The implication of the announcements that next year Ford/GM/Volvo EVs will have access to 12,000 superchargers in North America is that nearly all superchargers will be upgraded to support CCS in addition to CanBus protocols. I don't know whether that'll require a hardware upgrade, or if the controllers already can physically support both encoding mechanisms and it's just a software update.

Of course, adding Magic Docks for CCS physical compatibility is a hardware upgrade, and they've announced 3,500 of those next year.

I wouldn't expect Tesla to stop supporting the CanBus-based protocol in superchargers, as that'd require upgrading most of the Teslas in the field, going back many years, which would be a hassle for perhaps a million Tesla owners, and there's no particular reason to do so.

Typically Tesla just expands the station, as the older Superchargers still work just fine, and it's worth having them available in case all the newer chargers are full. For example, I've see places with 10 v2 superchargers (150 kW) and 10 v3 superchargers (250 kW). There's not much reason for Tesla to tear down working equipment, as both 150 kW and 250 kW are faster than the large majority of CCS chargers, which are 50 kW. And as they're not starting to deploy v4 superchargers and megachargers, I'd imagine Tesla will just add them too. Since only the Semi and Cybertruck can take advantage of the 1mw charging at 1,000v, everyone else should use the v2 and v3 chargers just fine.

Superchargers use the Tesla connector, and support both CCS (NACS) and CanBus-based (original Tesla protocol) control protocols. And recently manufactured Tesla cars also talk both protocols. Using the control protocol used by CCS doesn't mean that NACS is CCS1 - CCS1 specifies a particular physical connector, which is worse than NACS is many ways. NACS was specifically designed to allow CCS manufacturers of both cars and chargers to adopt Tesla's connector and use the Supercharger network, and it's been wildly successful.

The software integration is important, and it's why GM, Ford, Volvo, etc., didn't just adopt the NACS standard, they did a deal with Tesla to give their applications and vehicles access to the APIs so that they can locate chargers for routing, see their status, bill charging to their accounts, etc., using the GM/Ford/Volvo apps instead of needing to run the Tesla app. Or course, any driver can use the Tesla app and charge from Superchargers, once they're opened up. Most of the Superchargers in Europe are open, and they're starting to open up in the US as well. Tesla promises 12,000 Superchargers open to GM/Ford/Volvo (so far) and at least 3,500 open to everyone, meaning that they've got the 'magic dock' CCS adapter on the supercharger.

Perhaps you missed it, but Tesla and the US government are working with the SAE, who will be the host standards body for NACS.

DPReview is an amazing site, incredibly valuable reviews of cameras for an extremely long time, an amazing resource. I'm glad it's staying up and getting a new home!

OpenAI didn't lobby against the regulation. They lobbied for regulation, and they argued that ChatGPT isn't a "high risk" application, because it's not medical, industrial, etc., and they very specifically tell customers not to use it for any high-risk application. So if someone were to integrate GPT into a high risk application, then that application would need to justify how that's safe to do. Which makes sense.

Well written regulations are good for businesses because they have well defined rules to play by. The reason that OpenAI is calling for regulations isn't that regulations make it harder to enter the market, they make it so that everyone has to play by the same, well-defined rules. Without regulations, OpenAI could play by what rules it decides make their services safe (e.g. the porn blocking, etc., that they already do) but others might not, and competition will drive towards the lease controls, so there will be other AI systems with no controls that people can use to do bad things even though OpenAI doesn't, so society as a whole isn't protected.

Their moat isn't regulatory, it's that they invested in building a system and training it at a massive scale, giving them capabilities more advanced than others working on AI.

Right, the means-testing has massive overhead, causing the system to cost more and be less effective, because it costs money to administer all the controls, and it causes many people who should receive the benefits not to receive them due to administrative overhead. In many cases, the cost of controls is more than the actual service - for example, telephone calls cost more than 2x as much as they need to, because of the control and billing costs, which are more than the costs of providing the phone calls.

Deficit spending (and the 'spending and borrowing' you're complaining about) peaked under Trump, back in 2020, it's dropped dramatically under Biden. That being said, when the economy slows down is when the government is supposed to step in and boost the economy with more spending, and in particular to invest in things like infrastructure that have a huge multiplier effect - a dollar spend on infrastructure turns it about $11 in economic benefit because not only do the construction workers spend their wages to eat, etc., but the roads and bridges are used by people to get to work, etc.

There are millions of people who can't drive - elderly, kids, disabled, etc. - and they benefit immensely from other affordable options, mass transit for popular routes, and ride-sharing / robotaxis for unique routes. And even for people who can drive, buying a car is inefficient, as the car is on average only 5% utilized, so it's just sitting in a parking lot or driveway all the rest of the time, consuming space. A shared car can be more like 50% utilized, meaning that you can satisfy the same demand with 1/10th as many cars manufactured, a massive savings, meaning that transportation is accessible to people with a _lot_ less money.

Of course, sometimes you want to own the car, since you have unique requirements, or it's a collectible, etc., but it'll be great for many millions of people not to be forced to buy a car when they can rideshare for a lot lower cost.

The main delay is getting right-of-way negotiated with the owners of 2,300 parcels of land, complicated by NIMBY lawsuits. That's a hugely complex, slow process, that's led to construction stopping and starting, where stop/starts are extremely expensive compared to the single sustained construction project originally planned. That's all been going on since 2008, so it's not all on any one governor. And it's not unique to California - high speed rail is a mess in the US because we allow anyone to block progress, so (for example) high speed rail from Florida to NYC, which would have huge economic benefit and has huge business support (imagine tourism in Florida booming when people from the whole east coast can get to Orlando via a fast, cheap, easy train ride), has been blocked by the Florida state government that opposes trains due internal political party dynamics, even though both the voters and businesses want it to happen, and all the other states on the path want it. I'm not sure that complete failure (Florida) is better than slow with cost overruns (California) - at least in California they're getting something done.

Some other countries don't have these delays because the government has just push things through. In China, for example, the government blasts through NIMBY objections and just seizes the land and lays rail, allowing them to build rail extremely rapidly. Ditto highways. But of course there are disadvantages to living in a dictatorship. Still, there are plenty of countries (e.g. Japan) that manage to balance local interests and national interests on this front.

The credits also apply to used cars.

At the national average price of electricity, compared to the national average price of gasoline, my Tesla costs 1/4th as much per mile to drive as the gas vehicle it replaced. And electricity is (in well run states) regulated, so while the prices can go up over time, they can't go up unpredictably just because an investor wants more money (as gas prices did), and historically they go up more slowly than inflation, meaning that electricity gets cheaper over time, in constant dollars.

Unfortunately the right-wingers in the US push everything possible towards being written as tax credits, specifically so that they can't benefit poor people, retirees, students, etc. So, for example, the EV subsidy was originally written as a straight discount off of the purchase price in order to help poor and lower-middle class to buy EVs, the right-wingers forced it to change to tax credits. Grrr.

I've been charging an EV at home since 2018, and it added a few percent to my home power bill. That's not going to cause the price of power to skyrocket. EVs don't take that much power, on average, to charge. The average daily drive in the US is 37 miles, which can recharge on a single 15 amp circuit overnight (i.e. off peak, when you're not using much power). No drama.

That's a few percent increase in power consumption over almost 30 years. That's nothing. By your logic the grid would have collapsed many decades ago, when home and work HVAC rolled out everywhere, doubling residential and office power consumption. That of course didn't happen, either.