The Tech is Coming

Although we love to have a car or truck that roars with power, growls from under the hood to give you a fantastic sound that lets you know you are about to enjoy a great drive from a powerful motor the advancements in technology have given us a great deal to enjoy from other powertrains.  Both hybrid and all electric systems are amazing to behold and give us the power we want with the technology that has advanced so quickly.  Exactly how quickly has this tech evolved; let’s take a look and see what we find and where we seem to be going.

Only ten years ago there were no mainstream electric cars.  The Prius had gained a foothold as the premium hybrid powertrain, but buying a hybrid felt like a consolation prize.  You could show up anywhere in your area with your Prius and feel like you had to apologize for the car but toss in the fact that it’s a hybrid and saves gas.  That was pretty much the only factor that seemed to matter on this car for anyone who had the car and power was left to those cars that has massive gasoline engines only.

A few years after this, supercar makers learned how to use hybrid technology to improve power and performance in a car.  A hybrid powertrain gave you instant torque to take off and adding a few electric or hybrid motors to assist a gasoline powered motor made for the jump in power you wanted along with giving you the torque you needed to take off from the start.  At the same time we started to see the Tesla motors come out and show us what an all-electric car really is in order to give us a long range for driving in a great luxury model.

Now, Tesla is working on a Gigafactory, on several models that are perfect for driving on the electric only propulsion system.  Several other manufacturers have learned how to do what Tesla does and add similar ranges to their vehicles to be noted as “Tesla fighters”.  Nearly every automaker has some form of an all-electric powertrain now, which is certainly the direction we want to go.  With this new Gigafactory Tesla expects to start creating their own battery cells, which will significantly lower the cost of the items to make it much easier to justify adding more battery cells to the Tesla models.

According to Elon Musk the future of battery power is to have a 500 mile range within the next ten years.  Considering we didn’t have any mainstream all electric cars only ten years ago, he might just be aiming a little low and that range may be here well ahead of schedule.  Certainly the other side of the coin, beyond the cost of batteries is the fact that additional batteries will add weight to the vehicles that will need to be adjusted or accounted for in some way.  With this thought I wouldn’t put it past Tesla to come up with more powerful battery cells that have the overall same weight as the current models.