In your everyday life (aka, the vast majority of your time), instead of 5 minutes to detour to a gas station, a full charge takes 10 seconds: 5 to plug in, 5 to unplug. In the comfort of your garage.
... if you happen to have a garage and actually park your car inside the garage. I have a garage, but I park my car outside and would need a 50-foot cable to reach my car.
I park my EV (Chevy Volt) outside and charge with a long charging cable. Works great. All weather. Not a problem. With the long cord it maybe takes me 10 seconds instead of the 5 seconds GP said... It's very quick and routine and much nicer than having to stop at gas stations.
3) in the absolute worst case (which almost never happens), you can ask to charge virtually anywhere. Farmhouse in the middle of nowhere? Ranger station deep in a national park? You name it. And the answer in practice is almost always yes.
Well, if the out-of-juice car happened to stop conveniently right next to the electric plug, that's great. But that doesn't really happen with electric or gas cars. AAA trucks carry spare gas for stranded gas cars. What we need are AAA trucks with batteries to charge stranded cars... sometime in the future.
AAA now has trucks capable of giving an EV a charge.
In 4.5 years of driving EVs, I've never had any of the issues you are bringing up. You can keep bringing up less and less credible situations, but the reality is that it works very well today (if you have charging at home) and it will continue to get easier and easier as cars get bigger batteries, and the charging networks continue to expand.
So, I'm a little curious about your commute, because really there are a LOT of chargers around Boston. As you go out west of Worcester they're much more spread out.
In any case, a 70 mile commute is right in the sweet spot for many of the BEVs.
As for home charging, hell yeah you should install a 220v charger! I just had my electrician put a dryer outlet in the garage and then I hung a charging station on the wall next to it. I get home, I plug in. It takes maybe 10 seconds. When I'm ready to leave again, I disconnect; another 10 seconds.
As others state, with an EV you don't wait until the charge level is getting down... just plug in each time you get home. It's simple, it's quick, and you always have a "full tank". It's much nicer than having to stop at a gas station once or twice a week...
My old commute was 60 miles (Acton to Burlington). Took about 50% charge to do the round trip, and when I would get home and plug in it would be topped off within 90 minutes... So, you go home and plug in, make a meal or do something around the house, and voila the car is back at 100% charge if you want to go run some more errands. It's really nice to have the "gas tank" full each morning when you leave the house. Until people have an EV and experience it, they tend to think that you'll follow a similar procedure like an ICE: filling only when the tank is getting low. That's just not the way to do it if you have a garage (or parking space next to the house - I park my car outside the garage and just have a long enough cord that I can plug in without being in the garage - my old BEV I did park in the garage).
I gotta agree with Rei, you do seem to be going out of your way to try to misstate the point he's making.
In addition to what he said, there are some non-emergency reasons that driving slower is cool.
When I'm driving my EV, I often avoid highways:
1) The difference in efficiency between 45 MPH and 70 MPH is pretty dramatic.
2) In lots of cases, it doesn't increase the trip time as much as you might think. Often, the non-highway route is more direct, so you save some time by driving less miles, so the fact that you're going slower might not increase the trip all that much. Figure 20% longer trip times as an average. So, like... an extra 12 minutes on an hour long drive...
3) For repeated trips (like, every time I pick my daughter up from college or drop her off) it's actually pretty fun to go different ways on back roads. They're often very scenic, and by going different routes, you see different stuff each time. It's actually very enjoyable, and Google Maps usually gives you a few reasonable choices, so it's easy to try different ways.
4) It's a LOT quieter. EVs are very quiet at lower speeds. I was out with a friend yesterday and was showing him how at low speeds you can whisper to each other... it's that quiet. It definitely makes listening to music more enjoyable for me. At highway speeds most of the noise is from the wind and the tires so on the highway EVs suck almost as much as ICEs from a cabin noise standpoint.
5) You almost never get stuck in traffic. If you're on the highway and there's a sudden traffic jam, unless you spot it in time, you're going to get stuck in it until you can creep to the next exit. On back roads, you can always detour, and even do a U-turn if necessary, and route yourself around it (or not, but the point is that you have a choice).
On longer trips the highway starts becoming more compelling - the longer the trip, the more direct the highway tends to be. On shorter trips you may spend a fair amount of time getting to and from the highway, but on longer trips that becomes negligible.
As for chargers, Rei is right: regular charge stations tend to be all over the place. And yeah, in a pinch if the worst happened you can do a slow charge from 110 volts... enough to get to a real charger. And services like AAA are starting to offer mobile recharging services if you actually got 100% stuck.
I'll never buy another ICE car again, EVs are so much more pleasant to drive.
Ha! Can you imagine the government freakout if suddenly, all over America,
militias
started practicing in the town/city center every Saturday? Especially if every gun owner showed up?
In any case, I agree that
Further, if you want to understand how to parse the language, and avoid the misunderstanding that the 2nd only applies to militias, there are lots of articles out there which discuss how to parse it in the context it was written in, such as this pretty long article about it.
This does seem to be a common thing for Elon - he's stretched very thin, and he takes on unnecessary risk.
I can't imagine trying to run Tesla and SpaceX at the same time. SpaceX seems to be doing pretty well, though I don't follow it as closely as Tesla. But Tesla... geez, I shake my head at some of the decisions they've made.
On the subject of unnecessary risk, I think it made sense for Tesla to not use dealerships. They would have had the same problem that Apple had trying to sell through third parties who had no interest in selling their products. I well remember trying to buy Apple gear at Circuit City only to finally leave after the salesperson kept trying to talk me out of an Apple and into a PC. Very similar to what Tesla would have experienced if they tried to sell through dealers. So, yeah, necessary risk.
So, 2 unique things, Electric Cars + No Dealers.
Then Elon has to do self driving... I'm not sure why he found that necessary? Why not wait until the other manufacturers were offering it? I would have been happy to buy a nice BEV without self driving. Not only is it a distraction for Tesla from just trying to sell BEVs, but it's a huge risk - how many hugely expensive lawsuits will Tesla find itself in over this technology? Why did Elon think it was necessary? I'm not saying that Tesla owners don't love it, but why add risk to an already very risky proposition of trying to deliver BEVs that people want?
So then, same thing with Falcon Wing doors... Yes they're cool, but I would never buy a vehicle with them. Too complicated, too expensive to repair once the warrantee is over, and again, if everybody else can do an SUV with regular doors, would it really be so bad to have just delivered regular doors on a BEV that people would love?
So then, the whole thing with the schedule of the Model 3. I think it's an unwise risk to try to do an accelerated program to get it onto the road. I can see a couple reasons why Tesla probably thinks they need to. One is that they probably don't have the cash to take a couple years to get production going. They don't have lots of other car production to prop up the business the way the more traditional companies do. And of course, the other companies are catching up quick. If they take too long to get the Model 3 out, they'll have lost their lead against all the other companies. But maybe that would would have been the point to innovate on other stuff like self driving cars? Tesla certainly seems to be more agile than the other companies, and they're in a great location to get some of the best talent in the world, but I worry that by trying to shortcut the ramp up to manufacturing in production quantities that they might kill themselves. Why not start the Model 3 as a low production line, placed midway between $35,000 and the Model S? And then as you get higher production rates going drive the price down to $35,000? I would have bought a $50,000 Model 3. It would have been price competitive with the BMW i3 and a whole lot more desirable.
I get that some of the things Elon does is probably more about investors and Wall Street than it is about simply producing a well engineered BEV. And I have to give him credit, the fact that almost every car company is now working furiously to produce electrified cars is almost all because of Tesla. In a few years, everybody will be producing electric vehicles and the failure of Tesla won't matter. But right now, if Tesla should implode in the next year or two or three I think there is still time for the other manufacturers to back off from BEVs and that would be a real shame for the planet.
I wish Tesla nothing but good luck, and I hope to buy a Model 3 in a couple years if they're still around (and the quality is good).
Yeah, as a pilot I can verify that gas turbines have terrible fuel efficiency (unless part of a combined heat and power system, but here I'm talking about in transportation systems). As in, a 300 hp turbine will typically burn twice as much fuel as a piston engine of similar power output.
What's going to be cool is that in the next few years we're going to see a lot of different experiments on PHEV vehicles - what kind of ICE to use as a range extender, etc. etc.
So far, PHEV like the Volt and the i3 seem to size the ICE to be able to move the car at highway or just under highway speeds. This necessitates a fairly large ICE (and therefore it's fairly heavy).
I'd like to see someone offer a range extender that's not big enough to move the vehicle on the highway, but would just be used to extend the range of the vehicle. This is basically the idea of the REx BMW i3... except that BMW caught a lot of flak from people early on because on the highway the REx couldn't always keep the vehicle moving at highway speeds, and people were concerned about safety.
Despite how people reacted to that situation, I think that solution has a lot of merit. The i3 REx is 32 horsepower. I would argue for an option on an even smaller REx - perhaps half the size. The idea would be to reduce the size, weight, and to some degree complexity of the REx ICE and use it in only certain specific ways.
One way would be to run it while driving to extend the range of the vehicle. For instance, assume that you have a vehicle with 100 mile battery range, but there is a charger at your destination... 114 miles away. Rather than wait until the battery is depleted before using the REx, if the driver tells the car he needs to go 114 miles, the car could decide how much to run the REx during the trip in order to make it to the destination. There would be cases where the REx could not add enough power to make it to the destination (say, 150 miles of highway driving) in which case the car could tell the driver he better plan a stop at a charger part way to the destination. So, the idea is NOT to switch from electric to ICE operation and continue driving (like in a Volt) but to supplement the capacity of the battery with a very small range extender.
Another way to use it would be the case where you have to drive to a destination, park for 2 hours, and then drive home. If the round trip drive is longer than the range of the vehicle, you could elect to have the car run the REx while it is parked to increase the battery charge until it is sufficient to complete the drive home. Similar to the previous case, except that the engine could be run at it's absolute most efficient settings of power and RPM to get maximum charge for minimal fuel (and CO2).
The small REx ICE would also provide a limp mode, so for the person that totally runs out of battery charge, it might be possible to drive at very limited speeds on back roads (like... 25 mph tops) or you might have to sit at the side of the road running the REx to get enough battery charge to drive at highway speeds a few miles to the closest charger. That's not as convenient as having a larger REx that can just let you continue to drive, but it lets you avoid having to call a tow truck, and yet for 99.99% of your driving not have to carry around a fairly large ICE as backup.
Finally, during winter in cold climates, a smaller REx would still provide plenty of heat, so it could be used to keep the cabin warm. Since at that point it's acting as a co-gen, the efficiency would be very high. In very cold climates it might make sense to periodically run the REx to keep the battery within temperature limits.
An ICE engine can be much simpler and more efficient if it is only ever run at one operating point (typically low revs, with wide open throttle, to eliminate pumping losses).
If the engine is only used to charge the battery, it can be operated only at its most efficient load/speed point.
This is certainly true, but you still have the upper limits of the Otto (~24-32%) and Atkinson (Toyota claims 37%) for the ICE plus between 70%-90% for the electric portion of the drive, so you're still in the 30% efficiency range when you are actually using the ICE to produce electricity.
The fact that you can run the ICE at a specific RPM probably makes the Atkinson cycle much easier to achieve, rather than a complex system to switch between spark ignition and HCCI (like Skyactiv).
naughtynaughty said:
Because charging a battery with an ICE generator is very inefficient. Check out the fuel efficiency of a Volt when it is running off its generator. Do the same for any vehicle that uses your model.
I don't disagree. I had a BEV which one of my daughters crashed, so I got a used Volt at their request. It gets around 43 mpg when the ICE is running, which it almost never is (we still haven't had to put any gas in the car since we bought it 6 months ago). My daughters, like a lot of people, didn't like having to plan their trips in the BEV. They really do want to just jump in and go without having to worry about when/where to recharge. I suspect that will be the case for the average driver, and that this will continue to be a barrier to adoption of BEV for a lot of average drivers.
The Volt has the advantage that they don't have to plan their trips, yet because they have driving patterns like many people, 99% of their trips are pure electric. This is why I think PHEV is the way to go for the majority of the car manufacturers, for at least a decade... until people have the experience of driving a part-time electric vehicle, and thus will not fear going to a pure BEV after that (and the BEV ranges will be bigger in 10 years).
Certainly there are two major downsides to a powertrain like the Volt: you are certainly hauling around more weight in order to include an ICE and all the gear that goes with that. The other that I haven't seen people discuss as much is that the reliability will probably be worse (the BEV has the advantage over ICE of a much reduced parts count). Since a PHEV has both kinds of drivetrains it probably will have slightly worse reliability than an ICE alone and certainly much worse than a BEV, but of course it does have an advantage that with two power trains, depending on what breaks, the car may still be able to be driven until it can be repaired.
OMG, the first time I drove in the UK I was doing work in Swindon... It was bad enough driving a stick for the first time on the "wrong" side of the road, I got to the "magic roundabout" in Swindon and had no idea how to get through it.
I basically tailgated another car figuring that if I rode on his bumper and followed him through the craziness I at least wouldn't get hit. It worked and I basically avoided that place for the rest of the trip...
I previously leased a BEV for my daughters (but one of them crashed it). I replaced it with a 2013 Volt (Gen 1) for $11,000. Both daughters specifically requested a PHEV rather than a BEV because they wanted the flexibility to do longer trips without having to worry about how they were going to charge the car back up. It's worked out well because 99% of their driving falls within the electric range of the vehicle (it consistently gets 45-50 miles before running out of charge).
I put a dryer outlet in the garage for the BEV, and we still use that to charge the Volt. The only negative thing I'll say about the Volt is that it's on-board charger is too slow (it takes much longer to charge the Volt's 10 kWh pack than the old BEV 19 kWh pack).
There are lots of variables that determine who can use a BEV, and how much range they need. In general, I think it's fair to say that unless you have a dedicated parking space at work with a charger, it makes sense to be able to do the entire round trip from home to work and back on a single charge, rather than risk getting stuck. At my last job I could easily do it (the car had 105 miles of range), in fact if I was careful I could do two days in a row on a singe charge, but there was a charging station just a few blocks away, so if I knew I needed to run errands after work that would be pushing the range I could always plug in.
I've been working out of my home office the last few years so thankfully I don't have to worry about a daily commute, but I still drive into Boston, with the occasional long drive up into New Hampshire, but I figure the Model 3 with the LR battery will be sufficient for all but a couple trips a year, in which case I'll either swap with my wife for her car, or just rent a car. Even with the 105 mile BEV, I was only needing to use my ICE car about once a month - it became a problem because the brakes kept rusting in place because I wasn't driving the ICE car enough.
Personally, I think a lot of people who are reluctant to go electric should try a used Volt or other PHEV. After a few years of experience with a PHEV, you'll have a good feeling for which BEV will fit your needs (and, by then, you'll have lots more to choose from).
We've burned less than a gallon of gas in the Volt since we got it in April. My daughters really enjoy the car. I enjoy not having to mediate between two teenage girls about who needs to put gas in the car. My personal plan is to wait a couple years for the Model 3 - I want AWD and whatever passes for Ludicrous mode on the M3, plus I want to give Tesla a chance to get the quality up before I buy it. I figure I'll end up paying 50-60K for it (no tax incentive, but I don't care about that). Should be a fun car!
You didn't read his posting very carefully. He's (correctly, IMHO) pointing out that until there is a charging infrastructure for everyone who lives in apartments and condos it's not practical to force people into a pure BEV.
And, while it's not crazy long term to put charging into every parking spot, how long until that happens? Can you really require BEV until then?
As someone who has had a BEV and now has a Volt, I have to say that PHEV is probably the way to get the masses into electric vehicles. There are simply too many cases where a pure BEV doesn't work and probably won't for a while...
Yeah, I still remember the first time I visited LA in the late 70s. The Santa Anna winds had blown the smog away the day prior, so I showed up and wondered what people were complaining about.
By the next day you couldn't see stuff a mile away, the pollution from cars was so bad.
Btw, It was really cool to see all the cars from when I was a kid (because back in New England they had all rusted away long ago due to road salt).
Flying into LA at the time was gross... coming in from the east over the mountains, you would sink into this yellow/brown goop that was hanging low over all of the basin. It's really been quite a transformation over the last 40 years.
It's a good question. Generally, when you hit a bird (or other living thing) there will be some feathers or blood left on the aircraft. A child's balloon won't make the kind of sound & impact that a drone will. Otherwise, there really isn't much else to run into out there.
We believe we had a drone strike on one of our helicopters for similar reasons: crew heard a bang and landed. The aircraft was dented on the SIDE, and there was no blood or feathers. Given that the helicopter was moving forward but got hit from the side (hard enough to dent an aluminum panel ) and there was no blood or feathers, we figure it was probably a drone or radio controlled aircraft of some kind... there just isn't a lot of other stuff to hit in flight that will go bang!
You are reading the regulation incorrectly. We can fly below 500/1000 if we don't present a hazard to persons or property on the ground. The part about the "routes or altitudes specially prescribed for helicopters by the FAA" means that if FAA wants to make a route that has a specific minimum altitude for helicopters, they can. For instance, certain areas like the Grand Canyon have higher minimum altitudes for noise reasons. The opposite is actually more common: that a route is proscribed with maximum altitudes. But either could exist.
So, the way to read that is, outside of any specific routes or areas, the minimum for a helicopter that is not in the process of taking off or landing is either 500/1000, or lower if the pilot determines he can do the operation without hazard to the people and property on the ground.
This is not correct, there is no specific minimum altitude for helicopters. We are required, if flying below the minimum altitudes that would typically apply to a fixed wing, to make sure we are not presenting a hazard to people and property on the ground.
Also, a Blackhawk is a twin engine helicopter, so it has even less issues with minimum altitudes from a safety standpoint. But of course drones are now presenting a safety issue that didn't used to exist.
For a single engine helicopter, 500 feet is fairly low, but not really low, and you can indeed autorotate from 500 feet (or less), however your choices for where you are going to land do indeed go down (you'll be on the ground in 20-30 seconds). When I was flying a Boston traffic helicopter, there were days where ATC kept us at 300' or below following the freeways (because of traffic arriving into Logan airport). If the engine quit it was going to be a short autorotation, but I always had a place to go to (you basically fly along saying to yourself: if it quits in the next 5 seconds, I'll land THERE... then a few seconds later you're thinking NOW if it quits I'm going to land over at that OTHER spot. You're allowed to put yourself in danger, so a lot of the time an engine failure at 300 feet would have meant going into marshland along the freeway, and probably would result in some damage to the helicopter... but no question in my mind we would all walk away without injuries, and certainly no risk to people or property on the ground.
But again, a Blackhawk isn't going to have to autorotate... if they have an engine failure they will simply fly to an airport and land, just like any other twin engine aircraft...
What kind of failures are you worried about? If you're worried about engine failures, the helicopters that are operating over your house are twin engine. If they have an engine failure they're going to fly back to an airport and land.
The number of failures other than complete engine failure that results in the crashing of a helicopter is vanishingly small. If you are really worried about the risk of something so improbable, you should first consider banning all cars, no electricity in your house, etc. etc. The general public has a misconception about the actual risk - probably partly because of how Hollywood portrays helicopters - they always seem to be spinning out of control etc. in the movies. News flash: they don't do that in real life.
Personally, I've been Mr. Nosebleed at every helicopter company I've worked at - I try to fly high mostly because of noise reasons - trying to minimize noise for people on the ground. Still, in places like New York, there is often airspace above me that limits how high I can go, so even if I wish I could be at 2,000 feet I may be held lower by ATC.
The blades can take quite a bit of punishment and keep flying. Military helicopter blades are typically able to take several hits from fairly large ordinance (50 cal?) and keep flying. And yeah, you can hit smaller tree branches and not get knocked out of the air.
However, once you land the mechanic is going to compare the damage to the blade against some tables in the maintenance manuals and if the damage exceeds what is allowed (which is typically just some very very small dings) the blade would be replaced.
In Vietnam pilots did sometimes intentionally hit bamboo and small trees/branches if that meant they didn't have to leave a wounded soldier behind to die. But you can expect that in those cases they probably scrapped the blades once he got back to base.
Each blade on the helicopter I fly costs $40,000 so it's an expensive thing to replace.
You are correct that 91.119 prescribes the minimum altitudes for aircraft, and that the requirement is that a helicopter must not cause a hazard to persons or property when flown below the minimums that would apply to fixed wing aircraft.
In practice the way this is interpreted by the FAA for a twin engine helicopter (like a Blackhawk) is that as long as the operation itself doesn't provide a direct hazard (say, by the downwash of the helicopter damaging stuff on the ground) and the aircraft can fly away if one of the engines should fail, the operation would typically be approved.
When the operator determines whether the operation can be conducted without hazard, they would not be considering things like "what if the pilot has a heart attack" or "what if the aircraft suddenly explodes and heavy pieces should fall onto the people below".
Certainly I have seen the Massachusetts State Police hovering over crowds on the Boston Commons at altitudes as low as 50 feet. When you have two engines, the FAA is pretty forgiving about what you do with the aircraft (even though I personally would not operate directly over the public at such low altitudes).
I believe it's only a matter of time before a helicopter is brought down by a collision with a drone. I believe it's reasonable for the FAA to require ADSB participation by drones, and that drones have some kind of "land now" feature when a manned aircraft is approaching...
I'm a civilian helicopter pilot, and the regulations allow us to operate below 500 feet. Single engine helicopters have some restrictions when flying at those altitudes (basically that if we have an engine failure we can land without endangering any of the people or their property on the ground). Twin engine helicopters (like the Blackhawk in this article) do not even have that restriction.
When we have to operate at low altitudes (there are plenty of missions that require it) we try minimize the annoyance factor for the people on the ground. Along a coastline, a common way is to fly slightly over the water - in the article summary it claims this happened over Midland Beach, so it's possible that the crew was trying to minimize noise.
I'll second this. The brake pads on my Fit EV never showed significant wear.
This probably depends a bit on the aggressiveness of the regen system (some cars have more than others) and what mode the driver uses - some drivers prefer the feeling of an automatic transmission, i.e. coasting rather than braking when you take your foot off the accelerator.
With the Fit EV, you typically would only use the friction brakes at 1 or 2 mph, which I doubt generates significant brake dust.
My Subaru STi, on the other hand, generates huge amounts of brake dust... I can tell each time I wash the car:-(
I recently sold my Ford Focus RS which had start/stop. I doubt it made much of a difference:
1) In stop and go traffic where you move a car length, pause for a few seconds, and then move another car length, the start/stop system would either not activate, or would be stopped for such a short time the engine was still running a large percentage of the total time.
2) Especially with climate control activated, but even without, it would seldom stay stopped for extended periods of time. I forget the details, but it seldom would stop the engine for more than a minute.
3) Lots of times it wouldn't activate, and you would have no idea why it wouldn't, but you would sit there and the engine would keep running.
A hybrid will perform much better - in my experience with the Focus RS, the start/stop just didn't seem to keep the engine off much of the time.
This illustrates the point someone else made that autonomous cars may well increase the number of miles driven. (instead of 2 round trips, one for you and one for your wife, if you travel at different times the car would make 3 or 4 round trips - 1 to drop you off at work and return home for your wife, then take her to work, and then a repeat at the end of the day.
As someone who works from home, I wish companies would be more incentivized to have people work from home. Sure, there are lots of jobs that doesn't work for, but lots and lots of office jobs could be done from home, and then the savings is almost 100%.
While my wife is in medicine and really does need to be physically present with her patients, as a software engineer I find working at home much much cheaper (and I think I'm more productive than when I've worked in offices).
When you look at a large city like London or New York or Los Angeles, I wonder what percentage of the commuting work force could realistically work from home? Imagine the LA freeways if 75% of the traffic was eliminated by telecommuting!
Depends... my last EV, when charged, would not use regenerative braking for about the first 2-3 miles (and no, I don't live on a hill). In winter, it was more like 25 miles (until the battery came up to temp I guess).
So while it's possible to make an EV work the way you describe, not all existing EVs work that way... (mine was a Honda Fit EV).
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And... how long before they start doing this for domestic flights? Are there laws against wearing facial makeup to mess with the facial recognition?
In your everyday life (aka, the vast majority of your time), instead of 5 minutes to detour to a gas station, a full charge takes 10 seconds: 5 to plug in, 5 to unplug. In the comfort of your garage.
... if you happen to have a garage and actually park your car inside the garage. I have a garage, but I park my car outside and would need a 50-foot cable to reach my car.
I park my EV (Chevy Volt) outside and charge with a long charging cable. Works great. All weather. Not a problem. With the long cord it maybe takes me 10 seconds instead of the 5 seconds GP said... It's very quick and routine and much nicer than having to stop at gas stations.
3) in the absolute worst case (which almost never happens), you can ask to charge virtually anywhere. Farmhouse in the middle of nowhere? Ranger station deep in a national park? You name it. And the answer in practice is almost always yes.
Well, if the out-of-juice car happened to stop conveniently right next to the electric plug, that's great. But that doesn't really happen with electric or gas cars. AAA trucks carry spare gas for stranded gas cars. What we need are AAA trucks with batteries to charge stranded cars ... sometime in the future.
AAA now has trucks capable of giving an EV a charge.
In 4.5 years of driving EVs, I've never had any of the issues you are bringing up. You can keep bringing up less and less credible situations, but the reality is that it works very well today (if you have charging at home) and it will continue to get easier and easier as cars get bigger batteries, and the charging networks continue to expand.
In any case, a 70 mile commute is right in the sweet spot for many of the BEVs.
As for home charging, hell yeah you should install a 220v charger! I just had my electrician put a dryer outlet in the garage and then I hung a charging station on the wall next to it. I get home, I plug in. It takes maybe 10 seconds. When I'm ready to leave again, I disconnect; another 10 seconds.
As others state, with an EV you don't wait until the charge level is getting down... just plug in each time you get home. It's simple, it's quick, and you always have a "full tank". It's much nicer than having to stop at a gas station once or twice a week...
My old commute was 60 miles (Acton to Burlington). Took about 50% charge to do the round trip, and when I would get home and plug in it would be topped off within 90 minutes... So, you go home and plug in, make a meal or do something around the house, and voila the car is back at 100% charge if you want to go run some more errands. It's really nice to have the "gas tank" full each morning when you leave the house. Until people have an EV and experience it, they tend to think that you'll follow a similar procedure like an ICE: filling only when the tank is getting low. That's just not the way to do it if you have a garage (or parking space next to the house - I park my car outside the garage and just have a long enough cord that I can plug in without being in the garage - my old BEV I did park in the garage).
In addition to what he said, there are some non-emergency reasons that driving slower is cool.
When I'm driving my EV, I often avoid highways:
1) The difference in efficiency between 45 MPH and 70 MPH is pretty dramatic.
2) In lots of cases, it doesn't increase the trip time as much as you might think. Often, the non-highway route is more direct, so you save some time by driving less miles, so the fact that you're going slower might not increase the trip all that much. Figure 20% longer trip times as an average. So, like... an extra 12 minutes on an hour long drive...
3) For repeated trips (like, every time I pick my daughter up from college or drop her off) it's actually pretty fun to go different ways on back roads. They're often very scenic, and by going different routes, you see different stuff each time. It's actually very enjoyable, and Google Maps usually gives you a few reasonable choices, so it's easy to try different ways.
4) It's a LOT quieter. EVs are very quiet at lower speeds. I was out with a friend yesterday and was showing him how at low speeds you can whisper to each other... it's that quiet. It definitely makes listening to music more enjoyable for me. At highway speeds most of the noise is from the wind and the tires so on the highway EVs suck almost as much as ICEs from a cabin noise standpoint.
5) You almost never get stuck in traffic. If you're on the highway and there's a sudden traffic jam, unless you spot it in time, you're going to get stuck in it until you can creep to the next exit. On back roads, you can always detour, and even do a U-turn if necessary, and route yourself around it (or not, but the point is that you have a choice).
On longer trips the highway starts becoming more compelling - the longer the trip, the more direct the highway tends to be. On shorter trips you may spend a fair amount of time getting to and from the highway, but on longer trips that becomes negligible.
As for chargers, Rei is right: regular charge stations tend to be all over the place. And yeah, in a pinch if the worst happened you can do a slow charge from 110 volts... enough to get to a real charger. And services like AAA are starting to offer mobile recharging services if you actually got 100% stuck.
I'll never buy another ICE car again, EVs are so much more pleasant to drive.
This guy nailed it. Read that, and learn what it means to be an American.
Further, if you want to understand how to parse the language, and avoid the misunderstanding that the 2nd only applies to militias, there are lots of articles out there which discuss how to parse it in the context it was written in, such as this pretty long article about it.
This does seem to be a common thing for Elon - he's stretched very thin, and he takes on unnecessary risk.
I can't imagine trying to run Tesla and SpaceX at the same time. SpaceX seems to be doing pretty well, though I don't follow it as closely as Tesla. But Tesla... geez, I shake my head at some of the decisions they've made.
On the subject of unnecessary risk, I think it made sense for Tesla to not use dealerships. They would have had the same problem that Apple had trying to sell through third parties who had no interest in selling their products. I well remember trying to buy Apple gear at Circuit City only to finally leave after the salesperson kept trying to talk me out of an Apple and into a PC. Very similar to what Tesla would have experienced if they tried to sell through dealers. So, yeah, necessary risk.
So, 2 unique things, Electric Cars + No Dealers.
Then Elon has to do self driving... I'm not sure why he found that necessary? Why not wait until the other manufacturers were offering it? I would have been happy to buy a nice BEV without self driving. Not only is it a distraction for Tesla from just trying to sell BEVs, but it's a huge risk - how many hugely expensive lawsuits will Tesla find itself in over this technology? Why did Elon think it was necessary? I'm not saying that Tesla owners don't love it, but why add risk to an already very risky proposition of trying to deliver BEVs that people want?
So then, same thing with Falcon Wing doors... Yes they're cool, but I would never buy a vehicle with them. Too complicated, too expensive to repair once the warrantee is over, and again, if everybody else can do an SUV with regular doors, would it really be so bad to have just delivered regular doors on a BEV that people would love?
So then, the whole thing with the schedule of the Model 3. I think it's an unwise risk to try to do an accelerated program to get it onto the road. I can see a couple reasons why Tesla probably thinks they need to. One is that they probably don't have the cash to take a couple years to get production going. They don't have lots of other car production to prop up the business the way the more traditional companies do. And of course, the other companies are catching up quick. If they take too long to get the Model 3 out, they'll have lost their lead against all the other companies. But maybe that would would have been the point to innovate on other stuff like self driving cars? Tesla certainly seems to be more agile than the other companies, and they're in a great location to get some of the best talent in the world, but I worry that by trying to shortcut the ramp up to manufacturing in production quantities that they might kill themselves. Why not start the Model 3 as a low production line, placed midway between $35,000 and the Model S? And then as you get higher production rates going drive the price down to $35,000? I would have bought a $50,000 Model 3. It would have been price competitive with the BMW i3 and a whole lot more desirable.
I get that some of the things Elon does is probably more about investors and Wall Street than it is about simply producing a well engineered BEV. And I have to give him credit, the fact that almost every car company is now working furiously to produce electrified cars is almost all because of Tesla. In a few years, everybody will be producing electric vehicles and the failure of Tesla won't matter. But right now, if Tesla should implode in the next year or two or three I think there is still time for the other manufacturers to back off from BEVs and that would be a real shame for the planet.
I wish Tesla nothing but good luck, and I hope to buy a Model 3 in a couple years if they're still around (and the quality is good).
Yeah, as a pilot I can verify that gas turbines have terrible fuel efficiency (unless part of a combined heat and power system, but here I'm talking about in transportation systems). As in, a 300 hp turbine will typically burn twice as much fuel as a piston engine of similar power output.
What's going to be cool is that in the next few years we're going to see a lot of different experiments on PHEV vehicles - what kind of ICE to use as a range extender, etc. etc.
So far, PHEV like the Volt and the i3 seem to size the ICE to be able to move the car at highway or just under highway speeds. This necessitates a fairly large ICE (and therefore it's fairly heavy).
I'd like to see someone offer a range extender that's not big enough to move the vehicle on the highway, but would just be used to extend the range of the vehicle. This is basically the idea of the REx BMW i3... except that BMW caught a lot of flak from people early on because on the highway the REx couldn't always keep the vehicle moving at highway speeds, and people were concerned about safety.
Despite how people reacted to that situation, I think that solution has a lot of merit. The i3 REx is 32 horsepower. I would argue for an option on an even smaller REx - perhaps half the size. The idea would be to reduce the size, weight, and to some degree complexity of the REx ICE and use it in only certain specific ways.
One way would be to run it while driving to extend the range of the vehicle. For instance, assume that you have a vehicle with 100 mile battery range, but there is a charger at your destination... 114 miles away. Rather than wait until the battery is depleted before using the REx, if the driver tells the car he needs to go 114 miles, the car could decide how much to run the REx during the trip in order to make it to the destination. There would be cases where the REx could not add enough power to make it to the destination (say, 150 miles of highway driving) in which case the car could tell the driver he better plan a stop at a charger part way to the destination. So, the idea is NOT to switch from electric to ICE operation and continue driving (like in a Volt) but to supplement the capacity of the battery with a very small range extender.
Another way to use it would be the case where you have to drive to a destination, park for 2 hours, and then drive home. If the round trip drive is longer than the range of the vehicle, you could elect to have the car run the REx while it is parked to increase the battery charge until it is sufficient to complete the drive home. Similar to the previous case, except that the engine could be run at it's absolute most efficient settings of power and RPM to get maximum charge for minimal fuel (and CO2).
The small REx ICE would also provide a limp mode, so for the person that totally runs out of battery charge, it might be possible to drive at very limited speeds on back roads (like... 25 mph tops) or you might have to sit at the side of the road running the REx to get enough battery charge to drive at highway speeds a few miles to the closest charger. That's not as convenient as having a larger REx that can just let you continue to drive, but it lets you avoid having to call a tow truck, and yet for 99.99% of your driving not have to carry around a fairly large ICE as backup.
Finally, during winter in cold climates, a smaller REx would still provide plenty of heat, so it could be used to keep the cabin warm. Since at that point it's acting as a co-gen, the efficiency would be very high. In very cold climates it might make sense to periodically run the REx to keep the battery within temperature limits.
An ICE engine can be much simpler and more efficient if it is only ever run at one operating point (typically low revs, with wide open throttle, to eliminate pumping losses).
If the engine is only used to charge the battery, it can be operated only at its most efficient load/speed point.
This is certainly true, but you still have the upper limits of the Otto (~24-32%) and Atkinson (Toyota claims 37%) for the ICE plus between 70%-90% for the electric portion of the drive, so you're still in the 30% efficiency range when you are actually using the ICE to produce electricity.
The fact that you can run the ICE at a specific RPM probably makes the Atkinson cycle much easier to achieve, rather than a complex system to switch between spark ignition and HCCI (like Skyactiv).
naughtynaughty said:
Because charging a battery with an ICE generator is very inefficient. Check out the fuel efficiency of a Volt when it is running off its generator. Do the same for any vehicle that uses your model.
I don't disagree. I had a BEV which one of my daughters crashed, so I got a used Volt at their request. It gets around 43 mpg when the ICE is running, which it almost never is (we still haven't had to put any gas in the car since we bought it 6 months ago). My daughters, like a lot of people, didn't like having to plan their trips in the BEV. They really do want to just jump in and go without having to worry about when/where to recharge. I suspect that will be the case for the average driver, and that this will continue to be a barrier to adoption of BEV for a lot of average drivers.
The Volt has the advantage that they don't have to plan their trips, yet because they have driving patterns like many people, 99% of their trips are pure electric. This is why I think PHEV is the way to go for the majority of the car manufacturers, for at least a decade... until people have the experience of driving a part-time electric vehicle, and thus will not fear going to a pure BEV after that (and the BEV ranges will be bigger in 10 years).
Certainly there are two major downsides to a powertrain like the Volt: you are certainly hauling around more weight in order to include an ICE and all the gear that goes with that. The other that I haven't seen people discuss as much is that the reliability will probably be worse (the BEV has the advantage over ICE of a much reduced parts count). Since a PHEV has both kinds of drivetrains it probably will have slightly worse reliability than an ICE alone and certainly much worse than a BEV, but of course it does have an advantage that with two power trains, depending on what breaks, the car may still be able to be driven until it can be repaired.
OMG, the first time I drove in the UK I was doing work in Swindon... It was bad enough driving a stick for the first time on the "wrong" side of the road, I got to the "magic roundabout" in Swindon and had no idea how to get through it.
I basically tailgated another car figuring that if I rode on his bumper and followed him through the craziness I at least wouldn't get hit. It worked and I basically avoided that place for the rest of the trip...
I previously leased a BEV for my daughters (but one of them crashed it). I replaced it with a 2013 Volt (Gen 1) for $11,000. Both daughters specifically requested a PHEV rather than a BEV because they wanted the flexibility to do longer trips without having to worry about how they were going to charge the car back up. It's worked out well because 99% of their driving falls within the electric range of the vehicle (it consistently gets 45-50 miles before running out of charge).
I put a dryer outlet in the garage for the BEV, and we still use that to charge the Volt. The only negative thing I'll say about the Volt is that it's on-board charger is too slow (it takes much longer to charge the Volt's 10 kWh pack than the old BEV 19 kWh pack).
There are lots of variables that determine who can use a BEV, and how much range they need. In general, I think it's fair to say that unless you have a dedicated parking space at work with a charger, it makes sense to be able to do the entire round trip from home to work and back on a single charge, rather than risk getting stuck. At my last job I could easily do it (the car had 105 miles of range), in fact if I was careful I could do two days in a row on a singe charge, but there was a charging station just a few blocks away, so if I knew I needed to run errands after work that would be pushing the range I could always plug in.
I've been working out of my home office the last few years so thankfully I don't have to worry about a daily commute, but I still drive into Boston, with the occasional long drive up into New Hampshire, but I figure the Model 3 with the LR battery will be sufficient for all but a couple trips a year, in which case I'll either swap with my wife for her car, or just rent a car. Even with the 105 mile BEV, I was only needing to use my ICE car about once a month - it became a problem because the brakes kept rusting in place because I wasn't driving the ICE car enough.
Personally, I think a lot of people who are reluctant to go electric should try a used Volt or other PHEV. After a few years of experience with a PHEV, you'll have a good feeling for which BEV will fit your needs (and, by then, you'll have lots more to choose from).
We've burned less than a gallon of gas in the Volt since we got it in April. My daughters really enjoy the car. I enjoy not having to mediate between two teenage girls about who needs to put gas in the car. My personal plan is to wait a couple years for the Model 3 - I want AWD and whatever passes for Ludicrous mode on the M3, plus I want to give Tesla a chance to get the quality up before I buy it. I figure I'll end up paying 50-60K for it (no tax incentive, but I don't care about that). Should be a fun car!
similar here - compact fluorescents were terrible, but I switched my entire house over to LED and haven't had a failure yet...
You didn't read his posting very carefully. He's (correctly, IMHO) pointing out that until there is a charging infrastructure for everyone who lives in apartments and condos it's not practical to force people into a pure BEV.
And, while it's not crazy long term to put charging into every parking spot, how long until that happens? Can you really require BEV until then?
As someone who has had a BEV and now has a Volt, I have to say that PHEV is probably the way to get the masses into electric vehicles. There are simply too many cases where a pure BEV doesn't work and probably won't for a while...
Yeah, I still remember the first time I visited LA in the late 70s. The Santa Anna winds had blown the smog away the day prior, so I showed up and wondered what people were complaining about.
By the next day you couldn't see stuff a mile away, the pollution from cars was so bad.
Btw, It was really cool to see all the cars from when I was a kid (because back in New England they had all rusted away long ago due to road salt).
Flying into LA at the time was gross... coming in from the east over the mountains, you would sink into this yellow/brown goop that was hanging low over all of the basin. It's really been quite a transformation over the last 40 years.
It's a good question. Generally, when you hit a bird (or other living thing) there will be some feathers or blood left on the aircraft. A child's balloon won't make the kind of sound & impact that a drone will. Otherwise, there really isn't much else to run into out there.
We believe we had a drone strike on one of our helicopters for similar reasons: crew heard a bang and landed. The aircraft was dented on the SIDE, and there was no blood or feathers. Given that the helicopter was moving forward but got hit from the side (hard enough to dent an aluminum panel ) and there was no blood or feathers, we figure it was probably a drone or radio controlled aircraft of some kind... there just isn't a lot of other stuff to hit in flight that will go bang!
You are reading the regulation incorrectly. We can fly below 500/1000 if we don't present a hazard to persons or property on the ground. The part about the "routes or altitudes specially prescribed for helicopters by the FAA" means that if FAA wants to make a route that has a specific minimum altitude for helicopters, they can. For instance, certain areas like the Grand Canyon have higher minimum altitudes for noise reasons. The opposite is actually more common: that a route is proscribed with maximum altitudes. But either could exist.
So, the way to read that is, outside of any specific routes or areas, the minimum for a helicopter that is not in the process of taking off or landing is either 500/1000, or lower if the pilot determines he can do the operation without hazard to the people and property on the ground.
This is not correct, there is no specific minimum altitude for helicopters. We are required, if flying below the minimum altitudes that would typically apply to a fixed wing, to make sure we are not presenting a hazard to people and property on the ground.
Also, a Blackhawk is a twin engine helicopter, so it has even less issues with minimum altitudes from a safety standpoint. But of course drones are now presenting a safety issue that didn't used to exist.
For a single engine helicopter, 500 feet is fairly low, but not really low, and you can indeed autorotate from 500 feet (or less), however your choices for where you are going to land do indeed go down (you'll be on the ground in 20-30 seconds). When I was flying a Boston traffic helicopter, there were days where ATC kept us at 300' or below following the freeways (because of traffic arriving into Logan airport). If the engine quit it was going to be a short autorotation, but I always had a place to go to (you basically fly along saying to yourself: if it quits in the next 5 seconds, I'll land THERE... then a few seconds later you're thinking NOW if it quits I'm going to land over at that OTHER spot. You're allowed to put yourself in danger, so a lot of the time an engine failure at 300 feet would have meant going into marshland along the freeway, and probably would result in some damage to the helicopter... but no question in my mind we would all walk away without injuries, and certainly no risk to people or property on the ground.
But again, a Blackhawk isn't going to have to autorotate... if they have an engine failure they will simply fly to an airport and land, just like any other twin engine aircraft...
What kind of failures are you worried about? If you're worried about engine failures, the helicopters that are operating over your house are twin engine. If they have an engine failure they're going to fly back to an airport and land.
The number of failures other than complete engine failure that results in the crashing of a helicopter is vanishingly small. If you are really worried about the risk of something so improbable, you should first consider banning all cars, no electricity in your house, etc. etc. The general public has a misconception about the actual risk - probably partly because of how Hollywood portrays helicopters - they always seem to be spinning out of control etc. in the movies. News flash: they don't do that in real life.
Personally, I've been Mr. Nosebleed at every helicopter company I've worked at - I try to fly high mostly because of noise reasons - trying to minimize noise for people on the ground. Still, in places like New York, there is often airspace above me that limits how high I can go, so even if I wish I could be at 2,000 feet I may be held lower by ATC.
The blades can take quite a bit of punishment and keep flying. Military helicopter blades are typically able to take several hits from fairly large ordinance (50 cal?) and keep flying. And yeah, you can hit smaller tree branches and not get knocked out of the air.
However, once you land the mechanic is going to compare the damage to the blade against some tables in the maintenance manuals and if the damage exceeds what is allowed (which is typically just some very very small dings) the blade would be replaced.
In Vietnam pilots did sometimes intentionally hit bamboo and small trees/branches if that meant they didn't have to leave a wounded soldier behind to die. But you can expect that in those cases they probably scrapped the blades once he got back to base.
Each blade on the helicopter I fly costs $40,000 so it's an expensive thing to replace.
You are correct that 91.119 prescribes the minimum altitudes for aircraft, and that the requirement is that a helicopter must not cause a hazard to persons or property when flown below the minimums that would apply to fixed wing aircraft.
In practice the way this is interpreted by the FAA for a twin engine helicopter (like a Blackhawk) is that as long as the operation itself doesn't provide a direct hazard (say, by the downwash of the helicopter damaging stuff on the ground) and the aircraft can fly away if one of the engines should fail, the operation would typically be approved.
When the operator determines whether the operation can be conducted without hazard, they would not be considering things like "what if the pilot has a heart attack" or "what if the aircraft suddenly explodes and heavy pieces should fall onto the people below".
Certainly I have seen the Massachusetts State Police hovering over crowds on the Boston Commons at altitudes as low as 50 feet. When you have two engines, the FAA is pretty forgiving about what you do with the aircraft (even though I personally would not operate directly over the public at such low altitudes).
I believe it's only a matter of time before a helicopter is brought down by a collision with a drone. I believe it's reasonable for the FAA to require ADSB participation by drones, and that drones have some kind of "land now" feature when a manned aircraft is approaching...
I'm a civilian helicopter pilot, and the regulations allow us to operate below 500 feet. Single engine helicopters have some restrictions when flying at those altitudes (basically that if we have an engine failure we can land without endangering any of the people or their property on the ground). Twin engine helicopters (like the Blackhawk in this article) do not even have that restriction.
When we have to operate at low altitudes (there are plenty of missions that require it) we try minimize the annoyance factor for the people on the ground. Along a coastline, a common way is to fly slightly over the water - in the article summary it claims this happened over Midland Beach, so it's possible that the crew was trying to minimize noise.
I'll second this. The brake pads on my Fit EV never showed significant wear.
This probably depends a bit on the aggressiveness of the regen system (some cars have more than others) and what mode the driver uses - some drivers prefer the feeling of an automatic transmission, i.e. coasting rather than braking when you take your foot off the accelerator.
With the Fit EV, you typically would only use the friction brakes at 1 or 2 mph, which I doubt generates significant brake dust.
My Subaru STi, on the other hand, generates huge amounts of brake dust... I can tell each time I wash the car :-(
I recently sold my Ford Focus RS which had start/stop. I doubt it made much of a difference:
1) In stop and go traffic where you move a car length, pause for a few seconds, and then move another car length, the start/stop system would either not activate, or would be stopped for such a short time the engine was still running a large percentage of the total time.
2) Especially with climate control activated, but even without, it would seldom stay stopped for extended periods of time. I forget the details, but it seldom would stop the engine for more than a minute.
3) Lots of times it wouldn't activate, and you would have no idea why it wouldn't, but you would sit there and the engine would keep running.
A hybrid will perform much better - in my experience with the Focus RS, the start/stop just didn't seem to keep the engine off much of the time.
This illustrates the point someone else made that autonomous cars may well increase the number of miles driven. (instead of 2 round trips, one for you and one for your wife, if you travel at different times the car would make 3 or 4 round trips - 1 to drop you off at work and return home for your wife, then take her to work, and then a repeat at the end of the day.
As someone who works from home, I wish companies would be more incentivized to have people work from home. Sure, there are lots of jobs that doesn't work for, but lots and lots of office jobs could be done from home, and then the savings is almost 100%.
While my wife is in medicine and really does need to be physically present with her patients, as a software engineer I find working at home much much cheaper (and I think I'm more productive than when I've worked in offices).
When you look at a large city like London or New York or Los Angeles, I wonder what percentage of the commuting work force could realistically work from home? Imagine the LA freeways if 75% of the traffic was eliminated by telecommuting!
Depends... my last EV, when charged, would not use regenerative braking for about the first 2-3 miles (and no, I don't live on a hill). In winter, it was more like 25 miles (until the battery came up to temp I guess).
So while it's possible to make an EV work the way you describe, not all existing EVs work that way... (mine was a Honda Fit EV).
I think you're mixing up airlines.
ValueJet became Air Tran, and then was eventually purchased by Southwest.