Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Mandrake »

Speed limits in Satnav databases are definitely not trustworthy. Back when I still used Navigon it had the wrong speed limit for many places I drive through regularly and never seemed to get updated.

Fully autonomous vehicles are required to be able to read the road speed signs though, they don't rely a database from a satnav manufacturer.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

BMW will double self-driving car testing fleet...
Klaus Froehlich, BMW's board member responsible for research and development,

Froehlich said BMW's self-driving cars would undergo a test regime equivalent to 250 million driven km (155 million miles).

Of this, 20 million km will be on real roads, while a giant supercomputer will simulate traffic scenarios in a virtual test regime equivalent to 230 million km, Froehlich explained.

Self-driving cars will appear sooner if cities dedicate special lanes for autonomous cars in ring-fenced areas.

"In a dedicated space for only autonomous vehicles, it is easier to anticipate what other vehicles and traffic will do," Froehlich said. "This makes it easier to program vehicle reflexes and may even allow a car to have fewer sensors and less processing power than a vehicle which needs to navigate normal traffic with things like bicycle couriers."

BMW plans to launch an autonomous vehicle in 2021. Introducing a vehicle earlier than this is not plausible, since chipmakers and software designers have not yet developed a computer capable of processing the sheer volume of data generated by a self-driving car, Froehlich said.
Full steam ahead then!

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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Gibbo2286 »

There's an in car video of the incident on the BBC site today, the human component looks to have been more interested in the workings than the road ahead, a shocked wake up.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by NewcastleFalcon »

Bit of a heads-up if you are ever on a car-spotting holiday in Norway. yes they are miles ahead of us in adoption of electric vehicles. For our 2040, and India’s 2030, read Norway’s 2025.

..and electric vehicle spotting is made very easy.

All electric vehicles have a registration number beginning with E in Norway

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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by xantia_v6 »

I visited the Southward car musuem today. The relevant thing here is that when I arrived, the car park was nearly empty, but there was a Zoe in one corner. When walking past I noted that it was plugged in.

The owners turned out to be EV evangelists, and insisted I took it for a test drive ( which was short and uneventful). They are participating in an EV endurance run from Bluff to Cape Reinga.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Gibbo2286 »

This came on the news page today, not new I think but.........

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/03/24/fi ... t-3-days/
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by GiveMeABreak »

This guy is obviously an EV anorak, but doesn’t have much good news concerning the 2018 Nissan 40 kWh battery life. It seems after the first full charge the batteries get too hot and won’t allow recharging to full capacity again.

So basically it has blown his meticulous travel plans as he now can’t get the stated range. Interestingly though, he briefly mentions the Mitsubishi made C-Zero on the Ion (IIRC) which although were out in 2010, still had battery cooling technology (via the A/C), which this new 2018 Nissan seems to have omitted! Is this the EV world’s equivalent of the VW Diesel affair, with claims of more miles than are possible.......

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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Mandrake »

I guess you missed my long detailed post about this issue a few days ago over in our other EV thread. ;)

https://www.frenchcarforum.co.uk/forum/ ... 80#p570452

The issue is not that you can't fully recharge the battery a second time, it's that it takes an agonisingly long time due to the charge rate being throttled when the battery is too hot, making long trips that require multiple charge stops infeasibly slow.

And this is because unlike nearly every other EV there is no thermal management of the battery in any model of Leaf - the newest 40kWh Leaf seems to use a battery chemistry that is not as tolerant of heat as the older Leaf's and thus charge rate has to be throttled at at least 10C lower than previous models of Leaf.

And yes, it is a major blunder on Nissan's part that will come back to bite them. Hashtag #rapidgate is starting to circulate on twitter already. Check out my post in the other thread for more details and to hopefully keep discussion of the problem in one thread. :)
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by GiveMeABreak »

No I didn’t see your other post Simon (that Topic is one I don’t happen to subscribe to), but I see you have done your public service announcement duties 👍

It just happened to come up as a recommended video as I was looking at something else yesterday and thought it was interesting.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Peter.N. »

The most recent one I have seen was in Bristol when my son and I were walking back to the car park, it glided silently past and my son said 'is that electric' I turned round to look and fell down the kerb so I never did find out what it was.

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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by GiveMeABreak »

:rofl2: That's my usual trick too Peter.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Mandrake »

Peter.N. wrote: 25 Mar 2018, 10:43 The most recent one I have seen was in Bristol when my son and I were walking back to the car park, it glided silently past and my son said 'is that electric' I turned round to look and fell down the kerb so I never did find out what it was.

Peter

In tomorrows tabloids - "Electric car causes pedestrian injury!" :lol:
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Zelandeth »

We're on holiday in Florida right now, and I've lost count of how many Teslas we've seen in the last couple of days. They're definitely more common a sight here than back home.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by Mandrake »

That's interesting, because Tesla numbers in Florida are apparently quite low compared to their home state of California, where they literally are everywhere...

It varies a lot from state to state - in some states its actually illegal to sell a Tesla at all because their are state laws against Tesla's direct sales model, and the traditional car dealers fight tooth and nail to preserve that status quo!

It's quite hard for us in the UK to comprehend that many states in the US actually enshrine the car dealership model in law and ban direct sales from the manufacturer. (even if they open their own stores) :roll:

As Tesla are the only car maker in the US that does not have an independent dealer network (they run their own stores and service centres directly) this is effectively an anti-Tesla law!
Last edited by Mandrake on 28 Mar 2018, 06:59, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: Electric Vehicles: What have you spotted?

Post by myglaren »

A black i8 - hard to miss :)
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