• 0 Posts
  • 9 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
Cake day: October 25th, 2023
  • Lorax91@alien.topBtoElectric Vehicles@gearhead.town•Long waits for chargingEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I can take a picture of my local costco at any time of day where the five lanes of gas lines stretch to the end of the block.

    I’ve waited in a few long Costco gas lines, and the longest that took was ~20 minutes…including the time to refuel to 100%. Plus there are usually several other choices nearby, if you’re willing to pay a few more bucks to save most of that time.

    Compared to recent stories of people waiting hours to charge EVs on a busy weekend, even Costco gas lines aren’t bad. We’re going to need a lot more chargers.

  • Lorax91@alien.topBtoCars@gearhead.town•GM considers bringing Hybrid options back to North AmericaEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    you still need all of the power of a Model 3 or you can cheap out, I guess, but nobody wants anemic cars with a 0-60 time of “well, eventually, maybe, in favorable conditions”.

    I have a PHEV with a weak 0-60 time in electric mode, but that turns out to rarely be an issue. In city traffic it’s fine, because the instant torque is better than many gas cars. And on the rare occasions when I need to get on the freeway on a short on-ramp, the gas engine can kick in to take care of that. Not the same as driving a fully electric vehicle, but it fits my driving style. Most people don’t need supercar acceleration for their daily driving needs.

    The old school PHEV designs like the Volt with their 150 hp electric motors are just too underpowered in 2023

    A problem with the Volt is that it maxed out at 149 hp, because it wasn’t designed to combine gas and electric power sources to drive the wheels. The Rav4 Prime PHEV has 302 combined hp, and the Audi PHEV I’m driving has 362 hp.

    In terms of overall production cost, PHEVs are in an odd spot between traditional hybrids and fully electric vehicles. They’ll probably fade away soon because of this, but for some use cases they still have a place for now.

  • Lorax91@alien.topBtoCars@gearhead.town•GM considers bringing Hybrid options back to North AmericaEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    At current prices ($120 per kwh), a Model 3 battery is maybe $6000-7000.

    $9840 for the 82 kWh Model 3 battery using your price figure, versus $2160 for an 18 kWh PHEV battery. Which gives the Model 3 ~250 miles of highway range in mild weather, compared to more than double that for an efficient PHEV like the Rav4 Prime. So you’d need a $20k battery to match the range of the R4P, if a battery like that was small enough to be practical.

    But, you say, you don’t need 500+ miles of range most days. That’s right, most days most people only need 40-50 miles of driving range…like a decent PHEV.

  • Lorax91@alien.topBtoElectric Vehicles@gearhead.town•LA to San Francisco/Bay Area 11/25: 3 hour wait at Electrify AmericaEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    But like Musk, the legacy automaker CEOs are ALSO racist sociopaths trying to dismantle democracy

    If they are, they aren’t openly displaying it like Elon. A decent company would have removed him a long time ago, or at least banned him from using social media.

    If everyone running major corporations is equally awful, then we’re all screwed and we might as well “roll coal” to our inevitable doom. Or if we have any hope of a better future, we need to hold openly awful people accountable for their actions.