I read a Car Talk newspaper column a few weeks back where a reader asked if their brake lights went on correctly when one-pedal driving was enabled. Tom said that an accelerometer (not the word he used, but what he was getting at) in the car would sense the drop in speed and turn the brake lights on without requiring any pedal involvement.
It sounds like there are some cars that don’t have all the bugs worked out yet.
There’s still a Car Talk newspaper column?
There is in my paper, anyway. Just Tom, of course; he probably dictates it to Communications Director II Noam Sayin over coffee in Harvard Square, runs it by Cliche’ Monitor Saul Wellingood for some editing and over to the Mexico City office fact checker C.S. Verdad, then has Grammar Consultant I.M. Shirley-Wright clean up the spelling and grammar.
I think you mean just Ray. Tom was the older brother who passed away. I follow Car Talk on Facebook; they post their new columns there as well, as well as random funny car related content.
I’m guessing the reader in this case had a Chevy Bolt, since hue Technology Connections video specifically mentioned that the Bold uses an accelerometer to activate the brake lights, but other cars do it differently (or not at all in some scenarios, like the Hyundai).
As a bit of a catch-up.
I mentioned upthread that I had changed my plans a few months ago, ditching my order for an EV and going for a petrol vehicle instead.
Well two things of interest.
Firstly a neighbour now has an EV of the same model I was going to have and also my new petrol car has arrived and we’ve done our first long journey.
My neighbour confirms that the car is very nice but also that charging on the go is awkward and expensive. The fastest chargers are not always available and for longer journeys you having to calculate whether to charge to 80% (as recommended) and then have to stop sooner (assuming chargers are available) or to charge to a higher level and have to wait a lot longer to do so.
He now actively avoids using his EV for long journeys. Where he would once have driven to his skiing holidays he is now going to fly.
Our new car (petrol) has a little turbo 1.5l engine and it cost about 2/3 of the price of a similar EV yet with similar performance and even more space.
We loaded it with three people and as much luggage as it could possibly take in order to get my daughter to university. The round trip was 700 miles. Quite amazingly (and I’m not a slow driver) we averaged 57 mpg for the whole trip, and of course the single re-fuelling we did took about 5 minutes.
So there was no range anxiety at all, no need to find a working charger, but what about the cost? Well the total cost of petrol for us was £88. Using a very charitable consumption estimate for the EV it would have cost us £90 in charging (split between cheap rate at home and more expensive fast chargers on the road). The charging of course would have added hours to our journey.
Bearing in mind that those journeys are likely to form the bulk of our driving requirements over the next five years I think I’ve made the right choice.
In order to switch to an EV in future I think I’d need to have a longer range, guaranteed fast charger availability, EV’s of comparable cost (I don’t want to pay 33% more for no extra utility) and faster charging overall (I don’t want to wait for 45 minutes to get 200 miles of range)
I have seen no new chargers in my area the past few months since I’ve last posted, and I recently rented a Prius which gets extremely good mileage, so if I get a new vehicle in the next year or so it will be a HEV rather than a PHEV.
My rented Prius got in the high 60s and rarely dropped below 65, while my current owned Prius rarely goes above 50. Part of it was probably driving significant distances at medium speed without stopping a lot, but even under those conditions my current Prius rarely exceeds 55. Plus the new Priuses have a larger tank: the tripometer was at nearly 500 miles with more than 1/4 a tank remaining. If it really gets 600 miles to a tank on the highway, this would be more convenient than an EV on road trips even if gas gets as rare as electric chargers are these days and I need to use an app to find gas.
As of now, unless there are chargers around town or the new Prius is not as great as expected, I’ve definitely eliminated the PHEV. There’s no way I will choose charging once a week and getting gas once every few months over only getting gas every couple of months.
On the other hand, I do not know how much the chargers at my apartment cost. I’d need to sign up for the app just to find out! If they are significantly cheaper than gas once you add in their markup, then I would still reluctantly choose the HEV over a full EV since there are no chargers in regular businesses around town, but if there were, then the EV would be tempting because charging once a month or so is just as good as getting gas once every couple of months.
Ironically, there were a lot more chargers in the Vermont and Adirondacks area even compared to the last time I was there a few months ago. Ironic because that is where I know I can get upper 60s MPG with a new HEV Prius. If I lived there and lived in an apartment, I’d still pick a HEV. But if I lived in a home with a garage and lived in Vermont, I’d probably pick a PHEV because I would be able to top up at some local businesses.
Well, as an owner of 2 EVs. I’ll say that if I’m ever using the chargers in town* I’m doing something wrong. I charge overnight at home and can count the times over the last five year I’ve used a local charger out of necessity on one hand, excluding a couple fingers.
*of course I’ll always take advantage of the free charging at the mall, and there are a couple places down by the beach where sometimes the only available parking spots are the pay L2 chargers and I’ll use those rather than circle for a free spot.
Same near me. We’ll be keeping my wife’s gasoline car for a while and it has us covered for distance. I just would like a small, short-range commuter. But I can’t charge at home and the charging infrastructure in and around DC is inconvenient.
I haven’t been posting every new addition to the NACS standard, but since the last time there are a few more converts:
Hyundai:
https://www.hyundainews.com/en-us/releases/3952
Kia (no surprise, given Hyundai):
BMW group:
And Toyota:
Toyota’s EV offerings are a joke, but hey, the more the merrier.
This leaves VW and Stellantis as the only remaining holdouts. Charger suppliers are also continuing to add NACS-compatible plugs.
I’m trying to think of what EVs Stellantis offers in North America. I guess the electric Fiat 500, maybe. Is that still on the market? I know Dodge has some in the works, but I think their current offerings are just as much of a joke as Toyota, if not more so.
ETA: According to their website an electric Fiat 500 is arriving next year. I could have sworn they already had an electric version.
Pretty sure Stellantis is on board with NACS.
I haven’t seen an official announcement. This article claims that it’s just VW and Stellantis left:
It’s almost certainly inevitable now, but I’m going with official press releases here, and I don’t think there’s been one yet.
My wife and I just (mid-July) purchased a 2024 Alfa Romeo Tonale. It’s a plug-in hybrid, not pure EV. Has a CCS J1772 plug.
Kia/Hyundai does have a problem with respect to the Supercharger network: their vehicles are 800 volts, while the current batch of Superchargers are 400.
Their vehicles do have an internal converter to boost the charge voltage (since there are lots of other 400-volt chargers out there), but it seems to have some limitations and doesn’t work at much more than 50 kW.
They have a few options:
I guess we’ll just have to see how it plays out.
I mentioned that I decided against the EV. Main reason being the higher cost of both charging and purchase over an ice and also concerns about range.
As it happens, here is a test done on the very model I was interested in.
It was tested in a variety of ways to see what effect the various driving styles and modes had on range.
In short, not good. And I’m very glad I didn’t go for it. I will often be driving it fully loaded, all systems on, at 70mph+, for hundreds of miles at a time, sometimes with a roofbox and sometimes in very cold weather. I think I’d be lucky to get 2 hours of driving between charges.
your analysis is probably relevant to the “would you buy a used EV” thread …
there, a lot is spoken about battery longivity, but very little about (shifting standards) in hardware interfaces …
that might make for a dealbreaker to buy a 3 y.o. used EV … if it comes with the wrong plug, etc…
Got word on Friday that our Cadillac Lyriq is queued up for Production the last week of November. Probably won’t get it until January, which messes with our tax planning, but c’est la vie.
Everything I’ve heard has stated that you’ll be able to charge a CCS EV from a NACS charger with a simple adaptor. So “has the wrong plug” seems like pretty much a non-issue.
It wouldn’t surprise me if car makers (or even car dealers) started including adapters with the car until the dust settles and there’s widely used standard in place.
Until then, I’m seeing a variety of adapters on Amazon for pretty cheap.
J1772 to Tesla for $16
Tesla to J1772 for $53
Certainly cheap enough for dealers/manufacturers to include them as an incentive.
just had an interesting test case last week.
I had an airport return trip of 206 miles in total. Motorway all the way, fairly constant 70mph fully loaded and all systems on.
I did it in my ICE petrol car and the fuel costs were £24.40
Had I done it in the EV in the link above it would have cost me £23.32 minimum and £47.38 maximum (depending on whether it is home or public charging).
Also, going by the real-world range shown in that video I wouldn’t have been able to do it without charging on the journey.
So again. those real-world use cases aren’t pushing me to change anytime soon.