Charlie Rose interview with Elon Musk of Tesla

cwerdna · Aug 21, 2009

Charlie Rose - A conversation with Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors

The interview was ok, not "wow" IMHO. Click on the Transcript link if you want to read it.

Some great quotes and some info that I didn't realize:

And the Tesla battery pack, to reference it to gasoline, it weighs about 1,000 pounds and it has the energy content of two after gallons of gasoline.

the consumption of that energy is much more efficient in an electric car. And this is, I will get to -- why is the Tesla roadster twice as efficient as a Toyota Prius, which is not a sports car?

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

ELON MUSK: And the reason is because an electric motor is fundamentally super efficient at turning energy into motion. So a good electric motor such as the one that we have in the Tesla roadster is about 90 percent efficient at turning electricity into motion, whereas a gasoline internal combustion is somewhere in the range of around 17 to 18 percent.

Most of what it does is generate heat.

So even though it is only two and a half gallons of gasoline, that two and a half gallons of energy content goes really far compared to if that was.

I knew about the higher efficiency of electric motors and how inefficient IC engines are but didn't know about the apparently low energy density of lithium ion batteries.

Dang! We really do need some breakthroughs in battery technology.

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Charlie Rose interview with Elon Musk of Tesla

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Charlie Rose interview with Elon Musk of Tesla

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