For a sobering look at the reality of electric vehicle fires, including his involvement in some original research, you can’t go passed StacheD:

https://youtube.com/@stachedtraining?si=rMfvXq_GFa1hT5ra

I went in and played a few videos. I'm not sure if anything in there is "sobering" to me (as an EV owner), all the incidents that he shows make sense and the physics are easy to understand.

He seems to be pretty knowledgeable about battery and EV architecture and the stated facts and numbers seem solid, but it also sounds like he takes great care not to scare away his flock of EV-hating idiots.

If we’ve got data, let’s go with the data.

If all we’ve got is opinions, let’s go with yours.

Amusingly, $20 to $30 per kilogram is about what we pay for groceries here in Australia from the supermarkets when averaged over a few bags of mixed items.

USD / kg?

either the OP is a poorly worded statement or I lost the plot, we're talking about shipping cost here? the price of lithium is a very big factor for battery pricing?

People just don’t realise how energy intensive a manufacturing economy is.

Which is fine if your fantasy includes offshoring all of that and shipping the finished products in to the local market.

Which, no matter how you slice it, has to be more energy intensive than manufacturing locally.

The globe looks radically different when presented in transport-energy-cost-distance.

Bulk container ships are crazy efficient. It makes more energy sense for a nation like France to trade with the eastern US than it does with Hungary.

nothing stops them from also using swarms of solar panels on their roofs to at minimum offset the energy needs, localized power plants to save on transmission costs, raw high voltage power.

Hetzner does this!

I’d like to add construction materials to the list of energy intensive products. Glass, bricks, rockwool and cement.

As a result of this and the child comments…

As an Australian. I often find myself saying things like “the wiring hardness, or loom, or cable, or whatever were calling it this week”.

Exasperated by living in a state other than the one I grew up in. South Australians are often easily spotted by their pronunciation of certain words.

If I recall correctly, a fully charged lead acid battery has an open circuit voltage of 13.6V.

So the alternator has to put out at least something higher than if it’s planning on recharging the battery after 500 to 700 amps have been pulled from it for a few seconds to start the engine.

Yeah, max CV charging voltage is ~14V, max charging C rate is ~0.2C, open circuit voltage at 100% is that 13.x range. And lead acids like to stay at 100% unlike Li-ion which likes 50% +/-30%, so "12V" ICE cars just use a bus voltage of 13-14V and wire the battery there. At any given moment, the car's "12V" bus voltage MUST be above 13.x and below 14.4(absolute max).

It's a bit perplexing that those lead acid systems are referred to as "12V" systems when that figure is effectively the 0% voltage, whereas 3.7V for single Li-ion cell is the 50% voltage.

e: also, ICE transients can be in kV range, coming from ignition mechanisms. I've heard that you can literally measure engine RPM by selecting 1/dt on an oscilloscope and dividing that by cylinder count.

The nominal range for automotive systems is 10-16v. If you are designing anything for automotive use that doesn’t work reliably in that range, you are manufacturing problems for people.

This. Most cars nowadays come with the so-called "smart" alternators that vary voltage wildly depending on the current driving conditions.

One minute you might be accelerating and the onboard voltage drops as the battery supplies most of electricity. Then, as you reach the crest of a hill and start engine-braking, the car frantically tries to convert all the available kinetic energy to electricity, raising the onboard voltage to quickly charge the battery.

>This. Most cars nowadays come with the so-called "smart" alternators that vary voltage wildly depending on the current driving conditions.

Which in practice means that they do a very miserly job charging the battery and are a ton more sensitive to a battery being in less than tip top shape so you can expect your battery lifetime to go down.

But it's a "win" because they pushed the serp belt change outside of whatever interval the reviewers who calculate TCO care about and they saved .000003mph in the process.

I typically fault anything above 15.6V as “that’s a bit high, your alternator might be on its way out” when working on automotive / caravan / camper van appliances and accessories.

For static voltage sure. For short term resilience against static electricity these units typically are specced to endure 2kV on each pin.

Diagnostic Trouble Codes?

Yes.

All the people who decided to stay in the Middle East even when the second carrier group was en route, and then thought they were news worth enough to get on camera and comment about there being no commercial flights out of there.