Um, no, the default is "Express Settings" which enables all that spyful telemetry by default. Most people are going to go with that. I turned it all off except for crash reporting.

If you're going to try to misrepresent people convincingly, you'll need to do it MUCH better than that, Ace.

Self-Driving cars are what will drive mass sales of electric cars. Electric cars will always be a novelty until that time.

but I need to stretch my legs and rest a bit after driving 180ish miles. so stopping every 3 hours is still roughly in line with typical driving practices

I enjoy the five minute stop to get gas every 300 miles or so in my own car on road trips. I do NOT enjoy a 30 minute stop every 200 miles... That's called a "breakdown".

That's the kind of thing that turns a 10 hour one-day drive into a 17 hour mandatory two-day trip.

It's not like that is so uncommon either, lots of families I know only really stop for lunch, otherwise they are driving very long distances per day with short refueling stops.

Something else no-one seems to consider is the vastly larger number of "refueling" stations required if most cars are electric, each car has to stop for 10x longer, at shorter intervals...

A few years ago the U.S. military were evaluating a new hybrid vehicle to replace the Hummer. Their main interest was logistics, since Hummers aren't the most economical vehicles to operate. They couldn't help but notice that in electric mode their new vehicle was quiet.

Around here the Toyotas are positively noisy. The Teslas, on the other hand, only make a faint whirr from their tires.

...laura

What parts of Europe? Never saw that driving in England, Germany, or Amsterdam... as a tourist haven't seen that in Rome, Stockholm, Oslo, or again any other large european city I've even been in.

Some would argue that if you can't see the road, you shouldn't be driving.

You shouldn't start driving.

But you should keep driving if it means the difference between arriving at shelter for the night or risking sleeping in a car in a blizzard with extremely low temperatures, with the constant worry another car might hit yours.

Not in any city I've ever driven in. Who leaves parking lights on when they leave the car? Not people who want to start he car again, that's who.

Technically it's giving smaller amounts of something, not taking anything away. Nonetheless marginally it makes perfect sense to talk about "doling out cuts". It means starting with a total net cut and dividing the marginal impact among several parties.

Yes, it will raise a few eyebrows among editorial prigs, but it's perfectly clear what "doling out cuts" means.

white lines would fix that

In snow?

It irritates me when it's hard to tell between the grey pavement and the grey road

With enough rain, there is no grey, no brown. Just water.

If you add up all the auxiliary stuff you need to power with electricity and round up generously, it's maybe 2000 watts load. The very best commercially available technology of today can run that load for 45 hours. So the impact of the auxiliary system load is marginal. That means it's only a concern if you're contemplating using close to the maximum range of your car. If you're traveling 15 miles each way in an 84 mile range Leaf, or 80 miles each way in a 250 mile range Tesla S, you don't really need to worry about running the heater and lights, even counting diminished battery capacity.

The average American spends 25 minutes each way commuting; even in NYC the average figure is 34.6. Even double or tripling that commute time due to bad weather and halfing the range due to cold, that's still easy for the Tesla. It's a bit of challenge for the Leaf with its 24 kwh battery and 84 mile range.

If the typical electric cars of ten years from now perform close to the high end of today, then the vast majority of people won't have to worry about cold weather's effect on range. But a sizable minority of Americans are what the US Census characterizes as "extreme commuters": people whose commute takes more than 90 minutes or fifty miles each way. Even at the low end of that spectrum cold weather range won't be an issue, but if you commute from Fargo to Bismarck ND every day it's safe to say you aren't going to be going electric any time soon.

Good thing you're a mind-reader, then, since I'm not.

I'm a fan of getting rid of streetlights but...

There is one way in which I can see they make things definitely less safe, and that is clearly indicating where the edges of the roads are in really bad weather - in a driving snow or rainstorm, there have been times I've been really happy to have the lights on other sides confirming where the road was, because it was not possible to see that clearly through the windshield.

The people who died do not have to be *in* the cars, they could have been pedestrians that would have been visible to the cars at farther distances than without the streetlights.