So Tesla unveils a New 4 Door Electric..?

Coincidently, I just received a call back from Tesla Motors for a powertrain manufacturing technician position. During the phone interview the recruiter asked me what I knew about the company and I gave him too basic of an answer so he wanted me to research everything about the car.

To address your question. Well, first of all I am not sure what charging a cordless drill has to do with any of this since you're talking about an alternator and not a switched mode power supply (wall adapter). You are right though, these are Li-Ion but also have nickel added to them. Currently they are the highest power density batteries in any car, at 7000 cells per S Sedan. They take a while to charge because that capacity is significantly more than a drill. Thats why they offer a 120v trickle charger in addition to a 220v standard charger which takes less time.

It would be impossible to have an alternator to keep up the car's momentum. You can't have the cars momentum propel the car indefinitely via alternator. Here's why. Alternators cannot be 100% efficient, there will never be a 100% efficient alternator. Period. The conversion of electrical energy to mechanical propulsion also is not 100% efficient. The wheels of a car produce friction, a loss of energy expressed in heat. The faster a car goes the more wind resistance is present. This will be the biggest loss of power, expressed in sticking your hand out of a car going 80mph. In a perfect world where there is no power loss and everything is 100% efficient and friction did not exist, then yeah it would work.

Sid really explained all of this. You simply can't get more energy than you put in; in fact you can't even get the same amount of energy you put in. Everything mechanical and electrical every built or ever will be built cannot be 100% efficient. Unless we can get rid of friction, wire resistance, wind resistance, and a multitude of other factors that contribute to power/energy loss.

Physics. You have failed it.

Seriously: you cannot get more energy out of a system than you put back into it. Why is this such a difficult concept for people?

Jon; even in your scenario, where everything is 100% efficient and there are no friction, electric resistance or other heat losses, all an alternator could possibly do would be to produce enough energy to keep itself spinning. It would never produce any excess "free" power. It could not charge a battery or provide power to anything else.

Yet another impossible perpetual motion machine.

I won't try to explain why this is impossible, you don't have the background, look up the laws of thermodynamics.

Don't you think that if it were this easy, we would all have generators in our basement cranking out electricity with no input, and never have to import another drop of oil? But you can't get something for nothing. Energy doesn't appear like magic, it can only be converted from one type to another.