Just to set the facts straight, the Tesla Roadster's battery pack can be fully charged from dead to full in as little as 3.5 hours if you have the recommended 220v/70amp setup. That will get you the full range, which according to the US Environmental Protection Agency is 244 miles per charge. And it will cost you roughly $4 (depending on where you live, what utility company you have, and the time when you charge the car), which is a screaming bargain no matter what the price of gasoline is today.

Note: If you just need a little juice to continue doing errands for 100 miles or less, it can take significantly less time to boost your range, as lithium-ion batteries slow their charging time when they approach full to preserve battery longevity. (Think of your iPhone: If you plug it in only for 20 minutes, it gets a lot of charge -- but it takes much longer to go all the way to full.)

And as this blog mentions, plans for extensive charging infrastructure will dramatically change the time it takes to recharge. It may have taken the Top Gear crew 8-16 hours to charge the Roadsters they were loaned, but the vast majority of buyers have home systems that recharge in a fraction of that time.

Rachel Konrad
Senior Communications Manager
Tesla Motors Inc.

Thanks for stopping by my blog. I am a huge fan of Tesla and what you are doing, but frustrated by what I see as a lack of an effort by the auto industry as a whole to find a solution to this fueling problem. It's what ultimately "killed the electric car" that GM introduced ten years ago, and will likely determine the fate of the next generation electrics being developed and marketed amidst falling gasoline prices.

People want these cars but don't want to spend a bunch of money on a vehicle that will limit their travel options. Just about every car on the market has a nearly limitless range not only because there's a gas station around every corner, but also because it only takes 5 or 10 minutes to refuel and get back on the road. Who wants to get stuck somewhere for an hour because they had a few unplanned errands to make?

Sure, most weeks I only drive my car 30-50 miles per day, but there are times where I need to go farther. I just can't afford to own a car that requires me to buy or rent a second one to go longer distances.

What Shai Agassi is putting together is something that truly works to address the fueling problem in a very practical way. Pulling into a service station and quickly swapping out a discharged battery for a charged one is so brilliantly simple I don't know why electric manufacturers aren't flocking to this model in droves. It would require relatively little infrastructure investment if the car was designed to allow this fast battery swap. Such a design will also help thousands of small family owned service stations diversify their businesses and break away from the stranglehold of Big oil.

Short of that, I think what GM is working on with the Volt is a good start. They smartly recognized the fueling problem is the major barrier for nationwide adoption and have created a car that gives most of the electric benefits (for the first forty miles) without the range and convenience limitations of cars without a backup power source.

My wife and I bought a used RAV4-EV last summer. Even though it only has a range of 80-100 miles, we've never been limited by range since we starting using it as our primary vehicle in July.

In fact, we were out on a quick grocery run with the battery at 70% because we hadn't bothered to charge it the night before. While we were out, we got a call from my wife's mother. She was stranded because her Accord had crapped out with a dead alternator.

She couldn't reach her husband and needed a ride home, a 20-mile roundtrip with a 1500 foot elevation difference for us. Even though it was a totally unexpected trip, and we hadn't even started the day with a full charge, we had plenty of range to get her home.

For people who, like you and us, normally drive 30-50 miles, an EV with a range of 100 miles allows for significant unexpected driving. With a 150 or more, running out of charge just isn't worth a second thought. You do lose the theoretically infinite range, but you gain complete independence from gas stations. Once you get an EV, you quickly learn to change your model of driving. Instead of thinking, "whenever I get low on gas I have to find a gas station" to "every morning I start with a full charge that will easily last all day."

As malls, restaurants, hotels, and pay parking lots start putting in outlets to attract EV drivers, even with a lot of unexpected driving you can just plug in and pick up some extra charge while doing your errands. It's just not a problem taxpayers need to spend billions on, especially in the current economy.

It is kind of ironic the gas powered vehicle died because of it's electrical component :).

I will say that I am very excited about the prospect of owning an electric car. In fact I'd be out at the car dealer tomorrow if there were fully electric vehicles available for sale here in Connecticut. But that's me, a guy that lives on the cutting edge of technology who adopts new things even if it requires a little shoehorning every once and awhile. I suspect that you, like me, are not a typical consumer.

Here's my concern: the industry has not done much of anything to address what led to the failure of the EV-1. If electric cars ever have a chance of replacing internal combustion powered vehicles there has to be zero sacrifice on the part of the consumer to adopt them. While you and I would change our habits to be behind the wheel of one of these vehicles, the mass market wants convenience.

As of now I have absolutely zero options for charging an electric vehicle outside my home or office. I suppose I could find friends along the way willing to let me drain some of their power, but that's certainly no way to drive adoption of alternative fueled vehicles. And I just don't see an incentive for business and property owners to give away free electricity in their parking lots. Energy rates here in CT are off the charts and are crippling businesses - they simply cannot afford to give it away, even with a tax incentive.

So we're left with a classic chicken and egg scenario, one that just continues to repeat. Agassi's plan is the first one I've seen in a long time that is practical and works with existing infrastructure. The only burden would be on the vehicle's manufacturer who would need to design a battery mechanism to allow for a safe and easy swap at a service station.

The economics of Agassi's model are also more realistic. It's not relying on the government or business owners to give away free electricity. Under Agassi's model the electricity is paid for with a built-in profit incentive to small business owners to provide the charged batteries to customers. They make a small investment on the front end for equipment and can immediately begin fueling cars. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than converting a few of their pumps to offer hydrogen, and the growth potential is enormous.

I look at it this way: Agassi's model solves the "physics problem" by providing an electric fueling solution that can be nationwide in a year or two. There's simply no alternative that can solve this problem faster. The remaining concerns with potential monopolies and other regulatory issues are "people problems" that people can solve.

What happened with the EV1 was not from lack of interest; there were 800 in the field and 4,000 on the waiting list, while GM was actively trying to dissuade people from wanting them. The only reason the EV1 failed is because GM stopped leasing them, took them all back, then crushed and shredded them. None of the hundreds of people still driving a RAV4-EV would say they were a failure.

Who says anyone has to give the electricity away? Selling electricity for charging an EV isn't any more complicated than the coin-op mechanism in a laundromat.

With just over 100 Tesla Roadster owners starting to drive their cars, there is already talk of finding ways to put in charging stations in strategic locations. It's just going to take a little consumer demand to solve this problem, demand that will happen as a natural result of the starting trickle of production EVs. It isn't the hundred billion dollar problem that PBP wants you to think it is.

The EV1 died because it cost too much to produce - that is also the reason RAV4-EV are no longer produced.. Car companies need to make money on what the build or they won't be in business long.

The GM-Volt is making good progress on this front but even the GM-Volt is at risk because of high production cost..

What I like about GM's approach to the Volt is that the underlying eFlex
platform will make its way into other vehicles. We do see some of the same
strategy with Toyota's hybrid technologies (in fact even licensing the
technology to Nissan), but fuel savings and efficiencies of the Toyotoa
system decline as the size of the vehicle increases.

GM will need to move quickly to get the cost down on this technology..
$30-40k for what's effectively a compact sedan is certainly going to leave
it in the realm of the early adopter geeks like me. I just hope these
declining gas prices will not equal a decline in interest for the platform.

For daily driving on public roads, the Tesla Roadster has a ridiculous range of over 200 miles. 92% of Americans drive less than 70 miles daily. Using Tesla's home charger (240 V, 70A), it takes just over an hour to recharge after a 70 mile drive, or about 4 hours to recharge to completely empty battery pack. The 8-hour charge they quoted was for a full charge from a low-power outlet.

For daily driving, charge time is a complete non-issue. It takes a few seconds to plug in when you get home in the evening and unplug when you leave in the morning. It's MUCH more convenient than making a weekly trip to a gas station.

Charging time is only an issue for road trips or race tracks. So maybe first-generation EVs can only sell to households that have a second car for road trips (or are willing to make other arrangements, like renting a gas-burner). That's still a lot of cars, more than enough to handle even the most optimistic projections of EV production for many years.

The good news is that there are simple solutions to fast charging. Tesla Motors says they can charge their batter pack to 80% in about 45 minutes. So, if you're really keen on road tripping in your EV, you can drive for three hours, then stop for 45 minutes to stretch your legs and get some lunch while another 150+ miles of range is added to your battery pack.

As for Shai Agassi's Project Better Place, they are trotting all over the world trying to talk governments into spending billions of dollars on infrastructure, and giving PBP a monopoly on charging EVs, in hopes that someone will make EVs to the PBP specs.

I say let's sell EVs to people who want them for what they are and build out infrastructure as needed. Spend a tiny fraction of the billions that PBP wants us to spend on infrastructure on helping carmakers, both large and small, build production capacity for putting safe, affordable, long range EVs into the market.

Once there are EVs on the road, the demand for charging stations along highways will motivate a prompt solution to this simple problem.

Yep I agree. Not that much charging/refueling station. Tesla should build more of it to get more sale.