Love? Who the fuck are you kidding? I just want a handie behind a Wendy's dumpster.

To be fair I'd do that given even half an opportunity. But I'm cheap, so I'd exclude the food truck. And the motel.

Good point, well made.

"A while" in legal terms can be 5 years or more, which is about the same amount of time it'll take to make a case of criminal negligence.

In any case, access to the charger network is a different issue. While it may be owned by Tesla, $2bn in the scheme of government spending is nothing, and there are alternatives if needed. The supercharger network, without an upgrade to high capacity DC 800V charging, has only got a limited lifespan anyway.

Look, I'm not bullish in Tesla at all, but this is all getting tiresome. The only thing that will make a difference is if a government agency prosecutes them for criminal negligence. That day will come, just not yet. Until then, wait for tighter regs to come into place which forces them to scale back their systems.

One additional point with noting is that there is a limit to how much energy you can capture during regen - you fairly quickly reach a point where you're putting too much power back into the battery, which risks overheating the batteries and causing damage. It's no different to having a maximum charge rate when you plug the car into a charger. Heavy regen can also cause stability issues, especially on rear wheel drive vehicles - you can't only brake the rear axle without destabilising the car, so the front also has to be braked using the normal brakes.

On most cars, that limit is in the range of a braking rate of around 0.3G to 0.4G. For that reason, brake blending (using both regen and normal brakes) has to be done. Although 0.4G braking is well within most normal braking events, cars will actually be able to brake at a minimum of 0.9G, and some will be able to go up over 1.2G.

Recent battery technology has improved to the point where it's not so much of a concern. As recently as 5 years ago, the max brake rate you could capture regen from was around 0.2G.

The idea behind single pedal driving is that the Accel pedal also operates as the brake pedal. So if you put your foot down it accelerates the car, and when you lift it up it slows the car down. In an EV, it uses a combination of regen and normal (foundation) brakes to do it. The system is typically called brake blending or regen blending.

Feel free to ask more questions. I work in a highly related area.

Motors and electric generators are the same thing. If you apply power then it's a motor. If you spin it up without giving it power then it becomes a generator.

So in an electric car (EV), when you slow down the momentum of the car is used to spin the motor(s) to generate electricity, which is then used to charge the batteries. Because you're converting energy (the vehicle kinetic energy into electrical energy) it has the effect of slowing the car down. Depending on the use case, you can increase range by about 20% by doing this.

There are situations where regen isn't used - emergency stops and when the battery is full. In those cases the normal brakes are used.

There's a whole bunch of different materials, but basically sintered (i.e. powdered metal), Kevlar / rubber, and pads which combine the previous two are most common.

The material is pretty similar to what you get in car disc brakes. The only real advantage of a disc brake is that it's further away from the tyre / road / track, and therefore doesn't get as wet and dirty, which in turn improves brake performance.

There's a Venn diagram to be made here

There's a bit going on here.

Firstly, the US has a habit of buying big cars, and they've been getting bigger over time. If you add big, you add mass. If you add mass, you reduce fuel economy.

Second, regardless of the size of vehicles increasing, they've been getting heavier due to added structure for crash safety, additional safety systems, as well as added equipment in the vehicle.

Third, ignoring the way that fuel economy has been officially measured has changed over time (so you can't compare official figures separated by 20 years), traffic has increased which results in more stop / start traffic, which means worse fuel economy.

Edit:

I'll add a number 4:. Fuel costs by and large in the US over the last 20 years haven't been a major concern to consumers.

And 5: US federal policies haven't put major pressure on manufacturers to produce more fuel efficient vehicles until relatively recently. A lot of the rest of the world has spent the last 20 years pushing heavily towards reduced emissions, which has had a knock on effect of improved fuel economy.

550 calls should do it.

*6 hours

You've got a fair few answers here, but none really go into why aero is important, or the actual differences between gas / Diesel engines and EVs. I'm coming from this from the viewpoint of someone who works with this stuff, though not an aero engineer.

The first thing here is that gas (petrol and diesel) and EVs are tested for range and efficiency in the same way, so aero has the same relative effect. The way that they're tested depends where in the world you are. In the US, it's the EPA drive cycle (exactly which drive cycle depends on the type of vehicle), most of the rest of the world uses WLTP, and China uses CLTC (which is basically WLTP). The point here is that the drive cycle (a specific set of accelerations and speeds, conducted over a set period of time) is exactly the same in any territory for the same type of vehicle. That means that it makes no difference if it's an EV or petrol engine. Therefore the effect of aero is the same for everything.

So from that, EVs don't benefit any more from aero than any other vehicle.

But....there't more to it. EVs, despite a massive increase in popularity over the last few years, still have a public perception problem with lack of range. Every mile (or km) you can get out of an EPA drive cycle test, gives you a better figure that you're allowed to advertise. But then....range isn't everything. Efficiency is what actually matters from a design point of view. For every Watt of power you can save, you need a smaller battery to give you the same range. Or you can have better efficiency and the same size battery to give you better range. It's a design balancing act of cost to the consumer vs what is actually desirable in market.

The other point worth raising is that the "aero" isn't just aero. Although it's common to pick up on a drag factor, like "oooooh this car has a 0.87 [cd] drag factor, isn't that great?", by itself it does't mean anything. You also have to look at the the aero uplift and the reacting areas to actually understand how aero is playing a part in efficiency,