Yes. Kias are on the same e-GMP platform, all of which seem to suffer from the ICCU issues. It’s also unclear whether the software updates have fixed the issues, or whether more recent model years have fixed the hardware.

But Kia/Hyundai have at least extended the warranties on the ICCUs to 15 years in most countries, including in Germany where OP lives.

Ah yeah, the ability to pass power in both directions at arbitrary rates seems pretty important for that use case. Otherwise you’d have to charge the battery with the sun, discharge the battery into the car (while presumably wasting good sunlight). The setup you have sounds like it avoids most of that.

So a good sunny day is good for what, 3 kwh into the car?

Does the 2kWh battery go 0% to 100% in a single day? Or can you simultaneously charge it while discharging it by feeding a level 1 inverter to the car?

California is famous for having different emission regulations. They have an exemption from the national law that they’re allowed to make stricter emissions and gas mileage regulations. None of those should prove to be a burden for anyone who wants to sell a battery EV in California, because there’s no standard that applies only in California to EVs.

Kia pulled its EV6 GT, which basically did not sell well in the US. They only manufactured that particular top tier trim level in Korea, but the other EV6 trim levels continue to be manufactured and sold in the U.S. (Wind, GT-Line). Kinda stupid that they named their top of the line the GT and the one just below that the GT-Line, but brands can be stupid with naming schemes sometime.

now both Hyundai and Kia have stopped selling EV models last year solely in the US

They’re basically one company and they stopped importing EVs. They still build and sell plenty of new EVs in the U.S., made in their plants in the state of Georgia. They’re also currently expanding capacity at their plants, in the hopes of catching more of the growing electric SUV market.

So they no longer sell the top of the line trim level of the Kia EV6, or the Hyundai Ioniq 6, but they’re still building and selling very similar models on the same platform. The Kia EV6 still exists in the lower trim levels, and the Ioniq 6N and the Ioniq 5 and 5N, and their smaller EVs (Kia Niro, Hyundai Kona) are still available, too. Both brands launched their 3-row electric SUVs in the US, too (Hyundai Ioniq 9, Kia EV9).

A lot of companies are slowing down their EV rollouts, but I wouldn’t say that Hyundai/Kia is the best example of that.

Average new car price has gone up a lot because the average new car has been purchased by rich people who demand high performance and luxury features. And rich people have been doing great the last 50 years, so the top of the market has totally run away with high prices.

If you actually dig into specific models and what they go for, you see that the most basic cars have only gone up slightly in price, but are also much higher performing (0-60 times, quarter mile times, braking distance), more efficient (better highway/city gas mileage), more reliable (more miles/years to failure), and have a lot more standard features that used to be expensive add-ons (automatic transmissions, power windows/locks, power steering), and are generally better constructed (smaller panel gaps, better sound proofing/vibrations), and much, much safer by pretty much every measure.

Today’s cars, even the cheapest ones, are much better than the cars from the 90’s, much less the cars from the 70’s (5-digit odometers because getting past 100,000 miles wasn’t necessarily expected, bodies that rusted within a decade of normal use).

So if a first generation Honda Civic in 1974 cost $3000 in 1974 dollars (inflation adjusted to $21,000 today), we should compare what that car was, compared to what a Honda Civic is today (starting at around $25,000 for the barebones model, $30,000 for a few nicer features). Compare torque/horsepower specs, actual performance at 0-60/quarter mile, gas mileage, all of that. I’m not entirely convinced that the people of 1974 were getting a better bargain on their cars than today’s new economy car buyer.

I hate that cars have gotten so big, and that the SUV is basically the American default at this point. But I don’t think that car prices have actually gone up that high in the 30 years I’ve been driving. And cars from before I was driving just…sucked.

We should always look to nature, yes. A lot of aerodynamic designs seem to look a lot like the world’s fastest birds. Trees really do seem to optimize for capturing solar energy in an easily encoded blueprint.

But also there are a few areas where we should recognize the limits of scope of the solutions nature has provided, or recognize the path dependency in how evolution might optimize for a particular pathway that no longer should continue to pose a restriction (the giraffe’s recurrent laryngeal nerve, for example).

We’re allowed to mix and match. Just gotta be careful and recognize just how powerful billions of years of evolution is, as an optimization method.

The front tires have a finite amount of traction that needs to be reserved for cornering.

To borrow an analogy from computer RAM, unused traction is wasted traction. Yes, when cornering, all of the available traction should be devoted to steering. But for the straights, why not use the available traction for acceleration?

Hp is a fake number based on torque and RPM from ICE.

You can convert it to watts if you prefer, but it’s very much a real unit, denoting how much work it does per unit time. Torque alone is insufficient (just as force measured in newtons alone would be insufficient) for showing whether a particular machine is more powerful than another.

They are clearly mathematical.

Sure. But they’re also philosophical. The categories aren’t mutually exclusive. Basic set theory (which is both mathematics and philosophy).

I see philosophy as a place to make nonrigorous arguments.

Wait do you think Bertrand Russell and Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel weren’t making philosophical arguments?

Exactly.

HERE’S A THEOREM: IF IT’S PROVEN, IT’S TRUE EVERYWHERE, FOREVER

But at the same time, even if it’s true everywhere forever, it might still not be provable, because Gödel.

It’s for showing off the engineering. Lots of robotics competitions focus on different things (throwing balls, kicking soccer balls, moving fast), but BattleBots is definitely the one I’d be most worried about advancing a dangerous line of killer tech.

A humanoid bipedal foot race shows off balance, speed, power efficiency, and things like that.

Also the price difference thing is more or less gone now.

It’s just always been hard to compare like for like, because pure EVs compete on different features than similarly priced ICE vehicles. Is a Tesla Model 3 more like a $30,000 Toyota Camry or more like a $60,000 BMW 3 series? Which is the nearest ICE competitor to the Rivian R1S?

In the past 5 years we’ve seen a lot of new models released by different manufacturers, we’re also seeing more directly comparable models.

One interesting thing is that Toyota is soon releasing EV versions of vehicles they also offer as ICE vehicles. Sometime in the next month or so, the Lexus ES will be offered as either a pure EV or a hybrid, and the EV will actually be cheaper. And there’s an EV Highlander coming later this year, with a price comparable to the hybrid Grand Highlanders.

And obviously my comment is very much U.S.-centered because that’s the market I know, but most of the ICE manufacturers rely on global manufacturing and supply chains so that we can try to see patterns and trends more broadly. European brands like VW, BMW, Volvo, Mercedes, etc., have also been pushing electrified models that sit somewhere in the long spectrum between cheap economy cars and expensive luxury/sport cars.

ICE engines are cool because of how complex they had to become in order to become even as remotely as reliable as Electric Engines are fundmanetally.

I remember in the 90’s when a lot of carmakers were developing variable valve timing where the valve timing would adjust based on RPM, using the different parts of the camshaft for each cylinder’s timing, so that it could maximize performance/efficiency for a wider range of RPMs without trying a one size fits all approach for the whole range. And each carmaker used a slightly different approach, trying to do something to squeeze out just a little bit more performance out of the same size engine.

Or consider the nature of the transmissions, and the rise of the automatic transmission, which allowed carmakers to start going into 6-10 gears (or the continuously variable transmission) because shifting gears could be abstracted away from the driver’s perspective.

The history of a lot of the other engineered functions (getting power from the engine to 2 or 4 of the wheels while allowing different rotational rates, getting fuel into the cylinder, cooling and lubricating the engine, getting the fuel/air mixture right, etc.) shows that it’s so many different things to worry about just to make the car go, reliably and safely.

I wonder if there’s hysteresis where the slope of the curve depends on the prior charge history.

Like, if you charge from 1% to 100%, does the 20-80% part of the curve look different than if you discharged down to just 20 and started charging to 80 from there?

Exactly.

The whole reason why lithium is such a good material for cathodes in car batteries is because of its very low mass per cation. So for a Lithium Iron Phosphate battery, the the cathode material is LiFePO4, where the Lithium itself is only 4.4% of the overall mass of the cathode.

So it’s important to remember that although the lithium constitutes a small amount of the total mass of a battery, that swings both ways so that not much is actually needed to build the next battery out of recycled materials.

Your solar power storage expert is named Sun? Sounds lot like sun.

Maybe that’s why she became a solar power storage expert!

Also, I’d push back against the subtext that work experience gives skills. Plenty of people work a job for 10 years without having the adjacent job skills to be able to progress in that career or jump to another.

Critical thinking skills are the most important thing, and it’s possible to get a 4-year degree without actually picking them up or strengthening your skill sets in that area. But it’s also possible to work for 5 years without developing critical thinking skills, either.

In the end, no matter what you do with your time, only a small percentage of your effort is going into improving yourself. The people at work are trying to get stuff done for their employer, and the people at school are trying to get through the curriculum. It’s possible to do the work while the employer/school or even yourself cheats you out of the real long term benefits of actually learning during that time frame.