At Least EVs Have Just One Battery . . .

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EV batteries have many faults. They are preposterously inefficient as energy storage devices. It takes about 800 pounds of EV battery to store the energy equivalent of about half a tank of gas (which weighs less than 50 pounds). It takes a preposterously long time for them to recover the energy they burn through so quickly (this business of characterizing as “fast” having to wait 30 minutes to recover a partial charge is akin to characterizing as “public servants” people who tell you what to do).

Massively heavy EV batteries also accelerate the wear of tires (which are made of rubber, which is made of petroleum) and accelerate the obsolescing of vehicles, which when battery powered don’t last as long – requiring fresh raw materials to make new ones and using more energy to get the raw materials and transform them into new battery powered devices.

But at least EVs have just the one battery.

Most new cars have two. A main and an auxiliary battery. Because most new cars have ASS – the wonderfully apt acronym for Automatic Stop/Start “technology.” Part of this “technology” is a secondary battery that ASSists with all that stop-starting, which burns up a lot of electricity.

Ordinarily – in the days before ASS – a car had a single 12v battery that started the engine.

Italics to emphasize the singular.

Once started, the engine ran until the driver shut it off – as by turning the ignition to Off. In between, the engine replenished the charge that was discharged by starting the engine so that the battery would be ready to start the engine again when it was time to go for another drive.

In the era of ASS, the engine is repeatedly being re-started after having been repeatedly stopped by the “technology” every time the car stops moving, as while waiting to get going again at a red light. It is not uncommon, during the course of a morning drive-to-work in stop-and-go traffic, for the engine to be stop/started a dozen times or more. This reduces the amount of that dreadful gas – carbon dioxide – that plants must have to live and which they use to produce the oxygen we must have to able to breathe. And that’s why almost all new cars that still have engines have ASS. It is a compliance tool that the car manufacturers use to enable them to continue building cars that aren’t entirely battery powered devices.

There is almost no meaningful gas mileage “savings.” You might see a 1 MPG overall gain.

That’s why – in the Before Time – the counsel was to not shut off the car’s engine while waiting at a red light. Just the same as the law still says that shutting off the engine (or putting the transmission in neutral, which amounts to the same thing) while the car is coasting downhill is illegal – because doing that can be unsafe – because it can reduce traction/stability, especially in a rear-drive vehicle that’s light in the tail.

Never mind. It is now a different time.

You will, however, gain something else. Something that is necessary because of what ASS costs – beyond the annoyance of the engine constantly shutting itself off and then re-starting, accompanied by a noticeable sound/feel and slight delay. The car manufacturers have reduced the delay to almost none. But it is not none. It takes a moment for the ASS system to restart the engine and that means an additional moment before the car will move. If you’re one of those Before Times drivers who is ready to go when the light turns green, it is annoying to be obliged to pause a moment while the car gets ready to go. ASS is probably contributing significantly to slowed-down response times at intersections, worsening traffic which – oh, the humanity – probably results in more fuel wasted overall than is “saved” by ASS.

Never mind, again.

And the gain?

It is the second battery that is part of the ASS “technology,” made necessary (apparently) by the heavy-lifting expected of the starting/electrical system. Each restart requires electrical power to turn the starter motor that turns the engine over. Most ASS-equipped cars have a very high-torque starter that turns the engine over very quickly, so as to get it started as close to instantaneously as possible. As you can imagine, this draws a lot of electricity. If you can’t imagine it, think about starting your car’s engine, then shutting it off. Then doing that again. And again. And again. How long before it won’t start – because you drained the battery?

Ordinarily, once started, the running engine mechanically powers the alternator – which then replenishes the charge lost in starting the engine (as well as producing the electricity need to power the car’s electrical systems). The battery is resting – and recovering – while you’re driving.

Assuming the engine’s running.

But if ASS is involved, the battery – if there’s just the one – will be struggling to handle all those serial restarts and keep the accessories powered while the engine off; the alternator may not be able to replenish the charge lost, if the engine isn’t running long enough to accomplish that. The result can be a depleted starter battery – and a car that might not start. Adding a second battery (apparently, to store up some extra charge for the ASS system, to keep the car’s accessories powered up when the engine is off ) is the salve for this compliance-created problem.

Naturally, the buyer pays for this – twice. Once, up front – when he buys the car. Then again, sometime later – when the secondary battery inevitably dies. The latter cost to be paid at the dealership – because the secondary battery is not easily replaced by the owner.

Come to think of it, neither is the primary battery. It is no longer a simple matter of disconnecting two cables and removing it, then replacing it with a new battery and re-connecting the two cables. If you disconnect the battery in this Before Times way, you may not be able to start the car again – even if the battery is brand new and has plenty of charge.

More about this here, if interested.

Speaking of interest… . Did anyone ask for ASS?

You might as well ask whether anyone asked for “advanced driver assistance technology.”

Such questions are anachronisms; lingering habits from the Before Times, when cars were fitted out with the equipment buyers wanted. In this time, they are fitted with equipment almost no one wants – yet everyone is obliged to suffer who is still willing to buy a new car.

. . .

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57 COMMENTS

  1. It’s amazing how in such a short period of time, people went from being skeptical about new (especially UNSOLICITED) technology, to calling us “luddites” and/or “technophobes” for not “embracing” it. It’s almost as if life suddenly became a popularity contest. Surely, antisocial media had absolutely nothing to do with it. /s Whatever. The dildos shall reap what they sow.

    BTW, EVs don’t have one battery; they have one MODULE made up of HUNDREDS of cells. 😉

    • It’s amazing how in such a short period of time, people went from being skeptical about new (especially UNSOLICITED) technology, to calling us “luddites” and/or “technophobes” for not “embracing” it.

      The EV was rejected by the marketplace a century ago (!) because something better came along (i.e. the ICE-powered car). Even to this day the EV hasn’t managed to close the gap, and the ICE-powered car still remains superior. Bear that in mind when someone tries to convince you otherwise, and realise that this someone might just be a Luddite…

  2. It makes me wonder what kind of vehicle we could come up with, if real Americans (not the woke kind) were “allowed” to build them? You know, the kind without the nannies, saaafety crap and such on them. With 8-cylinder engines, and the gas mileage be damned. Or maybe not, as wasn’t there someone back in the day that had the technology for better gas mileage, only to have such bought and buried by the oil companies (maybe someone can clarify this for me one way or the other)? Aaah, to dream of just such a vehicle, that wasn’t made of plastic, and lasted longer than the car loan? Sorry, got carried away there for a minute…

  3. Again, we have idiots in charge of design. No mention of how many more starters will need to be replaced. Let’s hope they are industrial grade. How many fewer vehicles will be able to get through a green light if all of them have a built in delay to start moving? What stupid, idiotic thinking we have allowed to impact our lives. And to think it will make a difference only makes it more unbelievable.

    • Hi John,

      Yup. I’ve been test driving new cars for 30 years and have loved cars since I was a kid. I find new cars as appealing tome personally as Face Diapers, for they amount to the same thing. I will never own a car with a touchscreen or “assistance” technology. That rules them all out – the new one,I mean. Including otherwise appealing ones like the Miata – which also comes with the god-damned sail fawn interface erupting from the dashboard and has “assistance” technology you cannot opt out of. The Miata.

      It’s cloying and insulting – like insisting an able-bodied person walk around with a walker, because after all – he might require “assistance.”

      • If you need assistance technology, you should probably not be driving a Miata. I once had a 2008 Miata that had Traction Stability Control. If I forgot to turn it off upon starting it, it was constantly fighting me in curves. Not a particularly safe thing.

  4. I turn off the ASS on my car every single time. Pushing that button has become as automatic as putting the car in gear. The glitch that the car goes through to start to drive if I don’t turn it off is really disturbing.

    As for other battery issues, I used to have a 2008 Porsche Boxster (before someone decided to crash into me and total the car). I had that car for nearly 12 years. When the battery had to be changed, I had only about 5 minutes to disconnect it and put the new one in. Any longer and the entire system would shut down and be unable to be rebooted without the dealership.

    • There is a product out there now that is a small battery that feeds the car’s electronics 12V through the OBD2 port. This could also be done with a secondary battery or jump pack connected to the battery cables. It’s just nonsense and crap design.

  5. A recent trip to Portugal which included 4 rentals revealed that ASS is common in mid-range sedans, along with a bundle of other nannified add-ons, like a large white ring light that would spin on the dash when passing a merge lane on an expressway- it took a few hours to figure out the pattern that activated it. There is a whole range of exclamation-pointed messages that would appear occasionally, for which I had only vague guesses as to what menaces were massing against us. My favorite was a ‘safety’ feature that would redirect the steering into the current travel lane if the blinker wasn’t activated while changing lanes, which I’ll admit I don’t do when no other cars are around; the first time I felt it, I was sure that there was an impending blowout and I cut across 3 lanes to get to the shoulder, ghost steering gently but intently fighting me along the way. Now, all these systems could be deactivated, but take some getting used to- I left the last one on just to express recalcitrance to all this digital ‘assistance’. I remember visiting a friend of the family back in the mid-70’s in Bratislava, a dentist who had the means to afford a car. At every light, his engine cut out and a spinning flywheel would, if the light were short enough, provide a kickstart on green. Maybe that’s what motivates the modern officious regulators- a little Volga envy!

  6. While I wasn’t shopping for an EV last year, I did poke around the web sites and noted that the several EVs I checked had an in-the-days-before-AS/S 12v battery. For these _and_ the ICE vehicles I researched, I downloaded the owner manuals.

    The 2024 Chevy I settled on has AS/S, of course. The one and only 12v battery is an AGM deep cycle. And yeah, I won’t be able to replace that when it dies. My Snap-On tool chest has finally become household appliance and power garden tool specific.

    When AS/S does a stop, one of the cylinders is at TDC; a fuel inject, a spark and a poke from the starter gets it running. (I believe it was Mazda that worked unsuccessfully to use that TDC process without starter involvement.) The same is used to start the car, near instantaneous. For thirty years I listened to the sounds of a starter cranking reverberate in my garage. No more.

    GM used spring-loaded accumulator for 1st gear. But now it’s an electric pump maintaining persistent in-gear pressure.

    Those are just the tip of the iceberg in the tech involved. My owner’s manual cites 14 occurrences where the AS/S won’t kick in (HVAC on) or will restart while stopped (battery needs topping off, engine temp).

    When I press on the accelerator, it goes NOW. As in, no “it takes a moment” at all. One can barely feel it. Friends and relatives are astounded. My gear head buds acknowledge the tech is impressive, even the ones who read Eric’s rotary dial pulse phone era framed commentary.

    All that said, that AS/S can’t be toggled off, as in never on, is blatantly unconstitutional.

    The Car Care Nut has an excellent video on how the latest AS/S works. Enter TTBN8Ic57Gg in the YouTube search bar.

    • “My gear head buds acknowledge the tech is impressive”

      Do they also acknowledge the absolute uselessness of and lack of necessity for the technology? How is it necessary and useful? What are the benefits? 1 mpg?

      Impressively designed uselessness.

      “Eric’s rotary dial pulse phone era framed commentary”

      Do you mean the era of functional, market driven design? How quaint.

      • You misconstrue impressed with approve One can be impressed by apple’s or google’s tech in snooping and selling your data using their devices (aka “phones”).

        Granted, your attitude indicates you’re filthy rich without need for a financial benefits, but 1 MPG over, say, 25000 mi/yr at $3.50/gal adds up (use your “phone” to calculate it out). The value is more like 5 MPG for dense city driving.

        Functional, market driven design exists for all eras.

        My points were to highlight that Eric was wrong, again (i.e. one battery). And the AS/S tech has evolved beyond his whining and sniveling about it. Both from user experience and an engineered integration of ICE hardware and software. From a TDC bump, to a deep cycle battery, to slow-drain top end and heavier oil. Repeat: Enter TTBN8Ic57Gg in the YouTube search bar.

  7. ASS SUCKS!

    The only time I ever encountered this ASS Nonsense was having to take an Uber back to an AirBnb in Paris June 6, 2019..

    It was a Citroen? and for the life of me….the “mechanical appliance”….cut out every time the guy stopped!!!

    Approx. 2 miles to the destination …And the thing shut off 40-50 times during a 2 mile drive!

    Sorry about the exclamation points… but did I mention ASS SUCKS!!!

    I got a headache after the 15th time the thing shut down and FARTED to start again.

    Wow!!! If the proles put up with this Shit….Glad I’m 67 with no progeny….

  8. You want a battery? I can get you a battery by three o’clock this afternoon.

    A restless daydream
    Thoughts of jail
    Dust clouds rising
    Up and down the trail
    – Jimmy Buffet, Rancho Deluxe

    Great movie, a cult classic.

    Had a flashlight with two D-cell batteries, tried to switch it on, no light. Opened the canister, both batteries were breached. Got too cold, the D-cell batteries quietly exploded or something. Purdy much an omen there.

    Thermite reactions are used to weld ribbon rail so there are no fish plates and joints between rails. One solid length of rail for one thousand miles.

    The real world has advanced in the last two centuries, despite all of the war and upheaval.

    There are enough natural disasters and diseases in this world, war isn’t really necessary anymore.

    Peace is better.

    Time to drink.

  9. The concept of ASS is best utilized in a hybrid. A well-designed hybrid like a Prius will use it’s traction battery and motor to offset any lag in starting motion of the car. In addition, it uses a small 12v battery for lighting, and acc. loads, but that battery is topped up by a dc to dc converter from the traction battery, thus eliminating another alternator load on the ice. The transition is quite seamless and gives my Prius 45 plus mpg.

  10. Oh the hubris of humans.

    Calling the different gasses that make up the atmosphere a threat to the planet when those gasses were here long before the stench of humans permeated the air. Boy, did God FU when he gave Man dominion over this beautiful planet he created.

    • CO2 emissions are a proxy for energy usage. The crackdown on CO2 emissions is therefore an indirect way of attacking people’s use of and access to energy, thereby curtailing their freedom.

      The trick is to make people themselves think this is a good idea, or even a necessity.

  11. The ASS delay is downright dangerous. They’re in love with roundabouts here in WA, and the one near me is a mess sitting between two truck stops right off the freeway. You, and your car, need to be razor sharp to make the gaps in traffic and not get whacked. Several times I’ve forgotten to turn ASS off and the damn thing shuts off just as I’m getting ready to jump and the delay in restart is just enough to miss the gap. Great way to get rear ended there as well, car behind sees the brake lights go out you make a slight roll then slam the brakes back on since ASS delay prevents a safe jump.

      • we’ve got a ’21? grand cherokee w the v6 (newer body style).
        I do the imbedded coding ritual of silencing the seatbelt chime, one down.
        then I noticed something new. as I drive around the 25mph town or slower, when I come to a stop, the ass now sends me a message “ASS is disabled because the seatbelt is not buckled” or somehting like that. double win 🙂

        Now when I hit the highway, i do buckle up, but forget many times to hit the ass disable button, but I’ve yet to have enough time with the car to try to defeat ass permanently. my favorite trick is just a paper clip, we’ll see.

        • My understanding is that shorting two pins on the ASS button for Fords shuts it off permanently. Or rather it probably always sees the button as depressed turning it off.

          • yes, at least on my ’18 F150 it did. it was the 5.0 v8 version, and the ass button had to be pressed every re-start. got me a couple potential accidents because I would forget to hit the button. I could not find a work around like some cars have. So I took the button out (10min.) and jumped the wires. It worked. no ass ever again.
            when i traded the car in I forgot to take out the jumper and told the dealer what i did. he said thank you.
            Manuf. would be smart to make this defeat easy. so far all my FCA-Stellantis cars have not had ass or can easily defeat permanently with a setting. Although we just got a used ’21 grand cherokee and it has it, and have to push button every re-start. I have not had enough time with it to figure out a permanent solution, and there is no setting I can find. i will experiment with jumping the button next.

    • Nothing is free…. even speech, and no piece of paper, government, or court can guarantee it.

      The amendments to the present constitution was just that… amendments. The ‘founders’ that overthrew the Articles had no intention of any thing other than to consolidate power. The amendments were included to get several of the colonies/states to ratify. They knew a strong central government would eviscerate them in due time. These were not stupid men! They lied when they said the constitutional convention was to fix a couple of problems with the Articles. The biggest problem for them being the Articles specifically stated the States and People were sovereign. OMG!
      All clowngresses and El Presidenties since have done their part to destroy these amendments usually by redefining them as they redefined a vaccine and plandemic or dictating by ‘executive order’.

  12. The ASS on my Cherokee only works when the transmission is in drive. On Tuesday I got stuck behind a wreck and sat for 30 minutes. Had I left the ASS function engaged when I put the vehicle in park the engine would have started back up again. Of course at idle and no torque converter load an engine is burning almost no gasoline aside from making heat, so I really didn’t emit much CO2 while waiting for the heroes to clear the highway.

    Like the old hit-and-miss engines that only fire when they need to kick the flywheel back up to speed. No load, the flywheel will spin for several revs before needing more energy input. Big load, the engine will fire every revolution of the flywheel.

  13. My 2014 Audi A8 has ASS but doesn’t have a secondary battery, it’s not a “mild hybrid” as they have started calling it apparently. And, you can turn it off permanently, which I do.

    However, the 2024 SUV that I bought is a mild hybrid and does have that secondary battery. Unlike the A8, I have to turn off the ASS every time I start the car. There is a button right along side the ignition button. Once in a while, I do forget to turn it off. But the moment that I see the indicator come on at a stop light, then I’m reminded to turn it off right then.

    I see that the car indicates that it is charging that secondary battery all the time. I’m betting that, even if I never use the ASS, that battery is going to have to be replaced or the car won’t run whether or not you intend to use ASS. It’s battery after all, even if all you do is let it discharge and recharge it, it’s going to die eventually. And it’s apparently very integral to the operation of the car anyway. I’m pretty sure it runs all manner of subsystems on the car like the entertainment system and the climate control system.

    I’m wondering if my extended warranty is going to cover replacement of that secondary battery. I doubt it. It’s probably considered to be “consumable” like windshield wipers, etc.

  14. ‘cars are fitted with equipment almost no one wants’ — eric

    Auto makers remind one of the mainstream media in 2016, complacently assuming that ‘Her Turn Hillary’ was a lock for the presidency. Then they got a shocking surprise.

    Though they can carry on stuffing their fleet sales channels, auto makers don’t seem to notice that their increasingly costly, complex and dysfunctional devices [sic] are meeting buyer resistance.

    It’s not just EeeVees, which even the dimwits of the Woke press now see are ‘so 2021, dude.’ No, little by little, the scuttlebutt is getting round that new ICE vehicles are profoundly owner-unfriendly: Nanny tech out the wazoo. Surveillance and personal data harvesting. Almost no user-serviceable components. Crippling repair bills after the warranty expires, and the risk of getting bricked for lack of an obsolete chip.

    As ol’ Ape Lincoln joked (while taking a break from slaughtering half a million Americans), ‘You can fool all people some of the time and some people all the time. But you can never fool all people all the time.’

    Auto makers are headed for the same startling wake-up call as the Hildabeest: their former loyal customers are slowly, covertly drifting away, never to return. The savvy ones — the ones who can’t be fooled anytime — fiercely resent that these co-opted, gov-whipped dinosaurs cravenly sold them down the river on everything from ‘CO₂ pollution’ to impaired driving detection.

    Now it is their turn to pay, as we impassively watch them writhe and spasm in tar pits of their own making, while laffing with our saucy concubines and popping brewskis to cheer on their impending demise. 🙂

    • Technology is so far ahead of what’s necessary for the average person, but Moore’s law is progressing along anyway. Most processors are sitting idle for much of their existence. There’s little need for much more than 500 Mbps Internet for most families. So no one notices when there’s a lot of background processes going on inside their devices. And everyone likes free, right?

      I can buy a processor that can easily run a car’s ignition system for $4, retail. You want network connectivity? That’s another $2. Need a circuit board for that? Pay by the square inch, just upload Gerber files and get finished & populated boards for ~$10 each, delivered. The rest is just programming, and for an established player like Ford or VW, most of that’s just reusing old repositories and fixing bugs.

      Might as well dump more features on, everyone else is doing it. And it costs almost nothing, less than the cost of plastic and steel. And heck, you might even be able to gets some incremental revenue from selling satellite radio, or remote starting over the Internet (why?), or “free” unlocking services.

      I remember the first time I saw an ad at a gas pump. There goes the neighborhood. But it must not be as lucrative as I thought it would be, since I still only see them on a few pumps, many of which have been vandalized. As the FED pops bubbles I think there will be a shaking out of all this spy stuff by corporate America as they discover that they’re being played and none of this “research” converts to sales.

      The government OTOH…

    • A bit of doggerel to accompany my rant:

      I once knew GM
      In the years of my youth
      With eyes like the summer
      All beauty and truth
      In the morning I fled
      Left a note and it read
      Someday you will be loathed

      I cannot pretend that I felt any regret
      Cause each broken car will eventually mend
      As the blood runs red down the needle and thread
      Someday you will be loathed

      — Death Cab for Cutie, Someday You Will Be Loved

  15. 1958 Chevy pickup straight 6, it’s not fast but no emissions, no power steering or brakes, a real bench seat, foot start. Needs to be tickled first thing in the morning, then starts first try all day long. I have points so after that solar flare EMP event, it will still start no problem. The whole climate change is a con to get you to buy air.

    • Hi Viti,

      Your ’58 was a “classic” just a few years ago. Today, it and vehicles like it are the best form of practical transportation one can own.

    • Yeah. My 1957 F-100 had all those, too. And the fuel tank in the cab (!), all four brakes on one cylinder, and a solid steel steering rod (as in, a spear) from the box to the wheel. Really nice V8, tho. And who needs to work out when ya got a heavy clutch pedal and three on a tree?

  16. People love gadgetry. I’ve had arguments with people holding advanced engineering degrees over ASS, individuals who should know better but think the mechanism is “cool” and will eventually be perfected.

  17. This doesn’t even take into account all the energy required to manufacture and recycle these “extra” secondary batteries.
    The city where I work has converted traffic lanes to bike lanes. So at intersections traffic stacks up more. Less vehicles get through the green light, so vehicles sit idling more, wasting more fuel for bicycles that you never see. More unintended consequences!! Govment!

  18. My BEV has two batteries, and most do. Actually, I think all do. The 12V battery runs the accessories so it is smaller than a battery needed to start an ICEV. Many BEVs have problems with the 12V battery. If it dies, you cannot start the car. Pretty funny, actually. No starter, but without the 12V battery you can’t start your BEV.

      • My wife has no desire to get one either. I love mine though. 0-60 in 3.6 seconds never gets old. I floor it after every stop, except when my wife is with me. Taking curves and spinning the wheels is so much fun. It is by far the most fun car I have ever owned. And if you can’t have fun in a car, what’s the point of owning one? Just transportation? Not for me.

  19. Everyone thought Obummer was a passing fad and that this still was the United States of America. Little did we know that the Marxist/Communist Obummer would remain in the shadows, pulling all the strings, and turning our country into the United Soviet States of America.

    • Obama is a fabian socialist. The icon for the fabian society is a turtle. Slow and steady destroys the world.

      O’Biden is just an old school crooked politician. His senate tenure was for the state of Delaware, home of every corporation in the United States. He’s no socialist, just an old fool who follows orders as long as he gets a piece of the action. He was put on the ticket in 2008 to balance out the socialist Obama, but because he could just reuse the Obama staff we have what we have.

    • Barry Soetoro Obama isn’t smart enough to have done anything. He was a stooge of the globalists that installed him in the first place. (No way could anyone go from a nobody community organizer to the White House in 2-1/2 years without big time help…and fraud). His actions were to help destroy this country and he did a bang-up job of it. Yes, the actions he was told to do still are hurting us, including setting back race relations 50 years or more.

      • At that level, everyone is handled. But you’re correct in that old Barry’s political career probably should have ended with a stint running the Ecumenical Liberation Army (from the film Network). But I think he benefited from a very large contingent of people who would never let another Clinton into the Oval Office, and he was the closest thing to a competitor. Only one stupid enough to take on the Clinton machine, and it paid off. Not because he was worth a damn, but because he showed up.

        https://youtu.be/CuqvlMxfGA4?si=_Div5luQt4ZkiOMA

  20. I’m sorry but the premise for this article, that an EV has only one battery, is false! Have you ever seen an EV battery? It is made up of a large number of individual batteries, all connected in series/parallel to make a high voltage dc battery! One cell goes bad and the battery either shuts down or lights up (on fire)!

    • A battery is a group of individual cells. Typically a single cell will produce 1.2 – 1.5 V for traditional chemistry, 4.3 V for lithium. Ganging them together will build up to the desired voltage.

      I’ve seen old telecom batteries that are made of cells that are about the size of a 5 gallon bucket (only shorter) that are 1.5 V each. They’re ganged together to make the -48 VDC that ran the phone network for a century.

      • I have one of those types for a doorstop here at my shop. It isn’t much bigger than a .30 cal ammo box, but it’s about 30 lbs, lol!

    • Hi Looney,

      You’re right – and I ought to have made that clear. An EV battery pack is a collection of battery cells. But for purposes of discussion, I used “battery.” Apologies for any confusion this may have caused.

  21. Fuel is still not efficiently burned on a re-start. The reason there is any savings is the number of cars in densely populated regions that sit for extended periods of time at tragic signals placed every 100 yards. Add up all the immobile idling vehicles, and that is where the ‘fuel savings’ statistic comes from. Individuals who have infrequent stops are just wasting fuel at the stop-start locations they do encounter. In other words, any ‘savings’ only amount to a fart in hailstorm.

  22. Don’t give them any ideas. They may add a “reserve” EV battery to assuage rang anxiety. One that will get you home, maybe. If it isn’t too cold or hot, or if you aren’t driving at night. Meanwhile, while I don’t drive much anymore, my 05 Accord just keeps chugging along, with its 12 volt starter battery and its alternator, and a maintenance charger for long periods of not being driven. Which means it’s near a full charge almost every time I start it.

  23. ‘In this time, [cars] are fitted with equipment almost no one wants.’ — eric

    Like many other aspects of weaponized government, ASS is a legacy of the saintly Barack Obama:

    ‘In 2009, an historic agreement between the federal government, state regulators, and auto makers implemented the first meaningful fuel efficiency improvements in over 30 years and the first-ever global warming pollution standards for light-duty vehicles.

    ‘It grew out of new CAFE standards passed by Congress in 2007, the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, and global warming pollution standards enacted in California and then adopted by 13 other states and DC.

    ‘The deal allowed automakers to build a single national fleet of new vehicles that comply with federal and state requirements under both the Clean Air Act and CAFE standards.’

    https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/brief-history-us-fuel-efficiency

    Clearly, the US fedgov used its widely-known bailout of a bankrupted auto industry to shove this hardly-known agreement down their throats. But who did this?

    After resisting climate changers and Californicators during the Bush admin, EPA suddenly flipped under Obama and its new administrator, the now-forgotten Lisa P Jackson. For its part, CARB states that:

    ‘In May 2009, several automakers, California, and the federal government committed to a series of actions to resolve disputes over [greenhouse gas] standards through model year 2016. On July 8, 2009, U.S. EPA granted California a waiver for the Pavley regulations. (74 Fed. Reg. 32,744, July 8, 2009.)’

    Given its effect on the vehicles of today, one would expect books to have been written about this momentous diktat of the early Obamao regime. But I can’t find any. What the HELL happened here? And why did almost no one notice it at the time?

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