I just spent a few minutes writing my congress-critters suggesting this. Why not just take a few mins to do the same?

https://www.congress.gov/membe...

Yep. We need a heated, somewhat-crash-safe, stable on stop E-bike. If we had one, it would sell a lot. In other words, the US has no small EV cars, and no EV micro-cars. If we did have those, people would buy and use them for commutes.

The people who'll use an E-bike for a commute are largely (though not completely) the same folk who'd use a bike. So E-bikes are not going to move the needle much on adoption. A small, cheap, enclosed trike with a hair-dryer heater could be a huge game changer.

Nah, dude. This doesn't help. I'm a screaming EV advocate myself, but there are places still where it doesn't make sense. 100% EV isn't going to work yet. And not just for people in Montana with massive spaces between chargers -- in big cities where people don't have garages or lots, the per mile cost is just as high for an EV as for gas, and it takes longer to charge the EV. If you cannot charge overnight somehow, a life entirely on public chargers is not an improvement.

You'll be right some day, but today you are not. So being shrill about it and preaching 100% only allows people to point out why you're wrong.

Here's something to be shrill and 100% about -- If we could get everyone for whom it makes sense to have an EV have one overnight, you'd immediately see the new gas tax -- people paying a LOT more for transportation because they don't have garages. So the poor folks will be stuck with gas cars. That needs fixing with street-chargers all over the place, or an end to a 5X markup on KWHs at chargers, or just much, much better public transportation.

It's actually easy. Sit their butts in an EV. Let them drive it for a few days. 70-90% of them would change their tune. Here's a thought for some actually useful legislation -- a big tax break for repair shops on loaner cars which are EVs. So people who leave their car in the shop get an EV loaner. That would cause real change.

You can argue until you are blue in the face, and people won't listen. But when they find they can get going at a traffic light in a Renault Zoe faster than the Porsche next to them (it's not zero to sixty that matters in the real world, it's zero to fifteen) and that they can start driving the MOMENT they turn on the car, and that the car doesn't smell of gas when they start it around their kids, etc. EVs are just better, and everyone with an EV knows it.

Put them in an EV, and many of them will figure it out, themselves.

Yeah, a lot of people I work with drive to the train station. So assume a lot of 3 miles there, 3 miles back driving each day. They'd all be fine with a 12 year-old i-Miev, but they do the commute in an F150.

If you have a garage or some other trivially easy way to charge your car where you pay only home rates for electricity, you'll save very, very roughly $1000 a year on fuel. Obviously that number goes up or down based on how much you drive an if you know that number you can calculate it. Maintenance costs for EVs are wildly lower than gas cars -- no oil changes, less brake work (though you need to use the brakes now and then to get that benefit, else they'll rust), and overall less components/complexity. Tire costs are the same unless you buy a wildly over-powered EV like a Tesla and can still be the same if you drive sensibly. You have massively less risk of fire (contrary to the impression you get in the media) and my personal experience is the insurance is not greatly different in cost. Factor in faster start-up times (no engine warm-up) and never spending time at gas stations (and where I live the added risk of robbery or car-jacking they contribute), so there are intangible cost savings. If you're going to have a car for 10 years, yes, the EV is cheaper. That said, in this next year you should not have much trouble finding an EV for only a few thousand more than a Prius. In the EU and UK it's easy, in the US it's much harder. But in the US you can get a pristine two-year-old used Bolt for less than the Prius. The Bolt is (inexplicably, since it's GM, who could not find their ass, generally, with both hands and some kind of beeping proximity assist system) is a really nice car.

Note also that EVs are safer and more reliable in a crisis. They float better, drive on water in a pinch. They heat without idling, so in big snowstorms where cars are stranded EVs take better care of their occupants. Some provide power to your home in some way (in practical terms, you need to pick an appliance or two and get a long extension cord) during a blackout -- they'll also provide heat for your family during that time. They can air-condition you all night long when you need to sleep at a rest-stop. You can run them in the garage to warm them up, as there's no tail exhaust. And you can ALWAYS power them in a pinch, if you have time, so you're never stranded -- you tote a 100v (or 220v in the EU/UK) charger with you, so any friendly house with power can add miles to your car, albeit slowly.

The cost difference is worth it, and if you have a garage, goes away anyhow.

Yeah, we're not free if I can't put lead in the milk I sell or build bridges which collapse, or crash my private jet into any building I please.

Here's how this is going to work. You can continue to do whatever you like. But your insurance costs are going to skyrocket, because all our insurance is going to go down. And when you hit someone (unlikely but possible) you won't be on trial for making an honest mistake, you'll be on trial for gross negligence. The payout from your accident will be HUGE, as you could have driven safely by letting the machine do it, and you chose to let something known to be 20x worse (because by then they'll be better than they are now and they are already 5-10x safer) drive your car. To wit -- you.

It'll just be economics.

Fine if you want. I'd much rather there was a corporate owner, as they can pay someone to clean the... man, what's a polite word? The leftover traces of bad behavior of people who don't own the car they are riding in.

I do not want to deal with that at all.

Dude, the government isn't doing anything about guns. The number of gun owners fluctuates, year by year, but it stays basically the same on average -- it's not trending down. The number of guns continues to rise year on year.

The conversation on these things focuses on deaths. I'll bet the injuries count makes a massive impact on our national wealth. I really want to see numbers about car accident INJURIES with death as a category, not data which only tracks death.

But it seems like we do a really bad job at data collection in the US, whenever the police are involved. I suspect (someone please tell me) that we don't have an accident database where every accident gets a unique identifier. That should follow connect to hospital visits and hospital outcomes. I know we do a pretty good job of managing healthcare outcome data, because there are companies whose profits depend on those.

It's clear by the resumes I have been seeing that HR is using modern tools/services which get us precisely the candidate we want, based on our parameters. Which means they all mention the things we need on their resume and have NOTHING ELSE GOING FOR THEM. Nothing. Nada. And since the things they mention are anything they've touched, none of the candidates understand computing or why/how the things we want them to do work.

They're all young, which is a by-product of us asking for skills in these modern tools. Straight out of college, they started doing drag-and-drop computer work.

I finally realized that people in small towns are more able to get talent than us, because they will interview everyone in the pool and find the smart people. We're flooded with candidates, can't interview them all or even read all the resumes, and (thanks, modern search tools!) the losers sort to the top.

Not reliably. EV speed is really about software controlling the power going to the motor. So you COULD make a car which couldn't go faster than 80, but it would be software and hackable.

On the other hand, you could make every car in the shape of a parachute...

I could see this working in 2040, but right now there's still way too much possibility of cars thinking they're on different roads than they are.

However I absolutely approve of a hard limit of 90 mph, no matter the location. Obviously you can get around this stuff if you really want to, but it should take some work.

But the important numbers are in acceleration, not absolute speed. Fast take-offs at stop lights are really dangerous (I know for example, a woman who can attest to this with the parts of her brain which are still intact), and an intelligently done system could really increase the lifetime of tires.

CEO: We spend $14m on offices, and nobody is here in them?
CTO: Well, studies show we make more money when people work from home.
CEO: The office is empty. It's embarrassing. Make 'em come in.
CTO: Yes, sir.

That's it. No one cares what's really profitable, productive, etc. It's worries about looking bad, looking dumb, have stock-holders ask questions, etc. Reality doesn't matter -- it's petty egos and fears that matter.