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Cockmaster posted:The thing there is that Elon Musk's grand vision is for there to be no excuse for anyone anywhere to stick with fossil fuels. Short-range commuter cars don't really fit into that very well. The "have a short-ranged car for commuting, rent a long-range one for longer trips" model still makes sense even if both vehicles are electric. Going from a 30-mile range to a 150-mile range on an electric car costs an awful lot (at the moment, anyway) and if you don't need that range regularly then that's just wasted money.
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Aug 21, 2018 15:47
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Ola posted:Slightly cheesy ad The Workhorse PHEV truck has an outlet on the side, covered by a panel kind of like the gas fueling port. The truck's target market is contractors, so basically it replaces the generator they might otherwise have to haul to the work site. I don't know how much utility it'd give to most people though. How often do you want to run electric devices somewhere where you're taking your car, but you're not in your car, and there's no other outlets nearby? I'm sure it's amazing for a small subset of people, but how large is that subset?
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Aug 21, 2018 16:50
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but good idea. Tesla has also mentioned expanding on this.
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Viewing it as an education problem is kind of like saying "I'm a great communicator, it's just that everyone else is a terrible listener." I suggest either taking an approach that tries to work with people as they are instead of as they "should" be, or else buckling down and accepting that your market strategy requires large-scale cultural change and is therefore not ready for prime time.
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Sep 5, 2018 22:32
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Cockmaster posted:There's also the matter that according to climate scientists, keeping the planet in not-to-terrible shape will require essentially abandoning fossil fuels altogether. This means that the minority of people who regularly drive outside the range of entry-level EVs would need to go electric. It's either shift off of fossil fuels, or invest heavily in carbon capture and storage tech. In other words, you can keep your ICE car, so long as you pay the carbon offset tax for every gallon of fuel you burn, or else install some fancy doodad that captures the exhaust and stores in in some onboard tank or something. (Realistically, we need both, because there's already too much CO2 in the atmosphere) But the fundamental problem of climate change is that stopping it requires altruistic behavior on a global scale. It is always cheaper, easier, and more effective, at a local scale, to pollute than to not pollute.
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Sep 10, 2018 17:29
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Cockmaster posted:Is there any possibility that it would ever be cost-effective to develop carbon capture devices for individual cars? I mean, you'd probably have to empty the CO2 tank about as often as you fill the gas tank, and we're already making steady progress towards there being no excuse for any motorist to stick with internal combustion. I don't think this is likely for consumer cars, not that I know much of anything about carbon capture and storage. It's remotely possible it'd be feasible for larger vehicles. Converting a 40-ton big rig to battery power sounds like a challenge to me. Not insurmountable, but expensive, in terms of the amount of batteries needed to get any useful range, the amount of time spent charging those batteries vs. moving the truck (and therefore making money), and the additional weight (thus reduced hauling capacity) imposed by using batteries instead of fossil fuels. These are all solvable problems, but they'll take time, and in the intermediary period we may see alternative approaches.
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Sep 11, 2018 03:55
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RZA Encryption posted:Thread: Is $1+$0.30/minutes so expensive that you would skip it unless absolutely necessary? Isn't half the point of EVs that you usually just charge at home? So you should only need to use a for-pay charger if you're traveling long distances or if you live somewhere where home charging isn't feasible. If I found myself needing to charge while on the road, I wouldn't consider that price to be horrific. It's more than I'd like to pay, sure, but not excessively so.
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Oct 1, 2018 01:46
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RZA Encryption posted:Unless you live in an apartment building, condo, or rented house and you can't install your own L2 charger. Even plugging into a standard 120VAC outlet should get you something like 3 miles per hour of charging, right? It's not great, but that's at least 25 miles per day, which is enough for a lot of peoples' commutes. Especially if they live in the city; one would hope that their workplace is a short distance away. (Of course the Bay Area, bastion of irrational behavior, is an exception, since so many tech millionaires live in San Francisco and commute down the peninsula to Mountain View or Palo Alto or whatever)
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Oct 1, 2018 17:05
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Yeah, any time you see an efficiency rating, the inefficient portion is energy that's converted into waste energy. Energy can't be destroyed, but it can be converted into stuff we don't want/care about, like heat, noise, or unwanted movement. Presumably most of that 3% inefficiency is heat, with a little going to noise.
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Oct 22, 2018 18:59
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builds character posted:How absurd would it be to put a bunch of them in freeways + roadside solar panels to provide small maintenance charges as you drive? Pretty absurd. I can't imagine that the hardware involved in a high-wattage inductive loop is particularly cheap in terms of cost per square meter covered. Roadside solar panels also are not anywhere near power-dense enough to provide meaningful extra power. If you want to charge while you drive, install a conductive rail in the road and have your car tap into that. But then your "car" is a trolley.
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Oct 22, 2018 21:52
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I guess I don't understand car aesthetics. The i3 looks like a car. 
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Oct 23, 2018 16:23
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CAT INTERCEPTOR posted:I would agree with this in regards to the Roadster, altho it did reinforce a lot of the stereotypes of EV's esp with what Top Gear showed. Didn't Top Gear fake the Tesla running out of battery? Like, they got out and pushed a car that still had plenty of juice left. It's the obvious eyeball-getting scheme with a new technology: it's far more interesting to your viewers if it doesn't work than if it does, so one way or another you're going to make it fail. I remember reading about a print media reviewer who behaved similarly, except in their case they intentionally made the car run out of juice by driving wastefully, departing the supercharger early, and starting a trip that the car's own onboard navigation was warning it didn't have the juice to perform. But by that point Tesla had installed logging on their vehicles because they were pretty pissed about the Top Gear thing, so they were able to print out the logs demonstrating that the guy had done laps in a parking lot for an hour or so rather than proceed on the route he had ostensibly planned.
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Oct 26, 2018 00:44
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Ola posted:Isn't it so that previous pickup successes often are first successful utility vehicles for professionals? I'd say make an all electric 4WD stump puller that has enough range for the typical 8-10 hr work day with optional built-in air compressor or 110/220V outlet for power tools. Once it becomes the proper tool for manly men doing manly man work, the rest of the market will want one. That's what the W-15 Workhorse is: a pickup truck with 80-mile all-electric range, gas range extender, and builtin power port so it can act as a worksite generator. List price $52k, explicitly marketed as a fleet vehicle, and if it weren't for the fact that I'd never be able to park it anywhere I'd want it.
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Nov 1, 2018 16:01
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:jesus christ that's a lot of money It's not cheap, no, but if you're putting on 50+ miles every single day it doesn't take that long to pay off the premium compared to a cheaper vehicle. The important thing is that the people that buy vehicles for fleets have a very good idea of what purpose those vehicles will be put to and how valuable e.g. being able to haul/tow a certain amount or not having to buy and maintain an onsite generator is. (Also, for a sense of scale, IIRC its size and capabilities are roughly on par with a Ford F-250) For me? It'd be a total vanity toy, I'd hardly ever use its capabilities. That doesn't stop me from wanting one anyway.
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Nov 1, 2018 20:30
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Ola posted:Yeah that's the thing about "fake battery news", there's been several breakthrough announcements over the past couple of years but nothing came out of them. Battery tech has improved immensely in the last ~20 years. It just takes a long time for each new advance to work its way through the process. First they figure it out, then they announce it, then they have to figure out a manufacturing process that's commercially viable, then they have to build/retool factories to use the new process, then they have to make the batteries, then those batteries have to get incorporated into the products you buy. Sometimes they can't figure out a commercially viable manufacturing process, but even when they can there's like ten years' lag to get the batteries into your hands.
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Nov 21, 2018 16:24
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Definite highlight is when the guy tried to blow out the fire like it was a candle on a cake.
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Nov 24, 2018 00:30
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Peachfart posted:This is slightly off topic, but I don't understand the fascination people have with giant vehicles. What does a crossover/SUV really provide that a car doesn't? Bigger is better.
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Dec 8, 2018 04:31
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Infinotize posted:Now that SUVs largely suffer no penalty in fuel consumption and comfort Source please?
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Dec 8, 2018 20:29
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MrOnBicycle posted:Likewise, people completely overestimate the savings they'll see getting a more fuel efficient car. IF (big if) you need a new car, buying a as fuel efficient car as possible makes total sense. I'm driving a 15-year-old Civic hybrid pretty much for this reason. The drat thing never breaks, which makes it hard to justify dropping cash on a new vehicle. I spent $12k on it a decade ago, and the only major maintenance it's required (aside from regular fluids stuff and new tires) was replacing the hybrid battery a few years ago, which cost a couple grand. I paid cash, but if I amortize the purchase price and major maintenance over the life of the vehicle, and add routine maintenance and gas costs, I'm effectively paying like $250/month for the thing, only ~$60 of which is gas (still getting about 35MPG, or 8L/100km). It's pretty hard to improve on that with a new car! Of course the new car would probably be more comfortable, have better performance, look nicer, etc. But I mostly just need something to take me and mine from point A to point B.
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Dec 8, 2018 21:51
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MrOnBicycle posted:I just bought a $8k 2011 car. Looks great, comfortable, I average 5.5-6.5L/100km (~40 USMPG) cruising at 100-120km/h. (60-75mph) with 170hp. Will outperform most other cars I see on the road in Sweden HP wise. It's not a fast car, but very adequate and when most cars here do 0-100km/h in 9-11 seconds, it doesn't matter that much. Yeah, I did the "amortized monthly cost" thing mostly to get a handle on the total cost of ownership and figure out how long I'd need to own a replacement before it cost an equivalent amount. Like, say a replacement electric car had zero maintenance and fuel costs (which is clearly false); if I paid $30k for it, I'd need to own it for ten years before its amortized purchase price would be down to $250/month. That's about as long as I've owned my current vehicle, so hey, we're within spitting distance.
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Dec 10, 2018 16:29
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Powershift posted:Yeah, 1 is definitely the minimum, but most cars should have 2, for safety reasons. I've always kinda wondered why there aren't joystick-based controls for cars. About the only reason I can think of is that it's too easy for a minor motion of the hand to create a big motion of the vehicle.
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Dec 13, 2018 18:34
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Well, that shows me! Thanks y'all, especially drgitlin (and wolrah for the link).
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Dec 13, 2018 20:24
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bawfuls posted:That is quite promising! Hope that price point means that Hyundai wants to sell a boatload of them and will actually market the thing?? The article suggests that Hyundai is in no real hurry to use up their tax credits and will be making a minimal effort to market them, mostly only to people who are already strongly aware of the EV scene.
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Dec 14, 2018 22:05
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I feel like most people probably don't drive more than maybe 30-40 miles in an average day, and I seem to recall reading somewhere that as a rule of thumb you can charge 3 miles per hour off of 120V (obviously this depends at least in part on how efficient your car is). Given those numbers most people ought to be able to keep topped up without a fancy high-voltage charging system. Sure, you spend the extra however many thousand dollars on the long-range EV to assuage your range anxiety, but the day-to-day is a lot more predictable.
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Dec 16, 2018 04:16
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Finger Prince posted:It's a pretty normal number for your typical euro commuter car. The irony of the North American attitude of always needing the bigger engine and more acceleration is people here still have no clue how to accelerate to highway speed before merging. I know people whose skills have completely regressed because they bought electric cars. Why bother steadily accelerating to match the speed of traffic when you can just kind of dawdle along the entry ramp until you spot your opening, and then gun it? Never mind all the people behind you that were kind of hoping to be going faster by the time they reached traffic.
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Dec 16, 2018 19:14
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Tesla's autopilot scares the poo poo out of me; the impression I get is they're trying to push car automation way too fast, and the only reason the human cost hasn't been bigger is that relatively few people own their cars. I don't really give a poo poo about Tesla's business practices or what's happening to their stock or whatever. This is just downright irresponsible engineering. But then I'm the kind of person that reads stories like how that one Tesla car drove straight into a highway barrier and thinks that the NTSB should have shut down their "autopilot" division and made them push out a huge loving "don't use autopilot until we get this sorted out" update.
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Dec 17, 2018 21:21
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ilkhan posted:AP is still involved in fewer accidents than the "average" driver is, per mile. Until that changes, and we can convince a human hive mind to form so that when one person figures out how to drive every other driver also figures it out, AP is still better. Yes, it'll have kinks and deaths along the way. Hint: Multiple humans cause multiple fatal traffic accidents every single day. To be honest a lot of my problem is with how autopilot is marketed than what it's actually capable of. Or rather, it's the mismatch between how it's marketed and what it's capable of that's the problem. Calling it "autopilot" screams "this is a self-driving car" to pretty much everyone who isn't deeply distrustful of technology or aware of what tech is actually capable of currently. People don't usually trust their lives to cruise control (I mean, beyond the fact that they're climbing into a two-ton vehicle that moves far faster than humanity evolved to handle). If they knew not to trust their lives to Tesla's software, they'd treat it with a more appropriate level of caution.
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Dec 17, 2018 22:12
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eeenmachine posted:I'm not a pilot myself, but I'm guessing pilots aren't sleeping at the yoke when Autopilot is enabled. Which is why I was talking about consumer perceptions. When you're writing marketing materials, you absolutely need to be aware of how what you're saying will be received by your intended audience. There's no way that Tesla was surprised when people saw "autopilot" and thought "self-driving car".
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Dec 17, 2018 23:21
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eeenmachine posted:Maybe you're arguing that the public perception of how autopilot works in airplanes is completely wrong, and they think the pilot can head back into economy and take in the in-flight movie. That I would believe. Surprised any of them would still fly though, haha! Yeah, that's exactly my argument. Anyway, I'm done derailing the thread, sorry for this digression y'all.
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Dec 17, 2018 23:49
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Jiminy Christmas! Shoes! posted:I mean when you barrel into a barrier at 70 you'll have lots of skin in the game. And some on the concrete too. Reminds me of the driver safety device that consists of a sharpened steel spike in the middle of the wheel, to make sure you're paying attention.
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Dec 18, 2018 17:51
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I watched a video of an electric two-seater trainer airplane awhile ago. I seem to recall that once it was in the air and cruising, it used less power per mile than a Model S does. Of course, there's a big difference between a prop trainer that only needs maybe a couple of hours of endurance and, say, a 737. EDIT: duh, should've read the article. I'm almost certainly thinking of the Pipistrel Alpha Electro.
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Dec 18, 2018 21:09
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Westy543 posted:Yeah... my commute is like 40-45 miles (22 each way) so it'll cover one way at least. Though there isn't any shortage of public chargers here in Fremont so maybe I can get some extra mileage while at lunch. Volt has, what, like 50 miles of range (edit: I guess this depends heavily on the age of the vehicle)? That should recharge in like 12 hours on 120V (assuming 3-4 miles per hour of charging). Depending on how much driving you do outside your commute and how often you stay in in the evenings, you might be able to keep up electric-only and then get a full charge on the weekends. Or just start the week out all-electric and gradually use the gas more and more as the week progresses because you aren't able to fully recharge between commutes. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Dec 21, 2018 |
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Dec 21, 2018 00:20
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CommieGIR posted:Apparently poo poo like this is happening in the South Rolling coal is one of those willful idiocies that I really just don't understand. It's like pissing in your own cornflakes.
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Dec 24, 2018 19:42
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>10% of the population of the USA is Californians. That sounds pretty close to critical mass to me; I'm afraid the infestation is terminal.
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Dec 24, 2018 21:02
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Endymion FRS MK1 posted:Hold on, as a Volt owner, would I be a jerk for using public chargers? I thought it was cool I could travel to Columbus from where I live on a charge, plug in while I shop, and be on battery for the way home too Someone's always going to think you're a jerk if you're inconveniencing them, but I say that anything you can do to use less gas is a good thing. So long as you aren't occupying a charger without using it, IMO you're morally in the clear.
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Dec 26, 2018 21:51
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Westy543 posted:#RollingCoal Gotta wonder what assholes like that think of electric trucks.
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Dec 28, 2018 20:20
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Westy543 posted:a guy I knew who had a beefy truck used to drive just slowly enough up a hill to go nowhere and burn off his fuel tank. Isn't that super bad for the engine?
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Dec 29, 2018 01:04
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Just to be probably-unnecessarily pedantic, at $32k for an annual $1500 in gas savings, you're looking at 21 years to break even on the purchase price of the car. It'll be less than that since the electric needs less routine maintenance, but still over a decade. If you like your current car, IMO the economically and environmentally best decision is to keep your current car. You save your money and you save all the CO2 that goes into building the replacement car. Plus for electrics specifically the market is changing pretty dang fast so waiting a few years may get you a substantially better/cheaper product. I absolutely get the "man I hardly ever go long distances, my MPG is poo poo, an electric car makes perfect sense" argument. And if it bugs you that much that you're wasting gas, then that ties into how much you actually like the car. Whether the subjective distaste is sufficient to account for a $32k pricetag is something only you can decide. Of course, there are also cheaper options -- a used Leaf sounds like it would cover your driving pretty handily.
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Dec 29, 2018 03:44
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Infinotize posted:The engineering explained dude did a carbon impact of ev vs ice video that is interesting (cost ignored) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RhtiPefVzM Wow, that's way faster than I would have expected. I thought the CO2 embodied in a vehicle was much larger. Making me rethink my "drive my car until it's literally falling apart" strategy.
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Dec 29, 2018 16:59
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Is Nissan just completely married to the idea of an air-cooled battery pack? I assume it's cheaper to produce and they've decided that's worth the performance/degradation tradeoffs?
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Dec 30, 2018 05:43
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drgitlin posted:48v mild hybrids are a thing https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/05/48-volt-mild-hybrids-a-possible-cure-for-diesel-emissions-cheats/ This sounds basically like how my '03 Civic hybrid works. I don't know the actual implementation details under the hood, but the electric motor isn't strong enough to drive the car by itself; it just AFAICT helps to start the engine and keep it in its most efficient RPM range. It was good enough to get me high-40's MPG when I bought the car in '08, degrading to around 35MPG now after around 150k miles.
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Dec 30, 2018 19:25
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