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[McTraveller]

Fun fact: I think (but am not 100% sure) that EVs are mandated to have external speakers that play "running noises" at low speeds specifically for pedestrian indication.  My car has 3 different sounds from which to choose and 3 different volumes.  It also plays back-up beeps.  I believe it turns off above 20mph because above that it is indeed tire/wind noise that takes over.

I did finally today put the car in Sport mode and used it to pass someone going 10-under on a country road.  Holy torque batman!  My previous car was no slouch, but it would not put you into the seats like this did.  I don't even think I floored it! 320 bhp and 446ft-lbf torque are definitely visceral.  I'd have to do the math to see if I was still in the torque-limit zone of the motor or was into the power-limit zone.  Sadly the dash indicators don't give that information.

[Il Palazzo]

Fun fact: I think (but am not 100% sure) that EVs are mandated to have external speakers that play "running noises" at low speeds specifically for pedestrian indication.  My car has 3 different sounds from which to choose and 3 different volumes.

Can you upload your own sounds? Can you make it play Rick Astley?

[Duuvian]

Haha yeah, can the sounds be customized? What audio file format is it in? Can it be replaced by the user or when it's serviced?

[Telgin]

Even if you can't change the sounds normally, I'm betting if you jailbreak your car you can.

That's a sentence I never thought I'd type.

[Loud Whispers]

Even if you can't change the sounds normally, I'm betting if you jailbreak your car you can.

That's a sentence I never thought I'd type.

I mean it wouldn't be the first time someone had to deal with the company software locking features they already had

[Starver]

A long time ago, there was talk of "SENSE" (Simulated Engine Noise Suitable for the Environment? ...something like that!) as mandatory, but a quick application of Google-Fu seems not to find it. Might be a pre-web idea that long predated any serious thoughts of moving off oil and a mainstream use of battery tech. Not sure if it was UK or US, even, or elsewhere.

Went along with the idea of a modulated "overdub" so that your whiny little low-cc ICE runabout could sound like a more serious V6-turbocharged vehicle, but that was beyond utiity and into a questionable (and faked) degree of noise-pollution for the sake of it.


...I'm not yet into an electric vehicle. For some years now I've been planning for a successor vehicle to be self-charging/plugin hybrid[1], but not having impetus to scrap my current vehicle setup just yet. Possibly, by the time I do, it'll be full-electric or nothing (barring legacy runabouts or rare exceptions) so carting around a mostly unused fuel-tank/engine (very rarely ticked over and topped) won't even be a consideration.

But I occasionally look at what's out there. Enough to realise how much it keeps changing...


And DRMish behaviour would be a big turn off for me. Not sure how much I could avoid that, but Tesla seems to be at the high end of that practice. (Maybe if Tesla ownership conveyed a free Blue Tick Plus status on Twitter? Then that'd be two birds with one stone, that I could decline to throw.)


But that's my rather unstructured summary of my thoughts and intentions on this issue. Perhaps as a PTW to try to pick up any new info that I might otherwise have missed - but then still not do anything about.


[1] I thought I might PV-panel my garage roof, which has the best south-facing slope of any bit of my house[2], and couple with a buffer-battery to make home top-ups a priority before selling the rest as Feed-In-Tarif, but they keep changing the tech and the tarifs and I think I missed my 'ideal' chance to setup whilst still not yet ready to buy into the EV market itself.

[2] One of the reasons (but not the major one) I haven't yet actually done anything to PV/solar-water at the full domestic scale.

[McTraveller]

I finally took my EV out on the highway.  My big takeaway, which oddly has nothing to do with it being an EV:

Spoiler: rant against driver 'assist' features (click to show/hide)

I really really do not like level 2 driver assist features.  I want my old "dumb" cruise control back.  My car only has smart cruise control and you can't disable the "smart" part.

It also has something where it started adding steering torque to help follow the lanes around a curve... wow was it unnerving.  I managed to turn it off, but it's a good thing I wasn't in rush hour because my speed was quite erratic while I was going in and out of cruise and setting the wrong following distance and changing the speed setpoints.

I figure they could've shaved hundreds if not thousands off the BOM if they just didn't include radar and front-facing camera and all that, not to mention all the extra engineering for development and verification of those features.

As for the EV part:  fantastic, quiet driving on the highway.  Plenty of passing power even in ECO mode.  (Still got blown off the road by people who think speed limits are for the peasants... seriously I have little respect for people who are such poor stewards).  Got the expected increase in energy consumption at unfettered highway speeds, but as it's only a single data point I can't draw a proper drag curve yet.

[McTraveller]

"First tank of gas" update:

271 miles driven.  I think I spent about $9 in electricity. 

Would have cost over $50 in gasoline in my old car.

I think I can spend less energy for the same distance in the future, I'm still playing around with modes and things.

I'm slowly collecting statistics on my typical routes, but I don't know that I have enough to make any meaningful reports yet.

My highest-consumption trip was one where I was driving around town and messing around with modes and had basically no regen in stop-and-go, got down to 3.2miles/kW-hr.  My best trip (roughly the same route) was 5.7 mi/kW-hr. Regen is important!

I also track net vs just what is reported as "drivetrain" energy versus "accessory" energy; things like AC and radios and the computers.  All the electronics are hungry; basically just the control computers and the radio (which is on always) seem to pull around 250W continuous. Headlights seem to pull another 200-250W.  Highest I've seen for HVAC is 1200W so far.

Sadly the trip computer isn't as great as I'd like; it just tracks total trip time and doesn't split out time with zero speed, so you can't easily do a "true average speed" analysis to get more accuracy. I think I can fake it by resetting a trip manually...but that's kind of goofy.  Maybe an easier approach would be to use a stopwatch...

[Telgin]

Interesting.  Back of the envelope math on those economics say that for the miles I've driven my current car, I'd have actually saved about $2,000 by having an electric car over what I payed for it.  Of course, that's not accounting for the cost of the electric car, and while I'm sure some are pretty affordable I really doubt I'd find one cheap enough to justify it just by fuel costs.

[Loud Whispers]

You truly live up to your username McTraveller

[dragdeler]

ok

[McTraveller]

I happily include micromobility in-scope for EV-related discussion

Are you talking just a motorized bicycle, or are you talking something like what the US calls road-worthy golf carts?

[dragdeler]

enough

[McTraveller]

What happened? I think there was good content there...

Anyway:

Just finished more than 400 miles of driving over the Thanksgiving holiday.  Major takeaways:

* If you can find a fast charger (J1772+CCS), it's awesome. While my car can accept up to 350kW, the chargers I used ran about 100kW, which was still fast enough that we were getting 200 miles worth of charge in the time it took the family to use the facilities and eat a snack.  Sadly, these are farther between than I'd like, at least on the route we took.  (There is another station under construction at an "ideal" spot - 100 miles from the one at which we stopped - but it's not open yet.)

* "Local" charging options are kind of sad.  I topped up at my relative's house with a level 1 charger which is kind of a joke... but it did let me do a bit of around-town driving. 1.2kW is just not a lot.  There was a local parking garage that we used, at a whopping 6kW.

* I wish charging networks were more like gas stations: gas stations just accept credit cards. Swipe/tap and you're done.  Charging networks make you get an app and then "precharge" your account, so you're always going to have some funds sitting there idle.  Annoying.

* Don't trust the "miles remaining" estimates, ever.  Always do the state-of-charge to kW-hr conversion and look at present rate of consumption. We started our return trip with a 110 mile leg to the fast charging station, and when we left the estimate was 160 miles range; I figured a 50 mile reserve was decent.  However, as we got going, the remaining range was dropping faster than miles to go.  We ended up at the station with 9% state of charge, estimated 23 miles to "empty"*.  Funny thing is I was more stressed about it with the "charge gauge" than I'd have been with a fuel gauge with its light on.  Strange psychology there...

That said - we did average about 3.3 miles/kW-hr on the highway at 70mph.  No complaints.  All told, the "energy" cost of the trip was about $23 (with some high-priced fast charger kW- they are about 3x what I pay at home!), or about 6.5 gallons of gasoline at $3.50; 457 miles total (396 on the highway) so on a dollar basis we did about 19.9 miles/$.  My wife's car get about 35 miles per gallon - so we'd have gotten 10 miles/$ in her car.  Nice!

Spoiler: * range estimates (click to show/hide)

I was expecting some reduction in range estimate because we had done some in-town driving which gets much better mileage than highway. But I was surprised at how heavily the algorithm seemed to weight this - I was not expecting only half my reserve!

[Telgin]

* I wish charging networks were more like gas stations: gas stations just accept credit cards. Swipe/tap and you're done.  Charging networks make you get an app and then "precharge" your account, so you're always going to have some funds sitting there idle.  Annoying.

Wow, I didn't realize how much I was going to hate the future.

To think I was grumpy enough about websites like Reddit pushing apps for no reason.