Are you gonna get an electric car anytime soon? (Or do you already have one?)

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I'm not sure what you thought you were replying to but I will note that EVs don't "just" shift CO2 usage. EVs are wildly more efficient than gasoline cars, so much so that even if charged on a 100% coal fired electric grid(which exists nowhere in the us at this point), you're using less energy and producing less CO2 than a gasoline car.

Probably around 75% of EV owners are charging their cars from electricity generated from a coal, fired power plant. They are still the primary source of electricity in this country. Down the line is Natural, gas, then Hydro, then Nuclear, and lastly solar panels and power walls. And thus, by using mainly coal powered electricity you merely shifting the CO2 that the car itself would have generated over to the power plant. There is no way around it. It's a fact because of the way this country generates the majority it's AC power.

[Buck Wilson]

I don't think EV's do that, but hybrids definitely do. All EV's do right now is to move the CO2 output over to another source. That is unless you have Solar Panels and Power Walls. Then the people that do actually get a credit, or check back from their power company.

I'm not sure what you thought you were replying to but I will note that EVs don't "just" shift CO2 usage. EVs are wildly more efficient than gasoline cars, so much so that even if charged on a 100% coal fired electric grid(which exists nowhere in the us at this point), you're using less energy and producing less CO2 than a gasoline car.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I know this isn't your point, but with an EV you actually gain charge driving down a mountain

I don't think EV's do that, but hybrids definitely do. All EV's do right now is to move the CO2 output over to another source. That is unless you have Solar Panels and Power Walls. Then the people that do actually get a credit, or check back from their power company.

[Buck Wilson]

As a result of this, numerous vendors have appeared that offer to install these things on a profit sharing basis (the business hosting the chargers pays nothing up front, and receives a small percentage of the revenue they generate). The problem is that these charge the EV owners as much if not more than they would pay for gas to cover the equivalent distance.

I charge publicly daily and while it is twice the cost of charging at home(.10/kWh vs .20/kWh) it's STILL cheaper than gas, so costs do vary, it's not just a flat out "it's more than gas"

Drive-ins already keep a few "jump start carts" for use when customers discover a flat battery when they attempt to leave at the end of the show (typically 2-3 after each screening), so I guess that EV chargers will make these a thing of the past.

Beyond that, even if not charging, in an EV you can leave it "running" while parked unlike a gas car. It'll keep the 12v charged and you can sit there watching movies for 2 days if you want, WITH the A/C running. There's definetly perks.

His justification was that if you depend on an electric car for mobility and suddenly have to evacuate to escape a fire, having your battery go flat half way down the mountain would be a bit of a bummer.

I know this isn't your point, but with an EV you actually gain charge driving down a mountain

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

It's a pain but I keep doing the $4.99 a month deal and then I contact them and threaten to cancel before the full price charges start if they don't continue at the promotional price and so far they always give me another year. I'm not going to pay more than that for satellite radio but it is worth $5 a month with the amount of driving I do.

Back to the EV and practicality discussion, I watched this YouTube video yesterday showing how much the range of the F-150 lighting falls off when towing to the point that it seems completely useless.

Sirius has way too much blabber jabber. I'm not even willing to pay a nickle for that junk. I want music not someone's else's opinion.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

[QUOTE=Bobby Henderson;n24282]I really like the FLAC format. It's lossless yet supports embedded metadata and album cover artwork unlike LPCM WAV files. I just wish device support for FLAC was better.

I have my music collection set up where I can play parts or all of it on multiple kinds of devices or platforms. When I'm lifting weights at the gym I'll listen to music stored on my phone via a pair of Jabra ear buds. Samsung's stock music player app generally does a good job playing albums in "gapless" fashion./QUOTE]

I have mine set up in a similar way... The streamer feeds my router, and I also have JRiver on my phone.... We have a great College Station here that is commercial less, so I pretty much stick to that one. I can also feed my phone into my car audio systems for longer trips.

[Bobby Henderson]

I really like the FLAC format. It's lossless yet supports embedded metadata and album cover artwork unlike LPCM WAV files. I just wish device support for FLAC was better.

I have my music collection set up where I can play parts or all of it on multiple kinds of devices or platforms. When I'm lifting weights at the gym I'll listen to music stored on my phone via a pair of Jabra ear buds. Samsung's stock music player app generally does a good job playing albums in "gapless" fashion.

Vehicle entertainment systems and after market in-dash car stereos are hit and miss with what they'll read from something plugged into a USB port. Some car stereos have a limit of how many files they'll be willing to read. That limit could be as little as 256 files. Limits in the 2000-4000 file range are more common. I have a 32GB memory stick plugged into a USB port in my pickup truck's glove box. I have only a small portion of my music collection on that memory stick. I don't need to be scrolling through hundreds of album folders when driving down the road.

When I was in Colorado a few weeks ago I copied around 70GB of music albums in 320kb/s MP3 format for my brother to play in his old Jeep. At first I tried copying it all onto a single 128GB USB memory stick. The stereo system wouldn't read the memory stick (it was formatted in FAT32). I divided the collection across 3 32GB sticks and it worked. Funny thing: when I copied the same 70GB collection to a 400GB portable SSD the car stereo read the entire volume without any problem. SSDs work far faster than cheaper memory sticks. I'm guessing there is a certain latency limit the car stereo is willing to tolerate when cueing up audio files. It just rejects the whole volume if it's going to take too much time to parse.

The ever improving ability for people to carry around immense collections of music on smart phones or detachable USB volumes further lessens the relevance of broadcast radio. If I was buying an electric car, its ability to pick up AM radio broadcasts would mean very little to me. I would be more concerned with how well the car interfaced with my smart phone or read files from portable memory sticks or SSDs.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I rarely ever listen to broadcast radio anymore, be it FM or AM. Over the air radio might still be decent in really large markets like NYC, but it tends to suck everywhere else. IMHO, the only "good" radio station we have in Lawton is run by Cameron University, but it's a NPR affiliate. They air a mix of news/talk-radio and music, most of it Jazz or Classical. I'm a rock guy.

Our local commercial radio stations used to be decent 20+ years ago when they were mostly locally owned. They've all been bought and re-bought multiple times over since then. Each buyer has come in and trashed or deleted more and more of each station's music library. Playlists are ever more tightly controlled, if the station has any ability to play music on its own. Basically it's roughly the same dozen songs in a repeat loop for several months on end. There is a lot of automation and few human DJs on the payroll. Of course there's more commercials. The stations will still air these "bumpers" where some random person calls in a song request (of something they played barely an hour ago). Who the fuck do they think they're kidding?

Sirius|XM is a little better than traditional broadcast radio, but I think the service is kind of expensive.

One feature I look for in new cars is USB ports and their ability to play various kinds of audio files from different media, be it hardwired phone, cheap USB memory stick or a portable SSD. I'm a little disappointed my truck's stereo system can't play FLAC lossless audio files from attached media. My Galaxy S22 Ultra can play FLAC files. Still, WAV files or high bit rate MP3s aren't bad. I like being able to have much of my music library available to play at any time without having to cart along any physical CDs. I've never been a fan of those plastic binders where people slide naked discs into those clear sleeves. Those are a great way to ruin discs in short order. I usually RIP any store bought CD into LPCM WAV files and then export to other more portable formats afterward. The discs stay in perfect condition that way.

I have all my CD's and all the CD's that I wanted from the library system here ripped in flac mode on a media player I built. Id guess over 800 CD's so far and the 1 tb media drive is only 2/3's full. If anyone is contemplating building one I reccomend using JRiver as the control program. I ripped all my DVD's and Brue Rays as well. But I store those on a NAS.. And there are backups on other drives here and on a cloud. Too much time spent ripping all that stuff! I am actually about to get rid of all the CD's and dvd's.

Radio and TV are the same... tune in for a lot of commercials and a little bit of music, tv show or an abbreviated version of some movie. I don't even own a TV, but my other half does and likes to watch certain things. I rarely watch anything...

[Lyle Romer]

Sirius|XM is a little better than traditional broadcast radio, but I think the service is kind of expensive.

It's a pain but I keep doing the $4.99 a month deal and then I contact them and threaten to cancel before the full price charges start if they don't continue at the promotional price and so far they always give me another year. I'm not going to pay more than that for satellite radio but it is worth $5 a month with the amount of driving I do.

Back to the EV and practicality discussion, I watched this YouTube video yesterday showing how much the range of the F-150 lighting falls off when towing to the point that it seems completely useless.

[Bobby Henderson]

I rarely ever listen to broadcast radio anymore, be it FM or AM. Over the air radio might still be decent in really large markets like NYC, but it tends to suck everywhere else. IMHO, the only "good" radio station we have in Lawton is run by Cameron University, but it's a NPR affiliate. They air a mix of news/talk-radio and music, most of it Jazz or Classical. I'm a rock guy.

Our local commercial radio stations used to be decent 20+ years ago when they were mostly locally owned. They've all been bought and re-bought multiple times over since then. Each buyer has come in and trashed or deleted more and more of each station's music library. Playlists are ever more tightly controlled, if the station has any ability to play music on its own. Basically it's roughly the same dozen songs in a repeat loop for several months on end. There is a lot of automation and few human DJs on the payroll. Of course there's more commercials. The stations will still air these "bumpers" where some random person calls in a song request (of something they played barely an hour ago). Who the fuck do they think they're kidding?

Sirius|XM is a little better than traditional broadcast radio, but I think the service is kind of expensive.

One feature I look for in new cars is USB ports and their ability to play various kinds of audio files from different media, be it hardwired phone, cheap USB memory stick or a portable SSD. I'm a little disappointed my truck's stereo system can't play FLAC lossless audio files from attached media. My Galaxy S22 Ultra can play FLAC files. Still, WAV files or high bit rate MP3s aren't bad. I like being able to have much of my music library available to play at any time without having to cart along any physical CDs. I've never been a fan of those plastic binders where people slide naked discs into those clear sleeves. Those are a great way to ruin discs in short order. I usually RIP any store bought CD into LPCM WAV files and then export to other more portable formats afterward. The discs stay in perfect condition that way.

[Martin Brooks]

Some electric vehicles don't include AM radios, but some do. I've read online that the Hyundai Ioniq 5 has an AM radio and posters have claimed it works fine. I think AM radio has been primarily removed from EV's (and ICE's as well) sold in Europe and that's mainly because most countries have dropped AM radio.
But AM radio is slowly dying as almost no one under 55 listens to it and advertisers don't care much about people over 55 because correctly or incorrectly, they feel it takes far more impressions to convince an older person to buy a product. There are a few AM stations that still do well, like 1010 WINS (all-news) and WCBS-AM (all news) in New York, although their ad revenue is half what it was 20 years ago (which is why CBS spun off those stations to Audacy in 2017). Meanwhile, Audacy's stock price is 34 cents a share and if they don't do a reverse split, they're going to be de-listed. They announced today that they're going to simulcast 1010 WINS on 92.3 FM.
KFI (owned by iHeart) did well until 2018, when it still generated enough ad revenue to place it in the top 10 stations in the U.S., but it's fallen off the list since then. But even then, it generated $54.4 million in 2008 but it dropped to $35 million in 2018. All stations had severe ad revenue declines in 2020 and they increased slightly in 2021.

By the time California and New York's new laws that conventional vehicles can't be registered in the state after 2034 (and assuming that those laws aren't overturned between now and then, which is very possible if Republicans gain back power in those states), most AM probably won't exist anymore anyway. It's 100-year-old technology whose time has past.

[Leo Enticknap]

Bringing this very neatly back to topic, even if I do say so myself, I read somewhere that you simply can't receive AM radio in an electric vehicle: something to do with EMI produced by inverters buggers up the signal, and the workarounds are so pricey that neither Tesla nor any of their competitors have ever come up with a fix. The problem for me is that although I could use the iHeart app piping the audio via Bluetooth to the car audio, that app won't run in the background while having another one on the phone's screen. I rely on my cellphone for navigation (Waze), often to service calls at sites I haven't driven to before, and so need Waze on the phone's screen all the time I'm driving. If I send the iHeart app into the background, its audio output stops. I guess that this is because they want to force me to look at the app's on screen ads. Annoyingly enough, my car (a 2018 Honda HR-V) was the last model year not to have Apple CarPlay (which would enable me to send Waze to the car's screen, while the iHeart ads appear on the phone); but as long as I'm in this car, I need AM radio in order to be able to hear John and Ken and use a navigation app. When the time comes to move to an EV, if AM reception is simply not possible in them, I'll need a solution that enables me to hear KFI via mobile Internet, while simultaneously using a navigation app. But for the moment, it's AM640 for me.

[Mike Blakesley]

KFI's signal doesn't reach here...I usually listen to Handel in podcast format on iHeart Radio.

There was a guy writing on Quora about how the whole "we don't have the infrastructure for everybody to be charging electric cars all the time" thing is actually false, and it's somehow actually better for the electric grid to have a lot of cars charging. I don't know how that's possible.

[Leo Enticknap]

I listen to the "Bill Handel Show" on L.A. radio station KFI from time to time.

You can get KFI as far north as Montana?! KFI has an unusually powerful transmitter, because it has held its FCC license for such a long time (1922), that it just hung on continuously to the 50,000 watt license that was given out without question in the very early days of radio. It's been broadcasting on AM640 continuously for just over a century, and I was quite surprised that the centenary wasn't mentioned (that I'm aware of) on any of their shows around March 30, when the license was first issued. I've heard KFI clearly as far away as the Bay Area, Vegas, and Tucson, but I didn't know that the signal reached Montana. I listen to John and Ken on most afternoons, driving back from service calls.

Anyways, back to topic:

matt_electriccars.png

He was talking a few days ago about how California governor had implored residents to cut back on water usage last spring due to the drought.

It gets better. A big wildfire near Hemet broke out during a heatwave, in which Newsom was telling us to save electricity between 4pm and 9pm to avoid the risk of outages: don't run dishwashers, turn down the a/c, and, of course, don't charge electric cars. In response, the sheriff of Riverside County (who is politically about as opposed to Newsom as it's possible to be in California) hit the local media imploring people to ignore him, and for electric car owners to keep them fully charged at all times, regardless of when they are plugged in. His justification was that if you depend on an electric car for mobility and suddenly have to evacuate to escape a fire, having your battery go flat half way down the mountain would be a bit of a bummer.

[Mike Blakesley]

I listen to the "Bill Handel Show" on L.A. radio station KFI from time to time. He was talking a few days ago about how California governor had implored residents to cut back on water usage last spring due to the drought. Take shorter showers, don't water the lawn, don't wash the car, dont' flush the yellow water, etc. So what happened? During the months after his campaign, water usage INCREASED.

If it involves "lifestyle changes," I fear this country is going to have a real issue with that. Change is going to have to come very slowly, if it's going to be broadly accepted. Forcing it down people's throats won't go over well.