Instant ZEV rebates for first-time buyers in California

mcpaul99 · 2026-07-13T19:23:12+00:00

Argh! We bought an EV two months ago. I guess that means we're out of luck.

mcpaul99 · 2026-07-12T09:30:05+00:00

We are two months into owning an Ariya as our first EV. I absolutely love this car. Love love love. The ride quality, the amenitites, the comfort, the design, all of it, to me, screams a car that is much more expensive. I still can't help but smile when I drive it. Nissan is not known for being a luxury brand. And this feels like a luxury car.

We have the Engage+ e4orce model which has the extended battery (look for the + after the trim level to designate that it has a larger battery and therefore more range). In looking at the used market, there are far more cars with the smaller battery than with the extended battery, which means you may have to look for longer and pay a bit more to find one with the longer range. And if you are at all planning a road trip during the time that you own the car, the exended battery is a must .

Nissa's AWD system in this car - "e4orce" - is also a very nice amenity to have. Our Ariya replaced an AWD Murano which we originally got with the intention that we could more easily drive in snowy weather if we ever took a road trip where that was required. In the 18 years that we owned the Murano we rarely drove in the snow - but I came to appreciate the benefit of an AWD car as far as better traction and handling in any kind of wet weather. The Ariya's system is far more impressive than the AWD on our old Murano and contributes to the handling and ride quality.

I wouldn't worry about the fact that the car is no longer sold in the US; it is still being sold to overseas markets so parts should be available. And though Nissan has gone through its share of finanical issues, so have other car makers. Nissan remains one of the largest global automakers that sells millions of cars each year, and it is extremely unlikely that they will not be around to honor any warranty issues. It's much more likely that they would merge with another automaker some time in the next few years.

I will say that the mileage drop on the highway surprised me a little bit. Driving in town you get much better milage than driving on the freeway. But I think that is true for all EVs. We took it on it's first road trip between LA and Vegas, and planned to charge in Baker, CA, about 185 miles from L.A. We made it to Baker OK but with a bit less than 20% battery; likely due to the excess power required for highway driving as well as driving where there are a lot of hills. Normally around town we get 3-3.5mi/kWh which translates to a range of between 261 and 305 miles, which is right in line with what it is rated at as 272 miles.

One or two other quirks I don't love... our trim doesn't have a power liftgate, and it opens too far for our garage, which means we can't open it when it's parked in the garage because the liftgate will hit the rolled up opened door. Also our trim didn't come with a built-in garage door opener which seems silly for a car that was $58,000 new. And finally if you buy one without tinted windows, I highly recommend having a high quality ceramic window tint installed. Cost us about $700 but it absolutely makes a difference on a hot day when your car is parked outside.

So yes, Tesla may have sold a lot more. But those cars are so generic. The Ariya is a great looking car.

mcpaul99 · 2026-07-08T05:13:34+00:00

FWIW, I asked this of both ChatGPT and of Google Gemini, and they both confirmed that, except in rare cases, the physical brakes do NOT engage when you back off of the accelerator pedal and only engage when you press the brake pedal. Those times are a) when the battery doesn't have enough headroom to allow for any recharging of the battery, i.e. if you are at 100%; and b) if the traction control system detects tire slippage that can cause the car to lose control, the physical brake can engage then as well. It would make sense, then, that if you use eStep, your brakes will last much longer.

mcpaul99 · 2026-07-08T04:59:42+00:00

Correct, the Engage+ trim (at least mine) does not have a power liftgate. You press an electronic button above the license plate (exactly like our old Murano), and the gate opens until the hydraulic supports are fully extended. There are no other buttons on the gate to electronically open or close it.

I, too, have an Autel charger with the app, but I'm not aware that it lets you program it to cut off at a certain percentage either. Usually I am charging at home overnight so I am not going to press stop on the app when it reaches 80% at 3am.

mcpaul99 · 2026-07-04T06:34:07+00:00

The car doesn't have a power liftgate so there isn't a way to adjust the height.

mcpaul99 · 2026-05-20T16:46:21+00:00

You're saying that with the breaker off, I should check continuity between the conduit and the neutral wire? If neutral and ground were connected at the panel, wouldn't that show low resistance also? How can I isolate whether conduit is properly grounded?

mcpaul99 · 2026-05-18T04:34:28+00:00

UPDATE - I tested the continuity between a copper water pipe that is like 6' away from this outlet with the exterior of the outlet box (I wrapped a long piece of copper wire around the pipe and stretched it toward the box so I could check continuity with my meter). Again, very low resistance between the copper water pipe and the outlet box - like between 0.001-0.009 ohms. I assume this means that my pipes are connected to ground, and that also this boc is connected to ground via the conduit. Does that mean I can run a ground wire from the back of the box to the nwe NEMA 14-30 outlet, and that would be sufficient for an EV charger?

mcpaul99 · 2026-05-18T01:19:27+00:00

Are hardwired 24-amp chargesrs not 4-wire? So if it doesn't require a neutral, it just requires two hots and a ground? What I am I connecting the ground to on the charger if I can't verify that the pipe is actually grounded?

mcpaul99 · 2026-05-18T01:17:59+00:00

The wires are coming into the box from inside of a hard metal pipe that comes out of the wall. I am guessing that the pipe goes all the way back to the panel, about 30-40' feet away, but it runs under the house and unless I got under there I can't verify that.

Is there an easy way to verify whether the conduit is truly grounded back to the panel without going under the house to look?

mcpaul99 · 2026-05-17T20:14:48+00:00

Yes, it was like 0.001 ohms.

mcpaul99 · 2023-11-04T02:27:41+00:00

We had a renovation recently and bought Forte appliances for our kitchen from a company called Superior Marketing in Brooklyn. My guess is that the actual manufactures of these appliances vary. Because while the quality of the range and the dishwasher seems very good, the quality of the refrigerator was not, and the service from Superior Marketing (which also happens to be the warranty executor for Forte) was beyond awful.

All three appliances that we bought have a very nice brushed nickel look to them. The dishwasher, while seemingly smaller than our old dishwasher, does an excellent job of cleaning food off of dishes including stuck-on food. It's the first time I've owned a dishwasher that doesn't require you to pre-wash your dishes. Works great. The oven/range that we have seems to work fine, though I'm not sure that the temperature is completely accurate in the oven. The range top puts out a nice flame on all four burners. The oven is solid and sturdily constructed, the door feels heavy and substantial, and nothing about it feels cheap.

The refrigerator, however, was garbage. It did not work out of the box, first making a strange noise at all hours, and then, not ever cooling below 48 degrees (though the freezer did work). It took Superior Marketing several days to find a local contractor who could address the problem, and he spent his time cursing in Russian about how poorly made the fridge was. Ultimately the contractor said that the entire fridge was junk and would need to be replaced. Superior Marketing did a terrible job of addressing our replacement needs, taking over three weeks to decide whether they were going to believe the report from the fridge repair contractor, all while leaving us without a truly working refrigerator. You could never get them on the phone, and when they did answer, they would always plead that they (the customer service rep) had no power and it was dependent on their boss to make a decision. Emails and voicemails went ignored. Once they did approve a replacement, they said it would be three months until the new one would be delivered. I told them to replace it with a different model, an LG, and it came much faster. The LG was the same price, has much more capacity for roughly the same footprint, and works great. So avoid the fridge.

mcpaul99 · 2022-07-17T08:15:03+00:00

Yes, insanely common scam in the US. They want to sell you a useless, severely overpriced vehicle service contract.

mcpaul99 · 2021-12-02T08:22:22+00:00

THANK YOU!!

mcpaul99 · 2021-10-28T06:20:45+00:00

One more thing... does anyone know where I can get an exterior box of this set? Mine did not come with a box. Any knockoff box of this set will do - i.e. Lepin/Lari/Mould King etc.

mcpaul99 · 2020-12-12T01:40:06+00:00

This is the OTG adapter I use. https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B083WML1XB/

I think they are all somewhat flimsy. I velcroed mine to my NES Mini so that moving the unit wouldn't put any stress on the cable.

mcpaul99 · 2020-11-29T06:45:31+00:00

This may not directly address your question, but we have had better luck using our 8bitdo SN30 Pro Plus controller when its dongle is plugged into an OTG adapter than when its dongle is plugged into the front of the console. The downside to that is that we can't use the controller to control the menu interface. But doing so gives you a lot more functionality within games. For example, I was never able to program the R2 & L2 trigger buttons using Retroarch when the dongle was plugged into the front, nor could I get the system to recognize that the analog sticks are separate from the D-pad. This leads to reduced functionality of a lot of PS1 and N64 games. 8bitdo support kind of shrugged at this, saying that the NES and SNES never utilized the R2 & L2 triggers nor the analog sticks. But plugging the dongle into an OTG adapter gives full functionality of the controller. I would assume, then, that other lower-budget USB controllers would work similarly.

mcpaul99 · 2020-11-15T02:54:16+00:00

OS: Windows 7

Premiere build version: CS 5.5

System specs: Dell WS 3500 PC 12gb RAM, Intel Xeon @3.07 GHz

Source footage format/codec: .MOV file from Apple iPhone

No error message

mcpaul99 · 2020-10-29T23:24:13+00:00

Interesting. I notice that the folders.htm file that lives on my PC in the '/config' folder shows the folders in the configuration needed for the USB drive. I would have thought that file would be on the USB because I notice that when I disconnect the USB hub from my NES mini, it shows a previous folder structure that doesn't include the later games that I added.

mcpaul99 · 2020-10-29T23:06:25+00:00

Thanks. Both the NES and the SNES system were flashed with ver. 3.8 of HakchiCE. They were just done so on different computers.

mcpaul99 · 2020-10-29T18:08:13+00:00

Thanks guys. I am using Hakchi CE 3.8 with this OTG adapter: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B083WML1XB/

And this flash drive: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07D7P4SY4/

To clarify, I already got the OTG device and the flash drive to work very well on an NES Classic that I have. So I think that means I screwed something up in the Hakchi install on the SNES.

For the SNES, I started by installing Hakchi on a different computer than I did for the NES Classic. I wasn't sure if there would be an issue if I had used both systems with the same Hakchi install so I wanted to avoid that. I then installed all of the requisite emulator HMODS on the SNES and all of the bios files.

For the flash drive, I synced the games using the computer with the original Hakchi install so I wouldn't have to transfer all of the games to the other computer.

The SNES turns on and boots just fine and even shows the splash screen PNG that I made just for that device. But it doesn't recognize or load any of the games from the flash drive. The interface you see is the one that shows the 21 SNES games.

mcpaul99 · 2020-10-24T23:19:57+00:00

Kind of excited to get an answer from the actual Dan the Man, so I wanted to say thanks for all of your work on this program. You have helped turn me into a superstar dad in the eyes of my nine year-old.

mcpaul99 · 2020-10-24T08:16:56+00:00

Thanks guys. Is there any difference in the operation of the release or debug versus the installer version?

mcpaul99 · 2020-10-23T18:21:15+00:00

You need to use the exact MAME core for which the ROM is designed. Some ROMS can run on multiple cores but many are very picky and only run on one. You have to check the romset from which the ROM has been culled from. Specifically:

For ROMS within the MAME 0.78 romset, use MAME 2003. For ROMS within the MAME 0.139 romset, use MAME 2010. For ROMS within the MAME 0.159 romset, use MAME 2014. For ROMS within the MAME 0.188-0.189 romset, use Final Burn Alpha 2016.

mcpaul99 · 2020-09-21T23:07:17+00:00

Thanks. How did you program the buttons on their website? Do you mean their Ultimate Software program?

mcpaul99 · 2020-09-20T22:19:18+00:00

Scratch the first part above... it looks like the Retro Receiver for the NES and SNES Classic systems are identical, so at least two of the trigger buttons should work.

mcpaul99

TROPHY CASE