29 Replies to “We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars”

  1. Wow. Just wait until I patent my 400 mile long extension cord! You think bike lanes screw up traffic, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Wonder how much liability insurance I’ll need? Oh wait. As long as its for Mother Gaia, no worries about unintended consequences! Sweet.

  2. That looks like fun! Diving a couple of hours, then sitting on you ass
    for another 5 hours til the battery is charged. When I found out that
    a Ford Mo. T nearly beat a Tesla S, in a 900 mile race, I realized
    how totally impractical the electric car concept was.
    Every moment that Tesla spent connected to a charger, the Mo. T kept
    plugging along at a maximum speed of 40 MPH. The Ford could not even
    travel on freeways, due to its speed limitations, yet it came in about
    2 hours behind the Tesla. Were it not for a breakdown, the Ford would
    have won the race. And that was a race some woman with Tesla predicted
    the Ford would win.
    Imagine sitting here on the West Coast and your kids are nagging you
    to take the family vacation at Disney World in Florida. You are going
    to have that vehicle plugged into a charger for the better part of
    a week! And the ONLY time that charging the vehicle does not
    count on your driving time is when your family is sleeping at
    night, and that is IF the Motel 6 has charging facilities.
    There is a word for people who buy these things: SUCKERS!

  3. It sounds like taking the Tesla out on the road is like taking a Lindsay Lohan to a party.
    You’ll get lots of attention, but everyone will be snickering when your back is turned.

  4. I’d say that doing that trip in my 1998 Toyota Corolla would have been a whole lot easier, and the Corolla cost less than 10% of the Tesla’s price (unadjusted for inflation).

  6. Now consider the additional wait time if these cars actually got popular. You need to
    charge and the ‘depot’ is already full with a waiting line of other suckers.

  7. That isn’t going to be a problem. Their aren’t enough of theM Being sold.

  8. Read the comments for the column and you will see many feeble assertions that if enough charging stations are in place the range issue will largely be moot. Regardless is someone is needing to drive more than 200miles or stay overnight they are either going to need another internal combustion car or rent one when the need arises
    And of course this trip was done in late spring using AC only a few times. How about Edmonton or Winnipeg in winter?
    Cars are all about freedom. Electric cars greatly inhibit that element. Thus they fail at the most basic level

  9. And note the time it takes on the laughably-named “Supercharger”, ten to forty minutes, or more, per stop. If I am on a road trip in a fuel-powered vehicle, I can be in and out of a service station in under 5 minutes, fuel, rest room stop, and grabbing a coffee or soda included. And all for vastly less money, per mile traveled than the Tesla. Talking all-in costs here, purchase price, fuel/electricity, maintenance, insurance, etc.

  10. Tesla owners have too much money and too much time on their hands. And are too pretentious to be taken seriously.
    Internal combustion engine is the best of our current technologies.
    When there is a battery that will take you 500 miles on a one hour charge, I will take a mortgage on my house and buy one.
    But I will be the driver, not a robot which is likely to happen the way things are going.

  11. Considering the mountains of subsidies this company sucks in, four things should happen.
    Put one in the Ford Museum in Dearborn.
    Crush all the rest, and then the building they are produced in.
    Buy every electro-freak a Huffy bicycle.

  12. Think of all those Batteries that will be screwed by only charging them to the equivalent of the 2nd time constant (86.5%), and then the confusion of why they fail to deliver constant energy.. Discharging to 36.8% (in one TC) of a full charge….Counting electrons is hard
    I think the driver should let the software determine charge time, even if you think you can manually calculate it better

  13. Like, hello Suzukian cult followers! If you sell cars at $140,000 per unit, sales numbers will solve your (perceived) CO2 problem, not the Lionel HO gauge electric motor under the hood! Most people don’t pay $70,000 for a car, much less $140,000! If you have 300 passenger cars on the highways in the USA and 40 in Canada, agreed that the C02 levels will drop, and so will the blade on the guillotine when the public revolts against your outrageous ideas!

  14. Two questions arise from the article. One, what is the cost of a recharge? Two, what does it cost to replace those batteries when the warranty runs out in eight years? I suspect Teslas will have horrendous depreciation when the battery is life expired. I drive an ancient Mercedes diesel and have got over 600 miles on a tank when highway driving. That would be three “refuelling stops” in a Tesla thus negating any speed advantage.

  15. “…assertions that if enough charging stations are in place…”
    Yeah, if the government would just spend more billions of middle class money we rich people with expensive toys wouldn’t have to be so inconvenienced.

  16. Listening to all the back and forth is pointless drivel on both sides really. 140k for a hunk of coal powered crap or 140k for a mercedes amg carbon v8 with 550hp nav a/c that gets a measly 25 mpg with my foot in it…i’ll take a mercedes any day of the week the idea of electric cars is nothing more than smug pompus losers trying to wag the dog it’s pure stupidity and idiocy. what you don’t emit from your car you store in the batteries and use to power those batteries and if you think you can charge those batteries with wind or solar you are a full face mask hockey helmet wearing retard

  17. My 2012 Mazda 3 gets about 1000 km to the tank on the highway. They aren’t fuel stops anymore, just kidney breaks 😉

  18. The Electric Hushmoble from Inch-High Private eye and two choices for Al Gore the Flintstone car (just use yiur feet)and the Gilligans Insland car its peddle powred and made from totaly bio-degradible materials

  19. .
    I would like to know how many Chevy Volts were spotted on the trip …. in 2009 Obama said the highways would be swarming with them by now .
    .

  21. We do Vegas to Red Deer in 21 hours total driving time, including gas and food stops. That included a sit down meal at Famous Daves in Idaho Falls. Our current ride for road trips is a slightly thirsty Dodge Nitro. Given the cost of chain hotels such as Best Western or Super 8, any fuel savings on such a trip would be lost in extra lodging costs and then some.
    From Vegas to the border, we never dropped below 80 mph, except at St. George and to stop for gas at Filmore, Utah until we hit the Salt Lake City grind. We still never dropped below 75 for the entire length of the Salt Lake region, and then back to 80-85+ all the way to Idaho Falls. You can easily run 90+ routinely between Idaho Falls and Butte, Montana.
    We were fast asleep in Butte when a Tesla would have been straggling into Pocatello. We were home in Red Deer when that same Tesla would have been dragging it’s ass into Lethbridge. It cost us $200 and change for gas, plus maybe $30 in road food- jerky, almonds, V8 juice- and $50 for ribs and beer one day and $20 for A&W the next. Compare that to another $120 hotel room, one more sit down meal plus another day’s worth of snacks and it’s pretty hard to make the case for the Tesla as any kind of road warrior. We have’ even factored in the cost of adding more days to any vacation.
    In fact, we’d have had to add at least three days to our last vacation in order to have done it in a Tesla, and that doesn’t even factor in the dramatic drops in range that the Tesla sees when driven at speeds very common on western interstates.

  22. So, basically a really nice commuting car for the upper class subsidized by taxes. How nice.
    Seriously, by comparison the Prius models are far and away a better deal and idea.

  23. While we’re on the topic of Model T Fords, it’s a well know fact that Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were good friends. Edison and Ford had developed an electric car that got as much as 100 miles on a charge. Keeping in mind of course that the first cars of the early 20th century had a top speed of 25 MPH.
    http://www.wired.com/2010/06/henry-ford-thomas-edison-ev/

  24. Except, you’re not really counting electrons, are you?
    The number of electrons in the batteries is constant regardless of charge.

  25. ‘cept for stray electrons, they can escape once in a while, kinda like the wandering wife:-))

  26. I have seen one volt in our small town and i have also seen electric cars one looking like one of those MASH helicopter cockpits and another that you certialy wound’nt ever drive on the freeway

  28. The owner of the office building where I’m located owns a Tesla. He gets in here a couple times a month; he had charging stations installed in the three parking spots closest to the door and marked them “electric vehicles only”. No one else in the building owns an EV.
    There’s one rebellious soul who drives a massive gas guzzling SUV who’s taken to parking there, plugging one end of an extension cord into the outlet, and tossing the other end under the car.

  29. There’s a big-ass tax quandary here that few people think of. Let’s say your employer supplies a company vehicle that also can be used for personal purposes. This is not uncommon, at least here in Alberta. Fuel is often included, and the user pays taxes on CRA’s arbitrary value of the taxable benefit. At one point just a few years back, a company supplied pick-up meant taxes were paid on $1100 per month. CRA also has an arbitrary value per kilometer for fuel. If your boss is paying for fuel, you pay tax on the arbitrary value per month for fuel. If they set it at $500, what does the owner of a Tesla pay tax on if the company is giving him/her a power outlet and they drive the same amount as the guy with the A8 or the BMW 750? Bear in mind that CRA calculates the value based on the value received and not the cost.

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation