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Colonel Sanders posted:Range of the vehicle is 100 miles, but what I find interesting about this car is that the lithium-ion batteries equipped with a liquid cooling system to maintain ideal temperature. In my opinion that shows BMW is not worried about cold weather performance. It goes back to what grover said in the last thread: grover posted:I'm curious as to why everyone thinks EV cars' range is reduced in the cold. Batteries put out a lot of heat when used; so much so that EV cars have to have active cooling systems to keep them from overheating. Even if the batteries start out cold, they would quickly get up to operating temperature. I think a fairer statement would be that initial power is reduced when cold, not that range is reduced. A liquid cooling system doesn't have to run full-time, so before the pack warms up, it won't be trying to stay cool; it may use a trick like the Prius where it keeps hot coolant in a thermos after shutting down to help warm the engine up faster next time: motortrend posted:Okay, consider that behind the Prius's left headlamp is a three-liter stainless-steel vacuum-insulated coolant tank that accepts and stores coolant above 95 degrees F. Purpose? The engine's frequent starting and stopping makes it difficult for the exhaust to stay hot to light off the catalytic converter. Here, when the engine shuts down and begins to cool, hot coolant flows back into the head, keeping things toasty (indeed, the coolant can stay hot in the tank for days).
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Jan 21, 2012 18:06
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IOwnCalculus posted:I've actually seen probably four or five different Leafs (leaves? Last time I was out driving in Miami I saw more Panameras than Priuses, and no real EVs or PHEVs.
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Jan 22, 2012 07:11
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) on the road at this point, maybe even more than that. Only a couple Volts.
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Seat Safety Switch posted:I'll wait until they add the sound from the Jetsons' cars. Some of the Lexus hybrids already make a little beedle-beedle sound as you're stopping so they just need to figure that out and play it over the exterior speaker all the time. I'm trying to find this on youtube and all I'm coming up with is LF-A sounds.
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Jan 23, 2012 20:48
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Seat Safety Switch posted:It's a very faint sound and I think it probably comes from the transmission during the changeover from gas to electric when stopping. It's pretty audible on my dad's HS250h, but it sounds a lot like a lower-pitched Jetsons car. Bweep-weep weep weep. Oh yeah, the inverter noise. I was hoping it was something cool like the Fisker Karma: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_S8kc74Ed8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_S8kc74Ed8
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Jan 23, 2012 23:10
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Options and pricing for the Tesla Model S have been posted: http://www.teslamotors.com/models/options You can get optional rumble seats for the kids, and also double the on-board charging circuits for faster charges: quote:Model S can charge from almost any outlet, anywhere. All Model S cars plug directly into 110 and 240 volt outlets as well as public charging stations using the included Universal Mobile Connector and adapters. The High Power Wall Connector, which installs in your garage, enables cars equipped with Twin Chargers to charge twice as fast as cars equipped with a Single Charger.
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Jan 31, 2012 05:40
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grover posted:Starting price for a Tesla Model S Is $49k, with a US tax credit of $7500, still makes it very expensive. It's the first EV I've seen that I'd consider buying, though. Exactly; it's targeted at people who want the EV that doesn't look like a dorkmobile and are willing to pay for it, and is priced for that and also to keep the company alive until they make their next model of car. Unlike the Leaf, Tesla can't subsidize their research projects with Rogue and Murano sales.
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Feb 1, 2012 20:56
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Wiglaf posted:This could somewhat reduce the size of brakes needed as most would be done through the motors, but for low speed and safety redundancy they can't be deleted. I say low speed because below a certain speed there's no energy recovery, we'd have to actually power the motor to continue using it as a brake. This would not be the most energy efficient but could pretty much eliminate brake wear, and (assuming multiple motor) control braking forces on a per-wheel basis to influence steering/control in the same way as putting down power. Because of substantially reduced brake heat+use I would entertain the idea of inboard brakes or drums. Or at least review the pros and cons. A big rotor on the front wheel to lock it up is hard to give up though no matter how burly the electric is, but if it doesn't get used will rust and cause trouble. The Prius has done this part for close to a decade: light braking is induction, heavy braking and low-speed braking is done with normal friction brakes. The brakes get used, but not enough to make them wear out in the first hundred thousand miles usually.
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Feb 2, 2012 04:07
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Kenshin posted:I work only a few blocks from a Tesla shop that used to be the local Tesla dealership. This is a neighborhood in Seattle with a lot of software companies including Amazon, so there are a LOT of nerdy types. I think the papers you sign to get a Tesla include a clause that you must have a vanity plate that must be at least 800 milliClooneys of smug.
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Feb 14, 2012 21:15
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quote:Tesla’s Roadster Owners Manual [Full Zipped PDF] states that the battery should take approximately 11 weeks of inactivity to completely discharge [Page 5-2, Column 3: PDF]. However, that is from a full 100% charge. If the car has been driven first, say to be parked at an airport for a long trip, that time can be substantially reduced. The Prius traction battery can sit for nine months just fine: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3416077
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Feb 22, 2012 16:46
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Ola posted:The undisclosed surveillance hardware that shows the dwindling battery voltage to the increasingly stressed out Tesla technicians that won't tell the customer probably draws some current as well. Is the undisclosed surveillance hardware going to draw more than an iPad that can idle on 3G for weeks on the built-in 8mm thick 25 watt hour battery?
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Feb 25, 2012 16:03
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Colonel Sanders posted:I will admit it kinda sucks that you can not leave an EV unplugged for long periods of time. On the other hand, basic maintenance is a part of vehicle ownership. If I drove a car for 6 weeks with no oil there would be no question that the resulting damage would be my own fault. I feel Tesla has done enough to warn users about this, in multiple sections the manual states discharging the battery is bad and not covered by warranty, the car will message you if it is about to die. RTFM or pay the price I guess. This is kind of why I hope Zipcar-style EV rentals become more popular. A day or two isn't enough to ruin it, I won't have to care about the upkeep (it'll be contained in the rental cost), and I feel like I don't drive often enough to justify the kind of petrochemical-powered car I'd be happy with (i.e. not a Yaris or Rio). Renting a Leaf for a weekend for a couple hundred bucks that includes insurance and maybe 80 miles of power would solve most of my car issues.
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Feb 26, 2012 16:47
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Colonel Sanders posted:Considering Tesla warns owners about this, and the car notifies the owner and has an alarm, I find this hard to consider newsworthy. The Truth About Cars has a photo of the charging instructions buyers have to initial, and an explanation of battery thing: quote:- The Tesla Roadster’s battery, unlike those in the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt, is made up of 6831 “consumer commodity cells”, basically laptop or cellphone type cells that combine to make up the battery pack. These batteries use Cobalt Dioxide chemistry, which is the most energy dense, and prone to decaying with time as well as use. This is not the case in the Volt or Leaf, which use different chemistry. In addition, the “state of charge” used by the Tesla pack is different; when a Tesla range indicator displays “zero miles”, it could have 5 percent of the battery life left. If the car is then parked without charging, it may drain to zero, leaving the car “bricked”. A Volt, on the other hand, may actually have one half to one third of the battery pack’s life left upon displaying “zero miles”; it only uses 10.4 kW out of its 16kW battery. Exact figures for a Tesla battery weren’t available, but are said to be much higher.
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Feb 27, 2012 00:59
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Cakefool posted:As lexus are Toyota I'll speak from a Toyota viewpoint - the Prius & associated technology keeps the battery within a 60-95% window at all times & it will go through a charge/discharge "cycle" every time you hoof it or use the brakes. This is the same behaviour you'll see in just about any hybrid so he was talking bullshit. Don't believe a single thing a salesman tells you, ever. Some Consumer Reports tests on the Prius too: http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine-archive/2011/february/cars/toyota-prius/overview/index.htm http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine-archive/2011/june/cars/toyota-prius/overview/index.htm
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Mar 25, 2012 19:59
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grover posted:Yeah, this was what I meant. Which I guess is 4 digits, technically. My point was that saving $700/year on gas is a much bigger impact on when you're looking at a $2k difference between used cars than a $20k difference (or whatever) new. Don't hold your breath, in my area (Miami) the only Priuses that cheap have six digits of mileage or are eight or more years old.
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Nov 28, 2012 01:42
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Mortanis posted:The Tesla website claims that the Supercharger doesn't affect battery life or warranty at all. I have no idea if that's the same for all chargers. I've had an implicit understanding that cramming electrons into a battery in a short period of time is bad for it, but I'm not sure that's ever really been backed up by real data. I'd be interested in seeing some links on that, as I use my local CHAdeMO once a week. It's bad if you do it to a single cell, but Tesla uses battery packages with thousands of small cells to both make fast charging safer and to prevent Dreamliner-style battery fires, something Elon Musk loves to smugtweet about : 
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Jun 5, 2013 23:54
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dietcokefiend posted:Same reason your car has a battery, just more "everyone dies without it" thing going on since it falls out of the sky if electronics don't work. Airplanes don't fall out of the sky, they glide rather well, for miles and miles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider The 12V system in internal combustion cars like the Mustang, Prius, Wrangler, Golf, and loving every other car runs radios, instruments, computers, and the starter motor. In passenger jets, it does the same thing, although the starter motor starts a small engine in the butt of the airplane that provides pneumatic power to start the big engines.
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Jun 7, 2013 02:57
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eeenmachine posted:The real problem was thermal runaway in the battery packs causing them to burst into flames... A concern on any aircraft. Yup. The Tesla and SpaceX battery packs fight that by having smaller cells, which means more surface area for heat to be conducted away from the battery chemistry to the metal casing, which conducts the heat away like a heat sink. The Dreamliner's used larger cells for the weight efficiency (which is also why they went Li-ion), which is a reasonable tradeoff to make for an airplane part. Dragging an extra few hundred pounds of battery up to 40,000 feet once a day is an entirely different matter than having a few extra pounds inches off the ground like on the Model S.
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Jun 7, 2013 03:15
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Coredump posted:But what about when they're taking those extra pound up into SPACE? You forgot that part in your comparison. Not every part of every Bond villain's plan has to make perfect sense.
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Jun 7, 2013 16:00
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Squibbles posted:Plane designers are pretty obsessive about saving weight. Just look at the F35 story about the sacrifices they made just to save a few pounds. And that was just to save 11 lbs!! That's more about government contractors wanting to drive up costs; if they go over budget the penalty is they get more money.
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Jun 7, 2013 18:22
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IOwnCalculus posted:Chevy mitigates it to an extent with a very tightly sealed fuel system, but even then I think if it goes near a year without refueling, it will start running the engine to empty the tank. From a friend of mine: quote:Finally made it. Went two months without using any gasoline. 
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Jun 19, 2013 06:32
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Coredump posted:What really makes me sad is the fact that Better Place got the whole ev refill problem solved, it just didn't catch on. Now the company is going under. I wonder if Model S supercharger stations will someday have automated battery swap stations as well. They didn't appear to have a business model, just a blog post or two worth of ideas and lots of people who thought it was a good idea. Electric Vehicles are kind of at the stage where idiots and assholes just say it a lot and look for investment. Elephanthead posted:Volt, all the inconvenience of an electric and gas automobile. Would be an awesome all electric or Prius type hybrid but instead it is a weird electric with a built in generator. GM you got it wrong change it! Ahaha, link the Jalopnik comment you copied this from.
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Jun 19, 2013 16:44
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grover posted:They put over 22 gallons of gas into an Audi for that demo. Why didn't they do that demonstration with a car more people are likely to be cross-shopping an EV against, like a prius? Or at a station that charged less than $4.50/gallon? Well, aside from the fact that it would have been done in less than half the time and a third the cost. They're not marketing the Model S at the Prius set, they're marketing it at the S-klasse and luxury crossover set; this is also why a Model S starts at $60k and not $24k. $4.50/gallon is because they're in California.
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Jun 22, 2013 16:17
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MattD1zzl3 posted:I am by no means an engineer, but isnt a regenerative braking system (that would be on all the time) pretty much what that man was trying to suggest? They're suggesting a perpetual motion machine.
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Nov 25, 2013 17:13
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Elephanthead posted:Eventually Tesla will run out of stock to issue to pay the bills. "Free" charging by anyone besides governments is not sustainable. It works well as a marketing gimmick when consumption is low, but get 5% market saturation and lines for free charging will become unbearable. I am surprised some redneck hasn't filled a semi full of lead acid batteries and supercharged them for free to power his trailer park home. There's probably some DRM-like authentication on the chargers to prevent exactly that from happening. Battery pack can't provide a certificate chain tracing back to corporate HQ? No charging allowed.
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Jul 17, 2014 16:03
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angryrobots posted:The new EV's don't already do this? Volt is the only one? I'm pretty sure all the modern EVs and hybrids. Consumer Reports tested a 200,000 mile, nine-year-old Prius with its original battery and found that the battery wear was mostly insignificant: http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2011/02/the-200-000-mile-question-how-does-the-toyota-prius-hold-up/index.htm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9CsEEk30q4
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Jan 5, 2015 07:10
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Mange Mite posted:Removing any part from the bottom of a car is already pretty complex, let alone automating it. There's also steps you've left out like disconnecting the liquid cooling systems. Now you have to do all this either on a lift or a pit built into the ground, then get your 1300+ lbs of batteries out and stored somehow, and get a new one out of storage, then lift and install it. That's an extremely complex process. You might as well say "well it's easy to replace the headlights in this car, all you need to do is drop the engine then screw the light bulbs in." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_XEv2f_Uhw demo starts at 42s
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Jan 29, 2015 19:34
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The Locator posted:I'd bet money on it being slower than a P85D. What all's not slower than the P85D with Ludicrous Speed?
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Aug 4, 2015 04:35
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eeenmachine posted:I installed an update last night but I only skimmed the notes. Didn't see anything about lane assist, only improved adaptive cruise at highway speed. Looks like it's part of the annual DEF CON festivities: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33802344 Tesla has a Model S down on the contest floor, kind of interested to see what happens with it.
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Aug 6, 2015 18:58
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pun pundit posted:Visual signage and lane markings are the best we can do for humans. Signage and lane markings made to be machine readable from the start seems like a good first step. Then you need all cars on the road to be automated, communicate with each other their course, speed, and intended maneuvers, and be equipped with proximity sensors. Now you have a good, efficient, fast, safe transportation system... until someone goes into traffic without a radio beacon and all other traffic grinds to a halt for safety reasons. Machines can already read the same signage and lane markings humans do, and not just standard stuff, but things like house numbers. Existing self-driving or assisted-driving cars don't rely on other cars being beaconed or communicating either, they use RADAR and SONAR. The system exists today and the terrible parts are basically the human drivers. Google's Waze acquisition has been really valuable for getting updated GPS-surveyed map data, with proper signage read in and everything. There's an interchange near me (826/836 for any Miami readers) that changes shape every few months of construction, and Waze has the changes within hours.
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Oct 27, 2015 05:06
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Linedance posted:I can confirm that a Prius has no personality though, regardless of how it is driven. I enjoyed driving a third-gen Prius in Vegas about seven or so years ago on those dusty roads, flooring it everywhere, making the back slip around, only getting 35mpg.
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Mar 16, 2016 22:13
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Boten Anna posted:How do those things store all that goddamned electricity anyway? Do they just bury a shitton of batteries akin to the ones they use in the cars? Sell it to the grid?
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Apr 4, 2016 23:24
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Throatwarbler posted:The Tesla is a very heavy car and the amount of energy that needs to be dissipated by the brakes obviously goes up very quickly with increasing weight. Doing a gradual slowdown from highway speed to a stop in a Prius recovers almost all of the kinetic energy, with the mechanical brakes only being used right at the end; in a crash stop, it's probably all mechanical brakes though. For this under-defined Model S track driving scenario, how much of the braking can be regenerative instead of lossy?
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Apr 8, 2016 17:41
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I've seen plugs for block heaters in Canadian parking lots. Do people charge off those or just keep their cars from freezing solid?
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Apr 17, 2016 04:09
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Mange Mite posted:Displacement doesn't directly affect weight, engine size, or fuel economy, though. It, uh, absolutely does. You need to spend fuel to balance out the air displaced, you need to have interior volume for the air displaced, and containing that volume costs mass.
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Apr 28, 2016 15:14
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Michael Scott posted:How did they do that, a custom firmware from Tesla? If you're buying $15M of cars, you get to ask for things like that.
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May 10, 2016 21:19
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Boten Anna posted:Probably my favorite line in the tv show Silicon Valley so far is the incubator mans freaking out at the business mans being there, which he deduced from him having a Volt parked outside. What season is that? In the first episode of season 3 Richard drives a Volt.
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May 17, 2016 15:25
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Linedance posted:electrifying of heavy trucks is a cool idea, and even if figuring out implementation will take a while, anything to get lovely noisy diesels off the road is a win. What would be even cooler though, is fully autonomous trucking. Just think, a convoy of trucks, all driving themselves, never once trying to overtake each other up a hill at 0.5mph speed differential on a two lane highway. They could even separate the cargo boxes from the wheelie parts, and have some kind of infrastructure to allow chaining up hundreds of cargo boxes in a big linkage that runs on special separated roads, and only need to share streets for runs from endpoints to local depots.
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Jul 21, 2016 14:53
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Mercury Ballistic posted:Uber helped Carnegie Mellon build a research center, then head hunted much of the talent after it opened. Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek's car takeover research was funded by their employer to build business doing security analysis on cars, but as soon as they got an offer from Uber they quit taking calls from potential customers and hosed right off without telling their employer. You don't have to be an awful poo poo person to work at Uber, but it helps!
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Aug 17, 2016 05:38
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Ryand-Smith posted:Eh, ford jumped on the middle plug in (C Max) and every non truck has a hybrid and plug in option (I wish there was a hybrid crossover) I'm not seeing the Fiesta, Taurus, or Mustang hybrid/EV options here: http://www.ford.com/new-hybrids-evs/?gnav=header-cars
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Oct 29, 2016 15:35
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Three-Phase posted:You know I have been focusing on the traction battery - has anyone here ran into issues with other key components on their EV or hybrid vehicles? I'm talking about the motor/generators, M/G bearings, power cabling, or power semiconductor components. The top two entries on Consumer Reports' list are the Prius and the Lexus CT 200h (less efficient slightly fancier Prius), and TrueDelta has the Prius as more reliable than the Corolla or Camry. I suspect that it's reliable enough that there's not going to be a lot of scuttlebutt about anything like that. I remember a fairly epic PriusChat thread about somebody doing a transaxle swap maybe in 2009 or so, back before I realized I didn't drive enough for a Prius.
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Oct 30, 2016 21:51
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