Today I learned that the Toyota BZ4X can only be DC fast charged twice per day. It's hard coded to prevent further DC fast charging. Sucks if you expected to just drive it like a car on a long road trip, and didn't plan for this weirdness.
To be honest I don't think this is as much of a WTF as the friend who related this news thinks it is. (I don't have a BZ4X so I couldn't give two figs about it). I could still easily structure a 900km drive in one day around leaving home on a full charge, DC fast charge in the morning, AC charge over lunch, DC fast charge in the afternoon, and that probably gets you ~1000KM.
I think it's Toyota trying to protect their batteries - which is interesting because it's something no other car manufacturer feels the need to do. Toyota paternalism or did they just buy a batch of dodgy batteries and fit them to the car anyway?
@decryption The Leaf, really, is this anomaly in Japanese cars.
It's obviously adapted to cold climates, where passive cooling of the battery is enough. Then it's sold here in Australia and the USA. It's designed using a Japanese charger standard which is revolutionary but basically only gets used by Nissan. It has the fundamental problem that it's aimed to trickle charge but most people in Japan do not have their own garage with a power point.
Despite this they make millions.
My favourite story about the Leaf happened when I was coming home on my Energica Experia - literally on the day I picked it up. We stopped at Mittagong RSL because there's an NRMA charger there (free at the time, remember that?). There was a lady charging a Nissan Leaf there - I looked at the car and it had Tasmanian number plates! She had driven up from Hobart to visit family in Sydney; she was on her trip back.
She loved the Leaf. She loved chargers, because she could stop and talk to the people and EV people are so friendly! She didn't mind stopping, it was lovely to see the scenery. She was happily retired so she could make it a three day trip from Sydney to Melbourne. That car suited her perfectly and its battery 'limitations' were hidden advantages to her.
@decryption Let's face it though that's never going to happen.
Several friends have gone to Japan and reported there are almost no electric cars there. Even Leafs are a rarity.
Why, when Japan has to import almost all of its petrol and diesel but it generates its own electricity, is it still so wedded to petroleum fuels?
There are lots of hot takes on that question out there, I've shared my own in other posts.
But realistically I don't see any of the Japanese car companies making any full transition to EVs, or making any EVs that are not basically "compliance" cars that are necessary for them to keep selling what they already make.
tell me again how toyota not going 100% into EVs is a mistake - they're selling more cars then ever! I love EVs, have been driving one for 5 years, but EVs are not the answer for a large portion of motorists yet and hybrid/ICE engines have a long life ahead of them (20+ years imho)
I'm wondering whether these sales figures are worldwide, or in Japan, or in Australia.
I can kind of see the brand loyalty thing. All the big car makers build the brand loyalty because they know customers want to limit their choice - pick a car from the manufacturer you already know, they probably have a range of vehicle shapes and sizes.
And IMO that's two big reasons why they're also all basically stalling on EVs. Firstly, because they don't have the range of EVs. And therefore secondly EV sales essentially eat into their existing model sales. Dealers hate this because they like selling what they know and they already know what they get out of ICE sales - lots of lovely servicing revenue. And manufacturers hate having to make a new model or redo all the parts, when you can just do a few minor tweaks on the panels of an old frame and make it look like it's fresh and new.
The Japanese car manufacturers in particular have a very good deal where the government has built in a cost to register an old car, specifically to get people to buy new cars and keep pumping money into their car industry.
And I've also heard that the 'honour culture' in Japan makes it difficult for them to not keep the deals they have with the suppliers of parts specific to the ICE engine - spark plugs, cables, ECUs, radiators, hoses, etc. I'm not sure I trust this view entirely, especially since US manufacturers are dragging their heels too and they've been also outsourcing and off-shoring all those things anyway.
To me it just comes down to: sorry, but it's imperative for the future survival of the human race on this planet that we #stopburningstuff . Sorry if that gets in people's faces with brand loyalty and decision headaches. Tough. We have to choose.
@dgar I guess my immediate thought is: which companies aren't in the list that we would kind of expect to be there?
Things like fishing nets, PET barrels, styrofoam things... these all turn up in massive quantities but most of them don't have names of companies attached. And they almost certainly don't have the name of the company that bought them and used them and then dumped them.
If there's no styrofoam box manufacturers in that list, then it's not because we didn't find any styrofoam in the sea...
If I understand what you're thinking here, you want a USB 3 hub that doesn't just push every port down to USB 1 speed when a USB 1 device is plugged in, yeah?
So, I finally finished the basic bring-up of the board I’ve been assembling the last couple of days. I found the dead short from 3V3 to GND under the ADC, but needed to do a lot of digging to find it.
Right now, the MCU seems to work using its internal oscillators, and a quick poke shows that the 12MHz crystal is working too. The I2C ADC and GPIO expander appear to be responding, but the RTC isn’t (yet?)
I also think I melted the push-buttons because they don’t push now, and there’s one LED I forgot to hook up to anything in the schematic…
@melissabeartrix If "horrible disposable cup experience" is the way to get people to use reusable cups, then we should have brought in coffee cups made of licorice-flavoured asbestos years ago.
@dcbuchan@MishaVanMollusq@melissabeartrix Didn't need to. It worked out of the box first go. And man, it is powerful! But you do want to make sure you're not using it directly overhead.