CBS SF Bay Area | (Video News Report) | – –
“Tesla Inc. is set to deliver the new electric Model 3 compact car to its first 30 customers on Friday evening. Kiet Do reports from Fremont.”
CBS SF Bay Area: “Tesla Set To Roll Out First Model 3s In Fremont”
Headline suggestion: Beginning of the end of the acceleration of global heating.
Warming sounds so benign, change sounds as if it were innovative, therefore global heating fits reality better.
Wonder if they will go the way of the sixties terbine cars?
One must remember, “What’s good for General Motors,
is good for the Country”!
No Tesla has a huge technology head start.
Turbine cars went away for a simple business reason. Gas turbine engines are very expensive to build, requiring much higher precision than a standard gas or diesel engine. Turbine engines are used on aircraft because they are more efficient than gas engines at altitude, providing higher power to weight rations allowing the aircraft to fly faster with less fuel.
link to youtube.com
At this point, all the other car makers on earth, including GM, are playing catch-up to Tesla’s huge technology head start.
Plus GM has a huge corporate culture problem. Even after Toyota showed GM how to build better cars for less, using UAW union labor at the joint GM/Toyota plant in Fremont, CA, GM was unable to make the transition at its other plants. Even today GM plants are less efficient than Toyota plants.
BTW – that GM/Toyota plant eventually closed because Toyota had excess USA production capacity (GM was not building cars there). Now that plant is owned by Tesla. When Tesla purchased the plant for a bargain basement price, they were using less than 25% of the space, so Tesla probably still has lots of room to grow.
The most logical automotive use for that gas turbine would be spinning an electrical generator. The very first gas-electric hybrid car I saw was on the cover of Popular Science in 1973, homebuilt by an inventor using the turbine engine from a helicopter.