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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: October 26th, 2023

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  • To be fair way too many manufacturers are putting way too much screens into their cars.

    Physical HVAC and volume should be mandatory.

    It wouldn’t be so annoying in my Tesla if the auto climate worked as good as it did in my 2005 Audi A6, there I basically had it at one temp setting for summer and one for winter. Rarely touched it. In the winter I adjusted the seat heater the most.

    What annoys me even more is that Tesla somehow seems to be getting away with going too far.

    Removing parking sensors and the physical stalks… unless they miraculously manage to fix that with software and FSD my next EV won’t be a model Y, even though it’s quite a lot of EV for the money.


  • While obviously you could and there’s plenty of good answers in this thread to why two motors (or even three or four), the typical skateboard design for EV’s don’t really leave the door open for it without taking batteries out to leave room for a transaxle. Energy density in batteries is low compared to petrol or diesel, and you want to utilize the volume efficiently.

    Another point is that electric drivetrains regulate 100-1000 times quicker than fossil power trains, so having two motors doesn’t really have much downsides.

    From a manufacturing perspective: You can build an RWD or FWD vehicle, and without changing any components other than wiring and wheel hubs (maybe a subframe) you can add AWD, just need to plug it in. On an ICE vehicle you would have different gearboxes and stuff when going from 2WD to AWD/4WD.


  • YMMV.

    The math is different if you have a car already and decide to replace that prematurely because an EV is cheaper to run than if you are comparing two new/used cars.

    There’s a big difference between relying on public charging infrastructure and on charging (mostly) at home. Office charging can be priced varyingly, but if cheap or free then that’s a good deal as well.

    As for road tripping, I find that long trips in Europe is about 50% cheaper than they would have been in my previous car (an Audi A6, 3.2FSI Quattro, not the most frugal car, YMMV). Short trips, like where you only need to charge once or twice are much cheaper because I leave home with a full battery and arrive with a not so full battery and recharge at the destination. However, if you pay for charging at the destination it’s a different story. But most of my road-trips easily cost me between 1/6 to 1/4 of what they would in the past.

    Again, YMMV. But if you compare my model 3 to an ICEV of similar characteristics the mileage of the ICE vehicle is often high.

    Personally the financial calculation for me was a no-brainer. In Norway I calculated to save about $2000 on fuel, and another $1000+ on toll roads.

    $3000 saved on yearly maintenance and upkeep vs my 15 year old A6.

    So basically the math added up to TCO parity after 3 years.

    Considering fuel prices since I’ve saved even more. But we pay $8.5/gallon right about now, so def. easier to land the maths.

    Doesn’t hurt that it’s the best car I’ve owned in terms of performance and comfort/convenience.

    Always warm in the winter, always fresh in the summer. App access that works, built-in YouTube, Netflix, Disney+. Great when waiting for a ferry or sitting in the car waiting for someone or something.




  • Re soundbar that really depends on your setup.

    You should just output to TV, and then the TV uses ARC to talk to the soundbar, or the Apple TV goes into the soundbar input and the TV from there.

    No need to choose the soundbar.

    Now, if you happen to have an old soundbar without HDMI then you still need to pipe the sound from the TV to the soundbar. Older ATV have optical, which might be an option on some soundbars.







  • We don’t know yet. Age plays a huge difference in cars, more than mileage, and as such your question is very open ended.

    Do you mean what happens at 300k after 20 years of averaging 15k each year, or what happens at 300k after averaging 40k for 8 years?

    Or what happens at 300k after averaging 60k for five years.

    Those are all going to be different answers, and so far we don’t even have enough statistics to answer the latter one.

    Suffice to say, most ICE vehicles don’t reach 300k. I did have an Audi that passed 400k though.

    And as others are pointing out, LFP batteries are likely to last longer as they have about 3x the cycle life of conventional EV batteries.

    But battery packs are more than the sum of their batteries. BMS boards could fail, mechanical connections could fail, fuses can blow, etc.

    EV’s are full of electronics and I wouldn’t be surprised if at a certain age electronic components reliability is going to favor reselling the cars for battery pack extraction vs. being a used car.

    Battery storage could easily use a 15 year old battery pack for another 10 to 15 years, if not more.

    As such used prices are likely to hit a cutoff threshold when they reach a certain age where the used market will be 1:1 with the repurposing market.



  • Surely there must be better ways to upgrade that car.

    Either a USB or BT module or just replace the head unit?

    FM transmitters “work”, but it’s crappy deluxe. If you can just pop in a different head-unit then you are spoiled for choice.

    If it’s a very integrated thingy, like my 2005 A6 had a MOST bus and all the hardware except for the CD changer was in the trunk connected with fiber optics.

    Got a third party module that pretended to be the CD-changer and gave me a USB-interface and optional Bluetooth.

    Obviously the car is 20 years next year, so don’t go overboard, but if you can swap in a DIN-unit that’s basically the same price as an FM transmitter.



  • Bjørn Nyland has made several videos on the topic of AC charging, but titles are a bit vague so hard to tell which ones, but I believe this one touches on it:

    https://youtu.be/Zpp0iQC5xxc

    Obviously you might not live somewhere where it is cold during winter, peak efficiency of the on-board charger is likely to be around the 80% mark, but the more the battery heats up during AC charging the lower the internal resistance is.

    As for 11kW damaging the battery? Nope. Not even. Most EV’s to day fast charge at 100+kW, some at 200+. The battery doesn’t even get tickled at 11kW.

    At the end though it doesn’t really matter. 11kW isn’t a huge amount and your household could easily pull that around dinner time.

    What 11kW charging often enables is full off-peak (during the night) charging of the battery. So instead of taxing the grid at day you can fully charge an empty battery when the demand drops.

    Ideally chargers are smart and can help frequency balance the grid by charging when the load drops, or stop when it surges, but we have only seen the very beginning of this.