Our Tesla Visit yesterday by Rishub Kumar

We learned a lot at Tesla from Craig Carlson during our Tesla trip. There are models of cars, the roadster and a sedan called Model S. There are two prototypes for Tesla Model S, the show car and the mule. The mule is what the car will look like in the inside while the show car is what it will look like in the outside. There are 14 computers in one car so its important to make sure they are all working fine and will not malfunction. They have a red button to do a quick stop of the cars during test drive. They don't have a proving ground as most car companies do

The Roadster LiIon battery can be fully charged in 3.5 hours. We also saw a portable battery charger for charging on the road. It is hard to get a battery that is cheap because the batteries are so big and need to provide a lot of power. The cars will cost less if the batteries are cheap. Since it cost a lot, people don't want to buy the car. So, Tesla decided to make the car like a sports car so it is competing with cars that are also expensive - they went after a different set of buyers than Hondas or Toyotas. They also designed the car to be really safe.




Carl told us about an accident in Denmark between a Roadster, VW Tuareg and a Prius. The Tesla was standing still, and a Prius crashed the rear at 50 mph. The Roadster went underneath the VW Tuareg and the VW ended up on top of the Roadster. The carbon fiber protective top prevented serious injury to the driver. Look at the picture, it looks like a very bad accident. We learnt how important it was to design the car right and consider safety factors.

We ended up talking a lot about different technology to power the car. We realized how diffficult it is to charge the batteries, since it takes time to charge them up, and that is why this is not a long distance travel car yet. It is meant for short drives and when they tested the battery in the speedway, the battery lasted only 30 miles. Though typically the batteries last 350 miles. We discussed about this later, and we had to choose an alternative fuel technology that was easy. Solar Power would not be able to provide enough power to run the car. Carl mentioned that the amount of power that is generated in the Tesla battery can run a house for month. Thus, there are lots of issues we need to consider.

Telsa initially thought the cars will take 6 months to make, but it took 4 years. They wanted to use the Lotus shell to build their Tesla, but it wasn't very easy. We are trying to build a prototype of our flying car which we thought might take a week. It might take longer. We saw similar challenges and problems that Tesla is working on and what we are struggling with. For example - we have a small budget to build our prototype and they have a small budget too to launch their Model S.

We went to the lab where they test the cars. It was awesome as we got to sit inside the car. We were excited but were asked to keep quiet. The doors opened by a button which was new. The seats were very low and it was weird. The cars made no noise at all, but the show car did, which we saw later and it looked way better. We took cool pictures of the cars.

The visit to Tesla was very fun and we learned a lot!!!!!