Posted on 03/20/2023 10:19:59 AM PDT by McGruff
Yes, but one of my good friends had one in high school and we nicknamed it the “Cherry Bomb”. Though his never went BOOM.
A friend had a Bobcat wagon, with the 4 cylinder and automatic. Decent car, but slow.
Loved my baby blue pinto
Back in the bad old seventies one was included with every Lincoln sold
Want? Your new gas tank didn’t cost you $15,000? You got ripped off, my friend.
That will buff right out...
You are driving around in a firebomb.
Let's say a battery is quickly removable and is capable of being replaced in several minutes. The removed battery still has to be rapidly recharged for a future battery replacement. Musk's side show back in the day was just letting people know that Tesla batteries could be replaced.
My thought was instead of having gas stations, there would be battery replacement stations for EVs.
In that scenario the station would have to have a surplus of batteries much like the propane tank swap model......you don’t own the battery you just pay a fee for charge and use.
I remember in high school — a ‘few’ years ago — we used to play rally car driver out on the gravel roads passing through “hill and dale” wheat field land around here. Never mind we didn’t know exactly what “rally car driver” meant, but we faked it anyway. There were lots of dips and rises, some you could get air over (we called it ‘flying’). Well, you can guess where this is going — I got some big air — bottomed the suspension — and the gas tank predictably got ground into the gravel. This was a ‘67 Chev Impala powered by 396 - 325 HP as it was generously measured then. The tank must have had a pretty respectable gauge of steel as there was only one small puncture. Trailing a small stream of leaded gasoline we made it back home — about 20 miles — just as the needle hit “E”. We fixed the hole with a screw and didn’t tell our parents. The screw held for the life of the car (with us anyway, should have kept it). The car salesman wanted to sell my dad the 427 version but it is a good thing we didn’t have access to that.
Early Formula E races had the drivers changing cars at midpoint. Then they decided to just make the races shorter.
And probably all of us will have to pay these “extra premiums” even if we have not purchased one of these now obviously pieces of junk.
My take the reason Musk pushed the swappable battery scenario back in the day was to insure people that batteries could be swapped out if maintenance issues popped up. If a battery swap operation was viable, Tesla would already have a swap shop in operation in the LA area...
Haven’t bothered to watch it. I watch the Hornet Cars.. (INDYCAR!)
I had a similar experience with a “fix” like that. A colleague and I were working in a mill in eastern Oregon back in the early 70s. When we left the mill, we took a back road, all gravel, across the high desert west toward the Cascades. We were both in our company cars. We were bombing along this dirt/gravel road at about 70 mph when my friend noticed his gas gauge was going down. We stopped and found a rock had punctured his gas tank. It was a slow, steady stream, but we were probably 100 miles from the nearest gas station.
I’d read sometime before that that you can use a bar of regular bath soap to plug gasoline leaks. It swells and turns hard. So we tried that and, sure enough, it stopped the leak.
We parted ways. The next time I ran into him a couple years later I asked if he had ever fixed his gas tank. He said “No, the soap ‘patch’ is still there!” In those days, we got new company cars every couple years and he turned it back in with the soap plug still on the tank. LOL. I always wonder how many years that car had that soap plug and if the person who bought it found the plug.
I think I’ve heard of that soap bar trick to use with plastic off-road motorcycle tanks. But I have never remembered to take one — thanks for reminding me! (Although it looks like I’ll be using my e-MTB more, now — no gas tank on that one, just 17 ah of explosive lithium power. Probably better to take a fire extinguisher if there was a type that worked on battery fires).
“17 ah of explosive lithium power”
LOL...nice double entendre!
I bought my wife a Trek E-bike for her birthday last year. It has a Bosch battery and charger system. I’m still scared to death storing it in the garage, but that’s where it is.
I couldn’t afford a Trek but ordered a decent mid-motor-mount e-MTB with full suspension. I don’t know what configuration your wife’s is but the hub motors overheat and won’t go where I want to go off-road. The mid motors use the advantages of low derailleur gearing for steep hills.
Lots of people remove the battery and store it / charge it in a relatively safe place (middle of yard? lol). Usually just a turn of the key to unlatch it. That’s one thing you can’t do on a Tesla!
“Lots of people remove the battery and store it / charge it in a relatively safe place (middle of yard? lol)”
I’ve thought about that and, yes, “middle of the yard” is the only place I can think of. Not near our Doug Fir and Ponderosa Pine trees, that’s for sure.
We rent a storage unit, so maybe there. But the contract probably prohibits that.
Well, you could put it on a little boat out in the lake.
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