One of the goals is to end up helping people generate their own energy at home for their Teslas, thus making it 100% clean and with no more running costs. See the other companies which board of directors Elon Musk sits on, like SolarCity.

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Because producing 200 miles of electric power on the grid is more economical and less polluting than producing 200 miles of mechanical energy through an internal combustion engine.

Driving 200 miles in a Tesla accounts just a small fraction of the CO2 output from an internal combustion engine that just drove 200 miles if it's from coal, our dirtiest form of power, if that power is from natural gas, nuclear or whatever else, it's even less.

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You completely forgot about the efficiency of an electric motor; 80-90% by most counts. A typical internal combustion engine is less than 20% efficient, the rest all goes to heat. That is where an EV can make up the difference in CO2 output even using a dirty source like coal; an EV is still slightly better than a typical ice car even using 100% coal, factoring in the whole life cycle, including battery production and disposal. As you can see here, an EV also eliminates the need of a multispeed transmission due to it's high torque avaliable at low rpms, meaning much less complexity in the drivetrain which helps aid efficiency and reliability.

Mwmorph also mentions a lot of good points, how electricity is cheaper than gasoline and how coal is basically the worst source of electricity we can offer in terms of pollution. I don't see why they should wait around until the whole US is switched off coal. Some areas actually already use very little coal, so these areas can immediately benefit from an EV. Overall in the US, coal is roughly 50% so it's close to not being majority anymore. Anyways if you see all the reports recently about gas prices, pollution isn't even the biggest concern in ICE vehicles, it's the rising cost of fuel, and electricity is dirty cheap compared to gasoline. If pollution is a major concern you can always go solar or join the "green energy" program from your local power company if they have it avaliable (my power company has it). That's the beauty of EVs, that you have so many options for power, while in an ICE you have basically no choice.

The sooner they develop and gain a market for these expensive EVs, the sooner they can drive downmarket and make more affordable ones. Their next car is in the $50k-70k range. The third one is rumored to be in the $30k range.

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We own the coal, not the Arabs.

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@Mwmorph
do you mean more economical like you've stated or more efficient? Efficiency should be the key to the energy issues of the world, not economics. When fossil fuels run out, economics will be thrown out the window. I don't know stats so I won't quote any, but I would like to see some that quote the efficiency of electric power generated from a coal plant verses a gasoline engine that both produce the same work. I think it's more of a case of taking getting the energy from somewhere more politically acceptable. If you see smoke coming out of your tailpipe it's bad, but if the coal plant producing your electricity is spewing a bunch of smoke into the air in a remote location it is much better simply because it is not seen. I'm sure there are innefficiencies in coal plants that are comparable to that of the mechanical and thermodyncamic inefficiencies of combustion engines.

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Are you really that stupid? Or are you just trolling?

I can't tell.

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Coal is starting to become rather clean and is cheaper then and less strainful on the earth then importing oil from all over. Those ships produce tons of emissions and blah blah blah. Coal is bad in the 1970's scheme of things but Americans are to terrfied of Nuclear and are being lazy on natural sources of energy(solar, hydro, wind, etc..)

Coal could be worse...We just need to make the gov.t get strict on them bitches and their emissions

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Why is it that every time an electric car is mention, some idiot has to point out that some of our power comes out of coal power plants? Despite the fact that a power plant is more than 10 times as efficient as car engine.

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@ Andrew

You have to be kidding if you think a small 2-8L gasoline engine is more efficient at extracting power while producing less pollutants.

Yes Coal is out dirtiest energy producer but creating 1KW of power from coal both costs less and creates less pollution than 1KW of power from an internal combustion engine in your car. It's all about economies of scale. As numbers increase and size decreases, efficiency decreases. That's why power plants are centralized and use the largest generators possible without breaking the sound barrier while spinning. Otherwise, we'd all use mini generators in every home to produce our power. It would certainly simplify laying and repairing power lines and distribution.

Try doing some research next time before posting. Keep uneducated comments to Youtube videos

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I appreciate your comments for those that honestly replied without being asses to me. I like cars. I'm not an expert in power generation and thermodynamic efficiency. I'm always willing to learn. There is no prerequisite of being an engineer on this site and all I wanted was to learn. I was always under the impression that coal power generation accounted for roughly 70% of all electricity produced in North America which makes coal usage significant. I believe that extracting electrical energy from solar energy will be the future benefit of electrical vehicles as the supply of crude diminishes. Currently the advantage is small in my opinion over ICE.

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@Andrew,

I'll have to say, that is my bad, i read those comments as much more hostile than i think you intended being extremely tired and all at 12:30am. All I'd like to add is Wikipedia does wonders and can answer the basics of almost any question as long as you know how to search for it.

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The problem with that is: where do we put the radioactive waste that is produced by those nuclear power plants? Have you heard of Yucca Mountain?
(Its an amazing work of engineering. Look into it if your interested) We can only stash that stuff for so long. Then we are in trouble.
In the long run, wind, solar and tidal are the better solutions (in my humble opinion).

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Yeah, I live in New Mexico and I say put all the radioactive material you want out here. There is nothing here but dirt and radioactivity anyway.

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