Tesla: The Electric Revolution
This decade is set to be the Roaring Twenties of the electric car. Right now, electric cars make up only a tiny fraction of the automobiles sold worldwide, but according to a recent analysis, this is going to change pretty quickly. The same report suggested that by 2040, there's potential for electric cars to make up 57% of all passenger car sales worldwide. They are on the rise.
We all know the benefits of going electric, but this is a story that has already played out once in history. An electric didn't win out last round; it seems that we could be in danger of repeating the story with astonishing accuracy. This may come as a surprise, but the dawn of the electric car was, in fact, over a century ago. Battery-powered vehicles were already being developed in the late 19th century.
The early electric vehicles quickly became fashionable, particularly in densely populated cities, due to their lack of exhaust fumes. By 1900, around a third of all cars on the road were electric. In New York, electric vehicles were so common that a fleet of more than 60 electric taxis served the city. The rise of the electric car continued over the next 30 years, overcoming a lack of infrastructure with limitations of battery technology and tons of controversy.
That is, up until the inception of the Ford Model T, which became popular for its low costs, durability, versatility, and ease of maintenance. These developments effectively filled the end of the electric vehicle's popularity. However, fast forward nearly a century, and now we have Tesla.
Tesla is an American company located in Palo Alto, California, led by Elon Musk. Founded in 2003, Tesla designs, manufactures, and sells electric cars, components for electric vehicle propulsion, and more recently, solar-powered panels to allow the production of clean renewable energy for your home. They devote themselves primarily to the engineering of the electric vehicle propulsion system.
This includes the battery pack, motor, power electronics, and the control software that allows all the components to form a system. The system has many benefits, more than just the fact that it's electric. The system is compact, with far fewer moving parts than a standard internal combustion engine. Its modular design allows components to be reused on different Tesla and third-party models. Tesla's aim is to accelerate the transition to sustainable transportation.
In the beginning, its master plan was to capitalize on renewable energy and use this to influence the industry. Tesla began with a small project, manufacturing just a few units at a high price, which is almost exactly how it went in the nineteen hundreds. Tesla released its first car in 2008: a completely electric roadster powered by lithium-ion cells that could be recharged from any standard electric outlet.
In company tests, it achieved a range of nearly 250 miles on a single charge—an unprecedented achievement for the electric car. They could also perform comparably with many gasoline-powered cars in other areas, achieving zero to 60 in 3.7 seconds as well as a top speed of 125 miles per hour. It was lightweight, with a carbon-fiber body, and had no emissions. For the first car, this is very impressive.
The Roadster was a success, to a point. It demonstrated that the electric car did not need to be slow, heavy, ugly, and have a short battery range; they could be high-performance. This opened up a world of possibility. Tesla went on to manufacture up to 500 units a year. Unsurprisingly, it had a huge impact on the industry. Other companies, such as General Motors, began to follow suit, but having settled this, only about 2,400 of them were sold, and with the price tag of around $110,000, this was pushing to be a luxury item.
It certainly wasn't a car that your average consumer was interested in. So, whilst the Roadster demonstrated a lot of things about the electric car, it wasn't the car that was going to turn the tide against the internal combustion engine. But it was a start, and some might argue that Tesla would not have the success of those today without the Roadster. But by 2012, production had ended, and Tesla was con...