Posted on 01/25/2024 11:18:00 AM PST by Red Badger
They don’t tell you these things when you buy one.
EVs eat tires like crazy.
And they are more expensive than regular car tires.
So, all the money you supposedly ‘save’ on gasoline, you spend on tires, and I would think brakes as well........................
I drive with an egg under my right foot. There were “high-mileage” techniques taught when the first oil embargo hit and that was one of them. I’m a leisurely driver and got more so as I aged.
We have electric-assisted pedicabs here. They are awesome and get a lot of done. Or they did until they had a battery fire in their storage garage and lost 5 of them and the garage (detached, luckily). 2 were outside and survived. Insurance is covering the loss, but I doubt the lost income/employee pay is covered.
If it weren’t for those pesky Laws Of Thermodynamics, they’d get away with it, too!...................
I wonder how much of those tires come from petroleum?
I think you are correct but add that the computer won’t let the battery charge if the battery is too cold because that will ruin the battery. So, the battery is the actual problem, the computer is just the safety control switch.
We are not alone - listen to these Chinese and their EV woes:
Driving Covered with a Blanket, No AC, Even Pushing Cars! China’s EVs Only 30% Range in Winter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf9Ax4Crcy8
Huawei EV Crashes Into BYD, AEB Out of Control? China’s EVs Are Just Rubbish
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzNONy3Q6Rg
I respectfully disagree. Sure EV's tend to be more popular in urban areas, but I think that's more of a political culture thing (big city folks tend to lean left, as you correctly point out). But that's usually not a practical application of EV's. From a free market non-political perspective on who the best fit for EV's are, IMHO that's the people who live away from the city.
My wife and I have an EV as our main driving car (26K miles per year) because we drive enough miles for the gas and oil change savings to more than offset the other costs. Why do we drive that many miles? In part because we live away from the city. Where we live we have to drive far to get somewhere. LOL
Plus, in our rural/suburban area the homes have lots of space between our neighbors -- plenty of space for a garage we can charge the EV out in. Many urbanites can't charge at home because they either live in apartments or they live in houses that are so tightly built next to each other that everybody has to park in the street. (I'm sure there are exceptions, but I'm talking about the norm.) Thus, they have to use the road-side chargers for local driving and that's when there's a lot of waiting in lines (even before cold weather makes charging take longer). Contrast that with here in the rural southeast, the few people who own EV's almost always charge at home for local driving, leaving the road-side chargers to be used by only the out of town drivers. Thus I've never had to wait for a charger except for one time, and that's when we took a long road trip up north (it wasn't winter LOL).
...it takes about seven gallons of oil to make a standard tire—five gallons as feedstock for chemicals that make up synthetic rubber, plus two for the energy required to power the manufacturing process.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/hybrid-electric/a5750/bioengineers-turn-trees-into-tires/
Google. No need to wonder about anything these days… except for what the search algorithms and censors hide from us, of course.
Yeah...but a better name would have been Sparks or Burn...
:]
Needless to say, like almost everyone else who was around in the 90’s, I have zero recollection of that… car. Don’t ever remember seeing it (either in ads or on the road), or even hearing about it.
If you can afford a Tesla EV, you're not of below average intelligence. You're just virtue signalling by purchasing one.
We don’t know why the chargers weren’t working. We think the cold made them stop. It is possible that they were not turned on.
Stop it with that nonsense. Do you apply your same logic to an intersection stop light that is malfunctioning? Somebody just forgot to turn it on?
Charging stations are not manually turned on by some schlep whose job is to turn them on in the morning then off at night.......
Electric motors to provide traction for vehicles is a very good idea all around. Such an arrangement would do away with clutches, transmissions with varying ratios, driveshafts and differentials. Either an on-board generator driven by some kind of portable and independent fuel-burning internal (or external) combustion engine, or a hydrogen fuel cell, which can be swapped out, fully charged cell unit for depleted cell unit. The power generator could be driven by something like a closed recycling steam engine, or Stirling cycle hot-air engine, both external-combustion engines, fueled by compressed natural gas or propane. The waste heat from either of these designs could be used to warm the cabin in cold weather, or used to drive a secondary generator for the other electrical systems on the vehicle, like air conditioning, lights, or other on-board systems like control computers or other auxiliary purposes. Teslas and every other design of EV could be adapted to use these on-board power storage or generation systems, no longer relying on exotic batteries alone.
Battery powered electric vehicles are a technological dead end, suitable only for a niche market. And that may already be saturated.
Not to mention all the energy it takes to extract the rare earths required to make the batteries.
Common Sense killed the electric car.
“I wonder how much of those tires come from petroleum?”
I’ll put it this way: Producing one tire requires 5 gallons of oil.
At very cold temperatures they don't take a charge until somewhat warmed up, thus the Chicago charging meltdown earlier this month.
I get an overall average of 3.6 miles/kWh. But call it 3 miles/kWh in reality. The 3.6 is DC power coming from the battery for all purposes (including headlights, AC, heat, etc.) and all speeds (I get less than that when I drive 80mph on trips, more than that for local driving). Assuming a 10.6% loss when converting from AC to DC (charging at home from AC circuit), call it 3 miles/kWh if all of my miles were charged from home. (In reality that's 16K charged at home in 2023 of the 26K total miles we drove it, but I'll assume all of the miles have the 10% conversion loss to have a pessimistic miles/kWh.) Or another way to say it, if I didn't have solar providing 80% of all the power we consume at home, for every 100 miles we drive count it as adding 33.33 kWh to the power bill. At 16¢/kWh in my last few power bills (ignoring the flat monthly fees), adding $5.33 to the power bill gives you 100 general purpose miles (some driving fast mixed with driving slow while running the AC, etc.) Obviously if I was driving 50mph around town I get much better miles per dollar, and the opposite if I'm charging at home tonight to head out on a trip tomorrow morning driving 80mph (some of my local driving is 75mph, but that's part of living out in a somewhat rural area). I'm talking about my real world averages based on my real world telemetry that I pull from the EV's computer and my solar inverters, which I track every month when I get a power bill (like I did yesterday) to see how well my solar/EV/other energy improvements energy project is going to see if I need to tweak some configuration to improve on it. (I'm probably about done with finding new tweaks. It's pretty much minor maintenance mode to switch over from winter mode to warm 7 to 8 months, then set a calendar reminder to do switch some settings and duct dampeners back to winter mode around late November.)
I don’t recall ever seeing one of those either. I thought fender skirts went out in the ‘70s. I had a ‘68 Buick Electra that had fender skirts.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.