Random EV thoughts.....

From the article is was described as a sort of showroom/testing room/car park

So it seems the car was free to move around (as evidenced by it exiting via the window)

You'd think with a bunch of engineers in the building someone would have said that was a bad idea

Chief Engineer Sum Tin Wong and assistant Wang Ban Ow died in the accident according to witness Ho Lee Fuc

Well yeah... A typical multi storey car park has steel reinforced concrete walls. Would withstand most cars doing less than 50km/h.

This looked like a glass wall with a token bit of plasterboard above and below.

Also, if the car landed on it's roof, that would suggest that there was some braking applied just before falling in order to tip the car over.

But given that it's China, safe to say we'll never know the ultimate truth behind this.

A lot of EVs now you don't even need to press the start button, just enter the car and car is already "on" but silent. Many EVs also simulate automatic creep, meaning after you let go accelerator the car will continue to move forward slowly.

Yeah I wish they could be set to make noise when put in gear, not just when moving

It would make like easier in car parks as well, might result in fewer people stepping behind the car just when I start reversing out of a space

Unfortunately they walk behind the car when I'm reversing into the spot then 😬

Watched it. Incredible speed.

BMW I3 is discontinued to make way for the new ix1. Shame really i3 is still a great city car, a totally origional and inovative design and platform. Still holds up today.

My one, great little car, maybe a bit too hard on the suspension but super round town.

People went out of their way to hate on the i3- the whole hybrid - Rex thing didn’t help, anyone who has driven one can appreciate it for what it is. It was maybe indeed too innovative for its time.

161- Rex only cost has been 2 x €140 services for oil change + tyres. Car came with service pack for first 3 years. It does 100km per day on the battery.

Now at 163,000km’s, battery just out of its warranty at 160k with no loss of range. Still pulls like a train.

My mother wants to upgrade her car (2012 Yaris), and I desperately want to get her into an EV, and wold fcuking love to get her into an i3...

Obviously though changing cars right now is a bit of a non starter.....

Bit of a black eye for Glastonbury and other festivals which are supposedly climate friendly

£50 to slow charge your car for 1 hour from a diesel generator 😱

I'll never complain about Ionity prices again...

This does seem a fairly wide ranging problem, diesel generators seem pretty ubiquitous wherever there's no grid available

I remember walking through phoenix park last year and the council had put in extra lighting around the paths, each light pole with a dirty diesel generator spewing smoke out everywhere

My guess is that the main driver is cost and wide availability of diesel generators versus a battery bank, plus to some extent plant hire companies not being bothered to change

For the example of EV charging at a festival, that charging truck that Porsche were showing off a few years ago would have been perfect.

For smaller applications, there really need to be some push to have batteries instead of generators. I've even seen a few power trailers which integrate batteries, a small generator and solar panels so you get the best of everything

Having batteries attached is good for the generator too, since it means it can be run at it's most efficient setpoint to charge the battery, instead of often underloading it which causes problems down the line

But what if the car has the smart charging function, having both active can be a headache unless they are properly synchronised.

Yeah, but there's a lot of low hanging fruit at a festival that you could move away from generators

Lighting is an easy one, instead of having a 3kW generator attached to a 400W lighting pole, you could have a couple of battery which can be swapped out and charged elsewhere

If you think of the smaller tents that use power they tend to fall into 3 types, selling drinks, selling food or selling junk. So for power requirements you're looking at fridges, tills, lights and potentially some cooking (don't think wood fired pizza is going electric anytime soon). Power requirements aren't huge, so a box trailer with batteries and a small ground mounted solar PV array, with a small generator for backup would probably power a bunch of those tents for the whole festival

Or if any of those businesses in the tents were particularly forward thinking they might have an EV with V2L capability onboard 😀

The biggest consumers of power are probably the music stages, lots of high powered lights, screens and speakers. From what I could find you're looking at power draws from hundereds to thousands of kVa, often from multiple generators running in parallel at partial load so they can pick up full load if one fails

So definitely a harder one to unstick from diesel, but there's some possibilites. That Porsche trailer for example has 2.1MWh of storage onboard and can supply something like 2MW of power. A couple of trailers like that could run alongside the generators, so you could run 1 generator at it's most efficient load and use the batteries for load management or backup power if the generator fails, giving you time to bring a second generator online

As for EV charging, I think a festival like Glastonbury is a perfect event to showcase EVs and frankly car companies should have been all over the organisers to provide a charging trailer or something

Of course it's a bit questionable talking about CO2 emissions of a festival when the biggest damage to the environment is caused by the thousands of people being in one place.

There needs to be a bit of realism there that festivals will happen anyway, so it's best to try and look at ways of mitigating the damage, like requiring all food and drink containers to be compostable, having an army of litter pickers to clean up, good crowd control to ensure people don't wander and wreck areas outside the festival grounds, and maybe even providing good public transport options so people don't need to bring the car in the first place