique doesn't provide more power than it requires. The stuff in the documentry linked above does though. Some of it anyway. ps. the dude that meant to put spark plug replacements into retail got poisoned a few months prior to that happening, and his stuff disappeared. So that didn't happen as you might know

To sum it up - I'm not a chemist and only watch stuff like those documentries for entertainment (beats watching pearl harbour or something on tv). I don't know anything about the actual processes taking place. But what I do know is that zero point energy must exist. Either that or our methods for determining the amount of energy used or released are incorrect. So where is the error? with the mathematics, or with the theory that energy is constant, and only the form changes? I'm not competent to determine that, but I'm better at mathematics than I am at physics theories I don't even know the official names for, so I am expecting mathematics to be correct.

Hello neiroatopelcc,
I did look at the documentary sent in the link. Assuming the person is telling the truth, he has found a great way to heat water. In most boilers, more than 50% of the heat is wasted as exhaust gas.

However as far as greater than 100% efficiency, I am completely unconvinced. Inventions (by honest poeple) like this in the past were eventually found to have gotten their excess energy from chemical reactions, not accounted for at the time, between various the machine parts and catalysts. The mysterious "wear and tear" (in fact caused by chemical breakdown) was typically explained away by design and engineering that has yet to be perfected due to lack in funds.

"Zero Point Energy" - This topic is much hyped by various scam artists (or those who are simply ignorant) who know that few people (potential investors) truly understand quantum mechanics but hear about it whenever some great discovery makes the papers. There is great danger in trying to apply "common sense" reasoning (which most magazines - "Popular Mechanics" and "How stuff works" comes to mind) to Quantum mechanics and General Relativity. Though it is highly developed and most of it's concept are well proven, there is nothing intuitive about it. It is a mistake to draw simple conclusions from it's results without a thorough understanding of the highly complex mathematics.

"Zero Point Energy" is simple the amount of energy contained in the lowest possible level in a quantum system; In other words, the energy of a "perfect" vaccuum. It is now believed that it is precisely this energy which is causing the expansion of our universe to accelerate. The amount of energy at the "zero point" is believed by many scientists to be infinite.

Psuedo-scientist-inventors believe you can tap into this infinite source of energy to do work. Remember that to do work you need a difference of energy and energy is inherently a relative value (much the same way position is). Just because infinite energy permeates the universe does not mean you can tap it unless you had an energy source of higher value.

How can something be greater than infinity? As I stated, quantum mechanics does not obey common sense.

As far as mathematics or scientific theories being wrong. It is vary rare, in the history of physics, that a theory is completely overturned. As far as I'm aware, the last time this happened was in the 1890s during the "Michelson–Morley" experiments (very interesting reading on Wiki) when the "aether" theory of light was disproven.

Hope this makes some sense.

It certainly does make sense, but there are some things a simpelton like myself refuse to believe. Like infinite. In my perfect world that word doesn't exist. Everything is finite, even if it cannot be accurately determined. Everything has a relative value, even a number so absurdly big that we cannot comprehend it. So there cannot be an infinite amount of energy available anywhere. At least not if we assume einstein was right. And if you claim he is, then infinite doesn't exist.
As for the video. I don't know if you just read the text on the homepage, or aquired a copy of the video. But if you see the video, you'll see that all those inventors who stumbled upon mashines of this sort are sceptical about the output readings. Some have spent much more money on accurate measuring devices and in some cases staff than on the actual mashine. They may not know much more about this stuff than I do (which isn't much), so they seek professional assistance to clarify where the extra energy comes from. And at least at the time the documentry was made, many mashines produced energy that was unaccounted for by the few scientists that dared take a look. The movie actually mentions how common scientists avoid this kind of tech, as it's not a secure enough endavor to risk their careers on.

Anyway, there's little I can add. I only know so much.

For the performance, it is actually an extremely affordable super car. And, the market for six and seven figure cars certainly existed before the latest mortgage bubble.

Take a look around your average medical office building or financial or law firm's parking lot and I think you will see plenty of cars (Merc S600, Porsche 911 Turbo, Audi S8) that cost close-to, or over, $100k. If you figure in fuel costs, a lot of them could save money with a Tesla Roadster.