Tag: Tesla

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AA says charging is less per mile than petrol? when has it not been – only in very specific circumstances is this not true

So at the current time, tesla charges 50p per kwh (for almost everyone charging at home will account for most, so supercharging probably only accounts for about 10% but we will look at this later).

How does this compare? in the UK fuel is currently 165p for diesel and 147p for petrol.

Now one needs to compare like for like – it is unreasonable to compare a tesla s with a fiat punto, these are not comparable cars. So We will do it car by car. Please note, as teslas are only every electric, I will be comparing them to their nearest petrol BMW competitor – BMW does have electric cars in competition – though generally these get lower miles per kwh.

As such, I have compared the 4 main tesla cars to their nearest equivalent BMW (fair warning lots of numbers below

Continue reading “AA says charging is less per mile than petrol? when has it not been – only in very specific circumstances is this not true”
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A tesla plane? what impact would this have

Elon Musk has talked about creating an electric plane, I think that this is a fantastic idea, but not from a tesla fanboy point of view.

Electric planes are in their infancy. There are a range of extremely light weight aircraft for learning to fly. There are also an increasing number of island hopper jets, which can allow easy access for small communities – at prices that are affordable, and therefore long-term as well as the far more environmentally friendly setup.

The other big move in this arena, is Ryanair. They are a budget airline operating throughout Europe, but they are building an aircraft which should be able to carry 186 people (31 rows of 6 seats) that would cover 80% of their routes. My hope is that this is a move into them behaving in a more compassionate way – they have a reputation of treating people poorly (I have experienced that first hand but that is another story)

Elon Musk envisaged a vertical take off and landing aircraft, and one which would fly high enough to travel at supersonic speeds. He did state that he thought batteries needed to reach 400wh/kg and the batteries that run tesla cars are currently 260wh/kg, so were still some way off. Having said that, tesla has some of the best battery research going on, and they are confident that the batteries will be ready in the next 3 or so years.

So what impact would a tesla plane have? Well what Musk is describing is largely a private jet, not a passenger jet. Never-the-less Tesla cars started and high cost and came down. It is likely that a Tesla plane would do something similar. Certainly, with the weight Tesla can bring to bare, it is likely that any involvement by Tesla would push the electrical aviation market place to new heights.

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