June 11, 2007

• The Environment and Speed

  So with all of this Global Warming talk and gas prices steadily going up (and up), you’re becoming more and more interested in a gas-friendly car, likely a hybrid of some sort which gets great mileage, but you don’t want to sacrifice performance or design. After all, environmentally friendly is great, but why must the thing be hideously malformed and slow as a turtle? While browsing the web for environmentally friendly automobiles, I came across the following car:

  

  This is the Tesla Roadster, made by Tesla Motors. It’s the first fully electric sports car to ever be mass produced, and runs on a pack of lithium ion batteries, has a top speed of 130 mph, and goes 0-60 in an estimated 4 seconds. It can travel up to 200 miles on a single charge, and gets roughly the equivalent of 135 mpg (when compared to a gas car). Being an electric car, it uses no gasoline at all. That’s right, no gas. It’s not a hybrid of any sort and requires zero gasoline to run, and in fact comes with the option of solar panels that will recharge the batteries enough for a 50 mile trek during the course of a normal sunny day, which means if you travel less than 50 miles a day on a normal day, you’ll never have to plug it in to recharge it. That means it will drain zero natural resources and use no extra electricity, gas, or other power to use if you run it purely on solar energy (since you’ll never have to plug it in if you drive less than 50 miles a day). It also requires very little maintenance, since the engine is electric (like your vacuum and hairdryer) and requires no oil changes (since it doesn’t use engine oil), and requires less brake pad changes because it has regenerative braking (using the kinetic motion of the car to charge its batteries, which slows the car down). The estimated starting price of the car? About $100,000. Start saving those pennies.

  • 10:42 pm
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