Wired 08/06

I've been following the development of the Tesla Roadster for a while and so I was pretty excited to see a full article on it in the August edition of Wired Magazine. The article is in a test-drive format with some technical discussion thrown in, but it mostly seemed to be trying to convince the reader that "it's a real car!" as opposed to the previous generations of electrics that were under-powered and unpleasant to live with for a variety of reasons.

I had no doubt before reading the article that it would be a pleasant car, and that's not really the issue with the Tesla. The factor that's most important and most interesting about viable electric vehicles, roadster or minivan, is the mechanism by which they charge, and more specifically the speed at which they charge. Electric vehicles, from what I understand, are a good application for Li-Ion technology, which the Tesla Roaster uses, however it the battery technologies that are being developed right now seem much more suitable. No one wants to plug their car in a drip-charge it over a series of hours before they can go somewhere, and no one wants to get stranded without a dead battery. People are comfortable buying hybrids because when worst comes worst, you can still fill it with gas. There are battery technologies on the horizon that promise longer life and near-instant charging, but they're still years away. The Tesla Roaster would have been an ideal means of discussing that sort of thing, but it's strangely absent from the article. The real question isn't "who killed the electric car?", it's "what's going to power the electric car". What we've seen so far has been a series of false-starts, and the Tesla could be the start of a series of technological innovations with a real market application, but it seems like there aren't many people asking the right questions.