Musk on electric transportation

[Dr Mordrid]

GigaOM....

Lead the charge to electric transportation

By Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla Motors, SpaceX (As told to Katie Fehrenbacher)

Back in the day Elon Musk was well-known for being one of the co-founders of PayPal. Today, the former Internet entrepreneur is tackling no less than electric cars, solar rooftops and rockets. He’s the CEO of both Tesla Motors and SpaceX, as well as the Chairman of SolarCity.

The way I see it is that all transportation will go electric except for rockets, ironically. All that is needed is someone to provide compelling electric vehicles. That is something we’re doing at Tesla and that’s something I think we’ll see the rest of the auto industry doing over time. I don’t think there is such a thing as the electric vehicle market and the internal combustion market — it’ll all go electric. It’s just a question of producing a compelling product.

Currently for electric vehicles, there isn’t a problem with demand, there’s only a supply limitation. As many compelling electric cars that can be made will be bought. It just takes time to get them made.

People have the wrong idea of there being an electric vehicle market and also a gas car market. It’s just that if you want to buy a compelling electric car right now there are very few options. You’ve got the LEAF, with an effective range of 70 miles, which is not very practical. And you’ve got the Volt, which has an effective range of 35 electric miles plus the gas miles, so it’s not super great as an electric car and it’s relatively expensive for a car in that range. The Tesla Roadster is expensive and impractical for most people.

2012 is a big year for Tesla. It’s really just a matter of refining the engineering of the Model S. We’re down to the final brush strokes at this point. The most important thing for us is to get the manufacturing online. We’re trying to get to a 20,000 unit per year run rate as soon as possible and we’ve committed to start deliveries to customers no later than July. I feel very confident of meeting that date. Then we’ve also got a big event, on Feburary 9th, which is the unveiling of the Model X. I think that will be very well received.

(MY NOTE: Model X will be a 7 passenger crossover-SUV)

The biggest effect that Tesla will have on the market is being a good example for the overall car industry. We can show the industry that if you make cars that look good, have good performance and long range then people will buy them. With the Roadster we spurred GM to create the Volt, which Bob Lutz has been kind enough to acknowledge. The second effect will be the sector effect. Through the cars we make and the power trains that we supply to others.

The fully electric RAV4 will come out the middle of next year, or whenever Toyota wants to bring it out, and that’s going to be the best mass market electric vehicle out there. We’re making the whole power train, motor, battery pack, inverter, and charger and all the software.

I think we’ll also see steady improvements in battery technology. In the case of the Model S, it’s less than half the cost per kilowatt hour of the Roadster. So we’ve made a huge improvement there and the range has increased and the efficiency has improved. I think we’ll continue to see an improvement in the cost in battery energy maybe 7 to 9 percent per year. That may not sound like a lot, but if you compound that over several years it becomes very significant.

[Brian Ellis]

I fear his view is coloured by a tiny, little vested interest

[Dr Mordrid]

And the fact that the US EPA standards are heading north of 50 mpg, a fleet average that'll be hard to beat without a lot of EV's and hybrids.

[Evildead666]

I would like to see more from Hydrogen gas turbines that generate electricity for the vehicle.
Getting the H2 is a problem, but as long as it isn't produced with a polluting method it would be mostly clean.
There would still have to be oils for lubrication here and there probably, but to me it would be the best transition until we can get clean battery production, and lifetime batterys (100% recyclable), instead of the 10-15year ones now.

[Dr Mordrid]

There is a group at Harvard working on a new kind of thin film solid oxide fuel cell that cuts their price, size and operating temp by a lot. Since these can use natural gas directly the need for a hydrogen infrastructure is moot. Imagine that as the generator in an EREV etc.

[Brian Ellis]

There is a group at Harvard working on a new kind of thin film solid oxide fuel cell that cuts their price, size and operating temp by a lot. Since these can use natural gas directly the need for a hydrogen infrastructure is moot. Imagine that as the generator in an EREV etc.

Hydrogen is NOT a fuel. It is an inefficient means of transporting energy. This means that some other form of energy has to be converted into the energy that hydrogen molecules contain and then these molecules have to be converted to the kind of energy you need. Each conversion is inefficient to some extent and the total is horrendously bad. To take an extreme holistic example:
Mining coal: 85% (15% is used for the physical act of mining and transporting it)
Burning coal: 80% as heat less energy consumed by blowers, precipitators etc.
Generating electricity: 35% of heat in distributed electricity
Hydrogen electrolysis: 80%, the rest as heat and impurity cations
Hydrogen transport and losses: 80%
Fuel cell: 45%, the rest as heat and "unburnt" H2
Li-ion battery: 85%
Electric car: 75% (95% for motor, rest for other electrical accessories, aircon etc.)

Overall efficiency from energy of the coal in the ground: 4.37%
Overall carbon emissions compared with fossil fuel conventional car: >200%

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How is hydrogen made?

99% of commercial hydrogen is made from methane and water vapour. Electrolysis is far too expensive.

CH4 + 2H2O > 4H2 + CO2 in specialised reactor vessels with a catalyst and heat (entropy of splitting water)

Unfortunately, each methane molecule produces exactly the same quantity of CO2 as if you burnt it, ie CO2 mass of 2.74 times the mass of the original CH4.

Equally unfortunately, for each 100 methane molecules thus reacted, there are an average of 4-5 molecules that escape between the underground reservoir and the reactor vessel (more in some cases). Taking the highly conservative IPCC 100 year GWP figure for CH4 of 25, this means that the equivalent carbon emissions of the process involves 100 + 25 x (4 or 5) equivalent CO2 molecules emitted. This does not help the climate any, as the process is equivalent to producing more greenhouse gases than burning coal.

Exactly the same applies to using CH4 directly in a fuel cell with the added disadvantage that the fuel cell itself is inefficient.

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My personal opinion is that the IC engine, powered by fossil fuels, are here to stay for at least 10, probably 20, years yet as the mainstream vehicle power source, preferably as non-plug-in hybrids, purely because ¾ of electricity is produced inefficiently from fossil fuels with greater carbon emissions via EVs and PEHVs than ordinary EHVs. In countries like France with almost 0% fossil fuel electricity, EVs and PEHVs could be useful, but this represents a tiny market.

[VJ]

True, but don't they have new developments in extracting hydrogen (bacteria, new catalysts, ...)? Furthermore, IMO, the process does not have to be very efficient, as long as it is non-polluting.