this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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I'd recommend an electric car for avoiding oil changes, but I think we still have a few more years until cheap second hand electric cars become available.
I'd recommend not being poor
No, a electric car is twice the price of an ICE car. It's not an oil change per year that will break the deal.
Also don't believe the 3000 miles oil change, it's a scam. I change my oil every 8000 miles, there's zero problem with that, especially if you put synthetic, but dino works the same.
This is only true if you're purchasing used. Anyone in the market for a NEW car absolutely can and should be considering an EV.
Also, you would be fucking shocked how expensive an oil change can be on some cars, even when doing it yourself.
Yeah most* engines can fairly easily do 7500mi changes on good synthetic. Even my 30 year old Honda expects 7500mi changes from the factory.
*I say "most" because a lot of modern direct injected turbocharged engines (designed for efficiency) have issues with fuel washdown due to DI cold starts and high turbo bearing heat cooking the oil to death. Those actually do need 5000mi oil changes typically, especially since 0w20 and 0w16 has real low film strength to start with.
To be sure of any OCI do an oil analysis from a lab like Blackstone at the end of your extended interval to make sure it's still in acceptable shape.
You can find what the manufacturer recommends for your make and model in your owners manual or you can look it up online. It's never 3k miles and is almost always something like 6-8k miles, with increased frequency as the vehicle ages. Older vehicles frequently burn more oil so you might want to check your levels more often if you use one as a daily driver.
Which will also need a costly battery replacement not long after buying it 😬
I've had an electric car since 2011. The battery looks like it will last another 10 years.
Early Nissan Leaf batteries degraded relatively quickly (8-10 years) due to poor battery chemistry and no thermal management. Both of these issues have been fixed in all new electric cars (except the new Nissan Leaf which still doesn't have battery cooling).
Even the old degraded batteries are valuable as static energy storage, and several people are using them as house batteries.
Most of the cost of a battery replacement is the manufacturer markup. There is at least one company making replacement Nissan Leaf batteries for significantly less than Nissan, and they include the latest chemistry and liquid cooling (unlike Nissan who just give you a second hand battery).
Most electric cars today have a 10 year warranty on the battery. Manufacturers wouldn't be offering that if there was a reasonable chance you would need to replace the battery in that time.
Even if today's EVs degraded like the first Leaf, when you start off with 250 miles of range you could lose a third of it and still have a very usable vehicle.
Would you mind sharing which EV you have that has a battery that will last 22 years with normal use?
I have a 2011 Nissan Leaf AZE0 24kWh with about 40% battery degradation. It can drive about 80km (50mi), which is perfectly adequate for a second car. It is rarely driven more than 20km in a day.
My other car is a 2018 Nissan Leaf ZE1 E+ G 62kWh with about 4% battery degradation.
The fastest battery degradation happens when the battery is new, and the degradation slows down gradually over time. I expect the 2011 Leaf to still have at least 50km range in 2041, and the 2018 Leaf to still have at least 200km (130mi) range in 2038. Both of these will still suit my needs.
No, it will not. Stop spewing nonsense.
My 02 VW diesel goes 10,000+mi between oil changes. 50mpg fuel economy. The car cost $6000
Answer: hydrogen
Actual answer: Public transportation and bicycles
Actual actual answer: WFH
A job is not the only place any given person would have the need to transport themselves to.
Seriously, unless you're working a labor job in manufacturing there's little reason to do 90% of all white collar jobs in person. It's all staring at a damn computer screen anyway so who cares where you do it from?
Seriously... Everyone is missing all the side b.s that comes with cars especially new cars...
My car was "cheap" for a new car and it still came with a lane change radar thing... Guess who has a $1200 windshield replacement now because some schmuck kicked up a rock with their car? $300 was expensive for a windshield but now I need a freaking sensor alignment too?
Knew it would be a matter of time before the fuck_cars crowd popped in. Not everywhere is a city, and I work potentially all over the state. I also have equipment and gear I have to bring to the job. I actually need a vehicle.
Good for you, man. How would you like for most of the people, who don't actually have exceptional use-cases, to not be on the road, in your way, in the form of traffic?
That's entirely not feasible for anyone living a typical life with errands to run and places to go, and you know it.
You two aren't strongly disagreeing; he wants to make it more feasible outside of cities. I've met a handful of people who do indeed manage to bike around suburban towns.
I literally live a typical life with errands to run and places to go, entirely without a car.
Yeah
…are far too slow to be a practical substitute for a car.
In the US? Yep! We really need working public transit that isn’t seen as a poor person’s “punishment”.
Public transit only works in densely-packed cities. I do not want to live in a densely-packed city. In suburbs, where life is relatively pleasant, public transit is agonizingly slow compared to cars.
It works pretty well here in Berlin. The trains go far to the suburbs and beyond, are fast and comfortable. You pay 49 euros a month and can travel anywhere in the country with the ticket. Most of them go even at night.
This is highly dependent on what kind of built environment you happen to live in. In sanely built places, it's very much not true.
Hydrogen is only 30% efficient compared to 90-95% for batteries. Most hydrogen is currently made from fossil fuels, and contains less energy than the fossil fuels used to make it.
but an electric car is heavier than a hydrogen car, so the electric platform is less efficient. imagine carrying an extra ton of a batterypack wherever u go. hydrogen could be made from renewable energy, and doesn't require batteries to be stored. battery metals are finite. u can't scale that up. 5kg of H2 translates to 400km mileage.
Most large combustion SUVs are heavier than most electric cars.
Sodium ion batteries are being produced with no rare metals in them, and will be in production cars within a year. Hydrogen is difficult to store due to is low volumetric density, it's molecular size, and corrosive nature.
Hydrogen (fuel cell) cars all have a battery because a hydrogen fuel cell is slow to change it's energy output, so can't change its output fast enough to directly power the car.
Battery electric cars are about 90% efficient from charging from the grid to moving. Hydrogen cars are about 30% efficient from grid to moving when made from renewable energy. These efficiency numbers include the weight and rolling resistance of the car. The theoretical maximum efficiency of hydrogen storage allowed by the limits of physics is about 50%.
The volumetric density of hydrogen is so low that you would need 20 tanker trucks to transport the same amount of energy that 1 tanker truck of gasoline can carry. This is at maximum pressure or liquified.
Hydrogen only makes sense when the weight of the energy storage medium is critical. As demonstrated by American cars, it isn't.
Twice as expensive to fill as a gas car and more expensive than a battery EV to buy, all while still producing tons of CO2 by steam reforming methane to make the hydrogen? Wow, sign me up!
Hydrogen is the answer, but the question is "How can fossil fuel companies keep making money while pretending to be green?"
The technology is extremely underdeveloped. That's why it's so expensive and impractical right now. Batteries aren't ecological saints either.
Hydrogen is a pain to store and work with. Even on rocket engine that is worth millions it's almost impossible to avoid leaks.
On the other hand gas can be carried in a plastic bottle and electricity is already available everywhere.
I don't see any future where hydrogen car become mainstream.
Hydrogen is such a pain to deal with, the filling stations cost something like a million dollars each.
You can't just use normal materials to contain high pressure hydrogen - the molecules are so small that it seeps through steel and turns it brittle.
Hydrogen trades volumetric energy density for gravimetric energy density. It is too difficult to build a car that can safely hold a reasonable amount of hydrogen without making it bigger or sacrificing cargo space, and building a distribution network on the same scale as gasoline is a problem we still have no idea how to solve.
I think hydrogen will be much more viable in shipping, where these problems are much less pronounced. Big trucks and container ships are less concerned with volume (weight is more important). And they move along common and predictable routes meaning you don’t need quite so many hydrogen gas stations. You distribution just needs to cover truck stops and ports.