This morning about 9am I picked up an email from a friend, marked URGENT. 'There is a meeting TODAY 10-12am in Palo Alto of the East (SF) Bay Electric Auto Association featuring Tesla Motors'. My eyes popped - my dream car! Cute, curvy, convertible, and totally electric. So after a double-quick dash around Wunderlich Park (even dream cars don't get to interfere with my new exercise program) I hopped into the Mini Cooper and zipped down to Palo Alto to check it out.
[For a better quality version of the video click here]
The conference room was packed - about 200 people - sandals and facial hair abounded, but there were some normal people there too. By the time I got there JB Straubel, Chief Technical Officer of Tesla Motors, had finished his presentation was taking questions. A forest of hands waved in the air. Yes, the car could do 250 miles between recharges. Yes, it only takes 3.5 hours to fully recharge the batteries. And yes, yes, yes, it can do 0 to 60mph in 4 seconds.
The questions were getting increasingly geeky so an EBEAA officer stood up to rescue JB and to make the announcement seemingly everyone had been waiting for: 'The car is here'. The hall emptied in only a few seconds more than it takes the Tesla to reach 60.
And there it was, crouched alongside the curb outside, like a sleek black panther. Electric cars used to look like this:
A quirky oddity, but hardly practical, having a range of only 20-40 miles between recharges and a trunk the size of a briefcase. The Tesla is taking the electric car in a new and exciting direction. It looks as if rumours of the death of electric vehicles (I'm off to see the movie Who Killed The Electric Car? tonight - review to follow) may have been much exaggerated.
Links to further info:
- LA Weekly
- LA Times
- USA Today
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Use 1: Atlantic Row Day 48 - my fourth and last oar broke. I wasn't even halfway across the ocean. I was determined to maintain my unsupported status so rather than calling for replacements, I had to make do and mend using only what I had on board - a telescopic boathook and duct tape. I used the boathook as a splint, and bound the whole thing tightly in duct tape. I would row with these cumbersome, patched-up oars for the next 1500 miles. [Illustrated above: note stylish silver duct tape on oars on both sides of the boat.]
Use 2: Duct Tape Wallet - if you should happen to find yourself in need of a wallet, and for some reason you don't have access to a wallet shop but you do have access to a duct tape shop, here's what to do.
Part 3: Duct Tape Case for your iPod Nano - no problem!
Hard to imagine the need arising, but you never know. Duct tape and cable ties - surely the most versatile DIY kit ever.
Oar before the repair
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The Atlantic is 2935 miles across (although with all my meanderings I probably covered many more miles than that). That's the distance from New York to San Francisco. I've tried to find a comparable distance in Europe, but even London to Athens is only a measly 2112 miles. So try this one...
Look at your hand. If that hand is an average hand it will measure about 7.5 inches from wrist to fingertip. If that hand was my boat, the distance I rowed across the Atlantic would be the same as the distance from Oxford to Cambridge. Imagine 'walking' that distance (80 miles) by putting one hand wrist-to-fingertip in front of the other.
Kakadu Golf Gloves have just renewed their sponsorship with me. I wore out 5 pairs of their kangaroo skin gloves crossing 3000 miles of Atlantic, so will probably need 15 pairs to cover 9000 miles across the Pacific. That must be almost an entire kangaroo's-worth. And if you were 'hand-walking' from Oxford you'd probably be glad of them too.
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Four short videos of my Atlantic row are now available for viewing online. Even if you read the dispatches you might not fully appreciate what it was like out there. If a picture speaks a thousand words, a video speaks ten thousand.
Parts 2 and 4 are my favourites, but 3 isn't bad either. Nor is 1, come to that. Enjoy!
Part 1: preparations in the UK, boatbuilding, Henley, provisioning, setting out.
Part 2: storms, broken oars, broken comms equipment, but spirit intact - just about.
Part 3: 101 days gone, just 2 days to go. But the retrieval line to the sea anchor has snapped, so the sea anchor is hanging there like a ball and chain. Only one thing she can do... "
Part 4: after 103 days at sea, dry land at last! Arrival in Antigua - this is one very happy rower."
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