Update: Two attempts to recreate the problem with motor power fading after driving for an hour or so at highway speed. First attempt failed, perhaps stymied by too much traffic (couldn’t get up to speed for long) or not enough time or both: perhaps both needed to overheat something (AI search suggests electric oil pump, or EOP).
Second attempt successful after 75-ish minutes at freeway speeds between 55 and 75. Popped into the dealer straight away and because I was now in town, I even got to observe that the regeneration level paddles seem to fail or do in fact fail to activate regeneration, so had to use the brake pedal like an ICE vehicle.
Dealer scans for codes, and…nada, zip, zilch. And, nobody available to take the car right then for a drive, so… Bringing the car back next week for a mechanic to experience the failure and for the dealer to have a loaner for me. The mechanic needs to experience and write up the problem so the dealer will have the repair authority/authorization to proceed with what is likely to be under warranty.
Since I had to take a work meeting online after I got there, at least they took pity on me and let me charge up from my 40%-ish battery drain! hahaha
I’ve been involved with a number of small businesses. I’d say the first thing to check is your homeowners insurance policy (and if you have one, umbrella policy). Commercial activity often is not covered or is not allowed by standard homeowners insurance. Next, consider the impacts on any neighboring or nearby houses. Drivers listening to music while their car charges for 30 minutes at 2AM won’t make you the most popular person in town.
After all that, a lot will depend on the city and county. Permits, licenses, and targeted restrictions are common barriers to home-based businesses, especially in non-rural areas. Any activity involving motor vehicles tends to be highly regulated as well.
First, consider that unless you’re ready to spend tens of thousands of dollars for a DC fast charger and the likely 3-phase power drop from the electric utility to support it, the best you could expect to offer is level 2 charging, so likely less than 10 kilowatts. That’s about an eighth the power of even a lower-speed level 3 DC fast charger. If a vehicle uses 250 watt-hours per mile, that’s forty miles of range per hour of charging. How many folks would be willing to hang out at your (no doubt lovely) driveway for an hour just to gain 40 miles of range? And during that hour, they might need a bathroom or a place to throw their fast-food trash (you could refuse to provide these, but beware the consequences). You could provide 20 kW level 2 charging, but you’d want to have an electrical service panel that supported more than 200 amps. That’s an expensive – and possibly not to code – requirement for a residential install. Oh, and if you live someplace like Sacramento, expect a visit from the local police checking to make sure that power isn’t feeding an indoor marijuana farm.
You would also become a reseller of electricity, and if you are grid connected and paying residential rates for your power you might find that you’ve suddenly moved yourself into commercial electric rates which can be much higher. Also, many of the tariffs that allow you to resell your home solar energy back to the grid won’t apply if you’re a commercial user. Commercial sell-back rates are often lower than residential.
I don’t even want to think of the morass of homeowner associations regulations, local laws pertaining to fixed commercial enterprises in residential-zoned neighborhoods, state laws, business licenses, taxation, insurance…
I’ve read (though can’t now find the reference) that speed limiting in the US is less reliable than in Europe due to a lack of standardised speed limit signage. In Europe any time the speed limit changes there is a speed limit sign, including entrances to side roads etc. The cars use cameras with image recognition to detect speed limit changes (amongst other methods). In the US the signs aren’t necessarily posted at speed limit boundaries, placement is random/arbitrary, so the cars have to rely much more on GPS + speed limit maps which aren’t as reliable (frequency of updates, can’t include temporary speed restrictions for roadworks etc.). This may account for the hit-or-miss you experienced with automatic speed changing.
Unfortunately in the US, local law enforcement. If your car has out-of-state license plates or if you don’t match what locals want their community to look like, the speed limit can’t be assumed to be whatever the sign you most recently saw says.
This is one of those situations where I wished we took a more “European approach” in that you sign speed limits (even if there’s no change) after intersections or interchanges.
But what I really detest is the “end of speed limit” sign. Could a traffic engineer educate me on what purpose that is supposed to serve? If you’re going to put up a sign, you might us well just tell us what the new limit is.
It’s almost 10 years since Europe (and Australia) started to address the reliability problems with intelligent speed assistance. See this report by Global NCAP:
As I mentioned above, regulators have not always followed the expert advice!
A lot of local police forces. Would you like to travel the 700 miles back to contest the situation? No? Okay, there’s a local lawyer who’ll be happy to chat with the judge about things.
(PS If anyone makes a “Europe is so much better” comment, I will spend the next five days finding and posting the most insane European laws, so just don’t)
It means the limit goes back to the default speed limit for the road type (highway or other) for the jurisdiction (usually the state, but sometimes county or city).
I’ve only seen that in locations that also have signs like “State Speed Limit 55” or “City speed limit 25”, meaning that that is the limit wherever nothing is posted.
I know what the sign means. That’s not the problem. The problem is that it leaves ambiguity.
My city has a 25 mph general speed limit. But there are a select few roads that are 30 or 35 mph. When I encounter the end of speed limit sign, I know what the limit returns to, but nobody from out of town will know that. So instead of leaving them with that ambiguity, if you’re going to put up a sign anyway, just put up the sign telling everybody what they’re supposed to do and be done with it.
Yes - and the onboard speed sign recognition function is likely to be totally confused by near identical signs such as that example. I realised this would be an issue in the USA when I rented a car in Hawaii many years ago.
At least most countries use a red circle around the actual speed limit value (an international standard)
I do remember wondering the same thing in the EU where they have the same thing.
I guess one important difference, at least for those EU countries in which I spent most time, is that they have a very strict system of what speed limits apply to which type of road and that holds for the entire country, no town by town variations like you can find here in the States. So I guess there it’s easier to argue that a cancellation leaves no ambiguity and every driver will know (or should know) what that resolves as. Here in my town, that wouldn’t be the case. In fact, because they have that very strict system with only few instances of deviation, it probably makes sense to cancel in order to indicate “now everything is back to normal again”. I guess here we would have a much harder time saying what “normal” is.
I can imagine some future version of the Maps app referencing a cellular coverage map and automagically downloading offline maps when it detects you’ll be in a dead zone for some length of time. It looks like the Roadtrippers app has a coverage-map overlay, but AFAICT doesn’t automate this.
I think today’s map/navigation apps download the graphic tiles and related data for a computed route at the time you begin navigation.
It’s only when the app needs to reroute (e.g., you stop/restart navigation or deviate from the route) that network connectivity is required. Doing that recalculation locally would require a lot more data.
This is technically possible - there are third-party navigation apps that do on-device route computation. Whether or not it is practical to do it in the way you suggest (only downloading data that would potentially be used while in a known region of lost connectivity), is a question for the engineers.
I suspect the biggest issue will be the quantity of data that may need to be downloaded, especially if it will be temporary. Remember that not everybody has an unlimited data plan, so this could adversely affect people without unlimited plans.
Apple added this feature to their Maps app at some point in the last few years - I think it was either iOS 17 - for previously downloaded off-line map areas. So, if you have a downloaded area on your phone, and you are out of network, the Apple Maps app can still re-calculate a route when you miss a turn, go off the original navigation path, etc. You obviously won’t get live traffic data, police activity (“speed traps”), construction, but it does re-route on device.
With offline maps in iOS 17 and later, you can use Maps for information and navigation even when you don’t have a Wi-Fi or cellular connection. Offline maps include details like hours and ratings on places, turn-by-turn directions for driving, walking, cycling, or riding transit, and estimated arrival times.
I don’t use Google Maps or Waze often, and don’t download off-line maps for those apps, so I don’t know if they already have these features on iOS, too.
Yes! I forget where I saw a solution that I wish all jurisdictions would adopt: at the first instance of the changed speed limit, the sign said “Begin [fill in the blank]”.
For a jurisdiction that is dead-set on having a standard speed limit (and therefore would think that “End [temporary speed limit]” is clever), the sign could say “Resume [standard speed limit]”.
So on the topic of speed limiters, I’ve never driven a car with such a feature. For those who have, what happens in an emergency situation where the reasonable course of action is to temporarily accelerate? If you’re already at the speed limit, would you be unable to do so?
