For the sake of my mental health, I know much better than to read comments online. It doesn’t matter where – Facebook, articles, YouTube, wherever. The only good place to read comments is on evtv.me! The others are almost all full of bad takes and toxicity. But sometimes, I just can’t help myself. I almost […]

I spent a weekend with the 2024 Chevy Blazer EV in the hopes that I’d develop some solid opinions on it. And oh, boy howdy, did I. There’s a disappointing mix of positive and negatives to unpack about GM’s new all-electric mass-market crossover. Most EVs I’ve gotten behind the wheel of have been a pleasure

Recently it came to my attention that not everyone knows why we put diodes in reverse on the connections to some things. In fact, I recently gave some questionable advice in regards to what needs a diode for protection and what doesn’t. So, let’s get into it! First of all, what is it we’re trying

Throwback models can be hit-or-miss in a lot of cases, and brands are taking the very life and soul of an oldschool treasure into their hands when they bring one to market. Sometimes they do it right, like Ford, with the Bronco or F-150 Lightning. And sometimes they do it wrong, like GM with the

It’s that magical time when you should buy your EVCCON 2024 tickets! Get Tickets You don’t want to be the only one not there, do you?

My opinion on Hyundai/Kia is far from black and white. I’ve been impressed by their styling – often decent, yet inconsistent. Rental Hyundais of yesteryear have seemed well equipped, especially in the infotainment department. The last one I rented had Android Auto back when that wasn’t common. Don’t get me started on their apparent struggle

Once in awhile, a person has to take a deep look at themselves and realize when they’ve made mistakes. When we were younger, it might have been realizing how mean it is not to share toys with a sibling. When we’re older, it’s things like choosing the wrong major in college, or taking the wrong

For the past few months I’ve been on the “rubber chicken” circuit speaking to local business groups and service organizations about the benefits of electric drive as a viable alternative to I.C.E. vehicles.  While most people are quite amenable to the concept of electric vehicles, with an EV owner or two now in each audience,

Ever since electric cars started to go mainstream, back in the early days of the Model S, I’ve often expressed an opinion that electric fits best in two different, often overlapping situations – plug-in hybrids, and high-torque applications. Plug-in hybrids like the Volt appeal to me because they offer the fuel savings of electric for

EVs have been evolving over the last few years from their position as purely a luxury buyer’s car. With options like the Tesla Model 3 inching ever closer to “affordable car” territory, it seems like EVs are finally starting to look like sensible purchasing decisions. But many of the higher end EVs, flashy and fast

AI has been everywhere recently. Sometimes the news is great! Sometimes AI found a new drug or a new way to search for a disease. Other times… Well… So, what happened? Does Google Gemini know something I don’t? There actually *was* a female Pope once. And, it is possible that upwards of three popes in

Recently, Toyota has announced the death of the EV. I was sad to hear about this, given all I’ve invested into the electric vehicle world. But, is there any truth to this assertion? Will ammonia fueled vehicles make EVs extinct? I have some doubts. Toyota has long been the buggy whip manufacturer that says cars

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

Jackie and I like to work in fun and entertaining questions during our guest interviews for the EVTV Experience podcasts. In fact, we have a pair of giant dice we roll with each of the numbers assigned a particular question. One of those questions is Performance or Environment. This week’s episode explores the perceived importance

It has probably escaped no one’s notice that Tesla is having a good month. At the time of writing, GM, Ford, and Rivian have all inked deals to use NACS in their vehicles. So, it looks as if the supercharger network has won and CCS is dead. But, is it really? Let’s take a peek

As some may have noticed, there haven’t been proper forums here in a long, long time. After the new server was setup a forum was poorly attempted by myself. Whoops, I messed that up! It became nothing but a pit of SPAM. So, those forums were deleted. However, time marches on and the means of

I bought a Chevy Bolt EUV around a year ago but haven’t taken any long trips until recently. I decided to have a small vacation and also to visit the EVTV headquarters for a couple of days. I live around 550 miles away from Cape Girardeau so I knew I’d have to fast charge on

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

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

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

Let’s talk about motors and engines. Arguably, they’re kind of important to the driveability of your car or truck. Those of us who have ever had to try pushing a vehicle down the road can attest to how truly wonderful it is to have a different motive source of power than your own two legs.

As we progress through 2022 we find ourselves at an exciting time for electric vehicles. Tesla has been building momentum for around a decade and has taken the world by storm. It is to the point where more than half of all the electric cars you see on the road are some form of Tesla,

As, no doubt, many of you noticed, it has been impossible to register for an account on our site and impossible to get a password reset email. Basically, no email related functions at all worked. But, as luck would have it, guess who did not realize this important chunk of information? So, sorry about that!

Recently it was brought to my attention that I may not be as careful as I should be about the difference between kilowatts and kilowatt-hours. Yes, it’s true. Wash my mouth out with soap and slap my hands. However, our use of kilowatt-hours in the sizing and capacity of electric vehicle batteries does lead to

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.

As you may have noticed, our web store is no longer responding. We are working to rebuild the store and bring it back as soon as we can. In the meantime, we’re still here and ready to take your order. For now this will have to be done over the phone by calling us at

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

I generally eschew conspiracy theories under the rubric that little explained by conspiracy cannot as well be explained by incompetence and that the occurrence of stupid is vastly more common than the occurrence of evil in the hearts and minds of men. But it is also true that it can only be a conspiracy theory

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

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

Tesla’s stock has been struggling a bit recently.  I personally think they have been “crushing it” on all fronts recently, but after last night’s Model Y Unveil event I’m not so certain.   The recent announcement that they really were going to offer a Model 3 at $35,000 and the upgrade to 250kW in the

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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

Very unusual video this week. But it kind of demonstrates that my enormous talents as a young exciting titty blond video talking she-head may not be quite as overwhelming as I imagine, and perhaps my more proven skills as a writer should probably be the proper tool for the job of discussing a bit of

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

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

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

Selling yesterday. Buying back in today at a lower price. The Tesla ShitStorm continues unabated. Two law firms have launched “investigations” into Elon Musk’s “stock manipulation”. With his avowal to burn the shorts, and his announcement this week to take the stock public at $420, a case can be made. And these class action lawsuits

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.

On the morning of Tesla’s earnings announcement I believe the stock was trading about $293 and the September 21 $400 call option was about $1.90. Today, it closed a little over $380 and the option was about $11.50. With the help of experts from trade wise you can be assured to have a secure trade.

I get a lot of questions about Tesla stock recently. I am not a stock analyst and don’t even play one on tv. But I can say that the ones who do apparently are REALLY bad at it. You can pretty much make money on their recommendations using the George Castanza maneuver, whatever they advise,

It has come to my attention that our examination of solar energy storage issues has brought us TOO MANY VIEWERS. That’s right. We now have too many viewers at EVTV and I have to put a stop to it. Not to fear. As always I have a brilliant solution at hand. Too many viewers. Jack

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

We have drawn no small interest in our SELFISH SOLAR initiative – indicating everybody knows there is something wrong with the devolving net metering situation across the land. And this week’s video takes a deep dive into Selfish Solar. It may get a little technical. So set your Life Alerts on STUN and cinch up

We’ve been myopically focused on our own technical navel here recently and I suppose that continues with our most recent video on our new Singineer 12kw off-grid inverter. But we follow developments at Tesla quite avidly. I become more enamored of my Model 3 every day, and particularly now that Elon repaid me the purchase

Or Why Do I Do What I Do and Why You Should Too. I received a phone call the other day from a gentleman whom it quickly became apparent that I had much in common. Both raised in the Midwest, staring out in the U.S. Navy in a very technical field, and we had both

It is not precisely an accident that we are evtv.ME instead of evtv.COM. It’s all about ME. That may appear a shocking admission, but it is actually a communication technique. It gets your attention. And in a way, it’s quite true, I use my self as a comic foil to disengage from the world of

I’m sufficiently disoriented at this point to scarce recall what I expected of the Tesla Model 3. For years we knew the progression was from the top down starting with very premium high margin low volume vehicles and working our way down toward higher volumes and lower prices. This made perfect sense to me and

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

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

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

This past February 19, on a Monday afternoon, Richard Flentge and I drove up in the Tesla Model 3 to the Tesla Service Center in St. Louis to take delivery of my brand new Tesla Model 3. VIN: 5YJ3E1EA0JF005868 A couple of notable things, there were a LOT of Model 3’s on the lot. Like

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

And I’m working at it. Older, and between naps. But I’m hard at work. At 10:28 CST this morning, December 21, we will enter a new era – the winter solstice. This is the shortest day of the year here in Cape Girardeau Missouri, a little over ten hours of daylight. And after a fierce

I am remiss on both blog and video these busy days. Richard Flentge has rejoined me at EVTV to try to get the backlog of parts orders out. But I’m still a little overwhelmed by the targets of opportunity that greet me each morning. Two steps forward and a step back. I was discouraged to

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

After a month between videos, I find we have about 4 hours of video to hand. So I split it into two videos. I particularly wanted the Quaife install video as a single entity for future reference. Mr. Bill Bayer was a weatherman with the United States Air Force in Afghanistan. He became somewhat disillusioned

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,

Our news media once held promise to be the common campfire that bound us as a community to discuss the important issues of our time. It could have continued to evolve in that mission, but for various reasons has abandoned it in favor of entertaining us with inexpensive talking heads on the dubious assumption that

I’ve been obsessing on a new controller design for the Tesla Model S battery modules to such a degree the past two weeks that I’ve rather failed to do a video, or even blog our last one. Which is remarkable in that in the May 26 video, actually published on May 24, I’ve not only

Electric vehicle design has advanced rapidly in the eight years this month that we’ve been doing EVTV. Our first build used a forklift motor and a Chinese pulse-width modulated controller. Today, OEMs almost universally use 3 phase AC motors that are liquid cooled and use an advanced Field Oriented Control algorithm to control torque and

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

The Tesla Drive Unit continues to shock and awe – at least us in the shop. And of course, no sooner had we posted the last video than our “Jack Rickard wannabes” sprang to action to note METOO so it is genuinely an area of interest. We did learn a bit in dismantling the drive

The heart of the issue of electric automobiles has always been the energy storage cell or battery and it remains ever so today and into the future. Moving from the crude lead acid batteries, the limitation on electric cars has always been the weight and size of the battery necessary to power it to any

The heart of the issue of electric automobiles has always been the energy storage cell or battery and it remains ever so today and into the future. Moving from the crude lead acid batteries, the limitation on electric cars has always been the weight and size of the battery necessary to power it to any

The heart of the issue of electric automobiles has always been the energy storage cell or battery and it remains ever so today and into the future. Moving from the crude lead acid batteries, the limitation on electric cars has always been the weight and size of the battery necessary to power it to any

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m a Trump fanboyz and don’t deny it.  And I believe that a key element of his election to the Presidency was his bringing up the plight of millions of middle-class Americans who somewhat late in their careers have found that the job they endured for the sake of hearth and

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

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,

Albert Einstein is widely recognized as the premier “genius” of the twentieth century. He died the year I was born, 1955. In 1905 he published his Special Theory of Relativity and in 1915 his Theory of General Relativity describing the geometric theory of gravitation. Essentially, what is gravity and how does it work? The predictions of

There is technically no constitutionally protected “right” to be stupid. But there is also no element of our founding documents specifically banning it either. So we are kind of on our own in dealing with it as a society. As George Carlin sagely noted, “If you take the intelligence of the average American, you have

I left the United States Navy in October of 1979 to begin a working career as a civilian. In the Navy, “computers” were rather simple devices made up of NAND gates and AND gates and OR gates, each of which occupied a chip, and some “core” memory – literally magnetic cores with two wires bisecting

The adjective FREE commonly appears with either of two meanings: “at zero price” (gratis) and “with little or no restriction” (libre). This ambiguity of free is both entertaining and generally on point in a whole lot of situations. Richard Stallman, referring to free and open software summarised the difference in a slogan: “Think free as

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

At last, a video without the Tesla Drive Train in it. Actually, that’s because it is mostly about Tesla. We should probably rename ourselves TeslaEVtv. But I love the car AND the soap opera. There was a Christmas Eve some years ago when Elon Musk was dead broke, unable to pay the rent, his Tesla

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

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

I should probably mention how deeply we appreciate the many electronic mail comments received the past few weeks in support of our efforts. But I must confess a bit of guilt from them. All seem to express some concern about our health, our commitment, and the possibilities of EVTV as an ongoing concern. So it

As-salamu alaykum. Peace be Upon You. In the current hysteria over ISIS and Donald Trump and San Bernadino, we thought it usefully irreverent to announce the new radicalized EVTV. We are now officially a sleeper cell for the militant wing of the Salvation Army. What does this mean? Well, we advocate carpet bombing of all

I should be going down to the shop to begin the awful task of cleanup. But each morning, my wife and I start the day with a cup of coffee in bed, listening to Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on “Morning Joe.” Start the day with a bit of comedy posing as news. But this

I was really quite energized this week and had planned quite a show for the weekend. But we were kind of overwhelmed with orders and order problems towards the end of the week, and so increasingly I’m finding that the only time I can put focused effort into a project is at home in the

WHY THE NEWS MEDIA IS SO LOST ON DONALD TRUMP WHY I LIKE BEN CARSON Same answer, both times. They simper. They prance. They pout. They raise their eyebrows. They squeal with glee and they bellow with feigned outrage. But most of all, the new, young, homosexual, liberal media elite – condescend. They have apparently

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

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

  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

  We are a scant 13 days out from the biggest event in our year, the Electric Vehicle Conversion Convention.   We’ve had this annual gathering of cars and EV enthusiasts from around the world each of the past four years and 2015 would have been our fifth season with what has become something of

  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

We did somewhat better selling Bug-A-Salts this week than we did Tesla Model S reservations. We had ordered 24 Bug-A-Salts and they were gone the first week. Fear not. More arrived yesterday. Yes, it was mindless drivel but I certainly had fun shooting the rambo segment in the jungle and talking about houseflies. And no

In the ongoing saga of EVTV we continue our attempt to reinvent ourselves daily. This past week I kind of decided to change our frequency to bi-weekly. That means we’re either going to issue our video twice each week or once every two weeks. I love the precision of the English language. In discussing this

They say it is an ancient Chinese curse – “May you live in interesting times….” And so it seems. We were remiss in our video publishing efforts last week. Truth is, I got up last Saturday and went to the computer, sat down in the chair and promptly nodded off. Indeed I slept most of

I regularly hear from viewers who like to watch the videos, but don’t like to hear me pontificate on political issues. This is because they don’t agree with them, but worse, my take on it generally makes them extremely uncomfortable with their own dearly held views on the topic at hand. Now as I don’t