How Electric Cars Can Beat their Gasoline and Natural-Gas Rivals

[For recent comment on Germany’s big bet on wind and solar energy, click here. For reasons why Carlos Ghosn may be a genius, click here.]

Electric cars have some decisive advantages compared to cars powered by gasoline and even natural gas. They have the lowest energy cost of driving. As my calculations show, natural gas at industrial rates, solar photovoltaic electricity, and nuclear electricity provide the lowest per-mile energy cost. The first two cost 1.8 cents per mile, the last 1.5 cents. In comparison, gasoline at $3.78 and 30 miles per gallon costs 12.6 cents.

The differences among these three lowest costs aren’t meaningful. Within the probable error of the calculations, which were based on information publicly available now, they are the same. But the advantage of all three over gasoline is real and huge.

Electric cars are much simpler and more elegant in design and operation than internal-combustion cars. Electric motors provide nearly constant torque throughout their entire range of RPM, which is much wider than for reciprocating piston engines. So electric drive trains don’t need transmissions. (Have you ever heard a subway train shift gears?)

Electric drive trains also don’t have to endure the high temperatures and pressures of engines powered by sequential internal explosions of fuel. So, apart from their battery packs, they should last much longer with much less maintenance than internal-combustion vehicles.

If energy cost per mile and maintenance were the only considerations, we would be seeing an explosion of sales of electric cars. They offer the same reduction in energy cost as industrial natural gas: nearly a factor of seven over the cost of gasoline. With gasoline north of $4.20 a gallon, that’s the equivalent of 60-cent-per-gallon gas!

In addition, electric cars don’t emit carbon monoxide, noxious fumes, or any pollution. And you can charge them at home, in your garage, from a standard electrical outlet, without installing a natural-gas compressor.

Judging from these advantages, you would think electric cars would be selling like iPads. But they aren’t. Besides consumers’ inertia, the reason is electric cars’ three disadvantages: (1) a higher initial price, (2) limited range and (3) driving on coal.

At present, electric cars cost more to buy than their gasoline counterparts, and their driving range on a single charge is more limited. Aware consumers who believe in science and live where coal dominates electric power also don’t want to drive on that dirtiest of fuels, which spews twice as much greenhouse emissions per unit of energy as either natural gas or gasoline.

The dividing line for carbon emissions is 50%. Where coal produces 50% or more of your electric power, you would only increase your carbon footprint by driving on electricity. (For example, where I live coal provides 87% of electric power, so I would increase my carbon footprint by 74%.)

This blog doesn’t just bewail problems. It provides solutions. There’s no easy or quick solution to the carbon problem except reducing the fraction of our electricity that comes from coal. Converting our electric plants to natural gas can help there, but that takes time. Drivers can also reduce their personal carbon footprints by setting up a home solar array, but that’s expensive. So electric-car makers ought to be pushing their wares hardest where coal accounts for significantly less than 50% of electric-power generation.

But once over the carbon hurdle, electric cars face still two more: high purchase prices and limited range. Fortunately, there is a common solution to both problems—one which would also help gas stations survive as more drivers begin charging electric cars and compressing natural gas in their homes.

The solution would require some changes in how car-makers and gas stations do business. But it doesn’t require any technological innovation, let alone breakthroughs. It’s easily doable, and it would propel this new industry forward like a rocket.

Electric-car makers could sell the cars to drivers but only lease the battery packs. That would lower the selling price of the car by a substantial amount, giving electric cars an initial-price advantage over both gasoline and natural-gas cars.

At the same time, battery-pack leasing would solve the range problem. “Gas” stations would own or lease the battery packs and maintain supplies of fully-charged ones, ready to install. Drivers would come to “gas” stations and put theirs car up on racks. The station’s attendants would pop a few screws, lower the discharged pack, and replace it with a fully charged one.

The driver would be back on the road in no more time than it now takes to gas up and buy a doughnut. Cars could go hundreds of miles per day on electricity, just as they now do on gasoline or natural gas, with the slight inconvenience of a few more “pit stops.”

A local “gas” station would provide the battery pack in the car when it is first sold. Agreements among the car maker, gas station and buyer would govern who owns it and the terms of its use. Insurance would protect the car maker and “gas” station against loss or theft of, or collision damage to, the battery pack. Separately owned gas stations would have master agreements for interchange of battery packs in long-distance driving.

The agreements need not be much more complex than those for buying cars on time, which also can involve several parties (car maker, financer, and driver). They would relieve drivers of all worries about the battery packs, including charging-cycle deterioration and collision damage (which has been reported, in crash testing, to cause fires). They would also allow car makers or their battery suppliers to improve battery packs continuously (and recycle the lithium in old ones), in ways completely invisible to drivers.

Of course leasing the batteries to gas stations would raise the per-mile cost of electric driving. Gas stations would have to charge more for a fully-charged battery pack than just the cost of electricity to charge it. Not only would they have to pay their operating expenses and make a profit; they would also have to recover the cost of replacing each battery pack when its ability to recharge falls below acceptable limits for driving. Their removing this worry and burden from drivers would come at a cost.

But that cost appears bearable. The Nissan Leaf’s website advertises a battery lifetime of ten years, with a possible deterioration of 30% or so in range. Since drivers would charge at least once a workday, and since there are 250 workdays in a five-day, fifty-week work year, that means about 2,500 charge cycles. The cost of replacing a $5,000 battery pack after those cycles would add an extra two dollars to the cost of each charge, or about 2.9 cents per mile (at the Leaf’s 73-mile EPA range [footnote 1 at bottom of page]).

That would raise the energy cost per mile from 1.8 cents for solar photovoltaic electricity or 1.5 cents for nuclear electricity to 4.6 cents and 4.4 cents per mile, respectively. Those figures compare with the per-mile energy cost of natural gas at residential rates, namely, 4.3 cents per mile. In fact, they are all within the range of probable error in my calculations and should be considered equivalent.

Natural-gas cars would still offer an energy-cost-per-mile advantage if gas stations could procure natural gas at industrial rates. According to my table, they could offer driving at 1.8 cents per mile, or about 2 cents after a 20% surcharge for operating expenses and profit.

But with leased battery packs, electric cars would have a substantial initial-price advantage over both gasoline and natural-gas cars. That price advantage would be even higher for natural-gas than for gasoline cars, by at least the minimum $3,500 extra that it costs to buy a new natural-gas car now.

So consumers would have a real price choice. They could save big money on the car price and go electric, at the cost of paying more per mile of driving (but still much less than for gasoline). Or they could buy a natural-gas car at a higher initial-purchase price and save more in driving over the life of the car. But in either case they would save fuel costs over gasoline, by at least a factor of three.

The model here is the computer-printer industry. Printer sales skyrocketed after the industry discovered the “Gillette” business model of selling razors cheap and blades dear. By increasing their prices for printer cartridges (with extra profits from heavier use), printer makers lowered their initial prices for printers, sparking sales. The electric-car industry could do the same thing with cars and battery packs, substantially reducing initial purchase pricing.

An electric car is a thing of simplicity, grace, elegance and beauty. It has no transmission, no reciprocating pistons, no crankshaft, no camshaft, no clickety-clacking valves, no exhaust manifold, afterburner or muffler. It needs no electric starter. It has only electric motors (that also serve as generators) and solid-state power controllers, which have no moving parts. Its battery pack is the only awkward thing in it, and the only real point of maintenance worry.

Solving the initial-cost and range problem for electric cars, by itself, would be no small thing. But the battery-pack-leasing solution would also have societal benefits. As electric and natural-gas cars come into greater vogue, the future of gas stations will be in jeopardy. For the first time ever in the automotive history, consumers will be able to “fill up” in their homes. They won’t ever have to go to a gas station except when they need repairs. So gas stations, with all their gainful unskilled and semi-skilled employment, might begin to disappear.

The price disadvantage of residential over industrial electricity (and natural gas) will keep lower-income consumers coming to gas stations, especially if they drive a lot. But many higher-income consumers, from whom driving takes a much lower share of income, will accept that price disadvantage for the convenience of “filling up” at home.

So battery-pack leasing to or by gas stations would be a boon to the whole electric-car industry, including its infrastructure. It would lower drivers’ car-purchase price, giving electric cars a significant initial-price advantage for the first time. It would allow electric cars to recharge about as quickly as gasoline cars now fill up. It would unleash electric cars’ range, at the small inconvenience of more frequent pit stops. It would assuage consumers’ anxiety that, because of improvements, next year’s model of the very same car might have a better, longer-lasting or cheaper battery pack. It would promote energy independence in transportation, since virtually none of our electricity comes from foreign oil. And in places where less than half of electricity comes from coal, it would give drivers the satisfaction of lowering (or just not increasing) their carbon footprint while driving a modern, elegant, easy-maintenance, nonpolluting machine.

P.S. Where Government Might Help. The solution to high electric-car prices and short ranges proposed above might make sense for a single car manufacturer. But there are already two entrants in the industry, Chevy and Nissan, and at several more expected this year. There soon will be many different types of battery packs.

If every car maker has its own proprietary battery pack, gas stations will have a tough time maintaining stocks of charged batteries for every make of car. Some standardization of packs— for physical interchangeability only—is vital if this scheme is to work.

Otherwise, electric cars’ battery packs will be like incompatible railroad gauges in the nineteenth century. Different sizes and types will create mini-monopolies, make everything more expensive, and hobble the industry’s development nationwide.

It’s possible that an industry consortium could sort this all out. But more likely, car makers will continue to compete in everything, producing a jumble of battery-pack designs that render a sensible industry infrastructure impossible. To avoid this problem, government can and should encourage or require standardization of battery packs.

Standardization should be for interchangeability only. No regulation should mess with battery packs’ proprietary innards. Gas stations could and should charge more for recharged battery packs that have greater power capacity or lighter weight.

All that's needed is standardizing things like overall voltages, maximum current capacity, sizes, shapes and plugs, so that service stations can install recharged packs interchangeably. The packs’ internal, functional designs can continue to be proprietary and chief points of competition. Even plugs can vary in design as long as they fit together.

Battery packs’ most vital commercial parameter—energy-storage capacity in kilowatt hours—should NOT be standardized. That’s precisely where we want robust competition. If a battery maker can fit more power storage into the same size and weight, more power to him!

But within these limitations, battery-pack interchangeability would have three desirable effects. First, it would create a new industry for electric-car battery packs, just as IBM created the software industry in 1969 by “unbundling” computer software from computer hardware (then so-called “mainframes”). Second, in so doing, it would encourage car companies to focus on their main expertise—cars—while leaving battery design and chemistry to experts in those fields. Finally, it would create robust competition in battery packs, quite apart from that in cars, leading to quicker innovation and improvement of the most critical component of electric cars.

To encourage rapid development of a sensible electric-car infrastructure, government should encourage or require such minimal standardization. At the very least, it should enact a limited antitrust exception permitting otherwise competing private firms to join together and standardize electric-car battery packs, for inter-brand interchangeability only. There could, of course, be different standards for different classes of cars and light trucks (but not too many, lest the battery-pack leasing scheme become too complex.)

Footnote 1: Nissan’s Leaf website is coy about the replacement price of battery packs, so this price is just a rough guess. Any estimate is likely to be rough for the same reasons that Nissan won’t tell. Battery-pack design and production technology are under continuous improvement. Sales haven’t yet reached anywhere near the level where mass production will achieve maximum economies of scale. The price of lithium is uncertain and will become more so as electric-car sales take off. And, for all these reasons, battery packs’ costs are industry trade secrets as closely guarded as their design. (These same reasons also argue for battery-pack leasing, which will keep these issues invisible to consumers, giving them the benefit of continuous improvement without the worry.)

Footnote 2: IBM unbundled and created the software industry only under threat of antitrust litigation by the federal government. As any one who follows the computer industry knows, unbundling software was one of most successful acts of “industrial policy” in human history. (Imagine if hardware makers like Intel, IBM and Apple still served as the only sources of software. Microsoft, Adobe and and Oracle wouldn’t even be in business!) Sometimes it takes a little government nudge to get private industry and investors to do the right thing.

Coda: Is Carlos Ghosn a Genius?

Although you don’t see the ideas in this post widely discussed in the popular press, it is entirely possible that they are not original.

Carlos Ghosn (pronounced “Goan”) is the hard-driving CEO of Nissan. Over a year ago, in dedicating Nissan’s new plant in Smyrna, Tennessee, he mentioned some curious figures. When fully running, he said, the new plant would produce 150,000 Leafs annually and 200,000 battery packs.

If doesn’t take a genius to notice the discrepancy in number. The extra 50,000 battery packs amount to 33% of the car production. So what are they for?

There are only three possibilities. First, Ghosn might have had so little confidence in the battery packs’ reliability that he wanted 33% spares for warranty service to insure drivers’ confidence in his cars.

That explanation is possible but unlikely. The only major problems reported so far with either the Volt’s or Leaf’s battery packs are fires that sometimes occur after destructive crash testing. Major crashes don’t occur that often, certainly not in one-third of cases.

Second, Ghosn might have wanted Nissan to go into the related business of home battery packs. The Leaf’s (and Volt’s) battery packs have enough capacity to power the average household for several days, apart from any electric space heating. With proper electronics—no more complicated than the Leaf’s own—they could solve the intermittency problem for wind and solar power on a household-by-household basis.

Most Leaf owners will charge their cars at night, in between commutes to work. But the sun shines during the day, when the cars are at work. So consumers who want to install solar arrays on their roofs to charge their cars off the grid (and without coal’s massive pollution) could use an extra battery pack.

Finally, Ghosn might have had in mind precisely the business model discussed in this post: an infrastructure with spare fully-charged battery packs ready to install, in a mere five or ten minutes, in electric cars traveling long distances.

Ghosn was coy about his precise intentions. But he did mention Nissan’s massive investment in infrastructure.

Reporters’ and readers’ eyes glaze over with talk about “infrastructure.” But it’s vital to widespread use of any form of energy. How do you think your electric power gets to you from today’s remote and gargantuan nuclear, coal and hydroelectric power stations, by magic?

Tomorrow’s wind, solar and natural-gas generators will change our energy infrastructure considerably. They are all scalable, and natural-gas plants are the best short-term solution [search for “complements”] to the intermittency of wind and sun.

We don’t have to build massive, remote generators any more just to realize economies of scale. Another decade or two will see wide dispersal of power generation by wind, sun and natural gas, which will put power sources much closer to users and relegate our robust national grid to backup and intermittency-proofing.

Likely Ghosn was thinking about all this when he made his Smyrna announcement. But he didn’t want to be too specific and tip off competitors, including Bob Lutz at GM.

In our modern energy era, it’s not enough to be a “car guy” like Lutz. You have to be an “energy guy,” too. Among other things, that means using math for more than just building reliable machines. It means using statistics and probability to predict how far most electric cars will drive (on the average), how many spare, fully recharged battery packs they will need, and where service stations to swap them for discharged ones should be. There must be a lot of math behind that 33%-spares number.

Our telecommunications industry knows this story well. Decades ago, AT & T developed a whole new branch of statistical math in order to compute how little it could spend on telephone infrastructure and still let the average consumer have a dial tone and a long-distance trunk line when needed. The new branch of math it developed helped advance the progress of thermodynamics and statistical physics.

Of course you could “overkill” the investment and spend too much. But AT & T was frugal and didn’t. It used its head—and math—instead.

The same is true of cell-phone providers today. That’s why the phone system works perfectly in normal times but breaks down under overwhelming load during emergencies like 9/11. No statistics can predict the anomalous loads and abnormal traffic of days like that, even far from “Ground Zero.”

If Ghosn thought of all of this, he is truly a genius, at least as compared to his competitors. But that what it takes to succeed in transportation today. Transportation takes energy, and energy is getting scarce, tricky, multifaceted and expensive. So you have to understand energy as much as how to build machines that roll. Ghosn may be the first car-company CEO to ken that point well enough to succeed in today’s environment.

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Variable-Range and Variable-Performance Cars

[For the Apple angle on this post, click here.]

Why is the average car capable of driving between 250 and 450 miles without refueling? The average driver’s daily mileage is nowhere near that high.

Before Chevy approved its electric Volt for production, GM did a lot of market research. It found that the Volt’s rated electric-only range, about 40 miles, was enough for the daily commutes of a majority of American drivers.

Add a few miles for shopping and taking the kids to piano and swimming lessons, and most drivers might need a daily range of some 60 miles at most. For my own odd location—between Santa Fe and Albuquerque but closer to Santa Fe—I might need to be in a “sweep spot” in range, about 100 miles. That’s it.

So why do virtually all consumers buy and drive cars with from four to nine times the range they need?

There are two easy answers. First, in gasoline cars increasing range requires only a bigger gas tank, which adds negligibly to the capital cost of the car.

Second, people like having the security of extra range. They never know when they might take a long car trip. And a bigger range lets drivers go farther and longer before filling up.

So we have myriads of drivers running around day to day in cars, SUVs and light trucks with ranges that they need or use only a few times a year, if ever.

The engineering and efficiency of this practice make no sense. Carrying around unneeded gasoline as a routine matter increases the car’s weight and mass (inertia). It makes the car more sluggish, i.e., slower to accelerate. And it decreases gas mileage.

Does the extra gas give the car any better performance? No. Gasoline is gasoline. So any engineer with an eye to efficiency, let alone perfectionism, should tear his or her hair out at the very thought of big gas tanks and excessive range.

Drivers could get a little better performance and gas mileage simply by keeping their gas tanks only partly full—just enough for their daily needs, plus a 20% safety margin. For most drivers, that would mean keeping their tanks about one-quarter full.

So why don’t they? Well, fueling every day would be inconvenient and time-wasting. And because the energy-density of gasoline is high, they wouldn’t save that much in fuel cost anyway. What busy worker or home-maker wants to spend precious time and mental energy worrying, every day, about how full the gas tank is?

Enter electric cars. They are a whole new animal. They alter, dramatically, every one of the factors that got us to this inefficient place with gasoline-driven cars. Let’s analyze.

First, look at price. Bigger gas tanks add negligibly to the price of a gasoline car. Not so electric-cars’ batteries. In electric cars, the batteries are the single most expensive system, both to supply and to maintain. They are also the heaviest and most massive single system, by far.

What’s the difference between a Tesla Model S and a Nissan Leaf? Mostly range and performance. The minimum range of a Model S is about 265 miles, as compared to the Leaf’s 73. So the Tesla’s batteries have to have 265/73 = 3.63 times the capacity of the Leaf’s. If we assume that Nissan and its battery suppliers have roughly the same technology as Tesla, that means the Tesla’s batteries mass and cost over 3.5 times as much as the Leaf’s.

Let’s suppose the Leaf’s batteries cost $10,000. Then the Model S’ batteries would cost roughly 3.5 times as much, or $35,000—half the car’s sticker price. If Tesla dropped the mileage to 73 miles and used only the Leaf’s $10,000 batteries, you could have all the Model S’ elegance and high technology for $10,000 (the reduced price of the smaller batteries), plus $35,000 (the price of the rest of the car), for a total of $45,000. That’s still in luxury-car territory, but at least not in extreme luxury-car territory. (All these prices are before any federal or state subsidies for electric cars.)

Note that the battery-price difference, $35,000 - $10,000 = $25,000, is way more than the price of a larger gas tank.

Once you have a bigger battery, it doesn’t matter whether you fill it up all the way or only partly. Electrons don’t mass or weigh much. So you would save little or nothing, in performance or efficiency, by not “filling up.”

As for convenience, electric cars beat gasoline cars hands down. Consumers like long-range gasoline cars because they don’t like having to go to gas stations frequently, especially at night or in freezing weather. But suppose you could “gas up” in your own garage, every time you come home, as electric cars let you do. Then all you’d need is a spouse (or mother or father) kind enough to remind you gently, “Dear, did you plug the car in and close the garage door?”

What about the battery’s mass or weight? Remember Newton’s second law of motion, F = ma? The acceleration a of anything, including a car, under a force F is inversely proportional to its mass, m.

So as the mass of the battery increases, the acceleration for a given force decreases, and with it the car’s performance. Big batteries slow cars down. But if the battery’s peak current (which generates the force) is proportional to its mass, the rise in battery mass produces an increase in peak current and therefore performance, due to a bigger F.

These two effects don’t precisely cancel each other. The inertia-caused decrease in performance with increasing battery mass is inversely proportional to the mass of the whole car, which is bigger than the mass of the battery. But the change in peak current—and therefore the increase in force (and performance) that it causes—is directly proportional to the increase in battery mass alone. That increase is larger than the corresponding decrease in performance from the car’s increase in total mass because the mass of the battery alone is smaller.

So, perhaps non-intuitively, an electric car gains performance with increasing battery size, despite the increase in total mass and inertia and therefore a decrease in energy efficiency. This is the main reason why the Tesla Model S can go from zero to sixty miles per hour in 4.2 seconds, while the Leaf (or Volt) can’t.

If Tesla produced a 73-mile-range car, it could sell it for around $45,000. It might have better performance than the Leaf, but it would hardly match the Model S’ performance.

Something very like this is probably how Tesla plans to offer its low-priced “people’s sedan” some time in 2017. But the same strategy is much more versatile. Tesla could offer a range of cars having the Model S’ elegance and high technology, but with a wide range of mileages, performances and price tags, all using the same basic mechanical platform.

This analysis leads to a much more important conclusion. The nature of electric cars and the laws of physics suggest that there’s no need for permanently long-range electric cars, or for permanently high-performance ones, except for showoff drivers.

Remember Tesla’s online battery-swap video of a couple of years ago? There was Elon Musk, watching a Model S drive out on a specially-prepared stage. When the car reached stage center, a trap-door mechanism below the stage started popping the battery pack’s screws, lowering the presumably spent battery pack, and replacing it with a fully charged one.

As this was going on, a TV screen behind Musk and the Tesla showed a driver pulling up to a gas pump to fill up. The Tesla drove off the stage with a fully-charged replacement battery in 93 seconds, before the gas guzzler could fill up.

If you can replace a big, mostly-discharged battery with a fully-charged big one in 93 seconds, you can certainly replace the big one with a small one—or vice versa—in the same amount of time. All you need is batteries with enclosures and plugs of standardized size and shape. (Their mass or weight, and internal size, would of course vary with their range/performance.)

Want a cheap electric car? Buy the low-range one and charge it in your garage.

Want to go on a long electric trip? Drop by your neighborhood Tesla dealer or authorized service station and replace your small battery, temporarily, with a higher-capacity rented one, just for that trip.

Want to impress a pretty girl with head-snapping acceleration? Do the same. Then, after you’ve got her, switch back to a more moderate, lower-range, lower-performance and cheaper battery.

You pay for only the battery you use and for the time you use it. At other time, you’re not driving around with extra mass, wasting energy. And you can convert your car for the long trip, or into an impressive performance machine, in 93 seconds. A lot easier than swapping a gasoline engine, no?

Do you begin to see how important Tesla’s Nevada “Gigafactory” for batteries will be? It can make different sizes of batteries for different models/ranges of the same car. It can make batteries for quick battery swaps: no long waits required. It can let a single car platform have a range of mileages and performances. But Tesla’s batteries will go far beyond cars. The Gigagfactory can make batteries for smoothing the intermittency of solar and wind power, whether for individual off-grid homes or for utilities. It can make batteries for remote off-grid electronic and electrical installations, including cell-phone towers, microwave repeaters, radar stations and emergency warning systems.

How many months before the Gigafactory is running at full capacity? My guess is between nine and twenty-four. Remember, at 3 miles per kilowatt hour (the Leaf’s and Volt’s rated mileage), driving an electric car costs just 60% (at the nationwide average residential electrical rate for 2013) of what it costs to drive a 30 MPG car on gasoline, even at $2.10 a gallon. This saving comes regardless of any subsidies for electric cars; and it’s much smaller than your per-mile saving when you charge your car from your own solar array.

The iCar?

For over a week, Bloomberg.com has been posting “exclusive” stories about Apple’s plans to get into the car business. One recent story had a provocative headline: “Apple Wants to Start Producing Cars as Soon as 2020.”

Bloomberg.com proffers three kinds of evidence for these plans. The first is alleged “leaks” by secretive, anonymous sources. The second is accusations (and an upcoming lawsuit) over Apple allegedly “stealing” employees away from Tesla and from Waltham-Mass.-based battery maker A123 Systems LLC. The third bit of evidence is Apple’s huge cash hoard of $178 billion, which is currently increasing at about 10% per year, and pressure from shareholders to do something with it or give it to them.

As most Apple fans and shareholders know, Apple is as secretive about its new-product plans as any American public company. It’s almost as relentless in pursuing leaks and leakers as the President was in pursuing Edward Snowden. So it’s entirely possible, although not a sure thing, that these rare leaks are, to use a double negative, “not unauthorized.”

Why would Apple want to spill the beans? I can think of only two reasons: disinformation and planting a marker.

Apple may actually not be going into cars at all, but into high-tech, high-power batteries to make renewable energy non-intermittent and more usable. Such a foray would be entirely consistent with Apple’s recent investment of $850 million in solar energy.

Alternatively, Apple may be trying to scare away other new entrants from the electric-car business, or give them an incentive to sell out when the time is right. For reasons described in an old post, Apple is probably not at all scared of anyone from Detroit. The few good people there it can hire away, and the rest would only slow things down.

Long before its threatened bankruptcy and bailout, GM ignited the current-electric car craze by announcing the Volt. That was eight years ago. I gave GM kudos for that bit of innovation—the first real innovation in autos to come out of Detroit since Chrysler’s “hemi” cylinder head in the 1960s. Detroit had done a lot of prototyping and market testing, but it had missed small, fuel efficient cars, the Wankel engine and hyrbids.

In the end, all you really need to know about “innovation” in Detroit is that GM felt it could not make or sell the Volt without a gasoline engine. So no, if Apple is not spreading disinformation, any deliberate or tolerated leak is hardly aimed at keeping Detroit out of the market.

It could be aimed at Tesla—an attempt to dry up new investment. Or it could be aimed at keeping the nascent electric-car market a virtually duopoly, with savvy foreign suppliers like Nissan-Renault nibbling around the edges.

Assuming that Apple is aiming at cars, and not batteries, what are its prospects? Tesla already has proved that you don’t need many traditional mechanical engineers, let alone those from Detroit, to make a first-class car.

As it turned out, doing that was a lot easier than Detroiters taunted and than sleepy auto-industry analysts expected. The main reason is Detroit’s dirty little secret: it no longer makes much of the cars it sells itself. It designs the bodies and styles, does gross mechanical engineering on the chassis, suspension, and assembly, and then orders many of the most critical parts from suppliers. Things like bearings, brakes, hydraulic parts, and key parts of engines all come from firms other than car makers.

But that’s not all. As I’ve noted earlier, an electric car is a whole new animal. It doesn’t have, among other things: (1) any internal-combustion engine, (2) an ignition system, (3) an exhaust system, (4) an engine-cooling system (because electric motors don’t waste energy as heat), (5) a transmission (because electric motors provide constant torque throughout a wide range of RPM), (6) an afterburner or exhaust-purifying system (because electric cars produce no exhaust), or (7) a gas tank or fuel-injection system.

In other words, most of the complex Rube-Goldberg systems that the mechanical and combustion engineers in Detroit design or buy from suppliers won’t be in any cars that Apple makes. On the other hand, Apple’s cars will have several things that Detroit has rarely or never designed or made, including: (1) electric motors, (2) high-power, solid-state current controllers, (3) regenerative breaking systems (which recharge the battery smoothly when the car slows down or brakes), and (4) all the whiz-bang driver-oriented consumers electronics for which Apple is famous and for which Detroit has gotten uniformly abysmal reviews.

So if Apple is truly aiming at cars and not at batteries, its planting a marker makes perfect sense. It may be telling investors and foreign car makers, “don’t mess with us unless you’ve got $178 billion (and counting) to spend and have a track record of superb consumer-oriented innovation.” It may be telling talented engineers in Detroit to start thinking about relocating to a region with cities that work, far better weather, higher salaries, and opportunities that will knock their socks off. And it may be telling Tesla and Elon Musk to look to their laurels.

As I noted in an earlier post, even Musk can fail to grasp fully how much a new animal electric cars can be. The post just above explains one two possible reasons: variable range and variable performance. An earlier post explains some lesser, but still interesting, potential innovations.

Now that Detroit has survived, barely, let the real innovation and competition in personal transport begin!

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Common Sense about Pakistan

[For a brief update on electric cars and the risk of crash-induced fires in the Chevy Volt’s batteries, click here. I apologize to readers for being slow to moderate comments. I'll be back on that job December 2.]

Cyberspace is all agog over yesterday’s apparent killing of 25 Pakistani troops by American air strikes. As usual, we Yanks are aghast at a wholly predictable development.

This tragedy may not have been predictable in precise detail. But in general outline such events were not only predictable, but predicted. Nearly six months ago, I predicted a dark and prickly turn to the US/Pakistan relationship. The reason was an obvious divergence of interests.

That divergence becomes more evident every day. Our primary interest in the area is simple and limited: preventing the Af-Pak border area from becoming a launching pad for terrorist attacks against us.

Pakistan has much more complex and less limited interests. Among other things, it is caught up in a regional power struggle with some very strong neighbors, including India. It is also finding its place among the other “Stans,” including those that used to be part of the Soviet Union.

Part of its struggle (particularly regarding Kashmir) has religious roots. The British split Pakistan from India in 1947 because its Muslims did not want to live in a Hindu-majority nation. The Muslims who fled India to the new state―sometimes driven by pogroms and often bearing unspeakable hardship―were either more fearful or more committed to Islam than those who (in much larger numbers) remained in India.

This history gives Pakistan some of the tarnish of a religious state. But lest that fact evoke even more needless Islamophobia than we Yanks already suffer, I rush to qualify it.

Pakistan’s religious aspects are important but limited. They derive primarily from its origins as a state and the relatively primitive education of much of its people, especially in the tribal borderlands (inluding Baluchistan). They also derive from the extremist madrassas that the Saudi Princes have financed throughout the region. (This is by far the worst consequence of the Saudis’ Faustian bargain with extremism, which some day will destroy their own rule and perhaps take much else with it.)

But Pakistan also enjoys an overlay of modern bureaucracy, a strong but still nascent democracy, and a now-dominant professional military and intelligence culture―all derived (and well learned!) from British colonials. It is self-evidently not a theocratic state.

In these respects Pakistan in not dissimilar from Israel, although less advanced. Its modern democracy and relatively efficient military sit atop a population that, under the wrong circumstances, might support a theocratic state.

Let me remind readers than I am Jewish. As an American Jew, I have an absolute conviction that my own country handles religion the right way: no official or “established” religion, and complete freedom for every citizen to believe and worship as he or she chooses.

Our First Amendment has the best answer for a modern, pluralistic, connected world. And every successful empire in human history observed the same principles, especially the largest ones. The ancient Roman empire did. So did the Mongol Empire. China’s empires, including Mao’s, were all based on secular power and civil governance, not religion. At its height, the Islamic empire tolerated Christian and Jewish worship widely, although Islam was as much a part of the ruling class in it as Catholicism was in the Holy Roman Empire. (The Islamic empire, however, never had anything remotely resembling the Christian Inquisition. More medieval Jews were forced to recant their religion, flee or die from Christian lands than ever under the Caliphs.)

Today secular government and religious tolerance are the norms worldwide. To varying degrees they prevail in China, Europe, India, Russia and the United States. They even prevail (in somewhat diluted from) in majority-Muslim nations like Indonesia, Malaysia and Turkey.

So in this respect Israel and Pakistan are both a bit retrograde. And both have nuclear weapons. Every human on this planet has a strong interest in making sure those weapons never get used to advance religion, or because some “prophet” believes that God commands it.

I make these points simply because I have never seen them made anywhere else. But it’s important not to overemphasize them, especially in Pakistan. Pakistan’s current leaders are about as far from religious fanatics as it is possible to be. Like other leaders worldwide, they have exclusively secular goals, such as regional influence, social stability, economic advancement and national sovereignty (a key concern of any nation as young as Pakistan).

Pakistan also lives in a dangerous and still potentially unstable neighborhood. Freed by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the other “Stans,” including Afghanistan, are potential allies, potential rivals, potential trading partners and (by virtual of majority-Muslim similarity) potential partners for social and cultural exchange. Some are still ruled by tyrants and therefore sources of potential instability, including refugees from any violent change.

Pakistan’s neighborhood also has a number of powerful, stable giants (China, India, and Russia) and one not-so-stable Islamic theocracy, namely, Iran. As a young and insecure nation, Pakistan is trying to find its place among the giants, while trying to reconcile its sectarian origins and religious population with the giants’ uniformly secular norms and with Iran’s muscular theocracy.

All these things make dealing with Pakistan a diplomatic and military leader’s nightmare. They also make our stunning success in virtually dismantling Al Qaeda in the region all the more remarkable. But they make utterly quixotic any further (and perhaps more noble) ends, such as building nations or democracies.

This is where the realism comes in. We have nearly achieved our primary goal―taking down the terrorist training camps and killing or co-opting their leaders. There is virtually no chance that we can achieve broader goals at acceptable expense, whatever guilt we may feel for letting Afghanistan decay into a war-torn theocracy after our successful jihad against the Soviet Union.

So the key to wisdom here is hewing to the pragmatic. We are not in the neighborhood. We are half a world away. Very powerful nations situated much nearer―China, India and Russia―have more interest than we do in seeking stability and peaceful economic growth. They have infinitely more interest in avoiding the use of nuclear weapons, since any nuclear blast in the region would undoubtedly affect their territories and peoples directly, through radioactive fallout, refugees and all the other unintended consequences of war.

Like tyrants, great empires get pathetic in their old age. They cannot ken when it’s time to leave things to younger, closer, newer forces. Had they passed on power in their primes, Mao Zedong and Robert Mugabe would have been sung forever as national liberators, unifiers and founders of new nations. But they both nearly destroyed what they had built by holding onto absolute power far too long, far beyond their personal competence.

So it is with empires. Like the Brits before us, we Yanks have had a good run. We helped bring peace in World War I and World War II and bore the brunt of keeping the peace since then. Following the Brits’ lead, we brought the economic benefits of free markets and capitalism to most of the world. We have stood as the world’s prime example of racial equality, religious freedom, freedom of speech and human rights, although now the EU is challenging us (which is why it’s well worth preserving, whatever the Euro’s troubles). Having no colonies (we let Cuba and the Philippines go), we introduced the principles of native sovereignty.

We’ve done much that we can be proud of. But we’ve held on much too long. And in doing so, we’ve let our homeland decline to the point of embarrassment. (On my recent trip to Cataluña, for example, that part of Spain seemed like Beverly Hills compared to our aged and dilapidation Eastern cities. A US-Europe comparison used to be the other way around.)

So it’s time to let go.

Of course we need to maintain enough force in the region to be sure that terrorist camps don’t rise again. But our aerial technologies for doing so are increasing in power and accuracy daily. And this is one area in which Pakistan’s and our interests virtually converge. Might we do better in letting Pakistanis carry most of the burden, even if they don’t act as quickly and as decisively as we would like in every case?

As for the giant neighbors, their interests converge with ours almost precisely. They want what we want even more avidly because they are nearer to the possible epicenters of instability, as well as to the terrorist training camps. And their capabilities are greater because they are nearer and because they (unlike us) are not teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. So why not trust the giant neighbors more, work more closely with them, and build better relationships at the same time? The results might surprise us.

If we continue on our present course, future historians may rank us with Mao and Mugabe as having blown a promising start by holding on too long. There’s a time to build, a time to control, and a time to step back and work with others. We’re at that last stage now.

[Erratum (12/30/11): In an earlier version of this post, the following sentence was garbled by omitting the words in brackets: “At its height, the Islamic empire tolerated Christian and Jewish worship widely, although Islam was as much a part of the ruling class in it {as Catholicism was} in the Holy Roman Empire.” I regret the error.]

Yellow Journalism and Electric Cars

God, how I wish the news media would hire some reporters with engineering backgrounds. Even one or two would make the so-called “news” much better.

Today Bloomberg.com, my now-favorite source of business news, reported on a minor setback in GM’s Chevy Volt production with all the sensationalism of Hearst or Fox at their worst. “GM’s Volt Battery Fires Threaten ‘Moon Shot,’” the headline screamed.

What malarkey! The headline is absolute nonsense in two respects. First, it implies that the battery fires are regular or random occurrences. Not so. As the story itself reveals, three fires have occurred in the Volt’s lithium batteries days or hours after they were subjected to crash tests, i.e., simulated crashes. Second, referring to a remark of GM’s Volt “champion,” Bob Lutz, the headline implied that making lithium batteries work is as difficult as sending men to the Moon.

Anyone with the slightest knowledge of engineering can only shake his head. Lithium batteries aren’t rocket science. They aren’t even close. They’re matters of pedestrian engineering. They work right now, today, by the millions, in every cell phone, laptop, tablet, Prius, and other hybrid running down the road. Problems with fires after radical deceleration in crash tests (or possibly actual crashes) mean that the batteries’ interior structure and cell separation need to be more robust. Or the batteries need to be (better?) shock-mounted. Duh!

GM’s problem is purely economic. It has to fix the batteries (and possibly replace existing ones) quickly enough to avoid consumer anxiety. It needs to do so at a reasonable price, which may not be easy. And, above all, it needs to avoid a repeat of the Ford Pinto, whose rare but fatal gas-tank explosions tarnished the car’s and Ford’s public image for decades.

Can GM do this? Almost certainly, if it acts quickly and puts the right people on the job. Will it be as hard as putting men on the Moon, or getting the ill-fated Apollo 13 crew back safely? Not even remotely in the same league. GM could solve the problem right away, at least temporarily, by promising to tow any car involved in a crash and replace the battery pack free of charge.

GM’s reported solution―offering Volt owners replacement gas-driven loaner cars―is retrograde. It implies that electric cars are not a viable technology, and that GM lacks corporate commitment to them. Replacing the battery packs after crashes, however minor, would be a better solution. Likely it would be less expensive. Crashes don’t happen very often, and probably even less often to Volts. People driving a brand new, relatively expensive car with new technology tend to drive carefully.

For me, the big news in Bloomberg.com’s yellow story is that GM is now marketing the Volt in all 50 states.

So I should be able to test-drive one this year. I also plan to test-drive a Leaf if I can find one in my area. If I like one or the other, I’ll probably buy it. I’ve lusted for an electric car for most of my life, and I’m not getting any younger. I’ll worry about battery fires if I have a crash, which I don’t plan to do; then I’ll take the car in for testing. (My wife and I do plan to keep at least one of our two gas-driven Hyundais for longer trips.)

The big thing for me is not battery fires, but the Volt’s range in cold weather and the stories I’ve read that you can’t really force it to run on electricity alone, at least not when the battery is partially discharged or when accelerating on the freeway. If I can get to town and back on the battery alone, I may be satisfied.

I still want to reward stodgy old GM for being the first mover that forced all the “me, toos” (including Ford) to get off their duffs. So I’ll probably buy the Volt if I like the way it runs, even if the Leaf is fully electric, and without waiting for Ford’s all-electric Focus, which will probably debut late next year.

But GM better produce enough Volts to keep its dealers from price-gouging based on scarcity. According to the Bloomberg.com report, it plans to produce 60,000 next year. If it wants to stick to that schedule and retain the lead, it had better solve the battery-cell-matrix problem quickly. Competent engineers surely could.

[Note to readers: the shock-mounting alternative and the paragraph criticizing gas-driven loaner cars as a temporary solution were not in the original version of this post.]

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Lack of Imagination III: Selling Engineering, for a Change

Engineering
Driving Experience
Economy (that doesn’t depend on the price of oil)
Maintenance
Conclusion

This is the third in a series of posts discussing how our opinion makers have shown all the vision and imagination of moles.

The first one analyzed small, remotely piloted aircraft for military and intelligence applications. The second discussed the importance of preserving and completing the Chevy Volt project, whatever may happen to GM.

This one—in honor of the Detroit Auto Show—discusses why marketing the Chevy Volt won’t be nearly as hard as cynical auto industry reporters think. The Chevy Volt won’t just be a new car. It will be a new form of transportation with an entirely different driving and owning experience. Any marketer who couldn’t sell it would have to be brain dead.

Engineering

The first thing to realize about the Volt is that it’s cool. It’s not cool just because it’s far more efficient than any other car on the road and will rapidly cure our addiction to foreign oil. It’s more efficient and will help cut use of foreign oil because it’s cool.

Why is it cool? It’s the first real advance in the auto industry in over 100 years. There were some slow, stately electric cars early in the last century, but they had nothing like the batteries or high-power solid-state electronics of today. So the internal combustion engine and the promise of cheap oil eclipsed them.

The Volt’s technology is the product of a century of advances in physics, chemistry, electronics, and manufacturing. The folks who made the last century’s electric cars could no more have made the Volt than Orville and Wilbur Wright could have made a 747. Among many other reasons, the Volt is cool because it exploits the huge difference between the weight of lead and lithium, the third lightest element in the periodic table.

Many drivers’ eyes glaze over at these facts. But to people who know something about science and engineering, they are exciting.

And believe it or not, there are still people in our financialized nation who fit that description. We call them “early adopters.” They are the folks who drove the computer industry by buying laptops when they cost $3,500 and iPods when they cost well over $300.

Their education and technical talent allows them to make some money, and they like to spend it on new, cool things. They will buy a Volt even if it costs $40,000 (initially) just to be the first one on their block to own one. They are the Volt’s primary target market for 2010-2011.

Driving Experience

The mainstream media still haven’t internalized the implications of an electric car. That’s what the Volt is. It does have a small gasoline engine to extend its 40-mile battery range. But the people, like me, who will buy one as soon as it’s available will do so because it’s really an electric car.

And that’s a whole new animal. How? Let me count the ways.

First, it creates no exhaust and no pollution. None of the many dire warnings about running your car in your garage apply to it. Your garage won’t kill you with carbon monoxide poisoning even if you run a Volt inside it, with the door closed, all day.

If you lack power tools, you could put the Volt up on jacks, run it electrically, attach a saw blade or grinder to an axle, and go to work. I wouldn’t be surprised if the car creates an accessories aftermarket for that purpose.

Second, the Volt running as an electric car is quiet. It doesn’t make much more noise than a bicycle, especially on the getaway. Lovers will use it for trysts, to sneak away from their sleeping spouses. Teenagers will want one for their first car, so they can sneak away while their parents are sleeping. Police will want some for stakeouts and other missions requiring stealth. The only downside is that drivers—and especially pedestrians—will have to train themselves to rely on their eyes more than their ears to avoid disaster.

But the third point is the clincher. If you run the Volt as an electric car, you won’t ever have to go to a gas station again. You can simply plug it in overnight in your garage and be ready to go to work or the store again in the morning.

That means a lot if you live far from a gas station or winter in a cold climate. Wouldn’t you rather be at home with your feet by the fire than out in the cold, pumping gas, maybe in a not-so-nice neighborhood? And think of the convenience when you have a cold or the flu.

Economy (that doesn’t depend on the price of oil)

The Volt will be incredibly cheap to run. Even with gas at less than $2 per gallon, it will beat gas cars hands down. And oil prices won’t stay low for long, regardless of what happens to the American economy.

The magic number is five: five miles per kilowatt hour. That’s the Volt’s design parameter. Apparently it’s near an industry norm. Ford has announced a similar car for 2012, advertising a range of 100 miles with a 23 kilowatt-hour battery. That works out to 4.3 miles per kilowatt hour.

To calculate your cost of running a Volt, just get your latest electric bill and divide your cost per kilowatt-hour by five.

My cost per kilowatt hour is about 7 cents. So my cost of running a Volt would be 1.4 cents per mile. In order to get the same economy from a car burning gas, even at a mere $1.40 per gallon, I’d have to get 100 miles per gallon. Maybe that’s why the EPA is expected to give the Volt a 100 MPG [now 230 MPG] certification.

Maintenance

The Volt’s economy doesn’t stop with the absence of fuel. When it runs as an electric car, its only moving parts (besides the brakes and steering) are the axles, their bearings and the magnets that make up the motors, which serve as generators when the car is slowing down. No pistons move, no rings, no valves, no timing chain, no distributor, no fuel injector, no crankshaft, no oil pump, no water pump, no radiator, no water coolant, and no engine temperature gauge. There’s not much to go wrong because the electronic controls are all high-power solid state. Have you ever seen an electronic calculator wear out?

The batteries may create some problems in the early years. But GM will no doubt make it easy to swap out failing batteries. Drive up to your friendly dealer, put the car up on a rack, pop a few screws, and replace the entire battery pack. The whole process will probably take twenty minutes, thirty max. Try overhauling or replacing a gasoline engine in that time.

The reliability and convenience of electric cars will leave their gas-driven rivals in the dust. The real danger will be exacerbating unemployment by putting legions of mechanics out of work. Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, also may have to find a source of comedy other than the foibles of cantankerous cars.

Conclusion

Maybe executives in car companies understand these points. Most of them have some acquaintance with engineering. They know how superior—in every way—electric motors and electronic technology are to combustion, gears and crankshafts.

Today’s cars are the old wind-up alarm clocks with the mechanical bell on the top. In comparison, the Volt will be a digital watch. Maybe that’s why virtually every major car manufacturer, from Toyota, to Ford to an obscure Chinese company, announced an electric car at this year’s auto show.

Anyway, it shouldn’t take marketers much imagination to sell all these attractive features. Any salesman or saleswoman who can’t do that ought to find another line of work.

Car companies have to invest a lot of money to convert from the last century’s technology to the twenty-first century’s. But there’s not really much risk. Millions of cell phones, iPods and laptops are running on lithium ion batteries right now. You might be reading this post on lithium power.

The question is not whether it can be done. It can and it will. The question is not whether people will buy the Volt. I will and so will many others. The question is whether we Americans will squander GM’s rare one-year lead over the rest of the industry and end up buying the latest technology—in the world’s most basic industry—from the Japanese and Koreans again.


Update (8/11/09): Today the Wall Street Journal reported that the EPA’s new certification protocols for hybrids are expected to give the Volt a 230 MPG rating. At the same time, the EPA is expected to certify the cost of moving a Volt at less than 3 cents per mile for trips of 100 or fewer miles. Apparently the EPA has revised its protocols to properly reflect the extraordinary efficiency and economy of hybrids (like the Volt) capable of operating in fully electric mode.

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The Tesla Model 3, Long Range: an Objective Technical Assessment

Early in the Cold War, a reporter asked Albert Einstein about his recipe for world peace. He answered, “Why ask me? I’m just a physicist.” Or words to that effect.

Not so Elon Musk. Whatever the question, he has an answer. Often his answer reveals more ego than thought. Apparently many people—including an old friend of mine—evaluate his cars by assessing the man himself. They note his extreme libertarian politics and his inability to keep his mouth shut. Not surprisingly, their assessment is poor.

But Tesla cars are not Musk’s alter egos. They are physical products, as innovative and consequential as Henry Ford’s Model T in its day. So I thought maybe interested buyers might like an objective assessment by a guy who spent the first thirty years of his life immersed in science and engineering, and much of the next forty in and around the computer/software industry. I’m just a driver, not a competitor or media person.

Background. My wife has owned her long range-Tesla Model 3 for six months. During that time, we’ve driven it in just about every road and weather condition except pouring rain. We drove some 1,100 miles from Berkeley, CA, to Santa Fe, NM, in January, encountering some snow. We drove it back in June. We drove it all around Northern NM, on high-speed freeways and winding mountain roads. We’ve driven it around crowded Berkeley, at speeds seldom exceeding 30 MPH, and on interstate highways at speeds above 110 MPH and at sustained speeds near 90. Just this week we returned from weeklong “electric-car pilgrimage” to visit friends in Southern California, a region designed more for cars than for people.

Neither I nor this blog is new to electric cars. I started writing about them in May 2007—over fifteen years ago. I dithered for eleven years in trying a Chevy Volt, before leasing one for three years in 2018. Last year I bought it off the lease. We still drive it around Santa Fe, NM, where we live about half the year. I love it: it’s easier to use, but not quite as fast or as solid as the Tesla. For general thoughts on how economical electric driving can be, even before the recent gas price surge, click here.

In college in the sixties, I owned a 1955 stick-shift Chevy sedan. So I’m no stranger to good ICE cars. I loved that car as only a twenty-something can do. I overhauled its engine myself, with some help in grinding the values. Eventually, its engine blew up, due to my failure to replace the main bearings in the overhaul. So I ended up with no car in my senior year and learned some lessons about ICEs and their maintenance.

What follows is my personal evaluation based on all this experience.

The Car and How it Drives. Let me cut to the chase: the Tesla driving experience is the best I’ve ever had. Unlike the basic Model 3, the long range Model 3 has two electric motors, not just one. It’s rated at 4.2 seconds from zero to sixty. So it delivers impossible acceleration, both from the line and from speed, without any rumble or engine noise.

If you’ve driven ICE cars most of your life, as I had before 2018, you have to experience this to believe it. The rocket power and complete absence of engine noise reminded me of the scene in the movie Independence Day where the Will Smith character gets hold of an alien space fighter. He jerks its control stick back and forth. The ship moves accordingly, instantly and effortlessly, as if Newton’s First Law of Motion (the one about inertia) had somehow been repealed.

That’s how our Tesla feels to drive. Once you experience that for a few days, you’ll never look at an ICE car the same way again. You’ll appreciate in your soul how klugy is a machine that turns successive fuel explosions into rotary motion, as compared to an electric motor that is wholly symmetrical and intrinsically rotary.

The car’s curb weight is 4,250 lbs, nearly twice the weight of most similar compact cars. But most of that weight is in the battery, and most of the battery sits near or below the wheel hubs. So the car has an impossibly low center of gravity. It corners like a panther.

On a winding mountain road (NM State Highway 14, through the East Mountains north of Interstate 40), driving at around 70 MPH felt like driving at 25 MPH down a residential street. The steering tracks precisely, no matter what the speed. This despite the tires being a little harder, and consequently the ride a little harsher, than in the average ICE road locomotive.

The final joy of driving the Tesla (before we get to the bad stuff) was “single pedal driving.” This is a software-selectable option, which slows and even stops the car whenever you lift your foot off the gas pedal. When you do that, the car automatically—seamlessly, noiselessly, and jerklessly—turns the motor into a generator, which then charges the battery from the car’s forward inertia. This process is known as “regenerative braking.”

Regenerative braking is not a new technology. Every electric car has it, as do many older hybrids, such as Toyota’s Prius. Cars with a full-electric mode, including my Chevy Volt, use it routinely whenever you slow down. But not every car has integrated it as seamlessly into the driving “feel” as has Tesla. (If you want my Volt to stop fully, for example, it’s best to use a separate paddle on the steering wheel to step up the regenerative braking.)

What Tesla has done is make regenerative braking uniquely powerful, and uniquely easy, using single-pedal driving. With a little practice, you can stop the car fully using only the gas pedal, by moderating your pushing and releasing it. More than that: using only regenerative braking, you can stop the car entirely. It then stays stopped, even when facing up or down a hill. So you can learn to use the brake for panic stops only, and occasionally when you’ve failed to use the gas pedal correctly.

Once you get used to this mode of driving, it becomes relaxing and precise. If you’ve driven other cars for years, as I have, you never forget how to use the brake when necessary. But I worry about kids who learn to drive this way: how will they react in cars that require other-pedal braking? I have no idea.

These are the unambiguously good things about the Tesla. They are very good. But before you run out and buy one, be sure to read the rest of this post.

There are two important things you need to know first. The first is price: my wife’s fully-loaded Tesla Model 3, Long Range, with non-standard color, wider tires (for safety), and all the options except Autopilot, cost about $60K out the door, including California taxes and license. That’s far from the $35K that the Model 3 was reported to cost, at base, in early days. After some heated discussions with Tesla reps, we have reason to believe that our willingness to buy a premium model helped get us early delivery of the car—about a month after our order date—despite then-serious supply-chain problems.

The second thing you need to know is that our Tesla has issues: serious and annoying issues. The most serious involve software, because Teslas rely on software more than any other car you’re likely to have owned. In theory, these might disappear with software upgrades. But our experience suggests that may take some time. Other issues involve what I call “body design”—things like how the doors, trunks and glovebox open. Some of these you may have to live with forever, because they involve hardware.

Tesla Software. I first programmed a computer in machine language in summer 1961, at The Summer Science Program, a science camp for high-school kids. Since then, I’ve programmed computers in Basic and Fortran, and (if you consider that programming) I do my own HTML on this blog. As a lawyer, I spent eight years practicing “high-tech” law in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, including some of the first-ever licensing of so-called “expert systems” software, i.e., rudimentary AI. Since the Internet began, I’ve spent hours per day online.

So I’ve thought a lot about how “engineering” software differs from producing hardware, and the consequences of those differences. This prior post of mine discusses how bad software apparently killed 346 airline passengers, and how software “engineering” differs fundamentally from engineering mechanical stuff. This post and this one discuss how “communication” software often fails to communicate well. This post explains why I believe that modern hype about artificial intelligence (“AI”), including especially Elon Musk’s, is wildly premature.

All this matters to Tesla drivers because the primary “human interface” between car and driver, apart from the steering wheel and standard pedals, is a big computer screen located midway between the driver and passenger. In other words, your relationship as driver to your Tesla is much like your relationship to your cell phone or laptop.

Based on six decades of experience with computers and software, I consider the Tesla’s software abysmal. In my view it’s ill-considered, ill-planned, ill-executed, and poorly and inconsistently updated. If I were Musk, I would pay whatever it took to hire a top software manager from Google, Amazon or Apple (in that order), put all existing software on hold, and redesign its user interface from scratch. And I would do it all with constant and consistent user input—something that I’ve been unable to find anywhere in Tesla’s universe, despite persistent effort.

The rest of this essay lays out the ways, both small and large, in which Tesla’s software and body-hardware design decisions fall short. Sometimes they can lead to driver’s rage, although I hope not road rage.

The very most annoying thing about my wife’s Tesla is the absence of practically useful cruise control. The first modern automotive cruise control appeared in the 1958 Chrysler Imperial, about 64 years ago. But I can’t use (or find) anything resembling cruise control on my wife’s Tesla because it’s not there, not reliable and/or, in my view, not safe.

Apparently Tesla’s version of cruise control is inextricably linked to features of Musk’s much-hyped AI “Autopilot.” It consistently produces instances of so-called “phantom braking,” i.e. sudden onsets of hard regenerative braking for no good reason. During our trip to Santa Fe in January, it braked hard, unnecessarily and often. The only apparent causes were such things as temperature-inversion mirages on desert roads, trees’ shadows on the road, changing roadway colors (common in AZ), shadows thrown by trucks in the lane to the right, and even (in one case) a sharp and unusually ramped exit to the right.

Some time after that trip, online and media complaints about phantom braking exploded. References to “cruise control” (or similar features) disappeared from the ever-inscrutable and badly organized user interface. Yet just recently I discovered, solely by accident, that I could invoke cruise control by pressing the right-hand steering-wheel lever down (the same lever also used for drive, reverse and park). Then I could take my foot off the gas, and the car would continue at a set speed, noted on the display’s home screen. I could even adjust the set speed, up or down, by using the right vernier wheel mounted on the steering wheel.

Nothing on the display had notified me of this, far less any user update. I found it by accident. But fair enough. It seems to work well on divided highways; at least I encountered no problems while using it there. On two-lane and four-lane highways with no center divider, I suffered phantom braking within minutes, so I had to turn the cruise-control off (by pushing the same lever up).

So six months out, I’m still reluctant to use the AI-based cruise control, except carefully on not-too-crowded divided highways. Sudden phantom braking seems too big a risk to take with a teenager or pickup truck tailgating you at 75 MPH.

Body-Design Issues. The second most annoying thing about Tesla’s software user-interface is what I call the “let software do it” prejudice. The glovebox, for example, opens only with software. Often you have to hit two onscreen software buttons to open it, and only one of them is closest to the passenger. When you’re trying to retrieve binoculars, sunglasses or a Covid mask from the glovebox using the passenger-side door, that’s inconvenient. As for the economy of production, I can’t see why the kind of push button to open the glove box that cars have had for decades would cost more than a software-driven electronic actuator.

The trunks are similarly annoying. As I had suggested generally in an early blog post, the Tesla has two trunks, an ordinary rear one and a much smaller front trunk called the “frunk.” Both open with software only, although the rear trunk has a “close” button accessible only when it’s open.

Imagine this. There you are, your hands full of stuff to pack in the trunk or frunk. You have to fumble in your pocket for your cell phone to open the orifice, trying to hit the “open” button while not dropping the phone on the pavement. Or you have to put all the stuff down, on the ground, the top of the car, or the other trunk, so you can open the door, get the home screen going, and hit the software button there.

No doubt the Tesla’s rear trunk is uniquely secure. You can hear a big screw turning home when you shut it electronically. So no one is going to steal stuff from your trunk without a crowbar, a powerful drill, and a lot of noisy effort. But packing the trunk is another story—an exercise in patience and advance planning that, on car trips, can become a chore.

The doors are a similar annoyance. Yes, it’s a good idea, for reasons of safety and reduced air resistance, to have the handles flush with the car’s surface when closed. But why are the parts you push with your thumbs to the right, so that your hand is palm down when it grasps the protruding part of the handle? I don’t know about you, but my hand pulls more weakly in that position, especially when fully opening the doors against what seems like Tesla’s stronger-than-usual restraining springs.

So just opening the doors can be a chore, especially on the way to packing things. Why didn’t someone consult anatomical specialists before designing these pesky handles? Why aren’t they vertical, or slanted, the better to comport with human anatomy? Beats me. I think some hardware engineer didn’t do his or her human-anatomy homework.

The Software-User Interface. Things like the door handles and trunk openers can’t be changed, except in subsequent models. But almost everything about the software can. That’s its beauty.

Yet so far, Tesla software has suffered, big time, from the evils of apparently hasty user-interface design. For a while, in January, much of the GUI tool bar seemed devoted to various for-profit subscription services. Now they are mostly confined to a single button, which opens up a whole screenful of them. Fair enough.

But the phone-interface software needs work. When my wife and I travel together, especially on trips, both of our phones rest in their little nests on the forward console, where the car charges them inductively and you can see their screens. But the software lets only one of them be designated as “primary.”

Apparently, this means that only one can receive calls through the car’s electronics, and only one can bluetooth music into its speakers. (At least that’s been our experience.) Would it be too much trouble for the programmers to have the software answer both phones and let the user choose which to answer, and which to decline or put on hold, just as the phones do themselves in receiving near-simultaneous calls? Would it be too much trouble for the software interface to give users an easy choice of phone for both calls and music?

The environmental systems have similar annoyances. When the car is charging or otherwise stationary, the HVAC system turns off. To start it without putting the car in drive, you have to jump through a bunch of software hoops. That’s especially inconvenient during the pandemic, when one or both of us are hopping in and out to stay safe and do errands. Would it be too much to have a single button to turn the HVAC on to its last pre-stopping state, or even to use the air-bag occupancy sensors to keep it turned on whenever someone is in the car, even if stationary? Who knows? The latter feature, if adjusted for light weight, might save a pet’s life on really hot or cold days.

My last significant complaint concerns Tesla’s navigation software. Apparently Musk decided not to license Google Maps or even Apple’s less mature competing product. Instead, he decided, so to speak, to re-invent the wheel. The result is unimpressive.

After six months and about an equal number of annoying and stressful missed directions, we no longer use Tesla’s internal navigation software for anything but Tesla’s own supercharging stations. For all other directions we use Google Maps on our cell phones.

There are several reasons why. First. Google’s visual directions are richer, with arrows showing every turn, lane warnings and indications for multilane intersections, and visual distance countdowns (to key turns and destinations) by each 0.1 mile and sometimes down to feet.

We’re not sure about Tesla’s oral directions, as we turned its voice off early in our experience due to inability to reliably control its often startling stentorian volume. Even Tesla’s directions to its own superchargers often leave us wandering around huge shopping centers, or the backs of hotels or service stations, wondering precisely where the chargers are, until we spot their distinctive colors.

So I’ve reached the conclusion that much of Tesla’s software development has followed the “talking dog” philosophy: it’s not that the dog talks well, but that it talks at all. Tesla doesn’t seem to understand that software—especially the part that communicates with and informs people—is an exercise in human communication. No programmer or manager, no matter how smart or experienced, can possibly anticipate how many ways drivers will use the software, and with how many other systems it might interact in strange ways. That’s why the best software-development firms maintain user focus groups and admit (and heed) constant user feedback, even if the old industry custom of issuing “beta” (development) versions to self-selected users has largely gone the way of all flesh.

As far as I can tell, Tesla software updates are initiated and designed without significant user input. At least, after six months, I’ve been unable to find a way to submit the feedback that most software producers seek from users routinely. So Tesla seems to be bucking the trend of the software industry itself, which offers users every opportunity to criticize and comment, often through links on the very pages of a primary Website.

Perhaps the cause is Musk’s management style. Although brilliant as a (mostly self-taught) hardware engineer, he seems an industrial autocrat in the mold of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs. He seems personally unreceptive to criticism, and not too receptive to advice from underlings or customers. He doesn’t seem to need or get advice from investors, since he has self-financed Tesla with his killings from PayPal.

If so, a change of heart, with a change of inferior management, might make a big difference in the quality and user friendliness of Tesla’s software and improve its several body-design defects. These seem to be the chief impediments to making the Tesla the best car ever. In the meantime, we Tesla drivers can enjoy a superbly engineered automobile whose user friendliness in software and small things needs a lot of work.

We can also hope that Elon Musk will someday grasp the essential differences between hardware and software and/or hire people who do. And while he hypes his precious AI, in the hope of saving all us still-fallible humans from ourselves, we geezers are best advised to avoid it like Covid. Those of us in our late seventies can be pretty sure that Autopilot will not be anything like ready (let alone approved) for autonomous driving until we are too old to drive ourselves. By then we may not care.

What we need now is on-board software that is intuitively easy to use and communicates and works well and reliably, just like the best software now available on the Web. Tesla’s onboard software now falls far short of that standard.

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