Insurance Quotes

[Fly Boomer]

3 hours ago, Hank said:

Had to go.into Setting and disallow Chrome from accessing the camera. Now it works like it's supposed to.

This was a typical recent fillup, arriving at or enroute to the station.

Looks like you must have a 15 or 16 gallon tank, and good mileage.  In the spring, summer, and fall, I can get a little better mileage, but my tank is only 10 or 11 gallons.  That's a killer range.

[Fly Boomer]

1 hour ago, Will.iam said:

update I found the original YouTube link and it’s not hundreds but thousands of cars!

 

 

 

http://gofile.me/6zWE9/WKwmAcorR

i tried to share the link from my telegram chat but you can only share the link with other telegram users. I downloaded the video to upload it here only to find out you can not upload the video. So I put it on my synology server and shared the link above. I don’t have a web server for it so it throws up a warning it’s not a trusted site. But I don’t want to pay for a certificate key so I just accept the warning.  It’s a video about how wasteful the Chinese government has been in producing hundreds of electric cars just to say they make more cars than Tesla but then they just parked them out in a field!!! They are not selling them to anyone. Now they just sit and rot and a new worry to what all those lithium ion batteries will do to the land and environment when they start leaking and corroding away. It’s bad enough we are destroying our environment with digging for these rare earth metals but then to not even use them and let them waste away is doing double the damage. 

China's biggest problem is people.  Building those cars also helps keep people employed.

[Fly Boomer]

53 minutes ago, Will.iam said:

Yes whether you love or hate EV’s I think everyone can agree what china is doing hurts everyone as they are using what precious resources we have and then not even allowing anyone to buy the product! At least sell those cars or even give them away so that some one can at least benefit from the resources china took. There has to be a way to sell those cars and not just let them rot. 

Do they have enough electrical infrastructure to support them?  Tesla saw this coming and started building superchargers just before they started building the Model S in 2012.  Now they have 6,000 superchargers with over 50,000 connectors.

[A64Pilot]

3 hours ago, Schllc said:

This was the point I brought up some time ago about the “ecological improvements”

Are the really improvements?  I mean when you factor in the energy to produce, disposal,  the life span, etc.  
These elements have to factor in to the equation.  I have a feeling some of them are causing more harm than good.  Politicians are making these decisions based on what they “feel” and what lobbyists tell them,  or statistical analysis of the entire impact.  

When someone does a compressive study on the impact in totality I will listen, until then I am very suspect.  

 

That’s a red herring and always has been.

Such a “report” was done in 07 proving how bad a Prius was for the environment the Dust to Dust report, very long and seemed to be correct, got all the rave reports from the people that for some reason hated the Prius, it was of course pure BS

Found it, it was 458 pages a huge amount of work 

https://www.cnwmr.com/nss-folder/automotiveenergy/DUST PDF VERSION.pdf

Anyway those horrible batteries made from slave labor or whatever will be recycled, why? simply because they can be and when there are enough of them to make money they will be.

Read this written by Elon Musk written my God has it been 18 years ago? Of course you can believe he’s stupid and doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he’s been working the EV “thing” for about 20 years now.

https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-just-between-you-and-me

 

[Schllc]

A red herring?  I don’t think so, but that’s your opinion and this is mine. 

To be clear, it’s obvious that EV’s are here to stay, and while I’m not going to buy one, I’m definitely not a hater. I just think they should win their day on merit,  not subsidies, but that’s another argument. 
I do not believe the net impact is positive, yet…

I can tell you conclusively that the net impact in appliances is negative. Saving a gallon of water per load to put triple the amount into the landfill isn’t helping anyone. 
except the appliance companies and the lobbyists…

The fact is that we on this board don’t have enough information to make a declarative statement about the efficacy of any of these measures.  But no one hides from history forever and either way, the facts will be indisputable soon enough.

 

[A64Pilot]

1 hour ago, Schllc said:

A red herring?  I don’t think so, but that’s your opinion and this is mine. 

To be clear, it’s obvious that EV’s are here to stay, and while I’m not going to buy one, I’m definitely not a hater. I just think they should win their day on merit,  not subsidies, but that’s another argument. 
I do not believe the net impact is positive, yet…

I have agreed with this from the beginning as I have said ad nauseum, I got no subsidies and get none now

I can tell you conclusively that the net impact in appliances is negative. Saving a gallon of water per load to put triple the amount into the landfill isn’t helping anyone. 
except the appliance companies and the lobbyists…

Who knows But I don’t know what that has to do with EV’s

The fact is that we on this board don’t have enough information to make a declarative statement about the efficacy of any of these measures.  But no one hides from history forever and either way, the facts will be indisputable soon enough.

I’d like to say your correct, but call me a conspiracy theorist, but I’m not so sure we will be told

 

I tired something new, hope you don’t mind me altering your post, but other than what’s in red I didn’t change any of it.

It seems however and I do understand this, but your “beef” doesn’t seem to be against electric vehicles but the Government, for that I don’t have an answer for you, but I concur, but think it goes deeper in truth than most of us know about. As a partial answer I give you this picture and link, it’s crude oil production in the US going back for years, you can see the immediate effect of the “war on oil”, but you can also see it was almost immediately stopped, I think because it was wrecking the economy, I leave it up to you to decide why the cease fire was done, but it does make me wonder why we haven’t heard a peek out of the climate change activist why it is that? we are right now producing more domestic oil than at any time in our history? That’s the conspiracy theorist in me I guess. But why aren’t they protesting like mad?

US government link so hopefully a valid one https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRFPUS2&f=M

 

[Schllc]

11 minutes ago, A64Pilot said:

It seems however and I do understand this, but your “beef” doesn’t seem to be against electric vehicles but the Government

I think interfering with the market by the least qualified people, who suffer no consequences for their decisions is my grievance. 
The appliance regulations have everything to do with EV’s because the same premise is being used to force them on us, when they don’t really know if they are truly better. 
Economics is a social science, and evaluation of implementing measures must be part of these processes, yet it is not, t least not in a meaningful way. 
If EV’s were as awesome as we are being told, they wouldn’t need to subsidize.

The cult  of psuedo science aka green movement is intent on convincing everyone that humans are the problem, but we are all that matters, and the earth will be here long after we are gone, completely indifferent to our existence, regardless of what we do…

[MikeOH]

1 minute ago, Schllc said:

I think interfering with the market by the least qualified people, who suffer no consequences for their decisions is my grievance. 

If EV’s were as awesome as we are being told, they wouldn’t need to subsidize.

Those two sentences nail it. And, as you say, not just EVs.  (I hate our 'green' washing machine...doesn't clean worth a damn and sounds like it's tearing itself apart doing it!)

[PT20J]

11 hours ago, A64Pilot said:

I’ll find out this year soon I think, don’t remember when my renewal is but Feb maybe?

Even if the market stabilizes we still have some inflation with us. Never have understood why even a low rate is considered normal

Like almost everything in economics, there is debate about this. The Fed holds with the economic view that because something like 70% of our economy depends on consumer spending (much of which is discretionary), some modest inflation rate fuels the economy by incentivizing people to buy now rather than wait which helps keep businesses profitable and hiring.

[A64Pilot]

Well got my insurance quote yesterday and while I don’t remember exactly what it was last year, this year seems to have been about the same, possibly a little less.

On another front the news is reporting in Chicago Tesla “graveyards” at Supercharger stations.

Who knows, but I suspect it’s not very many and it’s people that wouldn’t read the instructions so to speak, or surely every year there would be “graveyards”?  

[GeeBee]

https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/chicago-area-tesla-charging-stations-lined-with-dead-cars-in-freezing-cold-a-bunch-of-dead-robots-out-here

[Schllc]

By core conditioning in cold temperatures I assume they mean preheating  the battery?  
Don’t the cars have this feature for this exact situation? Or is it the owners ran the battery so low that it didn’t have the energy left to heat them?  
I would think as smart as the car is, it would have a feature to protect that last amount of juice no?

Regardless of user error or not, the optics of this are not good. 

[Pinecone]

16 hours ago, Fly Boomer said:

China's biggest problem is people.  Building those cars also helps keep people employed.

I think that is a bit part of things there.  Keep people employed versus handing them money.  Like another country does.

[Pinecone]

7 minutes ago, Schllc said:

I would think as smart as the car is, it would have a feature to protect that last amount of juice no?

Well, then you run into the issue of is it better to be at a charging station with no power left or a mile, or more, short of reaching the charging station.

I would think that the car would be able to use the exterior power to heat up the battery to allow it to charge.  Might take a while, but it would at least get it charged.

 

[A64Pilot]

On 1/14/2024 at 9:54 PM, Hank said:

If EVs were such a great bargain, the car rental companies would load up on them and let many of their service people go.

You know I never understood how before the pandemic I could rent an economy car for $30 a day, but I did it frequently, so I started researching that being Retired and having the time to do so.

What I found out was that due to the vast numbers of cars that they bought they get screaming deals that you and I could only dream of, so good are these deals that if they sell the cars when they get one year old or so that they can get what they paid back or even a slight profit depending on how much that vehicle depreciated, Jeeps for instance seem to hold their value.

For a couple of reasons reselling an EV you take a greater hit than an ICE car, largely because of the big tax rebates, your 40K car wasn’t really a 40K car it was a 32.5K car and depreciates from 32, not 40K. Then the used buyer doesn’t get the big rebate so they are incentivized to buy new not used. I think these rebates actually hurt buyers in the long run not help them.

Maybe better to lease? You can lease a model 3 right now for $400 a month, my payment is almost twice that and it’s a 1.9% loan, of course there is upfront money. I have never leased myself so I really don’t know.

I started this EV car experiment with the idea of buying a used Nissan Leaf because before the pandemic you couldn’t give one away, they went cheap like $5000 for one just a few years old with the idea of if the experiment was a bust at least I didn’t lose much, but for some reason used car prices went through the roof even for the Leaf, so I rolled the dice and bought the cheapest Tesla and so far have been pleased. But won’t really know for at least five more years because I think a car ought to last more than ten years and think I’ll have a better idea then if it will than I do now, because I don’t think anyone knows truly. The batteries are changing and when they change I don’t know if the old data is valid or not.

Used Leaf’s were cheap due to the rebates, they had terrible range, weren’t performance cars and frankly were cheap cars to begin with and the batteries as they had no active cooling weren’t lasting well but it would have told me if an EV was viable or just Green marketing nonsense.

 

[A64Pilot]

51 minutes ago, Schllc said:

By core conditioning in cold temperatures I assume they mean preheating  the battery?  
Don’t the cars have this feature for this exact situation? Or is it the owners ran the battery so low that it didn’t have the energy left to heat them?  
I would think as smart as the car is, it would have a feature to protect that last amount of juice no?

Regardless of user error or not, the optics of this are not good. 

All the above is correct

plus the car will use or lose if you will approximately 1% of charge even on a warm day if you don’t turn off the security feature. This has caught people who didn’t read the manual and parked at the airport with say a very low charge and left for vacation.

Now the car turns off the security feature when it hits 20% SOC. But no battery that I know of doesn’t lose capacity in stupid cold. People that won’t drive their gas car with the low fuel light on will drive a Tesla down to almost zero for some reason. I think it’s the digital thing, people will run a battery down less than 10% and not worry but would never run the gas tank down to 1/10, can you even see 1/10?

Ever owned a Diesel? An EV is similar to a Diesel in cold Wx, it’s best for both to be plugged in a couple of hours before you drive if it’s stupid cold and a 110V plug is enough, but so long as you don’t park the car with a stupid low as in less than 10% battery you will be OK. In the 80’s in Central Tx it got stupid cold one year and I had to put a little gasoline in my Diesel Golf’s tank to keep it from gelling. If I didn’t then I would have been stuck on the side of the road and some were of course, because they didn’t read the manual

People just need to read the manual there is a learning curve just like there is for a Diesel, these things aren’t new.

https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_us/GUID-F907200E-A619-4A95-A0CF-94E0D03BEBEF.html#:~:text=In the mobile app%2C navigate to Climate > Defrost Car to,high voltage Battery as needed.&text=Tesla recommends activating climate settings,(see Operating Climate Controls).

[GeeBee]

34 minutes ago, A64Pilot said:

For a couple of reasons reselling an EV you take a greater hit than an ICE car, largely because of the big tax rebates, your 40K car wasn’t really a 40K car it was a 32.5K car and depreciates from 32, not 40K. Then the used buyer doesn’t get the big rebate so they are incentivized to buy new not used. I think these rebates actually hurt buyers in the long run not help them.

The prices of used EV's are falling so fast...how fast? I was at a Porsche dealership in Maryland end of December looking at a Panamera. The salesman showed me a memo from his owners, AutoNation. It said that due to rapidly declining EV prices any trade-in was to be discounted 50% off of Blue Book trade in value. The sales man went on to tell me they had 4 deals fall through on ordered Porsches because the buyer's trade in, mostly Teslas had declined so much they could not close the deal. The Hertz sell off of their fleet will make the problem worse.

[jetdriven]

Interesting thing about the Hertz selloff, those cars are market price.  They are 2021 and 2022 Model 3's but they are the base RWD trim, some are the long range variant, but 25-28K is market price for one of those with 90K miles on it.  I think Uber drivers were renting them by the week or something.

[Hank]

26 minutes ago, A64Pilot said:

People that won’t drive their gas car with the low fuel light on will drive a Tesla down to almost zero for some reason. I think it’s the digital thing, people will run a battery down less than 10% and not worry but would never run the gas tank down to 1/10, can you even see 1/10?

Ever owned a Diesel? An EV is similar to a Diesel in cold Wx, it’s best for both to be plugged in a couple of hours before you drive if it’s stupid cold and a 110V plug is enough, there is a learning curve just like there is for a Diesel, these things aren’t new.

I routinely drive my Altima down to less than 50 miles Distance to Empty, sometimes near 20 miles. Been doing this for 115,000 miles, no problems. That's less than one gallon remaining (two quarts plus a couple ounces) in the tank, then I refill with about 16 gallons. You do the math on the percentage, but it's small.

I won't have a Diesel because (in random order):

• Diesel fuel stinks
• Diesel won't evaporate away like gas, you have to wash it off of your hands and clothes.
• Most diesels are noisy
• All diesels act up worse in cold weather
• Diesel fuel costs more
• What's with the other tank that must be filled up periodically? Exhaust treatment?
• Do people idle Diesel cars / pickups for hours on end like the big trucks do? Never understood that. 

Similarly, what drives me away from electric cars (again, no particular order):

• Range on a full charge is poor
• You can't use the full charge! Fast charging above 80% or running below 20% shortens battery life. So poor range is a lie, it's actually much lower.
• Cold weather performance is exceptionally poor. Batteries don't like cold.
• I'd hate to not reach my destination because I played the radio, or it got dark and I turned on the headlights.
• What do I do when the government is browning out power, says to not run AC at home and not charge electric cars? Are we all supposed to stay home? My boss wouldn't like that!
• Too many electric cars just catch fire for no apparent reason. Yes, Tesla too.
• Electric car fires are extremely difficult to put out, a handheld extinguisher won't do anything noticeable. 
• Oh, yeah, the electric cars all cost more, too. I'm price sensitive and about to retire, which will make me more so.

[A64Pilot]

Diesels aren’t nearly as attractive as they used to be, back when I had my Golf it costs about half as much to drive as a gas car, first it got nearly 50 MPG and gas cars in the 80’s didn’t get good mileage and didn’t last like they do now, but at least as important fuel was much cheaper than gas.

‘I have always had a fun car and one that’s cheap to drive 

Now due to ULSD fuel is $1 a gallon more than gas and where they used to be reliability kings due to the emission controls they aren’t anymore. I just bought a used Diesel pusher Motorhome due to a good price, but I’m thinking seriously about selling due to the emissions problems, and the fixes cost thousands not hundreds to fix. 

EGR cooler for mine is about $2K and the Diesel particulate filter is about $2K, then of course there is installation costs.

If the EGR cooler fails it could hydrolock the engine which now of course we are talking tens of thousands to replace

[LANCECASPER]

1 hour ago, Hank said:

I routinely drive my Altima down to less than 50 miles Distance to Empty, sometimes near 20 miles. Been doing this for 115,000 miles, no problems. That's less than one gallon remaining (two quarts plus a couple ounces) in the tank, then I refill with about 16 gallons. You do the math on the percentage, but it's small.

I won't have a Diesel because (in random order):

• Diesel fuel stinks
• Diesel won't evaporate away like gas, you have to wash it off of your hands and clothes.
• Most diesels are noisy
• All diesels act up worse in cold weather
• Diesel fuel costs more
• What's with the other tank that must be filled up periodically? Exhaust treatment?
• Do people idle Diesel cars / pickups for hours on end like the big trucks do? Never understood that. 

 

Personally I like Diesels. I have a 2011 E350 Bluetec Sedan (6 cylinder turbodiesel) and a 2015 M250 Bluetec SUV (AWD 4 cylinder turbodiesel). I bought both of them used and they have been amazing vehicles. (I previously owned a 2007 E320 Bluetec turbo diesel until it got broadsided by a pickup. I walked away without a scratch even though I had to crawl out of the passenger side.)

Unless you knew it was a diesel you wouldn't figure it out since there is no diesel exhaust smell - none.

I've never got any diesel on my hands or clothing so haven't had to wash it off, but whether it's gas or diesel I stop filling on the second click. I've always carried a tub of wipes in the back of my cars in case it happens but it hasn't so far. I've used them for other things though.

I can tell it's a diesel from the sound if I'm outside of the car but it is so muted most other people can't. From the inside you don't hear it at all. When I go in for the state inspection I have to remind them to list it as a diesel, because if I don't they always check gasoline, even though they want it running during the inspection. 

It was 11 degrees this morning (and 30 in my garage) where I live (yes in Texas!) and the E350 started up immediately. Since they are very popular in Germany the cold weather isn't an issue. 

Diesel does cost more than regular gas, but less than premium, but since I get 36 mpg with the sedan and 32 with the SUV and the torque is incredible, more than a V-8 gasoline, I'm ok with the cost. The range on both of my vehicles is at least 750 highway miles. (There is 11% more energy in a gallon of diesel than a gallon of gas,  137,381 btu vs. 120,328)

Since I have a lift, I do my own oil changes and every oil change I fill up the DEF tank (exhaust treatment). It's $8.88 for 2-1/2 gallons at Walmart. It's the only time I ever think of it having DEF. 

I don't idle mine any more than I do my gas Toyota Tundra pickup.

On the owners forums there are many who have driven theirs' hundreds of thousands of miles with no engine work, with at least a couple users having earned the Mercedes million mile badge. By the way, no spark plugs to change : ) 

If my Mooney had either of these two engines I would be happy. 

 

 

[Fly Boomer]

Just to (possibly) clarify one issue with Hertz and their Tesla fleet, they are selling off about 1/3 of their all-electric fleet, and replacing with ICE cars.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/11/business/hertz-tesla-selling/index.html

[A64Pilot]

The new Diesels you DON’T want to idle them anymore than you have to.

The reason is the Diesel Particulate filter, it “regenerates” that means it gets stupid hot like a catalytic convertor and burns off the soot that it filters, it can do this one of two ways, Passively when your under a significant load it gets hot enough to stay clean, and actively when the restriction gets high enough raw fuel is injected into the exhaust by a couple of different means when the raw fuel hits the DOC or Diesel Oxidation Catalyst mounted just ahead of the DPF it’s gets very hot, hot enough to hopefully burn the filter clean, but they often fail, I’ve been told your lucky to get 80,000 miles from a DPF, don’t know about the DOC

So if you can avoid active regeneration your better off and hopefully the DOC and DPE will last longer, so you want the exh hot and anyone that has Diesels knows that at idle the exh temp is very low because the engine is pumping a full amount of air as there is no throttle.

Some Diesels can do a “parked regen” which is driver initiated and you try to burn off the filter when parked. I’ve been told to make sure nothing flammable is near the exhaust when you do this, but I don’t know if mine can do a parked regen or why you would want to.

On my Motorhome this DOC and DPE are Huge honestly probably 10” around and maybe a foot long, they are part of the exhaust system of course.

I crank my Motorhome in the hangar with the door closed and he’s right, you don’t smell the thing at all, and it never smokes, the smoke is of course soot and that’s filtered out.

The magic of Common Rail makes them quiet.

Many years ago I had a series of Merc Diesels starting with the little 220 and the last one was a 300SD, Mercedes has a very long history with Diesels, after all Rudolph was German. But in WWII all their tanks etc were gas, only the Russians ran Diesels, and yet Russia gets stupid cold? Always wondered about that.

[exM20K]

1 hour ago, LANCECASPER said:

If my Mooney had either of these two engines I would be happy. 

You could have two on your plane: 

https://www.diamondaircraft.com/en/private-owners/aircraft/da62/overview/

Regrettably, that would come with an unacceptable reduction in cruise performance.  Plus they're kinda spendy, and you can't get a new one till 2025.

-dan

[GeeBee]

• Diesel fuel costs more

 

Diesel fuel has a higher heat value per unit of volume. On a BTU/dollar basis it is cheaper and why it is the fuel of choice for large vehicle fleet operations.