kgwilson

My EV weighs 1672kg fully charged. Almost all of the modern ICE Utes and SUVs are as heavy or heavier. There isn't much of a 2nd hand market at present but that will change rapidly given the numbers being added to the national fleet. Nearly 15 million new EVs were added to the global fleet in 2023 and there are now about 40 million on the road. If that is what you call a fad it seems like a long term one to me. There are over 400 different brands of EVs globally, 300 of these in China and new ones a popping up all the time.

Public chargers are pretty expensive in Australia. There are not enough of them and there is not enough competition. At home it costs me less than a third of the cost of petrol even though the price has come down a bit from what it was at over $2.00 a litre. Unless you do long distance road trips every week or 3 it is still far less costly to fuel an EV. I charge mine 1 or 2 times a week at off peak rates when I am asleep and I get free power for 4 hours in the weekend so take advantage of that as well. I have had rooftop solar for 12 years but the capacity is only 2kW. I am adding another 6.6kW & then will be able to charge the car almost free during the day. Based on my average driving I have calculated that the investment will be fully paid off within 2 years and that is at current electricity prices. EV costs are still coming down and will reach parity with ICE within a couple of years according to some reports but the total cost of ownership is already well in favour of EVs. The first service of my car is after 2 years or 40,000km & costs about $250.00 & that is just to check brakes, wheels etc replace A/C filters and fluids etc. The motor only has one moving part & requires virtually no maintenance.

Since owning an EV I have never felt so refreshed after driving. Even driving a very expensive luxury car doesn't provide the same feeling. It may be a sub sonic vibration that is always present when driving an ICE car even though you do not seem able to feel it. The electric motor has none of this and it seems so effortless to drive. It makes no difference going up a hill or on a level road. There is no change in engine (electric motor) note and even though it may be hard to detect in an expensive ICE car it is still there. Then of course there is that EV torque that you just cannot get from any ICE car. My first long trip experience was terrible though. It was on the day of the Optus meltdown & I got to Brisbane from home, nearly 400km & was busting for a pee & coffee, but couldn't use the app or the charger as both were affected by the outage. I couldn't even buy lunch. Eventually I went in to a bank and they did a cash withdrawal from my account. Once everything was back up & running it only took 20 minutes & I was off

The fossil fuel industry has been supported by governments all over the world for decades and Australia is no exception. That's how so many massive corporations end up paying little or no tax. A few thousand off the price of a new EV pales in to insignificance compared to that.

There are heaps of you tubers rabbiting on about all the unsold EVs and how they are crap etc. It seems that US car manufacturers were all given billions by the federal government to produce EVs. Then the videos began to appear such as Ford was losing $76,000 for every EV is built. Then 3600 Car dealers wrote a letter to Biden saying the couldn't sell them, the charging infrastructure wasn't there and lots of other problems. The real reason they didn't want to sell them is they don't make any money from servicing and maintenance because they don't need any. Plus the other one about insane insurance costs and comments like $20,000 to fix a dent. GM and Ford, the only US owned manufacturers left have produced a lot of pretty poor EVs & they are not selling many. Tesla on the other hand is going gang busters and the Model Y is the number 1 selling car in the world now. Due to US import policy there are no Chinese EVs in America. China has surpassed Japan as the worlds largest motor vehicle exporter and makes more than half of the worlds EVs and most of the worlds lithium based batteries. Even Elon Musk saw the light and has a massive Tesla factory in China. BYD though is set to overtake Tesla in the next year. The US ICE car industry is looking like going down the same path as the British car industry did more than 40 years ago. The US treasury is still the biggest shareholder of GM after the record $13.8 biillon bailout over 12 years ago..

What we really need to do is have laws preventing the importation and sale of vehicles with engines spitting out high particulate emissions. We do not have ANY laws relating to this and we encourage manufacturers to sell us their dirtiest vehicles. They are cheap compared to cleaner vehicles but we have the unenviable distinction of being at the bottom of the pile in company with Mexico and Russia. The other thing we should do is completely overhaul the laws regarding fringe benefits tax which is currently one of the reasons Australia is out of step with the rest of the world where the average vehicle size is increasing. Don't get me started on those ridiculous giant American Utes like the RAM and F250 that compensate for the lack of personal self esteem of their owners. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-30/sales-of-suvs-and-utes-on-the-rise-in-australia/103174638

She is a bit off the wall as well but better by far than the rest of the nutters they have in their arsenal.

Why would Biden want to visit Trump in Jail?

No but we are trying hard to.

200mm and a small car will begin to float and loose traction, 300mm and most cars & SUVs will do the same. If there is a bit of a flow even though it doesn't look bad the vehicles will get carried away and once off the road and in to the river bed or flow and you are at the mercy of nature. I've been involved in a number of rescues with SES and the excuses are always the same. It didn't look too bad or I didn't think it was that deep, the current didn't look that strong etc. Any good 4WDer will get out and walk in to the flow to check it out. You can't see what is underneath especially when the water is dirty.

I'd also never heard of swooping Magpies in breeding season till I arrived in Queensland & saw people on bikes with wires poking out everywhere from their helmets. Initially I thought it must be some sort of fashion or identity thing.

Another driver ignoring the emergency services call "If its flooded forget it". The number of people who still think they can get through, even with all the publicity and evidence of vehicles swept away drownings and dangerous rescues astounds me.

I believe that SA is now 100% renewable self sufficient and is a net exporter of renewable energy to NSW.

Magpies were introduced to NZ to control grass grubs in the early 20th century. There were no natural predators & there was food everywhere so their population exploded and their range expanded through the entire country & they became the top boss bird. Eventually they were considered a pest & chased out a lot of the native species. I shot heaps of them. I had a cassette tape of a magpie distress call & when I played it they would come to help. They learned that trick pretty quick though. I also had a Magpie trap. It had 2 compartments. Food was put in 1 compartment & the bird got trapped, then another would turn up and get trapped in the other compartment & the process continued. Not surprisingly Magpies in NZ do not like humans but they are not in their natural environment and have done considerable damage. Here on the East coast it is completely different & it did take a while to warm towards Magpies. I now know that they are pretty intelligent and likeable and this is where they belong and are in their element.

My car has a WLTP range of 435km. I don't get that much as I don't drive it the way they work out that range. I do get about 390 - 400km though and that is at motorway speed on the Pacific highway (110kmh). The ambient temperature does affect the range too which is why there is a battery heater to keep the range up and is also used during charging. The range indicator in the car adjusts to your driving style and becomes surprisingly accurate over a few hundred km. This is affectionately called the guessOmeter. If you reset it it will go back to the original values until it gets some more real time data to work out the real world range. There are cable less battery chargers available now too. It requires a wireless charging pad to be installed on the underside of the car and another on your garage floor so you just drive in till the system says stop, get out and the car begins to charge. Just a bigger version of wireless charging of a mobile phone really.

Since the release of the Cybertruck and the big increase in its price, I'd have thought orders would fall away. Apparently not so. Tesla has reported that they have been receiving 10,000 new orders per day and orders now stand at 2.3 million. At their stated production rate of 250,000 per year that is over 9 years of orders. So order one now & get delivery in 2033. Most orders are from the US & Canada but apparently Australian orders are No 3. There are a lot of crazy people in this world.

And with the ability to walk on walls.

Bradfield didn't design the Sydney Harbour Bridge at all. His brief as an Engineer with the NSW Dept of Public Works was a rough copy of the Hells Gate Bridge in New York.The design was by Dorman Long of Middlesborough who borrowed much of it from the original Tyne bridge in Newcastle seen often in the TV series Vera.

I train SES drivers for 4WD courses and what we call DOV (Drive Operational Vehicles). It is all about thinking ahead and at the end of the 2 day DOV course each participant must drive the vehicle around a course they have never driven before in light and heavy traffic and must provide a verbal commentary of what they see ahead and what they plan to do and what they are actually doing. Some people do this easily but others do struggle to keep their mind on driving while looking and thinking ahead. Some fail this test, well we call it "Not yet Competent" and they need to do the course again and some of those do not even have a second go. Watch out for drivers like that.

Sodium ion battery technology has been around for a couple of years now and CATL, the worlds largest battery manufacturer is again at the forefront of this technology. Sodium is half of the chemical composition of ordinary salt and is everywhere. The BYD Seagull is also powered by a Sodium ion battery. Up until recently the problem with the technology was energy density. Now this is approaching the density of LFP batteries, common in EVs but is still a bit behind NMC lithium batteries. Manufacture costs are about 30% cheaper than lithium based batteries. Chinese brand Zeekr who produce high end EVs have already got a sodium ion battery car out in China with their own Sodium battery in the model 007 with a 100kWH capacity and 870km range. Zeeker is owned by Geely who also own Volvo and Polestar as well as a number of Chinese brands.

I don't know where you got this information. My neighbour and I had a small hydro generator for running pumps back in the 1980s West of Ngaruawahia. There are thousands of private hydro schemes in NZ. It is a hilly country with lots of rainfall so it is a no brainer. 85% of NZs energy is from renewable sources and about 60% is generated from hydro electric systems.

Following distance is a feature built in to all cars with adaptive cruise control. Mine has 3 levels represented by green bars on the graphic which displays the car in front and mine behind, 1 being the closest & 3 the furthest away. They seem to change with speed. I usually set it on 2. 3 seems to be way further than necessary & 1 is a bit close at 110kmh. 1 is OK at 60kmh.

The Tesla Model Y is the largest selling car of any type in the world. That says a lot. It beat the Toyota Corolla off the No 1 slot it has held for years.

The system in my car is called MG Pilot & with lane keep assist, lane departure assist, forward collision assist, speed sign recognition, forward radar, rear collision assist, blind spot monitoring and 360 deg camera plus a heap of other things. With adaptive cruise control on and on a well defined road like the pacific highway the car will follow the lane by itself until the woman who lives in the computer tells me to put my hands back on the wheel. The handbook has all sorts or warnings about the systems must not be relied on but then you get people who buy cars and have never read anything in the handbook. I hate the lane keep assist & nearly always turn it off. The problem is that to maintain the 5 star NCAP rating the system must always be on by default. The only things I have found really useful are the cameras when parking, adaptive cruise control and traffic jam assist as the car will automatically start & stop & keep up with traffic.

There is a huge amount of misinformation about EVs as well as complete and utter falsehoods. Someone will have a problem with a battery and all of a sudden that is all over the web that the batteries are useless. If EVs are no good how come there are 26 million of them on the road as at the end of last year with the forecast number by the end of this year to be 40 million. MG wouldn't give a 7 year unlimited km warranty on the car & battery if they didn't think the battery would last. Other manufacturers give between 5 & 8 years. The battery is typically about 40% of the cost of an EV but the quality of the batteries and the battery management systems included all but guarantee a long life. CATL is by far the largest battery manufacturer in the world and produces the best batteries. The 64kWH battery in my car should according to CATL have degraded to about 80% of new by the time the car has travelled 1 million km. On that basis the battery will outlast the car by a long shot. I speak to every EV owner I see at a public charging spot & I haven't met any yet who say they will go back to ICE. In the US there were government incentives to produce EVs & the US car makers all took the money & produced some good ones and a lot of awful ones. Now many are sitting in car lots without buyers. The public charging infrastructure wasn't/isn't there and little was done to promote and stimulate demand. Funny thing though it hasn't dampened Teslas market which continues to grow. Also the US does not allow importation of Chinese made EVs who make most of the worlds EVs and many of the best. Apparently some 3800 car dealers in the US petitioned the government to stop promoting EVs quoting all sorts of problems but omitting the main reason. Most of their income comes from servicing and maintenance and the lack of this requirement for EVs means a large part of their bread & butter income is not there, at least for the first 160,000km. Charge points don't throttle back when there are multiple EVs charging. The problem is the supply to the chargers is under specified. If the supply to the hub is 1 megawatt and the maximum out put of all chargers combined is 2 megawatts then they will only run at half speed when all are operating. This is being resolved by battery storage at multi charge point hubs. There is one new charge hub outside Shanghai airport that has 259 charge points & all can be used at the same time. This is operated by Shell, an oil company. They see the writing on the wall and want to survive. Also Teslas have a lot of hi tech sensors all over and around them and automatic car wash machines may affect them. My car has 360 degree cameras, forward and rear radar etc as well and so do a lot of ICE cars. This issue applies to all high end cars. I would never take any car I own to an automatic car wash. Tesla warns owners about this. Other car makers don't bother & the dealer rakes in more money when the item has to be adjusted or replaced. Tesla does not have any maintenance requirements during the warranty period at all. If something goes wrong you just take it to the service agent. It is not surprising that dealers are scared. They can see their income stream disappearing & so the misinformation stream grows and is stoked all over the web.