Featured Hertz is selling 20,000 electric vehicles to buy gasoline cars instead

I think the EU adopting a deceleration rate as the trigger for brake light activation. Regardless of how it happens.

 

My Model 3 goes by deceleration rate, or if I press the brake pedal or the vehicle is holding on stop while in drive/reverse.

 

I understand Hertz is reducing, not ending their EV car business: Hertz to sell one-third of EV fleet in shift back to gas-powered cars | Financial Post

Going forward, Hertz will keep a close eye on EV demand both at dealerships and within its own operations to decide whether the company should buy more vehicles, Scherr said. That means its agreement to buy 175,000 EVs from General Motors Co. over the next four years and another 65,000 from Polestar may take much longer to complete, he said.​

Source 2: Major car rental firm abandons electric vehicles after White House applauded company

"Going forward, the Company will continue to actively manage the total size of its EV fleet, as well as the allocation of EVs among customer segments, including leisure, corporate, government and rideshare," it continued.​

Bob Wilson

 

I see this as a potential problem too. I guess it depends how they are implimented.

If you're going down a mountain pass people should downshift or "one pedal drive" or whatever you want to call it in order to engine/regen brake. When they need to slow down even more they hit the brakes. People that ride their brakes are an irritation, not only because you know what they're doing to their car, but you can't gauge as well what they're doing because their brake lights are on all the time. If at any moment they decided to slam on the brakes and come to a stop their brake lights stay the same.

So if the deceleration brake light works by judging actual loss of distance-per-time as indicated on the spedometer, then yes, it would probably work fine. If it works by level of engine/regen braking, then no, I don't see it as a good idea. It would be like following someone who rides their brakes down mountain passes, brake lights on constantly.

 

As I recall, Europe has been doing this for years.
It does work by actually deacceleration rate, not the amount of engine braking.
It has been this way in Tesla vehicles since at least 2013 (when I went over the Rockies and got to enjoy the effortless trip down).
I believe almost all EVs operate this way. The Ioniq mentioned above would be the exception.

 

Funny/sad - how the first story you hear is Hertz as abandoning Ev's which promulgates media EV failure.
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An interesting little brain tease, as to a physicist (and to an accelerometer, which will agree), if you are holding a constant road speed going downhill, you are decelerating.

So you could go by whether an accelerometer says you're decelerating, or by whether the wheel speed readings are decreasing, and those have the same answer on level road, but different answers on a grade. (The car could even calculate the grade of the road by comparing the two.)

Seems like it might be less confusing to a following driver to base the brake lights on change of wheel speed rather than strictly on an accelerometer reading. But I haven't read those standards to see what they're really proposing.

 

Thank you, there was something making my eyelid twitch reading the prior posts...

 

It depends on how you look at it.

For those of us who don't own an EV, things like this just make it seem that our goal of owning one some day is farther out of our reach.

 

An ICE vehicle that would be going down that same hill will probably have to put the brake on to not overspeed or downshift if it's long enough to prevent the brakes from overheating, so it would normal for a EV with regenerative braking to put its brake light on if the force received is strong enough to be shown as deceleration.

 

I edited my post.

I think lights should indicate a change in deceleration, if that makes more sense. If everyone is decelrating at the same rate for the past 10 minutes, but someone suddenly decelerates even more, how are you supposed to know they did that if their brake lights are the same as before: on.

 

Yeah, I'm thinking most non-geeks probably think "decrease of road speed" when they hear "deceleration", and so would probably find a trigger condition based on decrease of road speed to make the most sense.

You could use deceleration, and just set the threshold high enough that the brake lights aren't constantly on for most reasonable downgrades. But then if you were on such a downgrade near the threshold, the lights would come on with your merest touch of the brake pedal, but only for harder braking on level ground, or really hard braking on an ascent. That would be weird.

 

Propane powers things in case of electricity outages via home generators. Also heats my home when the power is out and my heat pumps sit idle. Not my first choice since I use a bit of nuke in my electricity but, in a pinch, it is nice to have a tank full.

 

Do you have a timed, test cycle to make sure the ICE and battery are good?

My Generac system does a 15-20 minute test every Saturday, mid-morning. There is a 'green' ready and 'red' problem light I can see on the side of housing.

Bob Wilson

 

if you leave enough space in front of you, your eyes will tell you when the car ahead is slowing down.

and on more modern cars, the screen will tell you the distance is closing

 

No, I have no backup generator. I was trying to point out the uses of propane that are useful without being the primary source.

My next door neighbor heats his upper flor with a heat pump and his lower with propane.

 

i have propane fireplaces that operate on a D battery when powr is out.

and a 12kw generator that goes to the gym once a week

 

For 5+ years I drove a M3 and a Prius plugin. When the cat converter was stolen ~9 months ago I got a Chevy Bolt. So for 9 months, my household is EV only, including 3600 mile road trip last summer.

Boo, meet Mike. Mike meet Boo.
You now know someone who is EV only.

Mike

 

Not so fast.
Car campers and backpackers use propane in camp stoves. Much more friendly for the environment because you turn them on, heat water or food then turn them off. People that start log fires, with or without charcoal tend to let them burn out and for a much longer amount of time and pollute the air. If you've ever been to a place like Yosemite Valley you can see the hazy smog caused by all the wood fires.

When backpacking making any wood fire depletes the forests, is only available below the tree line and is more of a fire hazard.

Mike

 

I wonder, how many times more polluting is a medium size volcano eruption than all the campfires ever built in the past 5 millennia

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