Will Rednecks Buy the Ford Lightning?

[Windward]

Here's an EV that rednecks would buy ...

A gas-electric mid-size similar to the Chevy Colorado, $25,000 MSRP for RWD, $30k for 4WD. Towing capacity should easily hit 10,000 lbs. with the electric drive, payload capacity a quarter-ton, more than enough for general ranch work. Shitcan the expensive V6 engines and just throw in a lightweight rev-limited two cylinder, two-stroke to keep the EV capacitor-battery system charged and an option to use it as a small generator for welding and power tools. The time-temp-turbulence optimization should sail through emissions requirements, lessen the need for a lot of heavy steel in the engine box, keep the price down. Enough plug-in capacity for 50 miles which would mean a small battery and a cheapish super-capacitor to buffer the EV charge, and then the gas engine can kick in, with a 10 gallon tank for unlimited milage at any small-town gas station. Repairs should be dead easy, just pull the little engine when needed, it shouldn't weigh much more than 150 lbs., keep the electronic controls easy to fix, mostly module swaps where possible. Build a reputation of DIY, user repairs, make the money in aftermarket parts rather than the dealer service network.

Build them in Canada-USA-Mexico, call it the Chevy Sheridan. Bench seat up front with cheap saddle cloth covers, steel wheels, AM/FM standard, with the now obligatory back-up camera. The cab should be accessible enough for any ranch-hand to get laid in there as needed but not comfortable enough to get pregnant.

And a secret weapon ... make quarter glass vent windows standard. AC and power windows can be options, but rednecks love those quarter glass vent windows, they'll do anything to get them. Directs the cooling air where it is needed, to the nutsack.

Great ideas, but sadly the auto makers purposefully make many DYI repairs a thing of the past.

The Dealers make all their money on service.

And don't get me started on "specialty" tools.   Gee, lets make a fuel hose connection that requires a special tool to undo.

Planned obsolescence, dealer profits, design by accounting, will always trump the environment, ethics or even common sense.

Follow the money... its always been, and likely always will be the primary motivation.

 

[mikewof]

You’ve been duped. The “rare earth elements in lithium batteries” is a talking point from the rolling coal people, right? Please enlighten us as to the rare earth elements you believe are in a lithium battery.

Some electric motors use rare earth elements in their magnets. But not the induction motors in popular cars.

Plenty of rare earth elements used in ICE cars and oil refining.

Lithium is not rare. Mining it creates the typical environmental damage.

I've not been "duped", I've worked in this area for longer that you've had hot dinners.

There are rare earth elements in any and all circuits, conductors and semiconductors that need dopants, diffusion barriers, anti-dendritic coatings and other thin film active layers. Lithium isn't officially an REE, but politically it is grouped as one, because the USA has such a tiny contribution to this industry and such an overwhelming demand. Yes, there are REEs in batteries, but like with integrated circuits, not much, on the order of micrograms per cell.

The big need for REEs are in the electric motors, for instance when changed their EV motors to the higher efficiency neodymium iron boride type, they triggered a huge rush in the market and China secured its position. And regardless what you write, every motor on the planet that has semiconductor control needs some amount of REEs. To your point, neither Lithium NOR REEs are particular "rare" but they have huge environmental costs, because the concentrates in the ore are very low, and tons of ore (literally) need to be processed to produce grams of REEs (literally). The current chemical leaching process is done above-ground and it's an ecological nightmare.

The reality that you seem to want to ignore is that we can't transition from a gasoline infrastructure to an EV infrastructure with our current paltry supply of REEs and lithium, most of which are imported from Chinese controlled companies. What's the point of moving from one ecological nightmare (fossil fuels) to a new ecological nightmare (REEs and lithium)? Are you just more comfortable when the wholesale environmental catastrophe takes place in West Africa and South America rather than North America? Is that your political position, to happily shit all over some of the last remaining pristine ecosystems on the planet?

 

[mikewof]

Great ideas, but sadly the auto makers purposefully make many DYI repairs a thing of the past.

The Dealers make all their money on service.

And don't get me started on "specialty" tools.   Gee, lets make a fuel hose connection that requires a special tool to undo.

Planned obsolescence, dealer profits, design by accounting, will always trump the environment, ethics or even common sense.

Follow the money... its always been, and likely always will be the primary motivation.

i agree with you, but the market realities do change. The Magnuson Moss Act keeps pushing them back. G.M., Toyota and Fiat to a lesser degree haven't fought against the Magnuson Moss requirements like Ford, Tesla and VW have. Ford has made some really messy choices with their engineering that have purposefully punished anyone who tries to fix their own machines.

One of the tricky things in the industry is parking-lot rash, plastic bumper covers and taillights ... many of these vehicles, well-maintained are now good for 250k miles, which the buyers want, but which will cut into their margins. So they removed the bump strips, get the vehicles looking rough within a few years of normal use, and then keep changing the taillight designs to make the vehicles look dated. The buyers fall for it more often than not, and buy new vehicles while their old ones are still serviceable.

It's part of the reason why French cars never really did well in the USA market. The French way is to do little to no cosmetic repairs on their vehicles but maintain the mechanicals. It forced Renault, Simca and Citroen to look for alternate revenue streams with their vehicles.

 

[12 metre]

The French way is to do little to no cosmetic repairs on their vehicles but maintain the mechanicals. 

A result of parking by braille.    

 

[Blue Crab]

They're so ugly you just want to hit them.

 

[Steam Flyer]

I've not been "duped", I've worked in this area for longer that you've had hot dinners.   ....

That's a good line, Mikey.

You've certainly made more folding boats than him, ought to count for SOMEthing, right?

- DSK

 

[Ishmael]

Mike on battery electric vehicles:

While i won't go into the rest of your disinformation campaign inspired ramblings, try and let your ICE car run without cooling the next time you go for a ride.

The Nissan Leaf does not have active cooling. I have no idea if this fits into what Mike is saying or not.

 

[mikewof]

That's a good line, Mikey.

You've certainly made more folding boats than him, ought to count for SOMEthing, right?

- DSK

I've made more folding rowers and sailing dinghies than anyone other than Folbot (USA, out of business), Nautiraid (still in business in France), Klepper (Germany), Feathercraft (Canada, out of business) and Oru (excellent folding boat maker in California). So you have that right.

But wrt ion polarization with in-situ leach of rare earth elements, I did part of my research in this area and have worked in it since 2010. Thank you for the mention. I am currently working to get the research published, tested and commercialized for West Africa, hopefully in a last-bid attempt to save native cultures and ecosystems from Chinese REE exploitation.

Making progress, slow progress, but some progress. If you weren't such a right cunt, you would recognize the need, but for you, it's just another shitfight, and you would be more than happy to have China rip apart pristine West African landscapes and native cultures, because that's the kind of ignorance you embrace, apparently as part of an effort to cover your emotional wounds from feeling that the world should have loved you more, now as you drift into being a genuine old man, and you can see your grave just on the horizon, so you eke out these one-upmanship squabbles with strangers on the interwebs looking for redemption that you will be unlikely to find, due to your diagnosis of terminal dipshititis. 

 

[mikewof]

The Nissan Leaf does not have active cooling. I have no idea if this fits into what Mike is saying or not.

It doesn't need it, at least it didn't a few years ago when Laker explained it to me. Nissan used (still uses?) the older, and more stable nickel battery technology. It doesn't have the storage and cost advantages of lithium ion, but it doesn't try to commit suicide by hari kari-ing itself with conductive dendrites.

 

[BeSafe]

The Nissan Leaf does not have active cooling. I have no idea if this fits into what Mike is saying or not.

It actually does - they use air cooling - although depending on semantics, it could be argued that 'active' means liquid cooling.

https://insideevs.com/news/482245/nissan-leaf-repair-liquid-cooling-benefits/

"The Nissan Leaf and the Renault ZOE opted for air-cooling for cost reasons and the video above shows why that may be more expensive in the long term – for customers, mind you."

Battery efficiency is normally somewhere around 85-90ish percent on discharge, depending on rate and where you are in the discharge cycle.   So if you're running at a 10kW load, you're creating 1 kW of heat in the battery. 

 

[Ishmael]

It actually does - they use air cooling - although depending on semantics, it could be argued that 'active' means liquid cooling.

https://insideevs.com/news/482245/nissan-leaf-repair-liquid-cooling-benefits/

"The Nissan Leaf and the Renault ZOE opted for air-cooling for cost reasons and the video above shows why that may be more expensive in the long term – for customers, mind you."

Battery efficiency is normally somewhere around 85-90ish percent on discharge, depending on rate and where you are in the cycle.

Yes, I meant it in the sense of liquid cooling, as opposed to ambient or fan-driven air cooling. Residents of hot places are finding the battery efficiency can really drop in elevated temperatures. Battery lifespan is likely also affected, which has its own issues...

The National Post conducted an informal survey of Western Canadian Nissan dealerships to ask the cost of replacing a battery pack on a 2013 Nissan Leaf. Estimates ranged from $8,000 to an eye-watering $30,953.28 plus $1,200 in labour.

Virtually every dealer contacted said they had never once performed a non-warranty battery replacement, and that ordering a full stack replacement is a complex process unlike any other Nissan component. “It’s not a normal process,” said one Vancouver Island dealer.

Scott Waddle is the owner of Precision Auto Service, a Vancouver-area mechanic specializing in electric vehicles. He says he’s unable to acquire aftermarket batteries direct from Nissan, and thus all of his battery replacements have to be done using salvaged components from written-off vehicles.

 

[Mrleft8]

I saw a full sized Chevrolet Electric pick up in town today.... Jacked up, mud tires, and more chrome than Carter has pills..... Not a speck of dust on it though....

Looked a lot like this, but the lettering on the tires was correct.

 

[mikewof]

Mike on battery electric vehicles:

While i won't go into the rest of your disinformation campaign inspired ramblings, try and let your ICE car run without cooling the next time you go for a ride.

I haven't posted any disinformation. Regarding your point about ICE, that's the difference though ... once I park my big ol' Chevy truck, it no longer needs cooling, I can let the poor gal sit there for a day or a month or a year and come back to a vehicle that will still work as long as the gasoline hasn't lost too many of its volatiles.

But due to dendrites, even when the battery isn't in use, Lithium Ion batteries and some other batteries needs to be cooled to prevent the battery from killing itself. If you remember Ed who used to post here, he had one of the original Teslas built on the Lotus platform, and after just one power-outage while he was on vacation (if memory serves) the breaker popped on his Tesla charger, and the batteries murdered themselves, he got rid of it.

But to your larger point, ignorance like what you have displayed here does nothing to help the low-entropy industry. It is just mindless hoorah-harry nonsense that doesn't address real challenges to convert from the combustion economy to the low-entropy economy, and EVs will be a big part of that. And there might be a battery technology that actually works, like Zinc-Manganese Oxide, or maybe we will shitcan chemical matrix storage altogether and use variations on the capacitor, like room-temperature superconductor loops,  ballistic carbon nanowires, or just really good ultracap arrays. But declaring actual knowledge about these real life problems as "disinformation" does nothing to help clean our planet's water, air and soil. All you do is turn yourself into a consumer, able to be swindled into the "next big thing" that might be more damaging to the planet than what came before.

Here, educate yourself ...

 

[mikewof]

It actually does - they use air cooling - although depending on semantics, it could be argued that 'active' means liquid cooling.

https://insideevs.com/news/482245/nissan-leaf-repair-liquid-cooling-benefits/

"The Nissan Leaf and the Renault ZOE opted for air-cooling for cost reasons and the video above shows why that may be more expensive in the long term – for customers, mind you."

Battery efficiency is normally somewhere around 85-90ish percent on discharge, depending on rate and where you are in the discharge cycle.   So if you're running at a 10kW load, you're creating 1 kW of heat in the battery. 

My take on his post was that the older Nissan batteries didn't need to be cooled when they weren't in use, the way the newer Li-Ion batteries need to be cooled when they are doing nothing more than just sitting there. But Nissan may have switched to the newer batteries.

 

[Ishmael]

I saw a full sized Chevrolet Electric pick up in town today.... Jacked up, mud tires, and more chrome than Carter has pills..... Not a speck of dust on it though....

Looked a lot like this, but the lettering on the tires was correct.

That's one of the alternate universe's trucks, the

 

[Mrleft8]

That's one of the alternate universe's trucks, the

View attachment 507731

Ah..... That explains why it was parked in front of the county health dept. while they were giving out covid boosters! Thanks for the heads up!

 

[mikewof]

That's a good line, Mikey.

You've certainly made more folding boats than him, ought to count for SOMEthing, right?

- DSK

I'm exploiting your fee advertising. Thank you for your free advertising.

I have some in-vitro leukemia treatment that could use some free advertising too. Are you up for the job?

 

[Greever]

2016 Colorado, that truck will be good to go until 2035 if you let it. It's a Chevy.

She is doing her job for me. I also tow a 23’ Jayco travel trailer with it.

 

[Blue Crab]

Is it rednecky to be a rabid advocate of Ford or Chevy?  

 

[130lights]

They're so ugly you just want to hit them.

LOL…my first car was a Simca, had never heard of it until then…I was 16. 3 on the tree, which was a good lesson, but what an weird little car.