The Most Important Car Of The Last Twenty Years: Tesla Model S - Is It A Game-changer?

Tesla Model S is taking over UK now. 

  

Tesla Gigafactory: "Elon Musk Can Convert the Unthinkable Into Reality."

 Governor of Nevada Brian Sandoval has put it all in one sentence: "Elon Musk Can Convert The Unthinkable Into Reality." This Gigafactory will allow Tesla to produce the mass volume electric car. Tesla Model III is promised to be priced at $35k and will have 200 miles range. Tesla Model S and X will have 400 miles range with the new lithium batteries made at Gigafactory.

  It will be the largest lithium battery factory in the world and will alone produce more batteries than all lithium battery makers have produced last year all over the world.

  

All You Need To Know About Tesla's Nevada Lithium Batteries Gigafactory.

  

  "The deal of the century or at least its first decade for electric cars is signed by Elon Musk. Gigafactory will open the doors for the mass market for electric cars and $35k Tesla Model III will be the first one rolling out. I will provide links in addition to the report by Damon Lavrinc so that you can get the full picture of this groundbreaking development for our industry. Read more."

China Rolls Out Welcome Mat for Electric Cars: Ganfeng Lithium Partners with International Lithium in Argentina and Ireland.

Elon Musk With Tesla Gigafactory Starts The Race To Secure Supply Of Lithium Batteries And Lithium.

International Lithium Presentation September 2014 from Kirill Klip

Tesla's Elon Musk Expects 'Hundreds' Of Gigafactories As Lithium Battery Production For EVs Triples In Three Years.

Lithium Batteries Gigafactory: Why Morgan Stanley Is Betting That Tesla Will Kill Your Power Company

Tesla Battery Gigafactory, Lithium Materials Industry And Lithium Miners.

  

The Largest Ever Lithium Deal: Tesla Gigafactory, Smartphones And China's Race To Electric rEvolution.

Electric rEvolution: Elon Musk Goes Open Source - Opens Tesla's Electric Cars Patents To All.

GreenTechGrid:

The Local and Global Impact of Tesla’s Giga Factory.

Tesla CTO on Energy Storage: ‘We Should All Be Thinking Bigger’

MIT: How Tesla Boosted Its Roadster’s Range by 50 Percent.

  

MIT provides us with more details on the Tesla Roadster upgrade.

Tesla Roadster 3.0 With Range of 400 Miles.

  Elon Musk is extending the range for Tesla Roadster to 400 miles! We have the new frontier for Lithium technology put into the real life operation now.

Consumer Reports: Owners Survey Rates Tesla Model S The Most Loved Car. 98% Would Buy Again.

MIT:

How Tesla Boosted Its Roadster’s Range by 50 Percent.

An upgrade to the Roadster extends its range and shows how far battery technology has come.

• By Kevin Bullis on December 30, 2014

Tesla stopped making the $100,000-plus Roadster in 2011, but this spring those who already own one can upgrade it to travel 400 miles on a charge, a 50 percent increase. The new range is competitive with conventional cars, which typically can travel 350 to 500 miles on a tank of gasoline. Tesla isn’t saying how much the upgrade will cost Roadster owners.

Part of the Roadster’s range boost will come from using tires with less rolling resistance and from making modifications to the car’s body that improve its aerodynamics.

But the biggest improvement comes from increasing the energy density of the battery pack. Each pack contains thousands of cylindrical battery cells that look similar to AA batteries. “Cell technology has improved substantially” since Tesla designed the Roadster, the company said in its announcement. For the upgrade it will replace the original cells with new ones that store 31 percent more energy.

Though Tesla isn’t explaining in detail how it achieved the increase in energy storage, it was likely made via incremental improvements to existing battery technology, not through major breakthroughs in battery materials, says Jeff Dahn, a professor of physics and chemistry at Dalhousie University. He analyzed cells made by Panasonic, Tesla’s cell supplier, and found several small changes that might account for a 30 percent increase. For example, Panasonic has done away with some bulky plastic packaging material that had been wasting space inside the cells. He says Tesla’s battery pack could also accommodate slightly larger cells that store more energy.

In theory, it’s possible to more than double the range of lithium-ion batteries by changing their chemistry or fundamental structure (see “A Prototype Battery Could Double the Range of Electric Cars”). That’s because in current designs the active energy-storing material, lithium, makes up just a small portion of the entire battery. The majority is devoted to storing and protecting the lithium and providing pathways for electrical current. It may be possible to greatly reduce the amount of supporting material.

But such alterations to battery materials have been difficult because increasing their energy storage often makes batteries less safe, more difficult to manufacture, or less durable. For example, the startup A123 Systems, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors and the government before declaring bankruptcy in 2012, was founded in 2001 on the promise of nanomaterials that could multiply energy storage by 10 times. But it couldn’t manufacture these materials, and so it switched to far less energy dense ones whose main advantages were safety and faster charging.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has often said that novel battery chemistries are overhyped. He is betting heavily that they won’t beat incremental improvements to existing ones anytime soon. In Reno, Nevada, Tesla is building the world’s largest lithium-ion battery factory, which will be devoted to manufacturing conventional batteries. MIT."

Tesla Roadster 3.0 With Range of 400 Miles.

  Elon Musk is extending the range for Tesla Roadster to 400 miles! We have the new frontier for Lithium technology put into the real life operation now.

Consumer Reports: Owners Survey Rates Tesla Model S The Most Loved Car. 98% Would Buy Again.

Tesla Motors:

Roadster 3.0

By The Tesla Motors Team

The Roadster 3.0 package applies what we've learned in Model S to Roadster. No new Model S battery pack or major range upgrade is expected in the near term.

Battery technology has continued a steady improvement in recent years, as has our experience in optimizing total vehicle efficiency through Model S development. We have long been excited to apply our learning back to our first vehicle, and are thrilled to do just that with the prototype Roadster 3.0 package. It consists of three main improvement areas.

1. Batteries

The original Roadster battery was the very first lithium ion battery put into production in any vehicle. It was state of the art in 2008, but cell technology has improved substantially since then. We have identified a new cell that has 31% more energy than the original Roadster cell. Using this new cell we have created a battery pack that delivers roughly 70kWh in the same package as the original battery.

2. Aerodynamics

The original Roadster had a drag coefficient (Cd) of 0.36. Using modern computational methods we expect to make a 15% improvement, dropping the total Cd down to 0.31 with a retrofit aero kit.

3. Rolling Resistance

The original Roadster tires have a rolling resistance coefficient (Crr) of 11.0 kg/ton. New tires that we will use on the Roadster 3.0 have a Crr of roughly 8.9 kg/ton, about a 20% improvement. We are also making improvements in the wheel bearings and residual brake drag that further reduce overall rolling resistance of the car.

Summary

Combining all of these improvements we can achieve a predicted 40-50% improvement on range between the original Roadster and Roadster 3.0. There is a set of speeds and driving conditions where we can confidently drive the Roadster 3.0 over 400 miles. We will be demonstrating this in the real world during a non-stop drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles in the early weeks of 2015.

Appointments for upgrading Roadsters will be taken this spring once the new battery pack finishes safety validation. We are confident that this will not be the last update the Roadster will receive in the many years to come.

Happy Holidays."