Exactly. It reminds me of all of the maundering about being "forced to work" (ie. having to earn some income in order to purchase some of the bounty with which we're surrounded) which usually comes along with the "hunter-gathering was a life of luxury" mindset. Literally nothing is stopping anyone from walking off into the forest and living off berries and grubs, except that (a) they don't have the required knowledge to live off the land, and (b) they're not willing to do so, because (c) it's a miserable existence compared with living in a house with hot and cold running potable water, strong walls and a lockable door, electric amenities, and a comfy bed and sofas. Nobody's forced to work, we choose to because all of the above are nice things that are worth some effort to maintain.
We hear this refrain, that hunter-gatherers lived lives of relative ease while early agrarians lived lives of backbreaking labour, but honestly it's never made any sense to me. Outside of a few garden-of-Eden scenarios, life as a nomad seems far more precarious than life in an established village. Maybe the good days were better but the bad days were inevitable, and far more terrifying.
The enforcement is the problem if it is not secure legally. If you want to handle it with an iron fist like a dictatorship sure you can create laws to that effect, but there should be some human values on the books that makes those laws humane.
It's basically an objective fact at this point that excessive immigration is really, really bad, just look at all the politicians flipping sides on the issue. Look at the stats on European countries with the highest immigration rates vs those with the lowest (e.g. Poland)
By what metric are you looking at european countries and determining Poland is doing the best? If given the choice between say Ireland and Poland, which place would you prefer to live?
Look at RATE of growth (GDP, employment, safety, etc.) since immigration started getting bad in places like the UK - compare it's growth directly to the UK, or even the entire EU
I’m no expert, but reducing something as complex as a whole country’s economic outlook to just the variable „immigration“ seems like an oversimplification to me.
* developed countries obviously develop slower than developing ones. Is easier to improve if your economy is shit especially if you join a union of more advanced countries.
* polish immigration actually skyrocketed recently since Russia invaded Ukraine. It didn't harm employment, safety, growth rate or anything else yet.
Yep, might be there was a known issue that was addressed, at which put in a new one. But just replacing a fuse (or, simultaneously worse and better, just resetting a breaker) without further investigation is just kicking a very spicy can down the road.
I had a doozy of a trip issue on one project, a motor would occasionally (not always, no real pattern, hot/cold/etc. didn’t matter) trip the breaker, requiring a sparky to come out and open up the panel to reset it. We tried a bunch of things, megger-ing the motor, testing peak startup current on each phase with a fancy meter, checking phase-to-neutral current (Larger than you’d think! But this was normal, apparently.)
Everything was normal. In the end all we could think something was weird about the contactor. They took it out (I was off site at the time) and took it down to the substation to test it out.
With three phases connected to the contactor (and nothing connected on the other side) they energised the coil, and with an almighty bang it tripped the main incomer and took the entire sub offline.
Turns out there was a manufacturing defect in the contactor and sometimes for a millisecond, if the phase of the moon was right, it dead shorted two phases.
So there, even when you know everything, you don’t know everything.
This is BMW we're talking about. Their guarantees are worth absolutely nothing if my experience is anything to go by and them accepting liability is not something you should have to pay 4K for if other brands can do the same thing under $100.
They'll refuse warranty on the XDrive if you don't use approved brand and model of tyres so... my bet is on them wanting to extort all the precious money they can from their poor customers
They'll refuse warranty if the difference between thread is too much between front and back as that causes wear of the clutches. Just like you should have the same tire on the same axle.
Or if the tires are not the right size, especially in staggered setups.
If you come from a car that is FWD with AWD capabilities, it doesn't matter as much.
But BMW (at least the ones with the engine mounted longitudinally) which have xDrive are permanent AWD.
I'm sure it depends on market, but I also know 100% that if they will certify the battery as safe, and then you get electrocuted when entering your car because the battery was not safe - they will be on the hook, in all developed markets. No one else, that cares about people safety, do the same thing for under $100. Even Tesla, that almost completely disregards any safety - be it "Full Self Driving" or "let's just change this, without checking if the battery is actually safe", does not do it under $100.
Depends on the brand and the model, there is a trend towards higher voltages because that implies lower currents and wiring is heavy and expensive.
It started out with (nominally, voltage can rise and fall based on charge levels) (30S) 144V packs, (96S) 352V is very common and there are (192S) packs that do 704V (but that are marketed as 400V and 800V respectively).
You don't want to get zapped by any of these, it's middle voltage DC which is quite dangerous, so the fuses definitely have a safety aspect in case of a crash, they are to protect emergency personnel from touching the frame and exposed wiring. But that's in case of a very serious crash, your average encounter with a rabbit might set off the crash detector (which can't really know ahead of time how bad a crash will be) but has extremely little chance of resulting in exposed wiring. In the case of BMW that rabbit could end up being pretty expensive.
> I'd personally prefer e.g. 48V even if that meant some more losses and/or thicker cables.
That's unfortunately not an option. The problem with the 600 to 1000 V domain is that it is able to creep where lower voltage would stay constrained and high enough that it can jump small gaps and start arcing spontaneously. The fact that it is DC makes it more dangerous still. But from an economy and practical engineering perspective it makes perfect sense. Keep in mind that these cars are often built using Lithium-Ion packs (though fortunately we are finally seeing a change here towards safer options, even if they are slightly less dense and more expensive), so the electrocution risks are small compared to the thermal runaway risks.
Running an EV off 48V would lead to a heavily, heavily compromised vehicle. There just aren’t components that can handle 5-10kA of current with a reasonable size.
Charging speed is directly related to the voltage of the pack. Even if your own vehicle had arm-thick cables to support high speed charging at 48v there is no quick charger in the world that could support it. You would be stuck in the bad old days of needing hours to recharge the battery on your EV.
No it's not, only in a practical sense. If you truly had 'arm thick cables', you could definitely charge a 48V battery just as fast. Practically speaking, though, you don't do this because every becomes so unmanageable that you can't build a charger, bus bars, etc, that would be able to match the charging speed.
The problem isn't the cables in your car, it is the cable between the DC fast charger's transformer and your car. They are already thermally limited, which is why you need higher voltages to support faster charging.
Like I said, this assumes you use ridiculous cabling and bus bars. You could design something that handles this, it would just be wildly impractically large and cost way too much money.
Also, the problem is definitely also the cables in your car. Moving to 48V would mean amperage would increase by 10-20x, which would mean cabling thickness would have to increase substantially.
It’d be a massive waste of electrical conductors to use 48V batteries due to ampacity. Higher voltage means lower ampacity and smaller conductors.
You’d need to use silver plated copper buss bar as conductors, 150kW @ 48VDC is 3125 Amps. I’m not familiar with DC ampacity tables, but you’d need (9) 3” conduits each containing (3) #500 MCM conductors for a three-phase 3125A alternating current circuit. One foot of #500MCM copper weighs 1.5 lbs, so each foot would have 27 times 1.5 lbs or 40.5 lbs per foot.
150kW @ 400V is 375A, a single set of #500MCM can carry the current, 4.5 lbs per foot.
The risk of being shocked by 400VDC while using the car is essentially 0, so they use higher voltage to save on conductor material.
There’s no way in hell I’d ever open up an EV battery myself and I know enough to do it safely. DC is incredibly scary, make sure to discharge your start/run caps if you replace them yourself!
What are you talking about? Yes I know how quickly I can get electrocuted when the battery pack is open. I just need to touch two exposed busbars ~30cm apart. Or my tool needs to touch them.
Exactly, you need to touch both plus and minus. You moved the goalpost from getting electrocuted driving your car due to shoddy quality remanufacturing of battery, to getting electrocuted while repairing the high voltage side of your vehicle. Remanufacturing quality does not come into play if you decide to touch plus and minus side of a HV battery.
Sorry I have no idea about this goalpost moving, maybe it's a language barrier. I'm just saying working on it is quite dangerous. But you can easily get electrocuted by shoddy remanufacturing (especially if someone drilled into the battery to replace a single cell - as EV Clinic shows in their videos), that's why there are additional safeties with regards to bad isolation. So I stand by both takes.
There's a difference between BMW ignoring their warranty and who gets found liable during the wrongful death lawsuit after the mechanic gets electrocuted due to poor/unsafe EV design.
I'm sure BMW would love to not be liable in those cases if they could just decide not to be liable, but inspections and fuses presumably turn out to be cheaper than the settlements they'd otherwise be paying.
If that was the issue you wouldn't be allowed to change your wheels on the side of the road. They'd be locked down to the car and require a complex software procedure to guarantee they were swapped correctly and won't endanger lives.
This is a professional shop raising the issues. They are liable for how the repair is done. BMW is just liable to lose money if people can easily fix their car at some other, cheaper, professional garage.
> Yes, as changing a tire is completely the same tool-and-knowledge level than repairing a EV Battery.
I think you are intentionally misrepresenting this and moving the goalposts to make your point. GP blamed safety and liability for the way the process looks like, not the complexity of the task. When it comes to safety you bet that an improperly installed or inspected wheel or tire can be dangerous.
A short internet search tells me [1][2] that some sort of tire malfunction causes tens of thousands of accidents and kills hundreds of people every year in the US alone. That doesn't include wheel malfunctions (e.g. wheel coming off). Yet this isn't locked behind some manufacturer approval and proprietary tools.
How BMW chose to approach this is profit driven. The old money printing machine from ICE maintenance, repairs, and spare parts is slowing down so they come up with new ways of extracting money. Like making the lives harder and more expensive for any non-BMW shop to do repairs. They're not alone in this, other brands do the same.
> If you would see how EV Clinic "repairs" Tesla batteries, you would not say they have any concern for liability.
More moving of goalposts mixed with not understanding what liability is, and where it belongs. So you tell me what's Tesla's liability when EV Clinic "repairs" a battery.
> I think you are intentionally misrepresenting this and moving the goalposts to make your point. GP blamed safety and liability for the way the process looks like, not the complexity of the task. When it comes to safety you bet that an improperly installed or inspected wheel or tire can be dangerous.
Sorry that you feel that way, it was not my intention. But improperly installed or inspected wheel or tire is A LOT less dangerous than crashed EV Battery. And in EU you have a lot of effort going even into this, Police can inspect (and does) the tire from the outside (+ regular mostly yearly MOTs). All new cars have to have pressure sensors in the tire. So I would say EU (where EV Clinic is present) is making a lot of the same strides to make everything around tires safer. And believe it or not, if you go buy any new car in EU, drive it 5 minutes and swap the wheels yourself, it'll flag an error! As the wheels need to have appropriate pressure sensors - that also need to be programmed into the vehicle for a lot of makes.
You think it's profit driven, I don't. Agree to disagree.
> More moving of goalposts mixed with not understanding what liability is, and where it belongs. So you tell me what's Tesla's liability when EV Clinic "repairs" a battery.
I was aiming at EV Clinics liability, not Teslas. And I can guarantee you that both Tesla and BMW take into consideration the bad press if someone, even non official mechanic, repairs their cars and then they kill someone/catch fire. Of course Tesla a lot less than BMW, I even have a feeling that this contributed more to how BMW does things, than profit.
Improperly installed wheels that have fallen off of vehicles in motion have killed not only the occupants of the vehicle but pedestrians and other motorists (especially motorcyclists) in the past. We also allow people to fill vehicles with highly combustible fluids with little to no oversight, which has caused fires and deaths.
There is a certain level of risk that is inevitable with moving multi-ton machines at lethal speeds, and deciding that this particular issue is where we are going to draw the line is dubious.
The point that "allowing this fuse to be replaced affordably is too much of a safety issue" is a cop out is valid.
I posted some links with data. You still think that improperly installing the only thing that keeps a speeding car on the road is not dangerous? You disagree even when the data is provided so that sets the bar for what your disagreement means.
BMW has manufactured engines and cars for over a century and historically they were relatively easy to fix by anyone. Their image in the press never suffered because of bad unofficial repairs.
All of this is trying to find a retroactive explanation that fits the result when the real reason is staring you in the face: they make money by making the owner entirely dependent on BMW as much as possible.
Your explanations are flimsy and disproven by data or history.
This is a great example of something that experience has dragged me, kicking and screaming, into grudgingly accepting: That ANY time you say “We will absolutely always only need one of these, EVER” you are wrong. No exceptions. Documents? Monitors? Mouse cursors? Network connections? Nope.
Testing is such a good counter example. "We will absolutely always only need one of these EVER". Then, uh, can you run your tests in parallel on your 128-core server? Or are you forced to run tests sequentially one at a time because it either utterly breaks or accidentally serializes when running tests in parallel? Womp womp sad trombone.
Any time I invent a cool thing, I go and try and find it online. Usually it's already an established product, which totally validates my feeling that the thing I invented is cool and would be a good product. :D
Occasionally it's (as far as I can tell) a legitimately new 'wow that's obvious' style thing and I consider prototyping it. :)
What have you prototyped recently? Anything you have released to market? I'm in the same general area by am teetering on actually launching products wouldn't mind connecting with a like minded e gineer
I think it's awesome that they can do this amazing fun esoteric stuff, but at the same time a small part of me thinks maybe they need to be doing something more meaningful in the real world.
I wonder, what would that be, that thing that is more meaningful?
I would make the case that, zoomed out far enough, nothing at all is meaningful, so you might as well make beautiful things, and this is a delightfully beautiful thing.
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