• Hi Guest!
    If you appreciate British Car Forum and our 25 years of supporting British car enthusiasts with technical and anicdotal information, collected from our thousands of great members, please support us with a low-cost subscription. You can become a supporting member for less than the dues of most car clubs.

    There are some perks with a member upgrade!
    **Upgrade Now**
    (PS: Subscribers don't see this gawd-aweful banner
Tips
Tips

EV charging surprise?

I have seen a video similar to that and the guy kind of debunked it saying that it looks impressive but the rolling resistance of rail cars is low nce they move. Probable set it up with all the couplings slack so you get one car moving at a time as the couplings close up.
I believe that is what freight trains do as well.
I can't find the video where he goes through some of the things they do.

David
 
First off, thanks for finding that video. I couldn't find the second half of Rachael's segment. A debunking only works for me if another truck can pull the weight. Rachael's point was if a product is better than the competition, people will buy it.
 
I would hope the charge port would be like gasoline pumps, uniform and the same.
 
Fortunately nearly all USA/Canada pumps use the same cable connection; only car that can't use it is the Tesla 3 (I think), which comes with an adapter to use with the "standard" hose.

 
The F150 EV pickup is interesting to me. Instead of taking a generator to a job site, you can plug power tools into the truck.

Obviously battery charge needs to be managed, making sure you can get home at the end of the day!

(Plus, how many sub 40k cars can you get with a 4.5 0-60 time?? Yowzers!)
 
Great minds…. 🤠

I’m not a fan of electric cars (sorry), but if I were to suggest a support infrastructure it would not be charging stations. Instead, I would make the batteries easily changeable. Then, you pull into an exchange station…exchange for a fresh battery and be on your way in a lot less time. The exchange station would have capacity to charge numerous batteries at once so as to always have some fresh when a customer pulls in.

Been tried and not very successful. Look up "Better Place" they built a series of battery change stations around Israel, and sold a car that worked with them. A not bad Renault sedan. Actually was nice driving car. But the reality of the quick change batteries didn't work out very well. It took longer than promised to sway batteries and the investment in building the swap stations was just crazy.
And then there is is issue that they only had one car and no one else was willing to work with just one battery design. So basically for this to become really big you would have needed multiple battery types being kept at each station.
From day 1 when they started trying to sell their idea I felt that the biggest problem was choosing the wrong market. set up a quick swap system for small delivery trucks or taxi's which basically stay in the same city would make building infrastructure more reasonable since you wouldn't need to spread it across an entire country to make it really useful.
 
Last week on the way to Big Bear Lake and back we stopped at Harris Ranch on I-5 to eat. They have at least a dozen chargers in the parking lot. The Healey got more attention than the Teslas.
 
I have seen a video similar to that and the guy kind of debunked it saying that it looks impressive but the rolling resistance of rail cars is low nce they move. Probable set it up with all the couplings slack so you get one car moving at a time as the couplings close up.
I believe that is what freight trains do as well.
I can't find the video where he goes through some of the things they do.

David
Kinda more impressed with the tow-strap!
 
Back
Top