On the highway - a test drive of the new Tesla car

Not quite ready for prime time -- from the New York Times:

Stalled Out on Tesla�s Electric Highway
Washington, D.C. � Having established a fast-charging foothold in California for its electric cars, Tesla Motors has brought its formula east, opening two ultrafast charging stations in December that would, in theory, allow a speedy electric-car road trip between here and Boston.

But as I discovered on a recent test drive of the company�s high-performance Model S sedan, theory can be trumped by reality, especially when Northeast temperatures plunge.

A bit more:

The car is a technological wonder, with luminous paint on aluminum bodywork, a spacious and ultrahip cabin, a 17-inch touch screen to control functions from suspension height to the Google-driven navigation system. Feeding the 416 horsepower motor of the top-of-the-line Model S Performance edition is a half-ton lithium-ion battery pack slung beneath the cockpit; that combination is capable of flinging this $101,000 luxury car through the quarter mile as quickly as vaunted sport sedans like the Cadillac CTS-V.

The Model S has won multiple car-of-the-year awards and is, many reviews would have you believe, the coolest car on the planet.

What fun, no? Well, no.

And more:

I drove, slowly, to Stonington, Conn., for dinner and spent the night in Groton, a total distance of 79 miles. When I parked the car, its computer said I had 90 miles of range, twice the 46 miles back to Milford. It was a different story at 8:30 the next morning. The thermometer read 10 degrees and the display showed 25 miles of remaining range � the electrical equivalent of someone having siphoned off more than two-thirds of the fuel that was in the tank when I parked.

I called Tesla in California, and the official I woke up said I needed to �condition� the battery pack to restore the lost energy. That meant sitting in the car for half an hour with the heat on a low setting. (There is now a mobile application for warming the battery remotely; it was not available at the time of my test drive.)

After completing the battery conditioning process, the estimated range reading was 19 miles; no way would I make it back to Milford.

The cold temperatures suck the storage out of the batteries. Sure, the performance is great on a racetrack (electrical motors deliver full rated torque at a dead stall unlike internal combustion engines) but for practical use? Not ready for prime time yet. I do not doubt that there are a bunch of these puppies parked every day at Microsoft ferrying their owners the 30-40 miles to their palatial estates but for general driving? Give me fossil fuels any day...