Driving Too Slow (2023 Update)

It was dark and I didn't have night vision goggle on. It was a rural highway, may be 45MPH or 50MPH.

My car drops into 25MPH turtle mode when the battery is very low. I guess the manufacturer knows something about efficiency at low speed.

Yes, i had to redirect from a non-working charger.

But surely you could remember which sign you went past last?

Don't US signs have glass beads in the matrix so that you get to see road signs in headlights as you approach? Or do EV's not have them?

UK you need to know the rules as "derestricted" is a white disk with a diagonal black line across it. ISTR US speed limits are all numbers.

I can see that the lower the battery discharge rate the longer it will last but the drag coefficient of the vehicle must be insanely high for that to matter at such low speeds. It makes very good sense to limit acceleration when the battery is on its last legs but the vehicle should be able to do a bit more than 25mph without taking too much of a hit.

Once it is rolling you merely have to replace the energy lost to friction and drag to maintain a given speed. Drag forces scale with velocity squared so it seems very conservative to limit to 25mph.

I don't doubt that <25mph absolutely maximises the remaining vehicle range on low battery if you live long enough to actually get there.

So non-functional public chargers is an issue in the US too?

With the "new" exception, because everybody does it and it is sendible...

Rule 116 Hazard warning lights. These may be used when your vehicle is stationary, to warn that it is temporarily obstructing traffic. Never use them as an excuse for dangerous or illegal parking. You MUST NOT use hazard warning lights while driving or being towed unless you are on a motorway or unrestricted dual carriageway and you need to warn drivers behind you of a hazard or obstruction ahead. Only use them for long enough to ensure that your warning has been observed.

For a first order approximation ignoring rolling resistance, I would expect the difference to be proportional to v², i.e. 64%.

Measurements for a Prius show 31kW/100km at (64km/h) and

36kW/100km at (64km/h), i.e. 86% From Fig A12

For comparison, ISTR petrol pumps "charge" cars at 500kW :) If we ever get batteries that can accept charge at that rate, it will be 2000cars for every GW of generation.

Some of our local governments (Berkeley, of course) have outlawed any new natural gas installations. They want all electric, all renewable power.

It doesn't matter because you won't have any type of car when they finally ban ICE with no intention of building the 200GW of generator capacity needed to replace them with EV's. Hopefully they'll establish a bus route up that mountain.

It can't possibly work like the Tesla where there is nearly nothing to get used to. It is such a natural feeling it took me maybe two days to adjust my expectations and not dump my foot off the accelerator when I want to slow down. I move between the Tesla and conventional cars just fine although I do miss the smoothly controllable engine braking. I think the strength of the braking is limited by the amount you can charge the battery which varies. That's another reason to not charge up to 100% because much above 90% the regen is very weak.

I was driving the Kia today and while I don't dislike it, it does make me miss the feel of the Tesla. I certainly hope other EV makers are able to provide that same aspect of the Tesla experience. It's like no other car I've ever driven, although I've not driven other EVs.

I literally don't have the time as every update would require a reread.

It's not a matter of efficiency, it's an issue of damage to the battery. They have to monitor each cell to make sure they are not being discharged below zero. This is at the very end of the battery capacity. I think in the Tesla this happens when you are below a couple of percent. One guy took his car down to I think it was 13 mile range trying to reach the charger and pulled over for some reason. He was videoing the dash and while sitting it went from 13 miles to 0 miles. I think the guy had an inkling this would happen as he doesn't video the dash by default and had no reason to pull over as I recall. Most likely this was the car renormalizing at the low end. It also needs to do this on occasion on the high end to have an accurate range estimate.

As to the non-working chargers, I've only ever seen an individual failed charger at Tesla sites. Never seen a site down.

Ed Lee snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Up to about 40 mph the only thing the car has to overcome is rolling resistance, especially if it has a low cd / sleek design body. Up above that wind resistance plays a bigger factor even on the sleek models. It does not matter what the drivetrain power source is.

snipped-for-privacy@coop.radagast.org (Dave Platt) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@coop.radagast.org:

Cali is friggin weird. They don't write a speeding ticket. They write you up for "too fast for conditions" and that way it matters not what the posted speed is. And if it is too fast you could eat a reckless operation criminal charge.

The speed limit represents an UPPER limit in most places. In many if not most. In today's 'idiots in a hurry' world, even traveling at the speed limit you end up with idiots crawling up your ass, acting like you are holding them up. Driving in town like they are on a highway.

I don't have knowledge of this particular case, but "legal agreement" could mean anything. A couple of options are: - insufficient local capacity in the network to charge 30 cars at full rate - arguments about who pays for a network upgrade to allow that - rights of way problems for upgrading - etc

It wouldn't surprise me if it had been constructed where space is available, and guessing there weren't other problems.

Who pays for connecting it up and the supply tariffs when they do.

Basically in London and the SE there is enough physical infrastructure for EVs to make sense (but almost zero electricity generating capacity).

In the North I would have to drive around 50 miles (a long way in the UK) to my nearest public supercharger. The physically nearest private one is about 5 miles away at a very high end country house hotel. Snag is they expect you to dine there and stay the night to have use of it.

Rural mains is nowhere near the capacity needed to handle everyone with a nightly 7kW load. Several larger farms and businesses around me have their own diesel generator kit because the local network cannot supply all of the electricity they need to operate at some times of year.

Ok, but you are just making this up as you go. No basis for any of it.

What surprises you if of little relevance.

Why are you asking me???

There are a lot of people who want to be experts on why EVs are not possible in their area. I think the UK may be a place where this is partly true, just not for the reasons you seem to think. In many ways the UK seems like a third world country with a power grid that is more fragile than what we have in Puerto Rico. But mostly this is not relevant. Here are some facts.

The "grid" doesn't need to support a "nightly 7 kW load" for every EV. In the US, drivers average 30 miles a day. I think the UK is about the same. That is a grand total of less than 8 kWh or less than a single space heater for around 6 hours (in the US they are 1.44 kW). In the US you could charge this on a 120V outlet. No, if every home in the US added this nightly load, it would have zero impact on the grid other than to help amortize the fixed costs of maintaining the "grid" lowering everyone's bills a bit. I don't think I've heard as much resistance to EVs from anywhere as I do from the UK. Instead of spouting absurd numbers, why don't people in the UK *think* about the issue instead of blabbing how hard it will be to use EVs or to power them from renewable sources? Is the UK as resistant to every technological advance?

So you have to continue using ICE? How are you going to sustain population growth, let alone meet your global warming commitments?

Quote:

"The government has a commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the United Kingdom by 50% on 1990 levels by 2025 and to net zero by 2050. In May 2019, Parliament declared a 'climate change emergency', however this does not legally compel the government to act."

Sounds like someone needs to start looking at Molten Salt Reactors. These run at atmospheric pressure and don't need the huge containment vessels of conventional nuclear reactors, so they are much faster and cheaper to build and operate:

Thorium Lifters Could Power Civilization for BILLIONS of Years!

Molten-Salt Reactor Choices - Kirk Sorensen of Flibe Energy

Once the power grids start to collapse, and people can't charge their Teslas or heat their homes in the winter (which is happening already) there will be an anti-renewable political reaction.

Of course, experts tell us we'll all be dead in nine years.

I've missed that one. Which experts and references please?

That is the answer to the question of "why they are still not operational?". They cannot agree commercial contract terms between the energy supplier and the owner of the site with the chargers on!

UK electricity supply is a mess with zillions of electricity "suppliers" who do nothing but bill consumers. They are going bust at the moment left, right and centre since they have no generation capacity and by a peculiar price cap law are forced to sell electricity at a lower price than they are paying for it. I know this sounds like something from "Alice in Wonderland" but I assure you it is true. More than 30 UK "electricity suppliers" have gone bust in the last 3 months.

It is complete madness - they are merely clueless book keepers not electricity suppliers. Electricity generation is a separate business.

UK can barely make enough electricity to stay warm at this time of year. We are pretty much reliant on French nuclear generation and continental interconnectors if it is a grey windless day. Too bad if it is cold in France at the same time - they will serve their own needs first.

Successive governments have prevaricated on new nuclear and now the shit is about to hit the fan. I have to agree that the UK infrastructure is at near third world levels with the recent large scale outage in the North of England as classic demonstration of just how low we have sunk.

Today's news is they have just refused planning permission for another badly needed interconnector. You couldn't make it up!

They have been paying large users to shutdown heavily energy intensive production during winter months for a few years now. The rot really set in when Centrica closed the gas storage buffer in Yorkshire in 2017

That leaves UK electricity generation after the dash for gas incredibly exposed to the spot market price for natural gas (now extortionate).

torsdag den 20. januar 2022 kl. 19.38.44 UTC+1 skrev John Larkin:

kinda started already, on one hand people complaint politician don't take global warming serious and are not ambitious enough pushing for green energy and at the same time people complain that the politicians don't reduce the tax on energy now that energy has had a large increase in price

I'm sorry, you are just being silly about all this. "Tariffs" and the rest of the contracts were signed before any construction was begun. Why do you make up such things rather than just saying you don't know any more details?

I don't really care. Nothing to do with me or EVs.

Yeah, I've heard. I made the mistake of getting into a discussion about EVs in a UK ham radio group. There were those who thought EVs are impossible in the UK for many, many reasons including the impossibility of finding a way to charge in the sense of "where do you put all the outlets"? They sent me pictures of cars parked half on sidewalks as the norm making curb side charging impractical as if that was very commonplace. Then of course some calculated every kW EVs would need as adding to the peak use times all the while acknowledging there are many who, for better rates, heat bricks off peak for heating, all the while claiming this was terrible for some reason. It was hugely emotional and many were clearly angry that a Yank was telling them it was possible. Ok, so I agree, the UK is so backward that EVs are not practical.

I thought the cross channel electric connections were rather limited.

I've read quite a bit about UK nuclear construction, 1 very overrun project coming to fruition soon (for varying values of "soon") and talk of allowing construction overruns to be passed onto the consumer for future projects (no incentive to control overruns then). I prefer the US approach, let them either succeed or fail on their own. If nuclear can't compete, why subsidize it? It's not a nascent industry, just a money sink.

Paywall...

So storage at night and usage during the day is needed, eh? How much is the current bill for shutting plants? Maybe batteries would be profitable? Or instead of paying them to shut down, maybe change the billing to an increasing kWh rate with higher usage. In my home county the power company gave an aluminum refinery a break on electric prices (it's done by electrolysis, so some electron per atom of aluminum). Some years later the company was looking at a rate hike when the power company ended their price break. The company left for Canada I believe, much better energy costs there. I say good riddance. They used to emit fluorine which would kill dairy cows when they ate the grass.