Last week 404 Media reported a website called ‘Dogequest’ was doxing Tesla owners. The site administrators appear to have launched a clone of the interactive map on the dark web too.
Leaf was the first “off the ground”. Tesla were the first to show that production EVs weren’t limited to boring econoboxes.
Anyway, you can filter out early adopters because they didn’t have factory anti-chrome, so if you see a shiny trim around the windows - it’s probably got a pre-public meltdown era owner.
But look harder than just that! Many owners got the chrome blacked out with a vinyl wrap. And the blacked out appeared in 2018 in the model y first, which could’ve been just right after the pedo remarks.
The leaf did such a disservice to EVs that the world would probably have been better off without it. It was ugly, it was slow, it had no range, it had no battery cooling so degradation was awful, and charging was slow to boot.
Would we though? The model S was only ~2 years away and that was the first EV people took seriously.
The leaf was affordable, but depreciation hit so hard that buying one new was only for actually insane people. And the battery degradation was almost as bad as the price degradation so your meh range became even worse. In ideal conditions it was fine, but anything worse and it was not a good option.
I’m not a time traveller so I can’t say for sure, but cars lile Chevy Bolt and Renault Zoe wouldn’t be the same, since Leaf showed that there was demand for small BEV hatches and battery cooling systems
Most of those were fixed with gen 2 but the one the two that really matter were not fixed: no water cooling and the CHAdeMO charging. What is worse is that they still didn’t fix it over the last 8 years with a newer generation when it was clear those were both nonstarters. Instead they came out with the overpriced Arya which is much worse than the competition.
But make no mistake, the Leaf back in 2011 was a game changer. It showed that your commuter car could very much be an EV.
A lot of that is why I have kind of always resented the tesla marketing even before we k
new musk was a hateful sexpest. My uncle had one of the early models before they added a lot of the safety features and it was REAL fun to go basically have instantaneous acceleration… and he would probably have died from that if he didn’t die from cancer instead.
But very quickly they made the argument that people need giant batteries and massive range. And that still permeates today. And the reality is that, no, people don’t. The vast majority of driving is commuting which tends to be more stop and go than not and just making charging stations in parking lots more ubiquitous would go a REALLY long way. No, not the super chargers. Just simple slow as hell level 1 and 2 chargers. And that would cover basically everyone 6.9 days a week outside of the folk with REALLY long commutes.
Where long range and super fast charging DOES help is for people doing long road trips and… folk think they are gonna be in their 30s and 40s driving 12 hours straight with only a stop to dump their piss bottle at a gas station. The reality is that by the time you are even considering a “new” car, you are probably also going to be more likely to stop for lunch or have kids to deal with where 30-40 minutes for a full recharge makes a lot more sense.
But instead we got into the mindset that you need a massive battery so you only charge up once a week and when you do it is a 10 minute recharge because even that is too long to wait.
I occasionally think of an alternate timeline where we realized that was stupid and instead L1/2 charging stations were a lot more popular and pretty much every major manufacturer switched to plug-in hybrids. Yeah, their battery tends to be shite compared to a “real” EV but people vastly underestimate how much you get from regenerative braking under real world conditions. Couple years back I had a rental toyota sedan and ended up driving all around Ontario for the better part of a week on like half a tank of gas and it was insane. And the needle literally did not move the entire time I was in Toronto or even frigging London.
I think you are stuck on theory and don’t have a good grasp of the pragmatic realities here.
But very quickly they made the argument that people need giant batteries and massive range. And that still permeates today. And the reality is that, no, people don’t. The vast majority of driving is commuting which tends to be more stop and go than not
I consider a 300 mile battery to be the smallest I’d buy for a number of reasons.
and just making charging stations in parking lots more ubiquitous would go a REALLY long way. No, not the super chargers. Just simple slow as hell level 1 and 2 chargers.
In most of the western world all of those parking lots you’re talking about are private property. Getting L1/L2 chargers installed in dozens or hundreds of spots. That is not only a significant expense, but you’d have to talk to, and convince millions of business owners to make massive investments for something that would take decades to even come to break even. Also, the costs don’t end at installation. Regular maintenance is required for EV chargers to continue to be operational. That costs money too.
Further, there are a frightening number of Charging Networks. Each with their own app, account requirement, and billing terms. Just because an L2 charger exists at your location doesn’t mean its a fair price for charging. Some business owners charge MASSIVELY for L2 charging (which is their right, its their charger).
And that would cover basically everyone 6.9 days a week outside of the folk with REALLY long commutes.
You’re talking about literally millions of L1/L2 chargers that would have to exist with even more than 1:1 availability for each EV sold.
Where long range and super fast charging DOES help is for people doing long road trips and… folk think they are gonna be in their 30s and 40s driving 12 hours straight with only a stop to dump their piss bottle at a gas station. The reality is that by the time you are even considering a “new” car, you are probably also going to be more likely to stop for lunch or have kids to deal with where 30-40 minutes for a full recharge makes a lot more sense.
I don’t know of any EV with a single charge range that could drive for 12 hours at highway speeds. The largest are 400-450miles which would be a very generous 6 hours tops.
But instead we got into the mindset that you need a massive battery so you only charge up once a week and when you do it is a 10 minute recharge because even that is too long to wait.
No, you need a larger battery for a whole bunch of other reasons:
you may be in the 34% of Americans live in a rental and don’t have an L1/L2 EV charging option.
you can’t guarantee your regular public charger will be operational as lack of maintenance (because they are privately owned) or vandalism
its the deep winter and you only have 70% of your battery capacity available to you
its still deep winter and you’re expending more charge on keeping the car warmer than you do in summer
there’s ICE vehicles sitting in your public charging spot blocking your ability to charge that day
you came home exhausted and forgot to plug in the L2 charger at home, and if you had a small battery your day is now ruined/costly
there was a power outage at home for a night but with a larger battery its no problem and you can charge it in a day or so
your spouse was going to pick up the kids, but she had a thing come up at work, and so you’ve got to go pick them up and take them to Karate and ballet practice which was more than your standard commute charge
There’s construction on your commute and the detour takes you way out of your normal way for a few months until the work is complete.
You want to visit a city more than a commute distance away and even then public fast chargers are few and far between, assuming they’re functional/available when you get to one.
All of these things are solved only by a larger-than-commute-size battery.
If we lived in a planned authoritarian society like China, your idea of ubiquitous L1/L2 would be more viable. Business owners would be required to install the state sponsored L1/L2 EV charger. Alternatively, these would be installed and maintained by a public government service. In the West though, its a pipe dream to get everyone to agree and be able to afford to roll out that level of infrastructure all across a country.
people vastly underestimate how much you get from regenerative braking under real world conditions
From what I’ve heard and read, that’s why the original Opel Ampera/Chevy Volt was so beloved.
and pretty much every major manufacturer switched to plug-in hybrids
Nowadays we have new Honda (and Nissan but who cares tbh) hybrids where the engine doesn’t drive the wheels 99% of the time. So we’re intersecting with that timeline a lil bit lol
Leaf was the first “off the ground”. Tesla were the first to show that production EVs weren’t limited to boring econoboxes.
Anyway, you can filter out early adopters because they didn’t have factory anti-chrome, so if you see a shiny trim around the windows - it’s probably got a pre-public meltdown era owner.
But look harder than just that! Many owners got the chrome blacked out with a vinyl wrap. And the blacked out appeared in 2018 in the model y first, which could’ve been just right after the pedo remarks.
True, that’s why I sneaked a “probably” in my comment lol
The leaf did such a disservice to EVs that the world would probably have been better off without it. It was ugly, it was slow, it had no range, it had no battery cooling so degradation was awful, and charging was slow to boot.
I knew like 2 people that had leafs, they loved them.
So all of them
We wouldn’t be here without it though. It did a decent job popularizing EVs, much better than i-Miev for example.
Would we though? The model S was only ~2 years away and that was the first EV people took seriously.
The leaf was affordable, but depreciation hit so hard that buying one new was only for actually insane people. And the battery degradation was almost as bad as the price degradation so your meh range became even worse. In ideal conditions it was fine, but anything worse and it was not a good option.
I’m not a time traveller so I can’t say for sure, but cars lile Chevy Bolt and Renault Zoe wouldn’t be the same, since Leaf showed that there was demand for small BEV hatches and battery cooling systems
Most of those were fixed with gen 2 but the one the two that really matter were not fixed: no water cooling and the CHAdeMO charging. What is worse is that they still didn’t fix it over the last 8 years with a newer generation when it was clear those were both nonstarters. Instead they came out with the overpriced Arya which is much worse than the competition.
But make no mistake, the Leaf back in 2011 was a game changer. It showed that your commuter car could very much be an EV.
A lot of that is why I have kind of always resented the tesla marketing even before we k new musk was a hateful sexpest. My uncle had one of the early models before they added a lot of the safety features and it was REAL fun to go basically have instantaneous acceleration… and he would probably have died from that if he didn’t die from cancer instead.
But very quickly they made the argument that people need giant batteries and massive range. And that still permeates today. And the reality is that, no, people don’t. The vast majority of driving is commuting which tends to be more stop and go than not and just making charging stations in parking lots more ubiquitous would go a REALLY long way. No, not the super chargers. Just simple slow as hell level 1 and 2 chargers. And that would cover basically everyone 6.9 days a week outside of the folk with REALLY long commutes.
Where long range and super fast charging DOES help is for people doing long road trips and… folk think they are gonna be in their 30s and 40s driving 12 hours straight with only a stop to dump their piss bottle at a gas station. The reality is that by the time you are even considering a “new” car, you are probably also going to be more likely to stop for lunch or have kids to deal with where 30-40 minutes for a full recharge makes a lot more sense.
But instead we got into the mindset that you need a massive battery so you only charge up once a week and when you do it is a 10 minute recharge because even that is too long to wait.
I occasionally think of an alternate timeline where we realized that was stupid and instead L1/2 charging stations were a lot more popular and pretty much every major manufacturer switched to plug-in hybrids. Yeah, their battery tends to be shite compared to a “real” EV but people vastly underestimate how much you get from regenerative braking under real world conditions. Couple years back I had a rental toyota sedan and ended up driving all around Ontario for the better part of a week on like half a tank of gas and it was insane. And the needle literally did not move the entire time I was in Toronto or even frigging London.
I think you are stuck on theory and don’t have a good grasp of the pragmatic realities here.
I consider a 300 mile battery to be the smallest I’d buy for a number of reasons.
In most of the western world all of those parking lots you’re talking about are private property. Getting L1/L2 chargers installed in dozens or hundreds of spots. That is not only a significant expense, but you’d have to talk to, and convince millions of business owners to make massive investments for something that would take decades to even come to break even. Also, the costs don’t end at installation. Regular maintenance is required for EV chargers to continue to be operational. That costs money too.
Further, there are a frightening number of Charging Networks. Each with their own app, account requirement, and billing terms. Just because an L2 charger exists at your location doesn’t mean its a fair price for charging. Some business owners charge MASSIVELY for L2 charging (which is their right, its their charger).
You’re talking about literally millions of L1/L2 chargers that would have to exist with even more than 1:1 availability for each EV sold.
I don’t know of any EV with a single charge range that could drive for 12 hours at highway speeds. The largest are 400-450miles which would be a very generous 6 hours tops.
No, you need a larger battery for a whole bunch of other reasons:
All of these things are solved only by a larger-than-commute-size battery.
If we lived in a planned authoritarian society like China, your idea of ubiquitous L1/L2 would be more viable. Business owners would be required to install the state sponsored L1/L2 EV charger. Alternatively, these would be installed and maintained by a public government service. In the West though, its a pipe dream to get everyone to agree and be able to afford to roll out that level of infrastructure all across a country.
Oh, we did that, with the IRA, and we, of course, gifted it to Elon Musk, after we paid to build it.
We didn’t. Not what @[email protected] is suggesting, which is L1/L2 charging. L1/L2 is much slower but much cheaper EV charging infra to deploy
Musk is a Nazi asshole, but Tesla only got less than 13% of those awards for DC fast charging deployments:
“Tesla has won almost 13 percent of all EV charging awards from the law” source
So, we paid for it, built it, and gave 13% of it away to a neonazi, and the rest to billionaires? And that’s… Better, somehow?
Giving less than 13% of the money to a Nazi is better than giving 100%, yes. Do you disagree?
From what I’ve heard and read, that’s why the original Opel Ampera/Chevy Volt was so beloved.
Nowadays we have new Honda (and Nissan but who cares tbh) hybrids where the engine doesn’t drive the wheels 99% of the time. So we’re intersecting with that timeline a lil bit lol
That’s actually pretty cool to know. Thanks!