Jump to content

wws944

Members
  • Posts

    1,976
  • Joined

  • Last visited

About wws944

  • Birthday 11/23/1956

Recent Profile Visitors

1,118 profile views

wws944's Achievements

10,000+ Points

10,000+ Points (6/7)

  • Reacting Well
  • Dedicated
  • Very Popular Rare
  • Collaborator
  • Posting Machine Rare

Recent Badges

188

Reputation

  1. Barn find Coda that "out of spec" Kyle managed to purchase for $1.00:
  2. The Fountainhead Museum in Fairbanks Alaska has a 1903 Columbia Electric on display. Couple other antique electrics (Argo, R&L) as well. https://www.fountainheadmuseum.com/fountainheadauto/2011/10/new-arrival-1903-columbia-electric.html There is a 1916 Detroit Electric located in the Trolley Barn at the History Park in San Jose, CA. It is in excellent condition and is quite runnable. It was owned by two sisters who lived in downtown San Jose. They used it as a daily driver for decades. After they died, a local collector owned it for some years - until the museum finally purchased it. Many people who visit the Trolley Barn had no idea that vintage electrics ever existed! https://www.ctrc.org/projects/trolleys-trolleybarn/the-collection
  3. Teslas get updated over the air once or twice a month or so. It is like your cell phone - new features get added, old bugs often get fixed. I've even gotten two 5% performance boosts since I bought my car. The hoopla about a corner case and ABS braking system a few years ago? Tesla tweaked the firmware, sent out an over the air update, and every affected car in the field was done in a couple of days. No visits to a dealership service center. Same with the so-called "recall" a few weeks ago over the noise maker for pedestrian safety. As to OnStar, as was previously mentioned, they had the same problem when the analog cell networks went away. The 2002 Buick we had at the time was affected by it. Though GM has never made OnStar anywhere near as compelling as, say, Tesla has done with their infotainment. So the analog-digital switch didn't affect us since by then we had stopped our OnStar subscription.
  4. It is understandable that sometimes "stuff" happens. That is what warranties and part revisions are for. But someone at GM should have noticed the massive number of service problems and acted far sooner than they did. I'd imagine it took them somewhere around 15 model years, over a number of different engine lines, to resolve the issues at manufacture. Then we could talk about "clear coat disease" in their paint jobs.
  5. Most modern EVs use coolant or in some cases refrigerant for thermally managing the battery pack, motor(s), and other electronics. Nissan Leaf is a major exception. Their lack of good thermal management of their battery pack has cost them a lot in terms of pack degradation, high speed charging speeds, and so on. Given the right design, I think resurrecting the Airflow name is a fun idea. Chrysler could have a sorely needed winner here.
  6. McElroys take on it from CES. Actually looks pretty nice. Hopefully it will have good aerodynamics so as to be true to its Airflow namesake. Funny thing is that they are partnering with Amazon for some of the infotainment. Bezos trying to be Elon again... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvCSVmDAQE0
  7. Didn't help that, with the exception of Camaro and Corvette, GM basically doesn't sell passenger cars anymore. Just SUVs and trucks. Things like paint and intake manifold gasket problems were pretty bad on GM products in the '90s and into the 2000s. Amazing it took them so long to address the issues. But we've been pretty pleased with our 2016 Volt. Speaking of which, they were extremely slow to get into hybrid power trains. They should have done a lot more with Voltec than they did...
  8. That area of San Jose has managed to retain a lot of historic properties. Though with all the redevelopment, I wonder for how much longer. Little by little it is disappearing. Almost across the street from that building is Babe's Muffler Shop. Has one of the big "muffler man" statues out front. (Kinda like the Gemini Giant on Route 66 in Illinois.)
  9. Some very questionable and wrong numbers in that report. Looking at their client list on page 34, it is no surprise.
  10. I remember the round glove box door impressions in my parents cars as far back as my mothers '61 Lesabre. First car I owned with an actual cup holder was in a '90 Regal. It flipped out of the compartment in the armrest. I'd guess the earlier '88 and '89 W-body Regals had the same.
  11. LOL - that was almost me last week. We spent a couple weeks with my daughter, son-in-law, and (first!) new grandchild. They recently bought a house with a 5.5 kW backup generator. Generator hadn't been run in years. So I set about to try and get it running. Replaced the spark plug, a badly cracked crankcase vent pipe, horrible looking air filter, etc. Tried cleaning out what used to be gas in the gas tank - but the in-tank screen still seems kinda plugged up. Unfortunately didn't get to the point of actually starting it up before we had to leave. Next visit I'll change the oil and try to clean the gas tank out some more. Hopefully then it will actually start. To test it out, I plan to plug my Tesla into it and try charging for a bit. Oh - the road trip from the San Jose CA area to the Seattle area and back in the Tesla? (~900 miles each way) Piece of cake. Really not much different timewise from a ICE car - thanks to the Superchargers along I-5. The inns we stayed at overnight both ways even offered free EV charging. So we woke up each morning with a "full tank".
  12. Modern EVs don't use lead-acid batteries. (Except the small 12V battery. And that is changing.) Lithium-based batteries are MUCH better in almost every way. Lithium is an extremely common metal. They are literally scooping it out of dry lake beds in South America. More interesting is nickel and cobalt that are used in the more energy dense Li-ion cells. Nickel is fairly common, cobalt less so. Lots of research efforts to reduce the amount of cobalt vs nickel. In any case, battery packs can be recycled and the metals recovered for reuse. Elon calls used battery packs "high grade ore". Eventually, say in 20-40 years, this will form a closed loop where the amount of new metal which needs to be mined will drop. An alternative Li-based chemistry that is commonly used is "iron phosphate" (LiFePO). Not as energy dense but iron is a lot cheaper than nickel and especially cobalt. The Chinese seem to have cornered much of the market on this. But some of the key patents run out next year. So we could see a lot of non-Chinese manufacturers coming soon... So-called "rare earth" metals, like neodymium, are typically found in the permanent magnets in the motors. Again, recyclable at end of life. I know a fellow who converted a Porsche 914 to EV about 10-12 years ago. He initially used lead-acid batteries, but later converted it to LiFePO. While the car is quite drivable, it is still very much a work in progress. One of the things that surprised me about the Swedish Impala is that he used NMC (nickel-manganese-cobalt) battery cells in the pack, rather than heavier and less energy dense LiFePO. This is more in line with many modern EVs and a key to his comments that weight-wise, the Impala was about the same as before with the ICE and its components.
  13. I didn't mean to (re)start a big political thread with my post. Just thought the job the guys in Sweden did on the '66 Impala was particularly cleanly done and interesting. With 550 hp on tap - from zero MPH to as fast as one would feel comfortable driving a '66 Impala, I wouldn't exactly call it soul-less. Later in Bjorns video they show a '64 Impala hardtop that is in-progress. The body is on a rotisserie and the original X frame is being modified separately. So you can really see what they did. For the record though, I'm not a huge tree hugger. Nonetheless, both my wife and my daily drivers 'plug in'. After six years with the Volt, and three years with the Tesla, I'd find it hard to buy a new ICE powered car for daily driving.
  14. Youtube personality Bjorn Nyland, in Norway, does a lot of videos reviewing and testing EVs. Basically an EV hasn't been tested until Bjorn does his famous banana box test, 1000 km test, Arctic Circle test, etc - along with some scenic Norwegian countryside views and junque food reviews along the way. He recently visited some folks in Sweden who had converted a 1966 Chevy Impala convertible to EV using a Tesla Model S rear subframe and a battery pack of their own design. It looks like a very clean conversion. I think the video Bjorn made is pretty good, with lots of the right questions asked, and technical details. So maybe some folks here would enjoy viewing it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8McUViPbh6M
×
×
  • Create New...