Electric vehicles (seasonal rambling) Featured

Is there any benefit in allowing the system to fully boot? Or is that from 'warm'? What on earth takes 17s?!

A friend has a hybrid Yaris - whenever I get in the car with her the first 30 seconds after 'switch on' (I think it's keyless) are spent with her jabbing at the radio, trying to switch it off. Seems to me (from the splash screen) the system is trying to boot.

Once 'warm' it seems reasonably responsive. Reasonably in a YMMV sort of way - I don't have much success with the Yaris' or indeed many touchscreens (phone's fine though).

And...

My daughter got in her brand new Smart 1 car yesterday morning and it greeted her with "Happy Christmas"!!!

Yes, really.

My son in law go in his BMW a couple of weeks ago and got a tyre pressure warning. Five minutes late his phone rang, it was BMW warning him he had a tyre problem.

Skoda ask for the VIN - and then give you a generic manual which covers all variations so you don't have a clue which bits refer to your car and which don't! Grrrrr.

Except that, in principle, it doesn't. Admittedly if you accelerate hard then brake almost immediately then you will waste energy (even with regenerative braking, it's not 100% efficient) and you will lose out a bit compared with gentle acceleration.

However if you simply accelerate fairly briskly up the the same terminal speed as you reach if you, instead, accelerate gently then simple physics states that you have used exactly the same amount of energy. The only difference will be that if you accelerate gently you will spend slightly more time at a lower speed where frictional losses are slightly less. Depending on how efficient the motor is at high power compared with low power it may be that you will use a bit less energy if you accelerate hard to your desired speed.

THe major way to save fuel/energy is simply to drive consistently more slowly.

The first 5 times my tyre pressure warning went off on the dash it was a false alarm. The next one was real (failing alloy wheel seal). I guess that BMW are just being careful, but I thought that the safest view is you shouldn't answer mobile phone calls while driving, even when "hands free", as it's distracting.

If BMW's call resulted in an accident, that would make a most interesting "driving without due care and attention" case!

That is the exact situation. It's possible that things are still happening behind the scenes, but sometimes the first thing you want to do when turning the car on is to turn off the display. That's in the settings 'app', which is what can take the 17s to launch. This car has proximity keys (so no slot to put the fob into) but still has an 'on' button.

Just turning off the radio (as stopping the audio but with the screen still active) happens by pressing the volume knob with no lag. I suspect the radio app is foregrounded so that's quick while the settings app has to be loaded from mid-2000s-era flash memory, while the single core iPhone 1 style CPU (the Mk.3 was released in 2011 and so the design was probably frozen a few years before) is already busy doing other things.

Theo

Some people here will have travelled on the Tube in LOndon in the 60's and 70's and remember the way that power was applied in steps, whereas the modern tube cars make that funny noise which I guess is the from the inverters and associated gubbins.

In message snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>, at 16:08:20 on Thu, 25 Dec 2025, nib snipped-for-privacy@ingram-bromley.co.uk> remarked:

Somewhere I have the manual for an army SWB Landrover. Squaddies didn't need a driving licence/test. It explains, for example, what each of the three floor pedals does, and when you might think about pressing down on each of them.

It's up to the called to let it go to voicemail.

There was a program on the TV a few years ago about older people whose relatives were unhappy with their driving.

A member of the advanced driving institute went out with them (plus camera crew) to assess their driving. One old boy frightened him so much he stopped him driving. Turns out he had never passed a driving test (not required) and learned to 'drive' in a tracked personnel carrier and carried on driving a car in the same way (lots of lurching and violent changes of direction).

Maybe BMW just wanted to sell another car !! :-)

Ah right. She's in such a state that she seems to hit everything within reach. I might (just might) suggest she tries that next time.

I think it's a similar thing with TVs. My newish LG OLED is considerably slower (menus, guide etc) than a premium 15 year old Samsung I used recently. Strikes me they use whatever cheap mobile phone processor they can get their hands on if they think they can get away with it.

It's bad enough on a TV. Inexcusable on a £30k car IMVHO.

The Piccadilly and Bakerloo lines still have 1970s stock with DC motors powered via thyristors with camshaft control, where you go through the 'gears' by changing position on the camshaft.

Early AC electric locomotives used DC motors powered from tap-changers, which allowed selecting from one of a range of voltages on the transformer, to allow for low speed operation with high torque.

Modern electric trains, like EVs have variable-frequency variable-voltage inverter drives, with typically IGBTs doing the power switching. The whining noise is the drive frequency which varies through the power range. It sounds like 'changing gear' but it's just a change in oscillator frequency.

The best example is the Siemens Taurus where they have tuned it to musical notes:

Why?

Have you considered why a gearbox is necessary with an IC engine? Electric motor simply don’t need one.

There are EVs that simulate the feeble torque curve of IC engines and provide paddles and sound effects to create a fake “ICE driving experience” that some people really like.

Without a doubt there are folk who will miss the involvement of dancing on pedals and swapping gears but they are literally a dying breed.

Tim

They do, but they can start from rest so need no clutch to start.

Cars that have a single fixed gear are not likely to be as efficient as those with two gear ratios or so.

I once got a lift from someone who 'young' enough to have had to pass a driving test - but he treated the clutch as an ON/OFF switch. It wasn't easy to get a big old Volvo estate to lurch like that, but he managed it.

The purpose of gears, is to adjust for the power curve.

One speed cars, the max-rpm of the motor prevents achieving really high road speed. If I need to hit 160km/hr to make a pass on a long straight stretch before the next hill arrives, I expect my car to be able to do that speed. If the car will barely do 120km/hr, that is a marketing deal-breaker for "people who hate BEV". It's just one more thing to point to. I can pull out in my BEV, but never pass.

Tesla fixed that on one car, by designing a motor that could do an extra 4000 RPM on top of what the others could do. Perhaps the diameter of the motor was a bit less than the other motors, allowing more RPMs. And this allowed continuing with a fixed final gear and no transmission.

A two speed transmission, is not a good emulation of the cars we are used to. You won't be "rowing the gears" like on your old manual transmission. But it is a mechanism that allows perhaps a little more responsive highway driving.

One car with the two speed transmission, it's set relatively high, such that all of your city driving is in a single gear. Others are set a bit lower, which might be considered a nuisance depending on how long the shift takes.

There is the electric motor curve in Fig.13 here at the bottom. Constant torque at low speed, constant power at higher speed (with the torque dropping the faster you go). Maybe it's more likely that an econobox can benefit from a 2 speed (for eff&range).

For example, your econobox-BEV has 0-60 of 14 seconds. Can you safely merge into traffic using a short merge lane with your shiny new BEV ? The roads were designed with some "theoretical car" as a model. Maybe 8 seconds was the target value.

There are "city cars" that aren't real candidates for usage here, because some of the roads will have speeds where the vehicle can't keep up. Your "city" becomes a relatively small island.

Paul

Pointless nit picking. Can you select the gear in your differential? Nope. So it’s not a “gearbox” as understood by folk who are used to selecting gears.

Go on, name the models and percentage of EVs that have more than one fixed ration twixt motor and drive shafts.

Tim