Test drive: The Tesla Model S and the "insane" button

I’m not into cars. Well, not much really. I’m more of your average Aussie car driver, who takes the odd interest in a cool sounding vehicle. So, while I can’t offer an in depth analysis of all the technical aspects of the Tesla Model S electric vehicle that made its first deliveries in Australia this week, I can offer an angle of what the average punter might make of such a vehicle.

So what brings me to Tesla Motors on their Australian launch to drive one of their new cars? An invitation is a start. But additionally, there’s an aura about Tesla Motors similar to one you might find with Apple. After all, some people quip that a Tesla – because servicing mostly amounts to a software update downloaded from the web – is just an iPhone on wheels.

Tesla isn’t the first electric vehicle to launch in Australia, but it is, by far, the most alluring. And it is the complete package: Walking into the Tesla showroom in St Leonards, Sydney, the first things you will notice are the supercharging stations lined up at the front of the store, charging their demonstration vehicles.

These are the petrol stations of the future, but instead of spending 3 minutes holding the bowser whilst you inhale some toxic fumes, you’ll attach a cord to your car and then have a cup of coffee and a read of the paper. I quite like the idea of having to take 20 minutes to refuel the car, and here’s why.

It will force people to take a decent break on long trips
Even if you’re not on a long distance trip, we all need to take a few more minutes of our day to relax, and for those who just can’t take a few minutes out of their day, they’ll just have to charge their car at home overnight!

Imagine a re-fuelling station that’s actually a pleasant experience! Anyway I’m getting a little off track.

Back to the test drive. The car I’m driving is a black Model S P85+. The 85kWh batteries means the driving range is up to 500km (if they allowed it in Australia, it could power an average house for several days). Tesla’s come in a + version or a D version, with the P85D offering a more robust sporting experience, with the P85+ offering a smoother alternative.

The front of the car where you’d normally find the engine, is a roomy storage area. The boot at the back offers excellent space. Additionally, you can lift up the floor to find even more storage space from where the fuel tank would normally sit. Fold the seats down, and you can make yourself a comfy double bed which is over 2 metres long! But I wasn’t here for a rest.

In the driver’s seat, the left-panel where you’d find all your buttons for radio, GPS, controls and charging status is just a huge screen. The OS inbuilt on the Tesla is impressive, and with such a large screen the car can show you all the information you’d want to have without you have to flick through different screens. The in-built sim card means GPS and music streaming comes standard, not to mention being able to tune into practically any radio station in the world.

Pulling out on the road, I was a little nervous at first. This was a big step up from my normal ride (Mazda Metro 121). One of the first things I noticed was the re-generative braking. That’s the conversion of the vehicle’s kinetic energy into chemical energy stored in the battery, where it can be used later to drive the vehicle. As soon as you take your foot off the pedal, the re-gen braking kicks in, slowing you down automatically. And yes, the brake lights still come on.

rsz_img_4672 — Zero emissions, zero fuel consumption. *Photo: Sam Parkinson*

Going up a windy road, I noticed the grip of the car was incredible. Now to be fair, I’m comparing to my Mazda Metro, but nevertheless I was impressed. The car has such a low centre of gravity, that it is apparently near impossible for the car to be flipped over.

Five minutes later and I’m finally stopped at a traffic light at the front of the queue. This is the moment I’ve really been waiting for, as much of a car-noob as I am, I couldn’t help but feel excited at the prospect of flooring it and seeing what kind of power I could get out of it. I was excited and nervous. “I think I’m gonna floor it”, I said out loud to the Tesla staff member in the car with me. “Oh I wouldn’t do that”, he said nervously. Too late, I had already sent the message to my foot to floor it, and I couldn’t get the word abort down there quick enough stop it from flooring the pedal.

Now at the risk of making this whole article sound like a puff piece for Tesla, superlatives are inadequate for the effortless speed and quietness in which the car went from 0-60km’h. Once the Tesla staff member realised I hadn’t in fact totalled his vehicle, he told me about the smile I had on my face when I floored the car. “I call that the Tesla grin”, he said.

Arriving back at the Tesla dealership, I was unsure how to turn the vehicle off. “Just step out of the car, it will turn itself off once it knows you’re no longer in the car”. Unnecessary perhaps, but cool nonetheless.

The Tesla Model S is without a doubt a class vehicle, you don’t need to be an expert in cars to know that, but combined with its new technologies and what it represents for the future of car driving and energy storage for the matter, its a car worth having if you can afford it, and as some of the owners testify, it doesn’t matter whether you are there because you are a tech buff, a greenie, or just love the feel of the car.

But the affordability is a big if for most of us, with base models starting at around $100,000 in Australia, and the top of the range at just over $205,000 (which rivals the F1 McClaren in acceleration). Oh, did I mention the P85D comes with 3 driving modes; Normal, Sport, and “Insane”? Not even joking, the button says “insane”.

Would I buy one? Yes. Can I afford one? No. But if you can, and in the market for a new vehicle, I would strongly encourage you to at least test drive a Tesla, and see how it compares to it’s industry rivals such as Mercedes, Audi, and BMW. You may be pleasantly surprised. With this test drive out the window went all my previous concerns that electric vehicles meant a compromise in performance and class, and I’m excited about the EV future. And so are its new owners.

Comments

175 responses to “Test drive: The Tesla Model S and the “insane” button”

Leigh Ryan

12 December 2014

So what i want to know is, what is the issue with the 85Kwh battery coming into Australia to power homes or the 60Kwh for that matter, is it a conspiracy to protect the evil utility companies.

Carolhowes

12 December 2014

Yup, that’s exactly what it is ! Get rid of ABBOTT!

john

12 December 2014

Frankly as driver who has done about 3 million kilometres or so probably more let me tell you I always fuel up go get a coffee something to eat and sit down and often go refresh in the abolition block.
So being a responsible driver I know the advantage of taking a break not fuelling up and driving down the road with the inevitable result another death on the road.
Perhaps people need to have some driver education after all this is the bigger killer of people from when the infernal car was built.

Alex

12 December 2014

The “infernal car” – powered by the infernal combustion engine.
1. john
  
  12 December 2014
  
  If your a young person get a EV there is no question about this

Haggy

13 December 2014

Whether or not you can afford it depends on how much you drive. With petrol prices what they are, a person with a long distance commute could easily spend $10K/year. That’s $50K over the term of a five year loan. If you consider what that person’s monthly expenses would be with car payments and petrol prices, and compare that to the monthly payments on a Tesla, they would be about the same as they would be buying a much cheaper car. But the Model S is more likely to appeal to somebody who might have bought a Mercedes or BMW who could now get much more car for the money.

Let’s not forget that the savings don’t end after five years. A person who keeps the car for ten years might find the cost of ownership lower than it is for your Mazda.

The 20 minute charge has another advantage. It’s free. But for those who don’t want to wait 20 minutes, the trick is to charge at home. It takes less time to walk over to the car with the charging cable and plug it in than it takes to type this sentence, and with the time you save by not having to turn off the ignition or lock the car, it comes out to no time at all to charge the car. You simply set it to charge at night, and you need to make that setting only once when you first buy the car.

Since Tesla plans to use solar for most of its charging stations worldwide, protecting the “evil utility companies” won’t be an issue. The electric grid is taxed most heavily during the day and there’s excess generation capacity at night. Power companies have a lot to gain by giving cheap EV rates for night charging. The infrastructure is largely there and it’s a matter of wiring homes to support it, but a big issue is getting enough supercharging stations to allow for major trips.

I say all this as an American who spent the past few weeks driving around Australia and New Zealand, and wishing I could be driving my Model S that I have in California. Instead I spent money on more than just a bit of petrol but also realized that it’s not yet possible to replace rental car fleets with EVs. I’d love to see it happen though.

Joe Dick

27 December 2014

Good points, and yes it is about if you can afford it. It is a lifestyle vehicle. Some people want an iPhone, some want a simple cell phone that just lets them get and receive calls, and some would rather just wait until they get home to listen to the answering machine. Given that the average car averages 25 miles per hour during its lifetime, why do you need more than three horsepower? If you need to go on a trip, trains are more efficient: Steel wheels rolling on steel rails have a lot less rolling resistance than rubber wheels on asphalt or concrete. The difference in rolling resistance is orders of magnitude!

Meanwhile, why would you drive to work if you just work at a computer? Judging by the timestamps on many of these posts, a lot of you clearly have nothing to do but get on the internet at work. If you’re going to do that and get away with it at work, clearly you should be allowed to work at home, and your immediate superiors should be fired for letting you get away with that at work. Therefore you really don’t need that cubicle you’ve been slaving away in, your boss didn’t need paid, and you clearly didn’t need the car or use of public transportation to get to your “job”. In fact, your cubicle didn’t even need that computer, or the chair. You have those at home too. What a lot of waste.

You know what? I’m sick to death with the utter stupidity. Want to save the world? Demand to work at home if you use a computer at work as a primary thing.- and if you’re at home, get a life by telling your bosses that you want to work at home all day so you don’t have to worry about some penny-ante useless piece of bullarkey brought to you by – that’s right, the guy that employs creators of the total failure that was supposed to change our world, the Segway. Right. A $3,000+ toy that couldn’t do what a $150 bicycle could do a decade ago.

Joe Dick

13 December 2014

Okay, so let’s say everyone on the freeway was driving electric cars that take 20 minutes to recharge. Let’s say that’s a good thing to take a break. Okay, fine so far. Now, how insanely large would a typical petrol station have to be to service it’s typical maximum throughput capability? Gas pumps have a 10 gallon per minute rate limit, and I can fill my 15 gallon tank in two minutes with my credit card.

With a 20 minute “fill” time, the station would have to have 10 times as many “pumps” to service it’s maximum throughput. Now your roadside gas station with four pumps servicing 8 cars at a time with four dual pumps requiring a tad over 8 parking places worth of real-estate dedicated to refueling, now requires 80 parking places of real estate for refueling alone.

Then there’s the problem of the little walk in mini-convenience store, and what must be done for that. I’m not going to sit in my car for 20 minutes, and I’m not going to stand around either. In the US, people don’t generally like to share tables with strangers. Therefore you will need at least 80 tables worth of seating. Granted, some of those can be two-tops, but most will need to be four-tops. Then you need a staff to serve those 80 tables. And of course there’s the bathrooms for 80 cars worth of people vs. 8. And so on.

I find it quite humorous how who have visions of a new future don’t quite think it all through. By the way, don’t get angry at me. I’m just bringing up some interesting points to remind the author that “wouldn’t it be nice” isn’t a real-world approach to engineering the future – but it is a song by The Beach Boys. 🙂

rsteeb

13 December 2014

EV’s ARE the future. And unless you’re traveling much further than your normal everyday commute, you will NEVER have to charge the car away from home, while it sits in the garage, over night. No logical reason will ever exist for big crowds at the charging station. Along the interstate highways, charging stations will be integrated with dining and shopping facilities, so sitting in your car 20 minutes wasting time will not be much of an issue.
1. Joe Dick
  
  15 December 2014
  
  Wow. You take my comments way to seriously. Didn’t you see the smiley face? Anyway, as an engineering professional in the aerospace and automotive industries, EVs are not the future; but if you want to believe that that’s your option.
  1. Bob_Wallace
    
    15 December 2014
    
    So, what’s the future?
    
    Do we continue to drive ICEVs and kill the climate?
    
    Do we switch to FVECs and spend 10c to 17c per mile for fuel?
    
    Do we assume there’s some miracle fuel coming out of a lab somewhere?
    
    Here’s the likely competition. A 200+ mile range EV for the same price as a similar model ICEV that can be driven for about 3 cents a mile. What beats that?
    1. Joe Dick
      
      15 December 2014
      
      Answering your questions in order:
      
      –The future looks pretty much like the present.
      
      –I rather doubt that we going to “kill the climate” http://rps3.com/Files/AGW/EngrCritique.AGW-Science.v4.3.pdf
      
      –The important cost of transportation is life cycle cost per mile.
      
      –No.
      
      –Again, the life cycle cost per mile of transportation is what’s important. The flaw in your argument is that a 200+ mile EV costs much more than a comparable IC vehicle.
      
      It’s important to understand that Tesla doesn’t generate a profit by selling sexy cars, but rather by selling sleazy emissions “credits,” mandated by the state of California’s electric vehicle requirements. The competition, like Honda, do not have a mass market plug-in to meet the mandate and therefore must buy the credits from Tesla, the only company that does. The bill for last quarter was $68 million.
      
      Absent this shakedown of potential car buyers, Tesla would have lost $57 million, or $11,400 per car. As the company sold 5,000 cars in the quarter, though, $13,600 per car was paid by other manufacturers, who are going to pass that cost on to buyers of their products.
      
      First, there’s the $7500 taxback bonus that every buyer gets and every taxpayer pays. Then there are generous state subsidies ($2500 in California, $4000 in Illinois—the bluer the state, the more the taxpayers get gouged), all paid to people forking out $63K (plus taxes) for the base version, to roughly $100K for the quick one.
    2. Bob_Wallace
      
      15 December 2014
      
      Joe, there’s no room here for climate change deniers. This is a pro-science, pro-facts site. That that foolishness elsewhere.
      
      —
      
      It is true that we have no affordable 200 mile range EVs on the market right now. We have strong indications that we will have soon. So humor me.
      
      Your Tesla claim is incorrect.
      
      February 2014
      
      “In yesterday’s earnings call from the fourth quarter of 2013, Tesla Motors announced that their net income of $46 million late last year came without selling any Zero Emissions Vehicle credits.”
      
      http://jalopnik.com/teslas-zev-credit-win-should-silence-some-of-their-cri-1526351819
      
      —
      
      Now, what is this vehicle which will either sell for far less than an EV and/or operate for well under 3 cents per mile?
    3. Joe Dick
      
      15 December 2014
      
      Gee, I thought Burt Rutan did a great job analyzing the facts. If you’re really pro-Science, you would read his presentation that I attached, and respond with discussion. By the way, do you have a degree in science? I do. So does Rutan.
      
      Jalopnik isn’t what I would call an unbiased source of information. The link you provided is pretty much an editorial, rather than a report. What you refer to as “my” Tesla claim is shared by Forbes magazine, which is focused business viability which requires hard assessment of the facts: http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmichaels/2013/05/27/if-tesla-would-stop-selling-cars-wed-all-save-some-money/
      
      Your last sentence demonstrates that you did not read what I wrote, but rather what you wanted to see. If you are also indeed pro-Fact as well as pro-Science, you would have understood what I said the first go-around; but I’ll try again in lay terminology:
      
      It is useless to argue the energy consumption per mile of a vehicle as a merit. Besides the direct energy per mile consumed over its life, It takes energy to produce a vehicle, maintain it, and properly dispose of it at the end of its life cycle.
      
      A properly maintained internal combustion engine automobile can readily run for 250,000 miles or more. I owned a 1982 Jaguar XJ6 with over 280,000 miles on it. In its 28 years of dependable service, it saw an average of 10,000 miles per year. It cost a mere $38,000 and was paid for long ago. It consumed 14,000 gallons of fuel during its life, and the average cost of fuel during its life was ~$2.25. It consumed a little under $6,000 in tires, spark plugs, wiper blades, oil, washer fluid, etc, and had a total life-cycle cost of $75,500. That equates to an life cycle cost per mile of $0.27, or 27 cents per mile. I have a friend with a Chevrolet Cutlass that only cost $14,000 that he still drives daily, and his mileage and maintenance costs have been comparable. His life cycle cost per mile is $0.18 or 18 cents per mile.
      
      A Tesla Model S sells for $65,000 and according to Forbes would have had to sticker for an additional $11,400 for Tesla to break even were it not being subsidized by other car manufacturers buying mandatory carbon credits from Tesla. therefore the real sticker price should be more like $76,400. I rather doubt a Tesla Model S can run for 280,000 miles – at least not with the same maintenance costs, but just for giggles let’s make the very flawed assumption that the battery will have a prayer of lasting a couple of decades. With $6,000 worth of maintenance and 3 cents per mile of electricity adding up to $8,400 in electricity, that’s a life cycle cost of $90,800, which works out to $0.32 or 32 cents per mile. That’s five cents per mile more than my Jag, and almost double my friend’s Cutlass.
      
      Now I’m sure you’ll argue that a ~$40,000 car in 1982 would cost a darn sight more today, and you’d be right; but there are plenty of fine internal combustion cars to be had for less than what I paid, and properly maintained can readily go more than a quarter million miles. Therefore internal combustion is still cheaper per mile than a Tesla.
      
      Now, you refer to a Tesla as an EV, or electric vehicle. They are also called zero-emissions vehicles, aren’t they. The first label is a half-truth, isn’t it, and the second is just an outright lie. A Tesla is really an EC, or external combustion vehicle. Sure, you can go on about windmills and solar panels and such, but at the end of the day those are heavily subsidized and don’t make any more sense than electric cars – but that is beyond the scope of the discussion. By and large, Teslas are charged from coal fired power plants. Hardly zero emission, is it.
      
      At the end of the day, dollars are all equatable to burned fuel. Currency is merely a convenience, as carrying gasoline or lumps of coal in a wallet isn’t very practical. So, if anyone here is a “denier”, I would have to lean toward it being you, rather than me. Wave your hands in the air all you want, they’ll still be passing through all the CO2 that is created by so-called zero-emissions External Combustion powered automobiles. Not that CO2 is a bad thing; plants love it. That’s Science and a Fact; but you’ve already demonstrated that you are not really interested in either of them, haven’t you.
      
      Now that I’ve explained how your electric bill per mile isn’t relevant to the argument, do go have a sober read of Burt Rutan’s presentation. You might learn a thing there too.
    4. Bob_Wallace
      
      15 December 2014
      
      Sorry, Joe. Science has moved on and left you and Burt behind to contemplate how far it is to the edge of the Earth where one tumbles off.
    5. Joe Dick
      
      15 December 2014
      
      Sorry Bob, but snarky statements like yours are evidence of a losing position in a discussion.
      
      Are you a scientist? Do you have a degree in a science related field? I’m guessing not. Therefore you’re not really in a position to state anything about what science is or does.
      
      I am particularly amused by the “flat earth” element of your attempted insult. You do realise that the whole Earth being flat thing was a myth created by Washington Irving in his biography of Christopher Columbus; he is, of course, better known for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and both are essentially works of fiction. Mankind has never thought the Earth was flat. Sailors always referred to ships being hull-up near port and hull-down further away, fully understanding that the Earth was a sphere. Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth to within 5% two hundred years BC. What a shame you don’t know that; which should call into question your other convictions about a field in which you appear to have neither experience or training.
      
      It used to be that people deferred to those with expertise in a particular area, and were willing to learn from them. What a shame that doesn’t hold true in your case.
    6. Bob_Wallace
      
      15 December 2014
      
      Actually, Joe, I’m a published research scientist (was during part of my career). PhD from a very major university.
      
      It really doesn’t take more than a high school science degree to understand the basics of how greenhouse gases operate to retain heat. It’s stuff we’ve known for over 100 years.
      
      You might wish to look up the Flat Earth Society.
    7. Joe Dick
      
      15 December 2014
      
      Excellent. Then do have a look at Burt Rutan’s presentation and tell me what’s wrong with it. Let’s start with the fact that there is no such thing as a “high school science degree”. I presume what you mean to say is education, and it takes far more than a high school science education to understand the effects of CO2 in the atmosphere.
      
      For instance, Rutan correctly presents data on the efficacy of CO2 in the atmosphere on page 30. The ability of CO2 to act as a greenhouse gas is highly non-linear. The bulk of its ability to act as a greenhouse gas in in the first hundred parts per million. Once we reach 400ppm, the area under the curve pretty much summed up, and as Rutan correctly points out, doubling CO2 does not double the effect. Please offer me your comments on this.
      
      I would remind you that you are the one that brought environment into the discussion. I merely commented on the interesting real estate aspects that would attain giving the author’s comment on 20 minute charge times. I attempted to inform, and bring an interesting aspect to the discussion. Others have been polite in their comments in response. You’ve been downright rude.
      
      For instance, there you go again with the flat earth thing. If you really are a scientist, why not seek to discuss science and facts rather than hurl insults? Again, hurling blatant insults is a sign of weakness, along with being childish.
      
      I would think that a research scientist would be capable of assessing the true energy costs of a vehicle – i.e. the life cycle energy costs – instead of going on about the energy cost per mile alone as if that told the whole story. You might want to think about that, as it does not reflect well on the “major university”, PhD degrees, and research science.
    8. Bob_Wallace
      
      16 December 2014
      
      Joe, I have no desire to waste time in a conversation with someone who puts beliefs ahead of facts.
      
      However, if you are a person who operates from a factual base but has a bunch of bad information on board then I’d suggest you spend some time catching up.
      
      If you don’t understand climate science then read up on it.
      
      Here’s a very accessible site that approaches the science from the standpoint of all the anti-science myths.
      
      https://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
    9. Joe Dick
      
      18 December 2014
      
      Okay, so you’re not really about science or facts. I ask for your comments on a single graph that presents the actual measured ability of CO2 as a greenhouse gas, and you are unwilling to discuss it. It is a shame that the public is unaware of such information, as it demonstrates how incredibly stable the environment is. If people were aware of such information, I wonder if they’d be as fearful of our ability to destabilize the natural world in a catastrophic way. I find it utterly amazing that you claim to be a man of science, and yet cannot engage in a simple discussion about a simple graph!
    10. Bob_Wallace
      
      18 December 2014
      
      Here – this is from rocket scientists.
      
      http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
      
      (Why do we encounter so many ignorant engineers?)
    11. MorinMoss
      
      16 June 2015
      
      I’m replying to this older comment because some of your newer ones have been deleted. I imagine the moderators are tired of our offtopic discussion.
      
      I can’t speak for what is or is not there; I’m not affiliated with any of the climate monitoring sites and am not a scientist or data collector.
      I know that NOAA says their data is freely downloadable but if you want raw, unadjusted data then I would recommend you check (or ask) at wattsupwiththat.com for the best sources of unadjusted data.
      If you tell them what your purpose is, I’m sure at least a few would offer to help.
      If you find some glaring contradiction using your analytical methods that stands up to scrutiny, you could well had a paper worth publishing.
      You can also check at the Wood For Trees site to see what his data sources are as he appears to have downloaded from all the major ones incl raw data.
      
      Or you could try asking the BEST folks, There’s a phone number on the Contact Us page as waiting for an e-mail reply may take some time.
    12. Joe Dick
      
      18 December 2014
      
      I’m a published engineer with several US patents. I kind of have doubts about your claims, however, since you state, “It really doesn’t take more than a high school science degree…”. I don’t know of a single high school that offers degrees in science. Generally they offer high school diplomas.
      
      Actually, it takes at least a bachelor’s degree in science, including specialization in thermodynamics, heat and mass transfer, and the like to understand how greenhouse gases operate. This is why I brought page 30 of Rutan’s presentation to your attention for discussion, which you evade discussing at ever step.
      
      What a shame that the public is not aware that CO2’s ability to act as a greenhouse gas is highly non-linear, starting out having a large effect at 20 parts per million and then rapidly diminishing to ~1/24th of that effect at today’s levels of CO2 and further progressing asymptotically to zero soon after that. This sort of information never gets presented to the public, as it isn’t “scary”, even though it’s real.
      
      If a company hyped a stock, telling people that early investors made huge sums of money and they could too, while the company’s actual performance looked like this graph, it would be called fraud. “See how much these early investors made? You’ll get rich too!” Yeah, right.
      
      So, anyway, I find it amazing that you claim to be a PhD in science, and love to discuss facts, but you refuse to discuss the basic performance of CO2 as a greenhouse gas when it is plotted on a graph that properly puts its efficacy in perspective.
    13. Bob_Wallace
      
      18 December 2014
      
      You’re an ignorant old git, Joe.
      
      You give us other old guys a black eye.
    14. Giles
      
      18 December 2014
      
      thanks Joe. Take your stuff to another site.
    15. Joe Dick
      
      27 December 2014
      
      Hey Giles. Welcome to the real world. I have a multiplicity of US Patents in automotive engineering, and I come from a long line of engineers. As it turns out, I might just know a thing or two. Also, I did play a very minor role in your ability to have the opportunity to tell me to “go away”, courtesy of a long dead friend named Carl Anderson, who pioneered this sort of text exchange. So, Giles, are you just overly proud of your monetarily purchased power to shout other people down that you disagree with, or are you part of the solution in terms of having a conversation with people that helped you have that opportunity? Long before the ARPANET was converted to the “interweb”, we used this medium to exchange ideas, not to tell other people that there were other chat-rooms in which to have a discussion.
    16. Dale Smith
      
      25 February 2015
      
      But you fail to consider that higher levels of CO2 allow the atmosphere to hold more water vapor which is a much more effective heat trap. A rise in CO2 creates a rise in water vapor because a hotter atmosphere will hold more water vapor.
    17. Joe Dick
      
      28 February 2015
      
      I see nothing wrong with a warmer world. Don’t bother to comment. You’ll be wasting your time.
    18. MorinMoss
      
      16 December 2014
      
      “By and large, Teslas are charged from coal fired power plants”
      If you were being completely honest, “by & large” would be 40% – and falling.
      There are places where the %age from coal-fired power plants is much higher and places where it’s close to ZERO.
    19. Joe Dick
      
      18 December 2014
      
      I agree. In California you’d be looking at over 60% natural gas generating the electricity. Natural gas is replacing coal in some areas of the country, but it still makes CO2.
    20. MorinMoss
      
      18 December 2014
      
      Coal mining & burning has emissions above and beyond CO2, and so does oil & gas usage. Natgas is not without its problems and poorly-drilled wells leaking methane is a concern but let’s not overlook the fact that one important benefit of the “long tailpipe” is that your emissions are concentrated at a smaller number of large power plants rather than from hundreds of millions of exhaust pipes mere feet away from vulnerable lungs in highly populated areas.
      
      Even if the net amount of CO2 is no different, managing or mitigating the other emissions is made easier.
    21. MorinMoss
      
      29 December 2014
      
      JB Straubel, Tesla’s tech wizard-in-chief ( and also a guy who by sheer co-incidence has a science degree ) knows Rutan very well – they collaborated for years on a project for Boeing.
      If Rutan couldn’t dissuade a colleague as smart as JB, it’s likely that his reasoning is flawed.
      
      I’m glad to hear your Jag has served you well. But, an average of 10,000 miles isn’t a lot and I’m curious as to what was the most miles in any 12 month period and how much maintenance was needed during that time.
      By contrast, Bjorn Nyland of Norway posted a video of his 85 kWh Model S surpassing 100,000 km in about 1 year, most of his charging done for free at Tesla’s Superchargers but also a lot at home and some public chargers.
      His mileage includes a lot of winter driving and road trips as far as southern Germany, Geneva and France and as far north as Hatteng, 69N latitude and over 800 miles north of his home city of Oslo.
      
      He’s previously owned a BMW E61 so I’m looking for a video where he compares the two. He did say recently that the BMW had a much nicer interior.
      
      So far, he has not seen a noticeable decrease in range despite racking up just over 62,000 mi.
      That said, it’s not likely he’ll get 20 yrs out of the battery even if he cuts back drastically on his driving but EV batteries are still in the early stages and prices are dropping significantly.
      
      Most of the Toyota RAV4 EVs are still on their original batteries after 10+ yrs and 100,000 miles. Keep in mind that by the time an EV battery is out of warranty, it’s still performing at around 70% of original capacity which most people can live with.
      
      And lay off the carbon credits and subsidies,okay?
      If you’re old enough to have bought a 1982 Jag when it was new, you’re likely also old enough to remember what every major city was like before we started cleaning up exhaust emissions and power plants.
      These were actions that were, and in some cases still are, fought tooth and nail by the FF companies.
      The public paid the cost of that pollution with every breath and many shortened lives and then the cleanup costs that the capitalist corporations were only too happy to socialize.
      That’s a much bigger bill than any subsidies for renewable energy.
    22. Joe Dick
      
      30 December 2014
      
      As part of my research on the public’s understanding of science and technology, I find your means of coming to conclusions rather interesting. Rather than look at the data Rutan provides, you point to a guy who has a different opinion. I wonder why it is that people defer to “authority” as opposed to taking a look at the data first-hand.
      
      Straubel is an interesting guy, but his training in energy systems engineering at Stanford didn’t include the sort in-depth training in fluid dynamics and heat and mass transfer and meteorology or the analysis of complex physical systems that would give him a leg up on guys like Rutan and myself. Just the facts, man. I find it curious that you take it as given that Rutan ever attempted to “dissuade” Straubel on CAGW. Either of them tell you that that occurred, or have you a reliable source for that?
      
      The average driver in the US currently drives ~15,000 miles per year. So Bjorn Nyland’s 100,000km (62,500mi) is racking up the miles way above our national average. Only 328 Rav4 electric vehicles were sold to the public, and another 1156 were leased. According to Edmunds, just a fraction of those remain on the road. The reason they few remaining are all on their original batteries is because Panasonic ceased production.
      
      Why should I lay off the carbon credits and subsidies? They are real, and they cost me money. I don’t appreciate being robbed with a gun or a pen. Again, according to Forbes, Tesla would be in the red without subsidies and carbon credits.
      
      Yes I remember very well how big cities were in the 1960s and 1970s. Fortunately we came a long way with catalytic converters, port fuel injection, sensors and electronic engine controls.
      
      At the end of the day, electric vehicles are a lifestyle product in a niche market that will never be mainstream anytime soon. Just basic engineering facts.
    23. MorinMoss
      
      30 December 2014
      
      Because I’m not a scientist, it takes slow & careful reading & analysis on my part to determine whose data & conclusions are plausible and I don’t have that much free time.
      
      But over the course of the past couple decades, I’ve seen one expert or another, usually from an unrelated discipline, prop up a set of conclusions that were wrong.
      
      If Rutan’s work is so convincing, put it in front of actual scientists, not merely on a blog for interested laymen – and off-topic, too boot.
      
      Back in 2007, Straubel spoke at Stanford about climate change education and CO2 intensity. If Bert isn’t aware of his former collaborator’s wrongheaded view and hasn’t personally tried to change his mind, he’s being scientifically irresponsible.
      
      Look at all the effort you’re putting in with complete strangers.
      
      “We’ve” only come a long way, in terms of widespread usage of catalytic convertors because of the environmental activism of a previous generation, which caused GOVERNMENT intervention and laws for phasing out the leaded gasoline that poisoned these devices.
      
      That is also real and also costs you a LOT of money – at least 1 or 2 Trillion bucks since the laws….., er, since the Christian consciences of the oil & automotive industries were tickled, depriving us of the joy of coughing up lungfuls of freedom phlegm.
    24. Joe Dick
      
      30 December 2014
      
      Oh, I’ve shared it with many of my fellow scientists, and they agree Rutan does a great job – especially at making the information understandable in lay terms. That’s Bert’s main focus. The information is there to read, and Straubel is more than welcome to consider it. That is how science works – really the onus is on Straubel to avail himself of all available data and information, not for Rutan to actively win him over. In fact, if Straubel were as objective as Rutan, he could easily do the same thing: Plot all the known data and look at it.
      
      While I agree that environmental efforts helped us clean up car exhaust, you really shouldn’t forget that there were many engineers within the industry that not only championed these improvements, but also did the hard work of making them reality. Don’t think for a minute that environmentalists should get all the glory; in fact, they really only played a supporting role. Where you see it as a green-twists-industry’s arm and forces them to spend “1-2 Trillion bucks since the laws” – a figure I think you’ll find hard to substantiate – the actual picture is quite different: Engineers by nature want to use the least amount of materials to get a thing built and to make it go, and they don’t like things any messier than you do. Most of the improvements you put down to environmental legislation were already in the process of happening anyway, which is why the legislation was able to pass.
      
      By the way, why wouldn’t I put in some effort with complete strangers? That’s what authors do. I enjoy engaging potential readers. For instance, type in “Helium Hokum” and give my article at Scientific American a read on an off-toopic subject. Then, give Burt a chance. After all, it’s free, and only takes a little of your time, and you can disagree with it if you want to – but only if you really give it a read! Cheers! http://rps3.com/Files/AGW/EngrCritique.AGW-Science.v4.3.pdf
    25. Bob_Wallace
      
      30 December 2014
      
      Rutan makes sophomoric mistakes.
      
      He argues that too little CO2 is a bad thing, therefore too much can’t be a bad thing.
      
      He claims that there was a global cooling crisis belief in the 1970s when a quick look at the literature proves otherwise.
      
      He lumps a bunch of stuff together under the heading of “Modern Human-Extinction Scares” when some clearly don’t belong there, some were avoided (or have been avoided so far), and some need to be dealt with.
      He says things like –
      
      “The temperature trend is so slight that, were the global average temperature change which has taken place during the 20th and 21st centuries were to occur in an ordinary room, most of the people in the room would be unaware of it. ”
      
      Disregarding the fact that the “slight” rise to date has caused increases to sea levels to the point where they are now impacting our coastal infrastructure, has melted a very large portion of Arctic sea ice and equatorial glaciers and has changed our agricultural zones.
      
      Some more “slight” is really going to screw us.
      
      I’m sorry, Burt should go back to flying planes. He’s disgracing himself with his dabbling in climate science.
    26. Joe Dick
      
      30 December 2014
      
      How is it sophomoric to say too little CO2 is bad? Explain, please.
    27. Bob_Wallace
      
      30 December 2014
      
      Read more carefully, Joe.
      
      And do learn some climate science. The basics aren’t hard to grasp.
    28. Joe Dick
      
      30 December 2014
      
      And, uh, in the 1970s all the data from ice cores was pointing to the next ice age – to the point that that there were earnest serious proposals that we spread our coal dust on the glaciers that were soon to progess south at an alarming rate to slow their advance. Did not “The Blizzard of ’78” come up in your Googling or memory? Even Leonard Nimoy was on board: “In Search Of: The Next Ice Age”. Good grief! 🙂
    29. Bob_Wallace
      
      30 December 2014
      
      Leonard Nimoy is a climate scientist? Who knew? Well, well, well….
      Why don’t you read some science?
      
      http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm
    30. Joe Dick
      
      30 December 2014
      
      PS, why did Al Gore buy a mansion in San Francisco which should be well below the sea level rise he “predicted” was to have occurred by now in “An Inconvenient Truth”. It amazes me that you chastised me that only facts and science are to be discussed here. C’mon. Surely a guy who claims to have a PhD can do better. http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/06/26/rising-tides-of-terror-will-melting-glaciers-flood-al-gores-coastal-home/
    31. Bob_Wallace
      
      30 December 2014
      
      Hate to break it to you, but Al Gore is not a climate scientist. And he obviously got that wrong if that is what he said.
    32. Joe Dick
      
      30 December 2014
      
      And yes Bob, you are correct if what you mean is that the majority of scientists did not buy into “The Next Ice Age” in the 70s. They simply said it is impossible to predict. That, however didn’t prevent marginal scientists from hogging the media spotlight to improve their notoriety and scare up funding and profit from it. In those days there were only three networks, no internet no 24 hour news stations, and no social media. So why is it that the bulk of scientists stayed off-record politely back then, and now 30,000+ and of them 9,000+ sign a petition to say, “Enough”, when a comparative handful yet again hog the spotlight with “science” they clearly do not agree with? You never did respond to me about that. You just resort to calling a very talented and wise professional, who took the time to think for himself, collect the data, and graph it for himself and then share it “sophomoric” without explaining how that is so? That’s not the professional nature of scientific inquiry and discussion they taught us at Purdue. And your “major university” was… Surely you can see why I doubt your credentials and honest intent in discussing “science” and “facts” only here.
    33. Bob_Wallace
      
      30 December 2014
      
      Joe, let me open by saying that you are a very tiresome person and I’m not going to spend time playing whack-a-mole with you.
      
      If you don’t want to take some time and learn some climate science but spend your time trolling, that’s your decision.
      
      You’re obviously not a dumb person. But you are, apparently, intentionally ignorant.
      
      Don’t end up being one of those old fools sitting on the general store porch declaring the 21st Century version of “Cars will never replace horses.”
      
      Science isn’t debating, Joe. Science is based on empiricism. There are tons and tons of collected facts. Learn some.
    34. Joe Dick
      
      31 December 2014
      
      I never asked you to play whack-a-mole. You started this tangential discussion on climate science, and you were welcome to tune me out at any time. My atmospheric studies as part of my degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering included climate science. After all, the very heating of the Earth and the transfer and retention of that heat as it travels back into space drives the atmosphere, and atmospheric turbulence and its generation and modelling as an input to modeling the response and loads on aircraft happens to be a particular forte of mine.
      
      So don’t get snooty and effectively say I don’t know any thing and I’m intentionally ignorant and I need to take the time learn, and that I’ll become an old fool if I don’t.
      
      All I asked you do do was discuss one graph on one page of one presentation, and you refused. Amazing that you choose to hurl insults and refuse a discussion about a simple graph. All I wanted to find out were your thoughts on that one bit of data. That’s all.
      
      All I wanted to do was comment a little comment on the required land usage of electric charging stations vs. traditional gas pumps. You’re the one that took it to the great climate debate of 2014. I was just trying to raise a little awareness and get some people to consider the whole picture of what an electric service station would be – since it’s not just smack a charger in place of a pump.
      
      So I will tell you again: If you don’t want to talk about a simple graph on a single page of a presentation, you are of no use to me. I was curious about what your comments on that would be, but clearly you have an entire agenda to push, and don’t have time to talk with a fellow human being. Fine.
      
      By the way, Bob, I’m not the troll here. I’ve told you repeatedly to go away if you don’t want to talk about a simple little graph, and you keep coming back shout things at me, so I’ve patiently responded to your things, and then I’ve repeated my couple of questions – which you conveniently never answer. You could have been done with this days ago if you’d just looked at the damn graph and gave me a comment or two.
      
      That’s sad, Bob. Big ol’ PhD’s too busy to answer a simple question… Science _is_ about exchanging ideas, discussing, and yes, even debating. Instead, you make with the insults: “21st Century version of ‘Cars will never replace horses.”” indeed. You’re so consumed with spitting vitriol and saying I don’t understand anything and telling me to go read some website because I don’t know anything; you’d have had an opportunity to find out what I really do know instead of forming a prejudiced opinion of me. Not very scientific, Bob.
      
      Mean while Science is based on both the experimental _and_ the purely theoretical. Ever hear of theoretical physics? That branch has done a lot before any experiment was conducted to back it up.
      
      Oh, and by the way Bob, Empiricism is based on Science. You really need to ask for your money back on that PhD if they taught you that:
      
      em·pir·i·cism
      əmˈpirəˌsizəm/
      noun
      PHILOSOPHY
      
      the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. Stimulated by the rise of experimental science, it developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, expounded in particular by John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.
    35. MorinMoss
      
      30 December 2014
      
      There’s one who stands head & shoulders above the crowd:
      
      Arie Haagen-Smit, a chemist, not so much an engineer, with a very green thumb whose initial interest was the effect on Los Angeles’ terrible air quality on his beloved pineapples and then on people, after much public outrcry from concerned citizens and some of their elected reps ( who today might be referred to as bleeding-heart liberal Hollywood greenies ).
      
      What really pushed Haagen-Smit to abandon fruit flavorings for foul fumes was the denigration of his work & conclusions by a Stanford Research Institute scientist whose own research was funded by the oil & auto industry.
      
      I don’t know much at all about you but your posts are very much like those of present-day deniers who also want to rewrite history to make it seem like they would have been passionately on the side of the choking masses when, like professional contrarian Fred S. Singer, they would have been happily collecting industry paycheques to counter, obfuscate, deny and derail.
      It was those choking citizens, not your industry engineers, who force the shutdown of the butadiene plant on Aliso St in Sep 1943.
      There’s a great irony that the inventor of the catalyst for butadiene, Eugene Houdry ( an ENGINEER – you’re vindicated!! Hooray!) would go on to invent the automotive catalytic converter.
      It’s a great pity that it took so long after that for the use of the catalytic converters in cars because of the aforementioned lead poisoning, despite the work – and stolid activism – of Clair Cameron Patterson.
      But why trust a ivory tower geochemist over practical industry ENGINEERS like Charles Kettering (Delco founder and inventor of the electric starter) & Thomas Midgley who together presided over the creation of both tetraethyl lead AND CFCs ?
      These two accomplished experts, with over 200 patents between them, were willing to go to such lengths to defend their products, glossing over multiple deaths and lead-induced insanity at DuPont and later GM / Exxon’s Ethyl Corp with Midgley TWICE suffering lead poisoning requiring prolonged treatment & convalescence.
      
      Midgley’s engineering prowess served him well when he became disabled due to polio and designed a pulley system that permitted him to be easily hoisted from his sickbed – only to be further hoist by his own petard several years later when the aforementioned contraption was the cause of his demise by accidental strangulation.
      
      I can’t say that foresight was among his strengths.
    36. Bob_Wallace
      
      30 December 2014
      
      And that, folks, is the Tour de Force Comment winner of the day.
    37. Joe Dick
      
      30 December 2014
      
      It is interesting how you cherry pick things that were moves forward that later turn out to have had bad side effects. In Marie Curie’s day, we were going to heat our homes with radium, let alone the benefits of radium in toothpaste and other products of daily grooming use. Of course discoveries of science get misapplied. Those incidents have a lot to do with what the public wants – including tetra ethyl lead, because people wanted their engines to run smooth at the high end of performance they seldom used.
      
      Today is no different. Do you want to have a more efficient ride? Nothing beats the low rolling resistance of steel wheels on steel rails. Semis run 100 psi. Hybrid cars pretend at efficiency with 66 psi tires. Tesla apparently specifies 42 psi, “cheating” a bit. Typical internal combustion cars run 32 psi.
      
      Rolling resistance is an inverse function of pressure, and that has been known since the invention of the pneumatic tire. That’s why big trucks run high pressure narrow tires that incidentally don’t hydroplane as readily as well as roll with relative ease. Meanwhile, hybrid car owners brag about their mileage while putting up with a rough ride the would never tolerate in a gasoline or diesel powered car. Even Tesla pushes the envelope, betting on the “halo effect” of “feel good”.
      
      We engineers have known how to cut the rolling resistance of your wheels – the predominant efficiency loss of a passenger car – by as much as half for over 100 years. Customers want a cushy ride that has “performance” they really don’t use, nor should they in a daily driver.
      
      Unfortunately the public has been sold a bill of goods about what works, when what works is patently obvious: When it comes to using limited energy to the max, what do the cyclists in the Tour de France roll on?
      
      Skinny, high pressure tires.
      
      When the customer base gets realistic about saving the environment, then maybe they’ll start to think about that. Just saying’, as kids say today. 🙂
    38. MorinMoss
      
      30 December 2014
      
      Kettering had another solution to the engine knock problem – blending with ethanol.
      
      But that option couldn’t be patented so TEL it had to be, right?
      
      What else could he do? And hiring Dr Robert Kehoe only 2 yrs after, to “inform” the general public that leaded petrol was safe would surely have received the seal of approval from the Curies, no?
      
      After all, lead protects against radioactivity 😀
      
      And I suspect you truly know what “cherrypicking” is.
      
      What I did was draw straight lines from the identification of auto emissions as harmful to who tried to solve the problems and who – quite deliberately – stood in the way, for decades.
      
      “public has been sold a bill of goods about what works, when what works is patently obvious”
      
      So who was selling the lie? And why were the conscientious engineers who knew what worked not speaking out?
      Those skinny tires would have worked just fine on better roads that could be more easily maintained,which sounds like an engineering problem. Any solution to that?
      
      I would like to clarify what I said about your posts and climate deniers as it may have been unduly harsh.
      
      What I meant was that some of the things you say / write remind me of comments made by many prominent deniers or contrarians that exposes a particular bias.
      
      I’ll give 3 examples:
      
      Jim Inhofe, (R-OK) Committee on Environment
      “Do you realize I was actually on your side of this issue when I was chairing that committee and I first heard about this? I thought it must be true until I found out what it would cost.”
      
      Roy Spencer, (PhD) Univ. Alabama, Huntsville
      “my job has helped save our economy from the economic ravages of out-of-control environmental extremism.
      I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government”
      
      and your hero, Bert Rutan,
      
      “My bias is based on fear of Government expansion and the observation of AGW data presentation fraud – not based on financial or any other personal benefit. I merely have found that the closer you look at the data and alarmists’ presentations, the more fraud you find and the less you think there is an AGW problem”
      
      What I see in these quotes from very different men with very different accomplishments is a troubling mindset. Inhofe is not a scientist but Spencer & Rutan most certainly are – and they exhibit a mentality that’s all too common among the anti-AGW camps.
      
      Hypothesis: solving global warming would mean more government control & bureaucracy, less freedom for me and would take a huge amount of money.
      
      Conclusion: the problem doesn’t exist and anyone who claims otherwise is a fraud.
      
      Rutan says that his fear of government expansion led him to look closer at the data and, voilà, it’s all lies!! Lies, I tell you!
      
      I’m reminded of Christian preformationists who, examining semen under early microscopes, could clearly “see” the tiny but fully formed humans & animals contained therein.
    39. Joe Dick
      
      31 December 2014
      
      It’s funny that you can’t simply look at the data in the plots and talk about their content with me. Instead you put a lot of effort into shooting the messenger instead of looking at the message.
      
      As I mentioned earlier, I suspect a lot of fraud on the part of “climate science”. Good scientists publish their mathematical model and the supporting data, so that other scientists can evaluate their work.
      
      A truck axle manufacturer has to qualify their product, and publish the test data: Its beam fatigue life under different loads, the torsional fatigue life of its gears and shafts, the life of its bearings. Only then will a manufacturer buy that axle and put it under a truck.
      
      By that standard, Rutan is right: Michael Mann refuses to release the raw data that he used, how that raw data was arrived at, and the mathematical methods he used to reduce the data. How are we supposed to judge the quality of his work? Why would we trust him? Well, the fact is we cannot judge the quality of his work, or reproduce his results independently, so we cannot trust him. That makes Michael Mann a bad scientist, if you can even call him one at all.
      
      If the climate scientists are so all-fired worried about the fate of the world, why can’t they get us all to buy in? Above, you said Rutan should prove his point, but that simply isn’t the way it works. Climate scientists have an obligation to put the data on the table for all to see and test for themselves. They haven’t. If anything stinks of religion, that right there is it.
    40. MorinMoss
      
      1 January 2015
      
      In the words of the great statesman Marco Rubio, “Buddy, I’m not a scientist”. But you know who is?
      
      THIS CHAP. The word on the ‘nets is that he’s been known to take the time to look at and analyze huge amounts of raw data
      
      He’s no greenie-weenie – he’s on record as an enthusiastic supporter of fracking natural gas. Check out his work or put Burt’s in front of him.
    41. Joe Dick
      
      1 January 2015
      
      Even better. You’ve managed to make a link to THIS CHAP and get it to appear in blue as a link, and yet not discuss anything. I’m so proud of you for your use of the Internet. How techno-skilled of you. Is that how things are won these days? Some sort of video game with keyboards? Oh, wait, that’s Word of Warcraft too, isn’t it. Stop it with the “my links are better than your links – naaa naaa naaa naaa naaaa”, and just respond to something; like gee, do I have to use the vernacular, you did an epic fail in referencing that 2006 article from Rutan’s website saying I should convince him of my engineering expertise, but you didn’t pay attention that he said hybrids might be the way forward and bought a Lexus with a big honking V8. Did I shame you so much that this is all the game you’ve got? This is beginning to get really entertaining. I had no Idea that things were this devoid of content in discussions via the old ARPANET.
    42. MorinMoss
      
      2 January 2015
      
      If you haven’t read it, what is there to discuss?
      
      You claim to be an engineer & scientist and I’ve specifically said more than once that I am neither.
      
      Why do you need me to explain the work of another scientist?
      
      The information is there to read, and you are more than welcome to consider it. That is how science works – really the onus is on you to avail yourself of all available data and information, not for me, a non-scientist to actively win you over.
      In fact, if you were as objective as you expect others to be, you would simply have looked at the data, methods and conclusions and determined why it differed from Rutan’s.
      
      If you had actually read and tried to understand what Rutan wrote, you’d know that he was referring to what we now call extended-range electric vehicles of which there were none at the time and he was flatly dismissive of hybrids like the Prius.
      Based on his criteria, only the BMW i3 would merit his approval.
      It took Toyota 15 years to build a Prius with a power cord attached and it only has 10 miles of all-electric range.
      
      I doubt Burt would be impressed at their progress.
    43. MorinMoss
      
      31 December 2014
      
      “The information is there to read, and Straubel is more than welcome to consider it. That is how science works – really the onus is on Straubel to avail himself of all available data and information, not for Rutan to actively win him over”
      
      I thought science worked through peer review. And thousands of scientists who work in climatology, earth science and related disciplines have looked at the data – repeatedly.
      When you’re the outsider, you have to work at getting your point of view known – that’s just how it is. You and I may disagree but if I had a engineering question, I wouldn’t blithely accept an answer from my electrician or my mechanic over one from you.
    44. Joe Dick
      
      31 December 2014
      
      Science papers are published under the peer review process. That’s to try to weed out spectacular errors or erroneous conclusions. Those papers then must pass muster with other scientists, and most of us with degrees in science have not been convinced. I did mention the over 30,000 scientists, over 9,000 of them with PhDs, that don’t buy into CAGW, yes? It comes down to the fact that many of us are well versed in things like the Navier-Stokes equations, and the sort of computer models that can be built from them, their limitations, and the computing power that it takes to run them. There just isn’t enough resolution in their models to even hope to capture what’s going on. In finite element analysis, for instance, you want the element size to be and order of magnitude or more smaller than the size of the fluid phenomenon you’re trying to measure. Global climate models have huge elements; it takes only three to span the space between New York City and Washington, DC. From an computational fluid dynamics and heat and mass transfer point of view, that’s a complete and utter joke, and I say so as a peer of the people that write these things.
      
      Science itself has nothing to do with peer review; rather, it is a process of availing yourself of all the available information, making an hypothesis about what you’ve learned, and testing that, and then presenting that finding to the world so that they can replicate your results.
      
      If you come up with a mathematical model for crack propagation in metal alloys, you take existing test data for metals or even generate your own, and show that your model works. Therefore it’s hard to take any climate scientist seriously, take Michael Mann for instance, who says he’s generated a model for temperature based on data, but he expects us to buy into that without having access to either the data or the mathematical model to check his work. That too, is an utter joke, and not science.
      
      Rutan is getting his ideas out. Whether or not others choose to avail themselves of his analysis of the work of others – peer review undertaken at his own expense, by the way, and not a paid peer, a very important distinction – well, if they don’t read what’s available in the literature, then they haven’t really done their homework, have they. Rutan is only an “outsider” to the people that get paid to do climate research; he’s and insider in science and technology, He feels no need to run to the world getting people to buy into his point of view, because far more than those 30,000 of the Oregon Petition know he’s right, and happy that he’s taken the time in his retirement to pass the knowledge on to the pubic in as lay and complete terms as he can.
      
      The funny thing about your statement that outsiders have to work at getting their point known, well, think about it. Newton knew he was right, but couldn’t be bothered to deal with the squabbling masses, and it took Edmund Halley to get him to publish. Darwin was happy to quietly work away in peace until Huxley’s insistence and Wallace’s announcement. In Rutan’s case he undertook his review to convince himself (good science), came away unconvinced and one might even anti-convinced, and is happy to share his findings while waiting for the whole thing to slowly collapse under its own weight.
      
      In farmer’s terms, you don’t got to a lot of effort let alone take the risk of tearing down an old ramshackle barn when you can just let it sit there a year or two and let it fall down on it’s own.
    45. MorinMoss
      
      31 December 2014
      
      “I did mention the over 30,000 scientists, over 9,000 of them with PhDs, that don’t buy into CAGW, yes?”
      
      I have heard this before but as I said in a previous post, I’ve noticed a certain anti-government, anti-tax, anti-regulation sway in many of the anti-CAGW camp.
      Are you implying that either all of the 30,000 or the 9,000 have carefully examined the peer reviewed papers and found them to be substandard or fraudulent?
      While that 9000 is impressive, it’s only about 50% of the total number of scientific PhDs granted in the USA in a SINGLE year.
      How many of them are active researchers in fields related to climatology, or earth sciences? Focus & specialization matters.
      
      I don’t know what Navier-Stokes is am only vaguely aware of what finite element analysis is but I do know that the truth of global warming is NOT dependent on the accuracy or even plausibility of climate models.
      
      Those tools may act as an somewhat unreliable guides but observations, records and measurements of the world around us makes it clear that the world is warming.
      
      Floods, wildfires, arctic beachings, changes in migratory behavior; what’s the liberal agenda of a penguin?
      
      While your metaphorical farmer awaits the collapse of the communist conspiracy, actual farmers in many countries the world over are on the frontlines of calamity.
      
      http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/coconnor/we_dont_know_what_normal_is_an.html
    46. Bob_Wallace
      
      31 December 2014
      
      0.3% of all science graduates – the total number who would have qualified as “scientists” using the petition definition.
      
      There was no requirement that any of the signers had actually read a single piece of climate science or had any specific knowledge in the field.
      https://www.skepticalscience.com/OISM-Petition-Project-intermediate.htm
    47. Joe Dick
      
      31 December 2014
      
      I’m saying the 30,000 scientists with 9,000 PhDs among them have taken a serious look at peer reviewed papers, and don’t buy it. I gave you the link to the site previously. Go look for yourself, and convince yourself that they only accept people with degrees of sufficient relevance to the subject matter to have formed an educated understanding of the matter, and aren’t just PhDs in phys. ed.
      
      Boring bit first: The Navier-Stokes equations are the foundation of all things related to the way fluids flow and generate, dissipate, and transport heat. The equations in their full form are unsolvable, and certain simplifying assumptions have to be made to make them useful. Thus the simplified equations that allow you to predict the flying characteristics of an airplane will predict that a bee cannot fly, and they don’t work when you get close to the speed of sound. Thus, as you rightly point out, nobody knows how to build a complete climate model, even just regarding the way the atmosphere flows – and there are many other unknowns that simply make modelling such a complex system beyond our ability at the present time – and the truth is we may never be able to because of things like turbulence and chaos.
      
      Now on to the measurements, which you point out are more reliable. Well, are they? As I said before, and apparently must repeat, good scientists put their data on the table, along with the way they made their measurements, the mathematical methods they use, and their calculations, so that anyone with the skills can check it.
      
      Simple examples: I can check Newton’s laws, and have done so my self. I built my own Foucault Pendulum to demonstrate that the world actually revolves. If I’m going to buy into a thing, I want to check it out for myself. I can run electricity through water (with a bit of a conductive salt) and make hydrogen and oxygen. I can get a piece of aluminum and put it in a test machine and verify its strength and how much it stretches, and make sure the aircraft part won’t break and kill me or you.
      
      I can and have designed automotive systems, and I can select a wheel bearing and test it to make sure at most 5% may fail during the vehicle’s useful life. That requires some pretty advanced mathematics, called a Weibull probability distribution – a far more accurate and useful tool than that clunky old bell curve you’re maybe familiar with.
      
      Now, guys like Michael Mann have to use tree rings, ice cores, coral, and other stuff to try to figure out a way to measure what the temperature was in the past. How many samples for each year did they take, for instance? Did they take enough samples to be statistically significant? Did they use a bell curve, a Weibull curve, or what to turn those samples into a temperature? We don’t know, because they won’t tell, and we can’t check their work because the peer-reviewed papers don’t show anything but the results. That’s not how science works.
      
      Then there’s Rutan, who you don’t like very much apparently, and that Bob Wallace guy here simply hates. Rutan has gotten access to some data that the rest of us haven’t been able to as well as stuff he’s been able to verify as reliable, being that he’s a pretty well-connected and respected guy, and takes the time to plot all of it and put it all together. He’s an engineering guy, and engineering guys like to put things in perspective and solve problems that matter. Rutan is an honest and objective guy, and if you can’t get him on board with your data, you’ve done something wrong. Again, Rutan is used to looking at the data that people’s lives depend upon. He’s really good at it. When you plot the temperature data all together, it really doesn’t look like we’re in a world of hurt, and it’s worth giving his presentation a actual open-minded read – which is what real scientists do.
      
      The sort of shabby analysis that Michael Mann and his colleagues have done for their “peer reviewed” papers would get you laughed out of a meeting at Boeing or BMW, and might actually get you fired. Boeing and BMW have billion dollar programs riding on the analysis of engineers and scientists and others every day. These guys would not last a minute in the hard science world, saying “trust me” and not cough up their method of analysis or raw data. That’s why it is so hard for serious professionals with relevant skills and knowledge to take these guys seriously. They’re honestly quite a big a joke.
      
      I agree that the farmers, and even the people of the world could use some help. Clean water, irrigation, waste management, etc. would be a great help. In grade school we did an experiment. We built terrariums in 20 gallon fish tanks with seal-able glass tops, four kids each. Half the class opened the the tops during lunch and sprayed water mist in before they closed them. Half the class turned the glass top to expose the four corners and each breathed into a labeled corner (no cooties!). Half of each of those groups kept their terrariums in a south-facing unheated room near the gym, the other half in our classroom. The warmer ones did better than the colder ones, and the cold breathed-into beat the warm open/spray one. So I’m with Rutan; more CO2 isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, we don’t even have agreement among scientists as to how much natural forests and rainforests and other CO2 sinks behave, so again, we cannot even calibrate the complex computer models for that.
      
      How much money does it really take to pull together and get some ice cores and tree parts and coral take samples, measure them, build a database, and run the numbers? If this is such a huge world-threatening challenge, why isn’t there an open UN database with all this information for all to see and test and try and verify? That’s what scientists do when they want to convince the world that they’re right; they pin every thing up for all to see, saying, “Check this out! Here’s everything. Show me any mistakes I’ve made. I want to be sure this is right!”
      
      Sadly no, not with climate “science”. So where are these multiple billions of dollars going world-wide? The ice cores and other things have been collected, often with government funding. Why isn’t this information available? It’s not like we have to go out and get it afresh. To gather it together in a single database couldn’t possibly cost more than a hundred million dollars, and probably wouldn’t cost more than 10 million. Then all kinds of eager talented minds could look at the data, and who knows what we’ll find? A little thing like Weibull analysis might make all the difference in the world – and appears to be something “climate science” hasn’t thought of using.
      
      This could have been done 20 years ago, and keeping it up to date would be cheap. You want peer review? That’s peer review! So again, I’m with Rutan, waiting for the whole thing to collapse under its own weight.
    48. MorinMoss
      
      2 January 2015
      
      “I’m saying the 30,000 scientists with 9,000 PhDs among them have taken a serious look at peer reviewed papers, and don’t buy it”
      
      And I’m saying that’s bull; they read something that appealed to their mindset & bias and signed it.
      Educated people aren’t immune from being swayed by nonsense.
      Even with the trumped-up scandal of “Climategate”, AGW still hasn’t collapsed. While you’re waiting, perhaps you & Burt can design a cheap, superefficient air conditioner.
      This year is soon to be declared the hottest on record and we’ve now had during a “hiatus” a dozen La Nina or La Nada years that have been warmer than every previous El Nino except for ’98.
    49. Joe Dick
      
      6 January 2015
      
      You’re entitled to your opinion, even though it’s wrong.
    50. MorinMoss
      
      8 January 2015
      
      That must be your regular morning affirmation.
    51. Joe Dick
      
      9 January 2015
      
      Hey, you’re the guy without an engineering or science degree by your own admission. So again, sorry about your luck, but your opinion is wrong – it doesn’t jive with the laws of physics.
      
      What a pity you can’t do some more of that “slow & careful reading & analysis on my part to determine whose data & conclusions are plausible and I don’t have that much free time”, because you simply haven’t got the real skinny on this.
    52. MorinMoss
      
      9 January 2015
      
      Not everything needs a science degree and it’s not about “my opinion” but the decades of work put in by hundreds or thousands of people who are actively involved in the research.
      Merely having fancy lettering after one’s name and even being accomplished in another field isn’t good enough.
      
      I wouldn’t trust James Hansen’s “opinion” on aeronautics over Rutan’s but the expertise of the latter in all things related to aircraft isn’t going to blithely outweigh all the work of so many specialists.
      And a cursory glance at Rutan’s exercise in climate contrarianism is somewhat unsettling – I have yet to find a single footnote, it’s full of opinion and the diagrams appear to have been plucked from a variety of denier blogs.
      
      As time permits, I’ll take a deeper look at it but it’s not wowing me so far and one would think that such an esteemed “scientist” would have made his own work easier to verify if it’s his contention that so many others are so sloppy.
      So have you been in touch with Richard Muller yet, to demand his raw data so you can show him how wrong he is?
      
      If not, why not? How hard could it possibly be, right?
      
      How much Wei-bull analysis would it take to show, well, the bull?
      Given that 2014 is now officially the hottest on record, according to the JMA, what a feather it would be in your cap for an accomplished, patent-holding, published engineer like yourself to conclusively topple the glo-bull warming house of cards.
      
      http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2901776/It-s-official-2014-hottest-year-record-10-warmest-1998.html
      
      Merely sitting around waiting for it to happen while those conspiratorial alarmists try to deny the incipient Ice Age and defraud humanity of billions annually is both lazy & unethical.
    53. Joe Dick
      
      10 January 2015
      
      Well, there you go again, proving my point. Apparently it does take a science degree to understand it, and since you don’t have one of course you don’t understand. There’s no reason at all to make fun of things like Weibull analysis. If you were acting like a mature, thinking adult you’d show more respect to someone who has invested a great deal of time to explain something to you.
      
      I have to laugh at 2014 supposedly being the hottest year on record. Never mind the Mid-Cretaceous climate, which was on the order of 2 to 6 C (3.6-11 ºF) warmer at the equator and 20 to 60 C (36-110 ºF) warmer at the poles. Back then the world was extremely lush, what with two to four times the amount of CO2 that the plants love – yum yum! – and therefore there’s lots for herbivores to eat – yum yum! – and thus lots for the carnivores to eat – yum yum yum!
      
      (I love that you list The Daily Mail as a source, which is Britain’s equivalent of The New York Post or The National Enquirer. That’s priceless!)
      
      What a pity you can’t face the fact that you are not a scientist, and all you can do is quote things you’ve read about, but you really aren’t thinking about them.
      
      Nice talking head video, by the way. Unfortunately, you not being a scientist, you don’t get that he isn’t really explaining his methods and analysis. He doesn’t provide any data, the tolerances of his measurements, the calculations he made, etc. There is no way you can check his work based on the information he presents. You’re simply supposed to believe it – or not.
      
      It is interesting that you should post a guy that changed his mind. Here’s another, Dr. James Lovelock, who not only now disagrees with CAGW but also that our concerns over aerosols were ill-founded as well. I leave you with this excerpt. (Don’t bother responding unless you’re just wanting to hear your own voice.):
      
      Dr. Lovelock in 2006:
      
      “We are responsible and will suffer the consequences of Global Warming”
      
      Dr. Lovelock in 2007:
      
      “By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Phoenix will become uninhabitable. By 2100, the Earth’s population will be culled from today’s 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors…in Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic”.
      
      Dr. Lovelock in 2008:
      
      “… global warming is now irreversible, and nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater… famine and epidemics”.
      
      Dr. James Lovelock Now – March 2010:
      
      At London’s Science Museum Dr Lovelock said: “If we hadn’t appeared on the earth, it would be due to go through another ice age… greenhouse gases that have warmed the planet are likely to prevent a big freeze….We’re just fiddling around. It is worth thinking that what we are doing in creating all these carbon emissions, far from being something frightful, is stopping the onset of a new ice age….we can look at our part as holding that up…..I hate all this business about feeling guilty about what we’re doing…..We’re not guilty, we never intended to pump CO2 into the atmosphere, it’s just something we did.” He compared today’s climate change controversy to the “wildly inaccurate” early work on aerosol gases and their alleged role in depletion of the ozone layer: ”Quite often, observations done by hand are accurate but all the theoretical stuff in between tends to be very dodgy and I think they are seeing this with climate change….We haven’t learned the lessons of the ozone-hole debate. It’s important to know just how much you have got to be careful” “I think you have to accept that the skeptics have kept us sane….They have been a breath of fresh air. They have kept us from regarding the science of climate change as a religion. It has gone too far that way. There is a role for skeptics in science. They shouldn’t be brushed aside. It is clear that the ‘angel side’ wasn’t without sin”.
    54. Joe Dick
      
      22 May 2015
      
      Actually, if you really want to understand applied science, an engineering degree is very useful. While its all good to have a degree in physics, that is the science of discovering laws of nature. What can be done with those laws is the purview of engineers, who navigate the laws of physics and know what can and cannot happen.
    55. MorinMoss
      
      10 January 2015
      
      Stop wasting all our time here and go DO THE WORK to show why Richard Muller’s re-analysis was wrong.
      He was skeptical, did the heavy lifting and finally came around to the AGW side – after looking at much more data than almost anyone else incl Rutan.
      
      Muller’s is a REAL scientist, not just someone who plays one on unrelated blogs. That doesn’t mean he’s infallible but it does mean that anyone who wants to contradict him has to SHOW where & why he’s mistaken and not to simply point to some grade-school level presentation by an airplane designer.
      
      He was an outsider, too, and set up his own foundation & team to investigate the data, science & methods. That’s a verifiable claim not merely someone’s “opinion” on the supposed expert review by 1000s of PhDs who did nothing more than sign a petition that appealed to their biases.
    56. Joe Dick
      
      19 January 2015
      
      I like that you bring to the discussion that 2014 was the hottest year on record (that was you, right? I honestly don’t have the time to verify if that was you or another detractor of my comments…) Anyway, in engineering we consider a measurement to be useful if it’s within 5%. That 2014 thing? 38%. Smells like organic fertiliser to me. Granted, The Daily Mail isn’t a peer-reviewed source, but you can be sure I’ll be back with a more details if you get uppity. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2915061/Nasa-climate-scientists-said-2014-warmest-year-record-38-sure-right.html
    57. MorinMoss
      
      19 January 2015
      
      I’m sure I did mention it but it was suggested for several months that 2014 was almost certain to set a new record; the only question was by how much.
      I hope that you added data reanalysis to your to-do list for this Happy New Year of 2015. You & Bert are apparently unhappy with Mann’s data so I propose that you use Muller’s instead
      
      The relevant links are – BEST Data , Analysis Code and Methodology
      
      I must say I’m deeply disappointed by this latest post of yours. I had interpreted your silence to mean that you were diligently dissecting Muller’s BEST data to determine The Real Story and were announcing that you, diligent scientist & peerless engineer had found the Truth needed to tumble down the Globull Scheme.
      And what do you have to show?? What could be more important than saving humanity from the lies of the alarmists? Is football that much of a distraction?
      Unless you’ve kidnapped & probed by aliens, you must be aware that NASA and NOAA have made the official announcement for 2014 as hottest year. Imagine how much uppity you would merit if you could, er, I mean, WHEN you definitively expose the scam.
      But please hurry before FEMA comes to round us up for concentration camps and the UN One World Government imposes Agenda 21 and martial law.
      SAVE US, JOE!! The world is counting on you!!
    58. MorinMoss
      
      19 January 2015
      
      On page 2 of the linked PDF below, Muller calculates the margin of uncertainty at ~8%.
      That’s much worse than 5% but way better than 38%.
      
      http://static.berkeleyearth.org/memos/Global-Warming-2014-Berkeley-Earth-Newsletter.pdf
    59. Joe Dick
      
      21 January 2015
      
      So, while your link fails to load, an 8% uncertainty on fifty-odd degrees means that the couple one hundreths of a degree “increase” over 2010 or 2005 is a meaningless proclamation. 8% error bounds on fifty-odd degrees is over a 4 degree error bound, which is over 200 times the couple of hundredths of a degree increase. Despite what you report as Muller’s figuring, it is still statistically meaningless. The great two decade pause carries on. Sorry about your luck, but the numbers do not lie.
    60. MorinMoss
      
      21 January 2015
      
      Point it out to Muller, or an a thread about climate change; not one that’s conspicuously titled “Test drive: The Tesla Model S and the “insane” button.
      I’ll refrain from making any analogies to the word “insane”.
    61. Joe Dick
      
      21 January 2015
      
      No, you point it out to Muller. He’s your buddy. I don’t need to point it out to Rutan, he now drives a V8. By the way, I never made it about climate science, others did. All I originally commented on is that gas stations would have to expand their fuelling real estate by more than factor of ten given that Tesla can charge to less than full in 20 minutes, and I can pump my 15 gallon tank full an pay and be on my way in two. Can we get back on topic? Oh, no we can’t. Because you think you know everything about the environment because you read stuff on the internet. So, I invite you to discuss the original topic… Again.
    62. MorinMoss
      
      21 January 2015
      
      I said point it out to Muller. He’s a scientist as you claim to be.
      Delight him with your Navier-Stokes and Weibull expertise.
      
      While Tesla has only done stage demos of battery swap and their customer trial is not yet underway, Better Place had functioning automated swap stations years ago.
      The company’s failure was not a result of their tech but of their limited product – among other factors.
      And Chinese companies are working on variant ways to do battery swap.
      We’ve spent over a century extending the reach of the electric “fuel pumps”; there are city buses that get quick charges by induction and while we probably can’t have a Tesla supercharger on every block, it’s no big deal to have 10, 20, 50 KW chargers everywhere there’s parking.
      Despite your high opinion of Rutan, I suspect he likes EVs much more than you want to believe although he shares your clear dislike of actually DOING data analysis.
      
      I don’t have a crystal ball that’ll tell me what’s going to be the dominant form of ground transportation in 20 – 40 years but for the time being, I’ll side with the guys actually getting it done as opposed to the ones merely naysaying.
      
      Electric cars, for now, are still relatively expensive but thank heaven that talk is forever cheap.
    63. Joe Dick
      
      23 January 2015
      
      Again, please get back on topic.
    64. MorinMoss
      
      23 January 2015
      
      Too late to try weaseling out, Joe.
      
      We’ve all read your extensive blather about Navier-Stokes, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, Weibull probability distribution, etc.
      
      The raw data is there, I’ve already given you the link.
      Now go away and prove Muller, Mann and all the alarmists wrong. It’s what a real scientist would do.
    65. Joe Dick
      
      24 January 2015
      
      It is so wonderfully interesting how you can’t get back on topic. As I pointed out, tens of thousands of scientists are on board with me – including the PhD that created “The Gaia Hypothesis”. What is your problem? The only reason I respond is because you keep shouting silly things and my phone blows up with your admitted lack of training and expertise.
    66. MorinMoss
      
      24 January 2015
      
      So you’re making a “consensus” argument? Interesting that the deniers don’t accept that from the AGW-proponents. We’re still waiting for you to act like a real scientist but it’s looking like I’ll be older than Lovelock before that happens.
      After all your talk, I was really hoping to see some numerical & analytic prowess but all we’ve gotten is endless hot air – I guess we can use that hokum instead of helium to power any number of airships.
      C’mon Joe, show us the brilliance beneath that wonderfully reflective surface rather than trying to dazzle us with the light bouncing off of it while you’re dancing, ducking & dodging.
    67. Joe Dick
      
      24 January 2015
      
      It’s fun to make you go to lots of effort. Are you that bored? I don’t duck and dodge. That seems to be your circus act. Eight percent margin of error on 2014 being the hottest year on record according to your guy when the temperature difference vs 2010 or 2005 is a couple hundredths since then? Eight percent of fifty-odd degrees is over four degrees margin of error. That’s over 200 times the supposed increase. Statistically insignificant. Yawn.
    68. MorinMoss
      
      24 January 2015
      
      Have you forgotten that we’re on the Internet? The place that will never forget that a self-acclaimed, published, patent-holding, name-dropping, advanced-math-claiming know-it-all supposed scientist-engineer would rather trade jabs with a scientific know-nothing than challenge the claims of a worthy adversary who has made his data & methods publicly available.
    69. Joe Dick
      
      24 January 2015
      
      Indeed I have not. I played a role in in working developing it before it was called that. You make me laugh.
    70. MorinMoss
      
      24 January 2015
      
      If that is true then it makes me sad that you don’t recognize that the joke’s on you.
    71. Joe Dick
      
      24 January 2015
      
      What was the name of the first internet device?
    72. Joe Dick
      
      24 January 2015
      
      It was in the 1960s, and the joke was on them… Same sort of artificial “intelligence”. Funny how you get so worked up…
    73. MorinMoss
      
      24 January 2015
      
      “Played a role in in working developing it” ??
      If you say so, Joe. In in what ever ever that language you speaking typing in in.
    74. Joe Dick
      
      24 January 2015
      
      Indeed I did. Now, do tell me the name of the first internet device. And yes, as usual the joke was, is, and remains on you.
    75. Joe Dick
      
      25 January 2015
      
      Nice grammar, and spelling.
    76. MorinMoss
      
      26 January 2015
      
      That whooshing sound you hear flying over your head is NOT one of Bert’s aircraft.
    77. Joe Dick
      
      28 January 2015
      
      Lol.
    78. Joe Dick
      
      24 January 2015
      
      What was the first internet device? Do not look it up on Wikipedia. Lol.
    79. MorinMoss
      
      24 January 2015
      
      You can’t have a network with only one device.
    80. Joe Dick
      
      24 January 2015
      
      Remember, the internet always remembers….
    81. Joe Dick
      
      25 January 2015
      
      Oh just answer the question, “Eliza”.
    82. Joe Dick
      
      24 January 2015
      
      Is that how people like you defend their position? “This will be remembered for all time!!!” Um-freaking-glaublich!
    83. MorinMoss
      
      24 January 2015
      
      Un, not, um. And if you’ve not yet figured out where to find the defense of “my” position, your reading comprehension is truly dismal.
    84. Joe Dick
      
      24 January 2015
      
      Yet you never respond to any question, you simply pose more… Second hint…
    85. Joe Dick
      
      25 January 2015
      
      Lol.
    86. Joe Dick
      
      24 January 2015
      
      I do what scientists do. Meanwhile, you remind me of a quote: “A Vulgar Mechanick can practice what he has been taught or seen done, but if he is in an error he knows not how to find it out and correct it, and if you put him out of his road he is at a stand. Whereas he that is able to reason nimbly and judiciously about figure, force, and motion, is never at rest till he gets over every rub.
      (from a letter dated 25 May, 1694)
      Isaac Newton
    87. MorinMoss
      
      24 January 2015
      
      From what I’ve heard about Newton, he was a stern & dogged individual, not easily brought to laugh or smile but assiduous in his endeavors.
      If he were to peruse our discussion, I’m confident that his “Vulgar Mechanick” would be YOU.
    88. Joe Dick
      
      25 January 2015
      
      Perhaps you should read Newton, and about him, rather than “hear” about him. By the way, do get around to answering a simple question you inspired by yet again getting off topic: What was the first internet device? That you do not know is an acceptable answer. Just admit that and you might learn something without having to look it up or, heaven forbid, think for yourself. 🙂
    89. MorinMoss
      
      25 January 2015
      
      Not interested in playing TRIVIAL Pursuit with you. And whatever that device may have been, it’s at best a primitive precursor to any the dozens of devices in the average car or home that dwarf its capabilities in a tiny fraction of the space.
      
      I guess I’m going to have to start taking bets on which will happen first – will we have ice-free Arctic summers or will Joe Dick lay down the Wei-bull on climate data.
    90. Joe Dick
      
      28 January 2015
      
      The first internet device was the intercontinental ballistic missile.
    91. MorinMoss
      
      28 January 2015
      
      Considering the kinds of systems that have been hacked over the years, I hope that the military no longer allows for any possibility that any missiles are reachable from the internet.
    92. MorinMoss
      
      25 January 2015
      
      “I do what scientists do”
      No, you don’t. And if actual scientists were to mimic you, then we’re all doomed.
    93. Joe Dick
      
      28 January 2015
      
      How would you know? I’m a scientist, you are not.
    94. MorinMoss
      
      28 January 2015
      
      Here’s the funny thing about science – it’s not enough to make the claims, you have to put in the work and show your results.
      This seems to be very difficult for you to understand, after repeated attempts.
      For example, Richard Muller whose status in the scientific community is well above yours and may be on par with Rutan’s, could have said “I’m a scientist and here’s what I think – and I’m right because I know so much and can name-drop mathematical terms you’ve never heard of.”
      
      Instead, he rolled up his sleeves and got to work – doing SCIENCE.
      What is what scientists do.
    95. MorinMoss
      
      13 June 2015
      
      In Rutan’s exchange with Brian Angliss, an electrical engineer, he make the eyebrow-raising claim of identifying as an engineer, not a scientist.
    96. MorinMoss
      
      31 December 2014
      
      When GreenCarReports first wrote about the Toyota RAV4 EV in 2010, there were still over 500 in active use.
      
      http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1043811_electric-car-drive-report-2002-toyota-rav4-ev-crossover
      
      “Panasonic ceased production” – wow, a supposedly bona fide scientist & engineer with patents and publications to your name and this is what you come up with???!!!
      
      That’s like a coroner being asked the cause of death for someone blue in the face with ligature marks on his neck and replying “deceased failed to breathe”.
      
      FYI, Chevron effectively killed large-format NiMH batteries through its acquisition of Cobasys and subsequent successful $30 million lawsuit against got $30 million out of Toyota & Panasonic.
    97. Joe Dick
      
      31 December 2014
      
      Yes, I was aware of that. No need to be rude. Now, let’s examine the facts:
      
      1. Panasonic should not have been infringing on ECD Ovonics’ NiMH patents.
      2. Panasonic still makes the NiMH for the current Prius.
      3. Panasonic quit making the battery for the RAV4 because Toyota quit ordering them, since they weren’t going to build any more of RAV4 EVs of that generation.
      4. The current RAV4 EV is now out of production, and the remaining ones are sluggish at best in leaving the sales lots.
      5. General Motors sold ECD Ovonics because it wasn’t making money for them.
      6. Chevron only sued ECD Ovonics in late 2007 when they failed to fulfill their contractual obligations – including make a profit.
      7. Chevron has offered to sell ECD Ovonics back to GM, but GM isn’t interested, because…
      8. GM is using LiPO batteries with a power density that can achieve between 110-160 Wh/kg (as opposed to NiMH’s 60-120 Wh/kg), and have twice the recharge cycles during their effective lifetime.
      
      Finally, four years later, I rather doubt that all five hundred of those Gen I RAV4 EVs are still on the road. I’ll stick with Edmunds’ estimate of a few hundred as of last year.
    98. MorinMoss
      
      1 January 2015
      
      GreenCarReports was claiming 500 in 2012 but even the “few hundred” if we go with your Edmunds estimate means that these 1st attempts by Toyota lasted over a decade – and counting.
      
      Your reading of the patent encumbrance of large-format NiMH batteries is….interesting, to say the least. A term from the fruit production industry comes to mind.
    99. Joe Dick
      
      1 January 2015
      
      Hooray for “Green Car Reports”. They got a website, and presumably Danica Patrick and GoDaddy are making money from that. Good for them.
      
      I’m sorry. apparently you’ve never held a patent. You’ve been reading too much Wikipedia. Though Panasonic did commit a crime by infringing (a proper patent law term) by using technology created by others (and they shouldn’t have), they managed to work their way back out of that situation by not infringing to continue to produce batteries for the Prius. Meanwhile, you didn’t even bother to read anything I said about agreeing with you about what Rutan said, especially not having time to work on cars and that he “now” as of your article reference drives a big honking V8 leather coated Toyota called a “Lexus”. Not a word from you as to why he didn’t buy a RAV4 EV. No. You go on about a Wikipediaesque “encumbrance”, completely passing over the numbered facts I presented, including that GM didn’t want the company they managed to elegantly divest themselves of which an oil company picked up. GM was smart. They picked up a company, made use of its technology for the EV1, then discarded it when nickel-metal-hydride had run it’s course and lithium-polymer was the future.
      
      What planet are you on? Did you not get the stats I sent you on the energy density of both? As much as double the power to weight on average, and twice the recharge cycles? Of course not. You couldn’t even read that Burt Rutan passed on buying available electric cars and bought a V8 Lexus. Why? Factory GPS. Yes. Automobiles are lifestyle vehicles. Burt even says so with his actions.
      
      Hey, I am glad that we have free speech, and that friends of mine in the early 80s made this possible. This conversation. Right here, right now. What a pity you cannot respect that and even read what a person takes the time to explain. In a way, you are very much like the first ARPANET machine – a soft drink dispenser at Carnegie Mellon: You say how many soft drinks are in you, so to speak, but then once someone answers that, you still just say how many soft drinks are in you.
      
      Do take the time to read a thing once in a while. By the way, I almost can’t wait to read what unconsidered response you have taken the time to type in below. Let me close out and continue… LOL
    100. MorinMoss
      
      31 December 2014
      
      “At the end of the day, electric vehicles are a lifestyle product in a niche market that will never be mainstream anytime soon.
      Just basic engineering facts.”
      
      I was going to write up a retort to that specific points of yours but I realized that my lack of engineering & scientific credentials would merely undermine by case given that the opposing view is grounded on “basic engineering facts”.
      
      And you’d already been so generous with the link to the anti-AGW presentation that, in the spirit of the season of goodwill & giving, I felt compelled to respond with the viewpoint of someone with impeccable credentials, impressive accomplishments and years of direct experience with earlier, less sophisticated EVs.
      
      So here you go. And if you feel the need to reach out to him, as one engineer to another, to correct his apparently deficient understanding of “basic engineering facts”, I suppose you’ll need his name.
      He goes by Burt but I imagine some call him Mr. Rutan.
      http://burtrutan.com/downloads/RutanOnFutureAutomobiles.pdf
    101. Joe Dick
      
      31 December 2014
      
      I don’t disagree with anything Burt Rutan says in that article. Wonderful things, electric cars – if you can afford one.
      
      Does it actually do better than we can do with petrol? After all, Rutan admits you need a small combustion motor of some sort to extend the range. Has he looked at what it would take to do the best electric vs. best petrol powered vehicle, and which is better in what ways? No: “Cars? Look, I’m working to get the public into space, I don’t really think much about cars.” In fact, that article was January 2006. He could have bought a RAV4 EV by then, or a Prius or a Honda Civic hybrid as he states that is the future in the article. Civic had GPS even. Nope, Burt bought a Lexus with a big old honking V8. I wonder what he drives today… I don’t thing Burt and I would disagree much, if at all, on basic engineering facts.
      
      Meanwhile, there is the SAE Supermileage Competition, held annually for 35 years, now regularly producing single passenger vehicles that get over 1,000 mpg. I’m sure if the electric and hybrid kids want to come out and play, a drive-off could readily be arranged. It would be fun to see electrics and hybrids show some action where their mouth is. Game on boys. http://articles.sae.org/13261/
    102. MorinMoss
      
      1 January 2015
      
      Exactly how did you read “Extended-range electrics would be true hybrids with only one drivetrain but equipped with two means to provide energy to it” and “Let electric motors drive the wheels at all times, keep the heat engine light and simple” but wrote “Prius or a Honda Civic hybrid as he states that is the future in the article”
      
      Are you at all familiar with how those 2 cars operate?
      
      As for your supermileage challenge, Mater Dei High School’s electric prototype achieved 537 miles per kWh.
      
      http://mdsupermileage.weebly.com/results.html
    103. Robert Smart
      
      4 July 2015
      
      Joe Dick is a troll, ignore him …
heltonja

13 December 2014

Of course, since Tesla owners wake up to a full battery each morning, they will only need to visit a super charger for long road trips. Far from being over crowded, the local filling station will be an endangered species.
Bob_Wallace

13 December 2014

We will (assuming history plays out the way it looks like it will) eventually need enough ‘very rapid’ chargers to satisfy everyone driving very long distances on the most heavily trafficked day of the year. That is simply going to be required.

Now, is that impossible to do? Not at all. Will it be impossible to fund? Not at all. How soon will we need to have the system finished? We’ve probably got 20 years.

Once we’re driving longer range EVs what will your driving day look like? You’ll start with a full battery and drive until you’ve got 10 or 20 miles charge left. Then you’ll pull into the reserved charge bay that is waiting for you, plug in, and go eat your lunch. You probably pre-ordered lunch so that you can get back to your car soon after it’s done charging.

Going to be super-driver and cover more than 500 miles? If only just above you’ll probably pull in and charge for 10 minutes while you take your afternoon pee. If you’re going well over then you’ll stop a bit longer. Pee, get some coffee to keep you jacked up, check your messages, walk the dog, and get back on the road.

We’ll probably work out some clever ways of spreading the charging load in order to minimize the number of chargers needed. Some drivers will be willing to get on the road by 5am in order to enjoy free charging, perhaps a “$5 sweetener”. Other people driving just over their range limit may be waved in for an early charge when they are down 50% or so in order to get them on the charger earlier in the day and lighten lunch time demand.

Will this be a pain? I highly doubt it. I suspect people will adapt very quickly. Especially when they contemplate the $2k or so they save every year on fuel and the 10+ hours during the year they don’t spend at filling stations.
1. Harry Verberne
  
  13 December 2014
  
  Spot on Bob. To me the real sticker is the sticker price of the car. But once volume ramps us and economies of scale kick I think we can be confident of much lower prices, prices comparable to a quality car, ie about $50K.
2. AustinAnthony
  
  13 December 2014
  
  You are thinking with yesterday’s mindset. There will be an entirely new ecosystem around charging and supercharging of EV’s. Coffee shops, stores, pubs, hotels, and malls are already offering free EV charging in the US. The business model is simple, the longer a potential customer is at their business, the more they will spend. They get 20-30 minutes of exclusive time with a customer that can afford a $100,000 car. That is worth giving $3-$5 of free electricity. Once the competition offers it, everyone else will be forced to match, or potentially lose business over it. Every major hotel will offer this within 5-10 years.
  1. Bob_Wallace
    
    13 December 2014
    
    Oh, hardly. Those are things I was talking about 2 or 3 years ago if not earlier…. ;o)
    
    BTW, think about customers driving $20k EVs, not $100k EVs. That’s where we should be before too long.
3. Joe Dick
  
  15 December 2014
  
  Bob, you use the term “we” a lot in the above. Are you an engineer, perhaps? If so, that would be appropriate. At the end of the day, it is the engineers that make things happen, not the public. In this case, the public has gotten it into its head that this electric car thing is the future. During my quarter century on the planet, electric cars have always been touted as the future – but it’s a future that never seems to arrive. There are sound reasons for that, both engineering and economic. The only reason electric cars exist at all in this latest push is based on public policy rather than sound science. Dot-com billionaires that won the lottery of the late 90s internet bubble have opinions and money to throw at them, nothing more. They also tend to be hucksters: Musk himself just got busted, claiming he was in talks with BMW, and BMW’s brass responded with statements to the press that the answer on that was, “No.” In German, the statement was, “Musk offenbar mit dem Namen BMW schmücken”, which is rather a big slam and roughly translates as, “Musk is decorating himself with our good name.” http://www.wiwo.de/unternehmen/auto/elektro-mobilitaet-bmw-plant-keine-zusammenarbeit-mit-tesla/11049292.html
  
  If this is a place, as you state, that supports science and fact, the fact is that Musk is a snake-oil salesman, not a genius. From an well-seasoned engineer’s perspective, electric cars – which are really external combustion vehicles since they’re ultimately mostly powered by coal – are a wonderful lifestyle product. If you can afford one and think it’s cool, that’s great. However, from an engineering perspective they just fall flat on their face in terms of economic and overall energy performance.
  
  Real progress doesn’t need subsidies. If electric cars were viable they would have been on the market without policy and handouts. As an engineer, consumer and taxpayer, it miffs me that I have to subsidize stuff that I know and can demonstrate simply doesn’t make sense.
  1. Bob_Wallace
    
    15 December 2014
    
    Let’s see. Tesla came out of nowhere and in a very short period created the fastest production sedan in the world which is also rated as the safest car Consumers Reports has ever tested.
    
    Sounds to me like Tesla has some quality engineers working for it. Not ones with a “can’t do” attitude and a head full of baloney.
    
    BTW, Musk/Tesla have been talking with BMW. In June they discussed sharing charging stations. BMW decided that they didn’t want a do a deal. Can you understand the difference?
  2. MorinMoss
    
    16 December 2014
    
    “Real progress doesn’t need subsidies”
    
    A hundred years after oil has become the dominant fuel in transportation and with 10s of billions of vehicles that have come & gone, the industry can’t seem to give up subsidies.
    
    Without subsidies, we would not have had nuclear power, either.
    1. Joe Dick
      
      18 December 2014
      
      You don’t get it, do you? Tesla only makes money because of subsidies. The Forbes article I provided a link to demonstrates that.
    2. Bob_Wallace
      
      18 December 2014
      
      “Last year, when Tesla delivered their first profitable quarter (Q1 2013), they admitted that $68 million worth of revenue that quarter came from selling ZEV credits — about 12 percent of their income. They weren’t profitable simply from building cars.”
      
      “In yesterday’s earnings call from the fourth quarter of 2013, Tesla Motors announced that their net income of $46 million late last year came without selling any Zero Emissions Vehicle credits.”
      
      Tesla had a 4th quarter 2013 gross margin of 28%, excluding potential ZEV credit sales.
      
      ZEV credits have helped Tesla stand up but Tesla has now passed that phase in its development and is shaking up the automotive world.
      
      http://jalopnik.com/teslas-zev-credit-win-should-silence-some-of-their-cri-1526351819
  3. Pedro
    
    16 December 2014
    
    Corporate welfare irks me too especially when we all have to pay more tax to prop up the auto manufacturing sector. It is especially stupid to subsidize both sides of the fence.
4. Chris Fraser
  
  16 December 2014
  
  Good services design, and I’m not worried at all. The Tesla makes a nice 2m long bed. Wake me after 40 minutes …
Dan Durston

13 December 2014

You’re missing something key. With an electric car owners will charge at home each night and have more than enough range to get through the day. Thus refuelling events at service stations would be reduced by 90% or more, more than making up for the extra time they take.
1. Joe Dick
  
  15 December 2014
  
  Apparently you didn’t read the bit of the article where the author said it would be cool to take 20 minute breaks at a recharging station on long trips.
  1. sean
    
    16 December 2014
    
    apart from all those roadside stops that we already have along motorways.
John Silvester

14 December 2014

You raise an interesting point about extra real estate Joe.
With the help of Google Earth I took a look at how much extra real estate the BP Services on the Gold Coast Highway at Coomera might need to service a large number of EVs.

What I found was, without adding a single car parking bay, they could install electric vehicle chargers for 120 cars.
This doesn’t include the parking bays at the back that I assume are for staff, or the area set aside cars with caravans, or the area for truck parking. Or for that matter the area currently used to fuel cars.

As for having to built additional facilities to cater for their customers hanging around for 20mins instead of 3mins, they already have parking for over 120 cars for customers who want to hang around for more than the minimum 3mins. So one would assume the facilities are already capable of handling that many customers regardless of whether the cars are charging or parked after filling up with fuel.

And of course any business with a carpark and an interest in customers hanging around for 20mins or more may find a business case to install EV chargers.
1. Joe Dick
  
  15 December 2014
  
  That BP station you picture: It looks like there’s room for six pairs of dual pumps under that big awning, is that right? So instead of needing the 80 parking spots with chargers per my example, you’d need parking for 240 cars. That lot would have to be significantly bigger… Just saying. Thanks for the polite exchange of thoughts! 😉
  1. John Silvester
    
    15 December 2014
    
    Under that big awning is five pairs of pumps.
    
    So continuing with your thought experiment that area under the awning is available real estate for electric vehicle charging. Currently you can fill 20 widely spaced vehicles. If that same area where reconfigured for side by side parking would make 40 or more places available.
    
    Your multiplier of ten petrol vehicles to one EV is a stretch. If you want to use the time it takes to charge an EV from empty to 80%, that’s where the 20mins comes from, then you need to be able to fill 10 cars from empty to 80% in 20mins for an apples to apples comparison. It takes more than two minutes to put 50 or 60 litres petrol into a car, pay for it and clear the space for the next car, even if you use efpos at the pump.
    
    Implicit in your assumption that petrol car only need a parking spot for 2 minutes is, all petrol cars buy their fuel and leave immediately, otherwise additional real estate for parking is required, which is why this Services has six times the number parking bays to filling bays.
    1. Joe Dick
      
      18 December 2014
      
      How is it a stretch to use a factor of ten? I can fill a fifteen gallon tank in 2 minutes including swiping my credit card. Since you state things in litres, perhaps you are not aware that US gas pumps are rated at 10 gallons per minute. It takes me 15 seconds to exit the vehicle, wave my Exxon/Mobil smart card at the pump, unscrew the gas cap, and start pumping, a minute and a half to pump up to 15 gallons, and another 15 seconds replace the nozzle, gas cap, and get back in the vehicle.
      
      You say I can only charge to 80% in 20 minutes. That’s ten times as long as my 2 minutes and my tank is full, yours is 20% empty.
    2. Petra Liverani
      
      18 December 2014
      
      In Australia we go into the store to pay. People take more than 2 minutes to fill their car, pay etc. As stated above, battery technology is improving all the time and on long trips people tend to stop for a break anyway. If we can come up with the Tesla we can come up with a way to manage charging cars, for goodness sake.
    3. Joe Dick
      
      27 December 2014
      
      I’m terribly sorry that you don’t even have the ability to swipe a credit card through a pump, let alone have the gas pump recognize your card without even taking it out of a wallet/purse and just be near the pump like we can, down under as you are. Even so, per your comment, I went inside to pay with cash to fill my tank earlier today. I exited my vehicle and whistled a merry tune as I perambulated to the kiosk, extracting a $20 and a $10 to hand to the cashier and return to my vehicle, which took under 20 seconds, by which time the pump was already on, and then under minute and twenty seconds to pump the 14 US gallons I’d purchased, and another 10 seconds drop the handle back into the pump, get in, buckle, start motor, close door, and drive away. So you are correct: 20s + 1m20s + 10s = oh wait! Still two minutes. It would have taken less, had I not had a hand occupied with a stop-watch. Old school. Wind up. As kids today say, “Just sayin’…”
MorinMoss

16 December 2014

Every Model S, from the very beginning, is capable of battery swap, which Elon Musk demonstrated in a public event over a year ago where 2 Model S, in succession got their batteries swapped before a single Audi could get a fillup.

Tesla is building the 1st stations in CA at the moment but the defunct Better Place had built several dozen such stations in Israel, Denmark, Yokohama and has done 10s of thousands of swaps.
It’ll take time for these to become prevalent but it’ll also take time to replace the ICE fleet.
The big question mark is if Tesla intends to make its forthcoming “affordable” Gen 3 car swap-capable. If it does, that would almost certainly mean a build out of swap stations as it expects to sell hundreds of thousands of these annually.
1. Joe Dick
  
  18 December 2014
  
  “Every Model S, from the very beginning, is capable of a battery swap…” So, how’s that working for you? A staged event does not demonstrate capability. Where can I get this done? Nowhere. So it isn’t a real capability, is it? The infrastructure cost to make this a real-world capability would have to be added to the the life-cycle cost of the vehicle, making it even less competitive.
  1. MorinMoss
    
    18 December 2014
    
    Don’t be impatient.
    Tesla has accomplished a heckuva of a lot in the 2.5 years since the Model S went on sale – ~55,000 cars delivered, introduction of Dual Motor / AWD & Autopilot, opening of 225 Superchargers which will nearly double in number by 2016, finalizing the Model X (work in progress), getting started on building the Gigafactory, etc.
    It takes real cojones to look at all they’ve done and demo’ed and imply that they’re not capable of delivering on a promise that already been done from scratch by another startup with less resources.
    
    Battery swapping is going to be a paid feature and I have a suspicion that Tesla may tinker with V2G so that they can earn money from supplying services to the grid from the swap stations, probably voltage or frequency regulation.
    1. Joe Dick
      
      27 December 2014
      
      Oh, I’m not impatient in the least. The world has been waiting on a competitive electric car ever since the automatic starter motor made electric cars obsolete since it’s invention. The primary customers of electric cars before the starter motor were doctors – who dare not risk their hands with a crank – and women – to be seen cranking a “motor” was un-lady-like.
      
      By the way, does it take “cojones” to look at what they’ve done? I thought it took eyes, rationality, and some simple maths to figure out that a dot-com billionaire can keep his name in lights with money he doesn’t need. Meanwhile good luck with the “battery swapping” thing. Did it ever occur to you how to design a safe drop-out-and-back-up-into-the-belly-of-the-beast could be made safe and sound such that it won’t fall out on the road and kill people? Most people that say that problem is easy can’t even rent a trailer and things safely: http://www.amazon.com/Obstacles-Bring-Maria-Federici-Doyle/dp/148367360X
    2. MorinMoss
      
      27 December 2014
      
      It does take balls of steel because Tesla is not his only company and not his main focus. That’s the even more ambitious enterprise (NPI) SpaceX.
      If he buggered up Tesla, SpaceX would swiftly follow.
      I think you need to do considerably more research into how battery packs are secured (<== deliberate use of that word given your linked tale of woe) and how they can be swapped.
      
      In the spirit of the season of goodwill, I'll give you a tip: look into the dozens of swap stations built by defunct Better Place where a station wasn't considered to be in production until it completed 1000 trouble-free swaps.
      I don't need the luck; I don't build cars. The people who are driving the adoption of EVs have nerve but aren't relying on "luck".

Rob

13 December 2014

I reckon by the time “everyone” is driving EVs that wont be a problem Joe because the charge time will have been reduced to something close to what it is now to fill up. Battery and battery charging technology is improving all the time.

Matthew

13 December 2014

The P85 and P85+ are no longer offered. The only performance model they offer now is the P85D

Harry Verberne

15 December 2014

In articles like this, where we see future or emerging possibilities, it is easy for nay sayers or disingenuous deniers working for vested interests, to attempt to characterise them as impractical. Ok some can point to plausible difficulties but the focus of the site is to foreshadow a different future than the established ways.

It is always easy to challenge the new or the developing because there are bound to be potential blockers and challenges to be overcome with a degree of the ingenuity and persistence that is such a wonderful human characteristic.

Joe Dick

30 December 2014

Apologies to all if I’ve intruded. I just wanted to point out that if it takes 20 minutes to fast recharge a Tesla, and it takes me two minutes to fill my fifteen gallon tank including get out swipe my credit card and get back in, it would take ten times as many “pumps” and ten times the real estate “pumps” occupy at any service station to serve the demand. I didn’t mean to get a bunch of questions and into lengthy discussions about the environment. At Purdue we got into sharing knowledge because other than the Old Oaken Bucket, some significant astronauts, and the first flag on the Moon, well, we just take science and engineering to heart. I hope I haven’t offended! Peace to all, and Happy New Year! 🙂

Robert Smart

4 July 2015

If you read any of the replies & were not just trolling you would have realized that a service station to charge electric cars is just a car park with chargers at each parking space. The power to charge the cars either gets there at the speed of light down high voltage lines from a power station, or if the power is coming from the fusion reactor called the Sun add about 8.5 minutes for the photons to travel from the surface of the sun to the pv panels on the car park roof where they are converted to electrons to charge the car or are stored in batteries at the car park for later use. No nasty gas trucks travelling along our roads, or oil refineries using huge amounts of electricity. A normal service station wastes a lot of space with it’s widely spaced pumps.
You also repeatedly ignored people informing you that electric cars will be mostly charged from off peak electricity at home and from solar powered chargers at work, shopping centers etc.

Joe Dick

25 January 2015

I still cant believe the fight continues. I simply bring up High School algebra about the real estate required to recharge cars vs refuel them. The average speed of an automobile over it’s lifetime is a mere 25 miles per hour. A few horsepower can sustain that speed an much more. I’m tired of NASCAR envoronmentalists who think a 20 minute charging time is a good thing. Unfortunately MorinMoss and his ilk think they have the answers to everything. Fortunately I’ve come away from the discussion with a new understanding if the misperception of technology. Peace out!

MorinMoss

27 January 2015

If you read carefully through all the comments, especially your own, you’ll gain a very good understanding of yourself.
It’s not evident that you have a good handle of your own misperceptions but unlike your buddy Rutan, you may not be too old to change, judging by your profile pic.

But me and my “ilk” won’t be holding our breath.waiting for that to happen.
1. Joe Dick
  
  28 January 2015
  
  If I’m as off as you think, why would I be able to see that? Clearly I’m as mad as a hatter (according to you), so you’re wasting time?
  1. MorinMoss
    
    28 January 2015
    
    Wasting time? You’ve done a masterful job of that with all your trolling. I do hope you add it to your CV as well as that you’re as mad as a hatter – feel free to submit me as a reference.
    But I wouldn’t apply for any data analysis jobs if I were you – it just doesn’t seem to be your thing although you do TALK a great game.
    And I’m willing to vouch for that, too.
    1. Joe Dick
      
      22 May 2015
      
      Do you have a data analysis job? I do. It’s called engineering.
    2. MorinMoss
      
      13 June 2015
      
      Speaking of data analysis & engineering, an electrical engineer named Brian Angliss tried to engage your hero Rutan over his climate change views back in 2012. You can find it on Scholars & Rogues.
      
      Let’s just say that the exchange was interesting and Rutan did not distinguish himself at all. Perhaps he should stick to engineering and leave climate science to the climate scientists.
      
      And he’s not the only one that comes to mind.
    3. MorinMoss
      
      14 June 2015
      
      You have yet to establish a shred of credibility. I pointed you at Richard Muller’s Berkeley Earth site months ago and now I’ve told you about Brian Angliss, who challenged Burt Rutan – and Burt ducked and bobbed like he found himself in a boxing ring.
      
      Until you can refute the work of the former or are willing to engage the latter, you’re just another internet denier with too much time on his hands.
    4. Joe Dick
      
      31 May 2015
      
      Who’s wasting what, Morin?
      http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-20150531-story.html#page=1
    5. MorinMoss
      
      1 June 2015
      
      My, my, that response was a long time coming?
      Do you have an ointment for that festernig sore?
      How about making an actual point?
      
      “Subsidies are handed out in all kinds of industries, with U.S. corporations collecting tens of billions of dollars each year, according to Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that tracks government subsidies. And the incentives for solar panels and electric cars are available to all companies that sell them.
      
      Musk and his investors have also put large sums of private capital into the companies.”
      
      I suppose any subsidies to solar & EVs take away from the vital industries of growing corn for pig feed and building yet another fighter jet that won’t ever be used.
disqus_3PLIicDhUu

2 February 2015

Aren’t we forgetting the large refueling infrastructure (real estate) is mainly underground in large tanks.

Besides the usual fossil fuel vs electric fuel efficiency and maintenance arguments, which have been done to death and electric wins, hands down.
If Tesla moved over to nanoflow cell technology, where electrolyte tanks are refilled, like the quant-e http://www.nanoflowcell.com/en
I think this would be a real game changer, for charge turnover.
1. Joe Dick
  
  8 February 2015
  
  I’m not forgetting. The real estate for the tanks is already accounted for underneath existing gas stations. Meanwhile, along with the size of gas stations increasing ten-fold, we’ll need to consume more land space for all of the additional sources of electric power generation and transmission lines for which the national grid currently has no capacity. I find the whole subject rather moot, as of the 136 million cars on the road in the US alone, only about 250,000 are electric. That’s less than 0.2℅. Therefore think of the literally massive increase in land consumption alone required to go all electric. Its a thing to consider.
  1. disqus_3PLIicDhUu
    
    8 February 2015
    
    You really must research your subject matter better.
    Just look at the energy needed to create the petrol you get from your bowser, from the oil well to refinery to pump, look at the real estate and high voltage system feeding refineries, then come back and discuss this subject with clarity.
    As said, this subject is done to death, because the electrical energy resource can be derived from multiple types of resource, besides fossil fuel, wind, solar thermal, nuclear, the electrical resource transport system is solid state, the supply system losses are much less, electrical cabling is much simpler and obviously, far more safer than fuel infrastructure.
    
    Back to your service station real estate discussion.
    The latest supercharging is down to 10 mins for 300 miles, so I think you figures need amending.
    Don’t even go near drive efficiencies, you’d be pushed to get 25% occasionally, out of the archaic, method of using explosions to end up rotating wheels.
    1. Joe Dick
      
      18 February 2015
      
      Yawn. As why is Tesla losing money despite the substantial subsidies and tax breaks? All that for what, a fraction of a percent of cars produced? Meanwhile, do you have any training or a degree involving thermodynamics? Google is not your friend, it just makes you look ignorant.
    2. disqus_3PLIicDhUu
      
      18 February 2015
      
      Yes a degree in engineering and further studies in renewables and energy management
      Yourself?
    3. Joe Dick
      
      24 February 2015
      
      Ibid above. Degree in aerospace engineering, 1985. Purdue.
    4. Robert Smart
      
      4 July 2015
      
      That’s nice for you, but this is NOT rocket science. Elon Musk is however a REAL rocket scientist so perhaps you should watch this from someone you should perhaps look up to? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKORsrlN-2k Ignore “Joe Dick” his real name? The troll …
    5. disqus_3PLIicDhUu
      
      19 February 2015
      
      To be a fossil fuel advocate, these days you either need to be a spruiker or delusional, or both.
      Massive funds are being divested away from this toxic, inefficient, archaic, product and into either renewables or nuclear, well overdue in my opinion.
      Your link is hilarious, even the heading advocates doubting that producing petroleum is an energy intensive process, it doesn’t take much thought input, a high school student could understand it.
      Oil products still have there place, there’s still plastics, pharmaceuticals etc, even highly efficient and clean generation from the use of fuel, for the likes of linear generators, kept within an efficient band.
    6. Joe Dick
      
      24 February 2015
      
      I’m no advocate, as you imply. However to move from one thing to another thing, that move has to be viable – in this case, less energy intensive, especially in terms of the consumption of fossil fuel. Electric cars are a lifestyle product sold to people who spend their money to feel good about being part of a sub fraction of a percent of the automotive market, when they should simply use the internet to attend their cubicle jobs that they could do from home, reducing traffic and the need for redundant office space, computers, and coffee pots.
    7. Joe Dick
      
      31 May 2015
      
      Or are massive funds being diverted away into billionaire pockets with nothing useful to show for it? http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-20150531-story.html#page=1
    8. disqus_3PLIicDhUu
      
      31 May 2015
      
      How does this compare to the planetary fossil fuel subsidies of 5.3 Trillion Dollars a year.
      http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSL1N0Y61S220150518
      
      How’s the Tesla powerwall doing, yes sold out already.
      Thanks for your input, but you just appear to be a naysayer.
    9. Joe Dick
      
      18 February 2015
      
      http://doubtingisthinking.blogspot.com/2014/04/actually-refineries-use-120-times-less.html?m=1
    10. disqus_3PLIicDhUu
      
      18 February 2015
      
      Still got offshore rigs, oil tankers that all use fuel, road tankers etc, the whole system is energy intensive and wasteful.
      To make a comparison between sourcing the electric vehicle power versus fossil fuel efficiencies is done to death and obviously if one can source electricity from a wide range of sources, fossil fuel is just being sustained by an archaic system.

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