And how many EV’s are in your garage at the moment? This isn’t some academic arguing point. In the real world people’s travel needs change on a dime. leaving the house with 25% charge means you need to be close enough to a charging station for the least little deviation from your day.
We currently don’t have charging stations in any real numbers like we do with gas stations. And even if we did the charge time means the station is easily overloaded with just a handful of people who are going to be there for 30 minutes or more.
The Tesla wall chargers can be daisy chained. The car in the first slot takes as much power as it can, leaving the remaining amount for downstream cars (and communicating the reduced available current).
This isn’t quite as flexible as one might like–it would be cool to have a full graphical interface where you can distribute the load–but in practice it’s going to cover basically all cases. Over 10 hours, the chargers can supply around 450 miles of range. That’s more than enough for a full charge on any one car and a healthy topping off of a few more. If one car needs priority due to leaving early or whatever, give them the “priority” charger, or just manually adjust the charge rates on the remaining cars to give enough to the one that needs it.
Are you telling me I have been driving an EV for closing in on two years and I don’t know when I ought to charge it? Any other topics for which you have no experience you’d like to mansplain to me while we are at it?
You are still caught up on this idea that charging stations are gas stations. It’s just not how any of this works.
Yes, and I said that having multiple EVs in most situations is more an issue of who parks where on any given night, as opposed to needing to simultaneously recharge three cars to 100% by the next morning.
And I suggest if you think owning and driving a car in DC is a novelty, you have a strange sense of fun.
Owning one EV in a world of ICE cars is a novelty. There is no competition for resources. A family of EV owners are competing for the kind of amperage most houses were not set up for. This all scales up. We’re already taxing our electrical grid in the summertime. If each house adds 25% to their load use it will quickly cause a problem.
The summertime peak loads are during the day. Night is still low utilization. The very fact that the grid is sized to peak daytime summer use means there is a ton of spare capacity at other times.
Several hundred miles of EV range per night is more than enough for even a large family, no matter how many cars they have.
uh, more than enough to get all of them through the next day, of course.
I have a C-max. It routinely runs out of electricity and needs to switch to gas, because even on a warm day when new, it never charged above 20 miles. But except on days when I know I will run it down, I get cranky if it runs out of juice – because most days, I don’t drive more than 8-10 miles unless I know that I plan to do that in the morning. We have another car, too. It rarely drives more than 8-10 miles, either. It would be really easy to arrange for two electric cars to charge to comfortably more than we will be driving over night.
Well, first you need to stop thinking in terms of cars and start thinking in terms of trips the family members need to make. I could own 10 Teslas and it wouldn’t change my daily mileage.
Second, can you can really come up with a common scenario where the sum total of everybody’s trips is over, say 450 miles and there’s absolutely no wiggle room for charging the next day?
It just doesn’t happen, at least not often enough to care about. If there’s a family road trip, well, there’s just one car they care about. And even with two parents with long commutes, one kid with a hefty commute to college, and another with typical high school driving needs (just to construct a scenario), 450 miles is still a ton.
And of course this isn’t the limit. In fact the Tesla wall charger can handle up to 100 amps–not for one car alone, but in the daisy chain scheme. For a stable of Model 3s, that’s around 1000 miles of range a day. Is there any family on Earth that drives that much?
I was thinking that if the wifi goes down, and 2 chargers exceed the current max, the breaker’s gonna blow. That would be super irritating. Hence using a wire.
My various wifi gadgets fail all the damn time.
A more complex algorithm could be written where if the wifi is down, the chargers remember how many peer chargers exist and assume those chargers are active, and then it limits it to 1/n (max current draw). But that would be super annoying as well, you’d get slashed charge speeds until when/if the wifi goes back up.
Change the wifi password, and you have to go fuck with the chargers.
Your idea is terrible. I propose dedicated data cables that do not need to be connected to the internet or anything else but a peer charger. Each charger gets 2 ethernet ports, an A and a B port, and you can thus daisy chain as many as you like. They have just 10 megabit ethernet drive chips, and a barebones embedded system runs a TCP/IP client server and is always trying to ping a peer at a fixed IP address.
This is going to work every time, all the time. Save edge cases like failed hardware.
Ethernet is overkill. The Tesla wall chargers use a 9600 baud serial protocol (RS422). Very robust even in the presence of heavy interference and more than enough to communicate basic information like current capacity.
The chargers also communicate with the cars via the charging cable, which already have wifi and 4G. So configuration can be handled that way if necessary. No need to build extra complexity into the chargers themselves.
Agree. You’re right, serial, especially on an armored industrial bus like 422 or 485, would be a better option. Lower BOM cost as well. I was just thinking ethernet might be less engineering effort.
This would similarly depend ‘for what exactly’. For Tesla to sell a lot more cars than they do, all else equal, generally yes. For a significant % of cars to be EV’s (a wholly different proposition) it’s more complicated than you make it sound, at least. Electricity demand is very low in the middle of the night almost everywhere, it’s pretty high in the evenings most places. Especially considering constraints like local transformers and wiring, not just power plant capacity. Also there’s a big push to add solar which alone, obviously, doesn’t put out anything at any time during the night.
Assuming more changes, like differential pricing by hour to force car charging to the actually low demand hours of the night, otherwise strengthening the distribution network, making sure in general there are enough generators that can run all the time alongside renewable sources which can’t*, many things are possible at a price. Just switching rapidly to significant % of all cars EV’s with today’s situation otherwise though wouldn’t work well. Then again that’s not actually going to happen either.
The debate has to be specified more exactly. How many EV’s when and where, what’s ‘OK’ or ‘negligible’ in other associated costs, and of course the existing question whether EV’s actually reduce GHG emissions which in many parts of the US they don’t as of now. A change in power source often has to be assumed for that to be true (and as above, non-stored solar doesn’t fit particularly well with EV’s)
*wind has a favorable characteristic of night v day relative to night time charging of EV’s but sometimes just doesn’t produce much for days at a time in particular areas
BTW, are there any other Model 3 questions that didn’t get answered? Not sure if I’ve missed anything.
This car really is exactly what I hoped for. And it honestly makes me a tad angry at BMW in particular. I would have loved to get a BMW 330e, except that BMW somehow hasn’t figured out that there is a demand for a high performance pure EV compact sports sedan. The real 330e is an embarrassment–a slow-ass PHEV that combines the worst of both worlds.
So despite loving my 15-year-old E46 and even thinking of myself as something of a “BMW guy”, I’m probably done with the company, at least for the next couple of decades. Even GM is more forward-thinking than you. Your highest volume EV has less range than my Tesla even with its stupid range extender, not to mention it looking like a clown car.
FWIW, I totally agree that widespread adoption of EVs creates infrastructure issues. Most directly in the question of electrical grids, but also in the area of road constructions (since the gas tax is an essential part of road investments).
And on that topic, just five years ago I thought GPS tracking of mileage for tax purposes was absolutely bonkers. Now I think it is a pretty solid idea, hindered mainly by people who are more worried about the NSA following them to work than they are the trove of information they give to Google and Facebook routinely. (In other words, the vast majority of the public.)
What’s the deal with your interior fabrics? I read stuff about Alcantara (so?) being changed out with something else not quite so premium. Frankly I don’t know the difference.
ETA: and boo on you for your i3 hate. It without question has limitations, but it’s also a fantastic car.
