When the batteries degrade below 80% of their initial capacity can the car still be useful ? It would seem that an electric car whose range has degraded from say 350 km to even 250 km, would still be very useful as a commuter or similar apps.

On the plus side is that if they do have to do a battery recall, it's not going to cost them a bundle.

Maybe its one of those places where the rooms are rented by the hour?

For how long can one of these KPB's hold (store) energy? It looks like they could be portable so that might make them useful for siting at seasonal or temporary destinations like ski hills, trailheads or festival sites that are often fairly long distances from cities and not likely to have adequate grid infrastructure for fast charging.

I just did a quick check of Craigslist and it looks to me like you can get a older Nissan Leaf with low mileage which may have comparable range for less. I guess it depends on how well the Kandi is built and how likely the battery is to hold up.

My initial reaction is that a dramatic decline in oil and gas investment will lead to higher oil and gas prices in the longer term, however, looking at the report it appears that something similar happened in 2015 where investment dropped by around 20% and oil prices have not reacted upwards much in the succeeding years. Suffice to say the market is very complex and difficult to predict. Investment in 2014 was 1.1 trillion, almost twice what is predicted for 2020. EIA has expressed concern in the past that declining investment in oil and gas could lead to an energy crunch sometime in the future which will have an impact on the global economy, however my view is that oil and gas prices are too low and that high prices will greatly accelerate the development of mobility less dependent on fossil fuels like EV's and hybrids. Of course high oil prices could also lead to a flood of investment back in shale oil production. Interesting to see how it plays out.

I wonder what they do for cabin heat as it can get pretty cold at altitude at times.

The Tesloop model x that was recently sold and was the subject of a blog on Jalopnik had 317,000 miles on its original battery after about 2 years of service so that works out to about 435 miles per day (317,000/730). I would guess that this vehicle received way more than 50 fast charges so it seems that something in Tesla's battery management system is able to mitigate the degradation demonstrated in these tests.

As a bicycle enthusiast I took note of Lemond buying the technology back in 2016 and was wondering recently what had become of it. It is interesting to see how long it takes to move from the lab to production even in the modern fast paced world of today. If even a small proportion of the technological advances we read about here come to fruition, we're in for an avalanche of change in the coming decade. I'd imagine reducing the weight by only a few hundred kg is equivalent to a major advance in battery energy density.

I can see it displacing the Toyota Hilux/Tacoma as the vehicle of choice among revolutionaries, freedom fighters, jihadists and war-lords around the world.

Ugly for sure, but as the owner of a Honda Element, I can assure that one can get over that. On the positive side is the pricing which should catch the attention of fleet managers. $40K US for the base model would be around C$53K. A similar F150 being used as a service vehicle in an urban setting probably gets around 12L/100km at best. So at 30,000 km per year the F150 would burn about 3600 litres per year or around C$40000 in most Canadian cities. The cost of energy for the cybertruck would likely be less than 1/3 so the fuel savings per year would be more than $2500, or $25 K over 10 years. The base price for a similar supercab F150 appears to be around C$38K so the fuel savings alone puts the Tesla in the game without considering the savings on maintenance. In addition the stainless steel panels may make the Tesla last longer and the advanced autonomous driving features may be of particular value in fleet operations. I'm also wondering that if Tesla believes they can produce a basic truck for under $40K then they can probably produce panel vans for a similar price and if that is the case then that would also be of great interest to fleets.

I'm skeptical.

Does a typical EV actually use electricity at 60% efficiency? Does it take 100 kwh (at the house meter) to fully charge a 60 kwh battery pack? I would have guessed 75 kwh max.

The total GDP is actually 19.3 trillion dollars. The source for this article is DOE fact of the week website and the error is in the text in spite of a graph on the same page that clearly shows that GDP is 19.3 trillion. 19.3 billion is barely enough to build a wall on the Colorado border. Not a big issue except that it demonstrates a sort of sloppy and careless approach that one doesn't expect from US government sources.

The way I understand it this is basically like throwing a curve ball. I wonder if you put two such towers on opposite ends of a beam with a pivot point in the middle could get any rotation around the pivot point?

I had to check my calendar to make sure we weren't back in 2016. Unless the price is way down I can't imagine there being much interest in a 35 kwh vehicle.

Even if this is only a short term outage it will be of great benefit for oilsands developers and operators in Alberta as it will give credence to the argument that it is better to rely on petroleum sources from more stable countries. In the same way it could accelerate the development of alternative energies like EV's for mobility as it highlights the fragility of global oil supplies. There is a widely held belief in Alberta that environmental and indigenous groups opposing pipeline development in Canada are secretly funded by international interests who benefit from suppressing expansion of the oilsands. So much so that our recently elected UCP provincial government ran on a promise to set up a "war room" to investigate and disclose who those interests might be. I don't follow these theories that closely, however, it seems to me that the list of beneficiaries that could benefit from suppressing Canadian oil could include Russia, Saudi Arabia, certain American refiners like Koch industries and who knows. So if the Alberta war room discovers that Saudi's were secretly supporting anti-pipeline groups in Canada, then maybe the war room would rationalize that its ok to secretly support whoever attacked the Saudi facility? Trump tweeted there is reason to believe he knows who done it, but at the same time it seems to me there is equally good reason to believe he hasn't got a clue. It could have been the Alberta War Room. Good work Jason.

A 6.6 fold increase in the CPI over 48 years works out to an average rate of inflation of about 4% overall. Not sure about the methodology used here but the 2.8 fold increase in price for new cars could reflect a change in the mix of vehicles, ie. more civics and corrolas and fewer chargers and superbees or whatever was popular back in the seventies, but I'd also expect the quality and durability of modern vehicles has improved substantially as well. I always buy used cars because I consider them far superior in value so I am grateful to those who feel the need to do the heavy lifting in terms of absorbing depreciation and buy new.

DM I don't own a Tesla or Tesla shares and at live at an elevation above 1000 m in a city where the economy is highly dependent on the production of oil so your point of view wrt batteries is somewhat reassuring, cause I'll survive. Troubling however is that the latest leaked email suggested that in the 2nd quarter they produce and deliver a record number of cars and sofar that appears to be the case, although I suppose diligent sleuths will eventually find the lies, exaggerations and misrepresentations.

Dave So when I research "high mileage Teslas" I discover that there are a handful that have now gone over 300,000 km. Detailed articles on two vehicles owned by LA- Vegas shuttle service, Tesloop, say that a model x has logged over 500,000 km on its battery pack and actually is still better than 90% while a model s with 660,000 km (410,000 miles) is on its 3rd battery with the first replacement after about 190,000 miles and second after an additional 130,000 miles. Failures were attributed too overcharging in the first instance and manufacturing fault in the second. This is anecdotal of course and the age, usage and charging is atypical, but still to me it seems positive. I would imagine that given the data Tesla is capable of collecting, they have a pretty good understanding of how their batteries will stand up and the factors that lead to degradation and measures that can be taken to improve and mitigate degradation rates. So if one 90 kwh battery is capable of 1000+ cycles then I'd speculate that they can figure out how to make 1000+ the norm if it isn't already.

Why would you you worry about the "average" service life and/cost of batteries. Clearly Tesla is the only game in town and if the other autoco's don't respond they'll end up getting canned like BMW CEO. Even though Musk often appears to be working from the Donald Trump playbook, I don't see how you can ignore his April 19th, 2019 tweet .... "Model 3 drive unit & body is designed like a commercial truck for a million mile life. Current battery modules should last 300k to 500k miles (1500 cycles). Replacing modules (not pack) will only cost $5k to $7k." Is Musk completely FOS? Maybe but his detractors have been saying that for years and it looks like he'll be around for a couple more. Even if you consider gross exaggeration and say the body will only last 500,000 the battery 200,000 miles and refurbishing cost is 10 -12 K, those are pretty compelling metrics to me. I'd assume that Musk has as much information about the durability and cost of batteries so it really comes down to a matter of trust. On the one hand you have his 4:20 tweet which appears to have been deliberately misleading, or you can balance that with the fact that the company pretty much appears to be on-course to deliver the products they promise albeit somewhat delayed. The best power train warranty available for my Honda is 160,000 km but I have no doubt it will remain serviceable for twice that, so I don't see why one would simply assume that the battery warranty is the actual life. But this is all off topic. WRT the Bosch software, I'd expect this is something that Tesla has had deployed for some time now.

I appreciate a well turned out team of percherons as much as any city folk, but I suppose I'm not enough of a gearhead to appreciate the technical achievements of this vehicle, but at the same time I fail to see what this vehicle is capable of, that a model x is not? To me it looks like something that was pitched and proposed 4 years ago before dieselgate and now looks obsolete (to me at least) right from the get go. I buy my cars used and often at auctions and I can't image anyone paying more than 15,000 for the Audi in 10 years when it has 200K+ km, whereas a similar used model x could fetch twice that in my expectation. I note that the Audi does have the feature that you can tune the sound of the exhaust to the owners preference, which gives me the idea that you could mount speakers on the model x and play Wagner's "Ride of the Valkaries" as you swoop down the autobahn. Now that would be cool.

Call me a fanboy if you like, but to me, all this technical hype amounts to little more than trying to put lipstick on a pig.

Per vehicle consumption has declined from around 6 liters per day in 2010 to less than 2.5 lpd in 2018 (roughly based on the graph). The graph appears to show an inflection point around 2014 which is a bit odd because around that time oil prices were tanking and demand was picking up in places like the US. Its possible that China withdrew subsidies around then but it would be interesting to study what was going on.

Yes. Careless math. Too anxious to prove others wrong. I stand corrected.