Any GTAM'ers own an electric vehicle?

In an attempt to reduce costs, a few years ago Tesla decided to rely solely on cameras instead of other systems (radar, lidar, whatever) on their cars. This is one of the biggest pet peaves of Tesla owners. My own Tesla has this problem.

For example, for the auto-wipers function, it uses a camera to detect whether the windshield needs to be wiped, as opposed to a rain sensor like every other car with auto wipers. This works fine 90% of the time, but when it doesn't work it's really annoying, eg the wipers will wipe furiously when it's raining lightly, or they won't wipe at all when it's raining heavily..

Same with the auto-cruise. It uses cameras to detect the distance between you and whatever is in front of you. This works fine most of the time but on rare occasions I've experienced phantom braking when the cameras see something the computer doesn't interpret right. I won't even use cruise in heavy traffic cause I'm afraid of brake-checking the car behind me and getting hit. And the car has no dumb cruise, only auto-cruise and autopilot mode.
 
danp said:
And the car has no dumb cruise, only auto-cruise and autopilot mode.
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Sadly, that's not isolated to tesla. I think every car with smart-cruise fails hard if it has a sensor issue. I don't know why they can't post an appropriate warning and revert to dumb cruise. The computer is more than capable (as it's the same computer as the dumb cruise cars). I think it is mostly profit driven as the sensor gets hurt in most crashes and that is a profitable part and a profitable calibration to make it work again.
 
There may be a liability thing, too. Owner presses the wrong button (or someone else drives the car and turns adaptive cruise off) then ... "I thought the car would stop when the traffic in front stopped, and it didn't".
 
Brian P said:
There may be a liability thing, too. Owner presses the wrong button (or someone else drives the car and turns adaptive cruise off) then ... "I thought the car would stop when the traffic in front stopped, and it didn't".
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You may be right but every car has a screen. You could make active acknowledgement part of the logs. The screen pops up a message along the lines of "Active cruise is not functional. Auto-braking and maintaining distance are not functional. If you would like conventional cruise control that maintains speed without knowing what is happening around you, please press ok. If the driver does not intervene for slower traffic ahead, this will result in a crash."
 
How does it work on motorcycles with auto cruise (eg multistrada), can you choose dumb cruise if that's what you prefer?

edit: after some googling it appears the adaptive element of cruise cannot be disabled on a multistrada
 
Sat in the passenger seat of a RAV4.
Probably too short a car for me, unless the power driver seat goes way way down. I don’t want a car that I need the sunroof open to drive. At some point, we’re going to go out and sit in different cars to get a feel for the space.
 
GreyGhost said:
I don't know why they can't post an appropriate warning and revert to dumb cruise.
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Both my Hyundai and previous Hondas did exactly this. You get a warning on the screen saying which feature is disabled. Most of the time it's because of snow build-up on the sensors in the bumper, but I've also had it when the sensor suite in the windshield of the Civic got covered in muck.
 
Baggsy said:
Sat in the passenger seat of a RAV4.
Probably too short a car for me, unless the power driver seat goes way way down. I don’t want a car that I need the sunroof open to drive. At some point, we’re going to go out and sit in different cars to get a feel for the space.
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Kia Sorento hybrid?
 
Lash said:
I’m not an electric car guy but this sounds interesting

www.independent.co.uk

Chinese Tesla rival BYD’s electric cars can now fill up as fast as a petrol car

Super E-Platform offers 400km of range from just five minutes of charging
www.independent.co.uk www.independent.co.uk
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While that is the headline number, for practical reasons, don't expect that. That's not saying that 1MW charging isn't interesting and it will save some time. I think you'd be lucky to get half the pack capacity charged at that rate (say 30% to 80%). Above or below that (especially above), charging will be much slower. 800 km battery pack is expensive and exceedingly rare (maybe no production vehicles have that much range). Add in the 100% tarriff on chinese EV's Canada implemented and we are unlikely to see one yet alone have it as a viable choice.
 
Lash said:
I’m not an electric car guy but this sounds interesting

www.independent.co.uk

Chinese Tesla rival BYD’s electric cars can now fill up as fast as a petrol car

Super E-Platform offers 400km of range from just five minutes of charging
www.independent.co.uk www.independent.co.uk
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These sorts of mostly-clickbait articles keep popping up again, and again, and again, and they seemingly appeal to those with the "petrol station mentality".

Most of the time (97%) my EV trickles its way to 80% state of charge overnight while I'm sleeping. I don't care how long it takes.

400 km worth of driving in my ordinary-sized Bolt at as-advertised consumption would use 64 kWh (full battery capacity). Doing that in one-twelfth of an hour would require 768 kW of charging power. If it's doing that at 800 volts (call it 768 volts for easy math) that would require 1000 amps of current. That's twice what a CCS1 charging socket is rated at. More current would require bigger plug and heavier cable and more cooling, and some people already complain about the size and weight of the charging cables at high-powered DC fast-charging stations. Not going to happen.

If you use existing charging station capacities (350 - 400 kW, basically up to 500 amps at up to 1000 volts with limits on the total power) then it would take 10 minutes instead of 5. Meh.

"Actual EV owner here". You DON'T NEED these insanely fast charging speeds if you think about charging differently. It's not like filling up a petrol car where you are tied to holding the nozzle the whole time the thing is filling up. You get the charge going, you go do something else, and the car is done when you come back. Have lunch. Have a coffee. Visit the washroom. Stretch your legs. After 4 hours in the car, stopping for 10 minutes (or even 20 or 30 minutes) is not the end of the world.

Very fast charging speeds are, mostly, a "would be nice". What would be a potentially useful improvement is for the charging curves to improve, particularly as the battery nears full, so that it doesn't slow down so much as it nears full. That would be nice.

PrivatePilot's Hyundai is supposed to do 20% (or is it 10%?) to 80% in 18 minutes at a 350kW charging station. I would call that good enough. And it's existing technology that you can buy today.

Heavy-duty vehicles that are expected to be on the road all the time are a different matter, but even then, commercial drivers have mandated break times, and as long as the vehicle (mostly) fills up within the break time, that's more-or-less as fast as it "needs" to go, with anything beyond that being a "would be nice".
 
Brian P said:
Very fast charging speeds are, mostly, a "would be nice". What would be a potentially useful improvement is for the charging curves to improve, particularly as the battery nears full, so that it doesn't slow down so much as it nears full. That would be nice.

PrivatePilot's Hyundai is supposed to do 20% (or is it 10%?) to 80% in 18 minutes at a 350kW charging station. I would call that good enough. And it's existing technology that you can buy today.
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And pray tell what is extended use of this level of charging doing for battery health? a.k.a. someone who can't charge at home?
 
Evoex said:
And pray tell what is extended use of this level of charging doing for battery health? a.k.a. someone who can't charge at home?
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DC fast charge is not good for battery health (or wallet health).

For those that can't charge at home, try to coordinate L2 charging with necessary tasks. For instance an hour while grocery shopping, a few hours while eating dinner at a restaurant, charging while at work etc. Owning a BEV without charging at home is a painful experience that I think few would accept. Even L1 at home entirely changes the landscape and makes it a lovely experience instead of hell.
 
Evoex said:
And pray tell what is extended use of this level of charging doing for battery health? a.k.a. someone who can't charge at home?
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That's a darn good question. This is one of the other tech improvements that would be useful.

There's some people on the forums who do nothing but fast charging, and they seem to have been doing okay...
 
They need to make a lot more L2 chargers and put them everywhere. I can think of only 2 hotels I stayed at since I got my EV where they had chargers I could use overnight. The vast majority of them don't. Why not? Putting chargers at hotels seems like an obvious early step to ease the transition to EVs.

I think the future will have wireless charging, where the charging pad is built into the parking spot and you simply park over it and it charges you, and every grocery store, mall, etc will have a good number of these spots designated for EVs. They already have charging mats: https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/wireless-ev-charging-is-coming-heres-how-it-works
 
danp said:
They need to make a lot more L2 chargers and put them everywhere. I can think of only 2 hotels I stayed at since I got my EV where they had chargers I could use overnight. The vast majority of them don't. Why not? Putting chargers at hotels seems like an obvious early step to ease the transition to EVs.

I think the future will have wireless charging, where the charging pad is built into the parking spot and you simply park over it and it charges you, and every grocery store, mall, etc will have a good number of these spots designated for EVs. They already have charging mats: https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/wireless-ev-charging-is-coming-heres-how-it-works
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I agree about hotels. Throw $20 on your room charge for the L2 spot and you wake up full and ready to go. HVAC load is a lot lower at night so building shpuld have power capacity for more than a few L2.

Wireless will be a while (and maybe never). Power transferred falls off at the square of the distance. Practically, that means either the car (or part of it) needs to lower or the charging pad raise to reduce the gap. Sure, you can charge over distance but not at a reasonable rate. Even with the pads touching, the rate is far slower than a L1 wired connection.
 
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