Tesla founder Elon Musk recently spoke at an event in Germany. He’s been driving around the autobahn and loves it, so Tesla are announced a number of new things for the German market. We’ll get to that in a second, but one of most interesting things he says was that Hydrogen solutions are BS. Around the 29 minute mark, he said “they’ll say (EV skeptics) certain technologies like fuel cell, oh god, fuel cell is so bullshit. Except in a rocket”. He says if you take a best case scenario for a fuel-cell vehicle, combined with the cost, doesn’t even equal the current state of Electric Vehicles.
While this is probably expected from the guy who created an EV company, but listening to him talk, you get a sense that it’s not a marketing line, the guy genuinely believes in his mission to change the transportation industry through EV.
Germany is the third largest market for Tesla after the US and China. Musk says he likes Germany because “We can go quite fast, which is fun”.
Any buyer of of the Model S in Germany can select a custom tune of car to make it perform better at top speed. Given the brains of the Tesla is essentially software, they are making this performance tune for speeds up to 200km/h available for free for existing Tesla owners.
Tesla Motors are investing heavily in superchargers across Germany and will have the second highest number and the highest per capita. Expectations are that they’ll double the amount of superchargers ever quarter, right through 2014. Musk really does love Germany. This means by the end of the next year, 100% of Germans will live in range of a supercharger.
Germans must have weird power as the superchargers will be upgraded to 135kw vs 120kw in the US. Musk says there’s likely to be further upgrades to superchargers in the future that will take this number higher, meaning a full recharge will take even less time.
Navigation will also get an update which calculates you’re the speed you should drive, how long you’ll need to stop to recharge and even looks up the wind speed online to factor that into the calculations. This is worlds above what other manufacturers are doing and its easy to see why Tesla is one of the most interesting companies in the world right now, not just in auto, but in general.
Until Australia gets our turn, you’ll just have to be content watching the video below. It has some weird German at the start, skip through to around the 20 minute mark.
More information at DailyTech.
