Happy Hour News
As regular readers know, I am not a fan of give-aways to the rich, but I am also not a fan of climate change, so electric charging stations are going to help all of us:
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The Biden administration said Wednesday it has approved ambitious plans by 34 states and Puerto Rico to create a national electric vehicle charging network as the U.S. begins in earnest its transition away from gas-powered transportation.
The plans’ approval means $900 million can begin to flow to the states, which are tasked with using money from President Joe Biden’s huge infrastructure law to form the network of chargers across the nation. Building out a reliable and convenient network is critical to spur more adoption of the technology, which is itself key to reducing greenhouse emissions that cause global warming.
The announcement came on the same day that Biden toured the North American International Auto Show in Detroit to tout the new law that includes tax incentives to purchase electric vehicles.
In practical terms, it means residents in some of those states could see more charging stations start popping up along major travel corridors as early as next summer. Biden has a goal of ultimately installing 500,000 chargers across America and building a network of fast-charging stations across 53,000 miles of freeways from coast to coast.
There’s a bank of them in my ‘hood here in the Peoples Republic of Seattle, ironically or not, in the parking lot of the Bank of America. They were put in sometime during the pandemic, and I honestly have never seen them being used to charge a Tesla (and those cars are EVERYWHERE here), so maybe it is not a given that these things will only be for Tesla owners.
Mock Paper Scissors 
No, these are not all for teslas; this is the major venture https://www.electrifyamerica.com
I know VW’s EV’s use it.
The Ford F150 EV use the ‘Blue Oval’ charging network according to their website. I suspect they’ll work with other networks.
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The other 17 states, what happened to their plans? Maybe they just don’t want EV drivers to drive through their states. Hawaii has a captive driving population, so they’re an outlier. And Alaska is huge. If they get into EVs they might actually trigger more vigourous research and implementation of mini solar panel rechargers to keep AK EV drivers from getting stranded in the outback.
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I’m guessing those 17 states are all red shitholes.
Myself I am increasingly impatient for VW to get off it’s ass and bring the iD Buzz here https://www.vw.com/en/models/id-buzz.html since they’ve decided to NOT make an EV version of the Jetta (now Golf) Sportwagen. That’s our cheater diesel car; I love it.
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I miss our Jetta diesel. It was very economical for a full size sedan.
Some bimbo borrowed it (not true, hubby gave it to her because she ran out and paid a bill for him that no one asked her to) and wrecked it by rear ending a pick up truck at a stoplight. She swore the brakes failed (our fault! Right?) but a mutual, er, friend told us she was seen to be texting while driving. Small town here, sort of, so it can be tough to make bs stick.
Effin’ bimbo. We 86d her from our lives, finally (that was not the LAST straw)
I still miss that Jetta.
OTOH, I’m holding out for the Ford. Having a truck is a real plus around here, and I won’t be able to afford one before they work out most of the bugs anyway.
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Even after the fix ours gets ~34 mpg in town. By the time we got all the legal settlement $$ back, we got about a third of our purchase price back.
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After what fix?
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The court-mandated repairs to the emissions system; a new Catalytic converter and some other parts. What VW (and Siemens, the company that made the electronics involved) did was sense when a vehicle was being emissions-tested and juked the engine performance to reduce nitrogen oxides in the exhaust. Basically if the front (drive) wheels were turning and the rear stationary they ivoked, essentill, a cheat code in the engine controller.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal
I found it odd when we got the car, that every time I got emissions tested, the whole idiot-icons display was lit up and it didn’t settle until I’d driven a mile or so. That went away after they fixed it.
There was a big class-action suit against bot companies, by both the Feds and the states; in the end I got the car fixed and ~$7400 back in cash payouts. Not bad for a car that cost me $27K new.
This REALLY affected California, because of the power of the trucking industry taxes on diesel fuel were MUCH lower in California, so even though diesel was more expensive than gas, the much better mileage meany total fuel costs were considerably lower. They sold a boatload of them in California.
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Oh, yeah, I remember that scandal about cheating the emissions tests. I don’t remember hearing about the fix. We didn’t have a VW at the time, and we don’t typically do new cars so when it didn’t really hit the news (I assume we didn’t hear about it.
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Like you probably didn’t hear much about the scams perpetrated in the ACA Marketplace. We barely heard about it and I got a class action check last month in reparations.
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The Sportwagen was our very first new car (traded in a nearly 30-year-old Honda Civic wagon for it!) so we were kept apprised of all the goings on.
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We have had just one new car. When hubby spotted a Pontiac Solstice sitting on a local car lot he jumped on it. It was a bit overpriced since it had some extras on it and it was the preferred ride for the lot owner’s son. He tried to get the salesman to renege and get “his” car back, but no dice. Then the 2008 recession hit. We ended up having to return the car. The financer wanted us to pay the difference between the remainder of what they financed and what the car got at auction. When hubby pointed out that, by that metric, they owed US money they suddenly couldn’t find the phone to answer when we called. Then Pontiac closed.
Just one chapter in life with my hubby. He calls it “Irish Luck”.
He loved that car while we had it. We couldn’t drive it in the snow, but he could take it anywhere on road.
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Car dealers are the worst. Incompetent or crooked, and usually both.
Rgds
TG
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Actually, the Teslas have a proprietary charging head … it doesn’t fit.
Like Apple phone chargers, all the rest are standardized.
(we just ordered an E-Mini)
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I’m now envisioning a big car sized Magsafe charger for my EV…or turn your driveway into a big Qi charging pad 🙂
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I wrote this as a joke. Then I just read this https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/09/whats-the-state-of-wireless-ev-charging/
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WiFi charging ~ as if we were’nt weird enough without it.
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