Let's Talk About EV Conversion

I am not a big fan of rooftop panels. Basically you put DC generation units with all connectors and wires in the place where you would never inspect and is exposed to the environment in the worst way. And if there is a short up there, you have no means of disconnecting the power from the short (because power comes from these panels in the roof).

Without means of storing the energy really the only realistic use is in the summer time to run AC for your house - you get the energy exactly at the time when you need it the most. My brother put 16kW panels on the roof - in good winter day they generated 1kWh during the entire day. As for charging the EV from your panels, you either drive at night, and charge during the day time, or you have two cars to be used every other day (only in good sunny day, because on cloudily day or winter panels may not give enough power for a charge).

I wrote it once, that the best and the most "green" solar power for cars comes from biodiesel - canola oil is very efficient for that. It is 100% solar energy stored in plants as well as the CO2 taken from the air. When you burn biodiesel you use that solar energy in a form of heat and return CO2 back to the air. 100% recycle. 100% solar powered. And canola oil has much better stored energy density than any modern battery with very minimal "self discharge rate". Did I mention about "super fast charging you car" with canola oil?

 

The same would be true for line power, except the power is coming from a big wire on a pole near the road, rather than your roof. The panels themselves are designed to handle a short circuit anyway. It's one of the ways they are rated.

Yes, absolutely. The same problem I stated for industrial generation is the same as for household generation: Storage. For households, batteries are obviously way more practical and should be a part of every system. Every panel install should have at least a smallish battery.

My current system (installed before we bought the house) has a 5kW set of panels and no battery. And yes, it's dumb, because even during the day in full sunlight and there's a power outage (common in our area of fire prone CA), I won't have power because the system is designed to have line power for the converter. Dumb dumb dumb.

The way it's set up (we have a grid tied system with PG&E), we basically add up all the power we use, and subtract the power we generate (all sorts of math involved to calculate peak and non peak rates) then settle up at the end of the year. It's stupid, and we're getting out of it (our area is converting to a community based system like SMUD).

But yes, the main advantage in that type of system is the electric AC during the summer. Ours is a heat pump. But even then, it wasn't enough to offset, at least the way PG&E was billing us.

Fossil fuels are just really old plants (and animals). It's still just stored solar energy. Same thing, just a different time scale.

Also, I'm more of a fan of growing food to eat it, not burn it in car engines.

The only reason we have things like high fructose corn syrup and other corn-based byproducts is because the government effectively pays farmers to grow way too much of it. Farmers love it, and it would be political suicide to end it, as evidenced by expansions of the programs requiring corn ethanol in our gas. So while it burns cleaner than traditional gasoline, biofuels are IMO a political solution to the problem, not one lead by science.

I don't think we have the capacity for everyone to burn used fry oil. Plus, when you add up the amount of fuel (traditional or bio) needed to produce those crops and refine the fuel, it's not as "carbon neutral" as you might think or want it to be. Some studies even show it increases CO2 emissions.

Then you have issues with monoculture. The Irish saw it with the potato famine, and more recently we saw it with bananas. A single, wide-spread crop can be devastated by a single bug or virus, etc... Then you're hosed completely.

But more to the point, diversity is key. Lots of people think they have the ONE idea that will solve the world's problems, but really it's a combo of all (or at least most) of them. If it weren't for the fact that biodiesel is based on food crops, I'd be all over that. There are attempts to use bacteria that effectively fart ethanol, which is promising.

Honestly, Hydrogen is probably a better alternative. But as with any of these newer technologies, it's producing it that's the issue.

 

It is not panels I'm worried about. It is all wires and connectors - especially connectors. They are in extreme environment (heat in the summer, water and freezing in winter, and mechanical stress from wind. Plastic in these connectors degrade contacts are overheating and here we have a roof fire fueled but the electricity from panels, which do not have build in fuses. Because of the system location (sloped roof) nobody does any preventive maintenance over there. It scares the shit out of me.

In Poland it used to be that you can take back 80% of the electricity you put into grid, but starting 2022 every household panels will be treated equal to a powerplant - any energy sold to the grid will have a wholesale price which is about 40% what you pay and as a producer you will pay income tax of that 40% too. This is dumb!

And speaking of SMUD I was lucky in California that we had SMUD (Sacramento county) - much better provider than PG&E.

Just don't think canola oil as a food - it is bad for you anyway. My second bet is Hydrogen too, but that gas is a real bitch to store - it leaks even through a solid metal.

And by the way, getting to a main subject of "converting 1st gen Tacoma to EV" I think it is just dumb. EV is efficient because it is a completely different design - the vehicle is build around the power plant (battery) and fitted with so many electronics and sensors to manage the power usage. Electrical steering, recovery breaking, throttle control, power distribution - all that is integrated into main computer. To make 1st gen Tacoma even remotely close to the EV performance and efficiency would require stripping the truck to a bare frame and start building it from scratch.

Converting gasoline powered car into EV would be as dumb as converting a steam locomotive to a diesel by replacing cylinder and pistons to burn fuel instead of using pressured water vapor.

 

So... assuming power generation is not an issue and you don't have an ideological objection to EV's, given a sufficient budget and time for the project, and given the motivation to do the project... how would you do it?

 

Too bad we can’t convert all dinosaurs to sequestered carbon.

you should watch some of the extreme testing they do.

 

I'd do my Land Cruiser the same as the EV Hummer conversion. He seems to have the perfect setup.

 

yes, it is the planet......there is nothing to 'prove' EV sales will continue to incrase as will anti - ICE legislation. Capitialiam dude

 

Well and humans to breathe cleaner air is a good gain also.

 

Darwin beats all comers. If you can’t adapt you’re doomed. Ice was great but it’s time to move on. For now all it needs is wheels and something to make it go so ev conversion is just swapping out the “make it go” part while we’re waiting on complete ground up solutions. Conversions have been around for decades while waiting on Detroit to read the room. In many instances the US did not lead in innovation but in turning it into mass production, that time has come again.

 

Yeah, like I said, I just don't see that as a real problem. People have had panels on their houses for decades now, and their homes don't just burst into flames. You're more likely to have a gas leak than an issue with a solar system.

Until recently, I live in SMUD territory. They were great, though I can't speak for their solar rates or anything, but I know they were always pretty forward thinking. PG&E is 100% about profit and it shows.

Canola oil is vegetable based. i.e. someone has to grow crops (food) to make it. I would rather that acreage go to growing food people can eat. There are a lot of starving people around the world, and people like to complain about how expensive food is, but people are using that land to grow oils we burn in cars.

And yeah, that's a big hurdle for H2, But there have been a lot of really interesting advancements lately, like on-site generation using solar-based electrolysis. As with most of these systems, the technologies have already existed for a while, the problem is infrastructure. That's getting to be less and less an issue with EVs. I think ideally, you'd have fueling stations with H2, EV plug ins, etc... just like we have diesel and petrol stations now.

I agree. They are neat tinkering projects but any ICE vehicle just wasn't designed for electric and can't possibly take advantage of the technology. Can it be done? Sure. Is it practical? Probably not. Is it efficient? No.

You might as well just slap the body of your favorite car/truck on an EV chassis. I do wish that EVs, namely the Cyber Truck we're so god awfully fugly. It looks like the illegitimate love child a Chevy Aztec and a Delorean.

The other thing that's really annoying to me with the current EV market is the power. The Rivian brags about having 800hp and 900 ft lbs of torque. Like who the F**K cares about 800hp unless it's a track car. Give me a truck with 300hp and can tow 5000 pounds for 300-400 miles.

But I mean, if we're being honest, that's all bio diesel is... Replacing fossil-based diesel with oil made from plants.

 

Remember light switch in Tacoma - runs 10A through that plug in the steering wheel - it degrades over time and burns eventually. All these plugs in sola panels are the same, it is exposed to the environment even worse. There have been already multiple incidents where electrical fire started on connectors to panels and wires. Guess what - usually they start fire at summer sunny noon - where they give the most current, and feed the fire with all possible energy they can make and because you can't turn it off it is a bitch to put the fire out. Fires do happen, and with panels aging it will be more and more.

The only reasonable option for solar panel farm would be ground based, where I can have easy access to each component for inspection and replacement, and it they start fire, the worse that can happen is a burned hole in the grass. Roof is the worse place for panels from the safety point of view.

Not everything people grow is for food. Forests are grown for a construction material, flowers are grown to be cut and sentenced to death for people to look at. Instead of bombing Nevada desert, maybe someone would use this land for crops. You will not eat it, so who cares how much "elements" are in there

On the other hand I'm curious how future planes or ships would look like if not powered by fossil fuel.

These are toys. Like with EV sedans that people are buying now, the time for tucks will come. Hopefully not in my life so it will be someone's else problem

 

You say "usually" but I'd like to see some statistics to that effect. More than just a news story of an electrical fire in a house with some panels on the roof...

Sure they happen. But just like battery fires in Teslas, it's not enough to warrant throwing the technology out the window. If anything, that's just a reason to not not go with the low bid for the install.

With the millions (billions?) of panels installed around the world, houses aren't bursting into flames.

I suggest talking to some actual electrical engineers or even some installers to get an idea if your fears are warranted or not.

There is a whole myriad of reasons converting deserts to crop land isn't the best idea. Water being the big one.

But I'm not generally opposed to bio diesel as a whole, but I don't think it should be pursued as *the* solution to fossil fuels. Just look at the issues the Central Valley has with subsidence from groundwater withdrawal, and that's just for growing food to eat (in a desert), and now you want to add industrial scale production of crops for fuel production on top of that.

If there is one thing that Tesla has shown, it is that EV cars will look the same as ICE (if we ignore the Cyber Truck, lol). There are electric container ships, semi's and locomotives currently in various stages of development. Spoiler alert: they look the same.

I don't pretend that EV is a one size fits all technology, no more than ICE is.

There are 100% electric, commercially available aircraft flying around right now. There are flight schools using them for pilot training.

You can go buy one. https://www.pipistrel-aircraft.com/locations/

But just like current EV technology, it's in its relative infancy and isn't yet universally practical for things like transatlantic flights. But people also forget how long it took to get an ICE aircraft to (reliably) fly across an ocean carrying more than a single person and some ham sandwiches.

Not anymore. Just in the last 10 years alone Tesla has turned EV's into a very practical mode of every-day transportation for a LOT of people - granted, those who can afford it. The first "cars" were electric, and for a long time, ICE cars were "toys" as well. Just because they aren't yet practical for everyone doesn't make them toys.

Personally, I can't wait for a practical (and affordable) electric truck. Electric is objectively better than ICE in every way except range. And if we were to be honest with ourselves, even the range limitations of electric aren't as much a limiting factor as we think they are. The VAST majority of the trips I take in my truck are under 100 miles (under 20 miles, really), and I'm not towing 5000 pounds everywhere I go. Even the 400+ mile road trips I take every summer towing the trailer COULD be reasonably achieved with currently available vehicles, they just cost more than my 4Runner, and I'd have to more planning as far as where I could charge. But again, that's an infrastructure issue, not a technology issue.

 

I am electrical engineer and I know shit happens. I am not saying that photo-panels are bad, I'm saying the roof of the house it really bad place to put them on. It is not a matter of the quality of the installation, but aging with lack of inspection and maintenance. Plastic connectors degrade, metal contacts corrode not mentioning mechanical stress imposed by the environment (not just wind and rain, but hail, tree branches or any other crap that weather brings on). It will be no problem if you can pop the hood like you do on your Tacoma and check if all wires or connectors are in a good shape. Solar farms do a routine maintenance on their panels. They inspect and replace faulty connectors or wires almost daily. You don't have that piece of mind with panels 20 feet up in the air.

Exactly. The entire push into EV is like this is fantastic technology just stupid people do not appreciate it. Politicians are setting an unrealistic deadlines for banning IC vehicles. But all that transition requires time to build the infrastructure while the technology is constantly changing (it is almost like a chasing a rabbit). We may get there some day, but I hope not in my life

 

I dunno man, going to the moon seemed like a pretty unrealistic goal, but in the span of less than a decade, we went from barely launching rockets into space to walking on the moon. Still boggles the mind, really.

Now we have interstellar spacecraft and robots that land on asteroids. Seems to me that the idea that it's "too hard" to make electric vehicles more of a reality is simply that we don't WANT it to be. And if you look at the industries that fund most politicians (on both sides of the isle), it makes sense why they don't really WANT to make it a reality. We've simply spent the last 100 years getting used to easy and cheap access to petrol powered cars, and still don't really give a shit what it's doing to the environment. And frankly, that's a terrible reason to resist it.

I guess what we need to do is convince the politicians that converting to electric and other alternative "green" fuel sources is how we beat the Russians, or I guess now it's how we beat Al Qaeda. Then we'll get shit done, and done quickly.

 

Why is it always a government issue?

Like said above, the government put us into this global hazard. Career politicians literally are only good at obtaining your vote so that they can continue obtaining votes… how does that actually produce anything?

Its people, individuals with imaginations and hobbies of converting their fucking 1st gen tacos to EV that kickstart new technologies. I might not, he/she might not, toyota might not even be successful in the long run. It just might inspire someone else though and it satiates the human need for exploration which leads to new discoveries. We as humans build on top of our predecessor’s ideas until one becomes mainstream and revolutionary.

We live in exciting times. Embrace it and drive what you like. Supercharged E85 build tacoma or a tesla swapped EV tacoma. Or a canola oil 4BT swapped diesel tacoma. Use the solar panels that burned a hole in your shingles to synthesize some toxic methanol from CO2 in the atmosphere to power your new tacoma build…

 

Naa...let's talk tacos

 

Mmmm Birria tacos!!!

 

you know its a good taco when its so messy you need latex gloves to eat it…