Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#241 Post by OFSO » Tue Jul 05, 2022 5:29 am

My diesel Mondeo starts the engine by itself if it stopped when parked and the a/c, which has an electric compressor, not belt driven, runs the battery below a certain level. The screen then reads "Motor started, heating or cooling".

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#242 Post by VP959 » Tue Jul 05, 2022 7:37 am

G-CPTN wrote:
Mon Jul 04, 2022 10:08 pm
An unoccupied Tesla was parked in our village square (it had been unattended for a considerable time) when a couple of random pedestrian visitors walked closely behind it - though probably not touching it.
The brake lights flashed once - I wasn't aware of any people connected with the vehicle in the area - any explanation?

As above, Sentry Mode was triggered to go from Standby to Alert, i.e. a warning of close proximity but not an attack on the car. There is a staged response, so the flashing indicators is just the Alert state "I've seen you and am recording video" warning. This steps up to full blown Armageddon if someone tries to break into the car (lights flashing, horn sounding, very loud sounds from the car audio system) when the car goes into Alarm State.

Both Alert State and Alarm State notify the owner through the app immediately. I've once had mine trigger Alert State, I was sat in the barbers, waiting, when the phone pinged and I could see a young couple taking selfies in front of the car. They'd got too close and triggered the car to video them, just in case.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#243 Post by G-CPTN » Tue Jul 05, 2022 11:27 am

Thanks - it is appreciated from an owner/expert.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#244 Post by llondel » Thu Jul 07, 2022 2:57 pm

VP959 wrote:
Mon Jul 04, 2022 7:41 am
No specific mention of the cameras sending data to China but they very definitely do unless they are physically disconnected from the internet. I proved this beyond any doubt when I discovered that our fairly poor internet connection seemed to be carrying more traffic than it should have been. I installed a packet sniffer programme and after an hour or two of learning to use it found that the rogue data was between Chinese servers and the Hikvision CCTV system.
I have various cameras here, as seen on the puppy cam and for general home security. I have specific rules in my border firewall to stop those cameras from communicating with the internet. Of course, if I was designing a leaky camera then I know how to get around such a basic precaution, but hopefully it's enough for now.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#245 Post by PHXPhlyer » Sat Jul 23, 2022 7:03 pm

Cadillac thinks its hand-built electric car can take on Rolls-Royce

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/22/business ... index.html

Cadillac is going back into a market segment it hasn’t occupied in decades: the world of true ultra-luxury cars with huge six-figure price tags. General Motors unveiled the Cadillac Celestiq on Friday, and the company wants it to beat the best in the world.

The Celestiq, an electric car, is expected to cost as much as $300,000 when it goes on sale, a figure first reported by the Wall Street Journal and which GM has not officially confirmed or disputed. GM has not yet announced a date when actual production will begin. The vehicle GM unveiled is a “show car” version of the Celestiq, but executives have said the production will be very close in appearance except that it will be highly customizable by individual buyers.

Cadillac has sold cars costing six-figure sums before, but those were usually just over $100,000 and they’ve usually been Cadillac Escalades loaded up with options. The Celstiq takes General Motors’ luxury brand into direct competition with brands like Bentley and Rolls-Royce that routinely sell cars at these sorts of prices.

This is territory Cadillac hasn’t occupied since at least 1957, when Cadillac offered the Eldorado Brougham, said John Wiley, manager of valuation analytics at Hagerty, a company that closely tracks the collector car market. GM made only 400 Eldorado Broughams and they were entirely hand-assembled, not made on an assembly line. When it was new, the Eldorado cost just over $13,000 at a time when a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud could be purchased for about $16,000, said Wiley. (Adjusted for inflation, those figures would be roughly 10 times as much today.) Ironically, as a collectible car, a Cadillac Eldorado Brougham is today worth more than twice as much as a Silver Royce Silver Cloud, said Wiley.

It’s a bold move for the company which has repeatedly sought to re-identify itself for the past two decades. The first attempt was the Cadillac CTS, introduced in 2003, as the entry-level luxury American car to beat the BMW 3 Series. With its angular styling and crisp handling, it was a sharp departure from the comfortable cruising Cadillacs of past years. But the CTS reached its apex with just over 60,000 sold in 2005. Production ended in 2019. In most years, BMW sold around twice as many of the 3 Series.

Cadillac has made other attempts at re-invention, including a shift to alphanumeric names for its vehicles before going back to names again. There was also an attempt at creating an exclusive engine for the brand, dubbed the “Blackwing” V8, before ending production after just two years in 2020 with fewer than 1000 made.

The Celestiq appears to be Cadillac’s latest effort to return to its roots as a one-time pinnacle of luxury.

These days Cadillac is really identified with a single product, the Escalade full-sized SUV, said Tyson Jominy, vice president for data analytics at J.D. Power. The Escalade is, by far, Cadillac’s single best-selling product, and also the one with the most pop culture cachet.

While Cadillac has had many beautiful concept cars with rare and exotic materials in recent years, such as the Cadillac Sixteen with an enormous fuel-burning engine, and the Elmiraj with an interior featuring “handpicked fallen Brazilian Rosewood.” The Celestiq is the first that will actually be put into production. It arrives shortly after the brand put into production its first electric vehicle, the Cadillac Lyriq. Cadillac will be among the first luxury brands to make the shift to being fully electric by 2030.

The shift towards electrification – for Cadillac as well as the industry as a whole – provides a unique opportunity for Cadillac to reposition itself in the eyes of customers, said Brian Moody, executive editor at Autotrader.com. Customers shopping for electric vehicles have proven to be very open to trying new brands, and the Celestiq will get attention.

“That’s exactly what they need to do to differentiate themselves,” he said.

In its early days, Cadillac’s motto was “the standard of the world,” a market position it hopes to regain with this car, GM executives have said. Cars like Celestiq serve as a point of pride for GM, setting the standard for what’s possible, according to Jominy.

“This is their beacon,” said Jominy, “It’s the beacon for their employees, for their engineers to rally around. It’s the beacon for the dealers to show ‘We do things right. This is the pinnacle of what we can do.’”

Instead of a GM factory, each Celestiq will be built at GM’s Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. The Technical Center houses GM engineers and designers, and it has various test areas and wind tunnels. There are cars that are typically built there, but they are usually ones intended for testing or display purposes, not ones sold to the public.

GM has said it is investing $81 million to prepare the Warren Technical Center, not normally a site for production car assembly, to make the Celestiq.

The Celestiq features technology already available on other Cadillac models, like Super Cruise, GM’s hands-free highway driving system. It also has a 55-inch diagonal display screen and a glass roof that can darken to different shades in each of four different zones.

What will really set it apart will be the nearly infinite level of customization available.

“Each vehicle will be a custom-commissioned celebration of a client’s individuality, leveraging innovative design, authentic materials and the latest in automotive technology,” said Rory Harvey, GM’s vice-president for Cadillac.

This sort of extreme individual customization – buyers will be able to choose literally any paint color they wish, for instance – is something that ultra-luxury automakers like Rolls-Royce have been offering for over a century. This is not something that Cadillac dealers are used to, and it remains to be seen how GM will handle the vehicle ordering process. “The overall experience for the customer” will be an important part of what makes the Celestiq stand out, Harvey said in a statement emailed to CNN Business.

Cadillac dealers probably already have customers in mind for the Celestiq, Jominy said. These will be people with multiple luxury cars in their garages, including at least one Escalade, he said.

“They’re already buying [Aston Martins] and others and ‘Hey, let me take a chance on this, it looks interesting.”

Some might be classic car collectors who already have a 1957 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham in their garage. They might like the modern, electric version to park next to it.

PP

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#246 Post by OFSO » Sat Jul 23, 2022 8:53 pm

But will Americans be able to pronounce the name?

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#247 Post by Undried Plum » Sun Jul 24, 2022 6:47 am

Septic visitors to Edinboro won't have a clue how to pronounce Brougham.

Even Sassens struggle with placenames like Kirkcaldy and Kirkcudbright.

Going back onto topic, the EQS looks like a good 'un. TSLA share price will have to remain stupidly stratospheric for me to order one next year, though.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#248 Post by llondel » Tue Jul 26, 2022 6:33 pm

Undried Plum wrote:
Sun Jul 24, 2022 6:47 am
Even Sassens struggle with placenames like Kirkcaldy and Kirkcudbright.
I can manage those, I used to visit a friend up in Auchencairn so Kirkcudbright was a name mentioned often enough that it stuck.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#249 Post by Woody » Tue Jul 26, 2022 6:51 pm

llondel wrote:
Tue Jul 26, 2022 6:33 pm
Undried Plum wrote:
Sun Jul 24, 2022 6:47 am
Even Sassens struggle with placenames like Kirkcaldy and Kirkcudbright.
I can manage those, I used to visit a friend up in Auchencairn so Kirkcudbright was a name mentioned often enough that it stuck.
Nobody’s mentioned Milngavie yet :)) :))
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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#250 Post by Rossian » Tue Jul 26, 2022 8:29 pm

And nobody has tried Avoch either (it's on the Black Isle BTW).

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#251 Post by OFSO » Sat Jul 30, 2022 6:08 pm

According to the present owner, the car in question, which has had three owners from new, was built from the factory with a 60 kWh pack.

However, Tesla replaced the battery under warranty years ago with a 90-kWh pack, likely because it had no 60-kWh packs available at that point, and allowed the owner at the time to make full use of the larger battery. Fast forward to the present and the current owner, who is a customer of Hughes' company, took his Model S to a Tesla service for a paid MCU2 infotainment system upgrade after the 3G service shut down across the US.

Everything went smoothly, except that later on, Tesla reps called the owner to let him know they found and fixed a configuration mistake with the car. They software-locked the car to be a 60 again, although the Model S had been a 90 for years—and Tesla itself had made it that way.


Understandably, the customer was furious for losing 80 miles of range, so he demanded Tesla to revert the car back to the way it was. Tesla's answer was quite shocking: the company asked $4,500 to unlock the battery. He obviously refused and contacted the EV maker several times since, but to no avail.

Ultimately, it was the massive traction gained by Jason Hughes' Twitter thread that turned the tide and made Tesla change its mind. In a tweet the following day, Hughes confirmed the customer had his Model S restored to 90 configuration, free of charge. And that's not all; the day after that, Tesla did the same thing for another owner in a similar situation.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#252 Post by bob2s » Sun Jul 31, 2022 12:31 am

Please tell me, which of your governments has decreed, that the ICE is to be phased out by some future date, also if they have also started plans to provide more
in the way of methods to charge the EV that will fill the void left by the phasing out of the ICE. Politicians shouting from the rooftops, that they are closing down
coal-powered generators and nuclear power are without thought of any plans to fill the gap. It is no good relying on wind, solar, or storage batteries as they too have limitations for consistent reliable power, let alone upgrading the grid for the huge demand for power that is about to occur. Unless a lot more thought
is given as to the infrastructure required to support the proposed phase-out of ICE then we all should start stocking up on candles.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#253 Post by PHXPhlyer » Sun Jul 31, 2022 2:53 am

Bob:
The solution is very simple.
You will be in your EV to stay warm, not to go anywhere.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#254 Post by OFSO » Sun Jul 31, 2022 5:58 am

Thanks to Frau Merkel turning off nuclear power stations because of the risk of tsunamis, and the co-ruling green Party insisting on closing (finally!) the coal-burning power stations, Germany currently has a deficit of electrical power and there's no way anything will get better. Both "der Spiegel" and the "Frankfurter Algemein" had leaders last week castigating the German government for years of idiotic energy policies, and pointing out that no action is being taken to remedy the situation, as Germany falls into a black hole of its own choosing.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#255 Post by Undried Plum » Sun Jul 31, 2022 7:17 am

The problem for the UK will be to figure out what to do with the surplus electricity.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/20 ... batteries/

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#256 Post by G-CPTN » Sun Jul 31, 2022 8:33 am

Maybe we will eventually achieve free un-metered electricity that we were promised with nuclear power?

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#257 Post by Undried Plum » Tue Aug 02, 2022 8:16 am

The reason why this thing will work is precisely because energy prices will remain high.

The baby boomers' era of free lunch is over. Harold MacMillan's statement ought to be modified for future generations to 'You'll never have so good as we did'.

Burning fossil fuels for heat and propulsion and electricity was/is crazy. We can do so much better when we get over our addiction to coal/oil/gas.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#258 Post by OFSO » Tue Aug 02, 2022 12:05 pm

..... and just burn fossil fuels to generate electricity instead. That way the end user can delude himself into thinking he's not polluting the planet.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#259 Post by OFSO » Tue Aug 02, 2022 12:08 pm

In 2020, due to strong winds, Germany produced 484 TW⋅h of electricity of which over 50% was from renewable energy sources, 24% from coal, and 12% from natural gas.

Australia: Coal accounted for the majority of electricity generation at 54% of total generation in 2020. Renewable sources contributed an estimated 64,667 GWh, making up 24% of Australia's total electricity generation.

Nuclear was the main energy source for electricity production in France, with 360.7 terawatt hours in 2021. Nuclear energy share in France stood at 69 percent in 2021, and has remained over 70 percent from 1990 to 2020.

UK: renewables account for roughly 40% of electrical generation, with the remaining 60% being generated by natural gas and nuclear.

Yes, we are getting there, but hampered by politicians with no scientific or engineering background it's an uphill struggle.

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Re: Electric Cars II - Not Silly!

#260 Post by CharlieOneSix » Tue Aug 02, 2022 12:37 pm

At last, after 8 months waiting and some four months late I have my Kia EV6 GT-Line S All Wheel Drive. Two electric motors producing 321bhp. 0-60mph in 5.2 seconds - still a boy racer at heart! Practical range 290 miles. More bells and whistles you can shake a stick at - it's going to take me ages to delve into everything. The Head Up Display is superb!
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