The day Brian Feeney walked into a Palm Springs dealership to buy a new Nissan Leaf, he was fulfilling the dream of state policymakers to entice Californians to break off their love affair with gas-guzzling
purchase was identical to the amount of carbon emissions his all-electric Leaf would spew into the atmosphere: zero.
So, the salesman asked, how are you planning to get it home? Feeney
In the end, his fun new car was delivered to his home hitched to the back of a tow truck.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
He should have located a car charger between the dealer and his house.
As I have written before, I read MrMoneyMustache, all about frugal living. This fellow doesn't recommend buying new cars, but, now that he's worth a few million, he splurged. Seems the taxpayers covered a lot of the expense.
"Straight off of my sales sheet, this is what the car will cost me:
Sticker Price (from the car window): $35,445 Dealer Handling Fee (aka more profit margin) added in: $600 Assorted Discounts from Dealer: (-4500) Hard-to-Explain Discount from Nissan Finance: (-6000) Federal Tax Credit: (-7500) Colorado State Tax Credit: (-4653)
Sorta Net Price of Car: $13,391
However, it?s not quite that good, because many of these discounts are taken only after you pay sales tax on the full price of the car ($31,544 in this case). In my region, sales tax is about 8.26%, so I paid $2605 of tax. About $1500 more than you?d pay on a car that was really priced at 14 grand.
So my total out-of-pocket cost with tax will be $16,000, which is equivalent to buying a brand-new car with a list price of $14,775."
Here's the KQED version: "In the end, his fun new car was delivered to his home hitched to the back of a tow truck."
I kinda wonder about the article because the recommended procedure for schlepping most electric cars is to put it on a flat bed car carrier, not drag it behind a tow truck:
I had something like that happen to me, but in 1983. I just purchased a shiny new Dodge D50 diesel pickup truck. At the time, the economical diesel vehicle were the obvious next big thing to anyone who could calculate the cost of ownership.
We reached an agreement and had all the required paperwork finished just before closing time. I jumped into the drivers seat, and proceed to drive my new pickup truck home, about 15 miles away. I made it about 4 miles, when I ran out of gas, or rather ran out of diesel. It seems that the dealer stores all the vehicle on the lot with the absolute minimum of gas or diesel in the tank. The mechanics were suppose to top off the tank before delivery, but didn't because they didn't have any diesel fuel. Consumer diesel fuel was something new at the time and nobody was open. The nearest truck stop was about 10 miles away. I'll skip the subsequent fiasco, but basically I didn't get my new pickup home until about midnight and had to hitchhike back and forth about 3 times to get enough diesel to prime the injectors with a hand pump.
I think it would be fair to say that such incidents will continue to be common until a new technology is widely adopted and the required infrastructure is in place.
I wonder how the hydrogen fuel cars are doing?
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Sounds like the local 50kW radio station "consumer advocate". He prides himself on being a cheapskate, yet drives a Tesla and has over $50K in solar panels on his roof. BTW, electricity is about $.07/kWh.
I had a similar thing happen twice. The first time, it was a busted alternator. Our second car had a plugged fuel filter. Both were driven off the lot within 36 hours of the failure. Both forced us to walk home (once before we were married ;-).
How is an "infrastructure" going to help an electric?
I stopped for a potty break on the way back from the beach (Redneck Riviera) today. It was the first time I've seen CNG sold at a gas station. An off-brand station in the middle of Alabama, at that.
More electric recharge stations means the distance between stations will be smaller. That should help situations like the original problem of getting back from Palm Springs to Pasadena. If there were additional electric car recharge stations in between, Brian Feeney would not have needed to get towed home.
However, that begs the question of how Brian originally traveled from Pasadena to Palm Springs. Presumably, he did not travel in a Star Trek transporter. I would guess(tm) that he drove in a vehicle, flew in a commercial airliner, drove a one-way rental car, or rode in a Greyhound bus. Perhaps he drove a trade-in car. In all cases, traveling 100 miles to pickup a new vehicle should have inspired some consideration as to how he was to dispose of the rental car, previous car, or other travel arrangement. Nobody who could afford an electric car is that dumb and the person in the photo does not seem like someone who might make that mistake.
I'm also a little suspicious that the story is a fabrication. Notice the license plate picture in the above article. It's the old style California license plate. The new yellow lettering on black background plates began on June 17, 2015 and have been very popular, despite the $50 additional cost: I would have expected anyone wanting to make a statement by purchasing an electric vehicle to also have purchased the new style plates. It might also mean this happened over a year ago, before the new plates were available. Yeah, I know, it's not proof, just a suspicion.
Hmmm... Saving the photo in the above URL to my computah and using Irfanview to inspect it, I find the EXIF information intact:
Filename -
ImageDescription - Brian Feeney with his new Nissan Leaf, an electric car. Photos show Feeney at the charging station in his home garage. Photos by Iris Schneider, October 5, 2016. Model - Canon EOS 6D Software - Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh DateTime - 2016:10:05 08:48:57 GPS information: - GPSVersionID - 2.3.0.0
Ok, there's been some touchup, which I guess is normal. The Canon EOS
6D has a built in GPS, so the location data was either removed, or the GPS turned off. No way to tell if the photo was taken in Pasadena.
I had similar experiences in 1983, when I was learning to deal with consumer diesel. I could fill up with diesel in some really odd locations, usually a truck stop in the middle of nowhere. The convenience of being able to fill up at any hour of the night, in residential areas, came gradually over the years. (I drove the D50 diesel for about 20 years). I initially had to plan my fillups, which with 450 mile range, was fairly easy. I would expect electric car recharge stations to follow the same pattern of growth and convenience.
There is one difference between an charging station and a gas/diesel station. You can carry a gallon of gas or diesel from the station back to the car, so that you can ride back to the station for more. You can't carry a spare battery or spare "charge" in the same manner. Maybe a big portable capacitor that discharges into the vehicle battery or a small gasoline generator to charge the battery.
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Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
There is a major fallacy and lie concerning "zero" carbon emission WRT the Leaf. Yes, the car BY IT SELF may pass, but i dare anyone to tell me truthfully that the charging power SOURCE has zero carbon emissions.
Damn, you all sound like this is the first time government f'ed something up with your dollars. That's why we need smaller government, it can do less damage to, "we the people".
btw, MMM doesn't own a Tesla, I don't recall he has solar collectors, but if he does, I'm sure there will be an analysis of the cost on one of his blog pages. I don't know the cost of electricity in Colorado, but in Florida I pay $0.141/kWh.
I always liked the idea of a small motor/generator concept with an electric car. Even thought having it mounted on a small trailer would be ideal for long trips. However, batteries are constantly getting better and with more and more charging stations, that's getting less useful. Mikek
So you're going to take a day to drive it home. Good plan.
Probably has a real car, also. The EV is to show is friends how "in" he is.
It wasn't a truck stop, rather a little nondescript quickie mart.
There is another difference. You have to hang around the charging station for eight hours. Good thing most gas stations also sell Snickers, these days.
Possibly. Notice that the sheet of plywood leaning against the wall show considerable black tire scrape marks. It a two car garage that is almost totally devoid of the usual garage junk. Either the garage was cleared out for the photo, or there's room for a 2nd car.
Not quite true: Leaf battery packs can be charged from fully discharged to 80% capacity in about 30 minutes using DC fast charging. I'll assume that's with the 6.6kW charger and DC fast charging.
A full charge takes much longer: The base 2014 Nissan LEAF S comes with a 3.6kW onboard charger, which takes 8 hours to fully replenish the battery pack from a 240-volt Level 2 source.
Meanwhile, the LEAF SV and SL have a 6.6-kW charger as standard
charging time to a more reasonable 5 hours.
In addition, all LEAF models can be equipped for DC fast charging (standard on the top SL model), which can provide an 80-percent charge in just 30 minutes.The LEAF uses the CHAdeMO standard, as opposed to the CCS standard used by the Chevrolet Spark EV and
I don't think the typical quick stop market is going to tolerate having drivers stay for 8 hrs charging their vehicles, and will likely have the DC fast charging model for a faster turnaround.
--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I've heard a number of lefties say that the electric cars of 100 years ago were taken off the market because of an oil company conspiracy, and they even made a movie about it. What was the range of those cars back then? 20 miles?
Until maybe 10/15 years ago, commercial electric vehicles were
*common* here and would go down *most* residential streets every day. They were used by "the milkman" who delivered milk in bottles to doorsteps before breakfast.
Their vehicles were perfectly suited to repeated start - move
20m - stop operation as they moved down the streets. Mechanically they were open-sided for easy access, and powered by a large bank of lead acid accumulators.
The chink of two empty milk bottles being carried was a sound that everybody instantly recognised; the nearest equivalent nowadays is two empty beer bottles.
And 15 years before that, they had self-driving ones powered by 100% renewable energy. ;)
Actually horse-drawn milk carts survived a long time in Vancouver because they saved the milkman a lot of time--he'd jump out with the bottles for one house, and the horse would keep going to the next one and meet him there.
"The milkman's horse" was/is proverbial for being so habituated to one route that he could walk it in his sleep.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
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