201–210 of 210 posts
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If batteries get commoditized then it could be an easy process to replace the battery. It becomes no different than many other repairs you would typically make to make a used car sellable. However it will likely require legislation to ensure there's no DRM bullshit in the battery packs.
It becomes an issue because batteries are so much more expensive than other things you can get though. It's not replacing a alternator, it's replacing a $15000 battery "set". Also I'm hoping electric car longevity will prove out the value in this. Electric car drive trains "in principle" should have much longer lives than gas engines.
https://www.evwest.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=4&prod...
Used Tesla battery, 5kWh for $1500. you're looking at ~10 of these for decent range.
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Well, sometimes one coil for each pair of cylinders. I'm not aware of any motorcycle that had a distributor though.
All gasoline engines have a spark source. A magneto, a distributor/coil setup, or a transistorized driver/coil setup in the case of fuel injected bikes. Nearly all bikes from 1920-1990 have a distributor. The differince is that it often runs off, or is part, the stator (generator coil), making it appear to not exist. Just follow the plug wire.
And while the ignition cam may or may not be near the alternator or generator, it has nothing to do with it functionally.
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That is false, ignition coils go back to... before the sixties at least, when magnetos were used. And no bike that I know of ever had a distributor.
Every motorcycle has to have a distributor, unless it's either so new that it has coil-on-plug like modern cars, or it's so old it uses magnetos, or it's a single-cylinder engine.
The purpose of a distributor on a car was to distribute the output of one coil to several spark plugs. When you have a separate coil output for each plug, there's no need to distribute anything.
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All gasoline engines have a spark source. A magneto, a distributor/coil setup, or a transistorized driver/coil setup in the case of fuel injected bikes. Nearly all bikes from 1920-1990 have a distributor. The differince is that it often runs off, or is part, the stator (generator coil), making it appear to not exist. Just follow the plug wire.
That's simply not true. Every motorcycle that I am aware of (except the old ones with a magneto) has spark plug wires that go directly from a coil, sometimes one per cylinder, sometimes one (with two outputs) for every two cylinders, to the spark plug. They do not go through a distributor. The low voltage wires come from either an electronic module or a set of points (typically one set of points for each coil) which…
Also, I forgot that some old Harleys have the points in a housing sticking up above the crankcase. It's debatable if this should be called a distributor though, since the spark plug wires don't go anywhere near it.
Toyota is also doing this now, they began collecting data all 2020 models with TSS 2.0. They started insurance offerings to generate $$ off of this data, toyotaims.com.
https://www.toyota.com/privacyvts/images/doc/privacy-portal....
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Swings and roundabouts in the EU: GDPR should clobber all the nonconsensual data collection, but there is also the "eCall" mandate that will require your car to phone in location to the emergency services in the event of a crash. (What happens when an EU national drives one of the American surveillancemobiles? Sounds like a straightforward GDPR violation to me, although good luck getting that resolved)
Does this mean that if you cut the wires to your antenna you will be jailed in Europe?
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Swings and roundabouts in the EU: GDPR should clobber all the nonconsensual data collection, but there is also the "eCall" mandate that will require your car to phone in location to the emergency services in the event of a crash. (What happens when an EU national drives one of the American surveillancemobiles? Sounds like a straightforward GDPR violation to me, although good luck getting that resolved)
Does this mean that if you cut the wires to your antenna you will be jailed in Europe?
Not too long ago I owned a motorcycle from the 70s. I realized at one point that it was probably EMP-proof: no fuel injection, no fuel pump, certainly no OBD anything, and a (literal) kickstarter. The most complicated thing in the wiring harness was the key cylinder and the relay for the turn signals and headlights. I miss that bike sometimes.
There is an urban fantasy series called "The Rivers of London" series after the first book (or "Peter Grant"-series after the main character) and magic interferes with (in the sense of completely fries ) more complicated electronics there, so his master (the last fully qualified wizard of Great Britain) also drives an old Jaguar that is all-mechanical and therefore magic-proof. Very entertaining series with lots of r…
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> I realized at one point that it was probably EMP-proof Different kind of bike, but I used to feel that way about my bicycles. However, sometime last year I was parking at the office and realised even that world is on its way out. The No-True-Scotsman actual cyclists have largely moved to electronic shifting and such, and the utility bikes are quickly moving to e-bikes.
>The No-True-Scotsman actual cyclists have largely moved to electronic shifting and such Not true at all. Electronic shifting is a thing, yes: google for "Shimano Di2". However, road bikes with this are usually at least $4k: it's really something reserved for very high-end road bikes. I got a $3k road bike last year and it doesn't have it, nor does anything else in the low-to-mid range. It'll likely be a while before…