Santana Row, Thursday 23rd August.
This is a great location for wealthy San Jose residents, shopping, night life, bars with live Mexican music, and dining.
One shop peaked my interest straight away - the one with a car in it. Tesla.
There's a 4 door Tesla coming soon in $55k, $65k, and $75k guises. This is the same car with different battery packs.
Clearly the Sales people were 'on it', selling all the benefits of the wonderful electric revolution (as you would expect) but one questions they didn't really give a satisfactory answer to was what happens when the thing runs out of juice?
The idea is you charge it every night, so you should then have 300 miles of charge. There or thereabouts. That's definitely enough for an average round trip commute in the Valley (or anywhere in the world really). You take it home, plug it in, and its ready for the next day's commuting.
What about longer trips, I asked.
What happens if you are, for example, on your way from San Jose to Los Angeles, some 350 miles away. "Ah" said the sales guy "there's a plug in station ('super power' or something, can't quite remember the terminology he used) about half way between the two place on the freeway. You would just pull up, plug in, get something to eat, and come back in an hour and you would be ready to roll again". Great. So I have to wait an hour to fill up my car? And what happens if there is no super power station? Well that's an 8 hour wait....
And what happens if you want to tow a trailer? A boat? If for example, you were going on a camping trip? The answer is you can't.
Hmmmm maybe not quite the revolution they would have us buy into at that price point. It would save around $17,000 a year in fuel bills though... that's based on the current summer Californian gallon of $4.10 ish. That is, incidentally, getting up there with UK prices.
However, I guess the point is you have an electric car for the commuting and 'buzzing' around (see what I did there) and you have regular gasoline (if you're in the US) or diesel powered vehicles for doing the other stuff. So that means you have to have at least 2 vehicles per house hold, possibly 3, depending on how many people there are.
As we in Britain continue to refuse to build car parking capacity into new developments and want to keep extending charging people to use car parking at offices and out of town shopping malls, and reduce the number of available spaces outside new houses, this electric revolution is going to cause many problems.
The technology just isn't there yet to replace the standard petrol powered motor car.
