Lol, why would they push their car to a charging station? Plug the thing in at home.
Well then they can't have their story. And draining the battery that far is the petrofuel equivalent of running out of gas, and blaming the manufacturer.
They're "getting into" power generation? That makes it sound like this is something brand new. I remember when Apple put in its first natural gas cogeneration plant to take its build infrastructure off the grid, back around 2002 or 2003, I think. Google has massive generators around a bunch of its buildings, presumably for the same reason. Big tech has been in the energy business quite literally for decades at this point.
the product, fossil fuel cars, is obsolete...
I was singing a similar tune until this last winter, when a bunch of Teslas completely died due to the cold. People were pushing them down the street to get to charging stations. That showed me that fossil fuel vehicles are far from obsolete, and will continue to thrive until problems such as this are solved.
Isn't it weird how electrical vehicles are affected by cold, but petrofueld are completely unaffected by it?
Tents and gas flames https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Of course, you can always build a fire under it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
All sarcasm aside, gasoline and diesel engines also have problems in the cold. So if an EV does, it's because of the cold, not some inherent issue with EV's.
If people don't like EV's for some reason, that's fine. But just like the hand wringing when an EV catches fire, Petrofueld vehicles catch fire every day, and no one bats an eye. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... A lot of energy in batteries, and hella energy in petrofuels, and they get spunky every once in a while.P And a big part of the fix for both, rather than starting fires under the crankcase, is very similar in each case. Plug the thing in. In cold places like Alaska, parking meters have electrical outlets, battery and crankcase heaters, and you plug 'em in and keep them warm. An EV the same, you can even keep it topped off plugged into an outlet at home.
That was such a well-reasoned argument you made.
Expletives are the cheapest form of "I admit it, I'm wrong and have no argument." I note that you did not even have the courtesy to use your account to make your drive-by response and went [appropriately in this case] as "anonymous coward" but probably logged in and worked to down-mod the post to "Troll". The Ad Hominem attack constitutes a bright neon sign flashing a warning that you have nothing of value to contribute.
If your religion is so weak it cannot be questioned, you should consider that this might mean you need to re-think a few things.
When a person gets drunk and plows his car into somebody, killing them, we as a society say "You, drunk person, are NOT innocent; YOU chose to get drunk and therefore YOU are responsible for whatever bad thing YOU DID while you were drunk". We do not permit the drunk killer to say "I'm not guilty because I surrendered control, and then stuff just happened while I was blacked-out".
When a company outsources, transferring its work to some off-shore provider, NOBODY should allow the company to get away with a claim of no responsibility when bad things happen. If you are an American executive and you transfer battery production to a city in India and it blows up there killing lots of people, you absolutely should not suddenly get absolved simply because you arranged a level of indirection, you SHOULD be punished and indeed more severely for having increased the hazards by the very act of outsourcing (which leads to lessened control, just like drinking in the DUI scenario above). We need to end the despicable practice of allowing executives to escape accountability for their bad actions simply be moving those bad actions to some place far away where there is obviously going to be less control - the outsourcing act itself, deliberately reduces control and adds risk. If a sneaker executive outsources production to a place that then uses slave labor, the sneaker executive needs to be prosecuted for human rights violations. If an entertainment company executive outsources animation to a communist hellhole, the executive needs to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
Might be worth looking at variable tariffs. For March-May the demand for electricity generation goes to zero in California on a regular basis, and even more often over the summer. While you might not pay $0 for it, the price should go way down.
That's *with* time-of-use metering. I'm pretty sure the price for EV metering has roughly tripled in the last five years. And only about 11 to 16 cents of that is the actual generation cost. The rest of it is profit for PG&E. The only way to get reasonably priced power in California is to build your own power plant, which will bring your price down to about 17 cents per kWh, and even that isn't much below the price of gasoline.
For a state that's desperate to push electrification, the state's utility regulators sure don't seem to be on board. That's probably why EV sales dropped last quarter for the first time in years.
We really need to break up the PG&E monopoly or let the state buy it and run it. It has never been more clear that regional-scale for-profit utility monopolies just don't work and can never work no matter how regulated they might be.
I've been driving an EV as my daily driver for 5+ years now. So clearly, I made the decision they work well for me. But I also own several gas powered vehicles (including a Kia my daughter drives). One thing I've noticed is that a lot of EV owners brag about never having had to do any real repairs, but their total miles driven are still pretty low. If you haven't gone 100K plus on your EV, then you really aren't in a position to speak about their long term reliability and costs.
Most auto-makers have tried to engineer their offerings so everything in them will last long enough to get through their warranty period, or even their "extended warranty" period they sell directly at the time of purchase. They won't spend a penny to get reassurance any of the components will outlast that time period, though.
There are certain brands, like Honda and Toyota, who have an overall design philosophy of building their vehicles so moving parts tend to function at low levels of stress vs their maximum ratings. Instead of engineering things to push any limits, they're far more conservative. This strategy pays off for them because they don't have to spend a lot to use "stronger, better" parts than the other guys. It won't help them win many contests for "the most torque in its class" or "faster 0-60MPH time" or "shortest stopping distance".... but it built them a reputation for long-term reliability and being a cost-effective choice.
I've owned 3 different Teslas and I can tell you, my Model X was in their shop quite a bit. Still under warranty, thankfully -- but I traded it off before it ran out. It had more problems than any of my gasoline cars I own now have. My Model S I owned first was a great car, but not a trouble-free one. I had to have a cooling fan replaced when it started making a loud ticking noise, and that turned out to be about a $700 repair due to all the labor involved to get to it. The touchscreen developed yellow lines around the borders and that was a whole ordeal to get repaired properly too. It also had a (very common on Teslas) problem with the control arms wearing out prematurely. And while it didn't happen to me? A lot of Model S owners eventually had the air suspension go bad. The air suspension parts appear to have been made by Mercedes for Tesla, and you were looking at $1500+ to get it fixed in many cases.
I'd have to say that all in all? My EVs have been cheaper to drive than my gas vehicles. But repair-wise? I'd say an EV like a Tesla S is comparable in repair cost and hassle to a luxury car like a Cadillac. Lots of little things that can go wrong, even if it's not going to leave you stranded over any of it. Something more basic like the Chevy Bolt I drive now? It's saving me money on oil changes so that's a big plus. But it's been in the shop a few times now to fix recalls and for software updates it needed to fix issues with false alerts about the battery pack and drivetrain. I think a Toyota or Honda might see about the same number of visits to the shop.
That's my feeling too. I work in a private sector business that's basically "all Microsoft" (like most of our competitors). Once you get on the "Microsoft train", you ride their rails and go to the stops they dictate. You have to jump back off otherwise.
We ran into the typical situation where once people saw they had OneDrive capabilities to share files or folders with other people or groups, they started trying to create folders of information needed by entire teams. If they left the company, all of that data was at risk of vanishing because it was, after all, stored on their personal OneDrive, tied to their user account with only that person as its administrator.
Microsoft's answer to this is SharePoint. Create new SharePoint sites for your groups, so I.T. can be administrator of them and control them (and/or optionally designate others to admin them as needed). And then, people can collaborate and use the shared content on the SharePoint site. Great, right? Well, not so much! Because Microsoft intertwined SharePoint and OneDrive. People needing easy access to the content of a SharePoint site or folder from their Windows Explorer have to "sync" it via OneDrive from that SharePoint site. Then they get a new "tree" of SharePoint sites that appear in their Explorer to get to the information without visiting the web site directly.
Now you get all sorts of headaches because OneDrive can get signed out on a PC accidentally, disconnecting those shared folders. Users may not notice for a while so they keep editing their locally cached copy of the documents - thinking those changed were getting to the cloud. Or OneDrive will do as it does, and gets corrupted and stops syncing properly -- requiring an uninstall/reinstall to fix it again. Or you have "permissions" fun, where a user is initially granted "edit" rights to some content he/she syncs with OneDrive. But their permissions get changed to "read only" at some point, causing them to have files forever stuck that get sync errors, because their changes are no longer allowed to go back up to the SharePoint.
When you have hundreds of people or more in a company using this stuff, these "edge case problems" come up daily and your help desk team is forever tasked with trying to sort out what's happened, and how to help people get the correct versions of documents back in the cloud for everyone to use.
And all this is before we even start talking about your advanced users, trying to link data between Microsoft Office applications. SharePoint still doesn't support some of that like your traditional desktop Office apps do. They're all written to link to data via your standard folder paths. They can't pull from, say, rows in an Excel workbook and import to a PowerPoint using the URL path needed to specify the location of the file out in a SharePoint site.
Companies like ours tried to eliminate the traditional file servers to replace them with the SharePoint and OneDrive combo Microsoft wanted people to pivot to using. But the reality is, we still have to keep a traditional file server around, just for these scenarios. It's half-baked.
How do you know that guy at the store doesn't pull a work trailer around the other 99.9999% of the time when you don't see him? Or haul a boat and put atvs in the back. Or haul loads of firewood.
We call those Mall Queens. It is exceptionally obvious with so many of these trucks. Because using a truck for work leaves evidence.
Even my Jeep, while I have it detailed regularly, bears evidence of it's use. Mud, the occasional scratch that needs buffed out.
Pristine trailer hitches, no scratches on the chrome, and beds without scratches or dents, either, on the mall queens.
Having the pickup is a statement of their patriotism, and it must be shiny and polished, pristine as their pure heart and fealty.
There's a few reasons but one side effect I've read about is that we are in a vehicle size arms race. People liked "being above the road" and Americans have always held "big car = safe" and so if you have a family and other people are driving 4 ton monsters you are also going to require a 4 ton monsters to feel safe.
Unfortunately the culture of America is weird sometimes and in my opinion we fail to realize peak utility in vehicles is in station wagons, minivans and Hilux trucks, all vehicles most Americans think are not "cool"
I was really pissed when they quit making Ford Ranger trucks in the US, and even the Chevy S-10, once a compact truck, got bloated. After coming back, they are a midsized truck now. Which means that they are what a F350 used to be, in general.
This happens so often to vehicles due to marketing in large part - the 'ers. Bigger faster, wider and so on.
You might add something like the normal Jeeps to that mix. Some places, like where I live have pretty wild swings in weather, and there's a reason that our roads are busy with them. A bog standard Jeep Compass or the quirky Renegade is pretty inexpensive by today's standards, and will handle the swings.
I'd never buy such a thing but for reasons I don't understand they are very popular and sell at a huge profit.
The traditional 4 door sedan otoh is passing from American auto history bit by bit, year by year.
I see those trucks and suvs all over the place being driven by people who clearly would be better off in a 4 door but fuck if I know why they buy the trucks and big suvs. My BIL has a big truck he spent 100k on and then another 30k or so having it customized with big tires, jacked up, blah blah blah. He doesn't do a damned thing with it he couldn't do in -any- other street legal vehicle. The other day I saw some old guy coming out of the supermarket parked next me put two small bags in the back of his huge pick up. I could have carried both bags by one finger. wtf? Really? Those two tiny bags didn't fit on the floor in the cab?
I just don't get why they do it but it's why the automakers build them. They sell big time.
For many, the Pick-um-up is a statement of patriotism. I kid you not. These folk find their expression of patriotism in that big pickup, and the prices have risen because of that. But there's trouble in the land of Jingo.
You can easily spend 150K on that shiny new thing.
It is a tad jarring to see someone in one of them who obviously doesn't spend much on clothing, grooming, or their teeth, hopping out of their 10 mpg pretend monster truck. Meanwhile, My Jeep Trailhawk version costs nowhere near as much, gets between 28 to 30 mpg fills up for a third of the cost - They obviously aren't the wealthiest demographic. And it goes places they can't. I even knew one guy some years back that had a daily driver of a Ford 350 with dually rears and a 5th wheel in the truck bed. He had no trailer, it was all patriotshow.
You'll see these truck parked outside of old junky mobile homes that were built a long time ago, and might be exhibiting proton decay at this point.
10 year loans is one of the ways they "afford" these things. My guess is they also use a credit card for every 140-200 dollar fill-up, depending on if it's gas or diesel. Low easy payments for the rest of their lives. Sorta. P But the prices have reached a point where the hillbilly struggles to make the payments on that 10 year mortgage, and what is the point of having a prtriotmobile for 10 years, when you need a new and bigger one every 4 years.
"He'd like to see the government encourage more competition"
I think we all would like that, but let's be clear that is an ECONOMIC preference and (in essence) an ideological preference, not a security one.
I do NOT believe that the security environment of the US government - a government were a lot of sites (esp internal) look more like myspace pages - would be materially IMPROVED by having a vast array of churning alternative vendors of uncertain provenance being managed by IT depts that can barely keep up with one vendor, either.
No, the 'security-focused' answer is that if I'm putting your (MS's) code on government-critical and security-critical machines, that code is
- transparent
- only accessible to a hot box of HIGHLY secured and vetted A-team of MS coders (ie vetted to the standard of actually working in the agencies it's deployed in)
- every patch is critically vetted by that same team to the last byte, and yes, this means those patches are going to come out slower to the secure ecosystem.
Let's be clear that this has been the experience for a LOT of people in a lot of companies.
My firm is an ardently left-leaning European manufacturer who is all-in about a host of left-of-center values such as sustainability, DEI, etc etc.
Maybe the point of this isn't political, it's about a shit piece of software that's not ready for the critical needs to which it's being put, management choices that have little to do with actual staff needs, and IT accountability for following those dumb fads.
WHETHER we're talking about an organization led by an orange-colored nutball, or a senescent child-sniffing grandpa.
As someone in logistics, I'm more interested in the actual performance.
Amazon's operations run at scale that is usefully simulative of real delivery-truck operations, more telling than the performative 'tech demonstrations' of other companies (eg a truck or two that they trot out for pictures when the Sustainability C-suite is giving a speech) where it's impossible to discern if the trucks are providing a value/performance that means EVs are *actually* interesting for businesses.
The comments to the OP referenced article are few, but the one is positive:
"The Amazon Rivian vans are great. Quiet in the neighborhood, and the drivers I have spoken with love them. They also carry more packages than their older trucks. "
+ Drivers love them is a huge plus. They could make all the economic sense in the world but on a practical level, if the drivers hated them they're going to find reasons to make them fail.
+ More packages than other trucks is also huge.
In short, this is promising. Local-region delivery vans that can charge nightly, deliver during the days, lots of start/stops (ie the absolute WORST performance envelope for ICE in terms of efficiency, wear, and pollution!) is a great place to see where EVs can leverage their strengths.
So far, so good. But let's be honest: while the costs for this are large in absolute numbers, Amazon profit was $30bn last year. In terms of what they spend on shipping logistics, $200 million could still be a performative, boutique, tech demonstrator for them.
One question I would also like to know is regarding these vehicles being custom-built for Amazon purposes. I am curious if somehow the EV 'frame' is more amenable to easier/cheaper/more varied internally custom body builds than that of an ICE: that could be a compelling plus in favor of EVs as well? Would Amazon's mentioned benefits - driver preference and better capacity for the kinds of loads they handle - have been available in a custom-built ICE vehicle? If not, why not?
https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...
I quote someone else saying: "The PC world might have looked very different today had Kildall's Digital Research prevailed as the operating system of choice for personal computers. DRI offered manufacturers the same low-cost licensing model which Bill Gates is today credited with inventing by sloppy journalists - only with far superior technology. DRI's roadmap showed a smooth migration to reliable multi-tasking, and in GEM, a portable graphical environment which would undoubtedly have brought the GUI to the low-cost PC desktop years before Microsoft's Windows finally emerged as a standard. But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man."
And my comment on that included (removing all the supporting links):
"We had choices as a society. I saw some of them first hand in the 1970s and 1980s when I started in computing. I bought Forth cartridges for the Commodore VIC and C64. I worked very briefly on a computer with CP/M (although using Forth on it though). The OS choice pushed by the person born with a million dollar trust fund who "dumpster dived" for OS listings won (who did little of the development work himself) -- with an empire built on QDOS which has shaky legal standing as a clone of CP/M which is probably why IBM did not buy it itself. And we were the worse for it as a society IMHO.
But that problematical path would not have been possible without political and legal decisions to base the development of computing around the idea of "artificial scarcity" via copyrights and patents which set the stage for that. We still have choices, and we can still pick different ways forward. [With] the free and open source software movements, we are in a sense returning to older ways of sharing knowledge that were more popular before artificial scarcity was so broadly thought to be a good idea for promoting progress. One should always ask, "progress in what direction"?
Bill Gate's could have spent his lifetime writing free software. That being born a multi-millionaire was not enough for him is a sign of an illness that causes "financial obesity", not something to be emulated. But, in the end, it is not Bill Gates who has destroyed our society as much as all the people who want to be the next Bill Gates and support regressive social policies they hope to benefit from someday.
Those who have the impulse to share and cooperate more than hoard and compete are still stuck trying to navigate the economic mess we have made of today's society through artificial scarcity, the growing rich/poor divide, the diversion of so much productivity into weapons and consumer fads, and so on. The late 1960s and early 1970s when Kildall, Moore and Kay/Ingalls were having their breakthroughs were a more hopeful time in that sense.
Still, the web and HTML5/JavaScript/CSS3 are a new hope for sharing via open standards, and they have been a big success in that sense. I'm moving more of my own work in that direction for that reason (even for all their own issues). Like has been said about JavaScript -- it is better than we deserve considering its history and the pressures that we all let shape it."
So, while you and others who are posting here are no doubt right on technical limits and marketing issues, I would say the "downfall" story is more complex socially than one man and his decisions with one design.
I'll again echo a key point about Gary by someone else quoted at the start: "But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man." We need to build a society and an economy where people who make that choice get more support and respect.
Solutions are obvious if one only has the optical power to observe them over the horizon. -- K.A. Arsdall
