Tesla may be too good to be true (March 28)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
The rollout of the Tesla electric car in Hawthorne yesterday left me with a feeling of deja vu all over again, to paraphrase Yogi Berra.
I watched the rollout of an electric car in the 1980s, and I remember being most impressed.
This particular car could be charged by plugging it into a wall outlet, and also had solar panels on its roof. It had been built in an old dairy barn.
The fellow who built it and headed up the company he believed would make him rich took me for a ride in the car, and it was fun: quick off the mark —- it would accelerate half again as fast as a gasoline-engine car —- it also was quiet, with hardly any engine noise, although the road noise was about what you might expect with any car.
But it had a few problems, not the least of which was that it had no heater, no air conditioner, no radio, no power windows.
“The batteries won’t handle all that load,” the car man told me.
Well, that car never made it to market. I believe the one I rode in was the only one ever built.
The Tesla builders claim their car will have a 300-mile range and cost only $5 to recharge, but their claims make me wonder what they might be smoking.
Also, what about air conditioning, heating and all the electronic gizmos that are built into today’s cars? Will anyone buy a new car in California that doesn’t have air?
Most calculations of the energy it takes to move an electric car around would put the cost of running the Tesla at typical speeds at several times more -— probably about the same as a tank of gas.
Chevy is building the Volt, an electric car which it claims will have a range of 40 miles. Whom do you believe? I believe the Volt will be built, and some will buy it. I’m not sure about the Tesla.
