Cool video, but one nit to pick. Nissan's "Altra" was Lithium Ion
powered back in 1998. I don't think it was ever offered widely for
lease or sale. AC Propulsion also converted one of their tZero
prototypes to Lithium Ion in 2003.
Neither of these cars were as refined or as successful as the Tesla
roadster, but it's not correct to say that Tesla was the first to use
Li+ in an EV.
Inside Tesla's 1,000-pound battery pack
February 22, 2011 | Length: 00:02:27
SmartPlanet takes a peek inside Tesla Motors' R&D lab and talks to CTO JB Straubel about the evolution of the electric vehicle and the technology behind the company's lithium ion battery pack.
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RE: Inside Tesla's 1,000-pound battery pack
Posted by hoosier1
28th Mar 2011
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RE: Inside Tesla's 1,000-pound battery pack
Posted by hoosier1
28th Mar 2011
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RE: Inside Tesla's 1,000-pound battery pack
Posted by mjkobb
22nd Feb 2011
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RE: Inside Tesla's 1,000-pound battery pack
It's curious that cylindrical batteries are used by Tesla. I think
Apple decided to make it's battery packs in a rectangular shape to
waste less space. Additionally, there is probably less overall mass
because each battery is packaged more efficiently.
Apple decided to make it's battery packs in a rectangular shape to
waste less space. Additionally, there is probably less overall mass
because each battery is packaged more efficiently.
Posted by czarembo@...
17th Mar 2011
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RE: Inside Tesla's 1,000-pound battery pack
Electric cars are OK, but are they still using petroleum oil for those parts that need to be lubricated? To be completely free of using petroleum based lubricants, these companies need to switch to a synthetic. AMSOIL was the first to develop a SAE rated 10W-40 fully synthetic motor oil, with a 25,000 miles or 1 year drain interval. Think how much we could reduce are dependence on foreign oil, if we could get 30% of the people to start using synthetic oil. It would also reduce the amount of oil that needs to be recycled. AMSOIL.com. code 166252.
Posted by hoosier1
28th Mar 2011
Transcript
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>> JB Straubel: I'm JB Straubel I'm the CTO at Tesla Motors and we're working on inventing the next generation of electric vehicles.
music The history of electric cars goes back a very long time, almost 100 years and electric vehicles were around even at the dawn of internal combustion vehicles but the batteries weren't very good and it's been a continual evolution of battery technology. It was in the early 80s where the next generation of electric cars came into existence. The General Motors EV1 and many of those vehicles were powered by lead acid battery packs so when Tesla came on the scene in about 2003 we were you know competing with an existing technology base of lead acid or nickel metal hydride battery packs and Tesla was the first company to take lithium ion technology that's you know very common place today and put that into an automotive environment and figure out how to make a vehicle work with lithium ion batteries. The batteries in any full electric vehicle are much much larger than you'd find in a normal internal combustion car because they need to store enough energy to drive the entire car, all the energy has to be contained in the battery pack. For instance in the Tesla roadster the battery pack is almost 1000 pounds and it's the largest physical piece of the power train so we have to work very hard to save weight and volume elsewhere in the car to make the entire vehicle fairly light weight. The battery pack in Tesla vehicles is made of typically lithium ion cells and we have in our vehicles generally many cells so as many as 6,000 or 7,000 individual cells that are connected together to form the entire battery pack. In the future I think battery technology is just going to continue steadily improving and today we're much closer to a tipping point I think than most people realize with batter vehicles being directly competitive with gasoline vehicles in many more market segments. In the future I think you'll see a wider and wider array of purely electric of plug in vehicles in the marketplace from all different manufacturers.
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