The powerwall upgrade, rolling outages, covid and working from home

2020 has been tough on a lot of us, especially since our weak leadership and apparently coordinated fake news campaigns have confused enough people to fail to protect themselves and others with masks, and has us stuck with a much more severe outbreak of covid than any other developed country in the world.

Things have changed forever, and we are slowly getting used to a new reality of working from home, remote school attendance, and monitoring not just the weather but also the death rate and infection rates due to covid.

The weather today

COVID cases per day

Deaths per day

Grid tied solar gets shut down by PG&E in grid power outages

Living with solar power since 2015 has been a boon in terms of reducing fuel cost and not feeling powerless (haha) when PG&E shuts down the local grid in a desperate effort of wildfire prevention. In those events, grid-tied solar actually gets shut down as well, to prevent feeding of power into the grid while crews are potentially doing maintenance in your neighborhood.

A workaround we had already designed into our 10kW solar system in 2015, was to have inverters that allow manually disconnecting from the grid, and using an emergency power outlet to consume some of the solar generated energy instead of it evaporating unused altogether. Before working from home was a thing, we figured, we can survive without the AC running, as long as we can run a long power cord to the fridge and freezer to avoid food from spoiling.

2020 a new reality, working from home

2020 with the new reality of working from home, 100F summers, and a memory of extended power outages in 2019, our neighbors and us were looking at generators, but handling fossil fuels and doing maintenance on those and dealing with their noise just felt so… 1960 ?

Thankfully California has a rather generous self generated incentive program (SGIP) that along with the federal solar investment tax credit (ITC) which applies to solar and home battery installations, makes home batteries actually affordable and amortize in less than their lifetime.

So in March, we finally got an installation of three Powerwalls. Why three?

Tesla app showing charge state

Tesla app showing solar feeding home AC and grid for credit

Tesla app showing current power flow

Three is better than two, especially if the price is the same

We originally asked for quotes for one or two. Since we wanted to run the whole house off of it and not have to worry about only powering and separating out critical circuits (fridge works, AC doesn’t etc) we were pretty set on two home batteries. Using three however allows you to use a different tier of the SGIP which essentially pays for the third battery, and was not as oversubscribed as the default tier.

So now we have 40kWh of capacity backing our home, and spikes of use from AC running at the same time as the electrical dryer and cooking are just going to be covered regardless of power outages or not.

Smart automation

The powerwall software is actually pretty smart, using machine learning and energy forecasts (weather implying AC use) in order to take advantage of our EV2-A PG&E time of use plan, which has different per kWh pricing depending on the time of day.

Just showing battery charge (below) and discharge (above)

Showing battery, grid and solar

Showing home consumption in blue

Time of use based electricity rate plans, net metering

Solar homes usually are selecting a time of use rate plan that incentivizes donating your surplus of electricity generated to the grid with higher prices at day, while consuming cheap mostly unused electricity at night.

The beauty is that with a so called net-metering agreement, you get billed yearly for the difference between all you consumed and all you produced, and they give you pennies on the dollar if you produced more than you consumed, or bill you regular prices if you consumed more than you produced over that year.

EV-A, the too good to be true plan

We used to be on the EV-A plan, which I would call the ‘too good to be true plan’ which would perfectly align with solar homes and electric driving in pre-covid times. You charge your cars over night, and they are full in the morning, paying $0.13/kWh. While you are away from home, and parked at your workplace, your home solar produces electricity from about 8am to 8pm, which happens to be credited at $0.25/kWh mid-peak and $0.45/kWh at peak time. This makes sense because this is also the time that other neighbors of yours use the most electricity running their air conditioning and cooking lunch or dinner, so it’s the perfect time to donate your surplus energy.

I call this the too-good-to-be-true plan because it essentially stretched our daily solar production which can range from 15kWh to 60kWh depending on time of the year to almost three times that when we used most of that at night for charging our cars. It’s as if the grid is your battery, unless there are power outages, but that gives you 3 times the electricity at night for the same cost as what you donated it at day.

In consequence, until we added solar in 2015, we used to pay $2400/year to PG&E, and from 2015-2020 we paid less than $100/year, each year, in return to supplying

All good things have got to come to an end. RIP EV-A, here comes EV2-A

Eventually PG&E had to fix this situation, and they went a bit overboard. They forced us from the EV-A plan to a new EV2-A plan, which basically gives you lowest price for your solar generated power until 3pm, mid-peak pricing till 4pm, and peak pricing from 4-9pm.  Also the off-peak rate is now $0.17 instead of $0.13. Incidentally, homes in our climate also need the most AC from about 3pm when the heat outside is the highest. I bet you can tell how that this is a much worse deal for the consumer/producer already, while being more fair to PG&E by pricing electricity higher when it is actually in higher demand.

Yay, driving with solar power !

Now because of covid and working from home, this actually coincides somewhat nicely for us. The car is parked and connected to the charger at home most of the day now. Instead of charging the car from a partially dirty power mix at night, we now can charge from 100% clean solar power until 3pm at the same price as over night.

Guilt free acceleration!

But with us driving so much less while working from home, that is actually not as much of a big deal as before.

Time shifting demand

The Powerwalls now allow us to absorb the solar energy produced from 8am to 3pm and use the cheap off-peak grid electricity until then, and stop using the grid electricity from 3pm to midnight, allowing at least most of the solar power generated between 3pm and 8pm to be fed to the grid and compensated at peak pricing instead of partially being used by our home.

This means, our power hungry AC, dinner cooking, electric dryer etc, runs off of the battery when the per kWh price adjusts up, and should allow us to still not pay much for electricity per year, despite the devastating change in compensation plan that EV2-A brought.

Where there is light, there is shadow

So what are the downsides to adding a home battery in covid times?

First off, understand that the SGIP comes with certain restrictions, and I have not fully understood all the nuances of why it is this way, and how much is regulations due to SGIP and how much because of other details of PG&E and powerwall operation permits:

Being able to shift power does NOT mean you can charge your battery at night at low price and deplete it in the day at highest price, cashing on on the arbitrage.

It only allows consuming self generated power from the battery, which ideally you do at peak while donating all currently generated solar power to the grid instead of consuming part of it yourself.

Thankfully you don’t have to sit and micromanage any of that yourself, because the powerwall has an advanced mode that uses machine learning and energy forecasts to adapt the flow of power in your home as needed.

The surge in demand by more and more people working from home, and PG&E having scared so many people in 2019 with random long lasting power outages, makes it difficult to get reasonable timelines and correct answers on incentives. Talking to Tesla, their sales person outright said, SGIP incentives are already oversubscribed, buy it without it, or look at third party installers that are not tapped out yet.  Some people are waiting months to get theirs.

We got ours installed by a local installer that was working with us to secure SGIP.

Another downside is that now that I can infer through the near realtime power consumption graphs in the Tesla app what consumes how much, I am even more obsessed with efficiency, and want to upgrade the insulation on the home next.

By having the project happily scoped with SGIP offsetting the sizable total cost in the end, this will affect the property value from a property tax standpoint and cost of property tax per year will go up, clawing back some of that incentive over time.

Lastly, the software using machine learning to adapt to the time of use plan is far from perfect, and switching modes manually as you try to make it better, it confuses the algorithm further. This can be quite aggravating to observe.

Where there is shadow, there is light

While the machine learning based power control automation doesn’t always seem to do the right thing yet, the powerwall updates its software automatically as new versions get released, so performance and feature improvements will happen over time, just like with our cars.

Also it has a storm watch mode, i.e. when an extreme weather event is on the horizon, if enabled, the powerwall will actually charge from grid and solar at the same time to minimize time to 100%, and reserve the power in case there is a prolonged power outage. Note this also triggered when rolling outages where a thing because of extreme heat and unusually high electricity demand from air conditioning.

Where there is light, there is a future

Being powered on sunlight overall is great. According to rumors, Tesla may have battery technology breakthroughs lined up that allow future cars and home battery and solar homes to eventually be part of a virtual power grid that uses an autoarbitter software to shape the individual contributors demand and supply of energy to coincincide better with the grids needs. So rather than having fixed time ranges in a time of use plan, I imagine there will be dynamic pricing that allows the grid to not be impacted when a central power plant goes offline temporarily. It may very well allow us to shut down not just coal but also gas peaker plants, and generate revenue for the homeowners to offset their investment into power infrastructure. We will learn more about their ambitious plans at battery day which has been rescheduled to September 2020 last time I checked.

Audi e-tron event September 19th on 90 Broadway in San Francisco – first impressions

I saw an advertisement on facebook about the Audi etron ‘Visit the Charging Station Unleashed and preview the all-electric e-tron in person. Electric has gone Audi.’ inviting people on September 19th to 90 Broadway, promising a newly erected charging station. So I parked my Model 3 across the street and went to take a closer look:

It was a cool event with some free candy and swag, showing parked electric Audi cars.

No test drives, I was especially hoping to see the e-Tron in action, but according to the technical sales person I talked to, it’s a european model, which can only charge on L2 charger because CCS standard in Europe has a different contact layout than the US one and is therefore incompatible, and they don’t give test drives because of that. They would have driven it to Tahoe, arrived with 7 miles of range, charged it back up and drove back down to SF arriving with 95 miles of range left. So the EPA may come in around 200 miles of range.

Also when asked about how much kW charge-rate they actually see when connected to that new charger, they say 90% full in 30 minutes, car max is 150kW rate, battery size is 95kWh.  Pressed on if they plugged it into the 350 kW charger and what it would display it turns out the location actually does not have enough power to run the 350kW charger so it was more of a proof of concept (mockup?) than a usable thing.

The cars on display looked like cool concept cars, while the eTron was supposed to be pretty close to what production what would look like:

The technical sales person showed me the eTron, we sat in it and played with the controls, nice 360 cameras, software still somewhat unfinished and not super responsive.

Its obviously still rooted in legacy carmaker engineering, for example you cannot turn on the AC unless you first press the stupid ignition on/off button that Tesla got rid of in 2012 when they introduced the Model S. I hated that in my 2015 VW EGolf too, that I thankfully was able to trade for a Tesla Model 3 in 2018. I hope eventually legacy car makers get the memo that improved workflow is more important than saving old concepts over into the new age for the sake of familiarity.

Even after the AC was turned on, it was not very effective and did not cool down the car very fast. The comment of the sales person was, that maybe its in power-save mode since the battery range was showing only 59 miles.  Hopefully that is something that can be fixed before production, there is no reason why you should not be able to cool down your car with still close to 30% of charge left.

The navigation does require quite a few steps to get going, but once it got the route it does show where to charge and for how long, sadly the display is too small to see the full itinerary.  Note that somebody had sun lotion on their hands and the touchscreen had white streaks from it that are distracting below, otherwise the brightness and antiglare high contrast display was excellent.

The navigation said I could not go all the way from SF to LA yet because it did not know about enough charging stations along the way. The ones it picked were L2 only and so the charge times recommended were multiple hours long.

The CCS port looks a lot better than the jaguar i-pace, i.e. blends better with the rest of the body panels, and the combo portion cover folds down instead of dangling down like an air-matress valve cover as is the case for the i-pace (orange picture):

The frunk is bigger than the jaguar i-pace but much smaller than model 3, s or x. Probably too shallow for even just a standard piece of carry-on luggage.

You can tell its legacy car design with all the stuff exposed in the frunk, too. 

For comparison: Model 3 (gray) and i-pace (orange):

 

The trunk seems less deep than model 3, basically seems like less space overall. A big chunk of it is taken up by an audio speaker.

The car had a thin sounding radio but no streaming service, however it does have a still-empty app-store, so you can pay for and install those things later from inside your car entertainment system. 

For now it assumes you want to use your phone for these things via apple car-play integration. 

In addition it will have alexa as a personal assistant in the car, so you can say ‘its too cold’ and it turns up the heater.

The sales person also said they have over the air updates so things get better over time tesla style.  He also claimed that for europe they would already have level 5 autonomy, mostly would be a regulatory problem at this point. I am not convinced of that, but will look it up. 

He basically said all the hardware needed for it including lidar would be in the car already, but lidar would only be looking to the front for long distance vision.

For the dashboard behind the steering wheel, there are different dash board configurations you can select, so each driver can have their own style of how information is displayed.

Both  screens, the one behind the steering wheel and the one on the side seem to have a pretty good size and stunning contrast, much less glare than what I am used to from tesla. However its a pity those are separate instead of one big screen, i.e. when reviewing the itinerary of the trip the navigation figured out its too small to show more than 3 stops at the same time. 

The suspension adjusts with the driver profile, if you want high or low, and it autoadjusts not only with speed but also with the terrain. 

My conclusion: Hard to say without driving it first, but while this is no tesla, it should be a big improvement over the gas version of say the Q7. Audi-lovers will be happy to see their favorite brand start the transition into the age of sustainable energy based transporation, get the immediate electric torque and the convenience of charging at home over night instead of going to gas stations babysitting the refuel process all the time. They will also ove the typical Audi options like roof racks, backseat entertainment systems for kids etc that tesla does not yet offer. The software will hopefully improve by the time the first cars end in their customers hands.

2018 Tesla Model 3 – driving for Lyft for fun

This post is kind of lenghty, but I think well worth reading. I split it into subsections:

Introduction, Model 3 on Lyft, Lyft driving in general and the conclusion. 

Introduction

I am no stranger to teslas performance and autopilot, we replaced our last gas car end of May 2016 with a Tesla Model X, after the last time teslas stock was recovering from being artificially suppressed by lots of ‘creative news’ about car fires (despite gas cars having more such), or about how they are never going to build model x etc, and I had just kept buying on the downturns including some options. So in a way you could say tesla shorts paid for my Model X, which I also justified as a means to validate my investment.

You gotta live with it to really know its potential. And so after being wowed by owning the Model X, and my mind blown by Elon’s presentation of the Model 3, I had the hopeful expectation when I reserved my Model 3 that this still holds true, even at half the cost of a comparable model S. But I have to admit I was somewhat concerned that the economy ‘model e’ would have sacrifized some of its tesla appeal in order to get to that price point.

I can now confirm, the ride in the Model 3 is legendary and no downgrade, especially if you like dynamic, sporty driving.

So when I got my Model 3 in January, I did expect it to be more fun than the 2015 VW eGolf it replaced, but I had no idea how much more fun. I ended up putting more than 6000 miles on the car in just a few months and found myself tooling around in the mountains and playing with cornering, hugging the apex, learning how to use autopilot driver assist to my advantage in dynamic driving, enjoying different seat settings while in stop and go traffic etc, loving the streaming of about anything in highest audio quality. Autopilot is really a god-sent in stop and go traffic, turns a commute nightmare into a relaxation opportunity. Check out this small video from my commute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aB_uGz_6gI

And eventually I realized, I am spending an hour before work each day just having fun driving around, which seemed like a waste somehow. So I was ready for my next adventure: Signing up to drive for Lyft. 

           

Obviously this pays a lot less per hour than my day-job, but the idea is to do this only for fun and when doing unproductive car fun-time anyways. If I am already spending extra time in the car, I might as well pick people up and bring them to where they need to be.

It took me about 3 days from the idea to giving my first ride, which is pretty amazing IMHO, the longest wait was for DMV and background check, which took about a day to show up checkmarked in the app.

Since I drive this car so much, its uniquenesses seems normal to me now, but to have passengers that mostly never have seen one before is an interesting way to look at it with fresh eyes.

Model 3 on Lyft

I love how I can just put my personal belongings into the frunk and have an empty clean trunk for my riders,  most important when picking up from the airport.

The door handles and controls however are definitely not intuitive for a first time rider.

Almost every single passenger is confused at first about how to open the door, both from the outside as well as from the inside, there was exactly one that just figured it out right away.

My quick intro is ‘push the bigger piece of the handle with your thumb’ and then they say ‘oh wow, cool’ and it works.

When they want to get out, there is confusion again. I tell them ‘push the little switch with that white line’ and point to it. Again you would think that would be annoying as an experience, but somehow they find it amazing again, they somehow like how the door pops open and they just push it out. And maybe also because of the rest of the experience.

Another point of confusion is the window control. Nobody opened the door yet by accident, but especially when driving in the dark it is not obvious at first on how to control your window, and I often just do it for them. I learned how to turn on the lights in the back for them from my screen, and that helps.

A definite plus however is performance, looks, quality of the music streaming and voice control.

I usually ask them if they want to listen to music, and if they have a favorite artist, then use voice control to start for example like ‘play phantogram’. 

Often they say: ‘I listen to anything’ and so I challenge them a bit with bassnectar, and let them know they can change their mind anytime. Turns out they more often than not actually like it.

Also I get to listen to cool music I didnt know about before, and get delighted responses like somebody asking for coldplay and it happens to pick their favorite song. I get comments from audiophiles how unexpectedly excellent the sound quality is.

My favorite new song I am super grateful for learning about is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98bi0dxJGGc 

People are generally wowed by the quality of the ride:

‘I must have gotten a silent upgrade, normally its priuses or something’

‘this car really has pickup’ 

‘this feels more like riding in a train, I mean the road bumps you still feel but there is no vibrating and shaking, its like gliding really’

‘wow, I didnt notice that all-glass roof until now’

‘wow, I got to sell my S4 and get this’

‘you really made my day, I have wanted to sit in a model 3 for so long’

So far have been able to maintain a clean 5.0 driver rating, probably in part because of the unexpectedly awesome car  🙂

LR Range is more than enough for me, since I don’t drive all day, and the car is super efficient since I drive a lot more conservative and mindful about comfort when I have passengers.

I end up using less than 220 Wh/mile on my rides. When I have fun between rides I can consume closer to 270Wh/m 🙂

One sunday night I wanted to see how far I get with a full charge, filled it up to 310 mile range, and started driving at 8:30pm. By 1:30am and 11 rides later I had enough fun, and still 180 mile range left, and headed home, parking with 144 mile range in my garage, having driven 134 miles and consumed 36kWh of energy, which thanks to home solar I can recharge for free, but at the californian supercharger this would cost me $9.36

Lyft driving in general

People are generally very friendly and reasonable. Most don’t tip. The ones that do surprise you.

Driving late at night means driving more drunk people which carries the risk of soiling your car, but also results in more interesting stories to tell at parties (no names mentioned obviously) but so far so good. Driving before work is better than driving at night.

I now also always carry some water with me, that people are really thankful for, i.e. when they come from a long sunny day in the city and are all dehydrated.

Lyfts driver app has a red overlay of areas with surge pricing in effect. I spent a few hours taking screenshots every now and then to log when they start showing up and going away. 

Chasing the red (surge rate areas) was often not useful for me, typically evaporated before I arrived, and I get reasonable amounts of rides wherever I am in the SF bay area. I talked to another new driver and he had a similar experience. 

I don’t think I average more than $20/h, especially factoring in driving to pickups etc, last sunday night I did average $26/h thanks to more tips and surge pricing than usual.

I usually use destination mode on my way to work. It’s rare that something comes out of it. The controls for it are not easy to use, and if you correct it too often then they lock you out of using the feature with ‘you used it six times today, try again tomorrow’.   One time when returning from a Palo Alto trip back into the city with destination mode it routed me through the airport to pick up a family with luggage. He said he also has a Model 3 on order and was thrilled to be in the front passenger seat. 

By default the app is set to NOT use the bluetooth for the traffic dirctions, but still tunes out the music on bluetooth you are playing from your phone, then only announces its directions on the internal phone speaker which means you can’t hear it very well. I changed it in the app settings, but the voice quality is a lot less pleasant than the tesla one, so I am considering turning it off and asking people for the destination address and put that in with ‘navigate to’ voice command to demo the capabilities better.

Also a pity that the app is not integrated into the big screen, it is kind of annoying to look far down below the screen where the phone dock is. I wish tesla would get us a webbrowser like in the model S/X, maybe the touchscreen web interface of lyft driver would be sufficiently supported that way. It appears the app is halfway a webapp anyways, i.e. when I switch to the dashboard. I ended up buying a hands-free magnetic phone holder to have it higher up at the b-pillar so as not to block my view, but am concerned that it may be in the path of an airbag in case of a bad accident. Have to find out more about this.

Conclusion

I am super thankful for this opportunity to help people get to where they want to be while getting them interested in electric driving (if they ask). I love meeting all those different types of people, having good conversations, learning about new music and seeing the excitement when they get their first ride in a tesla. They give a consistent 5.0 rating and positive feedback all around.

Share the Love – if you want to sign up too, consider using my referral code https://www.lyft.com/drivers/WILL53406 and get the same bonus as me ($1.55 for every ride you do in first 60 days, capped at $775)

2017 coming up – two years of electric driving review 2015 VW e-Golf, 2016 Tesla Model X 90D

May 2016 we finally switched to all electric driving, after realizing that we put most miles on the short distance electric car and the 2014 Honda Odyssey was collecting dust for anything less than 150 mile distance.

Our gas station is our home 🙂 looking good freshly painted under a rainbow…

Why 150 miles ? Because that is about twice the distance of the eGolf on a single charge (84 miles) and charging once in the middle of a trip was preferable to hobbling around in even a fairly new gas car, because of the electric drive being so smooth it is closer to gliding, acceleration with instant torque, and a feeling of efficiency even when driving it without regard for consumption, knowing that the solar panels on our roof produce more than we would consume.

 

First snow in Tahoe was creating a mess. Thankfully with all wheel drive and lots of energy to keep warm and comfortable, we did not need snow chains for our 20″ continental LX m+s tires that we use all year round. Loving how the falcon wing doors form an umbrella to keep the snow out when we got in and out of the car to throw snowballs while legacy gas cars stopped in front of us for hours to get their snow chains on, get towed to the side when they ran out of fuel idling for hours or slid around on summer tires. Thankful for having all those superchargers on the way so we did not have to worry about range, despite the cold and heating while standing taking its toll.

 

So in May 2016 we traded in our 2014 Honda Odyssey 8 seater which we had loved until we discovered electric driving. Suddenly when going back to driving it, everything feels wrong, it smells bad, hobbles and wobbles, unevenly accelerates. You get spoiled by electric driving so quickly. So we loaded the Odyssey with luggage for its last partial vacation trip, drove it down to Fremont, and traded it in for a Tesla Model X 90D. We moved the luggage and went on our first vacation trip into the Sierras, about 400 miles round trip. There was a slight feeling of regret that we got the 6 seat version instead of the 7 seat version because that meant a 3-people family that was going to the same destination had to take their Volt instead of riding with us, but since it was a long weekend it may be all for the better. And we prefer the faster getting in and out of the six seater compared to moving seats forward and backward to access the last row in the 7 seater.

 

Topping off on a standard electrical outlet gets us 20 miles over night added. Not really needed since we filled up on the supercharger along the way to arrive with good range left, but definitely a plus.

We have done many road trips since then, some more far than 1000 miles round trip. Supercharging makes it easy to go the distance and knowing that it is already all paid for makes it easier to pay a meal at Harris Ranch Restaurant while filling up for free 🙂

So far the car has been nothing short of amazing. And my wife finally lets me take the eGolf again 🙂

Highlights:

• never again make time to drive to a gas station, oil change or smog check appointments, just plug in at night and full in the morning
• preheat car cabin in the garage, start from iphone while having breakfast or when arriving close to parking lot, no poisonous fumes emitted. Works on both cars.
• silent gliding smooth ride with superb acceleration and excellent traction control in adverse weather conditions
• long distance trips much easier thanks to autopilot taking over micromanaging tasks while I focus on the overall traffic situation and adjust speed or advise it to do a lane change for me. feels like half the distance driven on arrival

Downsides:

• don’t forget to plug it in over night 🙂 Thankfully the phone app sends notifications on charge start and stop so if you set it to start charging at 9pm you can set an alert in your calendar to double check that the notification of starting came in
• tesla model S and model X are still very pricey, this will only change 2017 when the Model 3 comes out.
• makes you realize how bad gas cars are in comparison and you are spoiled forever, the idea of going back to gas cars is like handing in your iphone for a rotary phone  landline.
• You get annoyed when driving the non-tesla and the driver door does not close for you automatically

 

Update:

In January 2018 I finally replaced the VW eGolf with a Tesla Model 3, which is such a tremendous upgrade, and a relief to never have range anxiety again. The sound system is amazing, autopilot is a life and sanity saver, and the promise of FSD makes it a future proof investment, or if anything, a great toy that gets more and more interesting over time through software updates. Summoning it across parking lots out of its parking spot towards the entrance where you wait under cover in the rain, sentry mode camera recording as part of the alarm system, Netflix and Youtube watching while parked, all those are features I did not even dream about getting when I bought the car and that arrived over time as free software updates in my garage over wifi in the night as Tesla figures out from customer feedback what else would be awesome to do with this car.

Even now in 2020, I still am looking for excuses to drive, this car is so amazingly balanced power and weight wise, it makes you giggle when it turns on a dime around the corner.

What if… cars moved people, objects, energy on demand

What if a car driving a person was just a side effect, one of its on-demand purposes fulfilled.

What if you did not own a vehicle but it would be available anytime like über from close by, and when not driving you or anybody else, it will function as a receiver and giver of energy, drive to a charging station, when fully charged drive and park at a building that needs more power as a power building block. It can fulfill energy, people and object transportation needs.

It will never sit idle uselessly, just moving to where it is useful.

Idea published by Michael Will March 15th, 2016, feel free to use, don’t patent it as its already published.

2015 was the year of the electric car for us

2015 was the year of the electric car – good bye gas cars and petrol stations.

After one year of owning a Volkswagen eGolf I can say I truly love it. The only real hard issue with it is that my wife wants to drive it most of the time and leaves me with the gas guzzler since she has a 20 mile commute and I don’t. We drove it for about 13,000 miles in 12 months.

Let me first tell you about the cars I compare it to, and then focus on the eGolf with issues I found annoying, and also the advantages that make me love it in spite of them. Too many reviews I read are just a reiteration of other reviews, so I promise that none of what I detail is not directly from my personal experience and impressions.

The cars I am comparing are the 2015 eGolf, the 2006 Volkswagen Jetta S 2.5 I replaced with the egolf, our 2014 Honda Oddysee that we bought as our family van in 2014, the tesla S that I test drove 2014 in the 85kw version and 2015 in the P85D version, and the Chevvy Volt 2014 that I test drove in 2014.

Characteristics of each car that I find noteworthy:
– 2006 Jetta 2.5 is a sporty roomy car, and with the tires I put on it had excellent cornering, temperamental sporty drive, a modern dynamic responsiveness to the gas pedal that makes a friends ford mustang of the same year feel dated and inaccurate, same for goes for
traction when accelerating fast. Being the 2006 version, it does not show the MPG, so I calculated those at the pump between filling up and while it beats the van, its not excellent, and I flirted with the idea of replacing the car with a TDi for a while,
higher cost and less availability of diesel at gas stations is what kept me from doing it. Thank goodness now that the VW Dieselgate truth came out.  It seats 5 which is good when picking up my kids and a neighbors kid at the same time, and is a lot of fun to drive on my daily commute.
– 2014 and 2015 Tesla win hands down on any aspect except cost, the experience of test driving those can be best summarizes as ‘WOW’ not just from the driving / handling but also all the other engineering aspects from the large display, charging station navigation integration, automated adaptive cruise control (no need to push gas/brakes in stop and go traffic), keyless entry is also buttonless start, ‘start’ really means turn on electrical system of car by putting foot on brakes after sitting down without pushing any on/off button, turn off the car by leaving the car with the key in your pocket and closing the door. It seats 5 comfortably. 7 is not really true, unless you want to seat two small children in seats you can buy as an option rear facing in the trunk area. So I consider it a 5 seater. Cabin lights are bright and full despite of using LED because they actually use hybrid lighting with conventional bulb and LED light to give you the full light experience with low energy consumption.
– 2014 Honda Oddyssee seats 7 on a trip to the Ski resort and has so much room for luggage more than any other mini van out there. For commute the MPG it gets are somewhat miserable, like 16-18 in the city and 24 on highways. Coming back from tahoe with lots of hypermiling tricks I got 34 mpg. Range of course is excellent, I can make it on one tank to Los Angele. Automated doors and high quality picture rear camera when backing up as well as blind spot camera when signalling right are great. Electric driver seat moving forward and backwards slowly with the button when switching drivers is very annoying, opening and closing side and trunk door from remote and from car buttons at driver seat are excellent. Drives like a street car and not like a truck, which is both fun and safe in any weather.
– 2014 GM Chevvy Volt – a plug in hybrid that at first impressed with 0-30 mile acceleration, but at highway speeds the handling does not seem safe to me, it just does not have enough responsiveness and power for room to get out of sticky situations. Also its a 4-seater since the battery protrudes into the cabin between the two rear seats. I seriously considered it for a while and it put the idea in my head that I can afford a vehicle with at least some electric range. I heard the 2015 and 2016 are a lot better in terms of handling too, but never test drove one again because of the short comings experienced on the 2014 model.
– 2015 Volkswagen eGolf – an 86 mile range pure electric vehicle, very impressive 0-30 mile acceleration leaving most gas cars behind at the light (probably even my jetta s),
reasonable 0-60 mile acceleration. So smooth it makes you feel like mounting a dinosaur when going back to drive a gas car.

Here are the good and bad things about the car and electric driving in general that I discovered:

Issues:
– ac automation: while air conditioning works well when outside temperature is very low or very high, in the 70’s it does not seem to hold it stably at the 72 that are dialed in automatically after turning on the engine, feels more like 69. Not so much an issue for me, but my wife complains 🙂
– resetting adjustments on power off/on: it does not remember when I change the ac from 72 to something else.
– noise maker: its quiet except they put in an electric noise generator for low speeds to warn pedestrians which I find annoying because it sounds downright ugly, and you can’t override it or customize the type of sound it makes. It ruins the fact that this car is so excellently smooth and quiet when it takes off.
– range anxiety: the range anxiety is real, if you venture out beyond its range and dont want to plan on a lenghty stay at a charging station, you start turning off air conditioning and music and get nervous. they mitigate that with the road side assistence promise below, but depending on how you use the car you can feel the anxiety. For me driving it shorter distances it is a nonissue, but visiting friends 40 miles away this has become an issue before. Lunch rescheduled from noon to 2pm. Thankfully finally we have some DC fast chargers from NRG EVGO to help out in a pinch…
– mobile app features: mobile phone app car-net could be better, i.e. responsiveness and using it from two phones at the same time can lock one out, I curse at it a lot but would not want to miss it at the same time as it is a major plus in usability.
– charging availability: DC fast chargers (80% full in 20 minutes) didn’t really exist yet at the beginning of 2015, but NRG EVGO caught up on the buildout, unlike BMW and Volkswagen who promised to put money into chargepoint to build that out 2015, but so far I have to rely on Level 2 chargers that can fill it up from empty to full in 4 hours, in my case I am just topping it off in however long I want to park there, usually it is full in 1-2 hours. Still much faster than in my garage at 110V outlet. It seems there are more Chademo chargers out in the wild january 2015 that the eGolf does not support than the DC Combo that it does support. I know of exactly one charge point DC charger in the bay area.
– 86 mph limit – yes they put a speed delimiter into the car. While its beyond the slow legal speed limits in the US, in case of any emergency I would want to be the one to decide about that and not the car. I got used to it and dont notice it anymore, but I don’t agree with it at all, imagine tsunami or other emergency.
– different charging networks at first seemed annoying (blink/nvgo/chargepoint/…) – volkswagen gave me two chargepoint cards and their network is large so I don’t mind too much and end up using charge point exclusively except for when I have to DC fast charge, which I can do for $10/use with NRG EVGO.
– LED lighting in the cabin could be more bright, compared to the 2006 Jetta this looks very weak. That is why Tesla uses hybrid lighting which combines LED’s and conventional bulb for a low energy full light experience.
– Charging Plug lock – when you charge the car, the plug gets locked so nobody can mess with it while you are away. When you come back you have to unlock it with the key remote button, so keyless entry does not apply to it. Sometimes it takes several attempts of unlocking before the car lets go of the charging plug, which can be annoying.

Advantages:
– clean: no visits to stinky gas stations, no guilt driving past a bicylist polluting the air they breathe in heavly, happy to park in my garage without concern of gas/oil getting into things stored
– less hassle and expenses: no expensive oil changes, no smog check appointments on registration renewals, no service appointment for two years until cabin filters inspection. I get about 4 miles per kWh so even when not charging for free at my gym every now and then the cost per month is a lot less than it used to be. Also after adding solar to my home and adding an L2 fast charger in the process means I can assume my energy was created clean, and the car is ready in the morning.
– quiet: this changes your perception on your other gas car – suddenly gas cars seem old and shaky and loud in comparison, despite of the excellent sound insulations cars have nowadays. I am not kidding, I did take the Oddysee in to service to find out why it was shaking, because I had driven the eGolf for a while and just was not expecting it to be normal again.
– just go: charging overnight in the garage means no planning on visiting a chargepoint station unless you drive it around for more than the 80 miles a day, basically I just drive it around, plug it in when I got back in the garage and forget about it, next day it is full. In the winter I preheat it in the garage while it is still connected to the charger. While at breakfast, from the iPhone. Besides comfort, this also means the impact of cold weather on range is less because the car is fully charged and its cabin preheated.
– safety: road side assistence button, if I ever get stranded out of electricity they will come and tow me home or to a chargepoint station if I am more than 100 miles from home. Have not had to use it yet (knock on wood). In fact they will call you in your car and ask if you are ok when the air bags get deployed in an accident…
– mobile app features: allows me to find where I parked it, how much range it has and how much longer it will charge until full, it allows me to turn on air conditioning from the restaurant table while waiting on my bill to get the car’s temperature to acceptable levels, especially going to be important in the hot summers here in CA
– premium parking spot finder: The chargepoint app allows me to find a free parking spot with a charger, typically located at the bottom of a parking garage, and it tells me if occupied or not. This translates to finding premium parking. The chargepoint network is pretty good in the bay area and in san francisco, but it depends on where you go. For me its a huge plus. I also use plugshare to find NRG EVGO DC fast chargers.
– sporty: acceleration from 0 to 30 is excellent, immediate torque and no shifting means you will pull away from the green light faster than pretty much any gas car around you, and you don’t worry about the inefficiency of it because the rest of the drive regenrative braking and low consumption still give you a good 4 miles per kWh for your trip.
– looks: I love the accent lights in the front and the general look of the car.

So in summary – I love it and hope that one day we will replace the honday oddysee with a tesla X and I wont feel bad about my wife taking the eGolf any more, which I will one day also replace with a tesla 3 🙂

iOS 7 flat design – WTF?

iOS 7 flat design is a disaster to me. Did they fire the QA / PM’s and just not rehire?

The main difference for me is not ‘getting rid of skeuomorphism’, that is just a buzzword everybody throws around, the big difference is decline in usability, because an apparent original goal ‘minimize effort to get to needed information’ has been compromised:

1. stock market display in notification area and in standard app – you can barely read the grey on red/green, what formerly was easy to see at one glance now requires a lot more focus to decipher. Much harder to use than before. I have no idea how they could get that past QA.

2. you can barely tell anymore if a phone is charging, the tiny arrow attached to it is barely visible.

3. I had to google it to find out how to get the input field for searching (swipe down in home screen) which is consistent with email search now at least, but was a pain to find out initially as well. But there is no reason why that input field should not be already shown in the sliding current apps view that you get to by double clicking your home button, thus minimizing the path to finding. The space above the app-screenshots is empty. Am I the only one to whom that is obvious?

4. double clicking home button now shows a sliding view of the icons plus screenshot of current apps instead of paging icons, which means that I now take longer and have to focus more to navigate to the specific one I had in mind. Before I could just page through and click on the fixed spot it was at. I knew exactly what icon I am looking for as that is how I started it originally, the screenshots are cute but don’t really help finding the app.

Now I have to make it flow by swiping until it shows up and then get back to it until I can hit it. A lot more mental processing and back and forth is necessary.

5. here comes the ugliest part: the drop-downs in safari web dialogs like bart.gov schedule are no longer drop downs in the page but have this ridiculously large carousel view with dark grey on medium dark grey below some weird less/greater sign next to a done-button. The text is more distorted for the lines below and above the current selection, more unreadable the more far away from currently selected item. It is incredibly hard to read, and swiping up and down does not allow for a precise selection. Then clicking on what you have selected actually does nothing, instead you have to navigate your finger over to the done-button, again an unnecessary extra step. Just a complete failure in usability.

6. inconsistencies – the first time I tried to share a contact it took me a while to figure out that I had to scroll down the actual contact to find a ‘share’ link on the bottom, I was looking for the funky share icon that is used everywhere else and would be immediately in view on the bottom without scrolling. Its there for photos, notes, maps, but its missing from calendar entries, and contacts.

Of course there are other things about iOS that I like. But none are related to look and feel. I like the flashlight app, and sharing contacts through airdrop, and the fingerprint sensor of the 5s almost makes me want to upgrade the hardware too as I can see how it would streamline use of the phone (unlocking and app installation)

Aesthetically the redesigned icon colors are not as appealing to me as before, and the flatness just looks boring. I gave it some time to get used to, but honestly, its November 7th now and I still hate it. I take this especially hard since I come from an Android background and have hoped to never have a reason again to go back to android. But this is  really pushing it.

I really hope some day a PM at Apple is reading this and claiming some of these thoughts as his own and pushes for fixing the issues, today we are on 7.0.3 and nothing has improved from the list above, and I don’t have high hopes that 7.0.4 would be any different.

iphone5 review – verizon LTE rocks

I finally switched from Android to the apple iPhone5 with iOS6, and I am loving it. I was eyeing the iphone 4s for a while but it’s internet speed was just so ridiculously slow compared to a state of the art android phones that it was out of the question. Well that concern has been lifted with the iPhone5, I got 30Mbit down and 10Mbit upload on Verizon the other day. Of course that means I burn through my shared 6G dataplan quickly if I don’t watch it, i.e. uploading 150 birthday party photos in one swoop to facebook 🙂

Battery life is excellent, especially compared to my my HTC G2 and my wifes myTouch. This morning I intentially let the iphone run to 1% after not charging it for 1 day and 8 hours, with 8 hours talktime. A friend of mine had issues with short battery life and identified the google voice application as the culprit. I have not been using that so I am fine, even with intense facebook / email / web browsing. Maybe because at home as well as at work I am close to a wifi network, unless I want to leverage the LTE speeds for downloading or uploading large amounts of data in a short time. 

The maps problems I have not run into yet, maybe living in California makes that easier to be accurate. 

Siri is excellent, I use it all the time from dictating SMS’s while in the car to starting music, navigation, initiating FaceTime… facetime is fun, like skype but better quality and easier to get going. Also it does not use the voice network, so it does not interrupt data on the verizon network.

Video recording and picture taking is awesome, I so hated it on my G2 that by the time I got the photo app going and pressed the button to the time that the shutter action actually got executed, the subject already walked away.  Or all the mafunctioning moments.  On the iphone it’s so perfect and so immediate, that I am actually able to use it happily rather than just try and hate.  

And the screen is fantastic too, colors are true, unlike the Samsung S3 that I had toyed with before the iphone5 came out – I am surprised that not more people seem to care, but when I tried it in the t-mobile store, photo and video on the S3 had way wrong colors, even watching a movie on netflix would be affected. I guess the specs are great but the color representation makes it look broken to my eyes.

And the apps are just awesome, and they are the same I am having on my ipad already, without extra effort they just got synced on and work. 

Airplay of my music to the living-room stereo while making breakfast in the kitchen is another highlight of how I enjoy it. 

 

So what do I not like? 

Email notification does not seem as immediate as I am used to from Android. I miss swype as a keyboard method, but not as much as I thought I would, since the predictive correction method is actually highly effective on the iPhone). I slightly but not really miss USB mounting the phone SD card as a usb drive. Since I use itunes on a macbook I am actually happy about the ease with which I get to carry my recent music with me via syncing rather than having to manage files or deal with the offline/online google music stuff.

Really trying hard to think here, but I guess one downside to the great games and apps is that my kids constantly ask for it 🙂

php pack(“H*, $s) does not throw exception or return false on error. SOLVED.

I was puzzled by this recently, code that uses pack(“H*”, $s) to compress a token into a few bytes would cause a warning to be displayed by php if the $s token was not a valid hexadecimal string, but still return a bogus result.  try { $p = pack(“H*”, $s); } catch (Exception $e) { } would not catch it, as it is emitted as a warning, not an error.

The warning looks like this:

pack(): Type H: illegal hex digit s in /my/fancy/webapp/problem.php on line 123

After a bunch of unsuccessful googling somebody from effnet reminded me to look up error handling specifics, but  all I  found was how to create error handlers that could catch that sort of thing. But I don’t want to introduce an error handler just yet, instead I am trying to find a simple way to detect failure of the function pack(), i.e. a way to query the error status, so I started experimenting with error_get_last() and came up with the following:

1. <?php
2.         function attemptpack($s) {
3.                 @trigger_error(“”);
4.                 $p=pack(“H*”, $s);
5.                 $e = error_get_last();
6.                 if ($e && !(strpos($e[“message”], “pack()”) === FALSE)) {
7.                         print(“$s pack error detected:” . $e[“message”] . “\n”);
8.                 }  else {
9.                         print “$s packed ok\n”;
10.                 }
11.         }
13.         attemptpack(“abcdef”);
14.         attemptpack(“axbcdef”);
15.         attemptpack(“abcdef”);
16. ?>

Note I am paranoid and am verifying that the message contains pack() in case an older message was not cleared by @trigger. It should not be necessary at this point.

Turns out that does not work on php 5.1.6. And the more obvious way to do this is to validate the input anyways. So now my approach is now much more simple:

1. <?php
2. function attemptpack($s) {
3.     if ( !ctype_xdigit($s))  {
4.         print __FILE__ . “: $s is not a valid hex string.\n”;
5.     } else {
6.         $p=pack(“H*”, $s);
7.     }
8. }
10. attemptpack(“abcdef”);
11. attemptpack(“abxdef”);
12. ?>

netflix price hike – I was quitting – now I am back

When netflix increased their prices to $15 from about $10 or whatever it was for having unlimited streaming plus 1 DVD out at a time, I was in with all the others saying NO WAY and canceled my account.

I was feeling strongly that $10/month for entertainment is enough since I may probably only watch 2-3 movies a month, sometimes less. So if I do pay per view on iTunes / amazon / youtube video rental, I should not have to pay more than what I was used to pay for netflix. In fact I had canceled comcast (an outrageous $100/month for internet and tv) many years ago and found that I was fine with using netflix and other sources and did not miss TV at all…

And while consumption wise I was right, content library wise I was not. Multiple times I knew exactly hat what I was not able to find would have been available on netflix. And I missed the user interface that allows me to browse, drill down on actors / directors / genres, and discover new movies.

So I paid for amazon prime, just to discover that the free instant view was only for a subset of movies, and that even the ones I was then still willing to pay for where not available when I had something specific in mind.

Long story short – I reactivated my netflix account for streaming only ($8/month) less than 2 months after I had quit and probably will turn on the 1 dvd out per month for a total of $15/month once I find more movies that are not in the streaming lib (already had the issue a few times).

Now get the movies that are DVD only into the streaming library please!

PS: Tempted to buy an $100 Wifi-enabled BlueRay player with netflix+amazon+youtube interface…  so far I just connect my macbook to the overhead projector in the living room 🙂