Vehicle Maintenace General

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Jotch said:
Whatever happened to hybrid electric with agriculture fuel oil/E100?
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I think it was like nuclear power where it became politically untenable because it answered the concerns of the carbon weirdos without the answer being "forced austerity".
 
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waffle said:
I think it was like nuclear power where it became politics untenable because it answered the concerns of the carbon weirdos without the answer being "forced austerity".
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I think that's a big part of the issue with electric cars. A completely overhauled electric grid, better batteries, and ubiquitous nuclear power would probably obsolete the ICE in under a decade, but there's no way we would be allowed to have resilient, stable utilities that can't easily mysteriously go down at opportune moments or have the closest we are likely to get to zero-point energy.

Hard disagree that EVs are more reliable; my time comes at a premium (whose time doesn't though, at least those of us who have jobs), but my car takes up much less time to maintain than many other things in my life. Just buy a 8-10th gen Corolla and change the oil every 7k if that's your concern. I also agree that EVs could be much cooler than they are. Instant torque, multiple motors, and no gearbox requirement are very attractive, but EVs will never be viable until the energy storage problem is solved. Anyone who has seen a video of an EV fire should think twice before getting in one. Maybe hydrogen will solve it, or maybe there is something else that will come along, but we just are not there yet.
 
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Hantavirus said:
High voltage does not scare me, it's the thousand+ pounds of toxic, unquenchable flaming death that scares me. Besides, my smartphone needs a replacement battery every five years (or less), but they want me to buy a car that's 50% lithium battery? No thanks. The environmental angle is just the icing on the cake. EV shills talk about the "dirty" oil industry but conveniently forget that lithium mining and battery fabrication is much worse for the environment, and the efficiency gains of electric are not as high as they would like due to inefficient power generation, transmission losses, and overburdening of outdated and underbuilt electrical grids. To top it all off electric vehicles are exempt from OBD-II requirements due to their not having an ICE, so many of them have no scan tool port and require the dealer to do even basic diagnostics. I hate EVs lol.
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You must be hard on phone batteries. EV batteries last much longer than most people believe they will, I think Tesla designs them for about a 15-20 year service life (or around 300k-500k miles). There's a taxi company (Tesloop) that has many in service with 400,000+ miles on the original batteries and they're putting those miles on them in only 3 or 4 years, so they're spending a lot of time fast charging.

I think EVs are pretty underrated. If you want to be self-sufficient I think it's a good idea to have redundancy in your vehicles, like having a gas powered, diesel power and electric vehicle in case there are disruptions to the supply chain (there's nothing going on right now that could cause that, right?).

One of, if not the best, values in used vehicles right now is the Chevy Bolt for ~$10K. Most of them have had their batteries replaced within the last coupe of years because of a recall so they should have many years of service left and EVs are extremely low maintenance.
KateHikes14 said:
I hear you, allow me to justify my sin.
TCO/per mile is king in this case
Second factor is reliability in both a perceived and to a lesser degree real sense when spare time to troubleshoot gremlins is at a premium.

I would not feel so gay for having it if the proponents were not such annoying pompous faggots. The culture behind electric cars could be fun dorky hypermilers building boat tails on cars, and nerds eager to unlock the extra 10% of battery capacity engineers locked out for reliability. But alas the well has been poisoned.
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Divorce your identity from your possessions. Why does it matter what other EV owners are like? Drive what you want without justifying it to strangers who don't know you're alive.
 
KateHikes14 said:
Automotive sins of driving a fagmobile aside, for as simple as EVs COULD be, is there any front of any group who's actually making an effort to have unjewed EVs exist?
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Not quite an EV, but early Toyota hybrids are pretty good. Think Gen 2 / Gen 3 Priuses, mid-'00s to mid-'10s Camrys etc. None of the current year electronic surveillance hellscape, just the right amount of safety gear, and it's possible to replace individual cells in the hybrid battery.
 
waffle said:
Plug-in hybrids are another thing that seem to have been killed for being too good. That's what I want if I get an EV, but they basically don't make any.
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Didn't Toyota recently announce they were ditching all their EV R&D to focus exclusively on plug-in hybrids?
 
Hantavirus said:
hydrogen
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Hydrogen is just EV with greater than twice the efficiency loss just from the energy (fuel) generation and usage, and even more difficult foundational engineering problems, without the benefit of massive related industry R&D investments that batteries have from basically any industry you can think of (which imo is more useful than raw dollars spent for innovation)
drammamean said:
Why does it matter what other EV owners are like?
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Because they suck and I dont want to have to deal with people that suck cocks and/or shit in streets when I have a question about cars
 
I hope EVs get better, they have the potential to be simpler to maintain and more able to be energy independent. (I know how to make electricity but I don't have easy access to crude oil)
 
waffle said:
Plug-in hybrids are another thing that seem to have been killed for being too good. That's what I want if I get an EV, but they basically don't make any.
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PHEVs actually kind of suck if you use them as "intended". The battery is small enough that EV commuting actually wears it out very quickly (HV battery swaps at 100k is a meme for EVs, but it sure ain't for PHEVs) and the gasoline engine also suffers from not being used, especially if you live in a cold climate where joining an onramp will have the car happily slam the ice cold engine into full load. If you're getting rid of it before the warranty expires and/or you really know how to maximize its longevity then it's a great deal, but used ones can be alarmingly sketchy.

Milder hybrids with a small wear-resistant battery are great though, having regen braking and a bit of electric power to fill in the gaps really saves on fuel.
 
Seymour Duncan said:
PHEVs actually kind of suck if you use them as "intended". The battery is small enough that EV commuting actually wears it out very quickly (HV battery swaps at 100k is a meme for EVs, but it sure ain't for PHEVs) and the gasoline engine also suffers from not being used, especially if you live in a cold climate where joining an onramp will have the car happily slam the ice cold engine into full load. If you're getting rid of it before the warranty expires and/or you really know how to maximize its longevity then it's a great deal, but used ones can be alarmingly sketchy.

Milder hybrids with a small wear-resistant battery are great though, having regen braking and a bit of electric power to fill in the gaps really saves on fuel.
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The core problem with hybrids of all stripes is complexity, which is the bane of everything this thread is for. A well thought out, well designed, long living hybrid cannot be cheap. That said I think the most interesting and promising design is series hybrids/erev, which allows the designers to build around never having to subject the ice to traction which significantly reduces cost, size, and could allow very strict efficiency and simplicity focus, or even previously infeasible powerplants, with incredibly fundamental advantages like rotary, or others. The smaller battery would have to focus on more durable rather than cheaper ones however, so I'd hope whatever donut is doing isn't fraud.
 
That's a good point. The electrical system suffers the worst wear and tear from repeated deep-discharge use and especially sitting at a low state of charge for an extended period of time, while the ICE system takes a beating from sitting unused under non-proper-storage conditions. I would guess that with some modifications to how you drive, a plug-in hybrid could be a good option for a typical 20-45 minute suburb-dweller daily commute to and from the city with power available on both ends. If you live in a rural area without EV chargers, owning an EV is challenging, and a plug-in hybrid loses most of its advantages over a traditional gas car.
Jotch said:
I know how to make electricity but I don't have easy access to crude oil
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Diesel can be stockpiled; ethanol-free recreational gas stays good for a long time but not as long as diesel, and regular 10% ethanol-free has a ridiculously short shelf life without expensive stabilizers. However, if you convert your car to run on E100 (pure ethanol), you can make your own fuel with food waste and a reflux still. It's a much more difficult conversion than E85, and if you live in a cold weather area, you have to make provisions for cold starts, either a small reserve tank to run the motor on gasoline for a short time to warm the engine up, or a heater circuit to pre-heat the ethanol fuel. Not as simple as a solar panel system with an inverter, but with EVs you just move the self-sufficiency issues one step up the supply chain. A talented machinist with a well-equipped shop can build an engine from scratch, in fact you can find YouTube videos of people doing exactly that, but making a lithium battery (never mind a whole electric car) would be a colossal undertaking.

I will stick with my ICE cars for now and let you all be the beta testers.
 
You can manually switch modes on most PHEVs though right? If you manually select battery or engine when you get in the car depending on where you plan on going that day wouldn't that mostly solve the wear issue? Most the nightmare stories I have heard about PHEVs are from retards who buy a PHEV, never plugin the battery ever and treat it like a mild hybrid. That obviously obliterates the battery then the car gets blamed.

I really would like to try a PHEV still at some point but the few I am interested in need to depreciate more and I am also worried about the previous owners being retarded. I don't have to get on the highway too much so using the battery for local trips sounds attractive to me.
 
Seymour Duncan said:
PHEVs actually kind of suck if you use them as "intended". The battery is small enough that EV commuting actually wears it out very quickly (HV battery swaps at 100k is a meme for EVs, but it sure ain't for PHEVs) and the gasoline engine also suffers from not being used, especially if you live in a cold climate where joining an onramp will have the car happily slam the ice cold engine into full load. If you're getting rid of it before the warranty expires and/or you really know how to maximize its longevity then it's a great deal, but used ones can be alarmingly sketchy.

Milder hybrids with a small wear-resistant battery are great though, having regen braking and a bit of electric power to fill in the gaps really saves on fuel.
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The 1st gen Chevy Volt is one of the most reliable cars ever made and it's a PHEV. Look them up on a site like Autotrader and sort by mileage.
 
KateHikes14 said:
The core problem with hybrids of all stripes is complexity, which is the bane of everything this thread is for. A well thought out, well designed, long living hybrid cannot be cheap. That said I think the most interesting and promising design is series hybrids/erev, which allows the designers to build around never having to subject the ice to traction which significantly reduces cost, size, and could allow very strict efficiency and simplicity focus, or even previously infeasible powerplants, with incredibly fundamental advantages like rotary, or others. The smaller battery would have to focus on more durable rather than cheaper ones however, so I'd hope whatever donut is doing isn't fraud.
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The Toyota Prius regularly tops lists of most reliable used cars. They've been around a long time and the technology is proven.
 
The real problem with the Prius is that they have the most dog shit interior design or any car ever made. A third of the passenger compartment is taken up by the humongous dash and center console and the pillars are both huge and poorly placed, creating helatious blind spots.
 
I changed my first muffler, today! And now understand why people despise exhaust work. Two of the nuts holding the back end of the muffler in place were disintegrated, so I got to cut the bolts off.
 
KateHikes14 said:
The core problem with hybrids of all stripes is complexity, which is the bane of everything this thread is for. A well thought out, well designed, long living hybrid cannot be cheap.
Click to expand...
Toyota cracked the hybrid code nearly 30 years ago. The R&D costs have long been amortized. Granted, a Toyota-style hybrid is still more complicated that a conventional ICE vehicle, but the tech has proven to be durable. There's a reason why so many Uber drivers use Camrys or Corollas, and there are plenty of ex-taxi Priuses out there rolling around with over 500k miles on the clock.
 
drammamean said:
The Toyota Prius regularly tops lists of most reliable used cars. They've been around a long time and the technology is proven.
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It's 1/4 more expensive than a corolla. eCVT is a (partial) demonstration of what I am talking about regarding having a motor savings since it uses an otherwise exotic design (Atkinson) i'm unsure if the prius can even run without the battery. So it may be a full series hybrid in effect.
 
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