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2nd March 2021, 12:03 PM | #321 |
Penultimate Amazing
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There is almost no such thing.
But I do think you're missing something. What about those people who can't afford a new car? You know, that sizable population that purchases vehicles with 100 to 250 thousand miles? The cost of replacing a battery for a Tesla model 3 at an authorized Tesla repair shop is 16K. That's too much. A secondary market is essential for the success of EVs as well as the economy. If I buy your Ford or Toyota with 100K, I might easily drive it for another 150K without a major repair. And you can sell it for $8,000 to $18,000. I'm not buying your model 3 for that price knowing I would be certainly spending another $16K in the very foreseeable future. |
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2nd March 2021, 12:10 PM | #322 |
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Well, obviously the latter would be silly. The problem is that charging takes, even at best, a hundred times longer than just filling up a gas tak. But I basically agree: Battery swap instead of charging has many problems. Apart from the already mentioned, it requires a standardization of batteries that will hamper development of better batteries.
So the charging time will instead require people to change habits ( nearly as hard ). You will need to plan your trip, as if flying: How much fuel (=charge) do I need for this trip, when and where can I recharge, what can I do while the car charges? Hans |
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2nd March 2021, 12:13 PM | #323 |
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Experience is an excellent teacher, but she sends large bills. |
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2nd March 2021, 12:13 PM | #324 |
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Well, that assumes complexity is correlated with unreliability. Not necessarily.
Thinking back to the early 1970's, a BSA or Triumph motorcycle was stone-axe simple, and yet they tended to be notoriously unreliable. I remember when the Honda GoldWing came out, folks were bemoaning the complexity, with liquid cooling, multiple CV carbs, fuel pump, that sort of thing. Yet all that complexity still resulted in a very reliable motorcycle, some running 100,000+ miles, which was very unlikely on the more primitive offerings. Since then I've never been prone to shy away from complexity for complexity's sake. |
2nd March 2021, 12:16 PM | #325 |
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That's why the whole "I'll just hummingbird from charger to charger, topping off just enough to make it to the next charger" solution will not work. People aren't going to do the land based equivalent of a flight plane to visit their Auntie Ruth for Thanksgiving Dinner.
//BTW. Lest any pedants sniff out this thread yes I'm aware that technically you aren't "charging" an electric car battery in the same way you charge your cell phone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMxB7zA-e4Y |
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2nd March 2021, 12:17 PM | #326 |
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Well, the Tesla was never meant to be the economic solution. It was the fancy car that could make wealthy people fell good and imagine they cared for the environment.
What we need to look at is the bottom level car. I'm not sure it exists yet, but what would be the price of the cheapo EV? So far they seem to compare with middle level family vehicles, but wait till demand comes up. Hans |
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2nd March 2021, 12:19 PM | #327 |
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2nd March 2021, 12:21 PM | #328 |
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Well yeah we traded away complexity when we got something else out of it, but rarely just "make it more complicated for complexity's sake."
A 2 stroke engine just isn't as good as a four stroke one, so the trade off in complexity is worth it. Back up cameras and automatic transmissions and sunroofs and heated buttocks massaging seats make cars more complicated but give us stuff in return. But with 55,000 dollar Teslas approaching hypercar territory performance with better safety and better efficiency with a motor that's little more than glorified coil of wire induction motor isn't a problem. |
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2nd March 2021, 12:30 PM | #329 |
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2nd March 2021, 12:34 PM | #330 |
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2nd March 2021, 01:23 PM | #331 |
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2nd March 2021, 02:37 PM | #332 |
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2nd March 2021, 03:36 PM | #333 |
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2nd March 2021, 03:50 PM | #334 |
Penultimate Amazing
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I understand what you mean about the Model T.
As for Achates. It looks promising to me. Here's an Engineering geek explaining it. https://youtu.be/UF5j1DvC954 They have integrated a 10.6 3 cylinder Achates engine in Peterbuilt commercial trucks and passed California emissions. They will be fleet testing it with Peterbilt this year. Achates claims as much as 40 percent efficiency improvements over the best ICEs today. They are also working with the Army on their 14,3 3 cylinder Advanced Combat Engine and testing it in the Bradley Fighting Vehicle this year. It will be interesting to see how it performs on the road. I'm optimistic that EVs will one day become dominant. Just not that confident it will happen soon. |
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2nd March 2021, 04:00 PM | #335 |
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2nd March 2021, 04:12 PM | #336 |
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2nd March 2021, 04:25 PM | #337 |
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2nd March 2021, 04:27 PM | #338 |
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Well, I did that with my previous car. 20 years, 450,000 km. Chassis rust just wasn't worth re-repairing. (It did have one replacement engine in that time. Cost me two or three hundred quid secondhand and I fitted it myself. Okay I may not be entirely typical.)
There may well be a time when people do that with electric cars (they're already doing it with Prius's) though I get the impression the manufacturers really would rather discourage that stuff. All too easy to detect a non-officially-authorised hardware change and shut down in pique. Right to repair is quite political in the US so if the rest of us ever get the right to do it it'll likely be thanks to American consumer pressure. |
2nd March 2021, 05:47 PM | #339 |
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So long as replacement batteries are available at reasonable cost, practically forever. The electric drive chain is so smooth and pollution free that a 20 year old car could be almost the same as new if quality materials are used and it's looked after. My Leaf was 8 years old when I bought it and people think it's a new car.
Originally Posted by crescent
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2nd March 2021, 05:57 PM | #340 |
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The battery is almost everything. It's the major piece of the puzzle. The interesting part of this is because of the limitations of the batteries, much of the work has gone into squeezing the most out every watt. The electric drivetrains are better than ever and will only get better.
If they could make a cheap battery that could store enough and charge fast enough we would see cheap EVs. Much cheaper than ICE vehicles. |
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2nd March 2021, 06:05 PM | #341 |
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But when you look at the total time taken that's not actually true. I have often had to wait 10 minutes during busy periods just to get to the pump. At other times I had to make a special trip that was out of my way. Depending on where you live, driving to the gas station, filling up, paying for the gas, and driving back home again could take a considerable time (and you're burning gas to get there and back!).
With the electric car? Just plug it at night or in the morning when you get up - takes about 30 seconds. That's a minimum of 15 minutes of my time saved compared to going to a Gas station. Plus it's a lot nicer (man, do I hate the smell of gas now!). |
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2nd March 2021, 06:19 PM | #342 |
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But that's only true for home charging. Of course, if you can charge overnight enough to get you through the day, then everything is fine. If you have to stop partway through a trip for a charge it's more of a problem.
Which is why I think electrics at least for the present make much more sense as urban runabouts, buses, taxicabs, and the like. I expect battery technology will continue to improve and like many other technologies will do so at an accelerating rate, but it's not quite good enough yet for everything. |
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2nd March 2021, 06:26 PM | #343 |
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2nd March 2021, 06:33 PM | #344 |
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2nd March 2021, 06:48 PM | #345 |
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Why you gotta be so negative? Kidding, I almost brought that up in my post. "I'd buy the hell out of that...well, until I saw one crash."
I'm not even a boomer and I get annoyed by the lane-departure warnings and blind spot monitors. I'm not really looking forward to replacing my beater partly for that reason. |
2nd March 2021, 07:37 PM | #346 |
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2nd March 2021, 08:36 PM | #347 |
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It's one of the Reasons my wife and I bought a Tesla Model Y. I'm currently using it for work, and I average about 80-120 miles a day. We have a fast (ish) home charger, which takes about 4-5 hours for a full charge if we drop it very low (under 20%).
It has enough charge to get to the Inlaws (Seattle - Portland) and we use a trickle charge there. But Tesla has the Supercharge network. DC Fast charging across the nation that only Teslas can use. We know where they are, the car knows where they are, and if you pull in when you're very low, takes about 30 mins to get you to the next supercharger for long trips. It helps to know the cars limitations, and I admit, it's the best damn car I've ever owned. |
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3rd March 2021, 12:21 AM | #348 |
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Robert Llewellyn on his Fully Charged Youtube channel (the thing that seeded my interest in EV's) is sure that we're already there. Batteries are close to $100 a Kwh, and you can buy an EV for under £10k in China, now. He is sure that it is legacy manufacturers inflating the cost of their EV's to protect sales of their ICE cars, because they can't transition the plants quickly enough.
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3rd March 2021, 05:32 AM | #349 |
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I'm glad for them--I think of all the times I almost wrecked (and one time I did) where features like that would likely have avoided incident altogether. Sure, a fresh, alert driver probably doesn't really need them... but how many people commuting to and from work are fresh and alert? How many are not as sharp as they think they are at the time?
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3rd March 2021, 05:59 AM | #350 |
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I AM a boomer, vintage 1949, and while those systems do occasionally annoy, they are to me a net positive.
My car has fairly primitive assists: Adaptive Cruise Control, Lane Keep Assist and some sort of emergency braking function (I forget the acronym, something about collision mitigation). Around town, they don’t do a whole lot. But on road trips, I find that collectively they do noticeably reduce fatigue and make driving longer distances a more pleasurable experience. I look forward to our next car - a CyberTruck? - having even more driver assist features. |
3rd March 2021, 06:48 AM | #351 |
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3rd March 2021, 07:15 AM | #352 |
Penultimate Amazing
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Not so much relax, but to better focus on other driving concerns.
Adaptive cruise control for example--I still have to remain aware of how close other cars are, but now I don't have to do it while constantly adjusting and monitoring my speed. That's a huge fatigue reducer right there, and arguably I've got MORE attention for spatial awareness, and less time looking at my dashboard to try to find a fixed speed that works for a while. |
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3rd March 2021, 07:16 AM | #353 |
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The last 12 months or so I've not driven very much at all but prior to that I did, by UK standards a fair amount of driving. For much of the first decade of the 2000's I was driving around 50,000 miles a year (I realise that by US standards this is nothing ), more recently 20-25,000.
Well over 80% of my driving was done on motorways (freeways), much of it when the traffic was pretty heavy. Driving in stop/start traffic when you're doing 80mph one minute and are stopped the next, constantly checking to see who is going to come at you next and from which direction is tiring. 8 hours of driving under those conditions were hard (especially because the driving was on top of the actual work I was doing). Any tools that make that less wearing are, IMO, likely to improve road safety by allowing drivers to concentrate the most important things. On the other end of the scale for a couple of years I set off between 0300 and 0400 in order to beat the traffic for the drive up to see my Dad. Lane assist and cruise control would have been helpful on a number of occasions. |
3rd March 2021, 07:23 AM | #354 |
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Drivers should not be lazy or distracted.
The penalty for them being lazy or distracted should not be them wrapped around a telephone pole or turning a pedestrian into a technicolor smear. So safety features are still a net good. |
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3rd March 2021, 07:28 AM | #355 |
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"Stay in my lane or the car will scold me" still encourages alert driving, without being as stressful as "stay in my lane or I'll crash into somebody".
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3rd March 2021, 07:33 AM | #356 |
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3rd March 2021, 08:58 AM | #357 |
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Suffering is not a punishment not a fruit of sin, it is a gift of God. He allows us to share in His suffering and to make up for the sins of the world. -Mother Teresa If I had a pet panda I would name it Snowflake. |
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3rd March 2021, 09:00 AM | #358 |
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That's why it's vitally important that you never tell your children to be quiet so you can concentrate on driving. Real drivers only drive manual cars with no traction control, no ABS, no seatbelts, no airbags, and with their trunks filled with nitroglycerin so they are always completely on while driving.
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3rd March 2021, 09:09 AM | #359 |
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3rd March 2021, 09:13 AM | #360 |
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I'm all for safety features. I've never driven without seatbelts except in old cars that had none. I don't mind airbags though I'd just as soon skip them and wear a good belt. I certainly appreciate crush zones and door rails, better bumpers, dual brake systems, and that sort of thing.
But I'm not so sold on some of the other features. I've been utterly stuck on back roads when my traction control would not allow my tires to spin a little. I'd just as soon be rid of ABS too, and go back to knowing how to apply the brakes, which I've done with great success since 1965. I'd rather have good side view mirrors and a proper rear window than a bunch of buzzers and cameras and more electronics to go wrong. I do use cruise control occasionally on long trips, just to ease the leg cramps, and do nowadays (reluctantly) have an automatic transmission, though that is only because since my 2012 cycling accident I can no longer drive very long distances myself, so need a car my wife is comfortable driving too. But for most purposes I'd just as soon ditch the cruise and go back to a stick shift. Of course I know I'm an outlying old curmudgeon, but there it is. I still wish (vainly) that someone someday would design an electric economy hot rod with all that luxo crap left off. Bring back my 1985 Honda hatchback with an electric power train. No air, no traction control or abs, manual windows, big rear window you could see out of. Handled well, went fast enough, great gas mileage. If the camshaft had not snapped in half at 185 thousand miles I'd probably have it still (rust patches and all). |
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