Name: 【TED】Elon Musk: The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity ... (The mind behind Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity ... | Elon Musk)
Uploaded: 2015-11-04T01:44:19.000Z
Duration: 21 min 5 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast

Chris Anderson: Elon, what kind of crazy dream

to take on the auto industry and build an all-electric car?

Elon Musk: Well, it goes back to when I was in university.

I thought about, what are the problems that are most likely

to affect the future of the world or the future of humanity?

I think it's extremely important that we have sustainable transport

That sort of overall sustainable energy problem

is the biggest problem that we have to solve this century,

In fact, even if producing CO2 was good for the environment,

given that we're going to run out of hydrocarbons,

we need to find some sustainable means of operating.

CA: Most of American electricity comes from

How can an electric car that plugs into that electricity help?

EM: Right. There's two elements to that answer.

One is that, even if you take the same source fuel

and use it to charge electric cars, you're still better off.

which is the most prevalent hydrocarbon source fuel,

If you put that same fuel in an internal combustion engine car,

And the reason is, in the stationary power plant,

you can afford to have something that weighs a lot more,

So in effect, even after you've taken transmission loss into account and everything,

even using the same source fuel, you're at least twice as better off

charging an electric car, then burning it at the power plant.

And then the other point is, we have to have sustainable means

of power generation anyway, electricity generation.

So given that we have to solve sustainable electricity generation,

then it makes sense for us to have electric cars

which, if we could play that first video --

So what is innovative about this process in this vehicle?

EM: Sure. So, in order to accelerate the advent of electric transport,

all modes of transport will become fully electric

There's just no way around Newton's third law.

And in order to do that for cars, you have to come up with

so that means making it incredibly light,

is the only all-aluminum body and chassis car

In fact, we applied a lot of rocket design techniques

to make the car light despite having a very large battery pack.

And then it also has the lowest drag coefficient

So as a result, the energy usage is very low,

and it has the most advanced battery pack,

and that's what gives it the range that's competitive,

so you can actually have on the order of a 250-mile range.

CA: I mean, those battery packs are incredibly heavy,

but you think the math can still work out intelligently --

you can still gain spectacular efficiency.

EM: Exactly. The rest of the car has to be very light

and then you have to have a low drag coefficient so that you have good highway range.

to try to get the highest possible range.

I think somebody recently got 420 miles out of a single charge.

broke the world record.EM: Congratulations.

CA: That was the good news. The bad news was that

to do it, he had to drive at 18 miles an hour constant speed

and got pulled over by the cops. (Laughter)

Not at all a dig at The New York Times, this, by the way.

What is the most surprising thing about the experience

the responsiveness of the car is really incredible.

So we wanted really to have people feel as though

they've almost got to mind meld with the car,

so you just feel like you and the car are kind of one,