wws944

And...

Barn find Coda that "out of spec" Kyle managed to purchase for $1.00:

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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.)

Some very questionable and wrong numbers in that report. Looking at their client list on page 34, it is no surprise.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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

I had one of the very last Oldsmobiles sold new. My late uncle purchased it, a loaded 2004 Alero, a few days after Olds officially ceased to exist. One of the reasons he bought it was nostalgia - as my grandfather always drove Oldsmobiles. Had paperwork from GM stating that Olds was no longer, and that they would continue to service it. My daughter drives it now. C4C - I used to walk through the local pick n pulls around the time the first C4C was in effect. You could tell the C4C cars because the engines were painted orange. No orange-painted parts were supposed to be harvested from them. There were actually some nice cars with orange painted engines. Others were rolling garbage cans.

Codas are real unicorns. They didn't make very many of them, and weren't that great of a car. I think $4900 is way high - when you can buy a battery degraded Leaf for about the same or less. (I wouldn't recommend a battery degraded Leaf either. Unless it was for a very short commute.) I used to know a guy who had a Coda, so have actually sat in one. He was using it to learn about EVs, and experiment with some electric motor design ideas he had. Last time I talked with him, he had bought a couple more as parts cars. That was about 10 years ago. No idea if he still has them.

Couple of other thoughts: I, like probably many here, have tried following the original alignment of Route 66. Today it is largely Interstate, and often literally on top of the original road. But I found it interesting that one can often find frontage roads right next to the Interstate that allow travel by slower vehicles. They sometimes even give a more realistic feel of the pre-Interstate era because they are not as "cut and filled" as the Interstates. They are also where a lot of the historic Route 66 tourist stops are located. I'd guess lodging, or lack of it, depends on the specific group and its goals. On our Lincoln Highway tour, the organizers tried to keep it at about 30 cars max at any point in the tour. This meant the group was large enough that we needed to stay in larger chain motels instead of mom 'n pop motels. Same with food - where the restaurants need to be a certain size to accommodate the group. Fuel... I drove my Tesla Model 3 on the LH tour. There two other Teslas as well. One did the entire trip from WDC to San Francisco, the other joined the tour in the Midwest - as I did. Since we were mostly close by Interstate 80, access to the Tesla I-80 Supercharging network made it pretty convenient for most of the trip. There were a few hard spots at the time though. One was Marshalltown, Iowa. I car camped overnight at a public RV campground and charged the car using their "50 amp" electrical hookup. Interestingly the same park was used overnight in 1919 by the Military Convoy! The other place I car camped and charged overnight was at the KOA in Ely Nevada. We did the US 50 run to Fallon the next day. (If I were to do the same trip today, two years later, there has now been enough EV charging installed that I could stay in a motel both nights...). Gas cars ranged from Model As to modern, and I don't think any of them had a problem.

The Lincoln Highway dates to 1913, and some notable names of the era - like Henry Joy and Carl Fischer. It ran from New York City to San Francisco. Today much of it is more or less on US Route 30 from the east coast to Wyoming. From SLC westward to SF, one can largely stay off the Interstates. E.g., on US 50 and others. Some roads along the original alignment through western Utah are not paved to this day. Here is an interactive map of the route: https://www.lincolnhighwayassoc.org/map/ In 2019 I participated in the centennial tour commemorating the 1919 US Military Convoy and put on by members of the Lincoln Highway Association. The 1919 Convoy started in Washington DC, hooked up with the LH in Gettysburg, then followed the LH to San Francisco. Our tour did the same. I joined up in Chicago, and drove with the group to California. There was a second tour at the same time put on by a Military Vehicle Preservation group. I actually met up with them in Wyoming when I was headed eastward to Chicago. Point being there are a number of these somewhat forgotten "named auto trails" throughout the country. When the roads were given federal funding in the early 1920s, and then federally assigned numbers in 1926, the various trail organizations disappeared. But some are being revived and documented by road historians. Many/most are still two lane highways.

As I mentioned in one of the other threads, between my dad and myself we had three 190SLs. Mine was a '61 which had been repainted in "resale red". But we knew it was originally white due to the dash color. So had it repainted back to white. I sold it, stupidly for too cheap, in 1977 or so to a guy who flipped it about a month later. Still makes me mad... I eventually used the proceeds to buy my first new car - a 1978 Buick Regal Sport Coupe (first year of the Buick turbo engines). Dad's 190SL was a '60 and was also white. He sold it in about 1988 or 1989 to a collector in Detroit. The third was a white '59 parts car that was full of rust and scrapped. The '59 did have a removable hard top and was one of the reasons we bought it. But it got ruined by some neighborhood kids where we had the car stored. Very pretty car, but not especially performance oriented. It was fairly heavy. And despite the dual carbs, wasn't that powerful. I did learn a _lot_ about cars from working on it though.

Antique electrics were pretty quiet too. In one of Leno's Baker Electric videos he comments on how it is one of his wifes favorite cars because it doesn't spook the wildlife. Gotta mention that Tesla started installing external speakers in their cars a year or two ago in order to comply with NHTSA mandates for pedestrian safety. In true Elon fashion, it can be configured by the cars "Boombox" app to emit a variety of user-selected sounds - including, um, "emissions"... (The pedestrian alert GM put in our Volt sounds like someone is rattling a can full of loose nuts and bolts. No user configurable sounds possible.)

I know you have the older R/V body style, but in the case of my GMT400 Suburban, they made a number of different radiator combos: smaller for the 1500, larger for the 2500, with and without engine oil cooler, with and without tranny cooler, gas vs Diesel, tow package, snow plow ("1 ton") package, and so on. They all "fit" - but obviously some are heavier duty than others. Ask them to look up a 2500 with a 454 or Diesel instead of a 1500 and see what happens.

Yes - These days Title 24 in California requires dimmers on most circuits with incandescent lights. (Max output is 95% of straight through. So the dimwits wise politicians in Sacramento can claim a 5% power savings.) I had to do that workaround with the light fixture over my dining room table due to the dimmer. It now has 5 LED and one halogen MR-20/GU-10s in it. There was dimmer in another location that I replaced with an on/off switch.

The Fountainhead Museum in Fairbanks Alaska has a fun 1903 Columbia. Though when I visited, it was kinda hidden behind a couple of other cars. See: New Arrival! 1903 Columbia Electric | Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum (fountainheadauto.blogspot.com)

Most were lead-acid - similar to most of todays 12V automotive batteries. Eventually Thomas Edison famously introduced his nickel-iron batteries that worked better, but were more expensive than Pb batteries. Too little, too late to stem the tide to gas cars though. In the "missed it by _that much_" department: In the 1910 kids book "Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout", Tom mixed some lithium into his batteries to make his electric car run better. If only Edison had taken a cue from Tom Swift, and tried lithium instead of nickel, he might have hit upon todays LiFePO battery chemistry. LiFePO ("iron phosphate") batteries are now used for many things, including lower end EVs.