Totally Electric

This morning, I was behind this car as we went to the same place, the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Miami. The car's name is Tesla. You don't often, if ever, see one like this in the street. I naturally asked the driver, Jason, about his car. It's a Roadster 2.5 AC induction motor all electric car. It has a single speed gear box that can create in no time up to 295 lbs-ft of torque equivalent to 288 horsepower and this sport car goes from 0 to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds. Now, that's impressive. This car is supposed to cover 245 miles per charge of its battery. Its top speed is 125 MPH and I am very surprised to learn that its engine red lines at a dazzling 14,000 rpm. Do you know how fast that is, 14,000 rpm? Motors turning that fast is the domain of racing motorcycles. I used to own a Honda car that red-lined furiously at 8,500 rpm and when pushed that high, it sounded like a cat. This Tesla must sound like a cat in heat at that regime. In any case, the battery is expected to last 7 years or 100,000 miles, whichever comes first. My guess is 3.5 years/50,000 miles is more like it.

Because you need to charge the battery, there is a cost for energy to run this car. It turned out that the Tesla costs an average of US $3.6/mile driven, the same as an average sport car running on gasoline, given that you must pay about US $.11/Watt-hour of electricity.

Many think electric cars save in energy cost. That is not true for this Tesla. However there is the argument that is has Zero emission. Well, let's not talk about that because it's so controversial, and you don't want to hear what I have to say there.

This field is the overflow parking lot for the Fairchild garden. It's crowded here because today is Butterfly day. Unfortunately, the butterflies apparently were not invited properly so I only saw a few of them.