250 Miles with a Made in the USA Supercar, the Tesla P85D

The surprising acceleration of the Tesla S prompted Jay Leno to race his 700 HP Cobra two-seater against a grandmother driving a Tesla P85D in the opening segment of a recent episode of Jay Leno’s Garage shown on NBC-SN.  With minimal effort, the grandma handed Jay’s Cobra a clear defeat. Jay retorted: “Horsepower wins sales, torque wins races.” This is where electric motors reign supreme with their instant, large and constant torque. Torque is the actual force that turns the wheels and propels a vehicle forward.

Through a school fundraiser I got a weekend drive of a Tesla S. I asked if they had the 2015 top-of-the-line model available for the drive, the P85D, and they did!  I kept the car for almost three days; offered rides to over a dozen wowed passengers, then loaded the family and completed a tour around the island… Honolulu, Mililani, Haleiwa, Kaneohe, Waimanalo, Hawaii Kai, and back to Honolulu.



A fair comparison would pit the Tesla against the $150,000 Maserati Quatroporte for size and luxury or a $300,000 Ferrari FF for performance and luxury, but hardly anyone is familiar with those Italian exotics. Instead, I’d compare the Tesla S by with two popular cars that I and a lot of other people are familiar with, that also have elective drive: The BMW 335i in hybrid version, which is sold as the Active Hybrid 3, and the top selling sedan in the US, the Toyota Camry, in Hybrid and XLE trim.

F U L L   R E V I E W

People who can deduct expensive car leases or who can buy cars in the range of $60,000 and above owe it to themselves to test drive a Tesla S and its more powerful variants.  I will wait for the 75% scale version of the P85D or its 2016 sister the P90D. I’d love a Tesla M, M for motor sport; 25% smaller, 25% lighter and 25% cheaper than the P85D.  Hopefully one of these days Elon Musk will read this and oblige me …

UC-Berkeley Professor: Rail TOD Isn't Sustainable Development

One of the conclusions that can be drawn from the article Does Transit-Oriented Development Need the Transit? by Daniel G. Chatman, Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley is that rail transit is ineffective in reducing auto ownership and in reducing auto ownership use for commuting.



Interesting quotes include the following (my underlining):

• Auto ownership: Once I controlled for housing type, parking availability, population density, bus availability, and other built environment measures, the results were striking. ... rail proximity was not an independently significant predictor of auto ownership.
• Driving to work: When I controlled for other factors, the apparent effect of rail access on auto commuting vanished entirely.
• Grocery trips: Again, when controlling for parking supply, housing, and built environment characteristics, neither housing age nor walking distance to rail showed any association with the frequency of auto grocery trips.
• Conclusion 1: Developers are aware that public opposition is often lower near rail stations, and policy makers and urban planners believe that rail access will mitigate traffic impacts. But such a policy will not improve long-term sustainability when rail investments and rail-proximate housing, in and of themselves, make little difference in auto ownership and use.
• Conclusion 2: If access to rail is not a primary factor in reducing auto use, it could be a blessing, not only because rail infrastructure is expensive, but also because the amount of available land near rail stations is limited.

My conclusion: Rail based TODs are unsustainable. They are sub-optimal projects that waste public resources on marginal (at best) mitigations of mobility problems.