Trivia Tuesday: January 27, 2015

Some of these famous buildings are hideous, some are interesting with decent parts to them, and a rare few are really nice. The hideous ones include the newer architecture building at University of Washington, Wurster Hall (also architecture) at UC Berkeley, and perhaps the Salk Institute in San Diego.  These buildings are cold and soul sucking, so they're hard to be in.  They also come from a fairly ugly (on various levels) sixties and seventies granola period. One of these buildings would be a "hybrid" and it's fine.  That would be Campbell Hall (again ... architecture) at the University of Virginia, which is definitely brutalist reinforced concrete at the first taller level or two, with an exposed waffle slab at levels above you.  However, they soften it up by using brick on the upper floors' exterior, as well as lower floor to ceiling heights.  The one brutalist gem would have to be the main library at University of California San Diego.  They definitely did not do this to reduce costs because it's a complicated building.  However, it's probably a nice space to be inside because of the floor to ceiling windows all around. It's just that there was a wave of putting up these buildings on West Coast campuses, surrounded by eucalyptus or fir and hemlock, and it was usually at hippieish campuses and their atmospheres don't gel with me.

Happy Mother's Day to the mothers in our lives - family, friends, coworkers  She came to mind, so I looked for a gif on her.  She is originally from Buffalo!  Most people have doubles.  I don't think she does. Happy Sunday.

Having looked at all the images online, I have to say that the interior and exterior other than the color which I like is a let down and I would even say for a Luxury brand looks cheap.

Due to my tradeshow season, do not have the time till June to do any writeups, but Lexus has released their Luxury version 3 row SUV EV that Toyota released as the Highlander and Subaru also has. Clearly not connected to the ICE Spindale grill or as many of us called the Predator mouth. https://pressroom.lexus.com/all-electric-three-row-luxury-the-all-new-2027-lexus-tz/ The press release says 300 miles of range on Select Grade. Look at the fine print, this is a sea level level road, anything else is 250 to 280 miles of range. FAILURE Lexus / Toyota along with the 400V system.

After doing a bunch of research on this, it isn't so much Honda/Acura are limiting charging speeds as it is the battery pack total size directly correlates to the rate of charge they can accept. The Prologue and non-SS Blazer EV have 85kWh batteries at 288 total volts and the ZDX/Lyriq/Blazer EV SS all have the larger 102kWh battery at 345 total volts.  Because of the way the Ultium platforms have multiple pack sizes that can and are linked together to make larger or smaller packs, the total pack volts varies based on the application and why the Hummer/Silverado/Sierra EVs can charge at 800v when they're still on 400v architecture.  Because kW = amps * volts, the bigger packs have more nominal volts because they have more cells.  Below is a Prologue example and change the 288v for the Prologue to 345v for the larger packs of the Lyriq, ZDX, or Blazer EV SS and you get 190kW for the maximum (or do the math for the other chargers, as well)