341–350 of 432 posts
So what is a family with a two car garage supposed to do, park the Bolt a block away? This seems like the kind of thing GM should get wayyyy in front of with a very generous offer to buy back the cars as a trade towards another GM model.
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It's not ridiculous but it does lead to this conclusion: That there is probably a single optimal "skateboard" type design. Manufacturers are converging on this anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skateboard_(automotive_platfor... Then the real truth that no one wants to hear, is that there is no need for so many different types of passenger vehicles.
It's astonishing how similar all cars are becoming, outside of the superficial stuff. For a reason. Convergence on the optimal solution.
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They've tried that before, it turns out that "you're holding it wrong" isn't the best customer experience.
I still can’t believe they went for that
Just missing out on such a basic thing is a bit boggling to me. My iphone 4 was working pretty good though, but I was also mostly in the inner city where connectivity is good to begin with.
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Isn't this basically what Apple should have done to avoid their throttling lawsuit? Told their customers to change their behaviors?
Nah, they should have just been transparent about the throttling. They still throttle now after the lawsuit, you can just stop it if you want to. Also an important difference with Apple is that the iPhone throttling wasn’t a safety concern.
This is all sound and well and well-known, which is why you design in a safety factor so that you have plenty of margin even at end of life.
Why didn't they? Since no internal Apple discussions surface, I can just speculate it's either,
* incompetence, they didn't anticipate this
* cost-driven decision, despite Apple products being top-dollar devices and even low-range devices work better in this aspect
* design-driven decision, larger battery would mean a larger device
OT: a cookie banner showed up and after I agreed it stated "preparing your Cookie preferences can take minutes". And it took indeed very long (a minute?), I was even able to do a screenshot: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/129644/133563621-6... What a time ...
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Certainly no one should expect to be able to swap the main batteries that are embedded into the chassis of the car. The total weight of the batteries in a Tesla are around 1200 lbs. But it seems like there could be a hot-swappable portion of the battery, kind of like a separate "reserve tank" (although it wouldn't actually be reserved). Some back of the envelope math says that if 1200 lb battery gets you 250 miles, a…
> a 200 lb hot-swap battery would get you 40 miles. According to one report, for a Tesla Model 3, a supercharger can add ~100 miles of range in ~10 minutes. It's hard to see how any improvement over that could possibly justify the immense additional complexity of physical battery swapping for only 40 additional miles of range. https://insideevs.com/news/506520/tesla-model-3-supercharger...
That said, it's probably a UX problem. Once EVs stop competing on range so much, it'll make sense to just designate the last 10% of battery as "reserve" and not count it in the battery level indicator.
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> and is only on the road because someone paid some mechanic off to look the other way during a state vehicle inspection for the past 5 years. Making mechanics liable - maybe jointly as a business and an individual - for their failure to inspect vehicles properly would be a pretty simple mechanic to reduce this risk.
These inspections are nothing but pointless revenue generation for the state, checking for the check engine light and inspecting 1 wheel at most usually. Lots of states don't even have them.
Of that, I’d say half of the initial failures are simple things that don’t require a mechanic, (dead bulbs, bad/low tires) and the rest require a me hanic to do something.
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might want to put it into context though... there are on average 160,000 passenger car fires per year and about 360 deaths due to that. i'd like to see that figure broken down per 100k miles driven or per 100k cars of the type but i can't seem to find that easily. https://www.nfpa.org/vehiclefires
Yes, but an important part of that context is that electric car fires also burn longer and hotter and take significantly more effort to put out. Too little water can actually make the fire worse. Annecdotally, my recollection from other articles is that electric cars do in fact catch on fire less often. But it also seems like they may be more difficult to deal with. This may change as EV's become more mainstream & fi…
"Nevertheless, existing test results have revealed that the heat release rate of EV fire is comparable to that of the fossil-fuelled vehicle fire, while EV fire may release more toxic gasses like HF from burning Li-ion batteries."
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338542510_A_Review_...
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Yep. Moreover, the issue isn't new cars today. You know when you saw that old Chrysler Grand Caravan burning on the side of the road, and you hear the story that the person has been holding it together solely with thoughts and prayers and maybe $500 between tires and oil for the last 7 years of its 19 year life? That's the current inevitability. I'm not worried about someone's 6-month old Bolt or 2-year old Model 3.…
Some countries have mandatory regular inspections for critical vehicle functionality like brakes. We will probably require EV battery checks like this as well, if the BMS / firmware is not enough to keep the battery pack safe.
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> a 200 lb hot-swap battery would get you 40 miles. According to one report, for a Tesla Model 3, a supercharger can add ~100 miles of range in ~10 minutes. It's hard to see how any improvement over that could possibly justify the immense additional complexity of physical battery swapping for only 40 additional miles of range. https://insideevs.com/news/506520/tesla-model-3-supercharger...
Does the Supercharger network come with a fleet of drones that can autonomously repair a charger in the middle of nowhere, that broke down one late evening of a particularly snowy winter Sunday? That said, it's probably a UX problem. Once EVs stop competing on range so much, it'll make sense to just designate the last 10% of battery as "reserve" and not count it in the battery level indicator.
> it'll make sense to just designate the last 10% of battery as "reserve" and not count it in the battery level indicator.
Very questionable? Why would you do that?
We don't do that for gas cars either.