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Your EV discount might carry a steep legal cost:
Chevy offered rebates to Bolt EV owners who bought their cars just before a 2023 model price drop, but that discount comes with a large catch. Jalopnik and Autoblog note the rebate application requires that drivers "forever waive and release" their right to sue GM or LG over the Bolt's reported battery defect. You'd have to be content with the savings even if the car did serious damage, in other words. GM confirmed the agreement language with Engadget.
GM first recalled the Bolt in November 2020 after reports of battery fires between 2017 and 2019. The automaker tried addressing the issue with a software update in April 2021, but two subsequent fires and a second recall led the NHTSA to warn against parking indoors. That prompted a July 2021 recall where GM replaced the battery packs. The brand eventually recalled all manufactured Bolts, pledged an additional $1 billion for battery replacements and offered an eight-year, 100,000-mile warranty on substitute batteries.
Toasty!
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday August 09 2022, @03:50AM (5 children)
My mom always bought mineral rights when buying a property. I have a 400' well, drilled in 1998. They kept going until they got enough flow. It was my dad's property back then. He paid around $9k. Pump is 3/4 HP Goulds. It might not be the right one for the well, but water level is sometimes 33' below grade. I need to measure it more often. I also have an older 150' well. Water is better in that one, tastes better and pH nearer 7.0, but it easily runs dry. I've been meaning to "surge" it sometime, maybe give it a little impulse treatment if you know what I mean. I can pull up that pump, but not the 400' one- it needs a motorized puller (3-wheel rig).
My issue with PayPal is principle. I refuse to accommodate corporations owning us. I'll fight them as much as I can. Sometimes (often) I think it's more about them controlling people than it's about making $. Either way, I'm standing my ground. Well, I would accept them paying me for all my time, effort, and hassle of setting up a new bank account (yes, at yet another bank...)
I'm super glad you didn't acquiesce to the new doubled payment. That's a case where We The People need to connect and band together and fight that stuff in unison. "Class action" and all that.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday August 09 2022, @04:29AM (4 children)
You rarely have a choice about mineral rights. They're typically separate from the surface property (which is why mining claims are not private as such). The more valuable the potential, the less likely they are to be included with the property. In some states you do not have water rights either, or if you do, have to file for them when you drill a well, but thereafter they usually convey with the property.
My well in the desert was 405 feet to bottom and water at 270 feet, but it would do 70gpm all day long (probably the limit of the 2" pipe off the top, was 3" down the shaft), as at that level it hit the big local aquifer. It was intended as an ag well, not just household. Tiny compared to the capped wells across the road from me. When my pump died, it took a big-ass truck and rig to pull it out (and cost $11k all found). Here I just have a $200 surface pump!
Yeah, sometimes you can flush 'em out. My neighbor here, his dad tried dynamite. This was a Bad Idea[TM]. Neighbor spent last summer re-digging the well (by hand, here we have water at about 20 feet). New well driven about 30 feet away was NFG (WAY too alkali, and we can already use our water as concrete... it tests off the hardness scale). You wouldn't think it would be that different when it's running over the same damn bedrock from the same uphill source, but some spots must pass through some undesirable mineral deposits.
I can understand refusing on principle, all right... there are some things I just will not be coerced into. Such as buying an electric car. (A car example in an OT post on a car article, I think I did something wrong...)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday August 09 2022, @04:56AM (3 children)
Double negative- loops right back OT. :)
Yeah, I wasn't going to go as far as dynamite. More likely a "quarter stick" or something similar. I'd drop a SS mesh basket down first, electric fuse for the 1/4 stick. I have some older pumps I'd rig up as "trash pumps" with a jet to blast and stir up stuff as it pumps out the debris. I dunno- all free to try.
I've done some work for a pretty important hydrogeologist, so I know a few things. One is that your ground may look flat, but there could be a very steep mountain under you, and it was all filled in by whatever that process is that deposits dirt when nobody is looking.
How many HP was that pump? And what electric feed, 480 3 phase? (electric cars have 3-phase electric motors, so we're back OT here!)
So, why do you hate electric cars so much? :)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Tuesday August 09 2022, @05:45AM (2 children)
Because I like the freedom to travel when and where I like. I'm peculiar that way. :D
Yeah, we're on a slopey chunk of bedrock here, 20 feet of dirt on top and about 30-50 feet above the river (depending where you stand, I've got about 25' of slope from the irrigation ditch at the top of the hill, down to my front yard), so the water that oozes up below me might not even be from the same flow (it doesn't come out the side of the fairly steep hill beyond me, so it goes somewhere else) and who knows what complications are under us... we're also at the confluence of two rivers, and there's doubtless plenty of seep through the gravel beds. (Water level at the gravel pit half a mile away is down about ten feet.)
My desert well had a 4HP pump, 240 3-phase (we couldn't get 480). -- Funny story, my neighbor a couple miles away decided to hand-dig a well (because he resented how expensive his little local water company was) and... took him a year of weekends to grind through 150 feet of calichi (the ground is so hard, he didn't need to collar the hole, it's stable as concrete and damnear as hard), and still bone-dry. When I met him he'd just recently given up... well, I coulda told you how much farther you'd need to dig! :D
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday August 09 2022, @12:31PM (1 child)
Interesting as always! Wow, 150 feet hand digging? That's insane. Long ago when I was a wee young'en I remember a company called "Deep Rock" that sold DIY well kits. I even considered trying it. They're typically only good for up to 200'. I suppose that would be due to weight limit for lifting the drill pipes back out. Your neighbor could take that rig down to the bottom of his hole and keep going!
I literally can't imagine digging like that. I have a sort of phobia about holes in the ground like that. I'm not sure how far down I could go before needing meds, but it wouldn't be far, no matter how well braced and collared it was. He'd be an interesting guy to meet. Or maybe not...
240 3-phase. You typically only get 208, but most motors are rated for 208 or 240. Converters and autotransformers exist of course.
So I get what you're saying about electric cars. You might not have as many charging stations as many other areas, and that's all being built up. Much of the investment / build is for commercial fleets like Amazon, but more charging stations are coming.
I would want both engine and batteries. A few years ago a good friend bought a Chrysler Pacifica "plug-in hybrid". He (they) love it. It runs on batteries most of the time, for maybe 50 miles, then the engine kicks in, esp. for long trips. In my mind it's the best of both worlds. He also has a Bolt and loves it. He's never had any problems coming close to running out of juice. But we have a lot more charging stations in these parts.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday August 09 2022, @01:27PM
What's more, my neighbor dug this dry hole when he was in his 70s. Dangling from a rope, and the hole was only about two feet across. If he hadn't passed away a few years back, I'm sure he'd be right interested in a faster-drilling DIY rig! (Cuz when I said the ground resembled concrete, I did not exaggerate. I had a young feller digging a drain pit, and at eight feet hit calichi and took a full day to achieve two more inches... we decided any deeper needed dynamite, and the present depth would have to do.)
Yeah, I'm not a holes and mines type myself. Unstable rock overhead gives me hives.
Anywhere built up enough to have sufficient charging stations, I don't want to live. Even if charging stations existed in the middle of nowhere, I'm sure waiting for the charge to happen when it's -40 will be real pleasant, if a battery that cold will take the charge at all. And here ... well, once I get out of town, there are stretches where it's 50 miles or more to the nearest electricity, and then it's a single line running from ranch to ranch. Who's gonna pay for the infrastructure? since we're busy getting rid of all the reliable electricity, how do they plan to refine the needful copper, never mind get it out of the ground? Oh, we don't like giant open-pit mines, cuz environment?? (One estimate laid out that if everyone in the U.S. switched to EVs, we'd need 5x the current grid capacity, and there's not enough copper in the world. And the all wind-and-solar mining-requirements estimate makes that look downright doable, not to mention that "out in the desert" solar is scorched-earth destructive to a fragile habitat.) Self-charging hybrids are reasonable. All-EV is a failure to perform basic arithmetic, and a belief that since it happens out of urban sight, the necessary components to all-EV spring fullblown from the brow of Zeus.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.