wws944

That is ridiculous. If your wife wanted a new electric clothes dryer installed in the garage (requires a 30 amp 240V circuit), are you saying it would cost at least $5k to get the electrical work done? I get by with a 30 amp (24 amp continuous) circuit in my garage for my Model 3 just fine. Can charge the 75 kWh battery pack from empty to full overnight - about 12 hours - though one NEVER does that in practice. If I want to charge faster, I have a 50 amp (40 continuous) setup on the other side of the house by the entrance panel which would cut that time almost in half. Could easily upgrade that to a 60 amp circuit (48 continuous) to max out what the onboard charger in the car is capable of taking. Ironically, we normally use the 50 amp setup with our Volt. Its onboard charger can only draw 16 amps. Just the way we normally park the cars that the Tesla ends up with the slower connection. We put in a 200 amp service 25 years ago when we installed central AC.

Never thought I was a Studebaker fan. When I was young, my mother told me her brother had owned one and said it was the worst car ever... But there is an early '50s Starlight coupe that must live fairly near me. I see it out driving on occasion. Really an interesting little car. Had a co-worker years ago that owned an Avanti. Wouldn't mind one of those either. Post-Studebaker with SBC engine would most likely be easiest to live with. Dream car as a teenager was a '70 Buick Gran Sport w/455 and 4 speed. Love the mid-60s to early 70s Corvettes. Other cars on my list are in the 7-figure range these days, so utterly unaffordable... (E.g., '55-'57 300 SL, early '70s 365GTB4 or GTC4 Daytona, etc.)

Considering that 80% of the money you pay for gas gets blown out the tailpipe and radiator as heat, vs none in a EV, there is no comparison. Like humans, battery pack works best when warm (room temp), so various strategies are used to keep them happy. A lot of innovation going on right now between the manufacturers. Combination of PTC heaters, coolant, heat pump, scavanging heat from motor(s) and inverter, even warming up the battery pack and using its thermal mass to keep the cabin warm, etc. Tesla does a neat trick where they can intentionally run the motor(s) INefficiently so the resulting extra heat in the stators can be harvested - rather than using PTC heaters. In the cabin, seat heaters and often, steering wheel heaters, are usually standard equipment - whereas they'd be considered luxury options on ICE cars. The reason? A cabin heater could draw 3-6 kW, whereas each seat and the steering wheel heater draw like 50W each. So often you can get away with just using the seat heater.

Avoid used Leafs. No thermal management of the battery pack, so they often suffer a lot of degradation. Other manufacturers have done a much better job of babying their battery packs with active cooling and warming. Large scale battery pack recycling will eventually be a problem that the industry will need to address. Lithium isn't particularly valuable, but other metals like nickel and cobalt certainly are. Been a huge push to reduce the amount of cobalt. The Chinese LiFePO batteries don't have any cobalt, but also don't have as good a energy density as other popular chemistries.

As far as driving at 80 mph in a Smart Car vs any Tesla... First of all, I'd never feel comfortable driving a Smart Car on a freeway at speed. Second, it is hard to describe how effortless a Tesla drives at those speeds. Hammer it, and there is immediate torque with zero latency. You are flying past 100 mph almost instantly. In the scenario I described a few posts upthread, commuting 80 miles/day with a total electric cost of around $4/day - that is about half what a Prius would use in gas and 4x less than the MB I replaced with my Model 3. Generate ones own electricity with solar panels on the house and the cost goes down even more.

A good rule of thumb for most EVs is about 3.5-4 miles/kWh. It is about 40 miles between Tracy and Sunnyvale. So about 10-12 kWh each way. I pay about $0.18366/kWh for off-peak charging. So about $4/day.

Well, a number of companies have offered solar roofs in their cars for years. Generally they run the HVAC blower when the car is parked on a hot day to keep the interior cooler. That, and trickle charge the 12V battery. More interesting is charging the traction battery in a hybrid or full EV. Back of the envelope: Assume there is about 1 kW of energy that falls on a square meter of space at high noon under optimal conditions, and that is about the amount of space available on the roof of a car. Affordable solar panels are about 20-ish percent efficiency range. So you might get 200 W out of one under optimal conditions. Clearly not much to power a car with. That said, Hyundai/Kia have started offering a 200W panel on some of their hybrid cars. So here in California, it would generate around 1 kWh a day in the summer. That is good for about 3-4 free miles/day. In the winter it would be much worse. So on average, figure about 2 miles/day year 'round.

Anything CNN says I take with a huge grain of salt. I'd post a link the TMC (teslamotorsclub dot com) thread on the tragic accident, but it looks like this forum won't let me. It is in the "Autopilot & Autonomous/FSD" sub forum. A couple of the posters in the thread live in subdivisions surrounding the accident site and are familiar with the road in question. A lot of conspiracy theorist postings too... Warning: Thread is 43 pages long as of now.

Sigh. So many inaccuracies and misconceptions in this thread... Electric grid can easily handle the extra load. Charging is generally done at home in the middle of the night - when there is excess capacity. Remember it takes a lot of energy to pump/transport crude, refine it, and pump/transport/pump gasoline too. All that disappears with EVs. The accident in Texas a few days ago had nothing to do with FSD or autopilot. Car wasn't equipped with FSD software and no way basic autopilot was engageable on the residential road where it happened. No lines painted on the road for the cameras to use as reference. (Per Elon.) Fire was quickly put out, though they continued to use some water to keep the pack cool. H2 for passenger cars is stupid for many well-documented reasons. Barra sees the writing on the wall. If Caddy (and GM in general) are to survive, they MUST make the transition. Lyriq looks like it could be a great car. I'd consider one in a few years. That said, I am in the process of dumping some dinero into my neglected old Porsche to make it really drivable again. Just an occasional weekend driver, like my Reatta. Will never go back to daily driving an ICE car. EVs are so much better for daily driving tasks...

Finally got time to mention on this thread a fellow named Robert Aronsson. He apparently did a lot of pioneering EV work in the 1960s-1980s based on conversions of production cars and his own battery chemistries. He was involved behind the scenes in the 1968 race between Cal Tech and MIT that I mentioned above. He worked with the electric utilities on charging stops, supplied both teams with motors, and the Cal Tech team with his batteries. (MIT team used NiCads.) There is a wikipedia article outlining his accomplishments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Energy_Systems Apparently he had some connections with Holiday Inns. In 1969 set up a series of charging stops at some HI locations between Detroit and Chicago to demonstrate road tripping by EV. At the time, he was converting Renaults. Later AMCs, and then Chevette gliders. For those of you on facebook, there is a "Robert R. Aronsson" FB page with a bunch of postings and photos of his cars.

@TerryB - nice overview of the Electrovair II. Silver-zinc batteries were a dead end. AC induction motors have been around since Nikola Tesla days, and are used by Elon and Co in their cars today. (Though half as many as they used to - induction on one end of the car and PMSRM on the other end these days.) The inverter description is more interesting. They attempted to use SCRs, but were clearly pushing the limits of solid state electronics of the day.

I've been a techie (and car lover!) all my life, and spent my career in Silicon Valley and the computer world. This stuff is highly interesting to me. The Corvair article that @alsancle posted is quite interesting, and has a lot of stuff in it that we still see used as arguments against EVs today. Even though the vast majority of those arguments are either no longer true, or never were true. Doesn't stop me from occasionally jumping in my 35 y/o 944 and enjoying shifting through the gears, or taking in the sun with my Reatta convertible! ICE cars will be with us for some time to come. But for me, not as a daily driver.

The not-so-secret secret is that the bigger the battery pack, the more power available for the motor(s) to draw - given the inverter can handle the power. Ludicrous mode (0->60 in under 3 secs) in a Performance Model S can draw 1500+ amps at 400V! They borrowed some tech from SpaceX to safely handle the high current. Latest models have upgraded the inverters to use SiC instead of Si IGBTs too. More efficient, so less heat to deal with. Also the highly efficient PMSRM motors introduced with the Model 3 are now being used in the rest of the lineup. The Tesla Semi prototype uses four Model 3 PMSRM motors powered by a massive battery pack. Will out drag any conventionally powered semi pulling a load, and doesn't have to shift through eleventy-five gears either. Ludicrous is old news now. Plaid and Plaid+ coming soon.

That was, in fact, their intent. Build something someone would aspire to own - like if they won the lottery. Not some 'weird mobile'. Hence the Tesla Roadster which, with a lot of help from Lotus, could match/exceed the performance of other high end performance cars. Tarpenning, Eberhardt, and Musk were all sports car guys. Speaking of EVs in the 1960s, the first EV "cannonball" took place in 1968 between a team at Caltech in Pasadena, and a team at MIT. The Pasadena team raced to the east coast in a converted VW van, and the MIT team raced to the west coast in a converted Corvair. A series of charging stops was coordinated with local electric utilities on the route across the U.S. Both teams encountered a lot of technical problems, and some towing was involved. After penalty points were applied, the Caltech team was declared the winner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Transcontinental_Electric_Car_Race Caltech team member Wally Rippel later went on to work for Aerovironment, AC Propulsion, and Tesla. FWIW, the current EV cannonball record, from Red Ball Garage in NYC to the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach, CA, is 44 hours, 26 minutes. Was done by a team driving a Porsche Taycan.

There is an Electric Shopper at the EV Museum in Kingman, AZ. It's not much more than a golf cart or something you'd see rolling around a factory floor. The EV Museum is co-located with the Route 66 Museum in the old Kingman Powerhouse building. Not sure if they have a Henny Kilowatt, but wouldn't be surprised if they do.

GM developed an electric Corvair prototype in the 1960s. There are videos on youtube of it driving around the test tracks, e.g.: There is a fun book that was published in 1996 that chronicled the development of the EV1. It is called "The Car That Could", by Michael Shnayerson. In it, he goes through a few of the earlier GM research efforts. But mostly the Sunraycer solar car of the mid-1980s, which led to the Impact EV concept car, when Roger Smith then committed into a production version that became the EV1. It is a great read. The fellow who led the EV1 effort, Ken Baker, was also involved in an earlier 1970s GM EV concept called the Electrovette. Shnayerson says the 1960s-era Electrovair and Electrovair II used variable frequency inverters to control AC motors - much like todays EVs. They were designed by an engineer named Paul Agarwal. But the electronics of the day were too crude. According to Shnyerson, Agarwal gave up in disgust. The Electrovette was experimenting with some newer battery chemistry, and apparently used DC motors and even cruder controllers. I am guessing they didn't have the budget to both investigate the newer batteries and update Agarwals inverter design. The Electrovette concept was also deemed a failure and buried. It wasn't until the mid 1980s when Holden, GMs Australian brand, contacted Roger Smith about an upcoming solar race across Australia. Smith had just purchased Hughes Aircraft, and as it turns out, Hughes knew a LOT about solar panels and batteries from their satellite work. A team from Hughes got Paul MacCready and his team at Aerovironment to help out and they developed the Sunraycer solar car. Shnayerson talks a lot about the rivalries between the various GM divisions when developing Sunraycer, Impact, and the EV1. It is amazing that any of them got built... The fellow who developed the inverter for Sunraycer and Impact was a maverick engineer named Alan Cocconi. Cocconi later started AC Propulsion and developed a prototype called the T-Zero. After the California Mandate of the 1990s got defeated in court, and the EV1 and others were immediately cancelled, Cocconi lost all his customers. Then Marc Tarpenning, Martin Eberhard, and venture capitalist Elon Musk used one of Cocconi's T-Zeros to demonstrate using Li-ion battery tech with AC Propulsion's inverter and motor designs. This led to the Tesla Roadster. And the rest is history.

With a 20 MPH top speed, aero probably isn't a big factor in a Baker. As most of us probably know, a lot of the early electrics were sold to women in big cities - who often wore Big Hats. The motors and their controllers weren't very efficient back then compared with what is being done in modern times. Actually I do have a question about the controllers in antique electrics. But at the risk of drifting my own thread, perhaps I'll post it in the "Electric Cars (Milburn, Baker, etc.)" forum. Lot less traffic in there tho...

Maybe a Fisker Karma? They were PHEVs that have a neat solar panel integrated into the roof. It and a number of other cars that have been available for a while now. The panels can basically tender the 12V battery and in most cases, usefully, run the HVAC fan when the car is parked. Helps keep the interior cooler. Charging the traction battery pack in a hybrid or full EV is another matter. Hyundai/Kia are starting to put 200W of solar on some of their hybrid cars now. When parked outside in the sun, e.g. while at work, it can ideally give a couple of free miles of driving per day. Not really a big deal. But over, say, a 15 year life span of a car, that can translate into as much as 10-15,000 miles of free driving - depending on where one lives. There are some other EVs on the horizon that may offer more panel space and/or higher efficiency that make solar even more practical. Thinking Aptera, Lightspeed (Dutch), Sono (Germany), etc. Elon even said they are looking into it as an option on the Cybertruck. And thank you @Bob Barrett and @alsancle for posting the interesting news clippings!

I have a friend who has been blind since birth. Really an amazing guy who has led quite a productive life, very computer/tech literate, and so on. His wife is blind too - so they've never "seen" each other. I've often wondered what his reactions would be if he were to suddenly have vision. (She is decent looking, so he'd be happy about that!) "A phone with a camera" is the wrong way to look at it. They are really handheld computers with a phone app.

Many years ago, I was on a jury for a M1 case. The perps had rented a car for their hit job, drove it several hundred miles to the scene of the crime, did the deed, drove several hundred miles back, and turned the car back in to the rental agency. Along the way home, they were hiding the murder weapon in the trunk of the car - and it fell into a gap between the seat and the fender well. Not being the brightest guys in the world, they actually turned the rental car in with the gun still lost in the back! Then they spent the next few weeks trying to rent the same car again so they could fish the gun out... They weren't successful. When the Law eventually caught up with them, the rental car was searched and the gun was recovered for evidence.

Or octal. Mr Cray preferred octal. Even in his 64-bit machines. P.S., typing this on my linux desktop. (Ubuntu flavor.)

Anyone know what happened to this Baker? Flick is from 1960 or so: https://skysolar.co.nz/1912-baker-electric-car/ I found Charles Escoffery's obit here: https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/latimes/obituary.aspx?n=charles-escoffery&pid=163576925

Yep. The Japanese actually listened to Deming.

Jay called it a valve cover. The thing that confuses me is the coolant connection on the end (front) of it. The engine photo that @1937hd45 posted has a very different cover on it. Jay said the engine was an off the shelf Buda engine. So perhaps it was a generic Buda cover that at some time in the past replaced the porous Owen Magentic cover? Fortunately Jay had the original cover on his and and the means to make a replacement.

Jay Leno just released a new video on his: It is interesting that this car apparently doesn't have its original valve (?) cover. The Leno car has one with "Owen Magnetic" cast in the side. Jay said the original was so porous that it leaked oil out of every pore, so he couldn't really drive the car. He scanned it and used a 3D printer to mock up a replacement. Once satisfied with it, he had a shop make a new one out of aluminum.