Chris M.

As a follower of technology companies and products I've been watching Tesla Motors  for years. With the Model S , Tesla has produced a luxury car that has raised the bar in terms of usability, features, performance, and safety and scored a near perfect score in Consumer Reports review. Tesla appears to be putting significant pressure on luxury car brands. The Model S  outsold, in the first half of 2013, Porsche, Jaguar and Land Rover  in California and in the first quarter of 2013  some models of Audi, BMW and Lexus . At this point, demand for the Model S appears to be outpacing production capacity. The current delivery wait on the Model S is two months or more, as indicated on the Tesla website. Today, at ~$70k USD, the Model S is in a different market segment and significantly more expensive than the the biggest selling EVs on the market. The  Toyota Plug-in-prius  (US$32,000),  Nissan Leaf  (US$29,650), and  Chevy Volt  (US$34,99...

Earlier this year I purchased a Toyota Plug-in-Prius . The car comes with a slow charger module that is powered through a standard 120v 15amp outlet. This kind of outlet can deliver something around 1kw of energy. For the 4.4kw battery pack in the PiP , it takes about 3 hours to charge the pack from its empty state. Empty for the PiP isn't actually a zero charge level, the battery is kept within a 15% to 85% State-of-charge(SOC) to prolong its life. Frequently I was finding that I didn't have enough time to charge the pack before leaving on another trip. One option was the $1500 or so to purchase a 240v charger and have someone install it. A quick search on the web turned up the OpenEVSE project , a project to build a evse charger. I started to read about the evse project and got interested in building one. I did want to have some kind of network support so I could control and monitor charging, schedule it better than the car could and otherwise expand upon what the proj...

2013 Toyota Plug-in-prius I recently upgraded from a 2001 Acura Integra to a 2013 Toyota Prius plug in. The Integra was getting older, mpg wasn't great and the dealer was offering a pretty good trade-in, a big discount on Plug-in-prius (PiP) and  0% financing. The good Mpg is excellent. Even without the plug in battery the car gets about 60 mpg if you stay in the 65-70 mph range. This basically matches the regular Prius even though the larger Li battery pack adds a hundred or more pounds. With the ev battery fully charged I get about 80 mpg on my 35 mile 40 minute trip. Oh, and the pip displays helpful trip summary after being powered off: Plug-in-prius trip summary Side decal The touch screen on the in car system works relatively well. It appears to be a resistive touch screen though. Resistive touch screens are being replaced by by surface and projected capacitance technologies. Resistive only detects single touches, requires harder touches, and takes more ...