EV owners getting fleeced at the plug?

Recently yet another article was posted that compares the price of charging an EV compared to an equivalent gasoline or diesel vehicle. https://www.businessinsider.com/ev-charging-cost-versus-gas-car-truck-suv-2023-7 But, is it true or has the author mined the depths for the highest quality manure? Well, from the smell wafting upon the wind, it seems the truth isn’t to be found …

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I wrote 100 million lines of code and all I got was this lousy t-shirt!

People who know me probably know that I’m not a huge fan of too many people – certainly not Elon and not Sandy either. I tend to be a bit critical of public personalities, especially those two. But, the above video is a very good discussion about the state of the automotive industry and how …

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Peering into the eye of AI

The last blog post was all about self driving and my thoughts on whether vision only is the way to go. Obviously, I don’t feel that it is. Limiting yourself to what humans have is stupid. If we can find sensors that give us extra-sensory perception or better distance vision, then shouldn’t we? We drive …

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Look, ma, no hands!

Self driving technologies have been in the public eye for a number of years now. In fact, according to Elon, we were going to have self driving cars several years ago. Well, we do, sort of. What’s the definition of self driving again? It can be famously difficult to define what we mean when we …

Look, ma, no hands! Read More »

We’re baaaaack!

Thank you for your patience as we transitioned to a new website and store. We now have our web store back up and running! We will continue to strive to create the best experience possible and hope you will check back for more updates in the future.

Tesla Kristallnacht – The CyberTruck Wardrobe Malfunction

November 21, 2019. The night of the broken glass for Tesla Motors. We think it may be one of those strange seminal inflection points usually unrecognized at the time, but hailed in arrears as THE moment in time. On this night, Tesla Motors transitioned from challenger to the status quo automobile industry to DOMINANCE and …

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Grid Wars

The oddities and ironies encountered in the march of technology forward are legion. EVTV videos are consistently about “how”. But once or twice per year, we try to share a bit of the “why” behind our sometimes perplexing wanderings from one apparently random project to another. It is true that I can obsess on the …

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71 Cents Cheaper Than Tea

I am simply astonished by the current level of discourse currently raging on the topic of economics at the PRECISE moment the U.S. Government is announcing the lowest unemployment rate since 1969 and the highest stock market levels EVER. But evidence from wife and daughter and employees is that our entire education system is ACTIVELY …

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Battery Nerd Porn for Tesla Model 3 2170 Cells

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Model 3 CAN bus Connections.

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Recalling the Army.

I’m running a bit behind on written articles in the blog, or perhaps a bit ahead on videos.  I forget which.  In any event we’ll discuss the last two videos simultaneously and at the same time, concurrently, together, and in aggregate, as a group, together. In our video of January 17, 2019, we open up …

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Solar Battery Frenzy

We’re partying like rock stars at EVTV. The jist of our mirth revolves around making LARGE batteries out of Tesla Model S Battery Modules and using AC coupling from grid-interactive inverters to harvest sunshine into the batteries. This was widely reported as impossible. And it turns out it is not only possible, but very nearly …

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Solar MQTT. Selfish Solar on a Global Scale – BOB (Battery on Board).

Hurricane Florence again pointed up both the vulnerability of our grid system and the advantages of solar power – along with its’ principle weakness. Duke Energy is an interesting case.  This utility grid operator is putting in solar photovoltaics at a furious pace all over the southeast.   The largest is at the Warsaw Solar …

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Tesla to a T

Tesla continues to awe and amaze the aborigines.  Elon announced Friday that he was reversing position and backing away from his plan to take Tesla private.  I for one am quite relieved.  I have publicly stated that Tesla has some enormous blue sky opportunities ahead and have predicted a stock price of $1500 by February …

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Tesla ShitStorm

A scant 24 hours into the ShitsStorm set off by Elon Musk’s 420 tweet and I’ve rather had a change of heart on the whole matter. My two personal heroes in this season of life are Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk. And it is striking how similar the national disconnect is on both men. …

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What’s a Liberal to Do???

I discovered an interesting gift early in my technical career, say 1980 or so – closing in on 40 years. Engineers are notoriously bad at and dismissive of documentation chores. And I rather had a knack for reducing dense technical material into matter more suitable for ordinary humanoids. As management and customers tended to be …

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Prime Time VIDEO War….

Wars and rumors of wars….earthquakes in diverse places. I’ve always wondered if there was a town in Nevada or West Texas somewhere named “Diverse Places.” In my last missive, I revealed a bit of my view on genetics and DNA and human generations and interconnectedness. Quite intertwined – the topic of war. And I’ve long …

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White Like Me….

I’ve been asked, numerously and recently, to blog a bit about phillisophical and political matters having nothing to do with Electric Vehicles and Solar Energy. I confess I don’t know quite what that’s about, but it appears that some of my asides on EVTV cause curiosity regarding my “beliefs” and how they came about more …

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SOLAR RESET.

We continue to stumble along and find our way. In this case, I think its important to share the process and ignore the embarrassment of “being wrong” as we go along. We need to walk our sins out with you. It’s peculiarly important in this case. As my needs for personal self-aggrandizement are modest and …

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Trump Tarrif in the Internet Wonderland. Alice joins METOOs.

Yes Alice in Wonderland has joined the METOOS and has accused Donald Trump of unwanted sexual Solar Tarrifs. Other mythical animated female characters join in. Or something like that. Over 140 years ago, Samuel Clemens noted that those who didn’t read the newspaper were uninformed and those who did read the newspaper were misinformed. Not …

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Canticle of the Sun

I’m busy as Santa in the EVTV shop vainly striving to tease clever out of not very good C++ code. Surrounded by too much equipment costing far too much to do so little. Fumbling with my blighted mind and recall, bereft of friend or assistant, and mired in an overwhelming sense of disorder and detail …

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Selfishly Solar

I’ve been working furiously this week on a 48v battery module and controller to work with the Sunny Island 6048 US Inverter. Coming nicely I think. This will be a good combo. But there is a kind of identity crisis between the Sunny Island and the grid-tied Sunny Boy. In Germany, where they are made, …

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Sucked Down the Wormhole

EVTV celebrates eight years of publication this month. Our first video was published May 22, 2009 and we have just uploaded video number 312 – two hours, nineteen minutes, 50 seconds. When we began this journey, there were ZERO electric cars available for purchase anywhere in the world – Tesla Roadster being much talked about …

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Predicting the Weather – Dancing in the land of the Buffoons.

Everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it. I was recently confronted by a long time viewer displeased that I am not working hard enough these days, particularly on my “blog”. I have never considered the “blog” very important as there are so very MANY people blogging and it is rather easy …

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Truth and Consequences

Honesty is the best policy. There seems to be some confusion about this. It’s not the best policy so Jesus will love you. He already does. It’s the best policy. Period. My father infuriated me during my adolescence as he had all these little maxims that he seemed to live by. Unexplained and unthought through, …

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The BLEding Edge

In a dozen different ways, technology is a double-edged sword with no handle. I marvel at the magic rocks emerging from vendors such as Analog Devices, Texas Instruments, Semikron, and others. Just reading the data sheets gives me a creative spurt. And that is a sign of our times as well. Twenty years ago I …

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Trump/Sanders in 2016

Over half the children born now in the United States are fatherless connards. So very many of their parents are so addicted to opiates, cocaine, or methamphetamines that we wind up with hundreds of thousands of feral children wandering through the streets and schools and what little they have of homes that they are essentially …

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The Power of Creative Failure and Separating the Players from the Poseurs

I’m delighted to report the first shipment of the first Tesla Model S drive unit with our Alset control kit. It is going to a startup in Oakland California that has big plans for electric boat propulsion – ergo the shipment. They have no need of a Quaif ATB Limited Slip Differential. That program is …

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Storms in the Petri Dish and One Brazillion Percent Growth

VW shares are now down some 43% and the cloud over diesel has spread across the autoscape to encompass everything diesel. The scandal started with the International Council on Clean Transportation attempt to show how clean diesels can be. They contracted with West Virginia University’s Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines, and Emissions (CAFEE) to actually …

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EVTV Open House Itinerary

What a bizarre world we live in.  Since biting down on the bad news and taking the hit – announcing the cancellation of EVCCON 2015, I’m both bemused and confused in that it doesn’t appear to want to BE cancelled.  It’s apparently showing no signs of cancellation.  As I thought I was the sole arbeiter …

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The Great V-Dub Flub of 2015

  Volkswagen AG shares opened down 20% this morning after last Friday’s shocking EPA letter/press release announcing an EPA recall of 482,000 “clean” diesel TDI engined vehicles manufatured between 2009 and 2015. The only thing similar in auto history might be GM’s announcement of pending bankruptcy in 2009. The drop in stock price represents an …

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Bolted On

  I’m thoroughly enjoying the CAN/Arduino aspects of EVTV these days.  I can quickly edit a source file and compile it to a small Arduino board in about 20 seconds from any  Mac OSX machine in the shop or at home.  I can e-mail those files to myself or thumbdrive em to get back and …

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Apple iCar and the CAN Primer for GEVCU/EVIC – The Only Constant is Change

In 1985 I started a ragged little newsletter titled Denver PC Boardwatch in Denver Colorado listing 218 electronic bulletin board systems. Over the next five years it kind of grew to encompass all that was going on online including online services such as CompuServe, GEnie, and what would become America Online. In 1987 we did …

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The Little Red Hen

“The Little Red Hen” by Joseph Jacobs There once was a farm with a big red barn. And in that big red barn, there lived many animals, the smallest of which, was a little red hen. The little red hen may have been little, but she was the most active resident of the farm. When …

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FAST Charging – Can Our Batteries Take the Charge?

Ed Clausen provides a seasonally appropriate description of a somewhat advanced application of postive temperature coefficient heating to his BMW 320iS electric car. The 320iS is actually a somewhat rare and very interesting BMW and may be the perfect electric vehicle car to start with as a donor. It was the precursor to the e30 …

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Your Car Are Still Belong to Them – But CHAdeMO May Be More Than We Thought….

Tesla remains an enigma. After announcing he was effectively “open sourcing” his Tesla Model S, apparently Mr. Musk feels it is appropriate to actively “disable” cars that have been wrecked until they can be proven safe, to his satisfaction, by a Tesla inspection. Mr. Peter Rutman, who cachinged out $50,000 for a salvaged Tesla, was …

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Welcome to EVCCON 2014

Our fourth annual Electric Vehicle Conversion Convention (EVCCON) opens with an icebreaker reception on Tuesday, August 12th at 5:00PM. I arrived at the shop Friday noon, August 8th all prepped and ready to shoot our weekly show only to find Paulo Almeida and Celso Menaia of Lisbon Portugal, Mark Weisheimer of Ohio and Jason Arnold …

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PRE-EVCCON 2014

This week’s show is again over two and a half hours. On the what to leave in, and what to leave out area I’m developing a really bad habit of leaving it all in. But I like it. What do a Miata in New Zealand and a BMW in Massachusetts and a Cabin Cruiser in …

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SHIT ATTACK

On June 12, 2014 Tesla Motors Inc CEO and Chairmon Elon Musk issued a dramatic announcement on the company’s blog titled ALL OUR PATENTS ARE BELONG TO YOU. It has caused quite a stir. There were 476 comments on it 12 days later. I was struck by this manifesto as on June 11, 2014 I …

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For Want of a Nail….

Is it me? Or has the pace of all this quickened markedly in the past few months. Both in the number of new trinket and toy developments, but also some sort of sea change among the populace. We’ve probably had a half dozen people in the shop here this week. That’s not unusual actually, but …

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TONIGHT IS THE NIGHT

Lithium Batteries are inherently humbling. The energy storage component of our electric vehicles is THE central issue to successful builds, so it comes as no surprise that we get a lot of questions about batteries. And every time I try to answer one, I think to myself “I hope that is more or less correct.” …

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MOVE ALONG..MOVE ALONG… Nothing to see here…move along

Thursday morning, at about 7:30, we sold our last available Renault Influenza/Better Place battery pack. Wow. Whoops. Or aw-shit. I’m not certain which is more appropriate. But people with publishing experience should NOT dabble in retail sales. That’s clear. We apparently mispriced the Better Place packs rather eggregiously. I hoped to pretty much clear these …

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EXODUS – A Parting of the Waters and My People Cannot Make Bricks Without Straw.

It was long, ugly, and expensive. But this past Saturday morning, March 1, 2014, the Renault Influenza Better Place battery packs we first sought in the first week of November finally arrived at EVTV in Cape Girardeau Missouri. In a devious plot, hatched between myself and Omer Bar Yohai, we liberated these battery packs and …

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Registry of Custom Electric Vehicles – Wormhole and Stargate

From our first build of the burgundy 1957 Porsche Speedster, our mission has been to inspire others to build similar cars using these phenomenal new lithium battery cells. In our view, the lithium ionic battery made electric cars viable for the first time in history, crossing some threshold of viability that we perceive with a …

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The Spring Offensive – Raid on Heber Springs

I received an e-mail this week from my favorite adolescent delusional mental patient expressing his concern about the future of the 100,000 man army we are raising for the express intent of completely changing the world’s concept of personal transportation. It is of course true the world’s five largest and most profitable corporations are all …

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The Thing about THINGS

It is springtime in Missouri. March rather carried a bit of late winter and so we’ve had a late bloom but a welcome one. This week we talk a bit more about the VW Thing progress. This vehicle has turned into a pleasure to work with largely because everything has been so accessible. Rerant on …

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The Cost of Everything and the Value of Nothing…

We call them batteries. They are both the bane and enabler of the electric vehicle. A strange paradox in personal mobility for over a century. The term “battery” derives from Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with capacitors actually – Leyden Jars – that he could use in series to achieve impressive voltages and shocking results. This series …

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TORRID HEAT, BITTER COLD, and Gliding About in an Elescalade. Announcing EVCCON 2013

THis week we talk a bit about several small things. Heat seems to be a pretty simple topic. It is hardly in the ballpark with range issues – right? Actually, at least for us, the range issue is almost entirely manufactured by the media. Heat in an electric car, on the other hand is very …

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Dyslexics – UNTIE!

We’re getting a bit sloppy around here. Part of it is reality intervention in our normal reality distortion field. Last week everything we touched turned to a mess. And I’m struggling here. The Ford Edge battery pack we just reconfigured we rather didn’t bottom balance. This is kind of interesting in that we have 28 …

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GETTING AN EDGE IN A WAR OF STANDARDS – THE OPEN AND THE FORGOTTEN.

Pretty good week last week. Made some progress on the test bench, got Speedster Nippon inspected for the registration process, and updated the Ford Edge which appears to be running pretty well. If you recall, we had rebuilt the Netgain 11 motor to some degree, and replaced the transmission in the Ford Edge. We also …

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ONE MAN’S TRASH

It’s early Monday morning. I got the show up on time this weekend but it is a relatively short show of less than an hour and a half. I’ve already heard from several viewers that it is boring and they were disappointed. Curses and drats. So now I have to do a tour de force …

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RAID ON LIVONIA

We failed to produce a show last week. This is partially a function of being under the weather a bit. I’ve had lung crud that has weakened me considerably. We had a bevy of daughters arriving for Thanksgiving celebrations. And Richard and Mike went to Detroit to manage the loading of a large and heavy …

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CATIONS, ANIONS, ONIONS and JACKIONS. Through a glass darkly in the land of the Motor Verks

We struggled to get a show out this week. Part of the problem was that I spent entirely too much time playing with RechargeCar’s AutoBlock AMP. For some reason, I keep having a brain freeze and calling it the AMPBLOCKER. I have no idea where that came from. The REchargeGuys chose PROCESSING to develop the …

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DENOUEMENT

It’s the day after EVCCON. I’m beaten down to a pile two and a half feet tall and six feet in diameter. Until last night, I had about 11 hours sleep spread across six days. It’s a good tired. But I’m left stunned, dazed, and confused. Attendance was a disappointment with slightly over 200 people …

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See this TURTLE goes into a BAR and says to the bartender….

This week, we take on a couple of oddities. The first is the Leaf range loss issue. This has been widely reported elsewhere with an inordinate amount of information I’ve found implausible. So this week we went to Tony Williams, organizer of the group in Phoenix purporting to refute a Nissan claim that there was …

See this TURTLE goes into a BAR and says to the bartender…. Read More »

The Trouble With Tesloids – They’re Not Tribbles.

The Trouble With Tesloids is that they are not like Tribbles. They don’t multiply very quickly. No one would question that Apple’s iPod, iPhone, and iPad represent truly disruptive technologies that have sold literally hundreds of millions of units and dramatically altered telephone communications, the Internet, and personal computers, all in one fell swoop. The …

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Escalade Cooling System

Not a lot going on this week. We reinstalled the Soliton1’s in the Cadillace Elescalade EXT, installed a cooling system for these controllers, and began reassembly of the front end. [jwplayer file=”news081012-iPhone.m4v” hd.file=”news081012-1280.mov” image=”http://media3.ev-tv.me/news081012.jpg” streamer=”rtmp://s3einxnpkaij93.cloudfront.net/cfx/st/” provider=”rtmp” width=”950″ height=”584″ html5_file=”http://media3.ev-tv.me/news081012-1280.mov”] We are getting closer to the Electric Vehicle Conversion Convention (EVCCON) scheduled for September 26-30 of …

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APPLE Aquires Tesla Motors – On a Cold Day in July in Cape Girardeau

It’s cold here in Cape Girardeau for July. Actually, not. It has been over 100 degrees Fahrenheit every day and most of our shop is devoid of air conditioning, making EVTV a pretty miserable place to be, much less pinned to for two hours writing down battery measurements every minute on the minute. But we …

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