Electrify America has a lot of their chargers at Walmart, so I’ve probably been to about 50 different Walmarts the last 2 1/2 years. Good to see them scaling up.
1200v architecture, wow. I’m a little surprised at the LFP battery, maybe the chemistry has improved there.
A reason to be cautious about buying a used Tesla. I imagine it could be a factor with other brands as well with prior accident damage.
So glad we don’t have to see more of this stunningly ugly POS car in Europe.
https://electrek.co/2025/09/30/u-s-army-confirms-tesla-cybertruck-cant-be-imported-in-europe/
Sounds like anyone considering a used tesla purchase should stop by the superchargers to test them out. Unless Telsa will provide a searchable vin list of banned cars.
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Well, that adds to the list of reasons that Swasticars are so expensive to insure, and why they contribute to auto insurance premium inflation in general.
UK has become BYD’s largest international market
Their pricing is basically impossible to beat.
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My car would be totaled by that ding.
Lol, that would knock out 3 of mine 
They’ve just unveiled the updated Bolt - a welcome return. It looks very similar to the old Bolt EUV. The charging is much faster (the one reason we didn’t buy the old one) - 10 to 80% in 26 minutes. It also has V2H. The cheapest trim will be under 30K.
This looks like a real winner. $30k is pretty cheap, a Civic hatchback starts at $29k, or $30k for a hybrid, for reference. Factor in fuel savings and it’s pretty darn affordable. It also has a NACS plug and the LFP battery is nice, I’m curious to see real world range. 26 minutes to charge will still be a hang-up for some folks, it’s better but not great. Oh, and being able to pump out 9.6kW with the V2H is impressive, that’s a lot of juice.
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I think 26 minutes for that charge is fine for now, at least at that price point. I don’t think there will be anything available at that price with a significantly faster charging speed for the next 3-4 years in the US. Solid state will be a game changer but will start with the more expensive cars first.
Our 2023 VW ID4 takes about the same time to charge. Compared to ICE, it adds up to about an extra hour of waiting for a full day (500 to 800 miles) of driving. We only have 8-10 days of full-day driving a year (although this might be more than most people), so we don’t mind. For someone who does a full day at least a couple of days a month it might start to get annoying.
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Fair. I know on road trips, charging costs something roughly comparable to gas. Varies by location, but crudely I think they are comparable. But for folks who can charge at home… I wonder if the occasional inconvenience will be acceptable knowing that ~90% of your charging is done at home (I know, not everyone can charge where they live) where it’s so much cheaper than gas.
Although saying that, I was asked recently how much charging costs compared to gas, I don’t think the secret is out yet that charging at home is very cheap*, and zero oil changes.
'* Charging is not cheap in San Diego, Hawaii, etc, YMMV, not financial advice.
Time to install the Solar panels for free, frere, free miles! (Sunk Cost notwithstanding.)
Question: how many panels are needed to gather enough energy to “fill” an EV?
Yes, EVs are different from each other. Let’s just go with what we know
Also, good news in HI is that the trips are never too long.
IIRC solar panels are rated for roughly 400w per panel in full sunlight. If you wanted to fill an 80 kWh battery from 0 - 100% you’d need roughly 200 panel hours to get a full charge. Efficiency also matters, so your panel to storage, storage to car losses would increase that number. Details are where it gets interesting.
More realistically, let’s say you drive 12k miles per year, 33 miles per day. At 300wH/mile you need 10kWh per day.
But what, 200w on average over the course of a day. And the length of the day varies by region and season, and cloud cover varies by region and season, and so on. Details, as you say. But if you can average 10 hours at 200w, 2kWh per day, per panel. So five panels might keep you ‘reasonably’ charged, but would require some grid juice here and there.
how big is this (assume standardized) panel?
About 5.5’ x 3.25’, but they vary slightly by mfgr.
Don’t you also need to account for at least a portion of your driving / time away from home occurring during daylight hours?
You’d either need to scale up the number of panels to capture that daylight time away from home, or factor in battery storage (and the costs of periodically replacing the batteries), or plan on additional grid usage.
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Home storage is mostly moving to LFP, (if not already there) which has a relatively high number of cycles for lifetime. Might be a 30 year kind of investment, like asphalt roofs.
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