My reasoning is that if I ever got stuck in water and the electrical system shorted out, I’d like to be able to roll the windows down and try to keep from drowning. Having mechanical locks sound also present a problem from the thieves using spoofed fobs to open your door remotely.

quote:

Originally posted by nhtagmember:
My reasoning is that if I ever got stuck in water and the electrical system shorted out, I’d like to be able to roll the windows down and try to keep from drowning. Having mechanical locks sound also present a problem from the thieves using spoofed fobs to open your door remotely.

Did you see the post from Bendable above yours?

In Tesla’s there is a mechanical door release that can be used if the 12 volt system ceases to function…

quote:

In Tesla’s there is a mechanical door release that can be used if the 12 volt system ceases to function…

At least they did that right. Any electrical door or trunk release (whether EV or not) should at least have a mechanical backup. Nothing like coming out to your car in bad weather only to find an electrical malfunction and you can't even open the door and get inside the car for shelter.

I saw no evidence of such on a Mach E that has been in my shop a couple of times, but I didn't look that hard either. Perhaps the owner of one in this thread knows.

smlsig, unfortunately, my company won’t be using the Tesla charging network, even for a Tesla. The only option will be to use a ChargePoint charger and an adapter or charge at home. Their car their rules kind of deal, they get some kind of deal where they provide a chargepoint card for drivers in lieu of the gas card we currently get.

The Mach E has a mechanical handle to get out.

If the power goes completely off you can get locked out though.

quote:

Originally posted by Sigmund:
Crash tests indicate nation’s guardrail system can’t handle heavy electric vehicles

BY MARGERY A. BECK
Updated 5:09 PM CST, January 31, 2024

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Electric vehicles that typically weigh more than gasoline-powered cars can easily crash through steel highway guardrails that are not designed to withstand the extra force, raising concerns about the nation’s roadside safety system, according to crash test data released Wednesday by the University of Nebraska.

Electric vehicles typically weigh 20% to 50% more than gas-powered vehicles thanks to batteries that can weigh almost as much as a small gas-powered car. And they have lower centers of gravity. Because of these differences, guardrails can do little to stop electric vehicles from pushing through barriers typically made of steel.

Last fall, engineers at Nebraska’s Midwest Roadside Safety Facility watched as an electric-powered pickup truck hurtled toward a guardrail installed on the facility’s testing ground on the edge of the local municipal airport. The nearly 4-ton (3.6 metric ton) 2022 Rivian R1T tore through the metal guardrail and hardly slowed until hitting a concrete barrier yards away on the other side...

Complete article:

https://apnews.com/article/ele...d0f63a6dd9357f663fce

Ohh spare me... A model 3 weight in @ 4K pounds. There's a huge list of ICE trucks, and SUVs that weight in at the 7K the Rivian is and even more. A few larger vans & larger trucks even top the 10K - 14K pounds. Some of the huge Ford Dulley's even come up to just under 20K pounds.

Heavy Vehicles moving at speed hitting guard rails is not some new fangled danger. Your basic Range Rover, Cherokee, Wrangler, Durango, Etc.. area all going to be near or around the 7K pounds mark.

Aim any of them at the guard rail and set them lose and they are going though it just the same. Being a EV doesn't give them some mysterious steel punching power. This is just pure physics...

quote:

Originally posted by myrottiety:
Your basic Range Rover, Cherokee, Wrangler, Durango, Etc.. area all going to be near or around the 7K pounds mark.

I'm sorry, man, but I'm going to be the bring-the-data guy this evening.

- Range Rover base curb weight: 5240 pounds
- https://www.caranddriver.com/l...er/range-rover/specs

- Jeep Cherokee: 4377
- https://www.caranddriver.com/jeep/cherokee
- (Grand Cherokee: 4863; Grand Cherokee 4xe: 5664)

- Jeep Wrangler: 4050-5300
- https://www.caranddriver.com/jeep/wrangler

- Dodge Durango: 5369
- https://www.caranddriver.com/dodge/durango

These specific examples are about a ton away from that 7k mark....

quote:

Originally posted by myrottiety:
Being a EV doesn't give them some mysterious steel punching power. This is just pure physics...

That, I can't disagree with.

EV's must have high SD

Link

China’s Electric Vehicles Are Going to Hit Detroit Like a Wrecking Ball

By Robinson Meyer

Mr. Meyer is a contributing Opinion writer and the founding executive editor of Heatmap, a media company focused on climate change.

It happened very quickly, so fast that you might not have noticed it. Over the past few months, America’s Big Three automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, the oddly named company that owns Dodge, Chrysler and Jeep — landed in big trouble.

I realize this may sound silly. Ford, General Motors and Stellantis made billions in profit last year, even after a lengthy strike by autoworkers, and all three companies are forecasting a big 2024. But recently, the Big Three found themselves outmaneuvered and missing their goals for electric vehicle sales at the same time that a crop of new affordable, electrified foreign cars appeared, ready to flood the global market.

About a decade ago, America bailed out the Big Three and swore it wouldn’t do it again. But the federal government is going to have to help the Big Three — and the rest of the U.S. car market — again very soon. And it has to do it in the right way — now — to avoid the next auto bailout.

The biggest threat to the Big Three comes from a new crop of Chinese automakers, especially BYD, which specialize in producing plug-in hybrid and fully electric vehicles. BYD’s growth is astounding: It sold three million electrified vehicles last year, more than any other company, and it now has enough production capacity in China to manufacture four million cars a year. But that isn’t enough: It’s building new factories in Brazil, Thailand, Hungary and Uzbekistan, which will produce even more cars, and it may soon add Indonesia and Mexico to that list. A deluge of electric vehicles is coming.

BYD’s cars deliver great value at prices that beat anything coming out of the West. Earlier this month, BYD unveiled a plug-in hybrid that gets decent all-electric range and will retail for just over $11,000. How can it do that? Like other Chinese manufacturers, BYD benefits from its home country’s lower labor costs, but this explains only some of its success. The fact is that BYD — and Chinese automakers like Geely, which owns Volvo Cars and Polestar brands — are very good at making cars. They have leveraged China’s dominance of the battery industry and automated production lines to create a juggernaut.

The Chinese automakers, especially BYD, represent something new in the world. They signal that China’s decades-long accretion of economic complexity is almost complete: Whereas the country once made toys and clothes and then made electronics and batteries, now it makes cars and airplanes. What’s more, BYD and other Chinese automakers are becoming virtually global car companies, capable of manufacturing electric cars that can compete directly with gas-burning cars on cost.

A Chinese-made EV: What could possibly go wrong?

There was a thread recently about the quality of BYD vehicles...

https://sigforum.com/eve/forum...360031605#1360031605

I personally have no interest in, nor will I ever own one. Where I live they are not practical, period and I don't want to get stuck with an enormous bill for a replacement battery...

We have more jokes about EV's than Carter has pills.

The Chinese version of a Yugo.

If the price point is low enough people will buy them and in CA you won't have a choice soon, since GM/Ford/Toyota/Stelantis are moving forward on Hybrids, which make sense, it will either force CA to change the date or conversion type to EV or Hybrid or the us Automakers will be out of CA.

Nothing like CA and DC politicians to find a way to destroy and offshore another American industry.

In order to sell them here they have to be imported

My guess is that the next president will ban them from importation with the stroke of a pen. Should take about 45 seconds for that one.

quote:

Originally posted by HRK:
If the price point is low enough people will buy them ...

I won't.

I guess Apple sees the writing on the wall.

quote:

After a decade of secret development, Apple has scrapped its plans to build an EV to compete with Tesla. The tech giant had announced plans to release its debut EV in 2028 just last month.

Breitbart News reported this morning that Apple has scrapped its plans to produce an EV, nicknamed the “iCar” in honor of Apple’s notorious product naming scheme. The cancelation comes just a month after a 2028 release date for the EV was announced by the company.

Reports first emerged in 2014 that Apple was recruiting automotive engineers and talent from major car companies, kicking off an ambitious but quiet effort to break into the electric vehicle market. While Apple never publicly acknowledged the project, internal teams worked for years to develop self-driving software and test prototype Apple cars around the San Francisco Bay Area.

https://www.breitbart.com/tech...ject-after-a-decade/

Electric cars make sense for an around town commuter but suck if you plan on doing any road trips or extended driving trips. The battery tech and infrastructure is just not there right now.

Elecric tech makes a hell of a lot more sense with bikes where the power to weight ratio and range is nothing short of spectacular. It’s an industry that expected to be worth $120,000,000 in the next few years.

People thinking China’s EVs won’t beat the shit out of American EVs are in for a rude awakening in the next 10 years.

My friend recently built his 2nd electric mountain bike and it’s mental. His bike uses a 72V 6,500w mid drive motor from Hong Kong and is capable of speeds exceeding 60 mph on flat land. I could tell you it is insane but words fail to describe how powerful his build is. I honestly think the bike might hit 80 on a downhill slope. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever ridden. It makes 260 Nm of torque at the rear wheel.

When people tell me EVs are boring or lame they have no idea how ignorant they sound. This tech is advancing incredibly FAST and in the right hands it is anything but boring.

My friends EV is easily as scary as my Yamaha R1 superbike.

I know a guy that had made six 950 mile trips in three years with his Y.

He liked it just as much , and a little more than his Prius

The Roberts Court May Force You To Drive An EV

Authored by Thomas McArdle via The Epoch Times,

The Biden administration has just required that the majority of automotive vehicles manufactured be electric by 2032, inflicting upon the American people troublesome cars whose price is an exorbitant $53,500 on average and that cost a fortune to repair. House Speaker Mike Johnson warned that the move will “devastate auto manufacturers.”

While electric vehicles (EVs) totaled less than 8 percent of sales of new cars last year, the Biden rule demands they reach as much as 56 percent in less than a decade, and as much as 36 percent for plug-in hybrid vehicles. The regulatory method to be employed is mandating that automakers cut carbon dioxide emissions by more than half by eight years from now. Far sooner than that as a result, just several years down the road, Americans may no longer be able to afford an ordinary gasoline-powered vehicle.

The extremism of the new regulations is a direct result of something many Americans likely didn’t think had anything to do with revolutionizing and dictating the ways they get themselves from point A to point B—2022’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

While doing nothing to reduce inflation, the law acted as step one of the implementation of President Joe Biden’s Green New Deal, giving the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) explicit powers regarding greenhouse gases and in forcing solar, wind, and other expensive alternatives to fossil fuels on the private sector. The IRA’s Title VI amended the Clean Air Act to identify by name pollutants, including CO2, so the EPA would have congressional authorization to regulate them and shift to pricier green forms of energy.

Overlaid on the new powers were massive amounts of new taxpayer cash, with the act spending approximately $370 billion in incentives for solar panels, EVs, and other environmentalist wares that can’t make it in the market. Demand for electric transportation, meanwhile, looks unpromising, with Ford reducing EV manufacturing to the tune of the withdrawal of $12 billion, and Toyota looking more to hybrids than EVs.

The Biden regs set the stage for a battle royale in the Supreme Court, but to know why, let’s back up.

Congress had in 2010 settled the issue of whether carbon emissions from coal plants could be capped, deciding in favor of coal and thus saving an industry that directly provides livelihoods for tens of thousands of Americans. President Barack Obama responded by issuing EPA regulations that imposed such a cap, his administration’s Clean Power Plan of 2015. This ended the constraint against the EPA’s imposing emission reduction methods that would put coal plants out of business.

In effect, President Obama took it upon himself to rewrite the 1970 Clean Air Act via the use of an obscure, vague provision within it and force coal plants that reached the carbon emissions cap to stop operations, finance new plants classified as clean, or buy their way out via emissions allowances—anesthetizingly referred to as “cap and trade.” His autocratic scheme had the obvious goal of shutting down the nation’s coal industry in stark defiance of Congress’s wishes, using established statutory language to exercise new powers not authorized or intended by those old laws.

Not surprisingly, coal industry states such as West Virginia sued the EPA. And in 2022 in a 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in favor of the Mountain State, and 19 others, against the environmental agency and its “expert” bureaucrats in exercising these powers not granted by lawmakers.

Quoting Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s statement in a 2017 case, Chief Justice John Roberts pointed out in the majority opinion that the justices “presume that ‘Congress intends to make major policy decisions itself, not leave those decisions to agencies.’”

“Thus, in certain extraordinary cases, both separation of powers principles and a practical understanding of legislative intent make us ‘reluctant to read into ambiguous statutory text’ the delegation claimed to be lurking there,” he wrote.

An agency such as the EPA “must point to ‘clear congressional authorization’ for the power it claims.”

The misnamed Inflation Reduction Act was written by Democrats to function as that clear legislative license the chief justice demanded; one Harvard law professor predicted it would strongly discourage future lawsuits against the EPA. But the new powers the IRA gives the EPA still do not go as far as President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which imposed exacting carbon emission reductions upon individual states based on their various energy consumption levels, each state being required to submit a plan or have the EPA force its own plan on them.

Despite the Harvard professor’s soothsaying, litigation against the agency is sure to materialize. Will the West Virginia v. EPA majority hold and view President Biden’s new plan to wreck the American automotive industry as another executive branch power grab that extends beyond Congress’s intentions? Will Chief Justice Roberts be flattered that federal legislators provided the “clear congressional authorization” he suggested, if indeed he determines that is what it is? Or might others among the six SCOTUS conservatives making up the West Virginia majority peel away?

If Congress really does want to de-industrialize the United States of America in the name of global warming, it seems reasonable to insist that it does so in language that cannot be interpreted otherwise. Whether the Supreme Court chooses to demand that standard will determine whether auto transport is soon taken out of financial reach for millions of Americans.

https://www.zerohedge.com/poli...y-force-you-drive-ev