Top Gear reviews the Tesla Roadster

Tesla Motors recently asked the government for bail out money. They’re on the road to bankruptcy.

ok, top gear had 2 of these cars, and had problems with brakes in one of them. Brakes?? so, by that math, 1% of their cars, at least, have bad brakes? i thought the mantra was ‘well all we need is a silicon valley startup to make cars and the car industry will be saaaaavvveeeedddd!!’. i wanna see dvorak roll up on calacanis with his tesla dead on the side of the road sometime. and to think, some of you smarty’s on here wanted to kill the last great hope for a great electric hybrid in the chevy volt. wanna see a car that will work, check that one out. and there will be at lease 10,000 of them when they start rolling next year. not 100, or a 1000..10,000.

Not all good news, but these are the first steps towards the future.

I wonder if the weight problem and the lengthy charge times won’t be solved once fuel cells can be used.

The Tesla Roadster, while not exactly ready for a mass audience, you might notice on the shitty eco tires it ships with went around the TG test track in the same time Porsche 911 GT3 and out performed the Lotus Elise it is based on in both a sprint and a race lap.

This is not a car that has had thousands of iterations to perfect the tech. Problem 1, the motor overheated. Again, this is not a race car and it can be fixed. Problem 2, on the replacement car they had a break failure…I assume the regenerative breaking system. Again, an early adopter issue. The third major issue was range. Oooh, they ran the battery out in only 50 miles and it charges slowly on the wall mounted socket. SHOCKING!!!

The one real problem with the Tesla in the UK would be having a place to plug it in to. Street parking does not come with a plug and that rules out damn near everyone that lives in Greater London. But, if they could make the batteries removable (at least some of them) then you could either carry them in to charge, or swap them out at a gas station.

And listen to the latest TWIT, they are not asking for bailout money, they were asking for access to some sort of government backed loans for electric car makers. It was other people that were saying “Why bail out the big 3 when that money might be better spent creating big companies out of little ones like Tesla.”

The news isn’t all good? What’s the bad news? That an electric-powered car doesn’t run forever? That Top Gear has ham-handed mechanics who break the brakes?

The only bad news I see is that the guy said “al-you-MINNIE-um”, and if Mr. Curry hears that, we’ll have to listen to him say “al-you-MINNIE-um” on No Agenda.

Miss_X2b: incorrect. They asked the feds for money authorized earlier in the year that’s available to pursue energy-efficient cars. It was conceived pre-financial crisis, not as bankruptcy aversion (though certainly Tesla could use it as such if that’s on their horizon)

The Tesla is way too choppy through corners to be considered a super car. They should of build a common sedan.

I call this review BS. This smacks of something done by a Oil Company or GM…they left a lot of information out(like several other charging options which require much less time) and didn’t test the vehicle in real conditions.

Bah Humbug

#16 – ChrisW

I call bullshit on it too. If it took them 16 hours to recharge, they must have been plugging it into that limp-dicked windmill. According to groovy green dot com:

“All Tesla owners will have two options. They can plug the roadster into a standard wall socket and wait six or seven hours to juice up. Or they can use a recharging station designed by Tesla, one that an electrician must install in the garage. Those are the stations that Hyatt will use at its three hotels, and they take three to four hours to recharge the roadster.”

Or maybe it took them so long to charge because they wanted to give their ham-handed mechanics plenty of time to bung up the breaks.

What news isn’t good? I hate half-assed comments like that with nothing whatsoever to back it up. I’m guessing John got a snippet of the video and didn’t watch the whole thing, and thought he’d put up a snarky lil comment with it.

The Tesla is a first generation electric supercar, and goes 55 miles under harsher conditions than any of us will ever drive.

Give me a break.

Obama was actually asked directly what he thought of putting a Federal Tax on gasoline to keep the price higher than market in order to encourage fuel efficient cars, development of energy independence, revenue for infrastructure etc.

Obama said he was not for it as Americans were under enough pressure already.

Sad to hear “no change” in our energy policy or words instead of deeds.

I think a phased in tax for the reasons stated would be very wise policy. We are only digging our hole deeper now with oil predicted to go to $40 a barrel before going back up.

#22 – JCincy

>>I can’t wait for the brown outs in
>>California when everyone plugs in their car
>>at night to recharge.

Shouldn’t be any worse than the brownouts every morning when they plug in their coffee makers. Or their hair dryer. They draw more current than the Tesla recharger.

Just finished listening to TWiT, and had the same thought about John posting this to piss off Calcanis (you could hear the two of them on the brink of coming to blows for a minute). Calcanis said, “Can you just cut them some slack?” No, Jason, for a car that costs north of $100k, I’m not cutting them any slack. Speaking from the normal gadget loving middle class who cannot fathom buying a $100k car ( much less buying a second one to give away), that damn thing had better drive for me and never have a single issue over the lifetime of the car.

Think about it – you can’t use this for much other than a simple commute. If you want to drive somewhere more than 100 miles away, you’re pushing it (200 miles there and back driving responsibly to maximize range). Going somewhere further away? Like Vegas from San Fran? No frakkin’ way, that’s about 575 miles. Even driving sensibly, that’s going to be three recharges before you even get there. And anywhere but your house where you’ve paid another $2k for the special wiring needed for the quick charger (3 hours time), you’re going to have to stop for an extended charge. The infrastructure simply isn’t there, and won’t be there until you start getting more of these on the road. And you’re not going to get more of these on the road unless you have a longer range and lower price. Still, there’s not much getting around the recharging issue until they get to a new battery technology (like the zinc-air batteries maybe?). Meanwhile, I’ll take my Prius that cost 1/4 the amount and get there on a single tank of gas (or close to it, might be hard to maintain the mileage through the mountains).

#10 Wow! What a post! Such contributor should be the best one around here.

His replies and dissertions are so filled with wisdom, I’ll need a whole week to digest just this one.

#17 Such an informed person. Such high standards. No freeloader goes past his expertise.

TOP GEAR is available on iTunes…

I want one powered by a ZPM, Zero Point Module! or a Fuel Cell…

Yes, have two!

good first step, but it is a 1.0 and we all know how 1.0 technology goes

Laptop batteries suck because they’re pushed too hard and they get hot. A newer Li-Ion technology (google A123) loses a bit of efficiency but runs far safer on cheap lead-acid chargers. This is the stuff they’re putting in high-end cordless drills, and hopefully these kinds of cars. I’ve got a pile of them in a robot, and those bastids are amazing, and freaking nasty! That is, their peak current is >70A per 3.6V cell, enough for this experienced electronics guy to be worried about when soldering them together.

They can charge very fast, if you have a big enough source. Ten minutes for a car.

Well obviously not the car for the rest of us, yet. Still, its the first electric car I’ve seen that I like! And its mostly there, the gov should give these guys the $$, as they’ve got a good product that should be further developed.

I’d love to commute in it. I have to drive 35 miles each way.

#35 – Andy

I agree, but the petro-powered Lotus Elise (bargain-priced at about $50,000) isn’t going to do you much good on a camping trip with the kids and the wife and the tent and the dog.

The Tesla is a niche product for people who want to be green and groovy AND to show off how much money they have, but without having to reveal that they don’t have $5,000,000.00 for a hydrogen car and that they’re not famous enough to get one for free like Brad Pitt.

However, the technology is improving, and the cost (which is steep now) will come down. You can easily drop $100K+ on a gasoline-powered Maserati, Lamborghini, or Ferrari. In fact, a Ferrari 612 Scaglietti runs about #315,000, and enough people buy them to make it worth Ferrarri’s while to produce them. You could get three Teslas for that price.

It’s annoying when wet-blanket luddites whine about the high cost and the lack of absolute perfection in the first iteration of a product. Windows 1.0 sucked, the airplane 1.0 sucked, television 1.0, even the automobile 1.0 sucked. With the exception of Windows, they all improved and became cheaper over time. And so will this.

For now, the Common Man can buy a Prius (I love mine, btw). In 5 or 10 years, maybe an electric car.

#35 – Andy

>>Of course, that doesn’t address the
>>reliability issues that Top Gear hit – the
>>brakes failing and the engine overheating.

Well, what he actually said was “while it was being charged, its breaks had broken”. They didn’t fail while the driver was beating the shit out of the thing. Unless there’s some kind of voodoo electric field effect that ruins Tesla car brakes, they got bunged up somehow while in the garage.

As to the overheading, well, yeah. If you want to drive the thing like Danica Patrick, Indy car driver and Go Daddy Girl, you may suffer “overheating and reduced power”. But at least it won’t blow up and burn you to death, like a gasoline engine.

For the record: Thanks to The Stig’s impressive turn behind the wheel, the Tesla Roadster gets a higher ranking in Top Gear’s performance board than a Porsche 911 GT3. Jeremy Clarkson, a die-hard “petrol head” with a clear bias against green cars generally, said that it must be “snowing in hell” because he had such a great time driving the Roadster and now considers himself a “volt head” thanks to the Roadster’s amazing performance. This is amazingly high praise from Clarkson, whose entire schtick is to savage even his most beloved petrol-guzzling sports cars.

However, I would like to clarify a couple things. Never at any time did Clarkson or any of the Top Gear drivers run out of charge. In fact, they never got below 20 percent charge in either car; they never had to push a car off the track because of lack of charge or a fault. (It’s unclear why they were pushing one into a garage in the video; I’ll refrain from speculating about their motives.)

The “brake failure” Clarkson mentions was solely a blown fuse; a service technician replaced the Roadster’s pump and it was back up and running immediately. They were never without a car, and the Top Gear testing did not put the Roadster’s reliability or safety in question whatsoever. Again, I’m going to leave out comments as to why the good folks at Top Gear might have mischaracterized the blown fuse as a brake failure, which is was decidedly not.

I am also unclear as to why Clarkson said it took 16 hours to recharge the Roadster without qualifying that statement at all. The vast majority of people who have taken delivery of their Roadsters (and there are more than 100 of them now) have much faster systems that recharge from dead to full in as little as 3.5 hours.

However, I really enjoyed Clarkson’s suggestion that, if people want to race Roadsters 24-7, they should simply buy two.

Rachel Konrad
Senior Communications Manager
Tesla Motors Inc.

Did anyone see the whole episode?

The conclusion at the end was that hydrogen is the future, as it only takes a few minutes to refill, in line with our lifestyles, as opposed to the minimum 1 hour Jason mentioned on TWiT.

They claimed that hydrogen is the same price out of the pump as petrol, but I’m dubious.

#43 – Jack

Yeah, hydrogen cars are great! If I had $5,000,000.00, and could buy hydrogen to run it, I’d have one already.

It’s probably the wave of the longer-term future, but a car that’s $150K today may well be the price of a Prius a few years down the line. It’s going to take longer than that for the hydrogen cars to fit into my budget, not to mention the fuel problem. Most people have access to electricity, hydrogen not so much.

#45 – John C Dvorak

I don’t know the specifics of the hydrogen cars and truck you drove, but I do know that the AC hydrogen bus is powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

What I’m talking about are internal combustion hydrogen engines, like the ones in the $5,000,000.00 BMW “Hydrogen 7″ (uses the same 6 liter V-12 motor as the 760i and 760Li) that they give to Brad Pitt, Jay Leno, and Placido Domingo.

#47 – Bobo

>>Mr Mustard–how do you know what kind of Bus
>>JCD is referring to? How do you know Mustard?
>>How do you know Mustard? How do you know
>>Mustard? How do you know Mustard? How do you
>>know Mustard? how do you know what kind of
>>Bus JCD is referring to?

Uh, there’s this thing called “The Google”, Bobbolina. You should try it some time. For example if you use The Google on “AC Transit hydrogen bus”, voilà:

http://www.actransit.org/environment/hyroad_main.wu

See how simple? ==//logical==\\, even.

$8–Mustard==unless JCD is referring to buses from a few years back (if they were hydrogen fueled even then?) it looks like your fact based posting wins this thread. Electric motors are all about torque, so if these buses lack it, it is by design==or JCD ran into some bus drivers with agendas of their own.

Seems to me rather than ask someone else, JCD could get on the bus and directly observe the performance for himself to check for bias.

Thanks for the links.

#50 – Bobbo

In fact, on this topic, he reminds me somewhat of Larry Kudlow, bellowing in impotent rage over the “enviromaniacs”, and their unnatural attraction towards trees and green spaces rather than traffic jams and burning chemical rivers.

The tesla is just a rich persons bragging car. Much like the temperamental and unreliable ferraris, its not for you and me.

Any production electric car for the masses will have half the batteries, half the motor and will emphasize practicality over performance. Something that is easily done.

And for those hydrogen folks, give it up, you have been lied to. Hydrogen will NEVER be practical, which is why the oil industry wants us to spend money on the research. It delays adoption of electric cars so we still use gasoline while we try to fix a technology that doesn’t work.
1) Hydrogen can’t be stored in sufficient amounts for a car 2) Hydrogen fuel is expensive 3) Hydrogen is hard to transport 4) Fuel cells will never be cheap 5) Hydrogen cars are finicky unless they operate in a very narrow temperature range

After all, hydrogen IS an electric car, but with an expensive and impractical electric supply. Batteries are cheap and capacity is more than sufficient.

Not terribly surprising, no? Hell, most new car designs have some failings. It’s like I said before, advances in alt. energy technologies are coming out faster than the designers and engineers can incorporate them. This car probrably has 5 yearold technology in it and it’s been one heck of a productive 5 years for researchers. Patience, in the next few years, a seriously viable electric car should appear.

#59. You think? They forgot an important factor in business. You need a market for the product you manufacture…

# 40 Mister Mustard said,
‘If you want to drive the thing like Danica Patrick, Indy car driver and Go Daddy Girl, you may suffer “overheating and reduced power”.’

I thought that was one of the main selling points of the car… you can drive it like a race car and feel warm in fuzzy inside because you are not blowing smoke out a tail pipe.

# 61 Deep-Thought said,
“They complain about the slow charging time from a 14Amp socket, willingly ignoring the fact that no sane person would do this anyway.”

So if I drive the Tesla to my Father-in-law’s house 120 miles away, is he supposed to have a “heavy duty multiphase power socket” just waiting for me to plug into?

It’s not surprising that the Top Gear guys broke the Tesla. They break lots of things. Jeremy (Clarkson) even managed to damage his own neck this year, pulling serious lateral Gs in a Nissan GT-R in Japan.

Hydrogen in to an internal combustion engine, which weighs hundreds of lbs and offers ~30% energy efficiency? I don’t think so. The fuel cell is a gargantuan improvement over those specs.

67 JCincy–are you one of the characters on Hero with a superpower? I think you can slow down time and cause gaps in causation loops? But since you appear sincere:

1. So you believe there is not energy lost in the transmission of electricity over the power grid? /// Of course there is power loss, all part of the cost. Its indeed “the cost” that makes comparisons of different energy sources comparable. The whole reason we use “Tesla’s AC Power” instead of Edisons DC Power is this transmission cost. Likewise, there are cost, uniformly HIGHER COSTS, for all other forms of energy with hydro-electric being the cheapest for lifetime cost including production, transmission, safety, cleanup. Maybe you could rephrase your concern to make it relevant?

You believe adding say 50,000 electric cars to the power grid on the west coast will have no detrimental impact on service? /// Electrical Service??? In most cases, there is unused power going to waste at night, so if rechargeables are charged at night, the impact on the electrical power grid is negligible during start up of this new transportation mode. In the future, that will change, hence the discussion about plugins to the grid and related issues. Have you read NOTHING in this area of technology?????

You believe rechargeable batteries are remarkably efficient and show no break down in efficiency over several months of heavy use? /// Everything breaks. Focus on total costs–everything included.

You believe rechargeable batteries require no special handling to dispose of them properly? /// All waste has to be disposed of properly. The point of battery tech is to recycle them totally. Your evident lack of basic tech knowledge, if not a joke, is tedious. Even the threads on this blog over the months have touched on most if not all of the relevant issues.

Fascinating and yet disturbing. //// We agree except for the fascinating part. Make google your friend.

Any money would best be spent on research. There is no way a small company selling a few hundred autos cobbled together from existing parts and technology can make a difference. It takes years and trillions of dollars to break new ground in physics and chemistry required to make a viable fully electric automobile. Few people have the money to spend on a toy like this. The promised GM Volt should be a more viable car, but for all we know that could end up at a giant corporate going out of business sale.

#71 – Brenda Lee

You’ve been taking the bus right along (and not to be green), so it won’t make much difference to you.

Re: Tesla range on the track.

Last night I watched a Top Gear off the DVR, from BBC America. They were testing the Mitsubishi Evo 10 vs. Subaru WRX ( STi, I think ) and Jeremy noted that the Evo managed just 48 miles around their track before it ran out of gas.

I used to live in Key West, FL. I drove an electric car for several years, one with 30 miles of range on an island that’s 2 miles by 4 miles. Full charge took 9-10 hours. I often used it for service calls ( computer tech ) and my boss let me plug it in at work.

I let it charge while I slept at night and always had plenty of juice to get around. If I needed a longer range for trips up the Overseas Highway, I just rented a car.

Seems moot, (a) If it works every manuf with years of experience building and selling cars will use the tech, so a company based purely on the idea of using laptop batteries to power a car is pretty much going to fail in the long term anyway. [And no, don't think patents unless you consider all the patents that car manufs have on everything cars have]

(b) the show basically pointed out that Honda’s Hydrogen Cell car they featured was far more practical…

For reference the Ferarri 599 managed 1.7 miles on a gallon of fuel (Top Gear, series 11, episode 1), and has a 23 gallon tank (wikipedia), so does 39 miles flat out on the track. The winner of that challenge was the Audi R8 (5mile/gallon) which with a 16 gallon tank would take you 80 miles.

By those standards the 55 miles of the tesla is perfectly reasonable.

The Tesla just doesn’t deliver. It looks like a sports car, and has straight line sports car performance, but through the corners it was rolling like a tall ship in a crosswind. It produced a good time on the track despite its handling, not because of it (and mainly because of its straight line speed).

But crucially, the recharge time is the death blow. It means you can’t use it for any significant distance driving; in fact, it means that it’s only really suitable for short journeys during the day with an overnight charge. And if you want an electric around-town runabout, why on earth would you go for a two seater pseudo-sports car? The comparisons with how quickly a petrol care can be run to dry on their track are irrelevant; a petrol car can be refuelled in 5 minutes.

# 80 Mister Mustard said, “So this bleeding-edge technology hasn’t worked out all the bugs that gasoline-powered cars have been working on since Karl Benz first built his Patent Motorwagon in 1885.”

No. It hasn’t worked out the bugs since 1842, when Thomas Davenport and Robert Davidson were producing electric cars…

# 82 Mister Mustard said, “After the muffler was invented, virtually no work was done on electric cars.”

Right, and work stopped on rubber band powered cars at that time too. It is because it is a technology that isn’t well suited for that application…

Must suck to be ignorant of the physical sciences…

#84 – Greg66

Sure I get it. It doesn’t charge fast enough, and doesn’t go far enough on a charge. Big woop. All barriers fall to technology, eventually. Although I suppose if you want to drive cross-country at 170mph, The electric nature of the car will always be a big problem.

As to the iPhone, it may charge as quickly as a real cell phone, but once the battery dies and you have to bring it back to the shop to be replaced (at great cost), then it becomes relevant again. And you can’t do MMS messaging, something that has been available on regular cell phones for years. Just like the electric car, it’s a technology that hasn’t had the bugs worked out of it yet.

I’m not buying either an iPhone OR an electric car this year, but maybe in the future, when they’ve taken care of the problems.

They also fail to mention, in the hydrogen film, that H is only the same price as petrol in the US because it is sponsored.

Not to mention the fact that while they think “hydrogen is as easy to produce as it is to drill for oil”. That may be true, but you need a lot of energy to separate the hydrogen, and where does that come from? For all intents and purposes, unlike oil, H is not an energy source, it is an energy carrier, like a battery.

And if you take grid power and use it to create hydrogen to put in a fuel cell to drive a car, you only get 25% efficiency. If you use grid power to charge batteries to drive your car, you get 75% efficiency.

I am not a roadster kinda guy, but I am looking forward to their family sedan; I would really like that for around town and we’ll keep our LPG powered wagon for the few times we both go in different directions or cross-country with the family.