19 Ideals and reality 97 Language in use: Tesla’s next move Read the text about a company that produces electric cars. Some words are missing. Change the word in brackets to form the missing word for each gap (1–14). Write your answers in the spaces provided. The first one (0) has been done for you. It’s a Thursday afternoon at the Tesla Factory in Fremont, California, and the robots are … 0 (hum). Humans in T-shirts and San Francisco Giants caps trade jokes as they help a massive … 1 (robot) arm guide a touchscreen dashboard … 2 (assemble) past the B-pillar of a partially built Model S. … 3 (Far) down the assembly line, finished cars rest in sleek rows according to their export destinations: Frankfurt, Oslo, Hong Kong. If Tesla’s goal were simply to become a world-beating luxury automaker, crafting pricey toys for the … 4 (environment) conscious elite, it would already have succeeded. But its aim all along has been to build an electric car for the masses. … 5 (Specific), the company’s plan is a $35,000 “third-generation” electric sedan with … 6 (compete) performance and a 200-mile-plus range, in the near future. Meanwhile Tesla has secured its place among the world’s great car companies … 7 (help) to push electric cars into the mainstream. However, there is stiff competition from carmakers around the world, especially China, which is flooding the market with much cheaper electric cars than established players like Nissan, Mercedes, BMW and the like. The … 8 (endure) problem with electric cars is that batteries cost far more than internal combustion engines relative to the power they provide. Before Tesla, the … 9 (prevail) approach was to keep electric cars as … 10 (afford) as possible by skimping on … 11 (perform) and range. Originally Tesla turned that … 12 (calculate) on its head by casting price concerns aside and building the best cars it could – the Model S costs $110,000, and it outperforms the best gas-guzzlers in its class. It was a stroke of strategic … 13 (brilliant), but it didn’t solve the underlying problem. Electric batteries are still nowhere near as cost-effective as gasoline engines (unless you count the societal costs of air … 14 (pollute) – but that’s another debate). Tesla tried to solve this problem by building a huge battery factory in Nevada. It is the largest factory of its kind, capable of producing more lithium-ion batteries each year than were produced in the whole world in 2013. This will bring down the cost of its battery packs by more than a third. (Will Oremus, slate.com; adapted and abridged) 0 humming 1 8 2 9 3 10 4 11 5 12 6 13 7 14 5 ✔ Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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