On September 24th, start-up electric car company Tesla Motors unveiled their Supercharger network, a series of battery recharge stations located across the state of California. They are located in Folsom, Gilroy, Coalinga, Lebec, Barstow, and Hawthorne. The stations can be thought of as gas stations, except instead of supplying gasoline for combustion engines, they recharge the batteries that operate the company’s luxury style sedans and crossovers. Another thing that is different from the conventional gas stations that charge per unit of gasoline, drivers can charge their Tesla vehicles at the Supercharger locations for free. To offer this service free of charge, the Supercharger stations harness solar power, and actually generate more power in a year than they use. So, in addition to providing free electricity, they also produce a small positive transfer of electricity back to the grid. This eliminates the notion that electric cars simply divert carbon emissions from the combustion engine to the power plants that power them.
Access to the Supercharger network is not some expensive add-on. Each of their base models comes equipped with the hardware, software, and testing required for an owner to enjoy free charging at all Supercharger stations. A vehicle that has been charged at a station for 30 minutes can drive for up to 3 hours at 60 mph (just under 100 km/h).
To speed up the recharge time at these stations, the Supercharger stations use DC power as opposed to AC power used in homes. DC power does charge the vehicle’s battery faster, but means that the vehicle cannot be charged at home. It also limits the number of vehicle models that can use these stations; for example, the Chevrolet Volt supports AC power but does not support DC charging.
The cars produced by Tesla motors are pure-electric, which means that unlike traditional plug-in hybrids that have a combustion engine that will kick in for extra power (or when the battery runs out), these cars rely solely on battery power. One of the traditional arguments against pure electric cars has been their lack of range. Buyers and investors are skeptical of the functionality of a car that can only be used for short trips for fear of running out of power before making it home to recharge. Tesla Motors has a vision of eliminating this problem and took their first step in the unveiling of the Supercharger network.
There is a fair amount of pressure on the car company, having received a $465 million loan from the US Department of Energy, and having been used by Mitt Romney in a recent presidential debate as an attack on the ineffectiveness of Barrack Obama’s tax breaks for energy companies. The start-up electric car maker is definitely not lacking ambition, with plans to expand along 3 major US traffic corridors: Vancouver to San Diego, Miami to Montreal, and Los Angeles to New York by next year, and begin installations in Europe and Asia in late 2013. Tesla also plans on opening its first store in Canada this November. The store, located in Toronto, will boast features uncommon to current automotive dealers including a design studio where customers can design their own Tesla on a touch screen and view their creation on an 85-inch video wall.
To the many skeptics out there: despite the potentially high stock evaluation and some early hiccups in production, Tesla motors seems to have addressed a number of major problems with the current electric car industry. Tesla is the first car manufacturer to build consumer cars that are 100 percent electric from the ground up. As the major car manufacturers tentatively venture into the electric vehicle industry, Tesla has jumped right in and is changing the way we think about electric cars.
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