So, nobody is sure. The 'guestimate' I have heard is that with regular usage is goes to 130 miles on a charge after 5 years, which would still be better than any of the other electrics that are coming when they are new - except a few very high-end ones that will cost just the same or more.

Again, that mileage is if you drive the TR like a hypermiler would, optimizing every last erg of energy usage. I can hypermile pretty well but I don't do it that much because it really just takes too much attention to do it well.

I'd be willing to bet I could get a brand new TR under 75 miles/charge without much trouble at all. It's really quite surprising if you haven't driven with an energy usage readout just how much more energy can be used by enthusiastic use of the throttle and brakes.

A 2008 Z06 Corvette with 505 hp can get over 30 mpg at 70 plus cruise on the interstate. It's not hard to drop that figure into the single digits with vigorous driving.

I'm not going to bother looking up the numbers, but Tesla wouldn't have even gotten investors intrested if that were true. It's probably more like 80% capacity remaining after 5 years, with normal usage.

I have a couple of minor quibbles with your other points, this one however I'm fairly sure you might be mistaken on.

Five years of a charge/discharge cycle per day works out to 1825 cycles.. The Tesla is a high performance car and will be driven as such by many, if not most, drivers. That means that the watt hour/mile figure given by Tesla is most likely wildly optimistic since that is the kind of figure you get by driving like a hypermiler, something few Tesla owners are going to do. It probably won't need a full charge every day but the TR is going to need a lot more charges/thousand miles than Tesla's figures indicate.

I don't think there is any way of predicting TR battery life under real world conditions by real world drivers yet. I've been designing, building and flying electric powered model airplanes for nearly fifteen years now and know enough to design and build my own electric assisted recumbent bicycle with a top speed near 40 mph and I wouldn't hazard a guess as to the lifespan of the Tesla batteries at this juncture.

I've seen electric RC planes literally explode and burst into flames from damaged batteries and most of them are only carrying a few dozen watt hours. IMO, lithium chemistry cells are not yet ready for prime time and Tesla may well get a rude awakening when the decidedly non-expert motoring public starts operating their vehicles on a regular basis.

Keep in mind that "state of the art" is technospeak for "unproven".

And finally, even if you don't get any further than you did this time, you will have gathered names and footage that can be used in the future by progressives who are running against them.

Freakin' brilliant..

Are you by any chance *the* spocko of getting the radio show off the air or whatever? (it's been a while and I read a hell of a lot).

If so, I doff my hat once again to you sir.

I'd have converted a car to all electric already if I weren't faced with the specter of replacing the batteries in a few years.

High quality NiCd cells are very durable and will last for thousands of cycles if properly matched and not abused. You can get fairly decent NiCd cells for around sixty cents a watt hour and quite good ones for a little over a dollar a watt hour. For those kind of prices you will have to assemble your own pack, which in the case of a car means a great deal of soldering or getting a spot welder to put the cells together.

SR Batteries makes what are generally considered to be the highest quality cells commercially available and have been doing so for well over a decade.

http://www.srbatteries.com/

NiCd cells are generally prone to a high self-discharge rate so it is best to charge regularly. Since the cell's self-discharge varies somewhat using a pack that has been sitting for a while runs the risk of reverse polarizing some cells, which will indeed damage them.

Even good old lead acid can work if not charged too vigorously and not discharged anywhere near their full capacity. It doesn't take very many full capacity discharges to seriously damage a lead acid cell.

There is a great deal of information on electric vehicles, batteries, battery management systems and so forth to be found here:

http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/

If I don't go the tried-and-true NiCd route on my electric assisted bike I may just go for about 300 or so AA Nimh cells and put them in tubes in such a way that they can be easily removed and tested individually. A soldered or welded together pack can be (and often is) ruined by a single bad cell, being able to rapidly and easily get rid of the "runts" would make a pack far more maintainable at much lower cost. I have some AA Nimh cells testing on my computerized battery tester as I write this.

Interestingly enough, 1/2" schedule 40 PVC electrical conduit makes an almost perfect cell holder for AA cells and is remarkably cheap. A wood or plastic plug on either end and a spring and contacts to hold the string firmly in place and there you go.

I'm reminded of that old James Coburn movie, where he is trying to out cool James Bond.

The bad guys in the end turn out to be.. (spoiler).

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The phone company.