Model S 600 Mile Pack in the works?

Is Tesla getting more energy density? Or is it using three times as big a battery pack?

Agreed!

240 v X 30 a (typical dryer circuit) = 7.2 kW. Assuming 4 miles per kWh that's just over 25 miles for an hour's charging. If you did drive 600 miles (ten hours at 60 mph or 8 hours at 75 mph) it would take you 24 hours to recharge. That's too long.

Bump it up to 50 amps and now you have 12 kW, and you get just shy of 50 miles for an hour's charging, and 12 hours gets you nearly full.

Some serious fast charging is needed for road trips. But not for most normal driving. Too bad EEStor turned out to be a scam after all.

Caveat: I don't know if 4 miles per kWh is realistic.

 

I see two scenarios in which the 600 mile pack is needed/wanted

1) For the people that won't have access to nightly charging. Those people will have to visit a charging station of some variety or another (if it's fast charge then someone could visit that station once a month for example). I will use me as an example either I pay for my parking spot to have a charger put in (i'm going to pay for the charger) or use a charging station (some people don't have the luxury of having a specific parking spot or their condo/apt building is against having chargers put in... My best friend wants a leaf and is fighting with his condo board for a charger...)

I can't imagine everyday visiting a charging station at the end of my day everyday. if my friend doesn't convince his condo board to let him have a charger this will be his reality. It would be like someone going to get gas every night and it takes more that 20 minutes to fill up. It's an inconvience and an annoyance. Home charging is a different story, where I am home for the night and able to do chores. with a 600 mile pack the visits to a charging station would be greatly decreased (once or twice a month for most people). I could deal with that.

2) intercity travel. This is my main stipulation on EVs. My travel pattern tops out at most 220 mile trip (usually once monthly). Some people might have a slightly longer trips. A 600 mile range would eradicate any range anxiety anyone might have. Even when/if range is diminished because of weather a person can easily make their trip in the same fashion as the would their ice cars. There would be no fear of "should I turn on the a/c/heat if I want to make it?"

 

I just looked up energy density per weight.

Tesla (Panasonic 3.4 Ah): 265 Wh/kg
Leaf : 140 Wh/kg

Tesla model S has ~double the energy density of Leaf's battery at the cell level. Leaf would probably have advantage in packaging due to the shape and air cooling.

 

not gonna repeat your post....

so, one scenario has them doing something that requires them to do a 300 mile RT trip DAILY??

what i see is unrealistic expectations that the new technology and new options will be released and somehow supported by the current status quo...of which there is none btw.


if this happened, hotels, motels, etc will install charging stations. if they dont, go to a hotel that does and believe me, it will be available.

what i realistically see is a charging station that will give back 400-500 miles of range in 8-10 hours...so no, not a quick charge, but more than sufficient for a normal cross country traveler.

now, will that make everyone happy?? LOL...dont even go there!!

 

PLEASE point out where I wrote DAILY???????!!!!?????? or is it more fun to make things up ? The purpose of a large mile pack is to give consumers the SAME flexibility they have with an ICE car.

With 500-600 mile recharge in 8 hrs it wold be quicker to travel by bus that stops in every town along the way. it would be the death (good or bad) of interstate car travel. 2 Hours stop after 8 hours of travel is reasonable even 3 hrs. Why not have an EV with a 10 mile range that only takes 2 minutes to recharge? Since plugs/stations will be so plentiful it will be like plugs raining from the sky??? It would essentially give you the same recharge time as 100mile per 25 minute dc charge (assuming its a road side charging station)... but it also has to be convenient for the drive 600 miles is the sweet spot and it it can be obtained with the same weight, why not (and price in coming years)? Plus the sheer fact that over 10 years even with battery degradation there will be plenty of range left.

It's unreasonable to think that every hotel or many hotels provide a charging situation. to think that infrastructure should be more complex than the one the in place (hotels don't provide gas for you to fill up). I can only use what I see now and what has been announced outside of the ca, wa and a couple of other places true ev stations and anything close to 240v 50amp is so few and far between it's sad.

 

lol....daily, nightly, whatever. guess i can assume this does not work for u

 

What you stated is very reasonable and logical. I feel 600 miles with a 2-3 hour dc charge would obliterate any need for anyone for buying a ICE. I specifically say the 2-3hr time window is still considered psychologically a "stop" anything more people will consider it "a stay" and thats not a good mindset for a person to have when they want to travel. It would get rid of any EVs can't but ICE can arguments.

EVs are slow
Tesla proved that wrong

EVs are expensive to maintain
Tesla proved that wrong (and I am sure nissan will too) check with tesla roadster owners

EVs are tiny
Tesla (and Nissan) will prove that wrong. I don't care about exterior dimensions, I care about interior room (prius is a perfect example)

EVs can't do road trips to "grandma's"
Tesla should soon obliterate that with the Model S (160-300 mile range) and 600 miles would put that to rest permanently (heck there would be no need or want for H2 power cars)

The USA is still a very highway/road trip orientated society. I like my occasional road trip,but I like to keep long trips to a minimum (I drove a couple of times from ny to fl). 300 mile range is more than I would need outside of the occasional.

 

240v @ 50a is doable with the grid service every hotel has. You cannot compare it to gasoline because the hotels have electric grid service but don't have gasoline, and with this level of service, an overnight charge is possible. OTOH, people cannot park overnight at a gas station, and gas stations do not have fast-charging capabilities.

Thus it would be a small investment for hotels to provide Level 2 charging; and thus once there are enough EVs on the road for the demand to be significant, some hotels will provide L2 charging to give themselves a competitive advantage. You park in the area where they have the plugs, you pay a flat fee based on the maximum amount of electricity you could suck up, and in the morning you are ready to go. (Maybe they'd meter each car, but for the purposes of this discussion it would not matter if they did or not.)

It is not only reasonable, it is certain, given the free market, that once there are a large enough number of EVs, some hotels (including all the big ones driven primarily by profit) would provide charging for a fee. Some locally-owned places would refuse, because their owners are nut jobs who hate EVs, but this would be so few it would not matter. And some would be slow to invest, but where there is a demand, someone will see a profit and fill that demand, with the earliest in the game charging very high prices, and prices coming down as more and more hotels offer charging.

The caveat is that those of us who buy Leafs in December will find few if any hotels offering charging, and with a 100-mile range, few people will be able to take advantage of an overnight hotel charge. Once EVs have significant range, though, it will happen.

Wherever there is a demand, someone will offer a service to fulfill that demand. That's why there's no way to stop drugs coming into the country.

 

One of the major hotels (Marriott?) in Philadelphia offers a Tesla charging station. I don't know if it is a comp. Some truck stops already provide auxiliary power so the diesels don't have to run continuously. I see these places advertizing to the EV market as the next step. "I want a 1st floor room where I can run a power cord out the door or window" is the next option. Motel 6 & Super 8 may have the lead.

At first, no place had wi-fi. Then some had fee based wi-fi. Today there is wi-fi everywhere, sometimes free, sometimes fee. If you choose a hotel/motel based on the amenities, electricity to recharge your car will eventually be on the list.

 

If you don't consider filling a gas tank fast, I don't know what you would consider fast. Hence why you don't HAVE to park overnight!

L2 chargers are not cheap and commercial ones look to be in the 10k+ range(i've seen the nissan one, but i don't know if it's rated for commercial use). Even if nissan and Tesla sold 100k next year that would be essentially be 2k per state, so at any location there would be 2k in how many square miles? and many hotels will want to spend 10k+ just to attract the most 10% of 2k in their state? that does not sound like a viable business decision, well not at first anyway. Most hotels don't want to replace their furnishings and that's what people sleep and sit on!

I do agree over time that charging at hotels will become easier to find, but check tesla forums and read about them scrambling to find charging stations and locations and thats with a 200 mile range. Not every hotel has a parking lot especially in cities that attract tourists.

 

again another "if it doesnt happen overnight, its not worth it" post.

hotels are in the service industry. they are 2nd only to cruise ships in providing services for a fee. and no; hotel charging wont be available next summer or the summer after. but i can tell you when Nissan alone is pumping out 200,000 units a year, hotels will not be far behind. in two years, i am guessing that a million new EV's will be hitting the road annually; wont take long before all kinds of new markets catering to EV'ers will be springing up like bank foreclosure signs were last year.

they will bill u just like pay per view. it wont be cheap power... cheaper than gas, but no where near as low as your home rates, but then again, what in a hotel is??

actually be a pretty good deal compared to $7 soda pop.. (ask The Force about that one!)

 

I don't need to check the Tesla forums... I've been driving EVs for WAY longer than Tesla has been in existance....

There are over 50 chargers within a 20 mile radius of my house. I rarely scramble to find then since they're at almost every exit I come to. Oh and look! Even one public quick charger is within my radius.

No, it isn't like this everywhere. But it IS like this in some places. It is real, and it is happening. Hang on. It'll be a fun ride. It is easy to point out how hard/expensive it'll be, and how long it'll take to electrify our transportation. It won't happen immediately. It will, however, happen.

 

YOU brought up the comparison to gas stations. I was pointing out that electricity and gas are DIFFERENT! Because a level 2 charge takes over night, the place to have L2 chargers is WHERE PEOPLE STAY OVER NIGHT!!! In other words, you locate gas stations where it's convenient to stop for 5 to 10 minutes. You locate L2 chargers at hotels.

It's not going to happen over night. If you really need one car that can serve as your commuter AND go 600 miles a day, day after day, then now is not the time to switch to an EV.

But if I listened to your logic I would not have bought my Xebra three years ago, and I'd be burning gas every day instead of ONLY for trips out of town.

An EV today is good for a two-car (or more) family. Not more than 1% of two-car families NEEDS EVERY CAR to be able to make extended road trips. As more EVs hit the road, more entrepreneurs will offer ways to recharge them away from home. The Leaf is a transitional form: It is not suited to road trips. But technology and infrastructure will progress together, just like the proverbial chicken and egg: Which came first? NEITHER! They evolved together.

There is a niche for EVs even without chargers away from home. As that niche is filled, a few people will offer charging facilities. Just a few at first. But from that point, charging and EV adoption will evolve together.

Your insistence that EVERY car MUST have the ability to burn gas or else it is useless, reminds me of the creationists who used to argue (some still do!) that cetaceans could not possibly evolve from land mammals because an intermediate form is impossible, even though several intermediate forms are alive and well today (penguins and seals and amphibians are all half land and half water creatures). Eventually, fossils were found intermediate between a wolf-like mammal and the cetaceans. You are insisting that charging infrastructure will never be built even though in CA it already exists!

 

Want to see what the charger infrastructure looks like in CA today? Today with basically no cars? This is the most complete and up-to-date information on charging available anywhere:
EVChargerMaps

 

I don't see any charger in NY.

 

No what YOU ARE INSISTING is that people be forced even on a small road trip to STAY OVER NIGHT. That is the anti point to travel! If the infrastructure is (everywhere like YOU insist) there it would be a nation wide release from Nissan, not pockets of where infrastructure exists.

When did I state EVERY CAR MUST HAVE THE ABILITY TO BURN GAS? ARE YOU SPECIAL??? With a 600 mile pack almost no one would be burning gas! It's obvious that you are just making stuff up at this point so this conversation is DONE. Make up whatever you want.

I guess reading comprehension is not one of your talents.

 

None of them can be used for the Leaf yet because nobody has a leaf: You cannot charge a car you don't have.

Don't be silly! I am saying that hotels will install slow (L2) chargers to attract guests, and therefore people planning multi-day trips will be able to get a full charge over night simply by selecting one of the many hotels that will offer this service.

Ignoring the fact that you are degenerating into name-calling (which reflects more on the person calling names than on the person being insulted!) elsewhere you have said, in response to any proposed range, that it is not enough because people will "need" to drive farther, and then you insist that there will be no charging stations because right how only CA has them.

Elsewhere also you keep insisting that the Volt is the only way to go because it has no range limitations, and no matter what range is suggested for an EV you think it's not enough, and no charging is fast enough.

My point was merely that with a 600-mile car, nobody would need fast charging at all because L2 overnight will be adequate. I don't know about you, but when night time comes I want to sleep somewhere. It's no hardship to plug in my car when that time comes. Those charging facilities are not available yet where I go, but neither is that 600-mile car. By the time I can buy that car, I'll bet the charging will be available. You seem to think that because it's not available now except in CA (where a handful of EVs were sold a decade ago) that it won't ever be. I can only assume that your loyalty to the Volt has led you to believe that gas is a necessity.

Elsewhere you said that even if Nissan sold 100,000 cars a year, it would be so few that nobody would install chargers. But only a few hundred EVs were put on the roads of CA a decade ago, and look at all the chargers that sprang up to service them! Right now I think Spokane has fewer than half a dozen electric cars on the road, and yet there are 3 or 4 charging stations. Imagine what will happen when Nissan is actively selling EVs here, and soon after there will be others as well.

 

what does the color codes on the map mean?? different charging capabilities?