In the recent years we’ve been bombarded by propaganda trying to shove electric cars down our throat, regardless of the fact that nobody really wants them, so I’ll write some things about that.
First of all, I have to say that I actually like electric cars as a concept. The electric motor is much more reliable and easy to maintain than the internal combustion engine. It also has excellent performance curve. My problem is with other things: first, the Li-ion battery is simply unfit for purpose. It decays after a few years, which is a problem since it’s the most expensive part of the car. It uses up Lithium, which is a very rare element that has to be mined and transported across huge distances, it’s a much more limited finite resource than petroleum, the batteries pose an inherent fire hazard which increases with age, use and mechanical damage, in order to power a car a battery needs to have huge capacity, and in order to charge such a huge battery you need either lots of time, or you need to shove an incredible amount of amps into the battery in a very short period of time, in your garage during the night, and this makes me uneasy, because if something goes wrong you have an incredibly deadly mixture of high current, dangerous chemistry and fire. Some of the battery issues can be resolved in the future, but we are not there yet. Right now the towing companies outright refuse to deal with wrecked electric cars because they are such a hazard.
Also, the electric cars are incredibly uneconomical. They cost more and do less. Apparently, most people agree with me since adoption of electric cars was not widespread, outside the circle of rich hipsters at least. You see, there’s a much more ecological and economical option: get a diesel with a modern particle filter and you get something that goes fast, sips fuel, is so low emission it actually beats most sources of electricity and certainly beats the environmental impact of Li-ion batteries, and is comparatively a bargain. Which is why the eco-nutcases are now working to badmouth and eventually ban diesel. Don’t get me wrong, I’m actually in favour of outlawing the old diesel shitboxes that leave black clouds of suffocation behind them, but we are talking about cars that don’t have particle filters. Euro 5 and Euro 6 diesels are not only not a problem, they are actually the best solution available. Everybody should drive those and the ecological impact of cars would drop to the point of background noise. Also, natural gas makes great sense as fuel, since it’s abundant and cheap, and you can easily convert gasoline engines to run on it and reduce their environmental impact, not on the combustion side, but on the oil refinery side of the equation.
But when we get to the energy supply side of things, it’s not like electricity is actually an abundant resource. In fact, I don’t see additional nuclear power plants being built to offset the expected increase in power consumption caused by the electric cars. Everybody talks about those stupid windmills that are the most useless and dirty power source of all time, and solar panels which are basically toxic waste, don’t work in most places for the majority of time, and work only at the time of day when people don’t charge their electric cars; the peak expected consumption would be over night. And oh yeah, neither the windmills nor the solar panels are recyclable. It’s just terrible landfill fodder, which makes “ecological” electricity sources terrible for the environment.
Which is why I expect the following to take place.
Now it’s “diesel is nasty, has to be banned, electric cars are pure and clean and wonderful”. Let’s say everybody switches to electric cars. Then it will be “electric cars consume more power in a day than a normal household consumes in a year, how dare you drive those pigs!”, “electric cars use components sourced from poor countries/using child labour/consuming finite resources, you should all feel guilty and kill yourselves for driving them”, and so on, ad nauseam. The next step would obviously be to restrict private vehicle ownership and push us to public transportation, which would of course be as crowded as those Japanese bullet trains where people are packed as sardines in a can. Which brings us to the next step, where the eco-freaks will simply kill us all because that solves all problems.
This aged pretty well.
https://www.jutarnji.hr/autoklub/video/video-ovako-izgleda-kad-elektricni-automobil-eksplodira-na-punjacu-mislili-smo-da-je-bom8ba-15016856?cx_testId=1&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=3&utm_source=pianojl&utm_medium=widget&utm_campaign=pianojutarnji#cxrecs_s
It did, but it’s a moot point.
The firemen need to be educated that lithium fires should not be extinguished with water but with foam or other alternatives because using water generates hydrogen which is highly explosive. In literally every electric car fire firemen just made things worse.
The thing is, moving a car requires a lot of energy, and storing a lot of energy in a single place is dangerous. Hollywood car explosions, while a bit exaggerated, are a trope for a reason. You should have seen the skepticism when car engine was introduced (for example here) – and while today we may laugh about it, a lot of that hate was completely warranted. Early cars were way deadlier vehicles than any car today. I don’t see how this can be avoided entirely, it can only reduced by better engineering, as it was for gasoline cars. And remember, so far, electric cars still have way better fire safety statistics than gasoline cars.
Personally, I’m not too happy about another thing – electric cars have way better acceleration, and when enough of them get on the roads, I believe that will become a major issue. Think of the way people are driving today with their slow cars, and then imagine what happens when everyone can accelerate to 100 kmh/80 mph in under 5 seconds. The situation you have today with e-scooters will move from the pavements to the roads and it will take a death toll until things get better.
I don’t think you understand that firemen literally can’t do anything once a LiIon battery catches fire, because it only takes one defective cell and then it’s a chain reaction in a very strong battery case that would have to be removed from the rest of the vehicle, and then mechanically torn apart or, I don’t know, submerged in liquid nitrogen in order to put it out, and if the cells are mechanically crushed, the chemical fire would reignite when the battery is taken out of N. It’s almost the same type of problem as a thermite fire, or runaway nuclear reaction, in the sense that the problem is self-generating and the only way you can deal with it is to dilute the mass, remove oxygen and lower the temperature, basically reducing solutions to liquefied inert gasses. Liquid nitrogen, argon, helium or CO2 would do it.
I’m aware of that. Basically, the best bet is to contain the fire and let it burn out, and afterwards cool it down. I did a bit of reading of Tesla first responder manuals just now and was surprised that they recommend that even water is good enough as a coolant if you don’t pour it in the open battery but spray it on casing.
But I’m not disputing that battery fires are hard to distinguish. It’s definitely a valid argument against EVs. It’s just not that it’s the end of the world if they do catch fire, and they catch fire less often than gasoline cars. In the end, it’s a question of statistics, and EVs are so far less of a fire hazard. I mean, gasoline car catching fire doesn’t even make the news – frequently quoted number is 3 fires for every 1000 crashes, and 26 fires for every 1000 fatal car crashes, compared to 0.13 fires for 1000 Tesla crashes. Couldn’t find any statistics on charging fires, that’s too rare.
This “fires per crash” statistics are very deceptive, because they are made for the ICE vehicles. If you make an analogy with phones, it’s the equivalent of a phone catching fire due to mechanical damage of the LiIon cell. However, if you add fires due to chemical fatigue of the battery due to aging, or manufacturing errors, things look differently. You can say that battery fires are not too common and everybody has them in phones and laptops, and that’s also deceptive because often battery swelling is caught before it gets to the point of causing a fire (I recently had two such cases with laptops, Mario had one), and I also preventatively replaced two batteries in old iPhones, age over 2.5 years. As electric cars start to age, there will be more issues, and their seriousness is all but guaranteed since the cells are contained in a strong metal case which will increase probability of cell swelling producing an actual explosion. Essentially, with a phone or a laptop, when the battery swells it’s obvious and most people react quickly and replace it. In rare cases, they charge a hot swollen battery and it catches fire. I don’t know how many such fires or cases of battery spouting hot toxic liquid are caught in time, or cause minor damage, and how many grow into structure fires. I do know, however, that those batteries make me uncomfortable, because I have a shitload of them at home. Five people, each with several current devices, each leaving several obsolete devices behind as they are replaced, you do the math.
I know how devices tend to multiply with only two people, I think we’re at around 15 battery-powered devices at home right now. And that’s even though I tend to avoid devices with battery since I don’t want to go through a hassle of charging them and/or replacing them. So I can imagine what happens when you increase multiplier from 2 to 5. 🙂
But, what’s one to do? You can’t buy the mobile phone without a battery. I recently bought a hair/beard trimmer and couldn’t find a decent one without a battery even for that. And I suspect benefits of EVs (the main one being that charging is way cheaper than gas) will continue to increase their number on the roads. You can’t do much more than try to push probabilities in your favor; you can’t exactly live risk-free as everything is a risk. You can see how expensive it is to lower a single risk at the expense of everything else in the coronavirus example; yes, it’s a nasty and often lethal disease, but if you keep people in perpetual lockdown economic consequences alone will decimate you and cause more damage than the virus.
Contrary to what one might conclude, I don’t give that much fuck about it. I just try to be aware of the problem, and not exacerbate it by leaving unattended devices on a charger when I leave home and go for a vacation, or push the age limits of batteries. The key word is “try”, because I only recently actually threw away some ancient phones that I kept in my drawer as “backup”, as if anyone would actually use a ten year old device if their new one failed. 🙂 This is contrary to my usual practice of not throwing things away if they actually work at all, but with ancient LiIon batteries, old laptops, tablets, phones, wireless handsfree devices etc. it’s a case of just taking up space and increasing risk of a chemical fire due to battery failure, while not really serving a useful purpose at all. So, I occasionally just take all that shit to the recycling yard and make it someone else’s problem. Unfortunately, the “greener” you try to behave (keeping and repurposing devices for as long as possible), the more you increase the risk of LiIon battery fire, which adds to reasons why I hate them; another reason is that they are increasingly integrated with devices to the point where manufacturers obviously try to limit the lifespan of the device to the lifespan of the battery. Ideally, a battery would be a standard module that would be the same across all manufacturers, and should be user replaceable.
One can argue that the battery lasts about as long as the rest of the device, which is sometimes actually true – the LCD screens wear out, for instance, so when a phone or a laptop is ready for battery replacement, it’s usually already obsolete enough and worn out enough to deserve retirement anyway. However, I recently had a situation where in 3 out of 4 cases the device was just fine and could be returned to daily use after battery replacement, and only in one case (13″ Macbook Pro) the CPU had only 2 cores and was too slow for the intended purpose, and the 8GB RAM was soldered on and couldn’t be upgraded, so the device was retired. The other devices were Mihael’s iPhone 8, which was perfectly fine except for the battery, my iPhone 8+ which was perfectly fine and even the battery was replaced only as a precaution, and my 15″ Macbook Pro which is perfectly fine, except for the battery, and the fact that the SSD was too small so I upgraded it to 1TB and returned it to daily use.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I have an old iPhone 4 which still works, even battery is still OK, and can’t muster the will to get rid of it under pretense that I might find some use for it, such as convenient smart home control panel attached to the wall, which is the project I will realistically never get to.
The issue is, among other things, that the major advantage of Li-ion batteries is they can be molded into any shape so they’re stuffing them into all parts of the device where they can’t put anything else. That pretty much rules out any reusability except for external batteries which are reusable by design.
That’s true in theory, but in practice, they are just rectangular blocks of more-less standard size. Apple’s battery pack looks like several phone-sized LiPo cells connected in a battery, and it could as well have been modular:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LcLUROT2thk/maxresdefault.jpg
I can see hardware designers in Apple going crazy if they couldn’t make battery for each new model a millimetre thinner. 🙂
It’s probably modular as it looks, but that modularity is optimized for easier production of their line instead of for repairability. Planned obsolescence or not, I can see how some sort of standard for batteries would make already complex compatibility requirements even harder for manufacturers. As it is, they are happy that desktop PCs are slowly becoming more and more marginalized because vertical integration makes them less dependent on competitors and earns greater margins. It’s much easier and cheaper to create a piece of hardware that doesn’t need to be internally compatible with a bunch of vendors and standards.
I found this example; this is how the defective battery fire looks like. It looks bad, but I’m actually impressed with how vehicle handled the fire – fire started slowly, permitting driver to exit the car, and you can see how underbelly protection works to shield the fire from entering the cabin. In addition to underbelly shield, Tesla has 16 firewalls in the battery itself, and the total amount of energy stored in battery is allegedly 10% of the amount of energy stored in a typical car gasoline tank. Which would have simply exploded if ignited.
I’m not afraid of a battery fire as a result of an accident; basically, if the accident was bad enough to damage the battery, it probably means that the car is scrap anyway, and the only problem arises if you’re trapped in a crushed car that just caught fire.
What I’m actually worried about is the battery catching fire or exploding because of either a manufacturing defect or degradation due to aging, when left unattended in a garage, presumably during the night, and the fire spreading to the house. That would be really bad. Also, the idea of going on a vacation, plugging the car into a charger somewhere at Brinje, leaving to find something to eat, and returning to find the car with all my stuff on fire, isn’t very appealing either. Sure, those fires are rare, *now*. But what happens when those batteries become cheaper, more mass-produced, and as they age, the cars no longer being new? I would expect the same issues as we had with laptops and phones. Almost all were fine when new (except Note 7), and as they age, the batteries with most power per weight get more prone to bloating and catching fire. Also, the superchargers contribute to the problem, because the faster you push those electrons in, the more you cook the chemistry in the cell, and if it’s older and degraded, the more likely that it will catch fire.
Batteries will probably be the component that limits the age of usability for EVs more than motors or anything else. The thing is, there are Tesla batteries, which Tesla is confident will last at least 10 years as all their vehicles have 10-year warranty, and there’s everybody else where batteries last way shorter. I’ve talked to taxi driver who has an EV that’s 3 years old, and batteries have degraded so much that he’s basically charging every 2 hours when he’s working. Technically he’s leasing the battery, but he can’t get the replacement. On the other hand, Tesla will replace the degraded battery and typically repackage it into Powerpacks where the peak discharge is not important. Still, as the oldest EV producer, they seem aware of the issue, that’s why they’re chasing the million mile battery technology.
That’s absolutely and obviously false; just go to youtube and search “tesla battery degradation” or “tesla range loss” and you’ll see what I mean. They want you to think their batteries are somehow better than normal LiIon, but they are so obviously not. They have water cooled battery packs and active thermal management, but many recent EVs have the same thing, and the cells inside are just normal LiIon chemistry, nothing special or extraordinary, which makes the expected lifetime of the battery identical to every other LiIon pack made by a premium brand. I had to change Apple’s battery after 4.5 years so I sincerely doubt Tesla is going to last longer, especially since I didn’t really pressure mine; it had less than 300 cycles when it bloated.
Also, battery degradation is a nasty thing that doesn’t really show in obvious ways such as a huge loss of capacity. I had bloated batteries that had 85% of nominal capacity, and you would expect it to be really dead. It’s a complicated issue that lends itself really well to marketing bullshit because manufacturers can argue their point and from a narrow technical viewpoint it can actually be correct, but at the same time your experience as a customer can be really fucked.
And yes, I have a LiPo battery in the late-2010 Macbook Air, it isn’t bloated and still works pretty well, so a 10 year battery span is possible for LiIon tech. Would I count on that experience being the norm? No.
Exactly, cooling is the key. You can tweak battery chemistry (and everybody does) to suit your performance needs, but cooling seems to be the major factor for battery longevity. Keep the battery in the specified temperature range and there is a fair chance it will last. The only reason Tesla can supercharge and others can’t is because of the way the car keeps the battery cool. Some manufacturers have as much as three different cooling systems; one for cabin, one for battery, and one for electronics, because they reuse components from gasoline cars. Tesla has one powerful system that can cool rapidly. That’s why people like Sandy Munro (the guy that reverse engineers vehicles) are excited by superbottle, octovalve and whatnot. This is a good high-level summary: …and this is a deeper overview of a superbottle.
Battery degradation (Tesla compared to others) is pretty well documented; this is a good summary, although original google sheet doesn’t seem to be available anymore. In short, you can expect around 10% degradation over 300000 km. That’s not bad.
In short, I don’t trust their numbers, and my expectation is that Tesla batteries will degrade exactly as much as expected from the LiIon technology and as they age there will be more incidents. I don’t trust them because Elon Musk is not an engineer, he’s a magician – he sells illusions, just like Steve Jobs. On the plus side, the thermal management is a good idea and it will likely make the battery avoid the most damaging overheating/freezing events.
One interesting thing about Tesla I found today, but it doesn’t really surprise me. They can blacklist your car for whatever reason, and then it won’t supercharge:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQPLbP-A8CU
What does it mean in reality? It means you don’t own the car, really. It’s just a part of Tesla infrastructure, that is all controlled by Elon Musk. And since a car is a significant part of your life, that’s the part of your life someone else is controlling.
…yeah. 🙁
Tesla is not a car company, they’re largely a SaaS company, with all the implications, good and bad, and their cars are just computers that run their software. It’s the same thing as with Apple. Try servicing an iPhone yourself, and there’s very little you can do. Or try using an iPhone without an Apple ID – good luck with that.
You can’t realistically own a Tesla car without a Tesla account. Or supercharge. Or even run a Tesla app on your phone. And they can disable your account, because those are their servers you’re logging in to. Granted, you can drive a car with a keycard and charge it through a power outlet or non-Tesla charger, it’s stil a nice car, but those additional services add a ton of value. They are the reason you want to buy a Tesla.
On the other hand, you can take out a SIM card, never connect a car to a WiFi, and then you’re safe from all the potential privacy intrusions.
You know how they’re now tracking people in self-isolation through their mobile phones, and nobody is even considering if it’s GDPR compliant? Tesla is just a mobile phone on wheels. With a GPS, microphone, and a lot of cameras, one of them that films the inside of the cabin (currently not yet used).
The upside is that it’s pretty much impossible to steal it (link). If you want to steal it, you basically have to tow it and disconnect both batteries and a SIM card immediately, and then you can’t sell it or drive it, you can only disassemble it for parts. You have a great level of control when your car is at a service center or you give it to a valet to park it or rent it out. You can let your kid to drive it and limit the max speed and check its location all the time.
And the downside is that it goes both ways, and you’re trusting a company with a lot, with its low-paid, easily corruptable, human employees. Oh, and a country too, because the company can’t operate in a country without that country allowing it.
When you’re buying a mobile phone and choosing between iPhone/Android and Xiaomi, you can basically choose who will spy on you, US or China. It was pretty ironic when the US officials started warning about Xiaomi phones potentially spying on you. That tells you all you need to know about what they have been doing all along.
The thing is, you can no more buy a phone that’s not a personal privacy destroying device. Not because you like to be spied on, but because it’s insanely useful stuff you can’t realistically live without. It’s the same with Tesla, now cars are becoming “smart” too, homes as well, and increasingly you’re going to have to work harder and harder to keep Orwellian Big Brother at bay without going full Amish.
I was never the one for the Amish way. A lot of today’s technology is pretty useful and amazing and, above all, inevitable, so I’ll rather embrace it sooner than later if I can. It’s a keep your enemies close thing.
I even have a Facebook account these days because that was the only way to use their login API. I was feeling pretty smug when I discovered that I can set that only friends of friends can send me friend requests, while I made sure that I have no friends. Of course, Facebook is still tracking me everywhere anyway, their ability to pick people who I’m in contact with was perfect even on my first login ever. I should probably slowly enter random data in my Facebook profile over time to corrupt their database, randomly open pages and ads I’m not interested in, and sometimes go to a random city and browse through a few sites I would normally never look at. Yeah, it’s becoming harder and harder. 🙂
BTW Rich Rebuilds is a great guy, if you’re interested check his video series on rebuilding a flooded Tesla.
Yes, my point exactly. And it’s a very bad thing.
I agree. But, would you rather use a flip phone than a smart phone?
Not a good analogy. A flip phone can’t run slack, or skype, or a decent sized web browser, and I need those for work. But a car that’s a smartphone on wheels doesn’t actually do anything extra compared to my present car, that I would need or even want by any stretch of an imagination. The only thing it can do is hold me hostage or actually take active measures to kill me. My present car has all the automotive capabilities that I need, so the analogy with a flip phone is invalid. It would be valid it Tesla actually introduced some added value that I find useful, but the only thing it introduces are better acceleration, and reduced long trip capability. By changing my Volvo for a Tesla I wouldn’t actually be gaining anything. By changing a flip phone for a smartphone I actually integrated two devices I was already using into one (PDA and a flip phone), so it obviously solved a problem I had. With Tesla, I basically like acceleration and hate everything else about the car. If I had to replace my Volvo V60, I’d swap it for a V90 or some big Mercedes. Tesla freaks me out. I already hate the spying properties of smartphones and GSM network, but that only influences information, not physical mobility. A car is something I need completely under my control and completely reliable. I don’t want it to install a new update and change functionality in unknown and non-transparent ways. With a phone, it’s non-critical, just annoying.
A phone that has a camera and a microphone that are useful for teleconferencing is a phone that has everything you need to spy on someone.
If Tesla doesn’t have anything you need you don’t have a problem. You simply don’t buy a Tesla. The stuff that doesn’t offer anything useful generally doesn’t get sold.
The good question is, actually, will enough people find those extra features Tesla brings to table essential enough that with time “smart car” becomes the only choice and you can no longer buy a “flip car?” Something like my relationship with Facebook, I hate it, I don’t use it, but I can’t realistically create a site without Facebook login so I have no choice but to be in their database. The stuff they do and the network effect actually creates a value for me, simply because other people use it.
And yes, carbon credits and political pressure definitely increase chances of that, and exist because a significant amount of people are in favor of it. That’s the limitation of a majority rule.
That might be the actual reason why Tesla as a company doesn’t actually make money selling cars.
This might not be accurate anymore. According to their financial statements, they earned about 20% gross margin on each car for at least the past year. Roadster funded X development, X funded S, S funded 3, and 3 is mass market car that is, it seems, actually profitable – especially every non-basic configuration.
Excuse me if I wipe my arse with their financial statements. They are the most bankrupt zombie company in the history of state intervention.
You are excused; I too don’t put much trust in financial statements, only the positive spins end up there. I guess we’ll see how they survive with time.
My sentiment exactly. The fact that they basically found way to monetize gretards and it’s their main business model is a huge red flag for me. Also, the more technology is used to reduce personal sovereignty of an individual, the more I turn into a techno-sceptic. With a normal car, I own a car. With Tesla, I am a tool of mass gretardation.
I mean, it freaks me out too. But Tesla somehow freaks me out in a way Google freaks me out, not in a way Facebook freaks me out, although there’s very little difference between the two and it’s only a skin deep. And it seems that Tesla freaks you out in a way Facebook freaks me out. 🙂
Have you watched the “I, robot” movie? The part where the AI remotely takes control of all the cars in a tunnel? Yeah, anything that can take control of my car and is uplinked scares me the fuck out, and if it doesn’t scare you, it means you have no imagination.
It does scare me… but I also have some experience how complex software tends to work only through sheer luck most of the time. More likely AI would try to take control of all the cars in the tunnel, and it would work for 2% of the cars on the ends of the tunnel, and others simply wouldn’t have the GPS signal until they exited the tunnel. I tend to be much more scared of the stuff governments can do through people, no AI necessary.
I already described how it can kill you. Wait until you’re at 160km/h, take all control, wheel sharp to the left, rollback version, wipe logs.
Oh, I hear you, and I don’t need hypothetical example. I can’t find the one example I remember, but here is a footage of a Tesla taking control and changing lanes to avoid collision with a car coming from the side. And here’s another experience when this happened while not on the autopilot.
Both guys were lucky, but what if the car reacted in a wrong way? The thing boils down to how much you can trust the collision avoidance system. If it saves your ass, great, but if it malfunctions and kills you? You don’t get to live from the fact that collision system makes less errors than drivers, if it malfunctions in your case.
Then on the other hand, it’s not much different being killed by the malfunctioning neural network or by the malfunctioning real neurons of some idiot that shares a road with you. Your choice might be to avoid driving a self-driving car altogether, mine might be to trust it enough to drive it, but both is a calculated risk. But to be frank, I too am pretty skeptical that any of those self-driving features will ever be reliably something more than bit smarter version of drive assist (like cruise control).
Not that I want to be the bearer of the bad news after today’s shakedown, but I stumbled across this Volvo recall just now and the models looked familiar. It seems that Volvo needs software update as well. Hope this doesn’t affect your car (this is for 2019-2020 V60 in the US, but is probably not limited only to US models).
Nah, mine is the older model, 2014 I think, which is why I’m considering eventual replacements because, regardless of the fact that it has 45000km on the clock, I don’t want to keep it for too long. The “problem” is, the car is too good to just throw away for the amount of money I can get for it. Doesn’t cost me anything to run, I paid for it cash so there are no monthly payments, doesn’t break down, it’s fast enough, sips fuel. Not very luxurious and a bit on the harsh side for Croatian roads, though, but considering the situation in the world and locally, I’m really glad I have a car that doesn’t cost me any additional money just sitting on the parking lot. So yeah, I’ll talk about expensive cars till the cows come home but when I actually have to think about buying something, I turn out to be a cheap bastard.
One thing about EV range.
I go from Zagreb to Hvar several times every year. That is the only range problem I would have with an EV, and it’s quite serious, because it goes like this.
My trip is calculated around the Split-Stari Grad ferry, which departs several times in the morning and then not until the afternoon. Miss the ferry, have a bad day.
You depart in the morning, drive, stop several times to piss or have a stale pizza slice, arrive at Split in time to buy the tickets, with some time to spare. The ride is a combination of Zagreb rush hour to get to the highway, a high-speed highway run, and rush hour in Split to the ferry port.
I tank only once, in Kozjak, and only for convenience, to have enough diesel on the island not to have to think about it for 10 days if at all. I would still arrive with half a tank. The ride is some 450km.
With an EV, you need to have at least one deep recharge. If there’s nobody on the charging station, it’s what, half an hour? an hour? If it’s tourist season, and EVs are common, you are now stuck in a long queue in front of a charger, with 20km battery left. The charger is also somewhere in Brinje, so you arrive in Split pretty much empty, and you need to immediately charge in ACY marina Vrboska. And that’s supposedly more convenient than my diesel? It’s more trouble than it’s worth, because of the overhead times I would have to add to the trip to accommodate for the slow charging and unknowns around its availability. I don’t have to bother with that bullshit when I’m already half dead or I wouldn’t be going on a vacation otherwise.
And now have that every month, sometimes twice a month and sometimes two times a week.
You miss a ferry, you have a bad day, late to business meeting, you can loose a project and a lot of money.
This is why no amount of hipster convincing is going to change my mind that “range anxiety” is blown out of proportions.
Sure it is if you are going to a coffee to Split …
I swear, the amount of range anxiety between the two of you is off the charts, and you don’t even drive EVs. :)))
It’s a car like any other. Once you get accustomed to the range, you plan accordingly and don’t sweat about it.
According to a Better Route Planner, with Model X, you’d charge a day before the trip to 90% in Zagreb, supercharge at Otočac for 33 minutes (42%-88%), and arrive at Stari Grad with 10% charge. Then you have a free HEP charger at Stari Grad (at Put Rudine).
Or with Model 3 which has a battery with better cooling that can charge faster, you’d have to charge for just 15 minutes. That’s basically the time you need for toilet+gas anyway.
But to be realistic, you’d probably drive ~160+ on the highway, and you’d use AC which would lower your range. You would have to stop several times anyway because you have kids, so you’d pick between supercharger at Karlovac and Otočac, or HEP chargers at Karlovac, Vukova Gorica, Duga Resa, Brinje, Otočac, Zir, or destination chargers at Karlovac, Senj or Grabovac, all depending if you want to go through Plitvice or not. The difference is that you would stop at chargers instead of gas stations (though that’s usually the same thing).
You assume wait lines at chargers, but there are no wait lines at the moment, even during the summer, and it’s not realistic to assume that the number of chargers won’t grow with the number of cars. So far, the infrastructure is oversized for the number of EVs on the road, and that, with the free charging, is a plus for the early adopters.
To be honest, Tesla (or any other EV) is still not the ideal or the cheapest choice, and I don’t expect diesels to go away any time soon even though gas price is much more volatile than the price of electricity. My biggest issues, except the initial price, are that the nearest service center is in Graz (or hopefully from this year in Ljubljana), and that even the smallest Model 3 is still a big car, not that practical for tiny European streets, especially not for Croatian islands.
I dislike this trend of pathologising rational concerns. I think it’s a form of passive-aggressive newspeak. I don’t have range anxiety, I drive a diesel that can go 1000km with a single tank, and refill within a minute anywhere. I calculated real problems that exist with EVs and said “no thank you, I don’t need to have this problem”. This is not range anxiety, this is a rational approach to crazy shit gretards* are trying to peddle.
—-
[*] Gretard, a follower of Greta Thunberg’s person and/or ethos, a compound of Greta and retard.
It IS newspeak, that’s why it’s a joke using it on gas car owners. It’s newspeak aimed against EVs, implicating that EVs can’t reach a charger, that they don’t have sufficient range and sufficient charger infrastructure.
For years I drove a gas car with 250 km “range” and it was not a big deal, and now suddenly with EVs everybody is talking about a range. While nobody ever talks about a range of a moped, motorcycle, thirsty supercar, or a tractor. No vehicle has complete autonomy, they all have range. Range is just a thing to be aware of. Even if you drive a bike, you need to take care to hydrate a driver regularly and take into account a number of kilometers you can travel in a day.
It’s a fallacy. You only have to worry about range in gas vehicles if your gas tank capacity is lower than what is required to get to the gas station. Filling up is a one minute thing, not almost an hour thing if there’s a supercharger, and, realistically, with poor infrastructure it can be multiple hours, and if proliferation of chargers isn’t great, it’s a not only a big issue, it’s a deal breaker for most.
I did have “range anxiety” with ICE on certain stretches of roads, quite a bit of time ago, when there weren’t that many gas stations, and it’s not a fun idea contemplating being stranded in the middle of nowhere, in an unknown area. The problem with EVs is that the charge times are so long, not even an increase in charger placement solves the problem, because long charge times absolutely guarantee cars forming queues in front of chargers. I have experience with that from the gas reduction times in the 1980s in Yugoslavia so I have a very realistic understanding what that would look like.
An additional problem with EVs is that improvements in battery technology (for instance supercapacitors) solve that problem, but they push the rest upstream, because to reduce charge times you need to push more amps, and that strains the infrastructure so much it’s hard to describe. To quickly charge a large supercapacitor, I don’t even know what kind of conductors at what kinds of voltage you’d need. Probably 12kV, and by that point it’s a serious life hazard to anyone in the vicinity because with that voltage almost nothing is dielectric enough.
At this point I don’t have anything substantial to add to the discussion, I think we went over all the major points and argumentation for and against, so I’ll leave it at that. You raise valid points and I actually agree on both. Slow charging on low-speed chargers can take hours and it’s not practical in the long term, and I’m with you on the issues with power infrastructure. Hopefully it ends better than everybody turning into zombies because of the EVs, because I really like quite a few things EVs bring to the table compared to gasoline-powered cars.
Actually, I do, too. The concept of being able to produce your own electricity and use it to power not only your home, but your car as well, is very appealing. However, for general use I think liquified methane (LNG) is an extremely simple way of using an extremely abundant, renewable resource to power vehicles, and EV is a clusterfuck in comparison.
And btw, for those who suspected, I had the coronavirus for the last 10 days or so, and with extreme symptoms (viral pneumonia with extremely reduced lung capacity and 39.5°C (and more) fever. This is the third day I’m at normal body temperature and I think the virus is gone, but my lungs are fucked and I can’t really speak because I scraped my vocal cords with all the coughing. Basically, everybody who had stronger symptoms is dead, and this was a close call. I’m on self-prescribed quarantine since I figured out what I had, and I intend to observe it for at least two more weeks. I don’t want to have anything to do with doctors because they are all incompetent liars, so I’m dealing with it at home.
Shit. Is the rest of the family OK?
I got the worst of it.
Fuck.
Wow. Do you have any ideas where did you catch the bastard? Locally or on a business trip?
Oh, I know for sure. Watch this, this will be funny considering the official lies in the media.
In late January my younger kid had a school field trip to Vukovar memorial museum. His entire class, and probably school, returned with a dry cough and high fever. Then they all had to be excused from school so they wen to primary health care, where they were all misdiagnosed as a matter of course. Then the whole school got it, then the cashiers in the local stores got it everybody in contact with them got it, all family members of everybody infected got it, everybody who went to church got it, everybody in the chain of primary health care got it, and on TV they talked about 19 known cases and fucking Italy. The main vector of infection were the unsymptomatic Chinese tourists from Vukovar and other places, and the entire Croatian political and health care system is incompetent and/or fraudulent.
You know it’s brilliant when Šankar, Mihael and Romana all went to the doctor because they were sick, and they were all diagnosed with spring allergies and some harmless virus or another. 🙂 I found it all very suspicious until I contracted it, and then I recognized the COVID-19 symptoms with certainty. In retrospective I could be certain about the entire chain of infection once I had one certain diagnosis. If they want to confirm my diagnosis they can check everybody’s antibodies to the coronavirus.
Now hold on, wait a second.
I had a situation in late January when I suddenly felt sick, couldn’t even drink my coffee that day and left it half-empty on a table. Got home, had a fever and diarrhea for three days, got up and proceeded as usual. Could it be that…
Diarrhea as a primary symptom doesn’t make it likely. The key symptom is that it goes straight for the lungs, completely ignoring the upper respiratory system. Diarrhea is a symptom but very far down on the list. Dry cough, high fever, headaches, I even had pain in the heart.
I had exactly the same thing you had, at the beginning of March. Diarrhea, vomiting, then fever, three days total. Figured it was food poisoning, cremeschnitte in Samobor that day, although the fever was unusual. Don’t have anyone around me with any symptoms like that (or coronavirus). If you got it too, it might be something going around and not just a simple food poisoning, but it doesn’t match diagnosis of coronavirus.
Yeah, just because we got corona, does not make all other viruses obsolete which complicates things of course.
This symptoms look more like rotavirus or norovirus which are both highly contagious and quite common.
Also Salmonella has this symptoms which is quite popular :-), but you have to be lucky to get out of it that easy (I did once, but ended up in hospital with delusion-inducing fever the first time).
Also, Corona does not look that bad unless you are sick and/or old.
I count Daniel as an exception not as a rule.
Considering what I ate, salmonella is a pretty good bet. 🙂
Good Salmonella sign is shitting green(ish). And with green shit, we are full circle back to EVs 🙂
It seems no matter what shit we talk about, we managed to stay on topic. 🙂
https://slobodnadalmacija.hr/vijesti/svijet/ovo-bi-moglo-promijeniti-sve-znanstvenici-s-oxforda-tvrde-da-je-korona-vec-dva-mjeseca-u-britaniji-i-da-ju-je-preboljelo-30-milijuna-stanovnika-1011831
Yes, that’s because there are no EVs on the road. I assume every car on the road is an EV or a plugin hybrid, and make calculations about charging availability from there.
Also, I assume huge power outage during the tourist season, because the power grid isn’t designed for this, and there are insufficient powerplants online for this kind of load.
Also, you assume a charge time of 15min. I assume 45min if everything is ideal and there’s enough amperage available. Realistically, it’s six hours and that’s without waiting. With waiting, it’s six days. And if you think I’m wrong, don’t, because I’m not. I know how many cars pass through the gas stations during the off-season on A1 because I’m there every now and then. If you assume violent EV proliferation due to political pressure, if you assume the same power grid during the next 20 years because it would take that long to make radical expansions, my numbers are conservative. You’ll have a queue 20 kilometers long, blocking the highway, all waiting for a charge, and each charger will work on reduced amperage because of reductions. And there will be breakdowns. Mass EV adoption looks like zombie apocalypse when you actually bother to simulate things properly.
I can see that come to pass in an extreme situation governments such as US, China and Russia turn against big oil, but I don’t see how it could go on long enough for EVs to achieve total domination of the car market. I would rather walk or drive a bike if the only car I could buy was an EV under that circumstances.
How likely do you deem that scenario, realistically?
Not very. According to game theory, the resistance to EVs would ramp up so significantly before that point, the states would have to resort to totalitarian measures that would result in civil unrests far before that point, if they pushed it too hard. EV is simply not a realistic proposition. It is too expensive as a city only vehicle and the majority of people need an occasional long-range trip at least once a year, so the argument of it being good enough for what 99.99% of people do for 99.9% of driving is a fallacy. Yes, you usually drive to work but sometimes you drive to your vacation, and everybody tends to drive to vacation at once and then you have my nightmare congestion scenario.
So you think EV batteries are larger fire hazard than a tank of gasoline, connected to an engine that ignites that same gas in a series of very frequent explosions, all while moving around at high speeds, risking collisions with another contraption of the same type? 🙂
The fire-hazard data so far is in favor of EVs, but it’s still early to say. For example, Tesla claims that internal combustion engine cars are 11 times more likely to catch fire than their cars, and there’s an ICE car catching fire every three minutes in the US alone. Tesla encloses their battery cells in some green “intumescent fire retardant” goo that rapidly expands on heat, cooling batteries and extinguishing fire. I guess the larger hazard than batteries are low-quality high-speed chargers, especially as they become more prevalent. Home charging is not an issue as it typically uses normal 4 kW outlet, which is more or less the same as using electric heater or induction cooktop.
The cost savings of an electric vehicle are, of course, in gas price, and that trumps everything else, even initial still high cost. In Croatia, my napkin calculation is that electric is about 13 times cheaper per km than gas – and that’s without free or cheap destination chargers where you can charge at better rates. For example, HEP/Elen chargers and most T-Com chargers have been free for the past few years, so current EV owners can essentially drive for free in Croatia. Of course that’s going to end eventually, but still, destination chargers (such as Ikea and other shopping centers) will probably remain free even then.
The real and very practical issue with electric cars is that everybody except Tesla/Panasonic basically has shit technology, and their batteries degrade to about half capacity after a few years. I’ve talked to a taxi driver whose car is just four years old, has to charge every two hours, he’s forced to “lease” battery (which means he’s still paying for it), yet can’t replace it. As car manufacturers try to squeeze batteries in their existing car frame designs, they don’t have space to put in larger batteries, and even when they do, their efficiency is mediocre at best.
Compare this to Tesla batteries which degrade about 10% after 10 years and then degradation stabilizes, with range of 400-500 km which is much larger range than anyone’s bladder.
I figure Tesla is doing for cars what Apple did for smartphones. They’re so far ahead of everybody else technologically that it’s scary. Next month they’re having investor battery day and, it seems, introducing million mile cobalt-free batteries. All that while auto manufacturers are dragging their feet and half-assedly pushing shitty EVs that you can’t even buy because they want to milk their existing lineup as long as they can. Quality EV is much better than most gas cars – no noise pollution, no emissions, cheaper to drive, efficient engine that doesn’t need frequent oil changes, great acceleration for overtaking, and you start every day fully charged and don’t have to think about going to the gas station at least once a week.
Euro 5 and Euro 6 are great, but then you have stuff like Dieselgate which make complete mockery of it. And of course, as you mentioned, old 20-year old rusty cans driving around without any kind of filters.
Yes. By a order of magnitude, or several, unless we’re talking about cars with known construction defects, like the Citroen van commonly used for ambulances in Croatia, or Ford Pinto.
If we’re talking about diesel, that stuff won’t catch fire even if you shoot the fuel tank with a rifle with incendiary ammo. It’s basically cooking oil, only petroleum-based, and you can literally drive it on cooking oil.
As for the gasoline cars, you totaled one to the point of popping the airbag, and exactly nothing happened. You towed it to the local blacksmith who hammered it together.
And don’t mention Tesla, they are using Mitsubishi battery packs while Rimac developed their own chemistry and literally everything else, and it’s funny how Porsche, Hyundai and others are licensing Rimac and not Tesla technology. Tesla is sucker-bait for hipsters who don’t know much about how technology and science actually work, but they fucking love that science thing, bitch.
Basically, Tesla is not Apple of car industry, it’s Theranos of car industry.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to. 🙁 Self-driving?
No, I’m referring to the fact that they’re everybody’s darling, with fantastic claims that have the actual scientists scratching their heads and it all serves the purpose of inflating the stock bubble until everything goes pop. Hyperloop? Total madness, I won’t even start with the physics. Catastrophic build quality issues with the cars. Fancy, complex and completely useless features like the gullwing doors on the model X. And I watched videos and videos of user experiences with the cars, how long it takes to charge them when there’s actually a significant percentage of people using those cars, and the very fact that the thing can do software updates on its own is such a security risk I would never even sit in the thing, let alone own it. The car looks geat, accelerates great, but almost everything else is a downside.
If I’m dealing with people completely devoid of imagination, imagine someone making an OTA update of Tesla driving software with something like this:
if sensors.speed >= 160 do {
autopilot.SetState(as_full_auto)
autopilot.ManualOverrideCommand(WheelAngleChange(-90))
ota.rollback(1) }
Basically, when you reach 160 km/h on the highway, it takes all control from you and turns the wheel 90 degrees to the left, which is when you start the process of being killed, and the computer has just enough time to rollback to previous firmware version to fuck with the forensics and hide evidence of tampering. In my car, if someone wants to kill me, he’d have to cut my brake lines or shoot me with a gun. With a Tesla, he can kill me with a few lines of code.
I’m more or less resigned with the fact that I spend significant amount of time with software updates. As a programmer, I understand why it’s necessary, but as a user, the best update process I’ve seen are with Paint.NET and Google Chrome. And the latter is automatic and not optional, which makes me cringe, but everybody else somehow makes me dread the thing. No, I don’t want to update your stupid program I use once a month everytime I run it, since I run it to do something useful, urgently.
As I understand it Tesla updates only when the car is parked, and connected to WiFi. You have to confirm it before the update. And you need to have more than enough battery and so on. But yeah, it’s a double edged sword and complexity in a world where everyhing interacts and changes/updates at the same time is something to be wary about.
On the other hand, one of the other EVs on the market which I can’t remember had its customers schedule appointment and leave it for a day for them to update. If that’s the alternative, somehow Tesla’s over the air updates look quite good. Or you can drive a car whose software is years or decades out of date. The option to drive a car which has no software doesn’t exist anymore.
Yeah, the guy likes far-fetched ideas. Though he also has a pretty good track record of realizing them, so I mostly choose to hold my disbelief and see how it plays out.
Tesla stock is an interesting story. I’ve looked at Musk’s compensation schedule; it’s actually a pretty nice setup where he is very disincentivized to create a stock bubble. Or, to put it differently, if there’s a bubble, he doesn’t get paid; he needs Tesla to do extremely well for extremely long period of time and then he gets paid in tranches. And I speculate that he wants to get paid, because he’s all wound up to go to Mars and Tesla is his cash cow to get there.
Build issues were never catastrophic but cosmetic, but that’s old news, and since around the start of 2019 they seem to have perfected the process for model 3 (and other models even earlier). I haven’t heard of a lot of delivery issues for a long time, and if there are any, they’re minor and quickly fixed.
My point was not that gasoline cars are exploding left and right, far from it, they are surprisingly reliable. What I was hinting is that even explosive technology such as gas engine which certainly seems like a bad and dangerous idea can become mainstream technology we all use every day. I mean, it’s just one step removed from rockets, which are made by putting around 2 million litres of highly explosive stuff together in one place and then igniting it, which is just asking for trouble if you ask any sane person about it.
Wait, aren’t they using Panasonic cells and packaging them themselves including their own cooling system, at least so far, before they bought Maxwell?
Rimac is indeed making top-notch batteries, though, they are focused on supercar segment of the market. And they would be nuts if they weren’t, since they don’t have resources to produce them at scale. Automakers that are licensing their technology, Koenigsegg, Aston Martin and such are certainly not putting them in cheap electric cars. Which is regrettable, it would be great to see Rimac technology produced at scale at major automaker factories.
Well… I myself certainly don’t feel qualified to judge all that science stuff, apart from maybe some sensor-related stuff and small part of software itself… so… 🙂
I do think, though, fanboys and science aside, that Tesla makes some cool cars that people tend to fall in love with. They’re certainly not buying them because Greta told them it’s good for their children.
I’m running a high fever for days so my brain isn’t up to accuracy of that type. In fact, I keep mistyping words.
That’s the part they were allowed to disclose. However, that new Porsche Taycan looks suspiciously like Rimac technology, and the incredibly good results of the new, quite ordinary Kia and Hyundai EVs also looks too coincidental with their acquisition of shares in Rimac for there to be much of a coincidence.
I apologize. 🙁 It certainly wasn’t my intention to molest you with completely insignificant stuff in that state.
It’s ok, I should know better than to do anything when I’m this far out.
I would like to add it’s not only about the fact it can self-ignite in garage, but also this:
Now scale that to theoretical billion electric cars.
Not that green any more.
> Tesla claims …
Seriously?
I was also a sucker in love with Tesla and was wondering what was Danijel “babbling” about years back that Musk is goverment-money-sucking-asshole (not in those exact words, obviously).
It took Musk’s dance with Leonardo Di Caprio in that bullshit climate change movie for me to see that.
And price? Do not get me started. For almost half the price of Tesla S you get superb, top of the line BMW 4 series with Euro 6 313PS 630Nm engine (among others). MPG is not even for debate with that price difference.
And Tesla is only faster on a drag race, so if you live from drag racing then Tesla makes sense. Of course, you are better off with a diesel to actually go to drag race and just let the truck bring the Tesla, because try maintaining top performance in Tesla and see how that goes.
He is a link about waiting lines for charging that Daniel mentioned: https://www.infowars.com/video-tesla-drivers-wait-up-to-an-hour-to-charge-electric-vehicles/
I bet Tesla does not claim this one …
You might say – yea, but this will scale up as well.
No, it will not, just think about what it would take to support million 50kW EV in Croatia. Or billion EV world-wide – without hours long charging queues.
Even with replaceable batteries, it just does not scale.
Not to mention all those greenies are against nuclear power plants which are the only thing that could support anything of that scale.
No, solar plants will not cut it, because most power you need over night which would mean more enormous battery capacity.
Water power plants – maybe in Croatia if you ignore huge environmental impact of any water power plant with huge accumulation lakes – but what about rest of the world without huge energy potential in water?
Dieselgate? It was all about hurting VW in USA and it is all about CO2 tax and not environmental impact.
Anyway, just get a diesel 🙂
Which right there says they’re idiots who didn’t know what they were doing, they should have used firefighting foam:
“Water should not be used on any lithium fire because pouring water on a lithium battery fire can make it more difficult to extinguish it because of the reduction of lithium in water, which leads to the release of hydrogen, which is highly flammable; the potential of reigniting a fire is much greater when using water.”
I remember this, it’s a pretty famous incident because it was one of the first. The guy run over a large piece of metal from a semi-trailer at high speed and punctured battery. Car warned him to stop and exit the vehicle, which he did without injury. Battery pack’s internal steel and ceramic firewalls kept the fire from spreading and vents directed the flames away from the car down towards the pavement. Fire never entered passenger compartment, which is impressive if you saw the video.
Subsequently Tesla introduced triple aluminium-titanium battery underbelly shield against piercing damage to all later models.
Every fire releases highly toxic shit due to modern materials like PVC and different paints. You can choose your exotic gasses and argue that some are worse but there’s really no point. I’ve lived through a house fire when old lady two stories below us fell asleep with a cigarette, and her whole apartment burned down. It took almost a month to get rid of the smell, the black residue goo was everywhere, it sticks to everything, and you can’t get rid of it. It’s also toxic when you inhale it, with potential long-term consequences.
I mean, I get what you’re saying. Batteries can burn. But that doesn’t mean there’s no green/safety argument to be made. I’ve just checked and there were 9 documented cases of fire in 111 Tesla crashes worldwide since 2013 (7 in the US), compared to official data of estimated 171,500 highway vehicle fires annually in the US alone. Tesla US market share is 1.3%, so as long as they’re below 2230 fires annually, they’re below the average. This doesn’t take into account a bunch of factors, but it’s pretty clear that Tesla fires are pretty rare, so each Tesla on the road actually decreases pollution from car fires, even if battery fire is worse than the standard car fire. Same argument can be made regarding safety; Tesla makes extremely safe cars (statistics and NHTSA and NCAP agree with that), even if battery inside inreases fire hazard.
But the number of car fires is so miniscule that the whole green argument is completely irelevant. Besides, even though I’m aware that Tesla is riding the environmentalism train, personally I don’t share their greenthusiasm and eco views such as “any human influence on nature is bad mkay” generally annoy me. I’m more of a guy who thinks that if we can’t even terraform Earth as needed we don’t deserve to live anyway (and certainly don’t stand a chance anywhere else).
Well, nobody has better data about Teslas then Tesla. 🙂 If anything, my calculation from other sources above (8 fires instead of industry average of 2230 yearly) is even more favorable to Tesla. Even too favorable. TSLAQ shorters from tesladeaths.com likely have incomplete data, there must be more Tesla fires that are not reported here because there were no injuries.
Oh, don’t worry, I’m pretty far from being a Musk fanboy, though I do like a fair amount of what he’s doing. And, I’m largely in agreement with Danijel, even on the subject of EVs, and even though it might not seem so since I crawl out of my hole only when I when I think differently or need to better understand what he’s thinking.
I’m not defending Tesla here because I think Musk is a cool nerd meme lord hero. Tesla has a very strong incentive to overcompensate on safety, because market and regulators are extremely conservative and inert, and media pretty bloodthirsty, so any talk about EVs not being safe can kill the whole market, and then it’s game over for Tesla. That’s why I have pretty high confidence that Teslas are, indeed, pretty safe.
I have my own very selfish and completely environmentally agnostic reasons to keep an eye on Tesla, one of which is, for full disclosure, that I bought some small amount of TSLA stock in August 2019 when I (correctly) predicted that short squeeze will boost the price significantly. At a time they were the most shorted stock in the world, and that’s after they cleared all major production hurdles, with China gigafactory and new big hungry Asian market on the horizon. When I bought, it was about 1.6% of my net worth, which has now balooned to over 6% of my NW even with the current bloodbath on the markets, so now I’m waiting for dead cat bounce to see if it makes sense to hold it further or exit sooner than I planned and therefore lose part of the gains due to taxes.
For almost half the price of a Tesla S you get a Model 3, with similar top speed and much much better acceleration than BMW 4 series. You have no need for service or maintenance for the first 2 years, and then you have to check brake fluid and replace air filter. BMW 4 series yearly overall cost is, in at least this one random case I found, $14,254. Roughly, in 5 years, savings you get with Model 3 compared to BMW 4 series would buy you another Model 3. Or BMW if you insist, though I bet at that point you’d insist on another Model 3. 🙂
OK, charging. Charging availability is a real issue. It’s not a big issue for Tesla, at least not yet, as their supercharging network is quick and superb, but it’s an issue for all other EVs at this point, because none of them can charge as quick as Tesla. For example, with Tesla, you can fully supercharge in 25 minutes. Typically though, you don’t even do that – supercharger availability allows you to charge for 10-15 minutes, once, on a 4-5 hour trip. With Audi e-Tron, in best circumstances, full charge takes about 45 minutes. On a standard 240V power outlet, that becomes 9-10 hours for both since they have around same battery capacity, so basically overnight.
Charging is not the same thing as filling a gas tank. Typically you’d charge overnight, in your garage or at a parking lot, or while at work. When you go on a trip, you will need to charge somewhere, but you’ll also have to take a piss and eat so you’ll do both at the same time. You don’t need equivalent of gas stations; you need parking lots with chargers and destination chargers. Charging should become an afterthought as the infrastructure improves. I don’t know what was the issue with Tesla chargers on the video you linked, but that’s not a usual sight. Americans sure like their traffic, I would have expected many of those in the line live in suburbs, have their own garage, and have no reason not to charge at home. In Europe situation is worse in a sense that many people live in apartment buildings and don’t have garages; on the other hand, this is the reason Europe has a lot more public chargers than America where Tesla superchargers are almost the only choice. US is at a disadvantage because of their 110V power, which at least triples charging time, which is why EV owners realistically DO need to get wall charger in their garage, unlike their EU peers.
And infrastructure IS coming, and fast. After a quick count, you currently have 28 chargers (each with 1-3 stalls) in Zagreb, not counting Tesla supercharger with 6 stalls where only Teslas can charge. You have only about 20 gas stations in the same area.
Of course, there are some unanticipated issues, and it’s not the power shortage. I went by the Tesla supercharger in Zagreb last year; there were two occupied by Model S one of which was leaving, and the rest of the stalls were occupied by diesels. Because it’s convenient place to park. This doesn’t happen in Germany or Netherlands, but it does with American rednecks and Croatian bumpkins.
Re producing power for charging. I mostly agree with you there, current power production is inadequate. I’m all for nuclear and hope for cold fusion. But just one thought. In Croatia, all you need to do is ban outside heaters in bars which basically waste electricity, and incentivize people to improve isolation in their homes and old wasteful heating systems. Almost nobody has a heat pump, and most of the population lives in old drafty buildings and uses cheapest and most wasteful electric heaters. I’m too lazy to do napkin calculations here, and data would probably be hard to find anyway, but I would dare to guess those two measures alone would offset a good amount of electricity needed for much larger EV fleet than Croatia is likely to get in the next decade or two.
Think again. Everybody is cheating on emission tests. Read this. “Since 2016, 38 out of 40 diesel cars tested by ADAC failed a NOx-test.”
Also, curbing diesel emissions is like allowing “only some people” to piss in the pool. Number of cars is increasing fast, and we all breathe that stuff all the time. I’ve thought for years that I’m allergic to pollen; it turns out that when I get out of the city, suddenly I’m not allergic to that same pollen. Everybody is taking smog for granted simply because there was no way to fight it until EVs, you just can’t live without a car. Forcing people to use public transport or ride sharing are relatively bad solutions; underground metro is a better, but costly solution.
Fuck. Sorry. This came out way longer than I wanted. Seems I have some pet peeves on the subject that I wasn’t aware of. 🙂
Did you read that article?
That price includes monthly credit payments, insurance and tyres for 32.000 miles in 12 months – which would all apply to Tesla as well.
So, the difference is gas and maintenance were maintenance seems quite high – 1000$ for 10.000 miles seems almost double of what I would normally expect. Also, you can not even count entire maintenance because Tesla also has brakes and bunch of electronics that can go wrong.
Also, try driving Tesla 32.000 miles a year. In 5 years you will need to change two battery packs which costs like a new BMW Series 4 …
Not to mention bumpers falling off … (they probably figured that one by now)
Oh, and what exactly am I paying 50.000$? A tablet with huge battery that accelerates good with automatic OTA updates? Sorry, just not into it.
But the point is – Musk is going to lie and support any bullshit that will favour him – and you talk about dieselgate (which is there because CO2 madness anyaway)?
Yea, sure, smog is bad, but it can be much improved with mild-hybrids and better public transport.
Tesla is leftist hypocrisy on steroids. I do not do stocks, but this is one balloon that will explode like a nuke, so you better know what you are doing.
And about reports … keep in mind that leftists like delusions (which, I could bet, are vast majority of Tesla owners), so even if there is a problem, you will never hear about it, unless you experience it yourself.
Yes, you’d have the same monthly payment, and you’d probably have to change tires somewhere around that mileage same as they have, but they had to initially replace tires because they bought a used car, which you wouldn’t do on a new Tesla. Then you have Tesla insurance (at least in the US) which I can’t really calculate so I won’t compare. You don’t have gas cost of $1,440 and if your charging price is quite a bit lower (if not free). You don’t need to worry about battery packs as they come with 10 year warranty. You wouldn’t need $4,732.40 of maintenance costs, period. Doesn’t mean that nothing can break, but you do have warranty, and the car really has just a few moving parts. That might not be $14,254, but it’s about $6,000 yearly at least. Wait just 6 years, buy yourself a cheap Model 3 for a difference.
This guy did. You can check out his maintenance costs and experiences.
Don’t forget you can also use that huge battery to charge your phone when you’re on the road! :)))
I do get that Tesla buyers picked up a lot of subventions around the world. I also do get that a lot of positive surprise with Tesla results in Q4/2019 was precisely because of the huge amount of money traditional automakers had to pay Tesla because they didn’t meet their CO2 quotas which a lot of analysts didn’t predict because they didn’t do their job properly. But that’s automakers own fault, they could have created their own EVs but they didn’t. There is also a huge amount of money that US government gives to traditional automakers and gas companies every year. I can’t find the source now because I saw it a while ago, but it was some mind-boggling amount. That’s how the world works, government tends to redistribute wealth and usually makes things worse.
The issue with leftists and their illusions is that they usually can’t afford an expensive car, just an expensive Starbucks coffee or an iPhone. Here are two guys that are more typical customers of a new Tesla truck (pretty good stuff, but feel free to speed it up). I have a feeling they didn’t vote for Hillary, but who knows.
I mean, man, I get what you’re saying, but it’s not all leftists Tesla bad, diesel alt-right good. There’s always somehow enough stupid to go around.
Ok, so let us do a recap.
You believe in Tasla claims, in 10 year infinite mileage warranty, to first article you dig on google, to a guy who is making a living from a video and Tesla shop sponsor it is promoting in Tesla video, your bullshit bells are completely off because at least several claims should at least chime them and you are not a Tesla/Musk fan boy. Ooookeeey 🙂
Let me go through few things again to demonstrate your argumentation flow.
See, this is true, except it is not. It would be true if other manufacturers would use PVC and Tesla would not, but they do. Which means, on a base line of PVC they are roughly equal. However, Tesla has HUGE battery – and I am not chemist – but amount of toxic waste is by an order of magnitude higher compared to any other car – which means you need to burn quite a few cars to get close to toxic waste of single burned Tesla.
Which leads me to second your second argument:
This should have rang your bullshit bell.
I am guessing statistics about ICE burnet vehicles took ALL vehicles into consideration?
However – where the hell Tesla has 1.3% US market share?!
Every year, in US there are 250-260 million registered motor vehicles – figure most likely used in “burning vehicles per year”. Out of those, about 180 million are cars, some 50 millions are vans and rest are trucks and motor cycles.
If we look total number, Tesla would have to have 4.160.000 registered vehicles to have 1.3% market share or 3.200.000 if we look at cars only.
If I am not mistaken, Tesla just recently produced a millionth car (red Model X) since it exists and not all of them are in the US (based on this site, there are roughly 530.000 Teslas in US, let us presume they are all still functional).
Which would put Tesla share between 0,15% – 0,2% at best or 6-8 times less than claimed. But hey, who cares, it’s close enough, 500.000 or 4.000.000 … quite close 🙂
Now, the fact they do ignite only means they will ignite more as there are more cars and it does not have to be linear, because from quality control alone it is not the same to produce 100.000 cars a year and 1.000.000 cars a year, not to mention 20.000.000 like Toyota and Tesla already had more than a single share of QA issues.
Combined with high-toxicity, ability to self-ignite in your garage without any accident, additional danger and complexity when dealing with those fire (image 10 Teslas in chain wreckage), even those small numbers are quite worrying because they scale horribly.
Of course not, their marketing surely knows the best … how to lie about Tesla.
An example from 2018.
Also, just tons of Musks false claims, including 35.000$ Model 3.
They are bending truth so it still looks like a truth, but it’s just a blatant lie.
Something like those “infinite data traffic” sold by mobile providers. It is true, right? Yes, except it totally is not.
That will be more and more the usual sight as number of cars increases. All you need is more people going on vacation in roughly the same time and it quickly turnes out to something like international border crossing in top season.
Yea, but … Those 28 chargers can serve, what, maximum of 170 cars per hour?
While those 20 gas station can serve at least 1440 cars. More charging stations – true, but significantly less bandwith.
Yea, your gonna need a bit more than that on a large scale.
In Croatia, roughly 1.5 million vehicles are registered every year. So, let’s say that 1 million are EV. Just for fun, I will take 65kW battery as an average because fleet cars and people that travel more will want bigger batteries than that and people that only do local mileage will get less.
This capacity gives you like 300km range, maybe? Lets go with that, again, for fun.
I think we can say that – on average – each car will need full charge once a week. I think that is reasonable because fleet cars will need two charges a day, I will need two charges a week and my neighbours will need one charge every two weeks.
So, each week you will need 65GWh or 3.500GWh per year.
Krško can output 700MW, our largest hydroplant Zakučac can output 468MW and Varaždin hydroplant has 86,5MW of power and total output of all hydroplants in Croatia is 2097MW which is 55% of all 3812MW power plants in Croatia.
So, if you would use ALL currently available energy including entire Krško, you can’t connect more than, what, 65.000 EVs on a 65KWh supercharger and we need to connect a million.
Ok, sure, you will definitely not connect them all on superchargers, but the fact is – you can not connect more than 65.000 at any given moment – on entire Croatia + Krško power output.
Also, the fact is, you will have to pull 65GWh to charge them all once a week, regardless how and most of that power will need to come over night.
In this scenario I did not shutdown only outdoor bar heaters, I shutdown ALL other electricity in Croatia, working with FULL capacity of our entire power production.
Can you sense which order of magnitude this problems is – and this is only in Croatia, US has 200 times larger problem than this?
And no one is even talking about it, everyone is babbling about saving the planet with EV cars.
Which is why I am certain this is all smoke and mirrors
I want to go back to this one. First, the fact that you pulled this article and the amount you found and posted as argument rang zero bullshit bells to you.
Allow me to do the same math for Model 3.
In Croatia, you are free from CO2 and luxury tax if you buy model 3 (I get CO2, but I do not get why you are free of luxury tax – oh I know – so that others can pay for you car :-)), but you still have to pay VAT and import taxes.
Long ago I had a simple math, which was not entirely correct, but was mostly correct enough – US price times 10 equals price in Croatia in HRK.
So, if model 3 in US costs 55.000$ it will cost around 550.000 HRK in Croatia.
Thats A LOT of money for a “luxury” car that looks like this …
Ok, since in the mentioned yearly price, it was actual price of the BMW through leasing, let us do that.
Going to PBZ financial leasing calculator, with $16000 paid upfront (20%), you are left with $1235 monthly cost which is 14820$ a year.
Should I add insurance (2000$ / year, it goes by car value), tyres and brakes?
Oh, and you will definitely want additional insurance for headlights (because they tend to die if you drive through water) and most definitely additional insurance for that gorgeous glass roof – because what could possibly go wrong there.
So … how exactly do I save for another BMW/Model 3 in 5 years?
Yea, sure I am comparing used vs new car, but that was your number in argument, not mine.
Also, as I was searching for supercharges, I landed on Tesla supercharger homepage
Scroll down a bit.
Less than a cost of fuel?
For 1500 miles, 100$ on supercharger and 150$ on gasoline? On Tesla website, which means the difference is even less.
You were talking about free driving? 🙂 🙂
Then this totally confused me:
Yea, you do not need new tyres with new Tesla, but why did you even wrote this if they paid their car $25.000 and not $55.000?
Please, how naive can you really be?
You can bet your ass off there are probably 10 footnotes you will not read when you will buy Tesla, but they will as sure as hell read it back to you when you will want to claim your 10 year warranty.
And this is not just Tesla issue, I have a Mazda and do not get started with their fucking warranty because I already had to change not only brake pads but brake discs as well and also rear-left suspension.
Of course, neither pad nor discs are in warranty (that was on 48.000km, car was year and a half), rear suspension, half a year later at 59.000km – and they did not replace both suspensions – a guy in service told me – “who told you both needed to be replaced”.
I had my share of warranties, so when a company that is all smoke and mirrors make such claim – that makes me laugh.
Now, I do not know much about batteries, so I will be guessing, but it is the same technology as in laptops, right? Li-ion? Sure, you can probably make some improvements, but I doubt you can double the lifetime of a battery in which you shove HUGE power output. If that was doable and anywhere near economical, our laptops batteries would not die in 6-7 years. Die, not loose 6% capacity, they loose more than 6% capacity after a year.
Another one where you should normally get ringing bullshit bells.
So, a guy living from Youtube video, being sponsored by a shop selling stuff for Tesla – is your source of information?
Also, the way he starts a video is specially annoying.
“I might be biased” – which should make you trust him more and lower your bullshit bells because he is all honest and truthful.
“But my wife – well, she is totally honest, she will tell you all the goods and bads” 🙂
Then, what is the first thing his wife do – sponsor ad.
Then she can not remember a thing, except “it is too low” …
Then he remembers her about heating … “oh, yea, heating is not adequate”.
Not adequate … in a sponsored video from which they make a living, for a girl that literary translates to “I was freezing my ass off in this stupid car” 🙂
Thats the sort of things I had in mind when I said you will not get the truth from these people, you actually have to experience it yourself and then have the guts to tell everyone if you manage to find a less-left medium that will not block your article.
I have seen many reviews and they are MUCH more worried not to offend anyone (and people offend quite easily this days) than giving actual, honest review.
I do not see why car reviews would be ANY different than that.
It is just more marketing packed into “honest reviews” package, which they throw away before intro ends.
It seems we have very different view of what leftist is.
I am pretty certain a vast majority of Tesla owners are big man-made (oh, sorry, that is so sexists of me, person-made :-)) climate change supporters.
That is kind of left I have in mind, Hollywood kind of left, not social-justice-warriors-students kind of left.
I am sure you think that, but you do not seem to be.
You have your bullshit bells off, the way you are spinning arguments reminds me a lot of conspiracy-theory argumentation or at least “unlimited traffic” marketing.
And I know you are a smart guy (smarter than me, anyways), which means something managed to blind-sided you. And I doubt it is the stock you own, that does not make sense, it must be something else.
It seems I can write even longer comments – ha! – which would indicate I have issues here as well 🙂
However, I am having such a shitty day that this seemed like a best way to focus on something and not go insane …
A few quick answers and I’ll try to be brief in the name of Disqus database. 🙂
I dunno. This is my source.
It could be the share of sold cars, instead of share of the cars on the road, it doesn’t say. And documented fires are just from the media reports and could be higher. If you use your share estimate of 0.15%, my argument still stands, Tesla has 9 fires, and according to market share they should have 257, so still 28 times less than average. But since the number of fires is in a single-digit range, and the whole thing is just a back-of-the-napkin calculation, you can certainly dispute my numbers, but I don’t think there is data to prove that fires are anything but exceptions, which was my whole point.
Well, since there are 459 registered EV cars in Croatia in total, the infrastructure is currently obviously ahead. Of course, the question is how many EVs visit Croatia during summer. But current situation will probably give infrastructure at least a year to catch up. 😉
I don’t buy into that “saving the planet” stuff as I already said. But I also don’t believe that not having enough energy is an issue to be alarmed about. It’s not like we’ll just wake up one day and find out nobody has any power. It’s the issue that will gradually resolve itself through the market.
At the moment, humanity is getting a lot of cheap energy by burning oil. We’re past peak oil, but fracking and real and economic wars delayed the issue significantly. After that, when “cheap” energy is gone, other not-so-cheap sources of energy start looking good. Or there’ll be some alternative – biofuel, cold fusion, whatever. But the point is, when there’s no cheap energy, then energy costs rise, and some things become unviable. Maybe driving cars becomes completely too expensive.
The thing is, diesel will probably become unviable long before EVs. Or, if there is a flood of EVs, then the price of charging will rise, and less people will drive EVs, until the oil runs out, and EVs become viable option.
It’s quite possible you’re right. Let’s revisit this in April, after Tesla battery day, and see if rumors are true.
Com’on, what should I have linked? Couldn’t find video on Tesla maintenance costs after 1 year from a guy that drives a BMW. :)))
On the rest, let’s just agree to disagree, because I have a feeling that further discussion is not too productive. I certainly don’t want to defend a position that everybody should drive Tesla or that there are no good cheap alternatives. Good old diesel beater is always a better option if you want to save money; nobody buys Tesla (just) to save on fuel costs.
But! Could you do me a favor and test drive a Tesla? When you’re in Zagreb, you can go to a test drive in Tesla with rent-a-tesla.hr. And please let me be on me; choose Model S or Model 3, bring a friend, whatever. Just contact the guy, schedule a drive and forward me an invoice when you get it (my e-mail is name.surname at Gmail).
You should not have offered that, I might just take it for the fun of it 🙂
Of course, I would never buy Model 3 because my mind can not handle giving that amount of money for a car that looks like a quickly made-up prototype.
And Model S is out of my price range, so there is no point to even consider it.
Also, I am a guy that has actual, physical reaction to car sound and I can not imagine high-powered high-torque car without sound to match it.
For instance, I do not dare say publicly what this video causes in me 🙂
And yea, I watched Shelby vs Ford in cinema and it was by far the best cinema experience I ever had.
I’m dead serious, and it’s a standing offer that won’t expire. Please indulge me. It would be even more fun for me than for you to put you in a Tesla. 🙂
I suspect you have even stronger physical reaction to rapid acceleration and squealing of tires. 😉
I agree with you on that one, it is a bit of a downside. But you might get your wish fulfilled in a worst possible way, as regulators are starting to force artificial sounds for EVs “so that people know they are coming.” Which completely sucks, as it completely ignores the issue of sound pollution, and all proposed sounds are a bad joke. And all that while all modern diesels are practically silent at low speeds.
Oh, this video popped up in my YouTube recommendations and I strongly suspect it’s research for this conversation that did it. I laughed my ass off, and I think you’ll enjoy it as well. 😉
First let me say I do not think that anyone should drive Shelby GT350 on high revs anywhere near populated places.
Luckily, GT350 sounds amazing on low revs, it is fairly loud, but emits quite deep frequencies that are actually rather pleasant.
However, I fully endorse quiet cars in populated places.
Well, I am not really new to acceleration.
I spent my share of time on Honda CBR 600 which goes to a 100 in like 3.2 seconds and Suzuki GSX 1100 which is even faster than that and you are at 250km/h insanely quickly.
Also, going from 4.8s (435d GC) to 3s is not that drastic as going from 12s to 4.8s.
And, yea, I understand what instant torque means, but I also understand that I need that … never, because I never do drag racing. And while moving, in sport mode, 435d always ensures max torque with that brilliant 8-speed automatic – no turbo lag, no nothing, just instant max torque acceleration.
Sure, Tesla will be more powerful all the time, but my conclusion is that 435d hits that sweet spot before diminishing returns hits and I just do not need that in every day driving, because I am already in jail with 435d as soon as I step on a gas pedal.
I really do not care all that much if overtaking takes 2.5s or 2.8s, but difference between 10s and 2.8s is quite drastic.
And finally, acceleration is super fun for an afternoon, like going to roller coster. But that does not make entire car experience, like few things Danijel mentioned.
Tesla has more of a software development company approach, while BMW 435d GC is engineering masterpiece in every aspect and every improvement over that costs significant amount of money (for instance Taycan starts at $100.000 – and you probably loose practicality of 4 GC – which I need, but someone else might not, of course).
I also dislike Tesla mostly because of tons of bullshit around it (and remember, I was in love in Model S when it came out).
My dislike of EV in general are batteries and “save the world” bullshit which leads to enormous taxes which most certainly do not go to any kind world-saving activities.
Also, long distance impracticality no matter how every Tesla driver is trying to convince me that it is not an issue at all.
With that said, I do like mild-hybrids with autonomy below 50km and speeds below 60km/h. That would make a big diesel perfect for city and you do not even need a charger all that often, it can mostly charge up while driving.
Also, I would probably support small EV city vehicles with range up to 100km, because they make sense.
But long distance, inter city, powerful cruisers and curve crunchers … I’ll stick to diesels as long as they will be available.
I’m kind of resigned with the bullshit part. Anything of value is kind of saturated by tons of positive or negative propaganda anyway, and I never seem to skip having to dully sift through it to find the stuff that’s useful to me.
Agreed. To be honest, acceleration is fun and nice to have, but not really important thing about EVs for me. I’m not that good of a driver – or a car person while we’re at it – to spend my days on the track or modding cars. My cars are there to be used, not loved.
Agreed on “save the world” stuff, though I do like silence and no emissions part. I also kind of agree on taxes, but I’m against all but most basic taxes anyway. You’ll get taxed whatever you do, for example, for EVs in Croatia, you’ll pay a pretty hefty “battery disposal” tax even if your car manufacturer disposes of your car battery at the end of its lifetime.
That sounds awfully like the negative bias right there. 😉
I’m with you on that one, but make it at least 200 km. Especially if you suffer from range anxiety as you hinted above. 😉 And for healthy battery, you’ll want to generally keep it charged between 30% and 80%, and you’ll want some margin for battery degradation.
Same here, except I love using my cars 🙂
In large city, lower emissions are always good.
But look, coronavirus is far more effective at pollution reduction that EV cars 🙂
And silence, I am kinda weird regarding that. I did a retrospect and I remembered I never liked the sound of motor bikes with an exception of few choppers and even fewer touring bikes like Yamaha FJR 1300 (which was my dream bike, something like 435GC today :-)).
It seems I do not like high-rev high-pitch sound in general like Ferrari, even though I have huge respect from engineering side because if there is any ICE engine polished to perfection, it is Ferrari.
So, it seems GT 350 is an exception, it’s naturally aspirated flat-plan crank non-typical V8 sound – my reaction to it is more similar to music than to noise – yea, I said I’m weird. But so was Carol Shelby, except he was also a genius, and I am just weird 🙂
435d has really nice, deep sound and very, very quiet compared to GT350.
So I would range it like this:
GT350 – full IMAX experience
435GC – IMAX screen with high quality headphones and subwoofer
Tesla – IMAX screen, sound off
🙂
When I was looking for various sounds, I stumbled on this.
Holy crap … I had no idea how much I missed this and it is almost 20 years now.
It seems my body still remembers it.
Why all the fuss?
Bikes were closest to “freedom” I ever felt. Stupid word, but I can’t remember better.
First, all safeties are off. No tech, no airbags, no steel frame around you, just your body propelling through air over 200km/h with 14000 RPM engine below your balls and gas tank below your belly. Sounds like fun yet? 🙂 🙂 🙂
But, that makes it all up to you and you make a mistake, you die.
Or at least it felt like that at the time, wasn’t thinking about tractors from corn too much.
It might seem it’s just adrenalin overdose (it is only later, when you stop, you realise your body is trembling from adrenalin), but when going this fast (for me at least), curve after curve, you quickly fall into state of undivided focus and clearness, loosing sense of body and moving through space with a mind and body somehow obeys and follows.
There is literary nothing else at those moments, entire being is looking for that perfect curve line to follow.
I craved for that state more than anything.
Much later, I experienced something very similar on a few rare occasions when I got AT right, just less intensive and much shorter in period.
Because AT is much harder than those bikes 🙂
Crazy? Probably, most likely, but I never felt more alive than in those moments.
I miss that because surviving just sucks.
Biggest problem was we were endangering others without being fully aware of it and tracks were simply not an option.
But none of my friends died (though I knew people that did) nor hurt anyone, so we got REALLY lucky, I am fully aware of that.
My cousin is especially aware of that, he was the craziest but also the best (he owned GSXR I borrowed from time to time).
He could do 10km in less than three minutes on local roads through three villages.
That is over 200km/h AVERAGE speed. It is another level of crazy entirely.
And he was not racing material because … he was too big.
After he sold GSXR he said “I need to live like a monk for the rest of my life because I think I burned all the luck there is”.
I derailed from topic but that video took me back and I remembered why I like curves and cars that can handle them properly.
My body can not handle bikes any more, so I am going for the next best thing. Ok, second best, I can not own GT 350 🙂
Because I can know the kind, been there and can smell that shit miles away.
I would not make his argument. I actually like the performance of electric cars, but I hate the lack of a gearbox in Tesla design. Rimac (Taycan, ahem…) has two gears, which allows it to have a much better highway performance while retaining extreme acceleration. My problem is with Tesla, because I’m allergic to bullshit, and they are almost pure bullshit. I would also buy a model S if Porsche made it, which tells you what I think about Tesla manufacturing capabilities and build quality. However, I would still be scared shitless because of the Li-ion tech, because I know how it works on a molecular level, I know what happens in repetitive charge/discharge cycles, I know what happens when the dielectric eventually is breached and the thing starts producing hydrogen. Remember those old phone and laptop batteries inflating up like a cushion? That’s why that happens. I would have nightmares about it, imagining small manufacturing defects being affected by huge amperages of the supercharge cycles, weakening the dielectric layer incrementally, until it “spontaneously” sets on fire in my garage while we all sleep. Fuck that shit, I’d rather have it powered by an isotope source if it’s well shielded and encapsulated in g-absorbing mass against impact.
Aren’t gears needed just because internal combustion engine has a very small optimal rpm range, while electric motor… doesn’t? I mean, obviously Rimac gets something out of its two speeds (and apparently doesn’t need a third), but on the other hand, Rimac is geared much more towards performance than Tesla and works with faster speeds; it makes sense for Tesla to simplify design because of the cost.
…ah, I found this interesting tidbit about how Tesla achieves efficiency at high speeds:
In any case, I’ve just looked at Taycan gearbox and realized that you just might be right with your theory that Rimac had their hands in Taycan design. If so, that’s great news, I like what Taycan is doing and hope it doesn’t fizzle out into vapourware like many other Tesla challengers. Because it’s really a true challenger.
Intimately. Though not Li-ion, I’ve had UPS lead acid battery inflate on me. I almost had to discard the UPS itself, but thankfully managed to get the battery out. Not the most pleasant experience I had.
While your concerns about batteries are valid, I hope that good engineering is able to lower the risk (and that experiment is already running and we’ll have good stats in a few years). Especially as I don’t see how nuclear-powered cars would make it past regulators any time soon. 🙂
The function of gears is to mediate between the speed of the engine and the speed of the wheels. One of their functions is to allow the ICE to fix its shit, basically to overcome its torque curve deficiencies. The other reason why you need them is not to require extreme RPM at high wheel speeds, basically to allow you to have a highway run at sufficient torque. That’s why Tesla bleeds the battery like crazy at highway speeds – it doesn’t have a gearbox, and therefore runs the engine at probably double or triple the RPM that would actually be required to overcome the air resistance. That’s one of those things why I think Musk is a shit engineer. He’ll over-engineer door handles to death but a difficult problem like this, he’ll just skip it. Rimac, however, dealt with it.
I’ll just drop in with one real datapoint. I bought Biljana a BMW 318d F30 year and a half ago. It came with 5 regular service vouchers, meaning, everything that’s normally done is free, you pay for extras like brake pads. Since servicing is done once in two years, and she doesn’t do much of a mileage, it means servicing is free for the time she’s expected to own it.
Fuel consumption on that car is less than what I had on my first Audi with 54 HP, which used 6.5l per 100km. However, it’s a 150HP 320 NM car that’s scary fast if you drive it like I drive cars. I am very sensitive to diesel exhaust and can’t stand it, and I can’t smell the exhaust in that car. The only drawback is that I got it with the cheaper equipment so there’s no leather and wood, just plastic and textile, but the driving part of the car is so good it’s silly. We didn’t have any single tinyest problem with that car, and the only thing I keep complaining about is the fake leather of poor quality on the steering wheel. I think I know where the stories about high costs of repair on BMW come from. People with more hormones than brains drive them hard while cold and new, bust the o-rings and other components, and then those start pissing oil. If you let it warm up properly before you push it, it’s incredibly well behaved.
This is really good to hear 🙂
Did you by new or used?
Also, you are probably aware, but it will not hurt to write it anyway.
Avoid Baotić service because they actually do not do anything (literary) which is actually a better case scenario because they did not screw anything up.
I am not saying they are like that with every car, but a car fleet manager for multi-national company shared several horror stories and lawsuits and I know several other people with exact same experience (and lawsuits).
Car fleet manager recommended AC Baumgartner in Čakovec if you need warranty and if you do not, most people I know from Zagreb go to Dobova in Slovenija.
I am amazed that 35d (313HP/630Nm) averages at 7.5L/100km and can fall below 6L on those rare occasions when you are good inter-city or highway citizen …
And the engine is running at 75% (same as 30d), it was tuned down because of CO2 regulations, so tuners love it because they can get 400HP / 770Nm out of it.
But for regular users that means this engine should last quite a bit.
New. There was that “Silver 25” action going on and the prices on the outgoing model were too good to pass up, especially since the 2.5T Volvo she was driving was 14 and a money pit for the last 2 years. It was perfect until a certain point, and then everything wore out at once.
You probably mean Tomić? Baotić doesn’t do BMW.
We don’t see it as a street racer of any kind, it’s intentionally set up with 16″ comfortable wheels and AT, but it’s fast enough for me not to perceive that much of a difference from the Volvo S60 2.5T AWD, and *that* was a fast car. But normally, it just wafts along very comfortably and quietly like the best Mercedes. Unlike my V60 Volvo, which is harder, more brutal and loud, with a manual shifter.
Tomić indeed. Have a dumb helmet today more than usual.
Oh BTW, if you’re getting a BMW, especially with a high-torque engine, absolutely get the xdrive version or you’re going to die. I’m very serious. Some people talk how rwd is fun, and they are just stupid. It’s not fun to be climbing a steep hill during the night in a rain and your tail just snaps off in every bend and you need to be all cramped up to dose the throttle so gently that it doesn’t cause a crash. Fuck that. You know what’s fun? It’s fun to feel that the car is well planted on the road and just obeys your commands, that’s fun. Take the xdrive.
Yea, a friend bought it a year ago, so we went through that “fun” story.
That’s for kids with daddy money about who we read in a newspaper.
So even he didn’t consider RWD, and after he bought it and we actually witnessed what that car can do … in any weather … it’s insane.
Amount of grip seemingly defies physics.
Biljana kinda regrets us not getting the xdrive, but it was not the option within the constraints of the limited offer, and it isn’t that bad even in the rain, but it’s just terrible in snow and ice, winter tires notwithstanding. But have in mind that it’s the “small” engine with “only” 320 nm of torque. I do have to notice that rwd actually has advantages over my fwd in the dry, but I never actually measured anything objectively. Essentially, the other drivers are doing so much crazy shit on the road, like texting or talking to passengers, we’re driving extremely defensively in the recent years, so I just can’t get my head into your “fun on the road” thing. I just can’t seem to find that road. 🙂
A cousin had 320d (touring though) and he used to drive two 50kg “bags” in the back through the winter – said it helped 🙂
As for roads, around Zagreb I know only one, behind Samobor towards the hills, but only in late autumn / winter / early spring and even then it’s not completely safe because here and there a truck use it as a shortcut. But there is rarely anyone else and it has solid clearance, so you only need to anticipate something on 90 degree turns. You can do 120km/h on a curves and 200km/h on a straight with good clearance. Of course, you need brakes that can actually stop a car from that speed and 435d delivers plenty of that as well.
Around my place there are plenty of empty, far out of village roads with great clearance (you can see several kilometres ahead). It is not an option only during late summer when corn is high.
Fantastic new road is between Ljubešćica and Varaždinske Toplice – out of village, fantastic curves, great clearance, not many traffic, great uphill S turn without clearance though – but it is fun even when staying on your side of the road 🙂
And you even have a roundabout on one end for easier repeats.
Međimurje around Sveti Martin at night … a car or two or none on entire section, it has very good clearance and you can see headlights far away in night, so plenty of time to slow down not to scare people. Of course, it is good to drive the road several times during the day before night attempt.
Highway between Breznički Hum and Varaždinske Toplice – it can be completely empty out of season and you “only” need some luck not to meet interceptor 🙂
But it is fantastic piece of curvy road, it gets quite interesting at 160km/h, but 435d can do 210km/h on those curves and it is buried into road like it has it’s own tracks. 210km/h is just around the limits of normal human perception on those curves, but 435d is so calm and stable at those speeds that it does not even give a single hint that is anywhere near to it’s actual limits and I would probably have to spend months on a track for my mind-set to allow anything faster than that.
There is also fantastic road towards the sea, I think between Gračac and Knin, but I could be wrong, need to go there again, but it is somewhere on old road (before highway) towards Ploče – with that section being completely new.
Not a living soul, anywhere, clearance is kilometres ahead, brilliant piece of road … with 60 km/h speed limit – I would really like to know why – but I actually know why, police patrol can park there and they will surely fill their pocket for the day because there is no way in hell anyone will drive 60km/h on that road, I would go faster on a bicycle there for fuck sake 🙂
Yea, 80% of time I am in defensive driving, but here and there I release my steam when conditions are right and by “right” I mean visibility is great, road is not slippery and I am only endangering myself and potentially wild animals, but not other vehicles – this is why I avoid driving fast when corn is high, for example, people on bikes and tractors just love to get straight on the road without even looking.
Sure, all this roads risks jail time at those speeds, but so does getting crazy from all the stupid rules imposed (like 60km/h limit on the road mentioned above), so I find this a good compromise.
As not being a family man, I can risk a ticket here and there since if you are not endangering anyone, cops can be reasonable especially if you pay on spot.
It would probably be MUCH smarter (and cheaper) to go to Grobnik, but I am somehow not there yet and it is not close, I can’t go there in drive-by like I can do one minute steam-out when I find empty road.
Oh, and what is fantastic about this car (435 Gran Coupe) is that with a flick of a switch it becomes luxury, comfort, quiet sedan with very practical 5th door.
It is incredibly polished and refined in every aspect. Beyond human capabilities on road in sport mode, beyond any luxury or comfort you might normally need on a road in normal mode.
There is also eco pro mode, but I am not sure what that is for 🙂 🙂
Are you fucking that car or what? 🙂
Fucking does not even come close …
But then, I am much better at driving than fucking, so I wouldn’t know 🙂
BTW, to me, an ideal driving experience looks more and more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y3_fVUMrdA
You might think that 435d GC is some low, sporty, rough car. But with M-Sport package and xDrive it comes with adaptive suspension which becomes rigid and lowers the car in sport mode but in normal mode it relaxes providing very comfort ride.
Ideally, I would get this E220 for 80% of my road time and Shelby GT350 for that 20%, but that is just too much and our roads are too harsh for GT350.
So, 435d GC is a blend of these two, neither being comfort as E220 nor sporty as GT350 but it is bloody close enough to both for the price of one.
You went about it so hard I configured one on the BMW site just to see how I like it. 🙂 I prefer the 5-series, but it’s very nice. Until I think about how much gold I would have to pay for it. Then my Volvo starts looking like an awesome idea all of the sudden.
Of course each has his own preference.
I like 5th door very much, it is just too practical to give that up (had it on Avensis, tried without it on Mazda, but regretted it).
Also 5 series is just too big, I think over 5 meters now? I just do not need that.
And 4GC just stands out providing space of a 3-series, but adding that great coupe line and 5th door practicality.
I am not going for a new car, there are great deals on German market, many saloon cars are going out after 2 years with less than 20.000km for almost half the price.
Only downside is – I can not choose the color, I think I’m going to survive that 🙂
As for weighing that in gold … we did quite the prepping last few weeks and we are past the survival point – I even managed to secure few months stack of blood pressure pills.
But as we think more about it, we get serious depression and decided – this is it, we are rotating supplies from now and we want to live for what is left, not just survive by thinking about survival.
Of course, it is our situation as it is, not that I am recommending it to anyone else or anything, just saying why I am buying 435 GC instead of kilo of gold.
That’s how I nabbed the Volvo. Got it with something silly like 17500 on the clock, looking almost brand new, for half the price of a new one, and was in my favorite color. I initially wanted to buy a Mercedes E-class, but I decided it’s too much money because we had to buy too many things at once because we just got out of several year long shit streak during which everything we owned degraded to the point of uselessness. After replacing things gradually, I started saving money for a house, and that’s where gold came in. You can’t save that much money in cash without losing all of it to inflation. Yes, we bought everything cash – all 3 cars, including Božo’s Hyundai i40, which might actually be the best of all 3. Biljana would disagree but that’s good. 🙂
Yea … I liked Tesla model S as a concept until I realised it is all politics and dirty money. By dirty I mean money stolen from people with another stupid law – like CO2 tax.
Another thing that resulted in that madness is a bunch of completely anaemic cars which are borderline useless.
I fall into a trap and bought Mazda 3 1.5d which looked like a really fine car and in a test drive looked quite performant – but it’s smoke and mirrors – it’s like it was designed for test drives and not actual usage – transmission is tuned so a car works quite well up to 100km/h when you are alone or with a passenger (most common test drive scenarios).
However, when you load it up for vacation, put bikes on tow hook and go to a highway that goes uphill – you find yourself in a situation where car struggle in 4th gear and a bus is overtaking you and then all electronics shuts down because entire thing overheats or something (happened twice).
And this 1.5D engine is “a monster” compared to flux of 3-cylinder 1.0L toys.
Oh, and they sell you – fuel consumption. True, that engine is extremely efficient up to 100km/h. While inter-city driving, I can easily get 3.5L of actual consumption (measured at gas pump, not onboard computer).
However, if you dare to go on highway and drive 140 or god-forbid 150km/h or more – fuel consumption jumps to 7+ litres. And Mazda has “revolutionary” technology to “recycle something bla bla”, but it is using extra fuel to do it – and we are talking about 2L of extra fuel which can last for 15 mins – seeing highway consumption reach 9L and more !!!
So, yeah, fuck all that. I am getting BMW 435d and I’m gonna floor it until bunch of leftist eco assholes suffocate from CO2 exhaust … which they won’t because it is Euro 6 engine, so I might just have run over them … 🙂
When I think about electric cars, I think about the circumstances in which it might make sense for me to buy one. For instance, if I had a house on Hvar where it’s sunny most of the year, and I had a 10KW solar power plant on the roof, then yes, I might get an electric car to use around the island, as long as I had another diesel-powered car for getting to Zagreb or other long-range trips. I would get something in the order of an electric Hyundai Kona. However, when I look at the maths, it makes no economical sense, unless we’re talking about a situation where fuel availability is disrupted due to some crisis and I have to rely on my own power plant as a power source.
I think I’d go with e-bike on Hvar instead, they are practical enough and don’t need power plant.
Tried it, it’s actually really nice on steep climbs, perfect for hot summer for normal people (yes, I know someone who enjoys steep bike climbs on Hvar at noon on hottest days … :-))
Situation where I like electric motors is when they are used as minor hybrids in ICE cars either for acceleration or city start-stop traffic.
This does not require any big batteries and most of power can be returned during driving, then you simply top it up at home – or don’t, just use ICE if battery is empty.
This significantly reduces fuel consumption since electric motor can get you going and at 40km/h diesel just takes over.
I think that would be vastly superior to idiotic start-stop tech which shuts down the engine every time you stop.
I am using it, because I’m lazy to turn it off each damn time, and after 57000km, I saved 85km in range … which is what, 0.2% … and impact on battery and engine on the other side is surely not negligible.
I “love” useless tech which solves nothing, but makes sure you car dies quicker – and all under “save the planet” cover.
It’s just crazy.
I don’t see an e-bike as a car replacement, it’s more of a scooter replacement; just another way to go places. But if you need to do a shopping run, especially in rain, you need a car.
It’s not a car replacement, you have a diesel for such occasions – it’s not like you need a big shopping or go to a doctor every day, and for daily commute and groceries – e-bike is more than enough.
I can see that work, but I do not need it as I go to vacation with an alien from the Sun and she finds 50 degrees, high UV radiation and steep bike climb as a great warm up … but, you know, for normal people … e-bike and a diesel could work really well 🙂
Well, apparently I manage to do just fine with just a diesel. And an ordinary bike, when it’s not winter. 🙂