Battery Boom!

This happened during a cold winter some years back. A guy from work was tightening up the battery terminals on his plow truck. He dropped a wrench and it just happened to land on both the negative and positive terminals. The wrench welded itself to the battery, shorted it out and the battery exploded. The guy’s hand needed medical attention. He’s lucky he didn’t lose any fingers or eyes in the fiasco. 

So now I maintain a battery bank of a dozen batteries in my basement. Each battery is bigger and has a lot more energy than that guy’s plow truck battery. You really really really do not want to short out the whole battery bank. With that in mind all my metal battery tools have rubber handles or are wrapped in electrical tape. 

Electric cars have more electrical capacity than my modest home battery bank. Not only that they have lithium batteries which are more dangerous than lead acid. When an electric car catches fire it’s a bad time indeed. 

Regular car fires are bad enough. There’s gasoline, of course, but the rubber tires and plastic body parts burn energetically. That pales compared to an electric car. Typically it can require tens of thousands of gallons of water and many hours to extinguish one. 

I’m glad I retired from the fire service before electric cars became common. There are special extinguishers being developed but they aren’t in common usage. In the mean time I’m using a rule of thumb when it comes to electric car fires. If I can see the car that’s on fire -I’m too close and need to back off. 

-Sixbears

Tesla’s next mistake

Elon Musk and Tesla haven’t had a good run lately. The Cyber Truck fails as a truck. It’s doing pretty good as a cautionary tale. It’s embarrassing when an old school company like Ford makes a better electric truck. Heck, Rivian makes a better truck -and it’s barely keeping itself afloat as a company.

Now it looks like Tesla and Musk are putting low cost electric cars on the back burner. Instead they are concentrating on self driving cars. That, in my opinion, could be a fatal mistake. People who love cars don’t buy them to have an AI do the driving. That’s called taking a taxi. Why would anyone want to own a personal taxi that a computer drives?

Car companies, and Tesla might be one of the worse, have fallen in love with subscription services. To unlock advanced features requires monthly payments. It seems weird to buy a car yet some of the features built in require subscriptions. 

What would really be nice to have are small, cheap, and efficient electric cars. Ideally one that can be recharged with a cheap home charger. It doesn’t appear that any US companies are working in that direction. 

The closest thing we have to a cheap and efficient electric vehicle are electric bicycles. 

Personally I’m pretty disappointed with Elon. His pet projects and increasingly erratic behavior are concerning. I’m not qualified to give financial advice, but it looks like Tesla stocks, even with current losses, are overvalued. 

-Sixbears

Gas prices change plans

Oh well. The best laid plans of mice and men and all that. My lovely wife and I had planned on trailering the sailboat all over the place this summer. Thanks to the price of gas our trailering distances have been greatly shortened. The best mpg the Blazer gets is about 18 mpg. Towing the boat it’s more like 12 to 14 mpg. That adds up. I can’t imagine what it costs to fill up larger tow vehicles. 

Our niece is staying with us again. We told her she can use the Blazer as much as she wants -as long as she pays for gas. It rarely moves. 

Our Nissan Versa gets over twice the gas mileage as the Blazer. It’s a manual transmission and our niece doesn’t drive a stick. Her loss. We use the little car a lot more these days. 

Now that the weather is halfway decent I’m running a lot of errands on the scooter. That 80 – 100 mpg is hard to beat. 

I miss my diesel vehicles that ran on waste veggie oil. Unfortunately that ship has sailed. My sources for free waste veggie have dried up. My main sources were a couple of local restaurants that both closed. With the price of diesel the way it is waste veggie for biodiesel will be in demand once more. That makes it a valuable commodity so it won’t be given away. 

Electric cars have always interested me, but the numbers just don’t work for me. The price of electric cars is a big issue. Being on a fixed income with crappy credit doesn’t help either. Our fast charging options are very limited. On top of everything else electric vehicles don’t do that well in cold weather. 

Living out in the woods is great, but the only thing within easy walking distance are trees. 

-Sixbears