Drew Dowdell

No reason... no reason at all that I play this often.

He wants to start a war with Canada not realizing that most of us south of the border would fight on the Canadian side.

Stellantis has paused all work at its Brampton Assembly Plant while it decides the fate of the next generation Jeep Compass. Production of pilot models of the next generation Compass was originally to begin on January 20th, however, the company decided last autumn to move the pilot production start date into May of 2025. Originally scheduled to go into full production in February of 2026 as a fully electric vehicle with a gasoline version offered later. The sudden resignation of Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares in December of 2024 has Stellantis reevaluating product roadmaps across all of its brands. Stellantis has not said how long the pause in activity would be nor if there would be any temporary layoffs. They did state that their investment plans to retool the plant have not changed. Prior to shutting down for retooling, the Brampton plant was the home to the Chrysler 300, Dodge Challenger, and Dodge Charger. The retooled facility is planned to support vehicles on Stellantis' STLA Medium platform that can support electric, hybrids, and gasoline vehicles. The Compass was set to go into production for the European market in 2025 with production in Melfi, Italy, later expanding to North America and global markets the following year. A source inside the company said, “I believe they’re reevaluating whether a battery-electric Jeep Compass makes sense for the North American market”. Related: 2025 Jeep Wagoneer S and Dodge Charger Will Share EV Platform View full article

No trips to red states for us, especially Texas. Canadians are $500m in tourism to Texas and are showing remarkable solidarity with redirecting their travel plans. We'll visit Toronto or Delaware instead.

Two policy updates for you to read: Generative AI Policy User Generated Content Policy

After weeks of weather in the teens or below, decided to give these two a mid-winter warmup.

I'm pulling back hard on spending. My vehicles are weeks (300c) or months (Avalanche) from being paid off. The LLC that owns C&G got some new contracts recently and I'm going to be writing off every last thing I can. Both of us may be putting a lot of expensable miles on soon and we might find a cheap EV lease to take advantage of the situation and keep the miles off the ICE vehicles.

All of that waste is reprocessable back into fuel again, but due to outdated regulations and fear mongering dating back to the 1970s, it is only waste because we say it is waste. Breeder reactors can extract additional energy out of those nuclear byproducts and turn it back into useable fuel in another type of reactor. The only reason we don't do that is because it could be used to make bomb quality isotopes. But if WE are the ones doing it, why are we afraid we might accidentally make the bomb isotopes? The remaining radioactive material left over from those next two steps in the process, if we got out of our own way and did them, would condense the entire container seen above down to a relatively benign thimble size.

Oh, yeah, they never actually put that into production like they did with the Mirai.

There was a Richard Craver and a Fahad Butt a year behind me in high school. At the energy company I worked for we had a Keister, two Cox (married couple), a Dick, and a guy named Halong Wang but shortened his first name to Harry. If you ever get stuck on the tracks, your first call is to 911 and they'll call the RR.

I'm not sure what you're referring to. BMW is the one making a hydrogen engine (though they'll fail too). Toyota builds/built a hydrogen fuel cell. The only difference between a fuel cell and an EV is how you "recharge" it. It's just an EV with a different kind of battery, and it performs decently well. The failure of hydrogen, regardless of if its an ICE (BMW) or fuel-cell (Toyota and others), is that it is expensive to produce both in dollars and in energy input. You never end up with more energy from hydrogen than you put into producing it, thus making it nothing more than an expensive and hard to transport battery system. Lithium and the other rare-earth metals might be expensive to get out of the ground, but you get to use them for well over a decade and a couple hundred thousand miles and they are input agnostic. EV batteries don't care if the electricity is generated by solar, wind, nukes, hydro, or @A Horse With No Name burning scrap wood in a boiler in his garage hooked up to a vintage steam engine.

Do me a favor. Pick up some N95s just to have. This new bird flu. The timeline of cases is eerily similar to the start of Covid. First a case in Vancouver. Now 60 cases in California. A case in Louisiana. Lions and tigers in an animal sanctuary dropping dead. It’s clearly made the jump to mammals. All 50 states have chicken farms vastly infected. It has a higher mortality rate than covid.

And you have other road trip cars to rack up miles on too.

Even though some degradation is expected, with ranges as high as they are getting these days, it's not really going to affect your day-to-day life if you're charging at home each night. A newer EV with a 320 mile range from the factory will still get 265 miles of range if the battery degrades to 80% after 12 years. That's still a longer range than some base model Tesla Model-3s

A commonly held perception about lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles and hybrids may not be true according to a Stanford University study that shows the batteries lasting longer than earlier lab tests had shown. In a paper published on December 9th, researchers from the SLAC-Stanford Battery Center and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory monitored differences in battery health when the batteries were subjected to two types of battery charge and discharge cycled. The most commonly used method of lab testing batteries involves charging and discharging the batteries using a constant current. Another more involved test, called Dynamic Cycling, mimics real-world activity more closely with surges in use followed by rest and regeneration cycles. The researchers found that the batteries subjected to the dynamic cycle test fared better in in health metrics such as the degradation of electrodes and lithium. The team tested four charge-discharge patterns to 92 sample batteries over two years and found that the closer to real world use the pattern was, the better the health results of the battery at the end of the test with up to a 40 percent improvement over the standard test. The results were unexpected because the researchers thought rapid changes in charge-discharge in the dynamic cycling test would cause faster degradation of the battery components. Fear of expensive battery replacement costs had impacted the adoption of electric vehicles despite the likelihood that they will last 12 years or more. View full article

For at least the next 5-7 years, nearly all EVs will need to come with an adaptor of some sort from the manufacturer as the charging network converts. If not NACS to CCS, then CCS to NACS.

Where did you find the car? I'm not familiar with that. The Stage kit for the HHR SS brought output to 290 hp and one of our members here got a stage kit for his HHR SS a while back, but 389 hp is nearly a 100 hp jump over what GM ever offered, and the rest of the car would have needed to be beefed up too.

Oh? The "E-Class" name first appeared with the facelifted W124 in 1993 for the model year 1994 (the W124 was introduced in 1984 but continued with the older naming convention until 1993 when all Mercedes-Benz models switched to a new system, e.g. E 320 instead of 300 E)