Having watched all the episodes of Highway Thru Hell in the tow/recovery industry where there's a will there's away.
I've found that for tow drivers the level of care varies with the reason for the tow. Getting hooked for parking when/where you shouldn't - dumb E36 M3 gets what they deserve.
In Britain they have some flat decks that pull up on the side deploy a crane arrangement and then lift the car using wheel slings.
I have found that a surprising number of tow drivers are car guys. It helps if they're picking up something cool, like a V8 ND Miata that has shredded a driveshaft or a Subaru powered Westfalia that is no longer powered. You get some great stories.
RevRico said:I don't understand this huge fear of running out of power on the road. Do you run your ICE on fumes all the time? Do you fill up every single day with fuel? No? Didn't think so. Then why the major fear with an EV that you can charge at home every single night if you want?
Seeing Teslas run One Lap has shown that even in a cross country road trip, you aren't really that far off the beaten path getting to a charger every day, and don't lose that much time charging.
It won't be long until Choice, Hilton, and the other hotel chains start making charge spots standards at their hotels, making the already impressive in some spots charging network even larger and easier to get to.
I mean I kind of get it, change is scary, computers are magic, but instant torque, no emissions inspections, special parking until they become standard are pretty nice fringe benefits of ditching ICE.
Up here in the frozen tundra most motels have plug-in's for engine heaters during our mosquito free time (winter)
Granted it's only 110 volts but usually a lot of amperage.
vwcorvette said:stuart in mn said:I suspect out of gas calls are pretty minor for AAA , if they get called it's for a two or maybe a dead battery.
They never bring me gas. They always tow me to the nearest gas station.
Having recently had an "out of gas" experience in central NH (it was ok when I stopped, but I parked on a slope and apparently the fuel in the tank dropped below the pick-up), the AAA driver did bring a 2.5 gal can of gas. Sometimes the DTE estimate in the OBC is somewhat optimistic.
When I ran my Cummins out of diesel, the AAA driver did tow it to the nearest diesel station and was nice enough to help me get it restarted since I hadn't learned the NEVER RUN A DIESEL DRY lesson until that time.
Do you run your ICE on fumes all the time?
As a mechanic, the flip side of that is that when a car gets towed in that wont start and it turns out to be out of gas, the REASON it's out of gas is because the gas gauge (well, sender) broke. Certainly some EV drivers will end up in stupid situations because some failing system on their car lied to them, just like people with ICE cars don't stop to wonder why their car has been on a 1/4 tank for three days and then get mad when it 'breaks down' in the middle of the road.
I've run out of gas many times. Usually not more than once in the same vehicle, because the only reason i ran out of gas in the first place was because the car was lying to me. I'm sure whatever EV i end up with first will lie to me about one thing or another and I'll find out in some highly inconvenient way.
They've actually had charging trucks since 2011:
https://electrek.co/2016/09/06/aaa-ev-emergency-charging-truck/
In reply to RevRico :
On the vans we built did not allow towing with the drive wheels on the ground.
In reply to Ian F :
My powerstroke will automatically bleed the fuel system when you run it dry. The fuel filter change procedure involves draining the bowl, changing the filter, and waiting for the bowl to pump full again on its own.
Batteries are also fundamentally DC, so a tow truck could just jack a charged battery into a dead one and let the voltage equalize similar to osmosis and water as long as the amperage was higher.
RevRico said:In reply to _ :
Kinda depends on the vehicle. Tesla was looking into swap stations for a while from the Bay to Reno. Not sure whatever happened to that actually. Still would have been a 45 minute stop though, the way they were talking.
It's long gone- they could do a swap in ~30 minutes, but many people were worried about how others treated the batteries in their Teslas which kept them from using the service. The eventual changes in battery pack size, general improvements from the OG 60KWh pack, and the addition of the front motor to the S is what really killed the battery pack swap.
NIO in China seems to be getting good at it, though. But I think "swapping" doesn't really fit American sensibilities.
An old thread. Well there are hardly any EVs on the road without quick charge capability now, so the answer is they'll have a truck with a charger powered by a battery pack or generator, they'll give you 5~10 minutes worth of quick-charge on the roadside, which will be enough to get you to a gas/charge station or the nearest building with electricity where you can get whatever remaining charge you want.
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