331–340 of 761 posts
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Level 4? Mercedes already beat them to level 3 https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/27/23572942/mercedes-drive-p...
The Mercedes system is a headline system. In that it was designed to generate headlines without actually accomplishing much.
I firmly don’t care which plug wins as long as there is _a_ standard… But with the wind blowing this way will there be an adapter for CCS vehicles already on the road? Or does one already exist?
There's not an official adapter but one has been announced by Ford & GM. The word on the street is that the Tesla plugs will start speaking the CCS protocol so an adapter is trivial.
(I've been there, too.)
TLDR: Basically, there's a CCS adapter hidden in the Supercharger stall. If you want to charge a CCS car, all you do is start the session from your phone. The CCS adapter unlocks, and it's on the end of the cable when you pull it out of the holder.
I didn't notice it at first when I arrived, until I recognized the location from the video. It's really compact.
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The thing about how this is affects Tesla is "compared to what?" Compared to the historic status quo where there were no other chargers, and Tesla had exclusive access to a large-ish proprietary charging network, it looks like Tesla giving up their advantage, and seems bad. But the forward-looking status quo was going to be a gigantic network of CCS chargers that makes Tesla's proprietary network look small, with eve…
My friend who is not an EV driver got stuck with an EV rental (Bolt) for a semi-rural trip and boy was that a ton of drama. I’ve been thinking hard about an EV myself and now I’m looking at PHEVs instead. I’ve gotten a crash course in EV charging around here and it’s not good. Level 2 chargers are not for spontaneous trips and level 1 chargers are fucking pointless. It estimated two and a half days to charge from 40-…
What they say is dead on -- EVs are great, but getting an EV in a rental situation that's not optimal for an EV without notice and without planning for it is a terrible, terrible situation.
Level 2 chargers are great in your garage, or in a place you're going to park for a long time anyway (hotels, say), but for quick top-offs on a road trip, yeah, not good.
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The thing about how this is affects Tesla is "compared to what?" Compared to the historic status quo where there were no other chargers, and Tesla had exclusive access to a large-ish proprietary charging network, it looks like Tesla giving up their advantage, and seems bad. But the forward-looking status quo was going to be a gigantic network of CCS chargers that makes Tesla's proprietary network look small, with eve…
My friend who is not an EV driver got stuck with an EV rental (Bolt) for a semi-rural trip and boy was that a ton of drama. I’ve been thinking hard about an EV myself and now I’m looking at PHEVs instead. I’ve gotten a crash course in EV charging around here and it’s not good. Level 2 chargers are not for spontaneous trips and level 1 chargers are fucking pointless. It estimated two and a half days to charge from 40-…
To put it simply, there are two types of modes I drive - short & in town or long (100+ mile round trip).
There is absolutely zero chance I’ll be using an EV to drive over 100 miles as there’s a risk I get stuck for hours or even need a tow.
For in town trips, 20-30 miles is more than fine and I never even switch to gas. There’s very little trips in between.
Tesla holds a decent spot for suburban regions where you drive 10-120 miles round trip. Arguably that’s probably fine for half of America. Particularly, if you have two cars (one gas, one electric) as most households with EVs do.
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Not a big fan of Tesla myself, but surely if they figure out self driving that’ll make their cars relevant for the forseeable future? On top of that they seem to be able to make cars cheaper and more quickly than most of the incumbents.
Musk absolutely underestimated the difficulty of full self driving. He's still doing it today. FSD is one of those techs that makes for awesome demos but it has thousands of edge cases that are hard to test for even with millions of vehicle miles recorded in their big AI datacenter. The tell for me is Hyperloop. That is an optimal environment for FSD, a closed and contained track that has only identical vehicles on i…
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My wife drives a Tesla and I drive newish rental cars on a reasonably frequent basis. So I have a basis for comparison. They are definitely not being beaten by larger players. At least not at this stage. Their software is top notch compared to the mish-mash of home grown and Car Play on other vehicles. And the implementation of AutoSteer (free cut down version of self driving) is far superior to what I've seen in oth…
I've never seen "software" (by which I assume you mean the consumer facing stuff in the cabin) that made me want to buy a car. Yes, I've seen Tesla's. It looks fine. So does a radio with 6 buttons. If I want anything, I have a cellphone. It's impossible to compete with "put that UX through better speakers/mic/screen"
I recently bought an EV and a secondary concern (as in, not one of the primary concerns of size, range, charging speed, and price), was the control interface. I went with a model that has nearly all physical controls. Had the choice between otherwise equivalent vehicles been available, I'd have paid a non-trivial sum to get a button interface option.
From my Tesla-owning friends, I hear that their software is the "best", which seems to be like being the tallest dwarf. I literally can't imagine a pure software/touch interface being better than a physical button interface for the most important driving controls.
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The thing about how this is affects Tesla is "compared to what?" Compared to the historic status quo where there were no other chargers, and Tesla had exclusive access to a large-ish proprietary charging network, it looks like Tesla giving up their advantage, and seems bad. But the forward-looking status quo was going to be a gigantic network of CCS chargers that makes Tesla's proprietary network look small, with eve…
My friend who is not an EV driver got stuck with an EV rental (Bolt) for a semi-rural trip and boy was that a ton of drama. I’ve been thinking hard about an EV myself and now I’m looking at PHEVs instead. I’ve gotten a crash course in EV charging around here and it’s not good. Level 2 chargers are not for spontaneous trips and level 1 chargers are fucking pointless. It estimated two and a half days to charge from 40-…
What do you mean by this? Do you mean "public L2 chargers" or private in-home L2 chargers? If public, I agree--it would take 4 hours to charge your car on a road trip, but if private then just keep your car charged to 80-90%.
> My house was wired for level 2 charging by the previous owners but the plug is 220 3 prong rather than the NEMA 14-50 plug that seems to be de rigeur lately. At least I could probably get an electrician to fix that cheap.
There are multiple NEMA 3-prong 220V standards, at least one of which is 50V and at least Tesla sells charger adapters for all of them. If you're buying an EV though you may as well shell out the extra $500 + labor and have an electrician install the dedicated charger (so you can keep your portable charger in the car for traveling).
> If anything the non CCS chargers are made by idiots.
I'm not sure what this means either. The Tesla charger isn't CCS and I haven't had any problems with it. Also, plenty of CCS chargers suck (at least one of the CCS standards is exclusively L2).
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> they are higher than current gas prices I am not aware of any electric charging station on the planet that costs more than gas does in the same area.
It's true in most of the US right now depending on how efficient either vehicle is. I can't check supercharger rates but EA pricing is mostly the same across the country: EA membership pricing: $0.36/kWh California gas prices: $4.86/gal ($4.86/gallon)/(x mpg)=$0.36/1kwh *(29kwh/100mi) x=46.6 mpg to break even with the Chevy Bolt's efficiency in the worst case scenario for gas in the US. A Prius and many other hybrid…
So to move the car 30 miles, I need 30*250 = 7.5kWh.
If 1kWh costs $.36 at a DCFC, then 7.5kWh of electricity costs $2.70.
Compared to $4.86/gallon and assuming an ICE car gets 30mpg, that says electricity at a DCFC is about 55% of the price of gasoline, for the same number of miles driven.
The breakeven mpg is 30/.55 = 54mpg. (This is a bit different from your figure of 46.6mpg because you were assuming 290Wh/mile and I was using 250Wh/mile.)
I was using 30mpg above because I'm comparing to my ICE sports car which is fun and fast and gets 30mpg. High-mpg ICE cars are (IMHO) less fun. (And my ICE car is still not as fun or fast as my Tesla).
So your numbers are in the right ballpark. $.36 is roughly correct for electricity at Tesla superchargers too (it varies depending on where and when you charge).
But at home where I usually charge I pay $.14/kWh for electricity. If I compare that price with my 30mpg ICE car, we see that I pay $1.05 to move my Tesla 30 miles. Premium fuel (which my turbocharged ICE car requires) is about $4.10 where I live. So for me my cost of energy is 4.10/1.05 = 3.9x. That is, my ICE car costs about 4 times as much to operate as my Tesla. And it's less fun to drive.
Caveat 1: For highway driving, the Tesla requires more than 250Wh per mile because of air resistance at speed, so the price advantage is smaller on the highway. That's even more true if you use superchargers (see above). But Level 2 chargers are common at many hotels and are usually free. So if you take road trips and are not in a hurry, you can avoid DC fast chargers and their high costs. Most hotels do not provide free gas pumps, but many provide free charging for EVs.
Caveat 2: Teslas eat tires like candy. You WILL have to buy new tires more often with a Tesla than with an ICE car. But that's the only maintenance expense that's higher with an EV in my experience.
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It is indeed totally insane, but this is what is being worked on, not necessairly for cars but trucks and semi trucks for example that have much larger batteries than a car. Already to achieve 250+ kW charging stations have to have huge cables and watercooled connectors, here's one such installation I saw some years ago https://i.imgur.com/BpG4QAa.jpg and an example of a cooled connector for 0.5 MW https://www.phoeni…
I assume the next jump in power will come from voltage. A Model 3 pulls ~600A when charging at 250kW, because it's relatively low voltage. If they alter the charging design to accept 800 or 1000V we could see over half a MW without a change in cable design. But I'd guess at this point that would be moot because the cell charging rate is the real limit anyway.
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Also one other detail: There's a hell of a lot more money in the car 'fuel' industry than the car making business. R&D costs are way lower, you don't need that many employees, and you can always charge these third party automakers more. Tesla is going to make bank off these adopters.
The latest rounds of gas convenience stores have gotten more square footage than earlier generations. I suspect they are anticipating indoor seating for charging customers at some point. I’ve also started seeing joint ventures where it’s a proper coffee stand or in one case I can think of an A&W root beer. Gas stations tend to be physically separated from pastimes (what Burger King owner wants diesel fumes in their s…
Recently when I drove around in the USA, I saw Sheetz, Wawa, Royal Farms, Rutter's, and High's. These are substantially larger with lots of amenities compared to the standard gas stations. Nothing compared to Buc-ee's, but still getting up there.