Tesla Motors has become a public company with an IPO on the stock market. Now this is the first IPO by an American car maker in 54 years and Silicon Valley becomes a car maker. Then the electric vehicle is the future ? Well, not necessarily.
The Tesla Roadster electric-vehicle makes its range by using an advanced lightweight vehicle technology. In fact the Tesla Roadster chassis is based on the Lotus Elise. Now the Elise weighs 1984 pounds while the Tesla Roadster weighs 2773 pounds. Then the Tesla Roadster weight might compare to the traditional-construction chassis and internal-combustion Mazda MX5 auto at 2542 pounds. See, the electric vehicle has to use an advanced lightweight technology just to come in at 9% greater weight than a traditional vehicle. But the cost of the Tesla Roadster is $109,000.
So now Tesla is going to build an electric-vehicle sedan for $57,400. But the Tesla sedan is only going to have a very mild lightweight technology of an aluminum unibody construction and the standard range will be much less than the Roadster while the vehicle weight will be very high.
Now Honda has fuel cell vehicles in the hands of a hundred or so southern California consumers. And Honda and others say that mass production of fuel cell vehicles could begin in about 2015. Now a fuel cell generates electricity for an electric motor but the fuel cell uses hydrogen fuel rather than an electric charge. The advantage of the fuel cell is less weight and greater range.
So basically I'm saying to wait from Tesla to hear what it's future fuel cell plan is.
Now consider vehicle design in general and in relation to air pollution and global warming:
Cars must push through the air so make them lower ? Well instead, cars got taller.
Next, cars that weigh less can use smaller engines while maintaining performance standards. But instead, cars got heavier. In fact the gains in fuel mileage and engine power from electronic fuel injection released a vehicle weight gain spluge for most cars and this after the initial move to smaller standard engines. (Cars did get lighter with smaller engines but power increased and they added weight back.) Also both car makers and politicians think the lighter weight cars means only smaller cars. There is no aircraft-industry sense of maintaining size while reducing weight.
So IPO me and I'll build a four-door sedan the size of a Camry that weighs 2400 pounds, has a 1.8 16-valve internal-combustion engine as the premium engine, and gets 24/36 mpg. And that's a mid-size car with a premium engine.