While a lot comes from the major vendors, some of the major vendors actually kind of suck and you absolutely have huge gaps in what they provide.

Particularly with firmware, you get chunks to cover bits and pieces but you have to provide certain bits and pieces. I'm frankly shocked how bad the 'ready to go' firmware even from someone like Insyde or AMI is, who you would *think* would have it pretty well down by now. You can have the most milquetoast combination of predictable components and *still* need to do work to behave as well as a Dell or Lenovo even if the components are largely the same, as they have some on staff firmware developers that build on top of the vendors and they don't share their assets with the world. Hell, it's obvious that they don't even share with themselves, some product families are worlds apart from the exact same company with the same chipsets.

Two possibilities:

- Regulatory folks have expressed "concerns", which may have motivated them to try to get some relief

- The had a plan that at least publicly anticipated tolerating 95% attrition and the other 5% were so locked in they'd pay the price needed to more than make up for the 95%. Based on a few situations I have heard about, I get the impression that not even 5% were as locked in as Broadcom presumed, so they may feel the need to buy some time to adjust their strategy to cope with that reality.

You're missing the point.

The point is that CA has now gotten to the point where storage is a real requirement to continue growing renewables, at least if they don't want to simply be discarding a lot of renewable generation. That is, CA has now gotten past the easy part of renewable growth, where the renewables are cutting into but not fully replacing fossil fuel generation. From here forward, it's going to be harder, and the state is going to have to be breaking new ground.

This is both a major milestone and an inflection point in the difficulty of converting.

Even that is not enough when renewables generate >100% of consumption for significant parts of each day. Then you have to start figuring out how to store that excess production. In the short term they can probably sell some of it to other states, but as other states transition their own production that's going to become less useful, especially for solar. Time to start building out storage!

I used my Leaf quite happily for years. My daily commute was only about 25 miles, so the car could make the round trip easily. In the winter making the round trip without charging got me closer to empty than I liked, but that just meant that I shifted from charging only on the L2 at work to also plugging in the L1 at home. The only real problem was that I often got home with low enough miles remaining that we couldn't take the car very far in the evening if we were going out to eat or something. So then we'd have to take the Durango. This was in Cololrado.

Then I moved to Utah (where I'm from)... but here I work from home. The Leaf was fine for running errands as long as you didn't have too many stops, too widely separated. In a pinch, there is a Nissan dealership with a Chademo charger not too far away, just at the bottom of the big hill I have to climb to get home, so sometimes I had to stop there for 5 minutes to make sure that I had enough juice to get home -- where I had installed a 10 kW L2 charger. Two of them, actually, because then I bought a used Model S and sold the Leaf to my son. By then my lease had ended (after being extended twice) and I bought the car for a steal. In total I only paid $14k for the car.

My son still uses it to get to school and work. He doesn't live far from me and has to climb the same hill, and the car has lost some range, so in the winter he always has to stop and charge on the way home. He seems fine with that, though, and even prefers to charge more than he needs to because the Nissan dealership's electricity is free.

Unless the battery was too small to begin with, you won't even think about it. I normally only charge mine to 70% anyway, so the difference between 100% of capacity or 90% is completely irrelevant on a daily basis. For long road trips it's also irrelevant, since it's most time-efficient to charge to only 70-80% -- charging slows way down as you get close to full.

So, why not get a smaller battery if you rarely use the whole thing? Two reasons: First, so that losing a little capacity or charging to 70-80% is still sufficient range. My first Tesla, a 2014 Model S, only had 200 miles of range when charged to full, and that meant that time-efficient road-trip charging required stopping every 100 miles, which is too often. Second, because using the full range of the battery causes it to lose capacity faster. So, you buy an EV with a battery that's 30% larger than "needed" in some sense. Losing some of that doesn't matter.

So, you wouldn't think about how to pay for a replacement every time you get in the car, because you wouldn't plan to get a replacement, ever.

Yeah, specific battery packs can be faulty. It also depends a lot on whether the car properly manages battery temperatures. My first EV was a 2011 Nissan Leaf, and the Leaf has no battery cooling so in hot climates the batteries often die quickly. That said, it's 2024 and that 2011 Leaf still has about 60% of its original range (my son bought it from me). We live in a temperate climate, but it does get pretty hot in the summer.

I live in rural America, and EVs are great here. Oh, public charging infrastructure mostly doesn't exist, but that's fine because I have electricity -- get this -- at my house!. I even have flush toilets, 'cause we're high class. The nearest Supercharger is ~100 miles away, but I have a garage, and a barn, and I put EV chargers in both. For normal daily driving, it works fine to just charge at home -- car is fully charged every morning -- and when I go on a long trip, well, the Supercharger network has me covered.

Works perfectly.

It's not clear that will ever be needed. EV batteries don't just stop working (barring some unusual fault); they just gradually decline in capacity, and the decline is very slow after the first 1-2 years. So expect to have 95% of capacity after two years, 80% after a decade, 60% after two decades, 50% after three, etc.

So it's just a question of when the capacity drops so low that the vehicle no longer has enough range -- but over time charging infrastructure is going to get better and better, so long range will become less and less important. Also, batteries are going to get cheaper.

So, yeah, it seems entirely reasonable to me to replace the battery in 20 years (if you haven't replaced the vehicle by then). Especially since the fuel savings over that time will far more than cover the replacement cost, even if the replacement cost hasn't come down, which it will!

That's easy enough to flip around. Obviously your time is worth much less to you because you are happy to take time out to go to the gas station routinely for daily driving, sometimes having to wait for a place to open up, sometimes having to drive to find another gas station, having to babysit the refueling for a few minutes even in uncomfortable weather. That's in a scenario where the gas station is 'on the way' to a daily destination. Around a relatives house, they have to occasionally go about 10 miles the "wrong way" because the area is rural, but no one thinks about it because that inconvenience has been there for as long as anyone can remember.

Now if you make a weekly road trip of 300 miles or so, then sure this disappears into the time taken for that road trip anyway, and pure EV won't be that appealing (hybrid or a PHEV maybe). If you live in an apartment building or city house with streetside parking at *best*, ok, EV sucks because you don't have access to residential charging. However, for those with residential charging as an option and for whom 300+ road trips are a rare occasion, the gas station can easily be the bigger inconvience when comparing head to head.

As mentioned, I've racked up $10k in various gas engine vehicle repairs by about the same time where an EV battery might likely need repair. Colleague recently had to replace his Volt battery after 300k miles for about $6k, and that was a battery that would be a full charge cycle in just 30 miles. So if the battery repairs are going to screw me, so too would owning a gas car.

No, it gets boring after years of the range being roughly the same, more to do with driving characteristics and weather and if there's been a decline, it's unnoticable.

You didn't read my comment did you? Yes in some places the commercial charging is *almost* (but not quite as much as gas). This is largely academic for me.

"Never" is the wrong word, but either:
      - The 2 or 3 times a year of having to 'suffer' a commercial charging provider is not enough to outweigh the *massively* more common daily driving activity where residential/work charging is sufficient, cheap, and massively more convenient.

If I have a strict timeline, I'm travelling commercial, and company is paying for rental or taxi/rideshares to close the gap. Adding 20 minutes to a 6 hour road trip is no big deal for any personal road trip. Chances are I can tuck it in with eating some food and not even have a delta. If it's longer than 6 hours, I'm probably stopping at a hotel anyway, I don't trust myself to drive safely longer than that in a single stretch.

I don't see the connection here. Public transit generally covers a metropolitan area, relatively low radius of transit. Range anxiety shouldn't be a factor even in theory within public transit.

I have family in rural america, and EV charging is better than city. Because no one gives a damn if your car parks right next to your house, right next to your breaker box. Adding a hardwired L2 charger to any house with 200A service is a few hundred dollars, because all you need is the EVSE, one breaker, and a trivial amount of wire. Go more city and *maybe* you can have a car nearby, but only streetside, and maybe you are allowed to install electrical gear, at some significant expense, but maybe not. The things that make home EV charging challenging for some urban people just don't apply in the country.

On the power outage scenario, you car's battery doesn't suddenly empty, no more than your gas tanks drain. In fact, if you felt fed up with power outages, then a solar array would mean you could replenish your cars range. With plenty of land to do the panels however you feel like (much cheaper and more effective to pole mount in the country, suburban has to settle for roof mounted solar only). Of course you likely have a generator or two, that's likely a PITA because you don't run it enough and infrequently used engines have some pain points.

In terms of replacing perfectly working vehicles, that's a bad idea to replace them if they are fine. Whether ICE or EV, best thing is to "drive it into the ground", because the difference in emissions is far less than the impact of frequently manufacturing cars. *However* when the time does come for an ICE vehicle to be put out to pasture because it's just not worth fixing anymore, an EV is actually a decent choice for rural living as a selection for the replacement.

Thing is, it's not that clear cut. They have different advantages.

For my use case, EV advantages outweigh the disadvantages:
-I can reliably plug in overnight as needed, which means I never go to the gas station.
-When I plug in at home, it's less than a third cost per mile driven in terms of fuel/energy
-I don't have oil changes to worry about, or air filter, or a lot of the gaskets and hoses that are frequently problematic
-My work provides free EV charging, and currently I can reliably get one of those spots, so most of my driving range is not even paying for electricity.
-It's quiet
-It's supremely good at strong and instant acceleration
-I can run it in my garage without a thought about the exhaust (e.g. during a power outage, was a shelter from the conditions)

Disadvantages:
-Public charging takes a long time and is relatively fewer. Not a huge deal for me because trips over 120 miles for me that *don't* involve commercial transportation are very rare, and I'm willing to suck up the inconvenience 2 or three times a year for the better convenience 95% of the year
-The battery will, eventually, wear out. Even the "bad" chemistries are lasting a long time in practice, however. Not *great* but I replaced a car that was racking up two to three thousand a year in various repair bills largely for issues that aren't applicable to EV, so I'll take the trade.
-The car is heavier and thus I'll also take a hit on the tires.
-It was more expensive, but recently the market took a hit and they are roughly in the ballpark of their gas powered cohorts now.

The exponential growth achievable by Von Neumann probes that don't mind traveling for millions of years to get to the next galaxy make space small.

What are these scientifically-sound indicators?

If superluminal speed is quite simply impossible, then you aren't going to have an interstellar civilization. It just won't happen.

*Maybe* you could go with sublight ships, but unlikely you'd find any sort of intelligence interested in bottling themselves up for hundreds of years with a large chance of the destination actually being uninhabitable when they got there. Such an effort would likely be born out of desperation of their current planet pretty much dying, so you might have a "nomad" situation where a civilization's home dies and they spend hundreds of years quietly bottled up before they land on a new planet and go back to planetary living for a few million years. *Maybe* they have some concurrency, but not interconnection, they exist on several planets but why bother trying to keep much in touch when a communication takes hundreds of years to make the trip?