kgwilson

When we were on holiday in Tasmania last year almost every local we met with an opinion about building a new stadium in Hobart was against it. Mostly they couldn't understand what was wrong with the existing one. It looked pretty good to me as well.

Most new ICE cars don't have a spare wheel these days. Usually it is large 4WD & SUVs that still have a spare. Also most spares if they are supplied are smaller in diameter as well as quite thin & are called space saver tyres. My EV does not come with a spare. It has a tyre pump & a can of goo. If that doesn't work, included in the 10 year warranty is a free breakdown service Australia wide. I don't know what models have poor fitting panels etc. The build quality of my MG4 is the best of any new car I've owned. So far 27,000 km and not a single rattle. Everything fits together without gaps etc. The Japanese originally raised the bar when it came to build quality but the Chinese have now surpassed them. Robots virtually build the entire car without human intervention & do it better. All I can say about reliability is that my MG4 has not had any problems at all.

Xaiomi is now the 2nd largest phone manufacturer in the world after Samsung. They produce all sorts of electronics, appliances etc and their new EV is one of the best available. So good that the President of Ford in the US drives one. I chose an Xaiomi phone to replace my old 2017 LG G6 flagship model over everything else. iPhones have become boring and look the same from the iPhone 11 up to the iPhone 16. The Xaiomi has features never seen on any iPhone with better cameras etc at 1/3 the cost (purchased direct)

Also it is a finite resource and can only be used once creating toxic by products like carbon monoxide and greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide among the many pollutants from the exhaust.

Australia is always slow to get on board with new technologies but finally we get to a point of critical mass & things take off. No-one is going to set up an EV battery recycling plant until there is enough stock to make it viable. Virtually all old EV batteries and those from car write offs after a crash are repurposed for use in houses and businesses. A typical house battery is 10-15 kWh whereas old EV batteries can be 30 to 80 kWh and cost less. They have many years left in them even when they have degraded to 80% or less of their original capacity. Already in the EU, US & China & probably many more countries lithium batteries are being recycled in recycling plants shown in the video posted by Octave. Black Mass, the name for the ground up components recycles 95% of all the lithium, cobalt, Nickel and other rare earths. So as the world electrifies much of the minerals needed to manufacture new batteries will come from recycled old ones.

My MG4 EV has a battery pack that can easily be removed for repair or replacement. MG (SAIC) introduced what it called its MG MSP (modular scalable platform) in 2022 when the MG4 was first introduced. The battery pack is just 110mm thick and sits under the cabin flat floor of the car behind the front and in front of the rear running gear. It can easily be disconnected and dropped out for repair or replacement. The batteries are both LFP & NMC lithium ranging from 50 to 80 kWh. There is little point in having a fast swap process in my opinion as like at least 85% of EV owners we charge at home via an AC slow charger and only at fast DC chargers when on a long trip. As I have said before I need a break after 400 km so am happy to have the car charge for 20-30 minutes while we have lunch or whatever. If I stop at a 350 kW supercharger the charge time is half that and it is very poor etiquette to let your car sit at a charger after the battery is full. Also most of us fully understand that the last 20% of charging takes nearly as long as the first 60% or 70%. All modern EVs have GPS & internet connectivity so you get alarms to say when the battery has reached certain charge levels. I have done 27,000km now and recently borrowed an OBD2 scanner & plugged it in to the car. It shows heaps of data but the battery health was the most interesting to me. It was still showing 100%. 95% of my charging has been done at home with my 32 Amp wall mounted EVSE & has cost virtually nothing as I get 2 hours of free power a day plus I have 8kW of solar panels on the roof.

This is just one of the many reports along with detailed studies providing evidence of how good modern EV batteries are. This is largely due to the quality of the manufacture and the BMS (battery management system). The BMS takes care of the battery as a large number of people don't have any idea how to look after them, and for those who do, saves them a job. The BMS continually monitors and adjusts battery voltage and charge rate etc far better than could be done manually. Every time I charge my battery to 60% and up to 100% the BMS runs its diagnostics and equalises the voltage of all the cells at the end of the charging session. Of course it doesn't do this when charging at a fast DC charger as there is no time available for it to occur. It performs other roles too like monitoring temperature and organising cooling or heating as required. From information gleaned from EV forums there are some owners who are obsessed with battery management but equally there are many who don't give a rats. It doesn't really matter which side of the spectrum you are on as the batteries in most cases will outlast the car they are in no matter what you do.

To be clear an inverter is used only to convert AC to DC current so is only used when charging from a granny charger (max 10amps) or an EVSE A/C power supply. Single phase is a maximum of 32 Amps (7.4kW) & 3 phase 11 kW up to a maximum of 22 kW. Fast & super chargers can deliver up to 350kW but this is DC current so is delivered direct to the battery. No inverter involved at all. The latest technology in China has chargers of more than 1 megawatt & can charge the latest batteries in under 5 minutes.

The inverter in my EV doesn't get hot & doesn't have any cooling system. It is only used when A/C charging at 32 amps. DC charging is up to 140kW. The delivery cables are liquid cooled. The battery has coolant as does the transmission. My EV is almost 2 years old & is not due for its first service till September. There is not much to do. The service schedule is mainly just checks. The most time consuming part of the service is the software updates. An EV is pretty much the same as any other car except it does not have an engine, gearbox or conventional differential. With regenerative braking I hardly ever use the brakes so they will last a long time. What has been found to be true is that the batteries are lasting a lot longer than anticipated partly due to habits of owners. 2000 charge cycles is from zero to 100%. Most owners plug in when the battery gets down to 20% or more often after a few days when they get home. Also unless going on a long trip most owners only charge to 80% as the last 20% takes the longest time. Charging to 80% is called "Health mode". That said even with NMC batteries charging to 100% has no detrimental effect unless the battery is left fully charged for several weeks or months without use. Plenty of EVs have enormous mileages on them. There is a Tesla High Mileage group on Facebook where owners with more that 500,000 miles (800,000 km) post information. Most are still on the original battery. Some have more than a million km on the clock.

There are plenty of Shopping centres that provide a few EV chargers free for customers. As time goes by I am sure that there will be a lot more of these and more chargers as the EV numbers increase. They only need to be slow A/C chargers so they are cheap to install. In reality A/C chargers are not chargers at all. They are EVSE's (Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment). All they do is supply A/C power as the Inverter/Charger is in the EV itself. They do not even have to provide the cable. EV owners just keep a type 2 cable in the boot and plug it in when they get there. This is happening at Hotels & Motels (called Destination Chargers) and at some shopping centres already. In inner city high density housing areas some Councils are putting in A/C charge points on lamp posts for use by apartment dwellers who do not have off road parking. By the end of the decade these will be everywhere.

At the moment most EV charging points do not have energy storage & rely on a large cable from the grid. If a petrol station did not have large tanks of petrol stored underground and relied on petrol & diesel being supplied via a pipeline, it would have to be a very big pipe when multiple vehicles were refuelling at the same time. The first very large EV charging station is near Shenzhen Airport opened in 2023 with 258 chargers and charges 3,300 EVs every day. It is jointly operated by BYD & Shell. The site is also covered in solar panels and has battery storage which is continually topped up from the grid & solar. The concept that you will need a megawatt of supply if 10 vehicles are being charged simultaneously at 100kW assumes no storage. Part of the basic premise of the grid using renewables is storage and exactly as petrol stations require storage so do EV charging stations. The only difference is that there is no giant fuel tanker required as the batteries are continually being supplied. My EV has a theoretical range of 450km & can charge at 140 kW from a DC supercharger. It has a 64kWh battery. At 110kmh I get around 400km. I do not have a 400km bladder & stop at a charge point when the battery reaches around 20%. At a super charger the charge is back to 80% in about 15 minutes. That only gives me time to visit the loo & grab a very quick bite. Normally though I will find a slower (50kW) charge point as they are cheaper & spend about half an hour to have a better lunch. There is a company I think based in Darwin that has designed an EV charging module with battery storage and a mini solar farm that can be delivered anywhere in the outback. It requires no grid connections & has 4 charging points. Sounds like a great idea to me and blows away the argument that EVs are no good in remote locations in Australia.

One of my neighbours has an electric push mower & the good thing is he can mow at any time and not annoy anyone as the only noise comes from the spinning cutting blade which is not much. He has had it for 5 or 6 years and says he will never go back to petrol. He has a spare battery but can get his suburban block lawn mowed with one of them. he just swaps them after each mow & the just used one is put on charge. It usually still has some charge left.

If i was in the market for a ride on it would be battery powered without a doubt. I have owned several ride on's over the years & it is the noise, fuel and vibration that are the biggest issues with engine maintenance next. All these are gone with a battery electric mower.

Remember Trump telling Zelenskyy he was gambling with WW3, well he may be just about ready to start it himself if he commits to dealing with Iran. If that happens you can bet the rest of the Arab world will have a go at all the US bases and interests they can get to. No matter how powerful the US thinks it is, it will not be able to defend everything and the only result will be a lot of destruction or use the nuclear card & that would be the end game.