Car Inspection Check List 1 - Dc Taxi: Fill & Download for Free

Ok, here are some tips and tricks for someone contemplating the jump to electric power. Just stuff I have managed to pick up over the 4 years we have had no use for gasoline. Yea, it’s long, I expect to make a faq out of it someday.Some basics.You should choose a car with a range at least 50% longer than your round trip daily commute. Makes sure you can run some errands, or it’s real cold or hot, and you have the heat or AC on full blast, etc. This isn’t hard to find these days, since the average US driver does 13,000 miles a year, or less than 40 a day, and even the cheap, small battery models have 130 or more mile range.You should have a place for daily charging. For almost all of us, that’s at home in our driveway or garage. For apartment dwellers, or on street parkers, this could be at the office. If you don’t have either option it is possible to get by with public charging, but it is annoying. You may not be a good fit for an EV unless you can change this. This problem should be solved eventually, around here apartment buildings are adding chargers, even including them in the amenities listed on the “now leasing” banner. There are some schemes being tested for those with on street parking only.Right now, you have the gas car mindset. You go someplace special and have to wait around while it gets pumped in. So you want to do that as infrequently and quickly as possible. You run the tank till the light comes on, and fill it up completely then.But with EV it is a different way. You don’t wait till you are low, and charge to full (unless you are dependent on public chargers). Instead you charge when you get the opportunity, and are busy with some other task. Most of us charge at home while sleeping. We are only charging the miles we drove that day. As a result as far as we are concerned, charging takes under 30 seconds, 10 to plug in at the end of the day, and 20 to unplug and put the cord away. And every morning, the “tank” is full. So we really can’t say how long it takes to charge fully from empty, it’s something we never do.You don’t need a garage to charge in. You can safely plug in the charging cable even in driving rain. You could drop the cord into the puddle you are standing in, and not get shocked. (I wouldn’t, but the system is designed to cope). Basically when you grab the plug, off the hanger, there is only low voltage in the cable. Only after the box determines that the plug is fully seated in an actual car, and that you let go of the latching button, will you hear the clunk that is line voltage getting applied to the cable.Some cities, and an entire Canadian province have required all new residential construction to be charger ready, (an open space in the breaker panel, and a wire good for 50 amps pulled to a parking space). For cities, there are some schemes under test that add charging points to streetlights, another that adds it to parking meters.I admit that charging when it’s snowing is annoying. When you are finished charging, you may need to dig snow out from around the socket in order to close the flap, and if you drop the plug, the end is deeply recessed, and can pack full of snow.Ok, some details on charging.First, there are chargers built into the car. There is a box hanging on the wall, or built into a kiosk. That actually isn’t a charger, it’s actually the safety system alluded to above. It’s official name is an EVSE They have two jobs, tell the car how big a fuse they are connected to, and to turn on the power when it’s safe to do so. It’s the built in chargers job to only draw the amount of power the box says to.The chargers built into the car vary in size, and are rated in kw. Typical sizes are 3kw on a few base models, and on plug in hybrids, 6 and 7.2 kw on the mid priced. The standard Tesla has a 10kw charger, there is an option for the model S to have a second one installed. To calculate an approximate from empty charge time, divide the battery capacity by the charger size. So your 30 kWh Leaf with its 6 kw charger, takes 5 hours. My 24 kWh eGolf with its 7.2 kw charger takes 3.4 hours. That P85D Tesla will need 8.5 hours.EVSE come in 3 strengths.Level 1 is an ordinary wall outlet. The cord comes with the car. It can add 5 miles of range for each hour you are plugged in. If you are in Europe, your outlets charge 2.5 times faster than ours. I used to carry an extension cord, I don’t bother any more.Level 2 is a dryer or electric stove amount of power. It will have you charging at speeds between 25 and 40 miles an hour. Most public charging kiosks are at this level. All cars sold will be able to use them. If you have a Tesla, it will come with an adapter. These will refill an empty battery (unless huge) in under 8 hours. If you need or want one for home, they start at $300, the cost of getting power to them will vary depending on what needs to be done, but figure $250 at the low end, with 5–600 more typical. You can even buy an open source board and controller for $100 that will let you make your own. Some places will insist the box be hard wired (especially if you mount it outside), others allow outlets. A few of the cords that come with the car will also work with a stove circuit, or other versions of 220 volt outlets, with adapters. The Tesla cord can do this, and comes with the adapter for stove circuits.The standard plug on level 1 and 2 chargers is the J-1772. All cars can be charged with one. Tesla uses its own plug, but includes an adapter. There are a few Tesla specific level 2 chargers in the wild, Tesla had a program that would supply them to hotels. There is an adapter that will let you use such chargers with other brands, look for a “Tesla Tail”. (It only works on the destination chargers, not the “supercharger” system.). The J-1772 includes a latch. Some cars can use this to lock the plug in place, requiring you to have the key fob to disconnect. We live down the street from a middle school. I am sure a 5th grader passing by would consider unplugging the car to be a funny and most original prank. (Our driveway is very short, Our chargers cable is bright orange, it’s not subtle). Our car came with a lock.Level 3 is what you will be using to top up on a long trip. This is a very powerful source of DC, that takes the place of your charger. They are very. fast, with speeds ranging from a low of 100 mph, to a high over 1,000 mph. They are a lot more expensive than a level 2, and even the mere 100 mph version is $10,000, and it takes as much power as your whole house. 100 amps, 240 volts. The rest want the sort of voltage and current that you might find at a smaller manufacturing plant. They can be hard on your batteries, as keeping them in balance at those speeds is difficult.Of course there are annoying complications. There are three different plugs for high speed connections, Japanese, the rest of the world, and Tesla. A public charger will usually support both of the public standards, and Tesla chargers are their own world. If you find one at a car dealer, it likely will only support the single standard that their brand supports. You find them next to interstates, and most have food or at least coffee available. Tesla has a 5 year head start on building their network, and has the fastest chargers for now. (This is the “Supercharger” system you hear about.)On some cars the ability to use a level 3 charger is standard, others make it optional, or dependent on which trim level you purchase. A few models don’t have it, even as an option. If you are even just thinking you might want to take a longer trip someday, and it’s optional, get it. We have only used fast charging a few times, but it made the difference between a routine dinner stop, and a delay.To tell them apart, or tell if your car is equipped to use one, if it is a Tesla, the car is compatible, and it uses the same plug as their slower chargers. In the case of a Leaf, the Chademo standard uses a completely separate and noticeably larger plug, the socket is next to the normal plug under the door. In the rest of the cars, SAE/CCS is two additional pins just outside of , and at the bottom of the standard J-1772 socket. Most have a cover over the pins when not in use.Adapters between the high speed standards aren’t generally available. Tesla does provide adapters for its cars to use the public standards as an extra cost accessory.The best way to find chargers is Plugshare (phone app or web page). It’s crowdsourced, so it shows all chargers no matter who is providing them. It also assigns a rating to them, showing how often you could actually charge, or that you always find them ICEed, (conventional car parked) or a victim of their own popularity and with someone already plugged in. It can filter out chargers that don’t apply to your car, and it has a system for people to offer up their home charger to a passing traveler in need. One thing really in its favor, they include detailed directions, often including pictures to help you find it in the maze that is the typical multi level garage. (For example the entry for one of the airport chargers says “its on the second level, turn right 3 times.”)If your average daily mileage is under 40, you can do pretty well with just overnight wall outlet charging. It will use less than $1 in electricity to do this. We ordered a level 2 charger when we bought our car, but it was more than a year before I installed it. Remember, since you can easily plug in every day, your charging time will reflect how far you drove, not how long it takes from empty.Tip: if you are renting the place, and park in a spot next to the house, look around for an outlet on the outside (the one they plug hedge clippers into) and buy a heavy duty extension cord. When my brother bought his Volt, until he got around to installing an outdoor outlet, they ran an extension cord out a window. In my case, it took me close to a year to get around to wiring and mounting the charger, and the outlet on the front of the house served.Check with your power company. In some places they offer a plan with off peak pricing, so your evening fill up will be half or more off. The car and possibly the charger will have timers that will make it easy to delay charging for when rates are cheap.If you are staying at a campground, the RV hookup will be an electric stove outlet, that will run a level 2. At a farm? Do they have a welder in the barn? The voltages are correct, but the outlet is an older 3 pin sort, rather than the modern stove plug that level 2 chargers use. Adapters aren’t hard to make, and you might be able to buy one at a place that has RV supplies. (For the roll your own sorts, welders use 6–50 plugs and sockets, stoves use 14–50)Wintertime. Batteries don’t work as well when very cold. Some cars will warm the batteries to an optimal temperature if you are plugged into the grid. The other problem is cabin heat. A gas powered car throws away 75% or more of the energy in the fuel, as heat out the tailpipe and radiator. It doesn’t change your gas mileage to divert some of it from the radiator in front, to one inside the cabin.In an EV, 90% of the energy goes toward motion, which doesn’t leave enough to warm the cabin with. So to get a warm cabin you have to spend some of the energy in the battery. There are two ways this happens, using the air conditioning “backwards” as a heat pump, or by using the same sort of resistive heater that you aren’t supposed to have under your desk at the office. The heat pump is the more efficient system. Both do have the advantage that warm air happens quickly, no waiting for an engine to warm up.There is another way, that is great in cool but not frigid weather. You want the heated seats. They will keep you comfortably warm when it’s 40F out, without affecting range.One thing about heating and air conditioning in an EV that will make conventional car owners jealous, the car has timers that can start the heat, air conditioning or the defroster, and if plugged in, they will use grid power for this. You go out in the morning, and the car will be already warm, and the windshield clear. You get back to the car that has spent all day in the August sun, and when you open the door, you aren’t hit with the waves of heat that feel like you are standing in front of a blast furnace. You can sit down, wearing shorts, and the back of your thighs won’t get branded with the upholstery’s stitching pattern. A number of them have the ability to also turn on the heat, etc. from a phone app. When the meeting finally is winding up, you poke the phone, and the car starts whirring all by itself.One other weather related thing: the batteries can freeze. If it gets below -20F -27C, and stays there for days, the batteries can freeze. Supposedly they aren’t harmed by this, as long as you don’t try to charge them. Just move the car into a warmer space, and let them thaw. The manufacturers build a heater into the pack, to prevent this. If connected to outside power, it will keep them safe, till mud season. If it isn’t plugged in, it will use the batteries themselves. Even a small pack will keep them safe for more than a week. So if you live in someplace like frostbite falls, or Barrow, be sure to plug it in when you leave it for a few days. Wall outlets are more than sufficient.Range anxiety and charging times, the usual elephants in the room. You get over it. Most of us charge at home, while we are sleeping. As far as we are concerned the car takes 30 seconds or less a day to charge, 10 seconds to plug in, 20 to unplug and hang the cord up. It’s like charging your phone, you don’t know how long it takes, you just plug it in before bed, and it’s full when you wake up.The real change in outlook happens after a month or so. Imagine there were pixies that came around every night, and topped up your tank. Every day you get in, and the “tank” is always full, you just stop worrying about range or charging. Gone is the arriving late to something, because you forgot to stop the night before, and had to make an unplanned pit stop on the way. (Or your teenaged kid borrowed it last night, and left it a needles width above empty.) And no more making a side trip, and spending 10 minutes in the rain, heat or cold, pumping fuel. If it’s alwas full in the morning, often would you think about your gas gauge? Would you really choose filling up yourself.Now I get range anxiety when I wind up driving a conventional car. Refueling requires a conscious effort, I have to notice that I need some, and figure out where I can get it. (if I am driving a gas car, it means that it is a rental, I got off a plane, and I am in an unfamiliar city). After a while driving electric, you will stop noticing gas stations, and won’t know what a gallon of the stuff costs anymore. The last habit to go, seeing a station, and glancing at the “gas” gauge.We have never sat around waiting for a charge. Even when we made trips further than a full charge would take us. Yes it took a bit of planning, it was long enough ago that high speed chargers were still limited in availability. We just picked a high speed charger at a shopping mall next to the interstate , and had dinner while it charged. It finished charging before we finished eating.Right now the only time you will make use of a high speed charger, is on a trip that today would have you buying gas more than once in one day. You may even not need it for trips where you fill up two days in a row. (You pick a hotel that has level 2 charging available, and the car is full by the time you finish breakfast)One reading of the name of the Japanese high speed standard (Chademo) is vaguely “a cup of tea”. The implication is that you would stop, brew a cup of tea, and drink. The car would be mostly recharged, and you could continue.If you are the sort of driver that packs sandwiches to eat on the way, and tells the kids “if you aren’t back from the bathroom by the time I am done filling the tank, we’re leaving you here”, using an EV will make your trip take longer.For a more typical trip to the in-laws, you pull into the rest area, find an open charger, wave your phone or RFID card at the box bolted to the concrete pad, and plug in. In the time it takes to herd the kids thru the toilet, wait in line for to-go at deathburger, get back to the car, and get them strapped back in, a good charger will have added enough range to drive for 3 hours, or about mean time to meltdown for siblings under 10. If you are being all adult, and actually sit down for a meal that is brought to you and you don’t have to unwrap before eating, you will get the charge complete text before you get the check.Time to finish charging isn’t linear. As the pack gets full, they slow the charging down so the batteries don’t overheat. If it takes X time to charge to 50%, going from 50 to 75% might take that long again. And the last 25% might take 3X to spoon in.What this means is on long trips, is that you start thinking like a transport pilot, you take on only enough fuel to get you to your next stop plus a reserve. In EV terms, it means you try to stay on the fast end of the curve, and you don’t stick around for the battery to fully charge. Pick the charger 3/4ths of the way, instead of half way, so you are down to 10%. Then if by leaving with only 60% you will get there with 30 miles range in reserve, you leave then rather than wait as long again for 80%. If you have a Tesla, the navigation system will actually do the calculations for you, saying you need to stop at charger Q for at least 12 minutes to reach your destination.One last comment on range. High speeds on the highway make a more noticeable difference with EV than with a conventional car. Since other losses are low, aerodynamic drags contribution is more prominent. A long way of saying you will get a lot further at 65 than you will at 85.Other random things….Maintenance, service, etc. Here is some real good news. They need next to none. On our car, the scheduled service is every other year, and is just a bunch of safety inspections (brakes, suspension, etc. your state inspection is likely more involved). The only scheduled service is every 6 years, when they want you to change the coolant and the cabin air filter.A conventional car has an engine with hundreds of moving parts, many of them reciprocating. There are high temperatures and pressures, well over 100 bar, and temperatures hot enough that parts glow red. It depends on a pressure fed oil system, that it contaminates with combustion byproducts, so you need to change it frequently. It needs a transmission, friction and possibly fluid couplings, and a bunch of ancillary systems.By contrast, an EV motor has one moving part, it rotates in sealed ball bearings. It is basically the same sort of 3 phase induction motor that you find in industrial machinery everywhere, where they are expected to run 3 shifts a day for decades with minimal attention. The conventional starter motor is more complex. There is no transmission required, and there are no friction or fluid connections involved.Here are a bunch of things that you won’t have to think about. No oil changes, no air, oil, or fuel filters to change. No spark plugs, timing belts, or serpentine belt. You won’t ever need a new muffler, catalytic converter, fuel pump, starter, alternator, ignition coil, crank position sensor, etc.Check your tire pressure. If it’s low, rolling restance takes a disproportionate jump, and I have found that the warning system wants you to be 20% low before it lights up. I have a compressor at home, so I just check them on the first Saturday of the month. (Unless it’s raining or snowing). A tire delays the airs escape, it can’t keep it confined forever. Plus when the temperatures drop, so does the pressure in your tire.Regenerative braking. This is where the car starts to recharge the battery as a way of slowing down. It will happen when you hit the brakes, it’s why the brake pads last so long. On an EV you can also get it to happen by just lifting your foot off the accelerator. On some cars it is the default, on others you have to tell the car you want it. it’s wonderful, it reminds me of engine braking with a manual transmission. I really notice its absence when I get back into an IC car. You can drive in city traffic, just using the accelerator. You only hit the brake pedal when you need to hold on a hill.Parking lots. Pedestrians walk 3 abreast down the middle of the lane, unless they hear an engine behind them. Engine noise, and they go single file at the edge of the lane. We learned this 20 years ago driving hybrids. Just a heads up, so it doesn’t surprise you.Since the horn is overkill in this situation, some cars come with a “growler” fake engine noise that comes on automatically below 10 mph or so, to warn people. At one point it was going to be required, don’t know if it happened. Our car is so equipped, even tho it wasn’t required that year.I find it annoying, I like the silent glide. At least it shuts up when you are stopped. I suppose I wouldn’t mind it so much if I got a choice of sounds. (A poll was taken on the VW EV forum, some of the nominees included Italian V12, Mack truck, big V8, air cooled VW, Harley, turbo 4 cylinder with blowoff noise, and a chainsaw, but the winner was the noise that the Jetsons cartoon flying car made). One solution for cars sans growler, that some proposed was to briefly turn on the air conditioning, as the compressor makes a similar noise to an engine. A wag on the Chevy Volt forum said “my car has a pedestrian warning system, 4 of them, they were made by Goodyear”. Apparently the factory low rolling resistance tires weren’t the quietest.Adressing some of the other “facts” that are routinely brought up by people that haven’t been in the same zip code as an EV.“Your electricity comes from coal, it pollutes more than a gas engine….” A couple of “facts”. with this one.. First, because EV are so energy efficient, the equivalent of over 100 mpg in a gas car, even if you had 100% coal fired electricity, (true in some parts of West Virginia, near the coal fields) it would still result in less pollution than a normal car.The second point, coal is only 28% of US generation, and dropping as fast as the utilities can get their hands on the hardware to convert to combined cycle natural gas, which halves the fuel costs, and carbon footprint. Predictions say that coal firing will essentially end by 2030. Some places like the New England states, it’s already gone. Carbon neutral generation is at 33% nationwide, last I checked, And any new generation built these days will be a renewable source. A lot more solar, especially household arrays, and for utility scale the current cheapest per kWh to construct and operate are wind turbines. (And that includes the generators that burn stuff) So your car is green already, and it gets greener without you doing anything. A gas burner doesn’t get better with time. (And you can make your car very green quickly if you have the ability to buy your power from carbon neutral sources only).“They are all slow”. This one is best dispelled by stuffing them in the passenger seat and demontrating. If a P100D is available, it should take under 3 seconds to convince them, but even more modest examples should suffice. Besides the torque curve everyone mentions, they don’t have a flywheel. It was an old rule of thumb with the drag racing crowd, that taking a pound off the flywheel was like taking a hundred pounds off the car. I have let various car nuts try our car (and it’s not one of the fastest ones). When you urge them to “go ahead, hit it”, a look of wonder spreads across their face.“The batteries only last 3–5 years, and cost more than the car is worth to replace”. We don’t know yet how long a set of batteries will last, we haven’t been using them long enough to wear many of them out. A car owner doesn’t have that much to worry about, the EPA requires that the batteries be warranted for 8 years/80,000 miles, if you live in a state that adopted CARB rules, the warranty jumps to 10 years/150,000 miles. As they are emissions equipment, they are transferable.Ok, some actual data instead of speculation. Some brands collect data from their cars when they are in for regularly scheduled inspections (there is essentially no regular maintenance on an EV) To get down to 70% of original capacity looks like it will take nearly 20 years. Faster in hot climates, slower in more temperate ones. There are already some cars running around with more than 250,000 miles on their original batteries. Should a pack loose enough capacity to be not useful for transportation, they can be rebuilt, which thanks to volume lowering battery prices, will be fairly cheap to do. Yes the first few years of the Leaf did have a battery life issue, they had air cooled packs, and didn’t use a particularly heat tolerant battery chemistry, the LA crowd did have issues with reduced capacity. After the outcry, Nissan switched to what got nicknamed “lizard” batteries. The companies that water cooled their packs didn’t have a problem.“But toxic batteries in the landfill”. First, most (but not all) aren’t toxic waste. The stuff inside is harmless should it wind up in the trash, and is legal to toss into a landfill. But landing in the trash is just Not going to happen, for a number of reasons. First, they are on a car. We do an excellent job with cars, something like 98% of them get recycled when they are dead. What that means is that if a battery is part of a car, it will not get dumped.The batteries are excellent candidates for recycling, they come in a handy easily isolated container, they are marked as to what chemistry they use, the metals inside are valuable, some as much as $10/lb, and there could be a half a ton of them.But most of them won’t get recycled, instead they will get reused. Space and weight are limited on a car, so you want the batteries at their best. But transportation isn’t the only thing that wants mass quantities of batteries, and some are a bit less fussy. Stationary power banks to pick the most likely. People and utilities use them to even out load on a power system. You have a fine solar array, but your peak demand is at 6 PM, nearly sunset. So you take a bunch of these batteries. You get them cheap because they are reclaimed. So you have to use 25% more of them, they are less than half the price of new, space under the array isn’t being used for anything else, it’s a little big, so what.Yes this is already happening. The junkyard owners learned long ago that there is real money at the end of those fat orange wires. When a car with a traction battery gets dragged into the yard, it is immediately stuck up on a stand, and they drop the battery out first thing. They are by their standards gentle, (wrenches not torches, and they won’t let it fall more than a couple of inches. They might even include a pallet to cushion the landing, and not just the unadorned forklift blades), and they move it to a shelf indoors.The owner knows there is a ready market, and its not just owners of that make. If you damage it, he will be pissed. (If the secret junkyard cabal finds out that a yard owner sold scrap for less than they could have gotten, they will swoop in, switch the office coffee for decaf, the donuts for bran muffins, and replace their pit bull with an equal weight of toy poodles, yorkies, and other tiny yapping breeds)The people buying the packs are doing or updating an EV conversion, rebuilding traction batteries, some live off grid, and are building a storage facility for their solar array, etc. GM has contracted with a third party to buy the batteries that are replaced under the emissions system warranty. The off grid folks are particularly keen customers. Lithium is a whole lot lighter than lead. So a pack of lithium cells while a bit more complicated to build, is a whole lot easier on your back than half the capacity of deep cycle lead acid. Even better you don’t have to make weekly rounds with the distilled water, checking that they aren’t low.The motorhead community has been wrong about battery life before. When we bought a hybrid the same short life was predicted. Well for those we actually can speak from experience. We bought a Prius in 2000. 14.5 years later, it was facing repairs to the internal combustion side of things that had a parts cost greater than the current value. As part of the decision that led to us trading it in, I checked the health of the original, unmolested, traction battery. It was just over 90% of its original capacity, and the cell to cell balance was good. The hybrid, where I know the owner, with the highest mileage was a first US generation Prius with 350,000 miles on it when a teen ran a stop sign and T boned it. There are reports of ones in taxi service with double that on the original pack.I think the reputation for short EV battery life is from the early homebrew lead acid conversions. Use of any sort of cell level battery balancing was unheard of. Charging could best be described as having a bit of a brute force approach. They didn’t limit discharge depth, which unchecked actually leads to some cells getting a reverse charge, when they hit 0 before their neighbors. All combine to leave them with a very weakened battery.If you have a lithium pack, you must have an active battery management system, especially since you the manufacturer are on the hook for 8 years.“But but they catch fire…. We read about that one in the news”. Yea, you don’t here much about regular cars catching fire. That’s because it happens so often, that it isn’t news. Try 171,500 times a year or about every 3 minutes in the US alone. Once a day, the event is fatal. 4 times a day someone is injured enough to need treatment. The fires only get reported if the car belonged to someone prominent, or it happened someplace that it was particularly disruptive, like a tunnel. Conventional cars have many ways that collision or parts failure can set things alight.There are two things that can get a lithium pack to self ignite, mechanical damage, and incompetent battery management. Those hoverboards that got recalled were because they did the battery management wrong. Every cell did have a protection chip, but they used the ones designed for a single cell, and not the ones with the extra circuits to deal with multiple cells in series.Mechanical damage fires start more slowly, than a fuel fire, the batteries smolder and vent smoke for a while before flames happen. You have more time to get away. And the battery fire doesn’t spread anywhere near as fast as you will see with a gas tank leaking it’s contents downhill.Remember, in most gas powered cars, the bottom of the fuel tank is at or at times below the floor pan. Random obstacles on the road can tear them open. Some are even made of rotary molded plastic. While some metal gas tanks are sturdy, a lot of them will collect a substantial dent if an adult were to jump up, and land on them with both feet.I helped a friend that bought a wrecked Leaf for its battery pack, to salvage the cells for some electric motorcycles he had built. The battery comes in a very sturdy can, that is mounted under the floor. Yes if you jumped and hit the center, it would deflect. At an edge or the corner, not so much. They are pretty well protected. Tesla goes one better, armoring the bottom and front edge with a substantial titanium plate. They also fill the space between the cells with a fire extinguishing gel.But cars can set themselves alight in other ways, ones that don’t even require a collision as a trigger. Conventional cars have fuel running 10 feet or more from the tank to the engine, in a steel tube at the bottom of the car. In fuel injected cars, this line is pressurized to 4 bar (50–60 psi) by a pump in the tank. At various places, there are sections of rubber hose connecting things.There is a guy on YouTube that rebuilds salvage vehicles, and records the process. He just finished recovering a Lamborghini that had a cracked fitting lead to a fire when refueling. He just started on a Ferrari where a rubber line rubbed against the worm drive hose clamp securing its neighbor, wore through, and sprayed the engine compartment with 50 psi fuel, and the exhaust manifold made certain that the failure of that cheap bit of hose did terminal amounts of damage. (The channel is Tavarish if you want to check it out)Last one, I promise.“Look at the damage mining the materials for the batteries makes” this is always accompanied by a distant view of a large open pit mine, or a detail view of excavation machines working on the ramp sides typical of open pit mining. This is a clear attempt at disinformation. Neither photo is a lithium mine. The distant view has been identified as a Russian copper mine. No identification on the close view that I have seen, but what they are mining appears to be coal or oil shale.A lithium mine and refinery looks like a bunch of man made shallow ponds, in the middle of an alkaline salt flat. It makes things a lot easier when what you want to extract is water soluble. If you have flown over the southern edge of the bay south of San Francisco, you would have seen some rectangular ponds that are somewhat unusual colors. This is a “mine” for sea salt. They just use sun and wind to evaporate the water, and the salt eventually crystallizes out.If you flew over a lithium mine, the ponds would look similar, but surrounded by the white sand of the desert, instead of the ocean. The primary source for lithium is the Atacama desert high in the Andes mountains. It is one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. Nothing lives there. It hasn’t rained there in recorded history. They used it to test the signs of life instruments used in Martian exploration.Anyhow you “mine” lithium, by rinsing the alkaline sand, leaving cleaner sand and some brine. You pump the brine into the ponds. After a while the lithium will crystallize on the surface, and you skim it off. Further refining is done electrically.