SethInMI

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Everything posted by SethInMI

  1. I'm curious what your SIL is going to do. Did he buy the Model S new? Is he going to stay with Tesla for his next car? Go to a different EV brand? Or go back to ICE?
  2. Interesting. Geely is going to sell in the US, through its Volvo subsidiary. I suspect BYD will watch and see how that goes. I read that the Biden administrations view of the tax credit rules for leases of EVs is pretty generous, and I suspect if Trump wins he could re-interpret them and close that door.
  3. I've been seeing this alarmist subject popping up for me lately, the latest from the NYT: The gist is that BYD and Geely the big chinese automakers are going to be selling EVs & PHEVs in the US soon and will be cheaper than Tesla, and cheaper than any domestic / european ICE cars / SUVs. This will flip the script of subsidy debates, instead of the conservatives griping over EV tax credits they will be clamoring for EV tariffs to push the price back up. The liberals will be pinched, as they want to support EVs and also domestic labor, so strange bedfellows will likely be shacking up. The big three won't be in as much trouble as one may think, as they sell pick-ups and large SUVs and those have a loyal (to ICE and brand) fan base. We live in interesting times.
  4. Prob not. My buddy bought a used Ford Flex last year, the water pump quit and that trashed the timing chain and the valves hit the pistons = new motor. Dealer quote was ~13k to replace. He found a junkyard motor and I think got out for 4-5k. But I would hesitate to extrapolate a early Model S to cars being sold now-a-days. As volumes ramp up and competition improves the gouging that comes with repair should come down. I actually wonder what the equivalent replacement motor would be for a low volume luxury car (high end BMW or Mercedes) of 10 years ago. Might be 20k.
  5. I know it has been a few days since your post, but at your wingloading and experience you are fine on the Sabre3 (I say that as someone on the internet who is taking you at your word. Getting advice from an experienced coach / instructor who has watched you land will be worth a lot more) Also, a lot of people say they won't downsize, but as you get more jumps and get more comfortable, they do and likely you will too. Downsizing isn't terrible to do, downsizing before they are ready is where people get hurt.
  6. Since the "EVs in the cold / the Chicago event" has come up a lot in this thread recently I can add my 0.02 on what I have read. Obviously as others have noted, Teslas have been used successfully in the winter for many years (Norway is a great example, but in the Midwest and Canada many many Teslas are used throughout the year, I'm in Michigan after all) What happened in Chicago seems to be some Superchargers near O'Hare were off line which is unusual. This may have caused a number of people coming from the airport with depleted cars to get stuck trying to get to the next nearest charger. Also their batteries would have been cold, and that causes a slower charge rate which exacerbates the wait time for others. Having better destination chargers at airports (or in other places like apartments or on-street parking) will go a long way to mitigating this issue.
  7. so how far out do you feel comfortable predicting Brent? Where are EV sales in 5 years in the USA? Is Tesla bankrupt finally? EVs a distant memory? Or are they still the same 7% of overall sales they are now?
  8. An almost a-political post garnering no responses . TIL that the Tesla connector uses the same pins for DC and AC power. Not sure why I didn't see that before...pretty slick. I saw Bill said that he "expects" Tesla to change their connector, but I would be surprised at that. They have long championed it, and it can do all anyone needs right now. 1000v and >650A is a crazy amount of power. I say "expects" because I think he was being a little sarcastic, but anyway we got a standard.
  9. I came to the same conclusion many years ago. Several times a year I rent the pickup that our local big-box store has available so I can haul things, or borrow a family van to do that as well. Way cheaper. Not going to throw rocks at anyone who wants to own a pickup though, sometimes it is just nice to have a capability at your finger tips, even if you rarely need it...but people need to understand how much that actually costs them.
  10. The advantage I see is that PHEVs don't run the engine as much, so less wear and tear on it should make it last longer, and the electrical parts of the drivetrain should be very reliable. (edit some Hybrids don't have a transmission with many gears so they eliminate a lot of complexity there) Really either way (pure EV or PHEV) you have to pay a lot of money for something you don't need very often, just for long trips. (pure EV extra battery capacity; PHEV an entire engine). I like the pure EV b/c the driving experience is better with smoother acceleration and ease of maintenance (no oil changes, etc) but I ain't throwing rocks at anyone with a PHEV
  11. agreed. I add that plug-in hybrids are also a fine solution for lowering carbon emissions, as many trips can be done solely or almost solely electrically. Any way to get clean energy from the grid into peoples' cars or trucks is a win.
  12. This is inevitable. A lot of people just don't want Teslas. Maybe due to Elon's antics, or just they don't want to be yet another Tesla on the road. My wife is one of those people, as long as there is another brand that is matching Tesla on price and features, she will go with that. As more models enter the market, this loss of market share is only going to increase.
  13. Agreed. Tesla Semis are making runs from Fremont to Nevada and back but that is only like 300 miles, and the Semi can do 500. The nice thing about that application is you run over the Sierras, and EV trucks can regen during the descents which is safer and of course far more energy efficient.
  14. Here is an estimate for a straight through drive from Winnipeg to Eloy (stopping overnight would save about 40 min of charge time if you could slow charge at the hotel). You are charging about 15% of the time. It ain't pretty, but it can be done.
  15. It's great to see all this chat about EVs. Some more details on charging since people were bringing it up. As Ryoder mentioned, Teslas have a very asymmetric charge rate. At low levels of charge, they can accept 250kW of power but this tapers off to around 50kW near 80% (iirc). As a result, I don't charge much past 50% as a rule. Here is my ideal all day charge drive pattern: Leave home with 100% battery. Drive 3.5 hrs until at 6% Charge 7 minutes, add 100 miles Drive 1.5 hours Eat Lunch. Charge 30 minutes, get up to ~70% Drive 2.5 hrs until back to 6% Repeat short charge, then long charge for dinner. 2.5 hrs to hotel. Hopefully one with L2 charger so next day can leave with full battery. Otherwise have to add charge in morning.
  16. 2023 was an interesting year in robotaxis. In some ways it felt like the technology was finally getting out of "will it ever work" stage and into the "the future is here" stage, but other ways it felt like it was a "maybe this will never work we are giving up" year Ford abandoned Argo. GM / Cruise bit of more that it could chew and is doing a reset (new leadership, layoffs, will they give up too?) Google / Waymo is plugging along. There was a lot of chatter this summer about cars in SF getting lost or confused and people getting pissed off and "coning" them as a form of protest, but despite that, Waymo reported it did more than 700,000 driver-less rides last year, in PHX and SF and LA, which feels like they are more in the "we figured it out" than the "we are still figuring it out" What will happen in 2024? Will Waymo face some sort of scandal of its own, an at fault accident or something else? And then there is Tesla, plugging away on its own "all our cars can be robotaxis" effort, version 12 with AI decision making will roll out sometime this year, but they are still many years away from no person behind the wheel, and the question remains "can they do it at all ever"
  17. Telsa makes this very easy. The car will route you to chargers as needed and tell you when to stop charging and resume your trip. Chargers are spaced out so that there are multiple options. The range estimates that the car gives are quite accurate usually to within 1-2%, so I don't worry about getting to a charger with <10% battery left.
  18. My 0.02 on the depreciation question: This stung me as my car has dropped in value a lot since I bought it 2.5 years ago, but I still view this as a good thing. Tesla was making enormous profits off of the high demand for its cars, and since that demand has cooled it had to lower its prices a lot but is still profitable. Couple that with the tax credit extensions / modifications and you can see where the enormous deprecation forces have come from. BUT this is temporary. Once new e-car prices stop dropping depreciation will come into line with ICE cars (or will be better). And dropping prices for new e-cars is good for everyone (except me of course).
  19. I think the 1400 came from me posting that last week I did a 1400 mile round trip in my Tesla. 700 miles each way, ~1.5 hrs charging spread out over 13.5 hrs of travel. Brent acts like this is the end-of-the-world but really it isn't. edit: even though my wife was annoyed at all the charging we had to do on our trip "we have to stop AGAIN?" she was not pushing us to drive the gas car, and actually has decided to get rid of it and make her next car electric.
  20. No. 5 stops, 1.5 hrs total time. You act like sitting in your car is completely wasted time, but I would disagree. Giving yourself a break every few hours is nice. We watch Netflix on the car screen. But I can't win the "we can get there faster so you suck" argument...although like I said, I likely spend less time fueling per year than you do, so if your time is very valuable, maybe an electric car should be on your list.
  21. I got a laugh out of this line so thanks for that. I got a 480 HP AWD "sewing machine" that is very fun to drive. More fun than my 300 HP Subaru STi was. And I just got back from a 1400 mi round trip to visit my sis in NC. No waiting for charging. Was I in and out in 5 min? No, but 15-20 min really isn't that long. Stretch your legs, get some lunch or dinner. And I can couple that with the fact I don't have to wait that 5 min any other time of year, the standing outside my car freezing in the winter or sweating in summer while it fuels is long past for me.
  22. from the article you linked, I am not sure it won't. Sweden is 90% union-labor, and the Tesla maint personnel have walked out in a labor dispute, so the rest of the country's workers are refusing to support Tesla. So sounds like Tesla will have to make a deal to get anywhere in Sweden anytime soon... Unions seem to be making a comeback these days, at least generating a lot of news. So I don't follow the connection to the Luddites.
  23. I don't want any updates sent to me ; ) In case anyone was wondering how I made this, I wrote a small program that automatically finds and downloads all the individual dropzone web pages on dropzone.com, finds the name and geolocation of each one on the page, and saves them all to a single kmz file. It takes about an hour to do that (I put a few sec delay in between each download), and as long as dz.com doesn't change the format of their website, I can re-run the process at any time. If there is data that is out of date, I think it would be best to update dz.com itself, and the re-run the program to create new kmz file Another alternative would be to add some data to @platypii 's website and work on keeping that up to date. They could provide a kmz download button if you wanted a google earth view.
  24. alright, I think I got it to work, scraping is brittle and a bit tedious. The attached kmz has about a 1000 dropzones. Some DZs didn't have coordinates or I couldn't parse them and they ended up at 0,0. I grouped them by country as they were in DZ.com. There is no additional metadata other than the name of each DZ, I might add a url back to its DZ.com page but I probably won't. As someone pointed out, this data is probably from 10-15 years ago. google earth can be found at https://earth.google.com/ dropzones-full.kmz
  25. I didn't realize the Map version of the dropzone directory was not a feature of this site anymore. It looks the like the data (LAT and LON of each DZ) is still there. I might take a crack at scraping it into a KML file, I have wanted to play around with scraping a bit this would be a good excuse.