GM is pulling back on EVs

[K4fxd]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/rise-evs-puts-tire-makers-213911993.html

Next up, ban tires.

Well looks like the cost of tires are going up. EV's cause tires to pollute more so gotta add more regulations........

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[martinjlm]

Hello; Interesting read. the 1:6:90 rule really caught my attention. I do hope @martinjim will comment on this.…

I’ve seen that a few times and they’re not wrong, but they don’t really tell the whole story. That piece is meant to arm the dealers with info to sell hybrid vehicles in an electric vehicle world. It doesn’t really detail why they are pushing back on BEV, while at the same time developing new BEVs. The pro-EV side also doesn’t tell the whole truth, so Toyota’s focus on only part of the issue is not anything new and is to be expected. Here are the reasons we (S&P Global Mobility forecasters) think Toyota is slow to go to BEV.

1. They absolutely o-w-n the hybrid market. Why walk away from that? Because they’ve been producing hybrids at high volume for so long, their systems are better and at lower cost. Of course you’d want to protect that.
2. As a company, Toyota has a deep dislike for anything with a plug. When you examine their home market in Japan it’s not hard to see why. Japan’s residential stock is very compressed and congested. Most people live above ground level. High rises are common. Access to a location to plug in a vehicle overnight is scarce. So hybrids that do not need to plug in are their best answers. They have only developed plug-in hybrids for Europe and North America because regulations and incentives are increasingly focused on vehicles with plugs. First PHEVs, now BEVs. When Prius first came on market, Californians bought them like lotto tickets because they qualified for HOV lane stickers. The stickers quickly became the automotive equivalent of gold. But when the HOV incentive was updated to only include PHEVs and BEVs Toyota had to pivot and introduce the Prius Prime. The first Prius Prime had an anemic EV Range. Engineered to hit the minimum battery size for the regulation and no more. Then the regulation was rewritten again to increase the minimum battery size to qualify for HOV and Toyota went full effort on the PHEV system and its now very good.
3. Toyota’s long game is hydrogen Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles. This makes sense in Japan. No plug needed. Infrastructure remains the biggest obstacle to hydrogen FCEV. But since Japan is an island and there’s only so far you can go, they can build up enough infrastructure with just a few hydrogen reformation facilities and support the entire country / island. When GM was more serious about FCEV passenger cars we were considering setting up test fleets in Hawaii. Because…island. FCEV makes a lot less sense in land masses the size of China or Europe or North America.

The uphill battle Toyota is fighting and most likely will not win, is that even the best PHEVs are not Zero Emissions. There’s only two ways to have Zero Emissions Vehicles (ZEV) and that’s Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV) and Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (FCEV).

In my opinion Toyota is not totally in a bad position, as long as they place BEVs in their portfolio in the right product lines. And it looks like they may be on their way to doing that. It is likely that by about 2035-40 they will make Lexus an all BEV brand. They are starting with the Lexus RZ, basically a more luxurious all electric upgrade on the Lexus RX. They do already have the Toyota bZ4x in the market, so RZ will be their second modern BEV, but it’s the idea of making Lexus an all BEV brand that makes RZ the more important vehicle.

 

[Burkey]

I do remember Greg for sure, maybe you too, gleefully applauding my Sister being fired. She is a MD, had caught Covid, recovered and then refused to get the experimental vaccine. Her rational was she had the covid, recovered and had immunity at least as good as the jab.

Two things.
1. I was never “gleeful” that people lost their jobs. It was a necessary consequence.
2. How exactly did your sister determine that the immunity she gained ,from infection was “at least as good as the jab”? What test did she perform to demonstrate this? See, we can all believe whatever we want, but in order to convince others, you need evidence. In this instance it would require evidence of prior infection (firstly) followed by a test that could determine the level of immunity she received.

She was called an idiot a quack and other snide names on this forum. One even said she was killing her patients.

“Possibly” killing her patients, yes. Healthcare providers are meant to improve your wellbeing, not diminish it. As much as she might have rights, her patients have rights too. They have the right to be seen by someone who has been vaccinated against whatever virus is circulating at a pandemic level, at a MINIMUM.
If you think the rights of the provider trump the rights of the receiver, you live in a different world than I do.
What exactly was her strategy? Catch covid multiple times during the pandemic? How many patients would she infect whilst doing that? You’ve already told us she was anti mask if I recall correctly. So what protocols did she have in place to protect her patients from her “beliefs”?

 

[sk47]

I toured the local Marathon Oil refinery in southwest Detroit in the early 2000s. We were working on expanding GM’s diesel offerings. This was when Europe was going hog wild for diesel and American OEMs were trying to get on the band wagon. They described for us their refinery process and stated that every refinery has their own “formula” dictated by which products they wanted to have the most yield. This facility was biased towards gasoline. You are correct in that it is pretty much a distilling process. At least that’s how they described it to us, but how much gets distilled at the different weights is adjustable. It’s not easy to adjust it, but it can be adjusted.

They indicated that they could switch the process to bias more towards diesel, but that those types of shifts in “formula” were time consuming and costly and that switching back would be just as time consuming and costly, so you want to be sure when you switch.

Hello; What you describe has been known fora long time. the process can be tailored to make either a bit more gasoline or a bit more diesel for a barrel of crude. Best I can recall the percentage of difference is not huge but is significant enough to be worth the effort. Another thig I think is that they cannot go all gas nor all diesel.
At least part of the big picture if the anti-fossil fuel agenda is successful is how we get the necessary things such as plastics for food wraps -medical equipment and road paving tars without also making the flammable fuels. The towers now bleed off products at different levels pretty much by height. The light gasses come off the top. The liquids further down. The thick liquids (tars) at the lower levels. (I forget just now how they create the octane rings. I think they are called octane rings, but may be called pentane rings)(ignore that last bit)

It would be both an irony and a tragedy if no practical method of reforming the gaseous and liquid fuels into something non-volatile can be found. We would lose not only the fuels but also the many thousands of other useful made from crude. We might wind up with not only an inadequate "green" energy & transportation system, but also have to do without the many useful crude oil derived products.
Let me make the point clearer if the millions of barrels of distilled fuels from crude oil cannot be transformed into something more inert, hopefully useful, then crude likely will have to not be used at all. So, no road tars, no plastics, no clothes or many thousands of other crude derived products.

 

[martinjlm]

Hello; What you describe has been known fora long time. the process can be tailored to make either a bit more gasoline or a bit more diesel for a barrel of crude. Best I can recall the percentage of difference is not huge but is significant enough to be worth the effort. Another thig I think is that they cannot go all gas nor all diesel.

That is true. I was simply answering K4fxd’s question. As far as the splits between diesel and gas you are correct that none of the processes deliver 0% diesel or 0% gasoline, but you’re not correct with respect to how big the differences can be. I don’t recall the numbers from over 20 years ago, but the Marathon facility in Detroit produces far more gasoline than diesel. Grade of crude that’s used as an input material will also impact how much of either you can expect to yield.

At least part of the big picture if the anti-fossil fuel agenda is successful is how we get the necessary things such as plastics for food wraps -medical equipment and road paving tars without also making the flammable fuels. The towers now bleed off products at different levels pretty much by height. The light gasses come off the top. The liquids further down. The thick liquids (tars) at the lower levels. (I forget just now how they create the octane rings. I think they are called octane rings, but may be called pentane rings)(ignore that last bit)

It would be both an irony and a tragedy if no practical method of reforming the gaseous and liquid fuels into something non-volatile can be found. We would lose not only the fuels but also the many thousands of other useful made from crude. We might wind up with not only an inadequate "green" energy & transportation system, but also have to do without the many useful crude oil derived products.
Let me make the point clearer if the millions of barrels of distilled fuels from crude oil cannot be transformed into something more inert, hopefully useful, then crude likely will have to not be used at all. So, no road tars, no plastics, no clothes or many thousands of other crude derived products.

I don’t see a world where petroleum derived products (plastics for consumer goods, tar, jet fuel, marine fuel, etc) are eliminated. Just no evidence of any rational or organized efforts to move in that direction.

Octane is the measure of carbon bonding efficiency.

 

[sk47]

Two things.
1. I was never “gleeful” that people lost their jobs. It was a necessary consequence.
2. How exactly did your sister determine that the immunity she gained ,from infection was “at least as good as the jab”? What test did she perform to demonstrate this? See, we can all believe whatever we want, but in order to convince others, you need evidence. In this instance it would require evidence of prior infection (firstly) followed by a test that could determine the level of immunity she received.


“Possibly” killing her patients, yes. Healthcare providers are meant to improve your wellbeing, not diminish it. As much as she might have rights, her patients have rights too. They have the right to be seen by someone who has been vaccinated against whatever virus is circulating at a pandemic level, at a MINIMUM.
If you think the rights of the provider trump the rights of the receiver, you live in a different world than I do.
What exactly was her strategy? Catch covid multiple times during the pandemic? How many patients would she infect whilst doing that? You’ve already told us she was anti mask if I recall correctly. So what protocols did she have in place to protect her patients from her “beliefs”?

Hello; You are an "I am always right" sort. You go off the deep end with this effort to justify past errors. I will concede you can call the level of "glee" you had when attacking his sister, but you were right in there calling for her and others to lose their jobs. You were insistent at the very least.

Hello; You and others got it backward with the criticism of natural immunity. Natural immunity has been part of the human response to viral infections for hundreds of thousands of years. Long before basic medicine and long before modern medicine. The newest type of experimental mRNA vaccines are the new kid on the block. In the year or so before the experimental vaccines got produced millions of folks caught covid, then recovered naturally. Along with that recovery they gained a natural immunity.
Some, including me, contended the naturally immune did not need the new vaccine on top and such has been proven to be correct. This contention was based on long understood facts, not blindly accepting the word of "experts" with a stake in the game.

Hello; His sister was not putting patients at risk. During that year plus before the near useless vaccines came around she and other health care workers also caught the virus. Those who recovered went back to take care of the ill and were no longer any danger to patients from at least one strain of the virus. As we know now it was the vaccines which did not protect others. Too many with all the shots caught the virus.

It would be good if K4fxd gave you the verbal beatdown you truly deserve. Thing is you or one or the other sniveling life forms are likely to report him.

 

[sk47]

Octane is the measure of carbon bonding efficiency.

Aromatics (content) | McKinsey Energy Insights

Hello; I was both wrong and partially correct at the same time. Benzene rings is the term I was trying to recall. Among the family of benzene rings is one called octane.

I risk again being wrong from memory. I think early gasoline formulas did not have good anti-detonation properties. At some point I think a way to induce octane rings to form was found. Allowed for more compression I think. Best to check up on this if it makes any matter to you.

 

[K4fxd]

2. How exactly did your sister determine that the immunity she gained ,from infection was “at least as good as the jab”?

Well let's say 11 or 12 years of medical school including residency along with years of practice, I think that qualifies her as an expert.

 

[K4fxd]

It would be good if K4fxd gave you the verbal beatdown you truly deserve.

It wouldn't do any good. Even after he has been proven wrong he doubles down on the "misinformation" he spews.

 

[Mitch03]

Two things.
1. I was never “gleeful” that people lost their jobs. It was a necessary consequence.
2. How exactly did your sister determine that the immunity she gained ,from infection was “at least as good as the jab”? What test did she perform to demonstrate this? See, we can all believe whatever we want, but in order to convince others, you need evidence. In this instance it would require evidence of prior infection (firstly) followed by a test that could determine the level of immunity she received.


“Possibly” killing her patients, yes. Healthcare providers are meant to improve your wellbeing, not diminish it. As much as she might have rights, her patients have rights too. They have the right to be seen by someone who has been vaccinated against whatever virus is circulating at a pandemic level, at a MINIMUM.
If you think the rights of the provider trump the rights of the receiver, you live in a different world than I do.
What exactly was her strategy? Catch covid multiple times during the pandemic? How many patients would she infect whilst doing that? You’ve already told us she was anti mask if I recall correctly. So what protocols did she have in place to protect her patients from her “beliefs”?

You are a demented individual. I’m so glad you’re not from the US. We wouldn’t tolerate your beliefs over here.

 

[martinjlm]

Changing course a little bit…

I’ve often said that finding a solution for Johnny on the 5th floor is one of the obstacles to widespread EV adoption. I’ve seen a number of approaches to solving the problem. I just ran across this one yesterday. Kinda like this idea.

Curb stone chargers

 

[K4fxd]

I just ran across this one yesterday. Kinda like this idea.

That would work, but it would cost many trillions of dollars. We don't have the money. That is a solution for new community construction, it wouldn't add much if they are already installing new roads and power lines. Just bury the power lines and add hookups for the charger plugs. One problem I do see is mains on the pole are much higher in voltage than what comes into ones house. so would need step down transformers every block or so.

I'd like to see an engineer drawing of this.

 

[sk47]

Changing course a little bit…

I’ve often said that finding a solution for Johnny on the 5th floor is one of the obstacles to widespread EV adoption. I’ve seen a number of approaches to solving the problem. I just ran across this one yesterday. Kinda like this idea.

Curb stone chargers

Hello; I admit it looks good in the picture. As K4fxd points out there are lots of things hidden from view. He mentioned the high voltages needing to be stepped down. Even stepped down it is my understanding the level 2 chargers are at around 240 volts and lots of amps. Need to push lots of energy in order to charge quicker. I would hope risks and safety can be figured out.

I also wonder how the credit card payment can be dealt with.

But it looks good.

 

[key01]

Changing course a little bit…

I’ve often said that finding a solution for Johnny on the 5th floor is one of the obstacles to widespread EV adoption. I’ve seen a number of approaches to solving the problem. I just ran across this one yesterday. Kinda like this idea.

Curb stone chargers

I guess in non snow belt this may work. In the North it would need to be a pedestal.

 

[Burkey]

You were insistent at the very least.

I’d describe my position as adamant, but we’re splitting hairs. I also think that the government is right to demand a range of vaccinations for those working in aged care. I’m not “gleeful” when someone is refused a job on the basis that they refuse to get those vaccinations. Reality is reality.

Hello; You and others got it backward with the criticism of natural immunity. Natural immunity has been part of the human response to viral infections for hundreds of thousands of years. Long before basic medicine and long before modern medicine.

Yes, and for hundreds of thousands of years, lots and lots of people died before they could reach immunity. Fantastic. We created vaccinations in an effort to reduce the suffering.

In the year or so before the experimental vaccines got produced millions of folks caught covid, then recovered naturally.

You accuse others of being wordsmiths and then you deliver this….
Yes, millions got the virus and recovered. About 1 million US citizens died in the process.

Along with that recovery they gained a natural immunity.
Some, including me, contended the naturally immune did not need the new vaccine on top and such has been proven to be correct.

Ok, so at what point does their natural immunity wane? How do they go about boosting that immunity? Do they need to go and get reinfected? How does a government go about making sure that these people have the required level of immunity? These are questions that need answering or I’m not continuing this conversation.
It’s easy to see the holes in your ideas if you actually think about the practical implications.

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