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Post by slh1234 on Feb 28, 2021 19:09:39 GMT
The reason so few chargers in my area is because of the current limitations of electric vehicles. Most of those limitations revolve around temperature. Not surprising for where I live. When it is zero or below, some folks like to run a heater. When Shaun realized he was in range trouble, he turned off his heater for the last 32 miles. It was -14F that day. He wasn't happy when he got to his parents house. We bought a Honda Passport last summer. I looked at electric vehicles. My wife wasn't enthralled with the range limitations. I set the price for the electric vehicle 5K higher than the ICE vehicle. There isn't anything available today that comes close to what the Honda had to offer. I looked at it as a way to reduce operating costs, willing to forsake some things to achieve that end. Being she is the primary driver, I conceded to her wishes. On a trip to Rochester, we drove by a fellow charging his Tesla. He had stocking cap, parka and gloves on sitting in his car. She reminded me of our earlier discussion, bluntly stated there was no way in hawl she would drive in a cold car. If I lived south of Kansas, I would have bought an electric. I don't, so will continue with ICE. Another item of interest. Fire. There has been 3 house fires in Fargo this winter from electric vehicles. I would never park an electric vehicle in our garage. Would have to build one at least 100 yards away from house. Electric forklifts are stored/charged at night in hardened rooms in these parts. Insurance coverage requires this. The Chicken and Egg problem. Chargers have more to do with the number of people travelling through an area than owners in the area, though, with the possible exception of California. I found it interesting that many of your northern neighbors own EVs, and the number is growing: electricautonomy.ca/2020/08/26/canadian-ev-sales-data-q2-2020/#:~:text=According%20to%20EMC%2C%20that%20number,Model%203%2C%20with%206%2C826%20sold. The link I posted earlier in response to range loss in cold weather was also from Canada. Interesting reading on the liklihood of fires: airqualitynews.com/2020/10/09/electric-vehicle-fires-should-we-be-concerned/
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Post by slh1234 on Feb 28, 2021 17:03:02 GMT
A friend from Fargo bought a Tesla. Proud owner decided to drive north 154 miles to show his parents. He barely made it. To add insult to injury, he didn't bring his adapter. Had to use 110V to charge. 4 1/2 days later he drove back to Fargo, barely making it. He is going to sell his Tesla. No one around my parts thinks electric vehicles are not useful for certain applications. Farmers are very tech savvy, are quick adaptors. What we recognize are the limitations of 🔋. I just pulled my camper 1650 miles. I usually drive about 250 miles, then stop for fuel and a walk around. The stop takes about 15 minutes. Weight is a factor. I have single rears, gross with camper is about 26,200lbs. To achieve the effective range i would gross over 32,000lbs with electric,forcing me to have a dually. Time to charge would be about 3 hrs with today's tech. Making Proclamations that there will be no ICE vehicles by 2030 is stupid. There aren't many chargers around your area, Sig. For your friend going north, there is a Chargeway (not Tesla) charger in Grand Forks, and another in Grafton, but no Tesla supercharger in that direction. He definitely should have had that adapter with him. Charging on a standard 110 will only give 5-7 miles of range per hour, and that's why I had the NEMA 14-50 put in my garage - that gets about 25 miles of range per hour. (FWIW, the only Tesla supercharger I see in Fargo is at Casey's General Store at 5680 23rd Ave S.) Most of the country is very different from that area, though. I don't think there will be no ICE vehicles by 2030. I've been following the development of hydrogen fuel cells for about 15 years now, and they're nowhere near being ready to replace ICE vehicles, even though I wish they were. I don't see a viable replacement for applications like farming, yet. However, I think there will be a lot more EVs on the road then, and I don't think that's a bad thing. Planning trips will be different like I said in the first post, and infrastructure continues to be built to make it easier. I guess I don't understand the opposition to that development. Most of the objection I see are not technically correct, or if they are, they're outdated.
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Post by slh1234 on Feb 28, 2021 2:05:06 GMT
Again, many thanks slh1234. One thing piqued my interest: "the regenerative braking reduces wear on brakes" Do you know how that works? Is electric motor braking used for gentle stops? This is the thing that I said takes a few minutes to get used to. When you let off the accelerator in a Tesla, it actually feels like you've downshifted in your ICE with automatic transmission. As soon as you let off the accelerator, your motors turn into generators that are adding charge back into your battery, and that is the slow-down you feel. This is the regenerative braking. When you get slow enough, you can press your brakes depending on what mode you have your brakes set on to come to the complete stop. You can always step on your brakes to stop faster if you need, too. There are 3 stop modes in the Tesla model Y, but they only affect what happens slower than about 5 MPH, or if you take your foot off the brakes at a stop. The three modes are roll; creep; and hold. With "hold," you can usually do one-pedal driving. When you let off the accelerator, the regenerative braking will bring the car to a full stop if you let it, and this is a gentle stop that feels like letting off the gas with your car shifted into low in an automatic transmission. When you get used to it, you can probably stop without stepping on your brakes most of the time, and in this case, you never use the brake pads and disks. "Creep" mode feels like an automatic transmission when you're at slow speeds. You still have the regenerative braking when you let off the accelerator, and that will bring you down to about 5 MPH, but you will need to step on the brakes to bring the car to a full stop. If you let off the brakes, the car will creep forward just like with an automatic transmission in most cars. "Roll" is supposed to feel like a manual transmission at a stop, and for this reason, I don't know why anybody would use it. You get regenerative braking down to slow speed, but then, gravity determines whether your car will stop or roll forward, and if you take your foot off the brakes at a stop on a hill, it will roll whichever way gravity will take it. On the downside of a mountain, regenerative braking also means your car's motors will add charge (and range) back into your battery.
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Post by slh1234 on Feb 27, 2021 23:09:05 GMT
How about a TCO comparison? I don't really know how I would compare it. Here are a few things I'd need to know how to compare: If we had replaced my wife's SUV with the current year of the same model, we would have paid just over $50K USD. Although the base price for the Model Y is less than that, upgrading to the Long Range and getting the options we wanted took the price to about $59K USD. That would say the Tesla is more expensive, but there are also features we wouldn't have in another car. But then, how often will I actually use things like Dog Mode? How much value does Karaoke add? Etc.? Although I can figure fuel cost/mile, I don't really know how much we spent for gas on my wife's SUV before. My guess here is that we may save something like $1K in a year on fuel. Oil and filter services were costing a little over $100.00 each. I don't have that expense anymore. My maintenance is pretty much windshield washer, wipers, tires, and brakes, but the regenerative braking reduces wear on brakes, too. I can't put a dollar amount on that. Lifespan? I never liked to keep an ICE car for over 100K miles because maintenance always got so frequent and expensive above 100K miles. I understand that with normal charging cycles, the battery should last over 300K miles, as should the motors. Will they? I don't know - haven't gotten there to have any experience with it. Mechanically, it's much simpler, so it sounds feasible, but I can't put a dollar amount on it. And I haven't really thought much farther that that, except to think it's nice to get software updates over the air, instead of having to wait to buy the new model. In the end, we bought the Tesla because it was REALLY fun to drive, my wife loved the glass roof, it did what we needed and added in a lot of fun accessories at the same time, and it was within budget, so we thought about what it would be like to have and use it, and we got what we liked.
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Post by slh1234 on Feb 27, 2021 17:54:45 GMT
This is all good unless it happens to be a bit chilly. Then the range is cut more than 1/2. I've read that AAA claimed EVs in general can lose 40% of their range in sub-zero F, but again, there's more to this than what is circulating. First, Tesla uses a different mechanism for their heater in newer cars, and it doesn't drain the battery nearly as much. Second, you have an unusable area of battery when it is cold that becomes usable as the battery warms up due to use: evannex.com/blogs/news/calculating-tesla-model-3-range-loss-through-a-cold-winter-night-videoYou will lose some range in the cold, but not half. Or at least, not in any conditions I'm going to be driving in.
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Post by slh1234 on Feb 27, 2021 17:36:29 GMT
Camping in my Tesla. That would make a good youtube video. There are many such videos, yes. I don't think I'll make one, though 😀 It's actually a bit comical to see the different ideas and accessories marketed for that. For us, though, we just need to cover the windshield, and make sure we have room for that Korean butane stove. The Korean trifold mattress fits almost perfectly when the seats are folded forward.
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Post by slh1234 on Feb 27, 2021 17:30:10 GMT
Thanks for that excellent explanation, slh1234. Can you compare your running costs in electricity to an ICE vehicle? I haven't done analysis deep enough to satisfy, but the numbers from many of the websites seem to fit my perception. They would break down about like this: The MY uses about 27 KWH to go 100 miles on the highway (per non-Tesla websites I'm reading. I'll use that because it is less efficient than the marketing ratings). If I'm charging at home, that electricity costs 9.75 cents/KWH, so that comes out to about 2.63 cents/mile. By contrast, my Sonata is a smaller car and is rated at 32 MPG, but probably gets about 30 MPG. Gas is a little over $2.75/gallon where I live, but let's use 2.75 and 32 MPG. That works out to about 8.6 cents/mile in fuel costs. So for home charging and highway driving, fuel costs are less than 1/3 in my Tesla what they are in my Hyundai Sonata. For city driving, the Tesla is more efficient than it is on the highway, but the Sonata is considerably less efficient than it is on the highway, so the difference is bigger than the highway difference. If I charge at a supercharger, in most of the US, the cost is 28 cents/KWH. In that case, on the highway, my fuel cost would be about 7.56 cents/mile, so about 12% cheaper than fuel costs of the Sonata. That's pretty close to what my perception is. It also accelerates and takes the uphill slopes of our mountains even better than that 2.0L turbocharged motor in the Sonata. The regenerative braking takes a few minutes to get accustomed to, though 😀 .
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Post by slh1234 on Feb 26, 2021 19:11:36 GMT
He gets close, but at best, he's a bit out of date on things. My son was the first from among us to buy a Tesla. My wife and I recently decided we needed to replace her SUV, and we thought we could keep one car for local, and either have the other for road trips (which we love taking), or if we were honest with ourselves, we could see that we normally rented a car for road trips anyway to keep from putting the miles on our own cars. Once deciding that, we first looked at the Hundai Kona EV, but we didn't like it, mostly because the Kona seemed dinky. We looked at a couple of other EVs before deciding (at our son's and daughter-in-law's suggestion) that we should at least look at a Tesla Model Y. Long story short, we loved the Model Y because it was everything the others weren't, including having a range of over 300 miles on the dual-motor models, so we placed an order for a Model Y Long Range. Still, originally, we were thinking of a commuter car. There is a very different mindset for traveling in a Tesla, and this is what I think is missed in virtually every video or article I have seen trying to compare it to an ICE vehicle. Perceptions on charging requirements is at the center of this. One of the first mistakes the guy in the video (surprisingly) makes is in talking about the time to charge from empty to full, and comparing that to a gas station fill-up. You don't charge that way. Normally, you plug in at home. We installed NEMA 14-50 plugs in our garage so we will not be locked into any one manufacturer. This is a slow charge giving you maybe 25 Miles of range/hour. In your normal daily usage, this is plenty, but you don't charge to 100% - you normally charge to 80%, and doing that, we have plenty of range for a full day of local activities. So for everyday use, we just don't go to a gas station at all. This means that for normal use, you spend a lot more time filling up than we do stopping at gas stations, and of course, we have no oil changes or transmission service, etc. You don't normally charge to full on road trip stops, either. Most charging, whether home or at a super-charger, you charge in the ranges of 10% and 80%. Due to battery conditioning, this is where the Tesla will charge fastest, too. The perception is that we can't go on a road trip, but again, this is in error. Every trip I see that I want to make, I have a combination of Tesla super-chargers, other chargers (which Teslas can use), and destination charging options. When he says a gas station stop is 4 - 6 minutes, that's just to pump your gas, but what I noticed was that on such trips, I normally spent that time to pump gas, then I need to go to the bathroom, get some caffeine and maybe a snack, then get back on the road. That is normally closer to 15 minutes. In an EV like a Tesla, the only time you really charge to 100% is to prepare to go on a road trip. In our case, we just touch that on the app maybe an hour and a half before we leave, or else, we just schedule it around our departure time, and it automatically starts charging that last 20% in time to be fully charged when we're ready to leave. In a Tesla, the super-chargers (typically either 150 or 250 KW) are located along the interstates and in places with plenty of amenities. In this case, you plug in your car to the charger, then go in to the bathroom, get caffeine and maybe a snack, and come back to the car. It's probably at 80% charge by then, and that is plenty to get me to the next time I will need to stop. So the ICE car may technically have more range, but I don't (at least not comfortably), so it's fine for me to go 2 - 3 hours and stop again for maybe 15 or 20 minutes. It is true that it can be a little slower in cold weather, but Tesla actually conditions your battery for supercharging as you approach the supercharger, so it's not disastrous. I think this will be a challenge for other cars because most of the other (non-Tesla) public chargers are not 150 or 250 KW like the Tesla cars are. But if I'm in a pinch, I can stop and use one of them, and if I do, I'm probably not going to try to charge to 80%, but rather, I'm going to be trying to get to the next supercharger because that optimizes my travel time. We love going to national parks, and there are no superchargers in national parks. However; when we go to these, we're typically spending at least one night in the area. Something I didn't know before placing my order, but I've now learned is that camping in model Ys is really a thing. The back seats fold flat so it can easily sleep two people our size. So all we need is an RV site. We can plug into the 30 or 50 AMP outlets at the RV site, set the car on "Camp mode," it keeps climate control on so we're comfortable, and it can be fully charged the next morning when we're ready to go. We also have charging options at most hotels since we often stay in hotels (especially Marriotts) on the road. So for my trips, I find that the Tesla will get me where I want to go, and I don't really spend any more time in transit - I just needed to change how I thought about things like range and pit-stops - and I need to be sure I keep my charging cable and adapter with me just in case they're needed (they're not needed at superchargers). The software in the Tesla will also allow you to schedule your charging at home if you're on a "Time of use" plan where you pay less during off-peak hours. In fairness, I don't think I could do all of the things I said if we had bought another EV - it would just have been a commuter car like the original plan. The Tesla Supercharger network is what really enables the fast charging, and keeping a similar schedule is due to a different mindset about the pit-stops, and realizing that it was my range, and not my car's range, that really dictated where I would stop. But as with the Model Y this year, EVs continue to improve, and as more people begin to understand what I was describing about how to travel longer distances with them, I think more people begin to entertain the ideas. I had several of the same ideas about range that was quoted by the guy in the video, and the first thing both of my brothers said about why they wouldn't buy one was pretty much what he said. However; not only did I buy one, but understanding what I've said has both of my brothers now entertaining the idea of their next car being a Tesla. Just my 2 cents worth. Edit: I didn't think his claim about "Can't drive from Dallas to Denver" sounded correct, so I checked the Chargeway app. Sure enough, it's not accurate according to Chargeway. Chargeway shows plenty of 150KW Tesla superchargers, and a good number of 65-75 KW non-Tesla chargers along that route. There is no long stretch in between those two cities with no charging as is claimed in the video. I don't have time to right now, but I can post a Chargeway screen shot later to show where chargers are really located on that route.
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Post by slh1234 on Dec 15, 2020 5:34:30 GMT
Trump blew it. He proved himself to be a failed executive and worse, all he had to do is just be a manager, something he claimed he was good at. He should have put someone in charge, not Pence or his son in law, and spent his time comforting families that have lost someone, gone around handing out masks in cities, meeting with Governors and Mayors to praise their work even if he hated them. He could have gone around to ICU's and also held brief press conferences weekly and put a message of unity that we were all in this together. ETC, ETC.. He would have cruised to re-election. What you're describing is not a manager nor an executive. That's a showman. I think we've had so many showmen that did not manage that it's what we've come to expect. That's unfortunate. Be that as it may, the results of the election are not going to change.
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Post by slh1234 on Dec 14, 2020 20:53:54 GMT
The official electoral vote is today. It's over. Going back to the (American) football analogy I used earlier, now, time has run out, and Trump's team is trying to convince the officials there was a foul on the last play. It doesn't work, and it won't work this time, either. It's time to face the fact that, like it or not, Biden will be inaugurated in January. The alternate electors are an interesting story, kind of like whether the band or fans tore down the goal posts at the end of the game, or the formal protest the Giants, or the Saints made over calls during the game in recent years, but it's not going to change the outcome of the game. The election isn't over until January 6th. This may very well be the basis of opposition. www.scribd.com/document/488080093/Antrim-Michigan-Forensics-Report-121320-PRELIMINARYI can't get to that, Sig.
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Post by slh1234 on Dec 14, 2020 20:04:26 GMT
The official electoral vote is today. It's over.
Going back to the (American) football analogy I used earlier, now, time has run out, and Trump's team is trying to convince the officials there was a foul on the last play. It doesn't work, and it won't work this time, either. It's time to face the fact that, like it or not, Biden will be inaugurated in January. The alternate electors are an interesting story, kind of like whether the band or fans tore down the goal posts at the end of the game, or the formal protest the Giants, or the Saints made over calls during the game in recent years, but it's not going to change the outcome of the game.
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Post by slh1234 on Dec 1, 2020 3:42:37 GMT
Guys, if you are resorting to train wreck rumors spread by Lou Gohmert about a raid in Germany where American Special Forces killed American CIA agents you grasping at straws. Gohmert is as as bat chit crazy as Sheila Jackson Lee. The more I read nonsense like this fictitious raid the more I come to grips with the fact that Biden is going to be sworn in. Agreed.
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Post by slh1234 on Nov 19, 2020 14:56:14 GMT
The result of the 2020 presidential election hinges on the bravery/moral courage of individuals in counties like this and not on major fundamental SCOTUS activities.... I'm reading now that they have reversed and voted to certify the election in their county. And now, they changed again, and rescinded their votes. I don't know if that is allowed ... I should have popped some corn.
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Post by slh1234 on Nov 18, 2020 19:35:32 GMT
The result of the 2020 presidential election hinges on the bravery/moral courage of individuals in counties like this and not on major fundamental SCOTUS activities.... I'm reading now that they have reversed and voted to certify the election in their county.
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Post by slh1234 on Nov 18, 2020 0:19:11 GMT
Honest curiosity; polling the members here. Setting aside who you think should have won, or actually won, or how much fraud there was... Who do you think will be inaugurated in January? Again, I'm not asking for what you *want* to happen, or what you think *should* happen, I'm asking what you think will actually happen. Honestly, I think it will be Biden. If Trump's team is able to prove fraud, there is no provision I am aware of to redo an election. I think if they were to prove fraud altered the votes significantly enough to have possibly changed the outcome, then the election will wind up before the House of Representatives. I realize the constitution gives the states the right to choose their electors in a manner according to their choosing, but if they have an election, then what is their individual provisos if election fraud is discovered. I don't think their laws deal with that, and I don't think any deleted or altered votes will be traceable even if fraud is proven. So in that case, I think the election will be disputed, and it will wind up in front of the HOR which is controlled by the democrats. I don't see any way that it isn't Biden.
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