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Finger Prince posted:a huge loving fruity fog of PG. Please don’t post my stage name at Swingin’ Richard’s DoLittle posted:I think ~63% efficiency is the record for a combustion power plant (combined cycle gas turbine) in electricity generation. A large diesel generators get up to 51%. F1 engines can also hit this in optimal conditions. Good modern, boiler - steam turbine power plants tend to peak around 48%. Of course if the waste heat can be used for example district heating the overall efficiency can be very high. I think passenger car diesels can reach up to 40% and gas engines 30-35%. Ok, this falls more in line with what I was told. So there’s a little efficiency to gain there if you were burning like-for-like gasoline. Being that a sizable chunk of those power plants burn coal, there’s a point for ICE motors there from a pollution standpoint (unless the EPA gets off it’s collective dead rear end and enforces emissions for power plants). However, as everyone else mentioned, when we move to solar and wind down the line the pollution thing swings back to EVs again.
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Jun 8, 2018 20:59
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A few weeks ago I was whining about the working with dealers while hunting for a Chevrolet Volt lease and the $550+ a month offers I was receiving for the car. Finally figured out why: Chevrolet's set the residual for the lease to 48% of the MSRP, rather than the 60% average you see across most vehicles with a 36-month, 12k mile per year lease. Chevy only wants to give you half of the EV Tax credit back as lease cash as well, versus Honda who apparently is giving you $7k (but has a lease residual of 44%, which seems really, really low for a Honda car). I guess this is Chevy and Honda's way to basically say "Yeah uh how bout you just buy the drat thing and stop worrying" so that is probably what I'll end up doing.
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Jun 10, 2018 01:38
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I test drove an '18 Volt today: Highs: - Holy poo poo the engineering in the Voltec drivetrain is excellent. The gas generator kicking in was almost imperceptible and the one I was driving was in "engine maintenance mode" which I only knew due to dash saying so. The only time I heard the engine was when I was messing with the settings and knocked it into Hold and the engine strummed up like when you accelerate in a CVT. - Steering and overall handling were good, and in "L" the drivetrain felt exactly like a Tesla and i3 with the single pedal driving, which is what I was looking for. - Apple CarPlay/Android Auto is excellent and the general infotainment setup is surprisingly good. Digging the cross-traffic alert and other safety gadgets, though I'm sad none of the discounted models I can find have the automatic cruise control option. Apparently that's pretty rare to find in-stock. - Looks like a Pininfarina-designed work of art compared to the only other EREV in its class, the Honda Clarity. Lows: - You can see where GM cut costs in the sea of cheap-as-hell looking plastic covering the dash, but I guess that's the trade-off for that drat good drivetrain. Oddly the interior of the Clarity is miles better but the exterior of that car is The Icon of Ugly. Like when you go to Hell (like all Goons are destined) we'll be surrounded by PT Cruisers, HHRs and Claritys. - The center seat in the rear is literally useless and I don't understand why they even installed a belt there. - Bolt, i3, Tesla and possibly new Leaf owners will be leaving your rear end in the dust acceleration-wise. You'll still give Cute-Utes and Skyactiv Mazda 3's a complete walloping off the line, though. - Still uses gas but I'm never going to be able to afford a Model 3, if they even exist 3 years from now when the "$35k model" is finally produced. I really like the Volt, I'm just terrified of the depreciation on it. The Chevy dealer was pretty up-front about how hard you're gonna get hit on this thing but that's the nature of buying a vehicle with ever-evolving technology powering it. I feel good about how few problems people have had with them and have no worries about reliability aside from the weird issues that pop up with a bad 12v battery. Now to navigate the labyrinth that is auto loan financing. 
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Jun 24, 2018 01:02
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:As long as you're willing to drive it for 10+ depreciation doesn't matter that much. If you're really concerned, hook up those sweet sweet subsidized leases. Subsidized leases come in as cash on lease, which as best I can tell is $3,800, so if you want the full $7,500 you end up buying it outright. The dealers I've been working with have no real desire to push the lease, and even the one decent sales guy I found for the test drive said that they don't "like" doing the leases on the cars. Also I have a mental issue and rarely keep cars for more than 2-3 years because there are so many good cars and I want to own them all goddamnit.  I'm also looking to pay this bad-boy off in 48 months so it won't be a huge issue after year 3 when I get bored and someone produces a machine that sounds and drives like the Toyota TS030 (except for the "exploding every few laps during LeMans" thing).
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Jun 24, 2018 16:05
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:the PHEV Pacifica is almost good enough that you can ignore the fact that it's a Chryler This is true, yeah. If Honda or Toyota made the Pacifica it'd be earning a shitload more press than it gets now. The Pacifica team has to be incredibly frustrated to be a part of Chrysler at this point because there's honest talent there and they know they're dead in the water.
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Jun 26, 2018 01:59
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bawfuls posted:Tesla modules are the most energy dense on any current OEM EVs though. There is a reason they are the most popular among the DIY conversion enthusiasts these days, despite Leaf and Volt batteries being more plentiful. They also have the most robust integrated cooling system, with a coolant jacket that touches two sides of every cell. Zero Motorcycles’ reps claimed back in 2017 when I snagged my bike that their chemistry had the best density per kg in the automotive world at the expense of fast charge times (only 1C before they literally make you blow a fuse to prevent overcharging the pack). They’ve most definitely been beaten by now, but I can’t help but wonder if anyone had the wherewithal to snag a bunch of packs, pare them down to some equal chunk like 5kWh and see who wins.  Also thank you all for introducing me to the Ioniq, a car I cannot own in GA because I don’t think it exists anywhere but the magical land of actual US freedom, good seafood tacos and weed. 
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Jul 3, 2018 00:22
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Ola posted:Energica has CCS, but only 11 kWh battery so it's probably far from 50 kW. Zero had CHAdeMO as an option on a 2012 DS bike of sorts and took it away after they discovered a chunk of HVDC chargers in CA said they adopted the CHAdeMO standard but it was actually CCS with the appropriate communications protocol. Turns out that CHAdeMO requires you to be able to drop to a DC voltage of 100 volts or so and the manufacturers of cheap HVDC units went  and the 115-something-Volt packs on the Zeros wouldn’t charge (CCS iirc starts at like 200 volts so they started there). Zero was testing with some good ABB units or something high quality while the majority of installs were cheaper poo poo.Its the only way the X-chassis folks like myself can get a proper fast charge so it especially hurts. FWIW i was futzing with the FXS’s main bike board in a telnet session and saw a flag listed for CHAdeMO charging input. Zero had really intended it but I’m guessing they didn’t want to deal with angry customers shouting at them because they went to the one poo poo-tastic charger in town.
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Jul 3, 2018 19:22
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If you are sad about not owning Mazdas, go drive a Skyactiv 3 hatch with the automatic. You’ll come to lose all interest in Mazdas soon enough. (I’m still bitter because the 1st gen MS3 was that good and I loved mine dearly, and yet the newest 3’s are pig-slow garbage that is nothing more than an embarrassment for the same company that made the MS3/MS6). Also I’m still waiting to see what Mini eventually does with their EV Cooper plans. I have a bad feeling it’ll be given a woefully underpowered motor to prevent it from rubbing elbows with its BMW brethren but I also heard that the people that leased their test mules in CA were putting up a fight like the EV1 and RAV4 EV owners did when they were forced to turn in their leases. Also I don’t even want to think of the rattles coming from that cabin without an engine to drown them out.
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Jul 11, 2018 03:12
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Ulf posted:New topic: I've been idly plotting out EV trips around here for a 100-mile-range vehicle (Zero SR). It looks like if I want to go from home (Denver) to Mt Rushmore there's a ~200 mile gap between J1772 stations, so I'd have to carry a 7lb. portable EVSE (NEMA 14-50 to J1772) and wait a few hours in some hopefully-friendly RV parks. Things are still pretty adventurous out here for a vehicle like that, and it's crazy how much just a little more charging presence will change things. Are you assuming taking the trip with an SR with a charge tank or the power tank? The charge tank is an absolute necessity as it gives you a 6kW charger vs. the standard built-in charger’s paltry 1.3kW, unless you’re willing to hack in a Diginow supercharger of sorts. It can be done, you just need to make sure that you have a willing host of sorts at the RV Park, else you may find yourself camping overnight at a hotel at a 120v outlet. The FXS still has a poo poo-ton of warranty left on it so I’m not touching anything as of yet, but I’m also exploring the idea of swapping out the pitiful 700w charger for a 4.6kw unit of sorts. That would make the bike a true “screw about in the mountains and find a charger for lunch” machine instead of the “make it there and back and lol woe unto thee if you get stuck charging somewhere” machine it is now. I wish Zero would slap in a larger charger since the DC thing is dead but I sincerely doubt they want to spend the money on that now.
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Jul 18, 2018 14:02
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Can someone please point me out to the magical Supercharger-to-CCS Adapter, because that would make me buy a Volt loving pronto. Cheap-poo poo HVDC garbage exists outside of the major city centers in the South and I have no desire to drive a 200-mile EV 120 miles in a single direction to find that the charger poo poo the bed. Superchargers work incredibly well from what I’ve heard however. Also as far as I know Model S units do not come with a CHAdeMO-to-Tesla Adapter in the North American markets, only Japan. You have to buy it separately here for a ridiculous cost but it’s hardly worth it when superchargers are easily found around the US.
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Jul 19, 2018 17:16
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The most beautiful thing will be that, when Tesla dies, we’ll see some postmortem analyses showing that the company, all-in-all, wasn’t doing too bad but was killed by a bunch of nerds and stock brokers posting every single bit of bad news they could make up so they can short the stock or buy when it’s low.
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Jul 20, 2018 15:13
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 00:17 |
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wargames posted:The issue i see is the ramp up/change over in production. That and the US government has gone especially bug-gently caress insane as of recent and there’s a non-zero chance they’ll start punishing people who bring poo poo in or out of the border (or just screwing industries over for political points with an increasingly unhinged, angry and idiotic chunk of the US populace). I can see an act banning sales of foreign-manufactured vehicles being introduced by the House and a bunch of desperate politicians voting for it for points with their dumbest supporters.
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Jul 22, 2018 04:37
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