ICEs vs EVs and the oil supply/price

The battery packs will probably eventually be standardized/modular if you don't like the battery that came with a used vehicle or it's on the way out do a swap for a higher-quality aftermarket piece.

Battery replacement on the Volt is already a totally DIY-possible job you just need a garage and a set of jacks that can get the car in the air up about 4 feet so there's enough room to jack the old battery down and out from underneath and the new pack up into place.

A diesel-electric pickup truck seems like a perfectly plausible/practical vehicle; put the battery flat pack and charger/regenerative braking electronics under the bed for cruising, and one of those little Cummins turbodiesels up front to spin a generator for hauling, look at how cute it is!

It would make a nice near-future project for the well-heeled DIY gearhead, mate the Voltec drivetrain from an EOL Volt and the battery pack from an EOL Tesla and hook it all up to a lil diesel powerplant shoved into something like a Ford Ranger.

They made a Ford Ranger electric pickup for a while I think I recall reading some guy was trying to mate the drivetrain to a used Tesla battery instead of the stock nicads.

This is how AC networks have been self regulating for more than a century. If there is too much production, the frequency will rise slightly. If too much load, the frequency will drop below nominal. This self regulating quite well in normal conditions.

However, if the frequency grows too much, frequency protection relays will disconnect generators, if far too low, loads are disconnected.

The frequency protection relays are set to operate at about 1-2 Hz frequency error.

It shouldn't be a big deal to add a water tank into the air condition system. Chill the water tank close to freezing during the day by solar power. using the evening, pump heat from the rooms into the cold sink water tank with minimal electric consumption.

Norway has a lot of cheap hydro-electricity, only a few percent of any other electric sources.

To high light your ignorance of such things.

And about 2% BE cars.

We see some Teslas in the Sierra mountains in summer, very few in winter. If things get snowy and slow over the passes, an electric could well get stranded. A small backup gas engine, like in the Volt, makes more sense.

That red car is gas powered. When Safeway is crowded, people park their cars in the unused Tesla charging slots.

Take a look at the cams around Kingvale or Castle Peak, maybe later today as a small storm moves in. When chain controls are in effect, it can take hours to crunch slowly through the snow over the crest. A full tank of gas is conforting.

What happened to the Tesla big semi truck? I haven't seen any yet. It will be interesting to see how that works.

Into a load of much less than 1 ohm impedance? that would be suicidal.

if there's pumped storage it would flow back down the spillway...

The Volt is a fine New England winter car but not just because it has a gas engine; the second gen Volt's drivetrain has nearly 300 ft/lbs of torque about the same as a base tier Ford Explorer but also all the way down to 0 RPM.

There's an operating mode to recharge a flat battery from the engine to give power assist in combination going up steep or slippery grades it's called "Mountain" for that reason but in the time I've had the car I can't say I've encountered a real need for it. With some stickier all-weather tires than the stock ultra-low rolling resistance Goodyears (I use Continental PureContacts) it easily busts out of drifts or deep slush.

With traction control off you can rock it furiously between R, D, and L if need be there's no risk of damage to the drivetrain, you can actually drop it into "L" at any point without risk even 80 mph if you like.

It's a lower-tech car than the Tesla in many ways other than the powertrain where the engineers had to get quite creative to meet a budget. It has regular knobs and buttons and manual seat controls and a manual spring-loaded charge-port release catch which doesn't seem to freeze up or malfunction. Much of the exterior lighting other than the low-beams and high level brake lights is incandescent rather than LED which helps keep the ice off.

I don't think there are any 4WD Volts. You'd think that 4WD would be natural in an electric. Why not a motor per wheel?

When it's snowy over Donner Pass, you need 4WD with snow tires, or chains. Chains are an enormous nuisance.

In a car that they're trying to sell at a MSRP 30-40k price point (depending on trim from base up to all the bells and whistles) it's probably mostly just cost. Two BLDC motors and planetary gear/dual clutch transmission, a 4 cylinder engine, a 12 kWh pack and associated parts is what there was a budget for.

More motors, or larger pack, or smaller engine, or...any major deviation from the design they came up with you either bust the budget or end up with a car that's going to be reviewed poorly. I think it's a more impressive piece of engineering than the Teslas because to sell as many of them as they did and get good reviews the three-legged stool had to be exactly right proportions.

It was IMO an impressive result from a small team of designers (maybe two dozen people had a direct hand in coming up with the spec and most of the design) on a relatively small budget, by Tesla standards.

Strip out the engine and put in a bigger pack and you can afford more motors probably even 4WD. Pack unit cost wasn't low enough to design a car like that for the desired sale price when design effort started over a decade ago.

All-wheel drive cars like Subarus don't get particularly good fuel economy for their size either, my father owned a mid 2000s Forrester it got pretty poor mileage (maybe 27, 28 mpg on a good day) for the size of SUV it was (small.) Maybe less of an issue with an electric drivetrain vs. mechanical but still a consideration.

That is to say for Americans to go out and buy an American-made plug-in hybrid even in quantities of a quarter million it has to be two things - not significantly more expensive than the foreign offerings, and better reviewed by the car mags.

A tall order for a company like GM, but American major car mfgrs can definitely innovate with the proper motivation, e.g. facing down imminent death.

The steam into the turbine is regulated.

While most consumers were focused on Tesla's goings on the Volt was the car that sucker-punched the European and Asian auto mfgrs. they thought US automakers were done and would never be anything more than a shadow of themselves. Which may still happen eventually, but it was at least delayed.

It did send them into a bit of a panic wondering where and how it had come to be, and likely the first time in a while the foreign manufacturers were left to scratch their heads and wonder "how do those Americans do it for that price." Maybe someone will write a book about the story, someday.

nutes

eyond

at all the power is solar. My guess is overall, maybe 10% comes from the pa nels. AC units consume LARGE amounts of power and in Chicagoland in summer

equire power and the panels are dead and even with battery storage, I serio usly doubt they have excess power during the day.

climates. The car is harder to move because everything stiffens up - tires, lubricants and just driving on snow is equivalent to a constant incline. T he batteries are less effective in the cold and the driver doesn't want to be in a cold car. You don't have an engine with waste heat to tap into whic h means using electricity for heat. Granted a heat pump (are those used in cars?) is less wasteful than resistive heating but you don't have that much to begin with. Then the 'fun' part. Re fueling can take hours and your ran ge can drop to less than half. Just what I want. Drive 150 miles and then charge for an hour and drive another 150 miles. Hybrids make a whole lot mo re sense.

ss the Norwegians just drive to the store and back. Do a YouTube search on

a model X. Yeah, he has some issues, but for the most part the cars just keep on truckin'.

Extra unsprung mass is bad news for traction. Also motors there would take a real beating.

Maybe one day there will be a compromise: 2 small wheel motors with just en ough power to deal with getting stuck in ice & snow, the other 2 wheels dri ven from the main engine. It all costs though.

NT

From the european side of the pond, most of us don't understand why anyone buys US cars. They're overpriced, terribly made, have crude handling & lousy mpg. So why do you buy US cars, what's the upside?

And yes, we had one once. Never again.

NT

Their cars are often somewhat cheaper than similar foreign offerings but IMO more importantly US automakers understand American psychology better. As another American pointed out to me once "the Volt looks like a hybrid I'd like to drive." Nobody drives a Prius hybrid because they desperately enjoy the experience. The Volt is often a thrill and always a pleasure to drive out the garage, every time. It's the eco-weenie car that also turns heads and girls want to ride in.

My first car was a Chevrolet Celebrity, a 1989 IIRC. You sure didn't feel like a celebrity in it. 30 years on the Chevy I'm driving now is something else entirely.

From time to time they also just make some true winners.

Hey, I had a British car.