121–130 of 161 posts
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You get 250 mileage? Seems like a draw with a diesel car
If you have at-home charging and mainly commute a huge perk is never hitting a gas station up. Getting a slower charge over night is better for your battery and better for your sanity (being able to skip the pump).
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Gas stations are usually franchises. Gas is sold on the thinnest of margins; it's the snacks inside the store and other things that actually generate a profit, and none of that but the franchise fee for the name actually goes to the oil company.
> Gas is sold on the thinnest of margins While this is basically true, it's not that terrible. A pure gas station operates on about the same profit margin as a grocery store. Both fairly thin, but both are successful businesses.
Gas pumps get periodic state issued inspections. Why not EV chargers?
Customers should be selecting vehicles that don't have to deal with the deliberate incompetence of Electrify America.
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Which controls are behind a tablet interface that you'd need to use while driving? Have you driven a Tesla? The controls you'd need while driving (audio, climate) are on the steering wheel. You don't have to look at the tablet.
Most commonly the wipers, unless you 1) live in a place with just the right type of rain (PNW is not this place), or 2) you're okay just using the button on the stalk to manually trigger the wipers. Then there's music. God help you if you want to use Apple Music while driving. Just don't, you'll get someone killed. Pull over first and then you can spend the time necessary to navigate the UI. No, don't say 'use voice…
I've only used Apple Music briefly since it just came out, but it seems similar to Spotify.
I love that the music controls are now in a dedicated mini-panel on the bottom left of the screen within immediate reach. This is far better than having to reach over to the center of the screen to skip forwards/backward (e.g. during a podcast).
You can also swipe on that same mini-panel to quickly see tire pressure and real-time energy metrics. This is an improvement over the original "swipe cards", which were clunky and undiscoverable.
For rear heated seats, that's a bit tricky from a UI standpoint. Not many vehicles have 3 heated seats in the rear, much less with 3 heating levels.
I imagine Tesla could add physical buttons for rear passengers to adjust the heated seats, e.g. next to the existing USB-C ports. I happened to come across this aftermarket upgrade [1].
At least the front heated seats are a single tap. Or they can be set to auto-mode, which works extremely well in my experience [2].
Looking forward to a teardown of an EA charger by someone familiar with power circuits. I wonder if they are shorting primary to secondary and getting 2400V AC straight into their car battery... Probably welding the plug to the car too.
What? > CCS vehicle inlets are equipped with an electromechanically controlled locking bolt … designed to withstand high pull-out forces. Source: https://www.digikey.com/en/articles/use-ccs-connectors-to-si...
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I watched a cross-country trip review of a Volkswagen EV and one of the big takeaways was that despite funding Electrify America, the experience of using their chargers, even with a Volkswagen, was terrible at the time of review. Not only were the chargers often out of service or underpowered, you had to use some app on your phone where you type in the charger ID # to turn it on, instead of the car negotiating it.
My experience is the opposite for what it is worth. I used to own an ID.4 (which was a great car in my opinion, but I recently moved from Dallas to Detroit and, ironically, was able to go car-free in Detroit). I made a round trip from Dallas to Denver without any Electrify America charger issues in 2021 (no waiting times either). I also made a round trip from Dallas to Detroit in September 2022 and I only encountered…
I'm about as pro-EV as it gets and solar/wind.
Charging away from major interstates in the Midwest is very very very iffy if you aren't in a Tesla, and if you ARE in a Tesla it can get iffy if your destination doesn't have a home charger.
For US people, a 500 mile car really is where the sweet spot of convenience is becausee:
1) you're not going to charge it all the way up (unless you have LFP chemistry), so knock 5% off of it
2) you're battery will lose 10-20% range over the lifetime of the car, so we'll take off 10%
3) Winter can knock another 10-20% off of range
4) and of course since you need to plan ahead to the limited stations, you can assume you'll not want to get to the "vapors" and assume 10% is less.
5) fast charging is only to 80% anyway.
Suddenly, your 500 mile car is really a 300 mile effective range.
We really need some sort of range extending trailer or similar simple scheme.
I'm really disappointed there isn't any 50-100 mile all-electric range PHEVs ono the market. This is perfect for electrifying all my short and medium range trips, but makes the long distance a seamless experience until charging stations are up to snuff.
If the hydrogen lobby (not that I like them) had any sense they would have pushed fuel cells + 100 mile battery as an effective compact PHEV format (since IIRC fuel cells can use gasoline), that would have developed the fuel cell economies of scale, but since hydrogen and BEVs are mortal enemies, not likely to happen. I also had hopes that the "inside out rotary" patent from a few years ago or Mazda engineers would cook up a very compact rotary recharging engine, but alas that never came to be.
Toyota was the company best poised to do this format of car (arguably should have been working towards this since the Prius was introduced in 1997), but they were so ossified and fat from being at the top of the automotive industry for 40 years they sat on their hands as the entire BEV revolution passed them by. We'll see now that Toyoda is retiring...
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for certain large segments of EV buyers, especially in US, Tesla is objectively the best EV right now.
Especially with the recent price cuts. I was cross shopping the Model Y and the Q4 E-Tron last year. The Model Y has the range and performance advantage but was a bit costlier. This year the tables are totally flipped. Audi jacked up their EV prices and now, with the $7500 tax credit, a mid-speced Audi Q4 E-Tron is like $20k more than the Model Y. I ordered a Model Y. That's not to mention that one can seamlessly ord…
Looking forward to a teardown of an EA charger by someone familiar with power circuits. I wonder if they are shorting primary to secondary and getting 2400V AC straight into their car battery... Probably welding the plug to the car too.
The high power ones are putting DC into the car for starters. The two extra prongs are the DC. Conversion would generally prevent the issue you cite. They are converting three phase ac, and usually only 480v. Isolation failure would not fry the car like this because it would fault first. They are separate ac and DC cabinets with proper controls. It may still be overvolting the DC, just not this particular way. It is…
Judging by the quality of automobile maintenance and manufacturing I would bet on the latter now that I think of it.
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As someone who has literally cut and crimped fuel lines to cut off a cylinder, used JBWeld to temp seal heads and blocks, pulled injectors, disconnected spark plugs etc etc to get something to limp back home.. yep. My main beef with EVs (and I own a Chevy Volt PHEV that I /adore/) is the fact they are rolling blackboxes. My Volt is the least shadetree mechanic friendly vehicle I have owned other than maybe my VehiCRO…
You’re complaining about a car that has both ice and EV components. Of course it’s going to be a pain in the ass to work on.
Gas pumps get periodic state issued inspections. Why not EV chargers?
"Gas pumps get periodic state issued inspections. Why not EV chargers?" From an infrastructure standpoint a gas pump (and related tubing, tanks, filters, nozzles, etc.) is quite a bit more complicated and fragile than a charging receptacle. A charging station really shouldn't be much more complicated than a streetlight, minus the UI and billing components. All of this to say: I don't know how often electric charge st…