I saw the piece quite a while ago, but I found a bunch of things misleading:
1) The way they quoted the 55 mile range made it sound like the 55 mile range was more representative of normal use than the 200 mile figure. I don't recall them ever saying something like "Toyota claims it gets 20mpg, but we've worked out it only gets 3mpg on our test track". Maybe they have (perhaps they mentioned the Veyron's fuel consumption at full throttle), but it's certainly not a normal part of a review.
2) They quoted the charge time from a standard power socket, when nearly all charges would be done at a higher-power charging station at much shorter time. They didn't quote the faster charge time.
3) While watching, I seriously thought the one Tesla's engine had completely quit.
4) While watching, I seriously thought that the other Tesla's battery had gone completely dead without enough warning for them to drive it into the garage.
5) They implied that the environmental impact from the power plants is roughly the same as the environmental impact of gas anyway. (oddly showing nuclear cooling towers while talking about power plants causing global warming.) Power generation obviously has an environmental impact no matter where it's done, but the nuclear scare plus polar bear mention just felt bizarre.
6) They implied that somehow hydrogen was magical and had no environmental power generation issues.
I don't disagree with their defense, but the piece felt very political in that it seemed designed to say things that are technically true, whilst leading viewers to conclusions that are false. All-in-all, I felt like I was watching Clarkson on an anti-environmental soapbox more than I was watching either a piece of entertainment or an automotive review.
I love Top Gear, but I was annoyed by the piece, and it won't bother me a bit if Clarkson has a few obnoxious days because of it.
The review would've been 1000x better if Hamster or Slow had done it.
The Prius using more fuel than the M3 when driven at the same speed - it's still surprising, even though clearly they hammered the Prius while the M3 was puttering behind slowly. A bit of a ridiculous test.
The other thing they said though does make you pause to think, and I quite liked it: Rather than selling your fuel guzzling vehicle now, it's quite possibly much better for the environment if you keep driving it, but drive it slowly. Making a brand new car has a huge environmental impact, so large that the difference in fuel consumption would take a pretty long time to overcome it. In the case of a Prius it's even more complicated as the batteries are particularly environmentally unfriendly - and there's a lot of those in a Hybrid.
But that was a silly and contrived test, which had absolutely no bearing on the real-world fuel efficiency of the car. If you're choosing a car to drive around a track all day, by all means, avoid the Prius.
I do love Top Gear, though, and Tesla should have known better than to hand their car to them.
A lot of people that like cars have been emotionally connected to the internal engine. These "car enthusiasts" enjoy everything about cars, albeit frequently do not analyze emerging technologies with a long-term vision. They like the sound the engine makes and the thrill of acceleration. That is nice and I can respect their decisions. That sentiment of connection to the internal engine has been challenged first by Tesla Roadster.
What I view as auto fans mistake in judgement is to portray electric cars through the lens of mistrust in the new design. Someone who has only driven IC cars will keep trying to find fault with a one that is not. Tesla is the new toy a boy can play with. Clarkson has been living with old habits and 'old' cars to question his own assumptions about car technology. This is what I had found when speaking with people in the automotive industry.
Yet, electric cars require a lot of future development to meet the high standards that they will be judged by.
I also think it would have been a good idea if they spent the extra 30 seconds talking about how you can have a higher-power charging station to speed up charging, I'm sure they also would point out that they may not exist where you are when you want to use it.
I'm sure in some places you'll be fine, like LA or San Francisco where I suspect they have more charging stations than the average town.
And this is an obvious chicken/egg problem and if you explain it, people will understand.
Maybe I should add, the same chicken/egg problem exists for the Hydrogen car which was shown later in the show.
To be honest hydrogen is a nice idea but just looking at one item, compressing, hydrogen just seems like loss of energy. I don't know if it will ever work.
Just know one thing that electric 'engines' are the future, I don't know where the power will come from though.
In their Prius review Clarkson said there was a big gap between Toyota's stated 65 mpg and the 45 mpg they saw with normal driving on roads. So, they have noted manufacturer mpg exaggerations before although they don't do it as a normal practice.
*edit.. don't mean to be a dick, I just don't think this fact helps their case much. I watched the episode, and it irritated me quite a bit even though I think Top Gear is normally pretty fun.
While it didn't directly involve Tesla, what got me about that episode was the claim that battery cars are totally irrelevent because of 'hydrogen power'.
They point out that the power for electric batteries has to come from somewhere, and completely gloss over that for hydrogen.
Why they didn't go all the way and advocate fusion powered cars is beyond me.
Energy can't be created or destroyed, just transformed from one form to another. So nothing is really an energy source. I'd say "energy source" is the vernacular for stored energy, in terms of where humans source their energy for machinery, electricity, etc.
While you are technically correct, that's not the best model for this. Energy in oil is ultimately stored energy from the sun. But for hydrogen powered cars, we must take one stored form of energy (e.g. fossil, nuclear) and use it to make the hydrogen. Or skip the oil step and use solar.
So question is, are we storing new energy, or converting previously-stored energy to a different format? The latter is an externality as obviously oil, uranium etc were around long before humans.
It is both. You can use it in a fuel cell form whereby you keep the water produced from its combustion, run electricity through it and get oxygen and hydrogen back. Alternatively though, the way hydrogen is turned into energy works if you just refill the hydrogen and throw away the water.
Israel is the first nation in the world that partnered with Better Place
to have an all-electric car infrastructure. Shai Agassi believes that
in Israel by 2016, plus or minus a year, more than 50% of cars sold will
be electric and that by 2020, Israel will achieve oil independence.
The Baran Group signed an agreement with Better Place to build
51 battery switch stations over the course of 2011 to cover all of Israel.
Please don't post quotes using pre-formatted text. It forces the browser to use the full width. That, in turn, puts a horizontal scrollbar on my browser, so I have to scroll back-and-forth to read any of the comments.
I find it works much better to quote using asterisks. (We could also lobby pg for a BLOCKQUOTE feature)
That's a brilliant solution to the problem for cars that aren't Teslas, which has something like 1800 batteries lining its cabin floor. I don't think they'd be easily swapped.
For cars that don't implement batteries this way, I'm wondering how they allow for non-floor-mounted installations preventing the batteries from destroying their handling.
Further, how are the filling stations expected to deal with the variety of non-standard battery types on the market?
The energy has to come from somewhere, but it doesn't have to come from electricity (every conversion means energy is lost, and a light -> electricity -> water conversion is potentially less efficient than a more direct conversion).
Hydrosol-2 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrosol-2) is an example of solar hydrogen production with no electric current intermediate - it involves high temperatures, so I'm not sure how much energy is lost maintaining that temperature compared to captured producing hydrogen, but it could theoretically be more efficient.
