What about transit? Why do Americans always have to drive. We need real alternatives to cars.
transit
“We mean electric cars, you commie! The next time you talk about that thing, you are going out that window.”
\s
People can’t afford a new car, let alone an EV, let alone a carport or car hole.
This is just tone deaf poor blaming.
Stupid article. You don’t need 240 V , you can charge with a regular wall plug. For a lot of usage patterns this is more than enough.
You can make it work on 120V, it just uses ~20-30% more energy due to the overhead of running all the vehicle systems for so much longer while charging.
I think that number is a bit off. Yes, there is overhead when charging a car to run its battery management system, heat losses in the wiring, etc. But it’s not 20-30% of the ~kilowatt of power you’d run through level 1. A quick search says that 20% loss is at the higher end for level 1 (probably 15% on the lower end) but even level 2 has about a 10% loss.
The bigger issue is that level 1 just doesn’t have nearly as much power as level 2. Most cars charge at level 1 at 8-16 amps. Most level 2 setups charge at a few times that, plus the voltage is doubled so the total power ends up being about 10x as much. But that’s not to say everyone needs that power either. Honestly, for the average driver it’s quite easy to make level 1 work.
battery management system, heat losses in the wiring, etc.
No, that number corresponds to the WiFi you need to connect it to, to send all the telemetry and the LLM that will be running on some server in the US, picking data out of your telemetry and deciding which company to sell it to, while your car is powered.
If you need to top off with 200 - 300 miles of range every night, you commute sucks giant donkey balls.
How about talking to the landlords who refuse to install EV chargers? Or maybe talk to manufacturers who won’t sell a basic EV that isn’t overpriced?
This is just “Am I out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong!” again.
What do landlords have to do with it? Can you not power the charger off 110V or 220V? Do you need a higher amp circuit cut in, larger than 30A? (American question obviously.)
I rent a house. Our lease is explicit about no battery charging in the garage, including EVs. Yet they seemingly have no problem with my welder or RC cars…
Some apartment buildings are nowhere near where tenets park vehicles. Running extention cables would be a mess and dangerous
Ah! When I think “landlord”, I’m thinking of a single family home. That’s generally the context in America.
It depends. More rural areas are single family/duplex set ups. If you are more urban you’ll find complexes or even skyscrapers in large metro areas :)
fast charging requires a larger service connection than a wall outlet. you can slow charge from a normal wall outlet, but it will take ages to fully charge a modest battery.
generally people have it installed by an electrician, running a new conduit from the circuit breaker.
For home charging to keep up with a commute, a normal wall outlet all night long is fine. It just needs to be installed where the car is parked, and it should have some protection from weather while the car is plugged in.
…this obviously depends on how far your commute is, and how large the battery is.
https://supercarblondie.com/tesla-cybertruck-owner-regular-plug-outlet/
220V? Better than 30A? I’m asking what I would need to install in my home. I have no clue on this.
Also, volts and amps are apples and oranges. Home electric circuits mostly run on 120 volts, but some bigger things like stoves and central air run on 240 volts instead. Amperage is the other piece of the puzzle. Wire sizing is largely based on how many amps the circuit can carry. Multiply the two together, and you get watts. Divide that number by 1000, and you get kilowatts.
My car’s battery has a capacity of 65 kilowatt-hours, meaning it can run 65 kilowatts for an hour, 1 kilowatt for 65 hours, 13 kilowatts for 5 hours… You get the idea. Same idea goes for charging. My 240V 40A charging setup (which runs on a 50A breaker) can give almost 10 kilowatts of power, meaning my battery will be charged 0-100 in about 6.5 hours. A regular outlet gives about a kilowatt and can do it in about 65 hours. But before you think that’s useless, remember that you can easily plug in daily and if you only use a fraction of your battery each day, it’s no big deal at all!
How much do you drive in a year? What kind of car are you looking at?
For the average driver, a 120V (normal) outlet on a smaller car is actually perfectly fine most of the time. If you think you might get a bigger car, or multiple EVs, you may want to look into a level 2 setup. And while you’re at it, use thicker wires so you can run more power through it. But don’t feel like you have to go overboard. I think the sweet “buy once, cry once, hard to come up with a situation where this isn’t enough” number is a 50 amp 240V circuit running a 40A charge cord (always charge at 80% of your circuit rating, max).
But if your panel can’t take it or you want to do it cheaper or whatever, a 20A 240V circuit is on the lower end of the level 2 spectrum and it can still do a lot… Like, more than double that “average driver” amount for level 1. And here’s the fun part: everyone is so afraid of 240V and think it takes special wiring or whatever. It really doesn’t. I’ve got a 240V air compressor outlet on a 20A circuit, just like what I suggested a minute ago. It uses the exact same wiring as the 120V next to it. The only difference? It’s connected to two “opposing” hots with a double breaker (not terribly more expensive) rather than a single hot on a single breaker plus a neutral as you’d see on 120V. All you need to do is wrap the white wire (usually neutral) with a colored (not green, that’s ground) electrical tape to indicate that it carries current. Do it on both sides. Easy peasy, up to code, and uses really affordable wiring.
In the us, home chargers will typically run on 240 volts, similar to a dryer or electric stove.
The amperage can be as low as 16 amps (not common) and up to 40 amps. There are higher amperage chargers, but they’re not super common. Most homes dont have that much capacity provisioned and adding it to the breaker box means new circuits and often the power company has to provide a higher capacity meter. It gets expensive.
Since volts x amps = watts, a 240 volt charger that operates at 40 amps will charge at 9600 watts or 9.6 kilowatts (maximum).
You can charge using a standard 120v outlet, most are rated for 15 amps. However, you will get 120v x 15a = 1800 watts or 1.8 kilowatts (maximum).
Don’t forget the 80% rule! Because those ratings are made for shorter periods of time drawing electricity, and cars usually charge for hours, you need to charge at 80% of the circuit rating. So really you’ll charge at 120V x 12A =1.4kW. Not only that, but if you have anything else on that circuit you need to leave room for that too. My car defaults to 8A on level 1 unless you tell it to do 12, in which case you get just under a kilowatt.
talk to an electrician after looking at the specs on the charger you want. I’m not qualified to give you electrical instructions
It ain’t the junk in the garage, it’s the $80k and the spyware
Yup. Find me a car that respects my privacy and won’t advertise to me and I’m in.
Edit to add: and no fuucking subscriptions to enable things the car can already do but disabled in software.
How clean is your garage? Do you have one? Just curious.
Currently parked in it!
Nice
I do not understand people who use their garage to store useless crap and leave their car outside. The car is more valuable than the crap.
Dump all that useless junk into a dumpster. Get a bike shed, put the mower in it too.
The garage is for cars, not bikes, mowers or trash nobody cares about.
Looking at you California.
my ford EV has no subscriptions (other than the usual sirius XM and nav subs that all cars have). There is data collection but you are able to opt out.
Also this is more of an issue with new cars in general, not a reason to choose a new ICE vehicle over a new EV.
If the car has an RF transmitter of any kind installed, it is a HARD no.
is an RF transmitter in your phone a hard no as well?
I reckon it soon shall be, the way such things are trending.
The point you’re trying to make is, if I willingly carry around a battery powered security hole in my pocket all the time, why should I be concerned about another one installed in my vehicle?
Well, should I decide I wish to travel without being monitored, I can leave my phone behind and still travel rapidly.
My phone does not have access to my vehicle’s CAN bus; my phone cannot disable the vehicle from afar should it detect I performed my own repairs or that I am not christian or that my skin is browner than the dictator will tolerate or whatever else the police will decide to murder me for.
As opposed to what your comment implies, the drivetrain (EV or ICE) has nothing to do with cars spying on you. You should not blame the technology itself because shady car companies spying on your internet connected car. Most of them are well known ICE car brands that do the spying (GM, Volkswagen for instance)
Yes, most new ICE cars are Internet connected now, not just EVs.
Blame those greedy corporations, not the technology.
As a matter of fact, ICE cars were connected to the internet way before the first EV was connected to the internet.
exactly, data collection is an issue with new cars in general. It’s not a reason to buy a new ICE car instead of a new EV.
It is a reason to not buy a new car which means people who aren’t buying new cars won’t be buying EV’s.
What does spyware have to do with EVs?
Well my next car will be an EV so I’m holding on to the older car i have for now until some good option actually comes that’s reasonably priced and not spyware
If we ever see a Slate truck, that will be your best bet.
Apparently people are living double lives and are afraid their secret identity will be uncovered by checks notes corporations who already know more about us because we have a smartphone in our pocket.
Would you mind posting your phone book and a copy of all your text messages here for us all to read? Can we see your photo album, all credit card transactions, amazon purchase history, GPS location data, credit score? We promise only to sell this info to other people, use it to sell you stuff, raise your insurance rates, tell us where to focus our funding for political campaigns. Don’t worry, we’ll only save it forever and you can be assured that we’ll feed this into AI models 10 or 20 years from now, along with everyone else’s data, establishing a massive cache of information from which incredible inferences will be possible. We may or may not use this information to enrich ourselves, increase wealth inequality, influence politics. You should surely not take steps to limit the data being collected about you. Just relax your body. Let it happen.
Privacy matters.
The government and corporations abused this information by stopping protestors getting to their destination.
Protestors can atleast use faraday bags or just leave their phones at home. Now they can’t even get to important events.
Now this information is being used by ICE to arrest immigrants.
Considering how conservative views and Nazis are coming back in to fashion, this is very scary for anyone not white and male.
Privacy matters. If it didnt, bathrooms would not have doors.
Imagine Senate passes a law to put cameras in all toilet motion sensor. People still go, “If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about. Genital recognition technology is used to identify criminals! Do you want criminals to get away?!”
privacy matters, but data collection isn’t limited to EVs. Pretty much all new cars collect data whether EV ICE or hybrid.
I have a used model 3 (I bought it before shit really started going downhill) and I’ve been contemplating disconnecting the wifi and cellular antennas. My car wouldn’t be able to send any images/video anywhere, I wouldn’t be tracked except for my location when I stop at supercharger stations, and I would never have to risk getting Grok installed in my car.
with the used EV tax credit there are good options at ~20k.
edit: why downvotes? the used EV market is bigger every year and if the price is under $25k you get a ~$4k credit.
Pretty sure it’s the range and charge times. Especially in the Midwest. I need a car that can take me to Florida in under 16 hours. Also I own a EV
The real problem is having to go to Florida so regularly. I feel for ya.
pretty sure it’s the lack of money that’s hurting ev adoption.
There can be multiple factors.
People with garages big enough for a nice car that also have it stuffed with things probally have money too. Right?
Money and options are hurting my adaption rate
I moved in to a house with a garage and my in laws are constantly trying to give us crap to fill it up.
I don’t even know where they’re getting this stuff, they just show up and are like “oh, we’re getting rid of this dresser, we thought you’d like it” or “or, I bought this antique trunk at a yard sale, can you hold on to it”.
Yeah, my bfs dad is constantly filling his house, garage, and yard with a bunch of crap that he’ll never use. It just sits there and gets forgotten and deteriorates. Took us 6 years but we got like 90% of what he was storing out of our house too.
Too real
you don’t even need a garage to charge your EV, just install it on the exterior.
Yeah lemme just do that on my apartment
this article is about junk filled garages, so clearly not talking about apartment dwellers.
Does your apartment have a garage? No? Then what does this add to the conversation?
They wanted to supply some negative charge.
I’m sensing a lot of resistance.
We have a one-car garage and two cars. I have a table saw, therefore we have a no-car garage.
I know lots of people who just run the cable under the door…
My parents have a garage full of junk. It used to drive me crazy. We have strong storms where we live and a tree/branches falling are a real possibility of damaging their cars. Plus hail storms sometimes.
It’s mainly my moms stuff. Some of it is worth money but it’s not being sold or anything.
If they used the garage as something other than storage it would be one thing. Instead it’s full of stuff for no real reason.
Some of it is worth money but it’s not being sold or anything.
My mother refuses to admit she’s a hoarder, and none of her things are really valuable. She’s clean, it’s not like she lives in filth, but she lives in 4000 square feet (main floor + basement) and has three full wall closets plus a room in the basement all filled with every item of clothing she has ever owned. I can barely fill a small closet with all my clothing. Her closets aren’t small, either. They are about 15 feet wide, each. So three 15 feet wide closets absolutely crammed with shit, and each one of them has storage space broken into three sections, about three feet tall each above each closet. Everything is crammed full. None of it is ever pulled out to be used for anything. She has all these things from her family she has kept for “memories” but 1. they mean nothing to me because I hate my extended family and 2. I won’t be able to afford to store them and won’t have reason to when she’s gone.
I don’t fucking get it, it’s a massive house, and it’s just stuffed to the fucking brim with crap crap crap!
There are lots of factors that lead to people of her generation ending up like this. It’s really common.
One factor for some people, is not wanting to face how wasteful we are. It’s putting off the reality that it’s all landfill. Just one of many reasons. And I think it might be common with people who are not exactly hoarders, but also manage to hold on to so much.
Sure, they could donate it… but the rationalization could spin up again knowing that’s just another cope, because most of it will go from the donation place to the landfill.
The big thing I see in my mom is she grew up with almost nothing, and all this stuff keeps her a little further from ever being in that situation again. I get it, but it isn’t a healthy way to deal with that fear, and you’d be better off saving the money instead. But she doesn’t trust banks, so that’s another negative. 🤷♂️
Me, who doesn’t even have a garage: Yeah… That’e what stops me from getting an EV…
