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Originally Posted by Bill8
No joy yet. The tesla folks have said they were shocked by how hard it was to manufacture a car at an acceptable pricepoint.
The wave disk engine looks like it should be cheap and easy to make, a slam-dunk improvement to the hybrid class of cars.
We will see.
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I don't know...everything I'm reading on the specs of the Tesla roadster say that it's price is more a function of the fact that it's made of carbon fiber (very expensive) as a true sports car, and that it's made by a small company in limited numbers.
Even so it's less than the new Corvette Stingray ($120,000) is going to be next year. And yet it's faster! lol
I think if a big dog like GM built a plant dedicated to turning out an electric car like the Tesla they would be able to build so many of them that the price would come down.
Plus...I was watching the engineers for the big Detroit car companies on CNN when the big Detroit auto show happened a few months ago. Every one of them said over and over that there wasn't any battery technology in existence that would allow an electric car to travel more than 40 or 50 miles off of electricity and that they HAD to have a gas engine in them to fire up once the electricity ran out.
They all said that they were working around the clock to come up with that "battery technology".
And yet...Tesla has had it for a few years now!!! And the news doesn't report it!
And check this bit of history out:
"The first taxicab company in New York City was the Electric Carriage and Wagon Company, which began running 12 electric hansom cabs in July 1897.[3] The company ran until 1898 with up to 62 cabs operating until it was reformed by its financiers to form the Electric Vehicle Company.[4] The company then built the Electrobat electric car, and had up to 100 taxicabs running in total by 1899. 1899 also saw a number of notable firsts for the Electric Vehicle Company. On 20 May 1899, Jacob German, driving an electric taxicab received the first speeding ticket in the United States.[5] Later that year, on 13 September, Henry Bliss became the first victim of an automotive accident in the United States when he was hit by an electric taxicab as he was helping a friend from a streetcar.[6]
By the early 1900s the Electric Vehicle company was running up to 1,000 electric taxicabs on the streets of New York City until, in January, 1907, a fire destroyed 300 of these vehicles which, in conjunction with the Panic of 1907 caused the company to collapse."
Our auto makers just don't WANT to build a real functional electric car in my opinion. There's just too much at stake for the oil companies who are in bed with the car companies.