Tesla's
Musk: Plug-in hybrid vehicles suck and why he's wrong
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Tesla
founder rips PHEVs
Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors, was recently asked
by Newsweek
why he didn't consider plug-in
hybrid vehicles in addition to pure electric vehicles.
He replied, "We spent a lot of time last year looking
at plug-in hybrids and ultimately concluded that it would
not be a very good car. You're forced to compromise.
Because you need both a gasoline-powered engine and a big
battery, neither can be very good, and the engine will be
a weak engine. It's just not where the future lies. We'll
be able to offer a car with a 305-mile range roughly three
years from now."
Ultimately, Musk believes that within 30 years America's
transportation system could be 100 percent solar-powered
pure electric vehicles.
As a fan and advocate for the electrification of the
automobile, I think Musk is selling his book - his
investments in solar power and EVs - in preparation for a
Tesla IPO.
Today, and for the next five to ten years, conventional hybrid
vehicles make the most sense as they most
cost-effectively enable the mass production of many of the
components required for electrification. In about 5 years
plug-in hybrid vehicles will begin to have an impact, but
serious mass-production of PHEVs is still almost certainly
closer to 10 years away.
EVs that meet consumer expectations can and should be
concurrently developed, but they will still be more
expensive than Musk seems to assume and there will be
infrastructure limitations for many consumers. For
instance, Musk believes auto consumers won't mind waiting
around for an hour using high powered chargers on longer
trips, versus a 5 minute fill-up with gas in 150 mile per
gallon, cheaper upfront, PHEVs.
In my opinion, Musk is making a lot of technological
assumptions and assumptions have a bad way of making asses
of assumers - Tesla's Roadster has been a perfect example.
The future will hold plenty of room for both PHEVs and EVs
in the next few decades and each will find consumers that
prefer one technology over the other for various reasons -
some of which probably aren't even comprehensible today.
Just as important, the future of the auto industry and the
key to ever-critical mass-production will be driven by
India and China - not America. Judging the future of the
auto industry, which is driven almost exclusively by
mass-production, through an American lense makes far less
sense today than it did just five years ago and it will
make even less sense five years from now. Twenty years
from now, America's automobile culture will mean little to
the rest of the world. Yet, the automobile culture of
India and China will mean much to America.
Nonetheless, I find much common ground with Musk's long
term vision and I hope he can prove my timeline incorrect.
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