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All Tesla Wants for Christmas is an Electric Supersonic Airplane

May 7, 2009 at 9:32 AM | by | Comments (0)

Picture this: you're flying along at 35,000 feet, somewhere above Greenland on a direct to Europe, when your airplane short circuits and everything goes dark. What happens then? We have no idea, since an electric commercial airplane has not yet been invented, but electric car company Tesla is thinking about changing that.

Elon Musk, the founder of both SpaceX and of the revolutionary Tesla company, which made owning a sports car you plug into your wall acceptable if not stylish, sat down with TechCrunch to muse on the future of sustainable travel options, which for him includes the extremely awesome idea of an "electric super sonic airplane." He even states that if someone could get around to whittling out the details, since he's already got too much on his mind, this electrojet could be charging up soon:

Technically an electric plane gets more feasible as battery energy improves. It’s definitely feasible right now. Its just a questions of the range . . . You have to have energy density for a global plane. You have to design a plane differently to deal with . . . its an interesting configuration of what you can do with vertical takeoff and landing angles with the design. It’s a tricky problem.

A tricky problem indeed, since we just barely got the Boeing 787 out of the hangar and into the skies, and heaven knows that thing is hauling some major fuel. How big would an electrical plug have to be to accommodate airplane batteries, especially supersonic ones? We don't know, but that sure is something next to which we'd like to take our picture.

Related Stories:
· Tesla Founder Elon Musk Dreams of Electric Airplanes [TechCrunch]
· After the Electric Car, the Electric Plane? [Treehugger]
· Travel Technology Coverage [Jaunted]

[Plane image: AirplaneGeeks]

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