Polarman

Tesla Roadster

I've posted about my interest in a Tesla Roadster.  As discussed, it is an all electric sports car run by lithium-ion batteries.  Earlier I expressed concern that the batteries might not last for 100k miles.  There's another concern:  Lithium is a very reactive metal and under the wrong conditions, a lithium-ion battery can burst into flames or explode.  Dell recalled a bunch of batteries for this reason.  Recently there was a case where a laptop burst into flames.   And the Tesla Roadster is going to have 100 times as many cells as a laptop! 

You can imaging that during an accident, cells can be broken open, mangled and crushed.  Other cells may have be shorted out.  Difficult to protect against these problems.  Being an engineer, I'm sure these problems can be overcome, but at what cost?

Customizing searches for IE7

It's interesting to think about how to add customized searches to IE7 using OpenSearch:  search providers For example, I often see searches for jobs, but what's the use of searching the whole internet.  You generally want to search for a job in a specific location.  Now anyone that's searching for a job should probably save searches at all the key job sites:  Monster, CareerBuilder, and so on.  No need to create a customized search for your IE7 or Firefox search toolbar.

But suppose you are a career counselor, and people walk in and want a specific job.  You might want a search shortcut available in your toolbar.  For example, let's use Indeed.com .  It's a job search engine that searches a bunch of places on the web for a job.  Go to the site and create a search on the zip code you want.  You end up with a URL like:

        http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=project&l=33014&start=10

It's easy to take the word I searched on, project, and replace it with the keyword that OpenSearchList.com uses.  Now you have the URL

       http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=brrreeeport&l=33014&start=10

Go to the add your own search page of OpenSearch:  adding searches to Firefox and IE7.  Add your name, description, the URL above, and you're done.  It's that simple.

Tesla Motors

The Tesla Roadster is a very cool concept.  It's a battery driven sports car with great performance and a 250 mile range.  That's better than any other all-electric car that's been manufacturered.  Note that it's not a hybrid, but a true all-electric running on Li-Ion batteries.  They're specifying 100,000 miles of 'useful battery life.'

The batteries are the weak part of the system.  Previous all-electrics used standard car lead-acid batteries, but the Roadster uses Lithium Ion.  I've heard that Li-Ion batteries can lose about 20% of their storage capacity per year.  And that they have a useful life of 200 to 300 charge-discharge cycles.  It's worse as the temperature of the battery gets warmer.  Cars are hot even without an internal combustion engine.  I'm concerned that the useful life of the batteries in the Tesla might only be two or three years.  It could be that the range of the car would be cut in half after 2 years.

What might the replacement costs of the batteries be?  As a order-of-magnitude kind of estimate, they might be storing 250 to 500 Mega Joules in the batteries to get their 200 to 250 miles range.  I'm estimating that it costs about 10 to 20 cents per KJ to get the storage.  I'm guessing the cost of replacing the batteries is 25 to maybe 50,000 dollars.  Although I prefer to buy, I think I'll lease this car! 

They rightfully brag about their operating cost of electricity being around 1 cent per mile.  Compare that to my car which the gasoline costs say, 3.50 per gallon and at 20 miles/gallon, you're paying about 18 cents a mile.  Of course, the real cost of operating the vehicle is probably 4 or 5 times that considering all factors, but I'm just trying to compare engine to engine, not tires and insurance, etc., which would be the same from vehicle to vehicle.  Now what if we consider the costs of replacing the batteries?  If we assume 100k miles and the low end of my replacement estimate, you come up with about 25 cents per mile.  So the cost of the batteries far outweighs the cost of the electric over the lifetime of the vehicle.  But the good thing is that it's not outlandishly more than the cost of gasoline.

I'm very interested in the Roadster, but need to know more about the battery life, and the replacement costs of the batteries.  I don't really plan to keep a car longer than 100k, but what if the batteries need to be replaced after 50k miles?  or even 25k? I was joking earlier about the lease, because the lease will ultimately take into account the depreciation of the batteries.

I am certainly interested if any readers can improve on the crude estimates I've made.

Hezbollah and Lebanon

Captain Ed says that Hamas may be ready to give in.  I see this as a encouraging sign.  Other observers feel that it's just a move to allow them to restock and rearm.  The optimist in me says that if you can get them to negotiate at all, then they're already showing signs of accepting the maturity it takes to run a country, instead of running a terrorist organization.

Now with Hezbollah, I think Israel made a mistake upfront.  After the kidnapping of IDF soldiers that precipitated this whole war, Israel should have asked Lebanon what their position was:  Would they actively help get the soldiers back, or would they back Hezbollah.  I would have like to seen them take a public position.

Internet tools and OpenSearch

One of the interesting things about Firefox 2 and IE7's search toolbar, is that it doesn't have to just be "search".  I created some interesting tools on OpenSearch Add searches to IE7.  If you look at these searches, you will see that you can do WHOIS and TRACERT right from the toolbar. 

Lame Bayes Theorem Analysis

Bruce Schneier says that you can use Bayes theorem to show that NSA data mining systems are useless.  I think he didn't apply any economic analysis to the results he came up with.  Using the worst case example he gives, the NSA has a accuracy rate of 0.4 and a false positive rate of 0.01.  That means that roughly 31,000 people will be identified as terrorists but only 400 of them will really be terrorists.  If it costs $30,000 to investigate the 31,000 people to identify the 400 real terrorist, then it costs roughly a billion dollars.  However, if those 400 terrorists were in 20 cells each which could have created a billion dollars of economic damage, you saved $20 billion in damage.

Oppose NSA monitoring for civil liberities concerns or on constitutional grounds, but don't oppose it on some lame Bayes Theorem analysis which doesn't take into account economic costs.

Bruce is a smart guy, but I disagree with his conclusion.