Electric Surf Vehicles in 2020

[PonoBill]

It does, of course, require a substantial inverter and automatic transfer switches to ensure you don't back power the grid and kill a lineman trying to fix an outage. But if full battery voltage is used (about 300VDC) then the wiring for everything--from the solar controllers to the vehicle charger to the inverter input becomes much lighter with less wire loss. I can (and plan to) buy HVDC solar controllers and a 15KV inverter from China. The solar industry at the residential level has a surprising amount of nonsensical legacy inertia for such a relatively young industry. All the big utility installations are HVDC. There are lots of ways to make this work, and if I can do it for $30K in quantity one then Ford and Tesla can do it for $5K or less in quantity 500,000. I'd build most of it into the wall charger if I were Tesla, and the charger would sell for $10K--which anyone who didn't have their head up their ass would be thrilled to pay. Same basic price as a Powerwall--almost the same guts only no wimpy battery. And they could still sell a full powerwall version for people who wanted a backup to the vehicle being available.

It seems incredibly stupid not to do it. I agree with Admin, Tesla has no choice now. And yeah, EV's are amazing snow vehicles. The more advanced stuff is the four-wheel differential biasing with very powerful computers doing the tweaking.

The wheels never spin unless all four a spinning or for some reason you decide to drive in Ludicrous mode on snow. Which sound kind of fun now that I think about it.

[PonoBill]

It looks like the plan for the lightning is to have the inverter in the truck capable of powering a house. Adding up what they plan for the trunk (front and back) outlets they are talking about roughly 10KW, which is enough, and there's a 230V outlet specified, which means either a big autotransformer or a split-phase inverter. That would be cool, and certainly feasible.

I like all the clever stuff, the trailer features are incredible--though the tech is almost obvious once you start with a clean sheet. Automatic positioning on the trailer hitch--push the button, let the truck get the ball in exactly the right place, and just lower the trailer onto it. Auto trailer backing--wow! A trailer hitch that detects tongue weight and calculates load distribution once you move it a bit, and then recalculates energy use for the planned destination based on load and known terrain. Hmmm, why didn't we already have that? I imagine Elon is a little bug-eyed. He's always said his aim was to get all automakers on board with moving away from ICE. I guess it's working.

[Tom]

Pono, do you know how the range will be effected by towing?

[PonoBill]

Generally, it drops fairly steeply, especially if you climb hills. Of course, you get a lot of that back when you come back down, which doesn't happen with an ICE--regen braking is a marvelous thing. There are too many factors to say for sure, but there's a good reason all the recreational trailer pics are airstreams.

[Tom]

it would be cool if you had. a Solar panel, battery, and motor in the airstream to help out.

[Admin]

This article outlines the power sharing capabilities pretty well.  It is a huge expansion and reimagining of a system which is already in place for their hybrids which they are calling Ford Pro Power.  The article starts "Doomsday preppers (and, um, power-hungry workers), your electric pickup truck has arrived."  That will prove to be a huge underestimation of this feature set.  I imagine everyone has a use for this.  Also cool that they are including the required highest end charger with the upper end packages.   Not the biggest deal but a nice touch.  Cool also that they have contacted with a nationwide service group to manage the in home installations. 

It also seems like Ford sent their minions a realistic message to share.  Basically, this is a monster for relatively local towing but not yet the answer for practical long distance towing use.  At 44 minute supercharger times and likely 150 Mile range with a heavy wind resistant load, this is going to be a bit painful. 

https://www.motortrend.com/news/2022-ford-f-150-lightning-electric-truck-charging-generator-power/

Lastly Ford did something really smart.  It looks like they priced so that (with tax credits) the electric option is going to be at or slightly below the ICE price. 

[PonoBill]

Despite its relatively flimsy frame, the underside of an Airstream is just begging for a battery pack--and of course, such a pack can be engineered to stiffen the frame and provide all you might wish for in floor insulation. I can't possibly be the only person to realize that. The top of a typical Airstream is enough space to hold a kilowatt or slightly more of PV if the stupid roof mount AC unit and vents are eliminated. Modern mini-split inverter AC systems are far more efficient and almost noiseless. I stupidly replaced the functional but overly tall AC in Fritz, my lunatic RV project, with a slightly shorter "low profile" heat pump that still sounds like 747 taking off. I'm installing a mini-split in the back, and that experience made me realize how dumb I'd been. Getting rid of all the roof crap would have enabled the 1.86KW of PV's I installed to hug the roof instead of looming over the coach like a giant wing.


Not only would the battery between the frame rails power everything you might possibly want in the Airstream, and six or more hours a day of solar power (6 to 8KWh) keep the battery topped up, but the battery could double the distance the trailer can be hauled without stopping.

The practicality all comes down to use case. Nomads, constantly moving would find this still limiting. The typical user drives some relatively small distance (a few hundred miles), stays there a week or two, and drives back. Most RVs sit in a driveway 10 months out of the year, where they could serve as a mega powerwall and solar charger. Add rooftop solar to the house and you can tell your local utility to piss up a rope.

[Admin]

Some more details on this. 

https://www.slashgear.com/ford-f-150-lightning-is-a-tesla-powerwall-on-wheels-19673534/

For Intelligent Backup Power to work, you’ll need a specific home charger designed to work with bidirectional power. The new Ford Charge Station Pro is a special, 80-amp unit that’s wired into the home’s electrical system; it also uses a new home management system which Ford says it can help users install. The automaker is working with Sunrun for installation alongside solar panels.

Down the line, Ford says, it has even more ambitious updates for the system, Ford Intelligent Power won’t just call the F-150 Lightning’s battery into play during emergency stations, but will aim to offset domestic use during high-cost, peak-energy hours. If your truck is plugged in during those periods – often in the afternoon or early evening – then its battery can be used to keep the home running, switching back to the grid to top-up overnight when electricity rates are lower.

The 80A Ford Charge Station Pro will be included with the Extended range battery version of the F-150 Lightning, and an option with the Standard range model.

[Admin]

This stuff is pretty wild to follow.  I remember reading about Ford investing a Billion buckaroos in Argo https://www.argo.ai/ a few years ago.  VW came on later with 2.6 Billion.  It seemed like a late to the party effort to get involved in self driving at the time. They were looking at 2021 to have self driving ready.  https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/16/16155254/argo-ai-ford-self-driving-car-autonomous.   They are Lidar focused https://fordauthority.com/2021/05/argo-ai-reveals-new-potentially-game-changing-lidar-sensor/ and seem to be coming at things from a very different approach than Tesla.  They clearly have set their sites on the ride share and delivery businesses https://www.argo.ai/company-news/breakthrough-new-lidar-technology-gives-argo-ai-the-edge-in-autonomous-delivery-and-ride-hail-services/.  This is where it starts to get really interesting as Musk has been pretty vocally negative on Lidar.  I was surprised to see "Blue Cruise" (kinda hate that name) in action already.  This is an E ticket.  I am just hanging out here and my simulation keeps getting better and better .

Ford to 20.  Actually, Ford to 50 has more zing.  Let's go with that.

[PonoBill]

It always reminded me of that movie about the Tehran diplomat rescue in 1979--Argo, as in "Arrrr go fuck yourself". Lidar is derided for good reason and bad. Humans drive cars with vision and a very slow computer. Far superior vision (our eyes really suck) and a fast computer are the most complete replacement for a human driver. But the database for our slow neural network is immense--the full input is everything seen, experienced, and interpreted for however many years the driver has lived. And vision requires a lot of processing just to interpret distance, where Lidar can measure distance directly. The big advantage is ranging, the huge disadvantage is that vision offers a lot more cues. You can't read a sign with Lidar. Anyway, there are a lot of ways to skin the self-driving cat. It's not a particularly difficult problem technically. The big difficulty is that the performance has to be nearly perfect for people to accept it. Every death in a self-driving car is big news. Meanwhile, humans driving cars rack up mayhem at a staggering rate.

If we were remotely pragmatic, when self-driving reduced fatalities by 50% we'd ban humans from ever sitting behind a wheel and save 600,000 lives per year, a half-billion injuries, and about 1.5% of the GNP for the world. That number was probably reached by the most primitive system years ago. But we are insane. Not just illogical--nutty as a fruitcake. Of course, 90% of the deaths and injuries occur in low-income countries and self-driving will be a long time filtering down to them, but it still costs 3% of the rich country GDP on average, and hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of horrific injuries.

Elon's vertical approach offers the usual benefits and issues. The cart drives the horse far too often in vertically integrated companies, and Elon's word is law. Smart guy, but hey, Model X--the stupidest car since the Edsel, all because he fell in love with a door system because it was zooty, not because it was in any way practical. I'd consider buying a Model X with a sliding door like my primitive mommy van. But with the Falcon doors? No fucking way.

[Quickbeam]

This stuff is mind blowing. You guys may have saved me $10,000 to $15,000. I live in a small community in British Columbia, and while I wouldn't say we get frequent power outages, we do get them, and they are a pain. A number of people in our community have purchased natural gas powered generators. They are pretty slick in that they come on automatically the second the power goes out and they power most, if not all of the house. My wife and I have looked at them and have it on our "to do" list to get one of the sales reps out sometime this year.

But now, if in the not too distant future we can use a car to power our house, well that would be perfect. So I'm going to once again put the natural gas generator on hold and wait and see what happens with this feature in electric cars. This technology is brilliant.

[WingNut Ohana]

Late to this thread, but I've put 105,000 miles on a Soul EV as my surf vehicle since 2015. So EV surf cars are already a reality.

Went and checked out the ID.4, Mustang Mach E, and Model Y last month. Any of those would be a good surf, SUP car.

As for EV's as power packs, here on Maui, we do get outages once a year or so. I've often looked at the battery pack in my EV, thinking it should get me through a couple of days of powering the house. So I got an inverter that clips onto the 12v battery. When needed, I just hook it up, turn on the EV and it'll power a few things around the house.

The F150 powering the house is a great killer app. Why pay the $10K for a powerwall when you can put that towards the extended range of the truck and get the bi-directional charger installed for free?

[PonoBill]

I was considering at least one, maybe two powerwalls for Ponohouse. I already have a fairly large PV installation. A powerwall would probably pay for itself about as quickly as the PV installation did--a little over 6 years--and that was back when PV panels were expensive. I spent 40K in my system, took all the tax credits and incentives which knocked that down to 31K, and took my monthly power bills from about $450 a month to about $30. The bills have recently started to climb because of the way net billing now works on Maui, the way the utility charges just for service charges, charging Diane's Volt, and a few other fiddles. Fortunately, my PV system has been installed for 15 years and has long ago turned a significant ROI. With big enough powerwalls and perhaps some added panels (cheap these days) I'd have the option to disconnect from the utility--I'd have to spend another 20K. But when/if Tesla quits dicking around I could pick up a model Y or the base level F150 Lightning and do the same thing. I expect Ford will carry the utility a lot further--they're being a bit restrained. There's no good reason to limit the discharge level to anything more than what is needed for daily transportation. With just a dinky powerwall I could make up for short periods where PV power is insufficient and the Truck is not connected.

I had a natural gas generator at my home in Portland. It was a great addition for a house in an area with frequent outages. Installing it pretty much guaranteed that we'd never have an outage--and we didn't.

[Quickbeam]

I had a natural gas generator at my home in Portland. It was a great addition for a house in an area with frequent outages. Installing it pretty much guaranteed that we'd never have an outage--and we didn't.

Too funny. I’m pretty sure this would be my luck as well.

[PonoBill]

Ford to 20.  Actually, Ford to 50 has more zing.  Let's go with that.

Could actually happen. They were trading at $6 a year ago, $13 today. for a company with all that legacy drag that's almost unheard of. And it's all from their EV position. Is there anyone--other than a few Facebook morons--who think ICE vehicles are still viable?