In reply to STM317 :
Yep. Even if the flames are extinguished on the outside the innards of the battery can still be in a state to reignite.
Some emergency crews have taken to submerging whole cars in water.
In reply to STM317 :
Yep. Even if the flames are extinguished on the outside the innards of the battery can still be in a state to reignite.
Some emergency crews have taken to submerging whole cars in water.
One project I would like to start later next year is an NC.1 MX-5 electric swap. Make it a daily, basically; 100 mile range would be acceptable and move to solar charging at home. NC's seem to be the most every-day comfortable of the first three generations and I'd have time to find one with a bad motor to keep host vehicle costs down.
Living in KS, it's hard to imagine going full EE for my only vehicle, with distances to cover without other means available. There's also a lack of charging stations so keeping local is the only way this really works. Where I grew up is about 80 miles from the nearest public charging stations.
In reply to Ian F (Forum Supporter) :
It's not just the Model 3; it's all EVs. I think it has to do with the fire risks that others have pointed to.
Hopefully everybody will figure it out but I worry that this prohibition will extend to other tracks and autocross clubs in the short/medium term as more lawyers and insurance companies consider it.
CrashDummy said:frenchyd said:CrashDummy said:When somebody makes a hot hatch and when I can take it to the track on occasion. This requires somebody to build that car (EV GTI or EV MS3 or similar) and the local tracks to un-ban EVs from playing there. I feel like that's not a lot to ask but I also feel like it's going to be a long time from now that it happens.
Since the Tesla is rated by the SCCA in the fastest class Your wish is already granted.
1. The model 3 is a sedan, not a hatch.
2. Even though the SCCA decided to bury the Model 3 in the fastest autocross class, it's still banned by many of my local tracks. https://www.tracknightinamerica.com/locations/1984322 https://www.tracknightinamerica.com/locations/1981674
I'm not sure if any of my local autocross clubs have a similar prohibition but I enjoy both AX and Track and I don't want to have to worry about my car being banned by this organization or that facility or whatever.
Playing devils advocate here, but is it possible the local clubs don't want to race EV's and used the fire danger as justification?
I mean auto crossing cars race all the time without fuel cells. Just production gas tanks. Is it really that common that an EV just bursts into flames?
If the local club is that worried do they require fuel cells and onboard fire extinguishers? Rumor has it only one car at a time is on the track. So the collision. Potential is eliminated. That and those rubber cones don't seem likely to cause fires.
In reply to CrashDummy :
The door count or configuration is that serious? I mean would you want a Cobra to autocross? either289/427. It only has 2 doors?
In reply to frenchyd :
Electric car fires require different fire fighting equipment and techniques than gas cars. Tracks aren't always equipped to deal with EV fires, whereas they all are equipped to deal with gas fires. Ergo that ban at some tracks. I'm sure it'll go away as EVs become more and more mainstream.
As a commuter car/grocery getter/family hauler around town, I would get one tomorrow if someone would build an EV wagon. Don't want a giant SUV, but need something with more interior space and dog seating area (trunk) than a CRV-sized VW ID.4. If Audi offered an EV version of the A6 Avant, I'd throw money at them.
For fun car/autox/track days, it'll be ICE for as long as I can hold out. Good thing is those energy-sucking endeavors account for a tiny fraction of my overall time driving, so my environmentally-conscious side is pacified
frenchyd said:In reply to CrashDummy :
The door count or configuration is that serious? I mean would you want a Cobra to autocross? either289/427. It only has 2 doors?
Yes, the configuration is critical IMO. Right now my daily is a Mazaspeed3 and my wife's daily is an Accord Hybrid. The interior of the Accord is much bigger than the Speed but it's WAY easier to get my daughter in and out of her rear-facing carseat in the Mazdaspeed because it doesn't have the fastback sloping roofline of the Accord. The Accord has a much larger trunk, but the Mazdaspeed's hatch is way better for using as kid locker room before swim class, or lunch area during a rainy road trip, or diaper changing area, etc. My strong preference for my next daily will also be for something in either hatchback or wagon form; it's just so practical with really no downside compared to a similar sedan.
For a pure autocross or track car, sure I'd love a Cobra. Day to day practicality isn't really a factor in that use case. Would I swap my track Miata for a Cobra if the cost to acquire and running costs were the same? Of course! That doesn't really have any bearing on when I'll buy an EV (which is still when there's one that can hot hatch better than my current car while also being allowed to play on the weekend). I guess I'd also buy one when a pure sportscar EV reaches NA Miata prices, because then I could upgrade my track car. I think that's a LONG way off.
In reply to frenchyd :
Sometimes it depends on the venue. My region runs in a couple of places where if a car really goes off course, there are solid things to hit. Sometimes curbs would could severely damage the under carriage.
I can understand the fire risk. Most tracks are trained and equipped to deal with gasoline/oil fires. I'm sure in time as EVs become more common and there is more desire to track them, tracks will get the required equipment and training. Especially since civilian emergency services are still in the learning mode themselves.
It'll take time. They'll develop procedures and as they get more experience, continue to modify them and share what they learn. Neither good nor bad, but it is necessary.
In reply to CrashDummy :
I'm not trying to sell you an EV. Honestly. I just hope you have an open mind.
My wife is buying a Tesla model Y because it's about the same size as her Honda CRV. Same kind of access.
We're old and stiff, bending over to get in won't work for us.
Me? I want a Ford F-150 lightening. I want it in the worst way. Almost enough to break my 20 year rule. ( I buy new and keep for 20 years).
Almost.
If you really want a fast nimble car at Miata prices how much does a new Miata cost now? The starting price of a new Tesla is $36k and a Chevy Bolt is selling for less than that.
But that's just part of the cost of a car.
There is gasoline, oil changes, brakes, etc etc etc. I'll assume you're getting 25 mpg. Average. You drive the average 12,000 miles a year, and you keep your cars 5 years. That's another $7500
An EV doing the same is $2400
Now my numbers are going to be off a little. I assumed $3.00 a gallon. Yours may be higher or lower and our local utility rate is pretty cheap. Yours may be higher or lower.
plus change is inevitable. I'm going to say both costs will be higher in 5 years.
Keith Tanner said:Tom_Spangler (Forum Supporter) said:frenchyd said:Whatever you decide will be fine. But do consider the cost of delaying. Resale of used EV's is strong and I foresee no reason it should drop. Unlike cars, brushless motors don't wear out quickly. There are Tesla's used as taxi's with near 300,000 miles on them and the batteries still retain 85% of charge capacity.
Source on that? Not doubting you, but the C&D long-term Model 3 is down to 93% after only 24k miles. Limited battery life (and the cost of replacing them) is one of the things giving me pause about buying an EV.
They're charging it at Superchargers quite often, so that's a tradeoff. They do acknowledge that their degradation is worse than a considerable majority of the sample size. It's the EV equivalent of running the car at the track all the time, things wear faster. If it was an ICE, it would likely be seeing faster internal wear as well but you can't check that in software :) Maybe they should be doing oil analysis on their long term performance cars.
There was a survey last year that showed that EV owners did something like 90% of their charging at home, which means only 10% would likely be at fast chargers - although some could be at destination chargers. I'm having trouble pulling it up, but I did find a Consumers Reports study that says that, based on driving habits, an EV with 250 miles of range could charge at home 92% of the time. With 33% of their charging taking place at Superchargers, C&D is definitely outside the norm so it's not surprising their car is as well. Probably also not good to use their tire life data as fully representative either...
Here's another big slug of data points (as opposed to one). This is from a group of 350 European Tesla owners sharing their data with each other and this summary is about three years old. Feel free to dive into the thread if your Dutch is up to it ! Interesting that the rate of degradation appears to level off, maybe we'll see the same with the C&D car.
At 57k miles on my S and I can say that I saw similar degradation in the first year and ~29k miles of ownership. Degradation has since leveled off and has is effectively the same for the last ~28k miles.
Shoot. The truth could be that every third EV will self-immolate in the first three years of use and that information would be scooped up, stuck in a can, and buried six feet under. You'd never hear about it.
1988RedT2, is that Morris Minor you were talking about rebuilding to be a daily driver a convertible?
In reply to pres589 (djronnebaum) :
I am rebuilding no Morris, Minor or otherwise.
Oh wait I was thinking of someone else. Never mind.
I might have a more extremist POV than others on the topic, but to bring up a new angle that I haven't heard in the thread yet... Privacy. I'm not sure I'll ever buy a new car again, period. Cars are becoming increasingly "smart", which generally also means that they are tracking your travel, driving habits, etc. No doubt that at least some subset of this data is being sold, with varying levels of pseudo-anonymity. For whatever reason, EV's seem to be leading this push, as companies tie together "electric" and "smart". Perhaps in the future this will change, and we'll have EV's that are privacy respecting, but I don't see it happening in the short term. Thus, I just can't get an EV even if all of the other worries in this thread were resolved.
Cell phones are bad enough, especially with Google or Apple on top. I don't want my car data used to build a profile on me. What stores I visit, whom my friends are, various aspects of my personality derived from driving habits, which doctors I go to, whom I'm sleeping with (if my car is parked overnight), the list is endless. I work at a company in a space somewhat adjacent to data collection and interpretation, and the amount of inferences you can make from just a small subset of the overall data we're all giving away is staggering. I don't think that society as a whole has quite figured that out yet. I've already done minor surgery to my tow vehicle to remove the SIM used for OnStar, but on newer vehicles this isn't really possible, so I may be stuck with -2010ish vehicles.
On a non-privacy note, I still can't see buying an EV anytime soon, if only because of my situation. Right now my wife and I have two "fun" cars (track car and an older Volvo getting LS swapped for her), she has a Corolla to daily, I have a truck I tow with and drive maybe once a week, and 2 bikes (which I daily). The fun cars aren't getting replaced by EV's anytime soon, the tow vehicle doesn't have a good electric replacement yet (especially at the price I paid for it), and electric bikes just aren't there yet at a sane price point. Her Corolla _could_ be replaced with an EV in the future, but we often take it out in the middle of nowhere in the American southwest. We've had enough range anxiety with a full tank of gas that I've brought extra cans with us, I can't imagine dealing with an EV in the same situation.
Maybe a couple years, maybe a very long time, but not because I don't like them, I do, they just don't make as much sense for me since I'm not commuting anymore. I already bought one ICE car after I said I wouldn't buy any more because an EV didn't yet make sense for a track car for me. At some point I may have to convert that car to an EV to keep it from becoming hilariously slow in relative terms.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
Well thought out. You recognize their advantages but can't accept their pricing. Fair enough.
A very long time ago I recognized I couldn't afford to be on the cutting edge of racing. So I selected vintage racing.
It's like the rules are frozen and when I race everybody in my class has to conform to the same rules.
The really cool part is the older the car gets the more in demand it is. I made money racing my Black Jack and even though I was forced to sell it at the worst possible time I got my money back and then some.
I see people doing the same thing today. They go buy a shabby Mustang, Corvette, etc. turn it into a ace car and instead of spending a fortune on a paint job and chrome. They buy go faster stuff. But they start out pretty basic and very low budget.
I would like to get an EV for my daily sometime in the next couple of years. A 200 mile range would cover 99.5% of the driving I do.
In reply to spedracer :
Naw dude, that's a legit concern; like you said, everyone here has a "profile" that's been made about them through social media without their consent until recently (funny enough, because Apple and some android phone makers realized personal privacy might be a selling point) and literally everyone has a Facebook profile wether you know or not- anytime a picture of you is uploaded to FB their algorithms try to connect it to someone, and if they can't they build a "shadow profile" for it (FB's words, not mine) so that way when you make a profile you can be wowed by everything connecting automatically. As for phones... the tracking is part and parcel with how they work, unless someone buys up all the 3G towers and somehow walls it off, and even then it's just down to a small group and not a government. Honestly with phones, Mutahar of Some Ordinary Gamers spells out the best route with a custom Android fork, and you're best bet is anonymity instead of full concealment, because the latter would require you to just not have one.
Like I'll own an EV at some point, but I'm not running something I can't hack to turn some of that off. I know the older Model S's can be pretty heavily hacked (Tesla's just run a form of Linux and their modems and connectivity parts are all modules- they recently made an upgrade kit from 3G for the S and X) but part of that also depends on which computer can run what motor system- and if so, what battery pack can it use as well? I want my damn Scrapla!
RichardSIA said:When you want it both ways, "The EV Revolution should be immediately mandatory!" and "Mining is EVIL, we are justified to engage in terrorism to stop it!" that pretty much defines as loony for me.
As seemingly always, my failure to go with the allegedly majority view of the moment gets me in trouble.
I'm fairly certain that view is being manipulated overtly and covertly, why I try to avoid catching the "News", AKA Re-Education media, as much as possible.
No TV, almost no radio, no expressly political "Social media".
I've come to the conclusion that trying to totally separate "Politics" of current fluid PC definition from frank discussion is like trying to separate Water from Wet!Meh, I have a Lotus head to complete removing.
I was gonna make a quick joke, but to be frank there's no greater laugh than knowing you let your "enemy" live in your head rent-free like this. You're not a rebel, you're a chud on the internet with opinions- cope.
spedracer said:I might have a more extremist POV than others on the topic, but to bring up a new angle that I haven't heard in the thread yet... Privacy. I'm not sure I'll ever buy a new car again, period. Cars are becoming increasingly "smart", which generally also means that they are tracking your travel, driving habits, etc. No doubt that at least some subset of this data is being sold, with varying levels of pseudo-anonymity. For whatever reason, EV's seem to be leading this push, as companies tie together "electric" and "smart". Perhaps in the future this will change, and we'll have EV's that are privacy respecting, but I don't see it happening in the short term. Thus, I just can't get an EV even if all of the other worries in this thread were resolved.
Cell phones are bad enough, especially with Google or Apple on top. I don't want my car data used to build a profile on me. What stores I visit, whom my friends are, various aspects of my personality derived from driving habits, which doctors I go to, whom I'm sleeping with (if my car is parked overnight), the list is endless. I work at a company in a space somewhat adjacent to data collection and interpretation, and the amount of inferences you can make from just a small subset of the overall data we're all giving away is staggering. I don't think that society as a whole has quite figured that out yet. I've already done minor surgery to my tow vehicle to remove the SIM used for OnStar, but on newer vehicles this isn't really possible, so I may be stuck with -2010ish vehicles.
On a non-privacy note, I still can't see buying an EV anytime soon, if only because of my situation. Right now my wife and I have two "fun" cars (track car and an older Volvo getting LS swapped for her), she has a Corolla to daily, I have a truck I tow with and drive maybe once a week, and 2 bikes (which I daily). The fun cars aren't getting replaced by EV's anytime soon, the tow vehicle doesn't have a good electric replacement yet (especially at the price I paid for it), and electric bikes just aren't there yet at a sane price point. Her Corolla _could_ be replaced with an EV in the future, but we often take it out in the middle of nowhere in the American southwest. We've had enough range anxiety with a full tank of gas that I've brought extra cans with us, I can't imagine dealing with an EV in the same situation.
While I take my privacy seriously, I also realize the complete absurdity of worrying about it. Short of 350 million Americans to keep track of? 24/7/365? Your phone your car your TV set, etc etc etc. ? They already keep track of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of non Americans. And do so with a tiny ( relatively) staff.
I don't think my looking up data on SU carbs threatens them in any way nor is it very marketable.
Heck my whole life is data points that is accessible to anyone who wants to bother looking. Big deal.
If you focus on crap like that you're giving more thought to them they they are to you.
Oh, if you do pose a threat it's nice to know they will be aware of you. I count that as protection. Same as the police might see you speeding or running a stop sign. Chances are you'll get away with it. Right up to the point were you put others at risk.
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