Nope sorry but Hertz is incompetent the world over. In fact it's not a USA thing because most of the time you're not talking to someone in the USA when you contact customer support. You'll get the same Indian call centre regardless of where you're from.

I've had bad experiences with them in France, Netherlands, Germany and Australia too. Actually I had good experiences in the USA, and that despite writing off their car (not my fault).

I have a Hertz Polestar 2 right now. They tossed me the keys and left me to my own devices. Took me several minutes to realise the reason there was no start button in the car was that the car was always automatically on and I could just drive off.

A simple card with the car to cover the basics would go a long way.

Also yeah mine was delivered to my house with the charge cap set to 90%, but it's not locked. It just defaults to this value. Bigger issue with the Polestar is people who don't log out. When I fired up maps and clicked home, the car suggested I do a 3 day drive to Norway stopping at 8 fast chargers on the way. Oh and the previous renter had bad taste in music on Spotify.

That is an issue. One of my colleagues just got given a Tesla, a general assumption that you can figure out the car yourself. Teslas are the worst for this. This was the guy's transgressions:
- Couldn't figure out how to charge the car. I showed him.
- Couldn't figure out how to stop charging the car - he ended up calling Hertz. It's not difficult but you do need to know that you have to swipe your pass again to stop the charge.
- Couldn't figure out how to lock the car. Seriously Tesla's stupid RFID card has no exterior marking on the car showing how to use it. He ended up using Youtube to check a video of how to lock his car.
- Kept flashing me as we were going down the highway. Turns out he was trying to figure out how to get the automatic wipers to turn off since they were running during dry weather.

To be fair, this is a general new car issue. I rented a DS7 and when we were at the Hotel I had to sit down and go through the manual to figure out how the heck to turn the passenger airbag on (I actually complained to Hertz that they rented me a car that was unsafe by default and that users shouldn't need to figure out how to turn safety features back on their cars after the previous renter does something).

Virtually all EVs default to this. But they aren't locked as far as I can see. At least none of the Hertz rentals I've had (including the current one) are locked.

This has zero to do with the EV transition. Hertz has infamously incompetent customer service. They've been doing this shit for 10+ years already. The only thing "news" here is which line items they fucked up this time.

I was once charged for snow chains in a country where it snows so little you don't even need winter tires, from a Hertz dealership who don't have them even if you did for some strange reason want some.

That said luckily it was a local hire, so rather than dealing with their ludicrously bad call centers I was able to get angry to them right in their face and they sorted it out rather quickly.

This has nothing to do with the EV program. It's just the latest in a long line of Hertz's embarrassingly incompetent customer service program. They've been doing stupid shit with gas vehicles for a decade already.

The constitution is clear that the first amendment applies to all people, not just citizens.
The prosecution is clear that this is not a first amendment issue, first amendment doesn't protect non-speech related crimes (or "crimes" depending on whether you think aiding the hacking of computer systems should be a crime).

This is a hollow victory, more like a procedural delay.

That's also an American perspective. For many other countries (TFA is about policy the world over), the TCO is far higher for the gasoline vehicle. The taxes levied on gasoline here alone are more than what Americans actually pay in total to pour gasoline into their tank. I didn't just get an EV to save money, I upgraded to a luxury EV and still save money.

Everything is relative. I too considered my previous car smooth and quite until I got my new EV.

Do you even need it though? I've been driving an EV for many months, and here's my statistics:

Number of times I plugged in at home: None, don't have a driveway.
Number of times I plugged in in my street: Once, I came back from a road trip through Germany and had only 10% left.
Number of times I used a public supercharger: Twice - I went on a road trip through Germany and charged on the highway twice in the process.
Number of times I used a public L2 charger at work: Weekly.
Number of times I used a public L2 charger at an airport: Every single flight since I got the EV.

See the thing is for some people, even if they are in the category of people who don't have access to easy charging at home, they still have plenty of ability to charge their EV. Heck if I really get stuck I have a pulse 150kW charger about 900m from my house, but never had the inkling to use it.

There seems to be two extreme camps: Those who shudder at the idea of having to stand at any petrol station for longer than 10minutes and think if this isn't possible you can't have a car. And those who shudder at the idea of doing any charging away from home.

The reality is infrastructure is growing very rapidly, and every day I see more and more places where I can charge my EV that is not my house / not a supercharger, but ultimately don't have to simply because my employer signed a deal with a company to have a bunch of charging points installed in our parking lot.

Ahhh found the American with his monopoly-money gasoline price. Yeah maybe in America where gasoline cars are dirt cheap and gasoline is dirt cheap thanks to the endless subisidies provided what you said applies. Meanwhile in many other parts of the world even if you charge from public charging stations only (like I do) you not only are virtually guaranteed to save money over the life of a typical vehicle lease, but I actually upgraded to a luxury EV and *STILL* will be better off over 5 years.

I also have several friends in Australia (important, since it's one of the countries in question in TFS) who switch to EVs because they couldn't afford their gas guzzlers anymore.

You should go explore the world some day. It's quite eye opening to reliase that what applies to you isn't the default everywhere. I don't blame you though, I was very close to accepting a job in Texas early last year and did actually get as far as to looking into cars and living location, commutes, etc. I would absolutely have bought a gasoline vehicle in the states for financial reasons despite being a very happy EV driver.

Thanks for telling us all that only "serious people" do the things in your list. #gaslightingisfun.

X has no concept of security as it doesn't allow an app to monopolise a session. Fundamentally there's no security on X. Some basic things like lockscreens require either horrendously clunky workarounds, and often even with those in place are trivially worked around.

Since I'm no longer dialing into mainframes from fixed PC where I can detach the network session to secure my station while I walk away this is a pretty big gap in the modern day. X's foundational design is simply not suited to many use cases.

I say many use cases because all the "plenty of downsides" other posters talk about are use cases not suited for Wayland. That's the thing use the right tool for the job. Wayland has no place on a thin client, X has no place on a laptop.

My only experience of Wayland so far was awful -- but it was on a Raspberry Pi.

I tried the Wayland version of Raspberry PI OS (Bookworm) and even just moving the mouse pointer around the screen spiked the CPU to 40 percent on a Pi4. WTF? Yes, I checked, that was a totally fresh install on a machine that ran perfectly well on the original 64bit Raspberry Pi OS.

Tried it on an RPi 5 and it was just as bad.

So much overhead in anything display-oriented -- and no, I hadn't disabled GPU acceleration or anything -- these were fresh installs.

Went back to the older X-based version (Bullseye) and it's perfectly fine.

Did I just get a bad build or what?

One (probably flawed) datapoint.

What's more secure? A new kernel with unknow bugs, or an old kernel where very potential adversary knows about the bugs?

The idea that new *may* be buggier simply because we haven't had time to look at its security is a fallacy. You're comparing an assumption with actual hard data.

I see at least three, maybe four companies that would be interested, if they'd open it up to a defined cost no-bid contract and let multiple companies handle the launches.