"1/5 cost of energy" may not be the right point of comparison.
Tesla speaks of well-to-wheel efficiency which is more relevant, and by that measure they only claim 2x the efficiency of the more efficient cars you put gas in (e.g. the Prius). That 2x is for a Tesla, which being pure electric should be more efficient as an electric car than the Fisker is. I am not saying I know that Tesla's numbers are correct, but at least they are trying to answer the right question.
When you say new technology that isn't perfected until you work on it, which parts of the technology do you mean? Electric motors are not at all new, not even in the application of propelling vehicles with them. Not much improvement is left to be found in motors.
Better batteries would help with range, weight, and cost, but it's not like we're just starting to want better batteries now that there are Fiskers and Teslas. People have been working on batteries for ages. Improvements will continue but they will not catch up with gasoline any time soon in terms of how much energy they hold per pound.
You could improve the solar panel on the roof until it's 100% efficient and there's still only so much sunlight falling on a roof. The solar panel is primarily a marketing gimmick.
Well said Tom. I'm half way through a graduate degree in Energy and Earth Resources and have studied the efficiency of various systems ad nauseam. It is quite difficult to come up with the true efficiency of a system as complicated as turning a fossil fuel (which goes through combustion, which heats water, which spins a turbine, which generates electricity, which must go through the transmission network, which must go through your home to your car's electric batteries, then from the batteries to power the electric motor..) into a car moving down the road.
This is a fascinating technology that requires people like Turbo's friend to lay down hard currency to give these firms a chance. Whether or not $500,000,000 loans from the DOE make sense is a different discussion I do not know the answer to.
I'd like to own a Tesla or Fisker but I'd
love to have one and it be powered by nuclear/geothermal/wind etc. so there is actually a net benefit globally (although reducing the concentration of emissions in urban areas certainly is not a bad thing, even in the U.S).
The drive trains of electric cars are highly recyclable; I think the only way 6-10 billion people on earth are actually going to have their own car is if they are electric and powered by nuclear breeder reactors (France's style, 10,000+ year supply of energy but produces plutonium which remains radioactive for millions of years).
The Model T was almost an electric car. The only real improvements in this area are the multitude of drive train configurations and battery storage technology. Not all that much has changed except that oil is the devil and gas prices have remained high. My hope is that battery prices and size/weight will decrease substantially. Cutting the size of the batteries required, for say a 250-300 mile range (long enough people will stop being deathly afraid of becoming stranded) in half would be a game changer; due to the dramatic decrease in cost and weight.
