why don’t you drive an EV?

honestly should really just get an electric cargo bike

they're cool, but batteries are extremely unreliable in anything but temperate weather.

Ford's EV chief is interviewed in a recentish episode of the InsideEVs podcast and he talks about how the F-150 Lightning battery management system deals with cold weather.

electric bikes are tite, if we built out infrastructure and increased subsidies so many car miles could be replaced

honestly should really just get an electric cargo bike

the one i want (urban arrow shorty) isn't sold in the US anymore --- i was on the verge of buying one up in boulder like a year ago but they're $$$ and now they're gone :(

There were zero at my daycare pickup a year ago and now there are four. Suddenly everywhere.

my dad and all his friend have e bikes and they ride around together

Porsche’s electric Taycan outsells the 911 for the first time

i saw one of those a few weeks ago, i was just walking along and it pulled up in a line of traffic. long, low, sleek and white like a shark. extremely dangerous looking. what was wild is that it made a low rumble like a high performance sports car which is a think a fake noise generated purely for effect??

Porsche’s electric Taycan outsells the 911 for the first time🕸

Oups sorry : wrong touch

I don’t know cars at all but it does look like a shark

Porsche’s electric Taycan outsells the 911 for the first time

― Elvis Telecom, Friday, October 15, 2021 10:38 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

thats crazy! guess part of it may be that there arent many electric sports cars, and if your choice is between a tesla and a porche obvs the porche is going to be much better

doesnt seem like porsche fans would be would be going out of their way to get an ecar wonder who the buyers are

my realtor

electric porsche is the classic california realtor car

cayenne's ineligible for residential parking SF btw haha

Fun fact of the day: any car that can haul 6,000 pounds is ineligible for a residential parking permit in San Francisco.

This means most large vehicles can’t park for >2hrs in residential neighborhoods. Further proof F150s, Suburbans, and Cayennes don’t belong on city streets.

— Dan Federman (@TheFederman) November 15, 2021

https://diminishedvalueofgeorgia.com/6000-pound-vehicles/

the thing about the taycan is that it’s absurdly powerful. it goes 0-60 in 3 seconds. plus the novelty factor obv

i mean that’s a crazy time for something that heavy

Its a crazy time for anything tbh

the rivian does 0-60 in 3 seconds too

lol wow really? the truck?

i am extremely sketchy on the physics of all this, but afaict electric motors (which don't have gears?) can be tuned to have much higher acceleration than regular mechanical engines. you're basically limited only by structural safety of the chassis and road safety (and battery life).

and because of the current market targeted by EVs (i.e. rich middle aged men, except at the low price end) it makes commercial/marketing sense to tune your 0-60 to that sort of time.

I'm a middle aged man rich enough to buy an EV and I can't imagine giving a shit about how fast a car goes 0-60. Like literally when would I ever be going 0 to 60?

I guess one needs to accelerate rapidly on a highway on-ramp, but they're generally pretty long, and you don't start at 0, and I've driven a lot of shitty cars in my life and never felt they couldn't accelerate enough to manage the merge

Now 60-0, that's important in case there's a crash in front of you, but they never tell you how fast it can do that.

Due to inflation 420 has gone up by 69

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 15, 2021

the marketing is targeted at the 326K people who liked this tweet

I guess if you sell 326,000 cars you're doing OK

yeah caek i think we talk a little about the instant torque upthread, i just wanted to kinda counterpoint lag00n in that i don't think it's THAT weird that the taycan is selling so well - it's a beast, and it instantly stands out

if i ever bought a car again in my life - i probably won't - i would want an ioniq 5

ha yes if you gave me a taycan i would accept it

I love plugging in my car, but I hate putting the cable cover over the cord so passersby don’t sue my ass for tripping them up in front of my house.

I mean, I DON’T want people to trip at all; just that the cable cover is a pain in the ass

What are you car mavens' thoughts about the Subaru Solterra?

im interested!

that elon joke tweet reminded me that it is actually a buyer's market and it's probably worth it to hold off on buying any kind of car right now (new or used)

which sucks because i have been looking at cars randomly

not EV-related, but i've gone from not liking cars, to wanting an EV, to wanting a miata just for kicks

ugh, i meant seller's market, obviously

cars are fine as long as u dont drive them

im feeling v good about buying my car when i did (march) bc i got it like $8K under msrp and now theyre going like $2k above, crazy

i've heard that was around the last time cars were priced okay

to keep it on topic, there's rumours the miata may go electric, but in the meantime, here's an EV conversion video, which is really cool (average to below average, in terms of EV performance, though):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZws7kE3U5k

scored a test drive appt for a kia niro ev on saturday!

noice

ask them about how they recycle their batteries 💀

??

just turn to the salesperson really matter of fact and ask what metals they recover from the car’s black mass.

lol sorry i just saw a little mini-doc about EV battery recycling and it’s slightly scary. apologies for undercutting what will be a pretty fun day out!

hah ok i thought you were intimating that you knew something more sinister.

fwiw if you google kia battery recycling all the articles are about how they’re investing in a “recycling ecosystem” for ev batteries.

nothing is recyclable recycling is fake

there's a burgeoning second-life battery industry where you'll see them re-used in other ways, like to create solar panels

in fact, i think i read somewhere that a lot of car manufacturers think that's where a lot of the money will be

https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/06/giving-ev-batteries-a-second-life-for-sustainability-and-profit/

To name only a few such projects that have popped up in recent years, Nissan is using old batteries to power small robots; French carmaker Groupe Renault, with partners, is launching stationary energy storage systems made with old EV batteries; and Audi Environmental Foundation, the daughter organization of Audi AG, worked with Indian startup Nunam to build solar nanogrids out of used e-tron battery modules.

Other OEMs, like Lucid Motors, BMW and Proterra, are incorporating reuse principles into their battery design. In fact, Lucid has built its batteries to work across its electric vehicle and energy storage products, including in second-life uses, Chief Engineer Eric Bach told TechCrunch. And BMW has used a “plug-and-play” concept with the batteries in its i3 model so that they can be easily removed and inserted into second-life applications, BMW spokesperson Weiland Bruch said in an interview with TechCrunch. “We believe that battery second-life will become its own self-standing business field,” he added.

update: they came in early. i am now a proud lessee of a kia niro ev

whoa nice

it gets very good reviews over here

i didn’t have a ton of time to dwell on it—they said they got 3 and that was probably it until february. but based on a quick spin around town i am going to be very happy.