Semi OT: Tesla Model 3

GM is not serious about EVs. They leave you to your own devices when it comes to the most important aspect of driving an EV, charging... at home or on the road. Dealers just aren't prepared to sell and likely aren't prepared to repair the Bolt.

That's because they didn't sell them in Illinois or Minnesota. Still don't I believe. They ramped up production very slowly and ramped up dealerships very slowly only in certain areas first. This makes the Bolt a very poor choice for driving cross country.

Silly to require me to buy a cell phone to drive a car.

Using a cell phone is silly. What if the phone can't see the cell tower?

On Monday, August 21, 2017 at 8:20:36 PM UTC-7, rickman wrote: ...

Presumably Tesla expects that all their target demographic already has a smart phone. ...

I don't see why the phone would need a cellular link for vehicle access - shouldn't be an issue. It is a direct BT link to the car.

Even if the phone doesn't work they provide a contactless card either for emergency use or for valet parking.

Probably the valet parking one restricts the driving ability of the car in some way - distance, speed etc.

kevin

How many hoses were available at the charging station? How many would have been needed if everybody had an electric car? What do you do when the sign says, "closed for maintenance, sorry for any inconvenience...next charging station 100 miles thataway...?" What's the range when you're averaging 5 MPH with the air conditioner on?

The model doesn't work when a significant percentage have an electric car or when traveling on roads that don't have the traffic to support charging stations.

That's not the point. If I have to download an app to drive my car and my phone battery runs down or it gets dropped or lost or stolen, I now can't drive the car! Very bad idea! A key doesn't run down it's battery.

If you use the phone all the time, what are the chances the card is at home when you need it?

So there's different cards? Even more complicated. I don't recall a card being used when I test drove the Tesla. Maybe the salesman used his phone.

Six.

Huh? When ifs and ands are pots and pans there'll be no need for tinkers.

Status is available online before and during any trip you would be on. No different than if I planned to get gas at that exit where there is *one* gas station.

Why do you ask silly questions?

You seem to be full of applesauce trying to argue both sides of a conversation at once. If more people have electric cars there will be more chargers. If I am driving a long distance so I need to consider charging it will always be on roads that have chargers. So far I have not taken any trips that would not be well accommodated.

But it's *green* >:-} ...Jim Thompson

Enormous battery capacities and extra-long ranges without recharge aren't prime motivating factors for most younger urban car buyers (the main demographic that will be interested in the vehicles.) We don't use our cars that way.

Nobody my age drives 400 miles on a whim. We're too busy working, no time for it.

So your car only has a 3 gallon fuel tank? Lol

Interesting how we want other people to sacrifice to save the planet while we think nothing about driving 400 miles for two minutes of self-gratification.

Yep, close your eyes and hummmmm. No need for math here.

Let's talk about failures. Something works. Next instant it's broke. If that instant happens after you checked the status before you started out, you will encounter a broken station.? Or maybe an alternate station failed forcing everybody to your chosen station and there's a 4 hour waiting line.

How about a traffic accident that forces people around the path to the charging station? Or when everybody decides to pass the time by charging their car

To encourage you to think beyond the simplistic and do a lot of math.

"SO FAR!" The gasoline infrastructure exists. You are never very far from a gas station. It takes you 5 minutes to fill up. It's not unusual to find all the pumps busy. What if it's rush hour and all those pumps are busy for 45 minutes? What's an extra hour and a half? Unless you are late for the airplane...or you have to pee. Yes, bathroom facilities are part of the solution.

Where are you gonna get and store all those electrons? Gas is delivered to the middle of nowhere in a truck. You may not be able to get a reliable source electrons out there.

What do you do in an emergency when a wildfire forces evacuation? Or a hurricane?

This whole electric fiasco is not based on math. It's wishful thinking based on everything else being perfect. We legislate/mandate electric cars. We stifle the only reliable source of electrons we have, NUCLEAR! We attempt to do it on a timescale that the infrastructure cannot tolerate. The infrastructure can't handle 100% of the city getting home from work and plugging in their electric car. Wishing will not make it so.

Somebody needs to give the legislature a calculator and a calendar... and teach them how to use them. And realize that it's gonna cost FAR MORE money and resources to make it happen than they let on. And that money will come from something else that we want.

One way to do that is to let the people vote on the real issues as a package. Option 1) electric cars AND nuclear power and increased distribution infrastructure and higher electric rates and higher transportation costs reflected in everything we buy and higher taxes and inadequate global participation to significantly affect global warming and no money to save the whales.

Option 2) gas cars and fracking and local air pollution and let the marketplace determine where we go from here, AKA status quo.

Option 3) ???? reduced consumption??? Like that's gonna happen.

If you concentrate on building the supply of electrons, you help EVERYTHING, not just electric cars. The marketplace will make the electric cars happen. Unfortunately, that requires cooperation among many factions and will never happen.

If you force the cars, the infrastructure will break down and be gradually fixed out of necessity. A very painful and expensive process, but it will happen because of the pain it causes. What a strange society we live in...

I'm not saying that we shouldn't have electric cars. I'm saying that we need an infrastructure that can supply the fuel for them. You can't have one without the other. Solar and wind are NOT the answer. We're gonna have to quit bitching and build a bunch of reliable energy sources like nuclear or equivalent, always-on, sources. And we're gonna have to subsidize the conversion of petrol stations to electric charging stations...while maintaining the petrol supply for many years until old technology is purged.

The electric car fantasy needs more calculators and less wishing. We need leaders who can see past the end of their noses, AKA the next election cycle.

We're so selfish that we're gonna murder the planet for instant gratification. Get used to it. It ain't gonna change, no matter how many Teslas you buy.

Interesting how we can trivialize other people's lives. You know nothing about me and you know nothing about my trip. It was more than *just* the eclipse.

No need for math when you ask "if" type questions.

The vehicle is just as likely to break. In fact, with many times more moving parts, an ICE vehicle is *much* more likely to fail on the trip. Then you are totally stuck until the vehicle is repaired. An EV can always motor on to the next charging station even if it's not a Supercharger. The Tesla will simply charge at the same rate as a Bolt or Leaf.

Asking silly questions just encourages people to ignore you.

IN MY LIFE, I have not taken a trip that would not be viable today with a Tesla EV. I have driven to Texas, New England and Nova Scotia. All these trips would have been simple in an EV with today's available charging network.

Drive away...

If nuclear were so good, why didn't we build more of it in the heyday? Today it is far too expensive to build. North Anna received approval for a new reactor, but it will likely never be built because the generated electricity will cost at least double what we are paying today. But that's another conversation, let's stay on topic.

I've lost track of what "it" is.

Option 4) Let the market place determine where we go with incentives to get new technologies off the ground.

Oh, wait, that's the status quo!

I think *you* have not looked very hard at how EVs can be accommodated within the existing system. Electrical demand is not even so nuclear can't supply all our power as it is not suitably dispatchable. Our peak power generation is summer late afternoon in the US. EVs can be charged at off-peak times which will not require a single power plant to be built and will allow the use of *more* non-dispatchable power generation. Win-win.

I don't think you understand necessity. Necessity provokes *rapid* change rather than slow change which happens *without* necessity.

Actually, alternative power sources are *ideal* for powering battery EVs because they *store* the power generated opportunistically.

Ok, show us some *valid* calculations rather than waving your arms in the air.

Each of us make our own decisions, so no, none of us can change the planet alone. You are amazingly observant of unimportant details.

On Monday, August 21, 2017 at 9:29:32 PM UTC-7, rickman wrote: ..

It's credit card sized so the expectation is that you will have it in your wallet.

What happens if you lose your conventional car key?

I'm speculating but it's an obvious extension that there will be different cards or you can restrict capabilities of a specific card in some way.

There will probably also be ways of loaning an electronic key with defined restrictions in use - you will be able to allow your teenage son to drive the car but with limitations on acceleration, speed, distance etc.

You may also be able to call up Tesla and after proving identity they will remotely unlock the car without a key at all.

I've had cars with special valet keys - with conventional cars they usually restrict access so they don't unlock the trunk and glove compartment.

kevin

On Monday, August 21, 2017 at 9:17:19 PM UTC-7, mike wrote: ...

Obviously it will hurt consumption and range but the A/C will probably cons ume about 1-2kW in hot weather. With the larger capacity vehicles (Bolt or Model 3) it would take days to deplete the battery form full. If you are in a traffic jam with a conventional vehicle you can easily use a gallon of gas per hour.

Nobody is forcing you to have an electric vehicle, it will be many, many de cades before they become rare or difficult to get. In the meanwhile range will increase and the infrastructure will improve. Just over 100 years ago driving an automobile had similar difficulties; nowhere to get fuel, relia bility problems, you had to repair it yourself and cost - why not just have a horse?

I have owned an EV before and will get a Model 3 when they are available. I like the driving experience of electric cars and for most of my driving t hey work better than conventional vehicles even with existing infrastructur e.

kevin

On Monday, August 21, 2017 at 9:17:19 PM UTC-7, mike wrote: ...

A stationery car with A/C running will probably consume 1-2kW. With the large batteries in cars such as the Bolt or Model 3 you can sit in traffic for days from a full charge.

A conventional car will probably consume about 1 gal/hr under similar conditions - I have seen cars run out of gas.

You are assuming that the infrastructure won't improve along with the population of electric vehicles. It will probably get better than we have now.

Just over 100 years ago a similar war was occurring between horses and automobiles; there were not gas stations, you had to get fuel at the pharmacists, you had to repair the unreliable car yourself and they were more costly.

kevin

On Saturday, August 19, 2017 at 8:09:09 AM UTC-7, snipped-for-privacy@notreal.com wrote: ...

You can use an application that uses locally stored data and not rely upon the data connection - I have done that while traveling abroad where data costs 10 cents a kilobyte.

kevin

If you sold a Toyota Prius variant with a 3 gallon fuel tank and a lifetime deal that your fuel cost would always be under $1/gallon you'd have a line of buyers out the door.

I pull the spare out of my wallet or get another spare from my house. But I've never lost my *keys* since they are large and heavy enough so I always know if they are in my pocket. If the card does not need to be removed from the wallet, I guess that's ok. I wonder how many you get and how much a replacement costs.

Yes, you are speculating.

More speculation....

"Call"? If you have a smart phone you can unlock the car. If you don't have a phone how can you call? I recall hearing of someone who drove outside cell coverage and couldn't get back into his car.

So have I, but without any electronics.

That's great until you have to alter your route. I hit traffic coming home yesterday and had to take side roads. With the large storage available and the size of maps, there is no reason why a GPS can't contain its own database of roads. That's what hand held GPS receivers do. That's what I used yesterday to get me home. The only downside was the batteries didn't last the whole 11 hour trip.

One of the "proper" navigators might have been better if it could have shown me details of the jams. It was very strange for being "congestion". We would sit for 15 minutes or more, several times I turned off my engine and got out of the car. Then it would start moving again and we'd do 60 MPH for a couple, three miles until we sat again. I've never encountered traffic conditions with such extreme variations. If I could tell where the compression waves were occurring, I would have gotten off the highway to get around them. But I've never seen a GPS with good real time info.

On Wednesday, August 23, 2017 at 1:13:52 PM UTC-7, rickman wrote: ..

Maybe, but I reckon that those features are highly likely - Tesla already has similar features in the Model S.

Again I 'm extrapolating form existing features in Tesla's or their competitors

You can borrow a phone? Or call from a landline.

That's not necessary just to restrict access to trunk/glovebox but most keys these days have electronics in them, even though it may not be obvious.

The standard way for the immobilizer to work is to use short range RFID techniques to validate that a valid key is present. The electronics are usually in the head of the key so is unobtrusive and doesn't require a battery.

kevin