More Fine Print . . .

By
eric
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They’re not hiding the facts about EVs. You just have look for them.

A good place to start is in the owner’s manual. That’s where I found out that Ford recommends avoiding the “fast” chargers you hear a lot about to charge up the F-150 Lightning electric pick-up, because regular use of “fast” chargers isn’t good for the “health” – Ford’s word – of the battery.

Now this is interesting because “fast” charging is the only way to get an EV back on the road again in less than several hours, which is the amount of time it takes to recover a partial charge using 240V household power (basically, a stove/dryer type outlet). It typically takes at about 8-11 hours to get a full charge at home this way.

That’s essentially all day – or overnight.

Put another way, if you burn through most of your range today, you won’t be able to use the EV again until the next day. Unless you charge it up at a “fast” charger. But if you do that, you risk the “health” of the battery – by which is meant its capacity to hold a full charge, which will degrade faster and sooner the more you “fast” charge it.

So what do you do?

You could avoid “fast” charging – or rather, avoid the waiting – by not heavily discharging the battery. But that means not making use of the vehicles fully charged range. For example, if you never let the Lightning’s battery discharge more than 50 percent, it would always have about half of its full charged range (about 300 miles) available. And that would be very good for the “health” of the battery. But that means you can’t drive the Lightning farther than about 150 miles.

It’s like having a non-electric vehicle with a gas tank that holds about five gallons – which you fill up using a syringe.

The electric Jaguar I-Pace’s owner’s manual advises the owner as follows: “In the event of long-term storage, make sure to charge the high voltage battery every 30 days. CAUTION: Make sure that the high voltage battery is charged to a target of 30 percent and no more than 60 percent. Failure to do so may result in damage to the battery.”

This above rigmarole being a function of seepage – the loss of charge over time when an EV is just sitting (and isn’t plugged in). Most EVs have a thermal management system that is always drawing power, kind of like inadvertently leaving an accessory like the radio on in a non-electric car. But with EVs, it’s not inadvertent. It’s by design.

But how does one maintain a “target” of 30 percent charge and no more than 60 percent charge?

That’s up to you to figure out.

Mitsubishi says owners of the Outlander PHEV (it’s a plug-in hybrid that has the capability to be “fast” charged, which is uncommon among hybrids) ought to avoid “leaving (the) car plugged in for a longer period of time than necessary. While you’re not driving it, aim to keep the charge at around the 30 percent mark and leave it unplugged. You can then charge the car up to full just before you need to use it.”

It seems like a lot of work, doesn’t it?

Here is what you’ll find in the Nissan Leaf’s owners’ manual:

“For the high-voltage battery it is recommended that the state of charge is kept between 50 percent and 80 percent and not to leave the vehicle plugged in once the high voltage battery has finished charging. Do not operate the charging timer repeatedly while the charge connector is connected to the vehicle after the Li-ion battery charging is completed. Doing so may discharge the 12V battery. Avoid exposing a vehicle to extreme ambient temperatures for extended periods to maximize battery life. Owners should avoid storing a vehicle in temperatures below 23ºC for more than seven days. Avoid leaving your vehicle for more than 14 days where the Li-ion battery available charge gauge reaches a zero or near zero (state of charge). Park/store your vehicle in cool locations out of direct sunlight and away from heat sources.”

You might want to do some more reading before you do any buying.

. . .

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55 COMMENTS

    • And they have the audacity to tell you that YOU have to control the charge level? What kind of incompetent script kiddie brain dead programmer cannot make that happen automatically? It’s like the Gott damned ATM asking me if I want english or Espanol every damned time I use it- these kids are effing clueless! If i programmed systems like that I wouldn’t have any repeat customers, and the stuff I deal with is industrial and by definition custom.

  2. What gets me, all these electric fanboys, “oh,, its so inconvenient,,,,, to go to the gas station!”

    It took me three minutes to go from 70 miles of range left on my gas car to 345 miles last night when I stopped for gas on the way home from work. Three minutes, not even enough time to get a soft drink. Seems more convenient than waiting all night for half that with something electric. No sale.

    • Wow, Rich, but they are not going to be inconvenienced when they have to sit at a charger in town for 45 minutes so that they can go home? What morons. I filled up my car the other day. Took all of a couple minutes tops, and now have about 380 miles of range. No range anxiety, no wondering if I am going to get stranded in BFE somewhere. Have not yet pushed this car to see how far I can go on a near-empty tank (ha ha).

  3. So you have to keep your EeeeVeeee in a climate controlled garage so that the battery doesn’t get too cold/hot. Good luck with that in the city 😆

    • I would almost be afraid to keep an EV in the garage. What if the damned thing caught fire? It would burn the EV vehicle-and the rest of your house-down to the ground? I have that little trust in the damned things.

  4. Wow! Those “little” details are just jaw dropping. Those people are worse than “high on crack”! They’re like the perpetual tweaker that’s been awake for 3 days straight talking about how they’re gonna win the the Publisher’s Clearing House any day now.

    For fuck’s sake! Put the pipe down already, get some sleep, and check into rehab!!

    I tell you though. When this shit blows up, “the morning after” is going to be glorious! A glorious disaster for all, to be sure but the “told you fucken idiots so!” credits will be astronomical.

    Meanwhile, idiot Europeans are starting to smell the lithium…

    https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/finally-europeans-may-be-rejecting-ev-kool-aid

    • I read the article, and cracked up over the one comment below it: Listen closely: The Sun is no longer the primary driver of Earth’s climate…because the Sun now self-identifies as the Moon, got it? I did not post that, but got a good chuckle over it.

    • If you actually use the Lightening, as in going out to pick up a load and hauling it home, you never have any idea what its range is, other than being less than the gauge shows. All electric trucks should be abandoned, since they are useless for the work trucks are designed to do. Unless you are an urban cowboy goat roper who never works their truck.

    • Ford was heavily invested in Solid Power, a solid-state battery startup. I threw in some discressionary dollars at $11 because they had other automakers and the DOE investing and they seemed to be close to getting their production plant online. Well, in November I gave up and took the loss at $6, which was good timing because a few days later the CEO left for more family time. Stock is sitting at $2 and change now and analysts are still saying it’s a strong buy!

      https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SLDP?p=SLDP&.tsrc=fin-srch

  6. There are two states a person can be in this world: you are either sovereign or a slave; the choice is only yours to make.

    Sovereign Pete, from the Sovereign Project, talks about freedom, car tax, property tax, government oppression and the constitution.

    @ 4:26 in video law versus legal meaning

    @ 19:50 the constitution doesn’t protect you

    @ 21:15 the national debt is what the government owes the people

    @ 22:05 property tax

    @ 26:45 15 min cities…easy to defeat…

    @ 35:26 petitions are useless…start serving notices today…

    @ 39:00 agenda 2030…you will own nothing…that already happened…

    @ 41:25 do you own your car?

    @ 55:40 car emissions scam

    The Sovereign Project
    https://www.thesovereignproject.live

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XKBSf4qghI

  8. Talk about an utterly worthless (and expensive) truck. Who in the hell is going to want that way up here in the Great White North, when you cannot even drive to town in the damned thing, without wondering if you are going get stranded? 170-some miles of range? I would automatically halve that. Add to that the drain on the battery to keep warm at -40 below in the Winter, and you would go nowhere with that thing! Want to go hunting in Septembre, and haul your four-wheeler on the back of that thing? Uh yeah, not happening. Even if you made it to where you wanted to go, you would never make it back home: No chargers in the middle of BFE, after all. That thing cannot even drive down the bare bones road. Can you imagine how much EV juice you would lose driving through thick snow? However, I will be most interested in your review, Eric, after you drive it. The fact that it could not make it down to your place without being charged twice is quite sad to say the least. The powers-that-be cannot be more obvious in their goals to keep us off the road in the long run (no pun intended).

  10. On our local talk radio this morning the question of EV’s and car insurance came up. If you damage the batt pack in any way (small dent, whatever) then the car is totaled. Insurance will go through the roof that being true. Even the rich might feel that since risk is spread out over all the insurers.

    Tomorrow the new emissions standards hit. Can’t wait to see the madness evident.

  11. “You can then charge the car up to full just before you need to use it.”

    Their definition of “just before” must be vastly different than mine.

  12. EVs are designed to be used lightly every day and charged slowly every night. City cars. Short commutes and runs to the grocery store. Neighborhood delivery vehicles like milk floats are perfect for electrification. Slow speed, nearly maintenance free (not that ICE vehicles aren’t) and only used for a few hours a day. No wonder Domino’s is using them for deliveries and the Post Office is trying to do the same. But as your only vehicle, all purpose, it’s never going to make sense.

    I suppose someone could rent a gasser when needed for traveling, but that’s fraught with cost and taxes since local governments figured out they can tax the hell out of visitors and get away with it because they don’t vote in their elections. And it’s a hassle. Drive your EV to the airport? to pick up your rental. load up your stuff. Pay to leave the EV at the airport (following the owner’s manual instructions), then hope you don’t do something stupid with the rental, because everything is recorded on a black box and they’ll find a way to pin anything on you.

    • The marketing around EV’s is deceitful to trick people into buying them.

      People have gotten used to the maintenance requirements of gasoline cars; drive them as hard as you want, and if everything works and you stay on top of maintenance, the car won’t suffer for it.

      EV is more like electrochemical vehicles. They have extremely robust motors and inverters which really don’t break, however, they’ve got an incredibly fragile battery pack, chemically speaking. If you charge it too fast, you heat it and evaporate electrolyte and it loses capacity. If you discharge it too fast, the similar thing happens. If you keep charged close to its maximum voltage (like letting the car sit while 90% charged), it becomes damaged. If the battery gets too low, it also takes damage when charging the next time.

      You can design an EV where the battery won’t degrade in any meaningful way. Take that 100kWh, 1000lb battery and limit it to using the middle 60%, don’t let it charge above 80% of max, or below 20% of max (yes, this is a simplifcation). Furthermore, disallow fast charging and fast discharging, limit it to C/4, so 25kW. The car now charges in about 4 hours at the fastest, and has about 35HP. Sounds great, no?

  13. My Lowes battery powered lawnmower manual advises to store the battery indoors during winter and that the mower will quit working when the battery gets too hot. Seems like a common issue with battery powered anything.

    • I exited the construction trade just as battery powered tools were become predominant. I never owned one. Regarding the tool not working if it becomes too hot, in my years as a plumber, I often worked my plug in Sawzall until it was so hot you couldn’t pick it up without gloves. It neve quit. In fact, I used it yesterday, 20 years after I quit making a living with it.

      • Funny you mention the battery Sawzall. Yesterday I was cleaning up the yard and was cutting up some bigger branches for the trash. I grabbed the wood blade, a full battery and broke down the branches. Only a few minutes and done. Pulled the battery off and it was warm. Not hot or anything to be concerned about, but the angry pixies were not happy about being put to work, even for five minutes. I could imagine what that abuse does to all those batteries on the job site. They’re probably gone in a month of hard labor.

      • I absolutely love my cordless tools. Even the cordless sawzall does a great job and I wouldn’t give it up- though the corded ones still have a place for really heavy work. But I also keep a bunch of batteries in rotation and Dewalt’s battery management is obviously decent as they have held up very well in medium service these last 4 years. My Black and Deckers, OTOH, are absolute crap batteries and/or charge management. Have to be replaced about yearly in fairly modest/light use (weedeater, branch saw, leaf blower- all used sporadically for fairly short times).

  14. **”if you burn through most of your range today, you won’t be able to use the EV again until the next day.”**

    WoW! What a great way to limit people’s mobility! No overt orders, like “You shall not venture more than 80 miles in a day” (out and back, in the cold or heat, with accessories on, etc.)- The people will declare it a ‘victory’ when 15-minute cities are not mandated….but what they don’t see is the simple yet revealing quote above, which is a condition caused by other mandates, which effectively achieve the same thing as “15-minute cities”…only they accomplish it covertly- as the masses cheer and applaud themselves for being so ‘technologically advanced’ and ‘sophisticated’ and ‘prosperous’ so as to drive such modern state-of-the-art vehicles…unlike their grandparents who had to drive those smelly old brutish ICE cars!

    • I know right? Thats what i see happening too. Young people who never saw an ice car living in a stack and pack and loving their ev that allows them to briefly exit their 15 minute zone and drive to the mini mall in the next town over (you’ll never believe it – those guys have a Habit burger there! And the impossible meat tastes great).
      So what will these kids and young adults do all day on their 15 minute reservations? Wash their clothes in washing machines with 5 hour wash cycles, play games on their x boxes and take virtual reality staycations while snacking on bug treats?

  15. Why would Ford bother selling practical vehicles to the stupid proles when they can celebrate gay pride instead? Priorities, ya know. C’mon, man… drink your Bud Light, drive your useless $80k electric truck, and STFU:

    https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/feu/en/news/2022/06/21/ford_s-very-gay-raptor-set-to-redefine-tough-at-goodwood.html

    https://fordpride.org/

    https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/ford/2022/06/04/ford-pride-bronco-wildtrak/7502415001/

    • I am showing my age here, but when I look at these trucks I just think, Rainbow Brite and the Care Bears would love these. Maybe if Ford put Cheer Bear and Lala Orange as their spokespeople they may have a lot more takers.

      • Well, with “furries” part of our modern era, probably will be here soon!

        Friends granddaughter has a school mate, girl, that IDs as a “Fox”.
        No, not Doors style ‘20th Century Fox’ but a “furry” complete with ears and a tail. School accommodates this nonsense as well. Friends are now moving and the grandkids will be in private school from here on.

        • Hi Sparkey,

          I just looked up the “Furries” that you were referencing. Hubby and I were watching a video recently from JoeyBToonz and there was a “Furry” convention somewhere (Vegas?) and it was grown adults dressed as foxes parading around the hotel. I don’t know who is crazier the furries or the drag queens. All I know is mental illness is a lot prevalent then I ever thought. My daughter wanted to be a cat when she was four years old. I told her cats were not allowed to have ice cream or donuts, but she could eat all of the tuna fish and Fancy Feast she wanted. Her life as a cat lasted a total of five minutes.

          • Hi RG,

            This – ” I told her cats were not allowed to have ice cream or donuts, but she could eat all of the tuna fish and Fancy Feast she wanted.” Was just what I needed this morning. I thank you for it!

            • Hi Eric,

              Glad I could help! 🙂

              We run a monarchy in my house. There is one king and one queen and neither one of them is younger than 40.

              We don’t put up with foolish behavior, but rather than saying “No, don’t be stupid” we let the kids come to their own conclusions on the choices that they made. Phases never seemed to last very long.

              • Hats off to you for smart parenting! We had few friends with kids that I could tolerate for family dinners much less vacations together.
                Thankfully my best friend from school was one, my wife’s best friend was not. Her kids were a prime example of why some animals eat their young.

  16. First of all no one reads the owner’s manual – they only refer to it when something not working. The fine details about frying the battery early is not important to the fools that buy these contraptions. I did not see all those fried to a crisp Tesla owners deterring any sales.

    Second of all, the fools rushing to buy EV’s have way to much money, the nouveau rich who landed a big trust funded account or owned a home that when up 10x by inflation. Seems to me, there is a whole lot of wealthy people without much sense.

    I read an article that Facebook paid an employee $190,000 a year to do nothing. Gee, pay me that kind of money and I can by an all electric EV and when it fails I’ll just leave it along the road and go buy something else.

    Fortune: Meta ‘hoarded us like Pokemon cards’: Former staffer reveals she had to ‘fight for work’ at company

    • When I was a kid we’d go to Pittsburgh. I used to wonder what people did in the monstrous US Steel building. The blast furnaces weren’t anywhere near there, so I knew it wasn’t make steel.

      I have no idea what goes on at the FAANGS. I guess Apple and Google at least have to maintain an opperating system and wrangle the hardware contractors, but how bad is your web site that you need thousands of people to maintain it? Elon fired huge swaths of employees at Twitter, and I don’t believe anyone has seen the fail whale since then (I’m guessing that’s the case, because if there were technical issues the mainstream media types would never shut up about it), so apparently the site is still running. How many people does it take to maintain a data center? Especially if it is exclusively for your company? Once your site is built it should basically run on autopilot with occational patches for bug fixes and to freshen up the look.

    • I read the owner’s manual in my vehicles when I buy them. You can learn a lot about your vehicle that way. I was laughed at and made fun of by a co-worker when I mentioned this. Only to be laughed at herself, when she had no idea there was something simple in her own, Dodge Charger. I cannot help but think that car makers hide crap in the vehicles they make, mention in the owner’s manual, knowing that very few bother to read it until (as mentioned above) something goes wrong.

    • “Seems to me, there is a whole lot of wealthy people without much sense.”
      Which makes one wonder exactly HOW they got wealthy. Probably the same way EVs came to be. Subsidies and tax breaks.

  17. A Ford F-150 EV is the Edsel for Ford in 2023. Ford needs to pay attention, going to be a big help for them.

    You gotta go all hybrid, a standard original four-cylinder motor as a power plant to charge a battery to drive electric motors to help make it go will be a no-brainer for Ford.

    Since dot gov has convinced Ford they have no brains, only dot gov does, all you can expect is eternal ignorance, not much more.

    Ford has more expertise than all of the dot gov brainless fools put together.

    Going to have to clean the oil bath, discard the old oil and add new oil to the bath inside the carburetor on the Ford tractor. There is no air filter on the thing.

    • Raider Girl,

      As I’ve stated before, all of this nonsense has only strengthened my resolve to make synthetic gasoline and diesel from biomass. My target price per gallon will be $2. I believe it can be done. Even eventually making use of all of that potential labor in Central and South America where they have continual warmth, rain and sunshine, depending on the area.

      It can be done, oil and car companies be damned!

      Also, we’re going to be working on planting copious sunflowers, and extracting the oil from the seeds in order to power by diesel backhoe. All very exciting!

      • I am rooting for you, BaDnOn. I would happily volunteer to live next to a farm of sunflowers vs a farm of solar panels.

    • Hi RG,
      I love how ExxonMobil is fattening my IRA; I bought a bunch of shares about a year ago when oil futures went negative and it’s more that doubled since then. My only regret is not buying more.

      • I love to hear that, Mike. I hope you make a ton of money on that bet. 🙂 I don’t see Exxon closing up shop anytime soon.

  19. Just as the government “Fast tracked” (“Warp Speeded”) COVID jabs, and endlessly peddled REAL MISINFORMATION about them, such as the worn out narrative “Safe and Effective!”, it increasingly appears they’re doing the same thing with electric vehicles: Fast tracking EVs, peddling narratives about them, and even trying to MANDATE them like the Biden Thing tried to do with the COVID jabs. What misinformation, er, narratives will they concoct for EVs in addition to the existing one that essentially says “EVs will save the planet from climate change!”?

  22. Ages ago, Ralph Nader ostensibly said that owners were too stupid to check the tire pressues on its rear engined, swing axle suspensioned Corvair and that the car had to meet minimum safety standards regardless of tire pressure. This might be unrelelated, but it rhymes.

    Now, automakers are burying charging information in the manual and expecting owners to make heads or tales of the information. Of course, people are no smarter than they were in 1965, so here we are.

    Of course, that Asshole Nader is nowhere to be found except gabbling on his radio show somewhere on Youtube.

    • I don’t think that Nissan actually advises against fast chargers, but I haven’t read the user’s manual yet, although my Leaf is now 7 years old. Nonetheless, I have heard that using fast charges may reduce the lifetime of the battery. Some people say that it is actually high temperatures that are killing the batteries.

  23. ‘not to leave the vehicle plugged in once the high voltage battery has finished charging’ — Nissan Leaf owner’s manual

    What? Why is there not a battery tender type circuit, that does the unplugging automatically for you?

    It’s the EeeVee equivalent of pre-1912 hand-cranked IC engines: guaranteed inconvenience.

    If I’m buying a damned cell phone on wheels, I at least expect a cell phone level of smartness … if not a giant contactless charging pad on the garage floor.

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