Mike Nickerson wrote: > It is a good thing when a vehicle like a Tesla disables itself in an > accident. Even my conversion does that. I have an inertial switch to > disconnect the traction pack in the event of an accident. > > Now, in my case, I just need to reset that sensor. I'm sure Tesla has > something much more exotic. However, I don't think you can argue against > disabling the output of an 85 kWh pack during an accident!
Let's consider this statement for a minute. The energy content of gasoline is 32.4MJ/L, and 1MJ=0.28kWh; so, a 10 (US) gallon tank of ordinary gasoline contains 343kWh of energy, and yet every other auto manufacturer has *millions* of vehicles on the road with a manually-resettable-by-anyone inertia switch to disable this energy source in the event of a sufficiently serious accident. Yes, a means of automatically disabling/disconnecting the traction pack in the event of an accident makes sense for ~any~ EV, however, there is no obvious justification for this feature not being manually resettable without the assistance of the manufacturer. It seems reasonable that the vehicle might have the intelligence to refuse to re-enable should its onboard diagnostics determine that something is unsafe or defective with its systems (in the same way that a manually-resettable circuit breaker will immediately re-open if the a fault condition persists), but again it is not obvious that there is any need for the involvement of the manufacturer. Cheers, Roger. _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
