Hello World — Tesla Journey
Many people looking at a Tesla will find that it is both their first EV and also one of the most expensive items they have purchased in their life. That’s me. I’m not a car person. But I am a technologist, concerned about the environment, and beleive in the importance of supporting a positive vision for the future.
After almost a year of serious consideration, and many years of circling around the world of EVs, as of February 2017, we are now Model S60D owners. This is our story.
Given the perils of a busy life and the rest, I have given up on this writing project being an edifice, perfectly constructed from the outset. I am going to try and limit each post to 500 or fewer words in deference to being able to share more often.
That said, I did map out my broad plan for this story line. I will almost certainly deviate as we go, but this is what I had in mind.
So, with that, here we go …
Why EVs: Matching the energy medium to the task
Sitting beside a camp fire, it is clear that heat radiates and warms your body. It is equally clear that when you try and press two magnets together like-pole to like-pole, you feel force pushing the magnets apart. These are some of our earliest experiences of the natural world. Hold your hand over a candle, and it gets burned. Take two magnets off the fridge and try to press them together, and they repel one another.
When you burn a fire in a confined space under the right conditions, pressure builds and the container expands, and this expansion can be translated via crank shafts and gearing into motion. It powered the industrial revolution. But, bottom line, motion is not the first thing you think of when you stare into a campfire. It truly is a wonderful leap of imagination to go from fire to the energy, motion, froth, and bubble of the modern motoring world.
Where if you charge a loop of wire with electricity in a magnetic field, the direct result is motion. And if you arrange the machinery of humanity in the right way, you can translate that electricity directly into rotational motion, and hit the road.
There is vastly more to say on the topics of internal combustion engines and electric motors, and many better to say it, but for the purposes of EVs, my basic thinking has long been around matching the forms of energy to the task at hand. Heat for cooking and warming your house. And electricity for moving stuff.
Why EVs: Zero tailpipe emissions
EVs have zero tailpipe emissions. This means there are emissions in other places, and that will be the subject of many future posts in this series. There are two basic goods that derive from zero tailpipe emissions.
First, and this is probably the last I’ll say on this point, this is fundamentally good for the many and numerous people who suffer from respiratory conditions. Many of those conditions are exasperated by poor air quality which can be linked directly to emissions from vehicles on highways that run directly through the hearts of our communities. Having the emissions from EVs centralised in a generating plant, ideally far away from population centires, can greatly improve the air quality in densely populated areas. (Better still, those emissions can be reduced or eliminated — plenty more on that later.)
Second, there are no climate altering greenhouse gasses (GHTs) emitted at the moment of driving. In very many energy systems around the world, these GHTs are of course emitted elsewhere in the energy system. Which brings us to one of the first major talking points around EVs (once you get past the fancy displays, silent running, and software updates) — Isn’t this just a coal fired car…? More on that in the next post.
GD
