Australian (ASX) Stock Market Forum

Electric cars?

Would you buy an electric car?

  • Already own one

    Votes: 10 5.1%

  • Yes - would definitely buy

    Votes: 43 22.1%

  • Yes - preferred over petrol car if price/power/convenience similar

    Votes: 78 40.0%

  • Maybe - preference for neither, only concerned with costs etc

    Votes: 36 18.5%

  • No - prefer petrol car even if electric car has same price, power and convenience

    Votes: 24 12.3%

  • No - would never buy one

    Votes: 14 7.2%
  • Total voters
    195
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China start-ups are dominating the EV industry in Europe, with the German manufacturers at least a decade behind.

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Chinese e-vehicle makers flock to the mobility show in Munich with high confidence and even higher production volumes. We’ll hear from correspondent Kristie Pladson. Meanwhile, trade expert Vince Stamer at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy talks us through German export data, which fell in July.​

 
So that the non-mechanically minded can understand why ICEV are entering the endangered list, watch this video, especially at the 5:30 mark. Engines and transmissions have become so complex and sophisticated, in the name of fuel and emission efficiency, that they have become extremely expensive to repair, and a throw-away item.

 
A RHD version of the Ford F150 lightning has been spotted in Brisbane.
From Drive comes the news that it is nor an official Ford test vehicle.
Some enterprising (and wealthy) Oz person has bought a HD Lightning and had it shipped here, and converted by Wlakinshaws, Ford Performance Vehicles or one of the many privateers that import and convert LHD trucks to RHD.
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Bit of a pity they are concentrating on the gas powered versions rther than diesel or even better the full EV.

Going out to buy a lotto ticket tomorrow to emulate the bloke or blokess who has done the import.
mick
 
Honda is onboard -

Honda is the latest automaker to adopt Tesla’s charging port for its future EVs​



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Honda is the latest automaker to adopt Tesla’s charging port for its future EVs© Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Honda Motor announced today that it’s adopting Tesla’s electric vehicle charging connector for its future vehicles. The Japanese automaker was one of the holdouts to accept the competing (and winning) standard, joining the likes of Ford, GM, Rivian, Volvo, Polestar, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, and Fisker.

Honda is planning to implement Tesla’s plug, now known as the North American Charging Standard (or NACS), in a new electric vehicle slated for 2025. The automaker, like every other manufacturer on board with NACS, is promising the availability of a CCS Combo to NACS adapter before 2025 so existing models (and soon-to-be-released ones like the Prologue) will have access to Tesla’s vast and reliable Supercharger network.

Before its plans to adopt NACS, Honda jumped in on a joint venture with BMW, GM, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, and Stellantis to build out a nationwide electric vehicle charging network. DC fast charging networks that aren’t built by Tesla are found largely unreliable, so with access to Tesla’s Supercharger plus building a new network, future Honda EV owners might have a better time, whenever the automaker gets around to releasing them.
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Free fast charging EV electricity ?
Yep. Check it out. Makes a ton of sense.

The 120kW EV fast-charger that is free during day-time “solar soak”​

Screen-Shot-2023-09-07-at-8.49.28-pm-800x517.png The Port Adelaide DC fast charger is now free between 9am and 4pm


On Thursday we wrote a small story about a new phenomenon at EV fast-charging stations – big displays with the kilowatt hour pricing rate, just as we are used to see at petrol stations.

We noted that the pricing offered at that charging station in the Barossa Valley included a big discount for charging during the middle of the day, to help soak up excess solar in South Australia, a state that already sources a world-leading wind and solar share of 70 per cent over the last 12 months, and where rooftop solar can sometimes meet all of local electricity demand.

One reader pointed out that another fast-charger in the state – at Port Adelaide – has an even better offer: Free fast charging between the hours of 9am and 4pm.
Screen-Shot-2023-09-07-at-8.47.51-pm.png
The pricing at the Port Adelaide Plaza shopping centre was only recently changed, according to regular users (down from a day-time rate of 12c/kWh we believe) and is part of a series of trials in South Australia to test consumer response to various price signals.

thedriven.io

The 120kW EV fast-charger that is free during day-time "solar soak"

This 120kW fast charger is free to use between 9am and 4pm to encourage EV drivers to soak up solar. It's part of a trial of different pricing signals.
thedriven.io thedriven.io
 
basilio said:
Free fast charging EV electricity ?
Yep. Check it out. Makes a ton of sense.
Click to expand...
I'll just add that there are very good reasons from a technical perspective, as distinct from the financial incentive, to encourage EV charging (and other electrical loads) to be shifted to the middle of the day wherever possible. That's here and now in SA, increasingly so in Victoria and WA too, and ultimately will apply elsewhere. :2twocents
 
Well the obvious has become even more obvious, the legacy car manufacturers are starting to incur the costs associated with completely changing their operation, while having to support the transition.
I can see this becoming another disaster that the taxpayer is going to have to fund, by propping up the larger legacy manufacturers, or like the coal power stations the owners will just walk away and leave the ICE problem to the Government to sort out.
The manufacturers will just say, 'look you guys are demanding less and less emissions, we are making less and less money, yet we need to spend huge amounts developing a completely new product, we just ain't going to make ICE cars or support the spare parts any more'. That will put a cat among the pigeons.
All of a sudden car supply crashes, demand for charging infrastructure and electricity goes balistic, get out the popcorn. 🤣
Interesting times, when ideological forces are driving the change, rather than the technical department driving it.

 
Fastest accelerating EV car. 0-100 kph --..956 sec. ( Tesla Plaid does it in 2.5 sec)
Built. by Engineering students.
Yep they had woman driver.
Cool... :)

This hand-built electric car just crushed the world’s fastest-accelerating EV record [video]​


c30a1ae9b39bfb3de5c1175d9d10e?s=30&d=identicon&r=g.png Peter Johnson | Sep 12 2023 - 1:05 pm PT

23 Comments


EV-acceleration-record.jpg
Swiss students just broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest accelerating EV in their hand-built electric car. The all-electric car crushed the previous record, running from 0 to 62 mph (0-100 km/h) in under a second.


electrek.co

This hand-built electric car just crushed the world's fastest-accelerating EV record [video]

Swiss students just broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest accelerating EV in their hand-built electric car. The all-electric...
electrek.co electrek.co
 
Teslas Semi Trailer trucks are on the road and proving their capabilities. Travelling between 376-545 miles a day..

Tesla Semi proves itself in fascinating, new independent test​


1698b64e3d1fca5c1ceead88373dd?s=30&d=identicon&r=g.jpg Fred Lambert | Sep 12 2023 - 3:32 am PT

205 Comments

Tesla-Semi-PepsiCo-truck-uTutrifor.jpgTesla Semi Image credit: u/Tutrifor
Several Tesla Semi trucks are participating in a fascinating, new independent test study, and the electric truck is starting to prove itself.

The North American Council for Freight Efficiency (NACFE) has started its new Run on Less program to test several electric trucks in real-world conditions and release the data in real time.
There are three new Tesla Semi trucks in the program this year, and the data for the first study has just been released.

electrek.co

Tesla Semi proves itself in fascinating, new independent test

Several Tesla Semi trucks are participating in a fascinating, new independent test study, and the electric truck is starting to...
electrek.co electrek.co
 
basilio said:
Teslas Semi Trailer trucks are on the road and proving their capabilities. Travelling between 376-545 miles a day..

Tesla Semi proves itself in fascinating, new independent test​


View attachment 162404 Fred Lambert | Sep 12 2023 - 3:32 am PT

205 Comments

View attachment 162405Tesla Semi Image credit: u/Tutrifor
Several Tesla Semi trucks are participating in a fascinating, new independent test study, and the electric truck is starting to prove itself.

The North American Council for Freight Efficiency (NACFE) has started its new Run on Less program to test several electric trucks in real-world conditions and release the data in real time.
There are three new Tesla Semi trucks in the program this year, and the data for the first study has just been released.

electrek.co

Tesla Semi proves itself in fascinating, new independent test

Several Tesla Semi trucks are participating in a fascinating, new independent test study, and the electric truck is starting to...
electrek.co electrek.co
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Distance over here is the killer with the diesel ones being driven 2-up so non stop driving
 
The development of EV's has often focused on battery technology improvement.
The system for transforming the stored electricity is just as important, and a "redevlopment" of an old technology has some of the big players taking notice.
From The Evil Murdoch press
It sounds like something from science fiction, or a propulsion unit from “Back to the Future’’, but an electric-motor technology known as “axial flux”, first patented by Nikola Tesla back in 1889, could be about to change the world of motoring forever.

Back in 2008, an Oxford University-based electrical engineer and scientist, Tim Woolmer, who for years had been fascinated by electric motors, wrote his PhD on a disc-shaped motor he built based on an old concept known as the axial flux design.

The axial flux motor turns heavy, conventional, sausage-shaped electric motor design – designs used in every electric vehicle – on its head. It’s a highly compact, disc-shaped motor with copper-wound “legs” inside. When it spins up, it makes twice the amount of torque at lower speed compared with conventional motors.
Despite their enormous weight advantages – they’re just 20 per cent the size of radial electric motors – early axial flux designs had their problems, mostly related to excess heat generated by the magnets inside and the need for highly precise engineering – with tolerances of just 1mm – to be reliable.

Numerous designs were produced down through the years but it was Dr Woolmer’s thesis and a 20kg working model – known as the YASA (for Yokeless And Segmented Armature) – which first overcame the cooling issue and used new and more easily sourced internal materials.

At his Oxford lab, Dr Woolmer kept developing the concept and in 2014 he placed four of his YASA motors inside a modified ex-Le Mans race car, took it to an RAF runway in Yorkshire and broke a 40-year-old land speed record for a vehicle weighing less than 1000kg.
And very quickly, the automotive world began to take notice. The idea attracted huge interest from various manufacturers who took Dr Woolmer’s YASA design and used it in a variety of trial applications, firstly the Williams F1-engineered Jaguar C-X75 hybrid supercar, then the ultra-low volume $2 million Koenigsegg Regera production hypercar.

Ferrari, too, came knocking early, to place the tech into its spectacular SF90 Stradale plug-in sports car.
“This [the Ferrari SF90 hybrid] is the hardest application we’ve ever done where it [the YASA tech] sees 60G of vibration, very high temperatures, nearly 2000 newton metres of torsional vibration and everything else. It [the Ferrari] just wants to rip the whole machine apart,” Dr Woolmer explained.

“They [the YASA motors] will get a much nicer life in the world of electric cars.

“By cutting our teeth on these type of [Ferrari] applications, we’ve demonstrated the technology is reliable there and we’ve learnt things; we’ve learnt some really important lessons in doing these projects and proving various aspects of the technology.”
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In 2019, when Mercedes-Benz announced it would end its combustion-engine development and concentrate on electric vehicles, the company’s advanced research and development engineers had already begun talks with Dr Woolmer.

And while the Oxford scholar had many suitors and Ferrari was, as Dr Woolmer described it “a rapid evolution partner”, eventually it was the Mercedes-Benz pitch that won him over, allowing him to keep his 120 patents and his original development team around him, and refining the design and taking it forward.

Mercedes fully acquired YASA in 2021, with Dr Woolmer remaining as chief technical officer.

“Because of the Mercedes-Benz opportunity to scale up into the hundreds of thousands [of YASA motors], it becomes a point where, as a small start-up [company], it’s not a good use of capital for us to build factories to produce it; it doesn’t make sense,” he said.

“So the Mercedes collaboration made sense from a scale and industrialisation point of view. Also the vision for YASA was always to accelerate electrification, and Mercedes shared that vision.”

Eventually, it seems highly likely that other car companies are going to be banging on Benz’s doors to buy the new motor technology, because it is just so much lighter and more powerful than current tech.

At the 2023 Munich Mobility Show, the first Mercedes to use YASA technology – the extraordinary, gull-winged Vision One-Eleven concept – offered a glimpse of the opportunities to come.

“The One-Eleven uses our second-generation technology and there’s still so much to come; we are now working on our third and fourth-generation motors,’ Dr Woolmer said.

“An automotive development program typically takes around four years. When you think we are a company that is just 14 years old and the first production car used our technology in 2016, there is still much development to come.”

Scale production of the YASA tech has begun in Berlin but Dr Woolmer was cautious in discussing future plans.

“It [YASA tech] definitely has the potential but it’s too early to say how broad an impact it will have. It’s going to take another five to 10 years to figure that out,” he said.

“The next five years is all about an order of magnitude increase in the volume, industrialising things in Berlin, and then we’re on that journey.”
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one of the comments to the article was quite pertinent, in that the writer said it reminded him of the technological superiority of the wankel rotary engine, but the requirement for very high and repeatable tolerances meant it never really took off.
Mick
 
Mazda from memory are still developing the rotary, there may still be a place for hybrids in the future, as long as the ICE engine can run on clean energy efficiently.
I wouldnt be surpised to see the rotary resurface in that role.
 
sptrawler said:
Mazda from memory are still developing the rotary, there may still be a place for hybrids in the future, as long as the ICE engine can run on clean energy efficiently.
I wouldnt be surpised to see the rotary resurface in that role.
Click to expand...
I womder what ever happened to Ralph Sarich's rotary engine that was going to set the world alight all those years ago.
 
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