Hey, how do *I* get paid to shillmod for big oil? I could use the cash rn.

I'm so non-gullible I didn't let anyone guilt me into breeding.

It's false that LFPs can't be ignited. They are much, much harder to ignite, but they can still burn. They are also much, much easier to put out because NCM electrolyte releases oxygen when heated and LFP doesn't (which is also a large part of why they are less likely to combust) but they are also still toxic when burning and non-trivial to extinguish. I am very pro-LFP because they are better about all of these things than NCM, and support more and more EVs being made with them, but I do still hope for superior batteries to replace them as well.

Making the only means affordable mobility unaffordable is not the answer. Making an unsustainable means of attaining mobility unaffordable is, however, necessary. The obvious answer is to make some other means affordable before making the current means unaffordable.

You are seriously arguing we should not look at history to determine what we should do next? I think you need to work on that one for a while.

They are arguably not even complying with the letter of the ruling, and are definitely not complying with its spirit.

The kind of thing they are doing now is the kind of thing they did before that the EU did not look upon favorably. How is that "careful"?

It's exactly what we need to do, but as usual we aren't providing the alternative before doing it so we're screwing people big-time. We need to expand public transportation (especially rail) BEFORE making cars unaffordable, not AFTER. But that would take the will to do the right thing, and that is prevented from existing by big piles of lobbying money.

That argument doesn't hold up because what that shift does is take profit out of the hands of dealers, and automakers would like dealers to go away so they can sell directly. They can't do that because of protectionist laws which won't go away until the dealers are too poor to lobby.

The manufacturers are dragging their feet because change costs money. If there is anything nefarious going on (which is hardly a stretch) it is kickbacks from big oil. They are the only major industry that stands to lose vast sums of money if we ditch the ICEV. Engines are made by automakers, if they can stop doing that then they can close a lot of plants where they employ a lot of people that they'd like to stop paying.

I'm a bit confused here. We are already using the next generation of battery after NCM. It's LFP. The only problem is, we haven't stopped using the NCMs. But even ~50% of Teslas (whose original batteries were made of clusters of cylindrical NCM cells) made in the USA use prismatic LFP cells... supplied from China. Whoops, Joe just increased the tariff on those from 25% to 100%, guess Tesla will stop using them and just do all NCM from now on.

Perhaps you want the next "next gen" of battery? Me too. But LFPs are here already. Prismatic LFPs about the same energy density as cylindrical NCMs with all their wasted space, and yet are still less fire prone even without using the cylindrical packages (which can help prevent thermal runaway of full battery packs vs. prismatic packaging.)

Accurate. Military use is the primary driver of funding for new technologies and the military saw little benefit to electric vehicles vs. diesels. Quiet doesn't mean stealthy given modern sensing technology, so that wasn't enough to do it. Honda sold their NiMH EV battery to Chevron, who refused to license it, and lithium batteries weren't realistic at the time (too expensive and flammable) so this set back EVs at least a decade. As usual it's Big Oil to the opposite of the rescue.

They are, albeit much more slowly than they think.

Why should people who don't need the credit get the credit? Why should automakers be allowed to advertise the price with a credit the customer might not be entitled to?

And it won't, because Biden is putting a 100% tariff on EVs from China, preventing competition from the only place that might provide it. This tariff is openly protectionist because it doesn't offer any provision for any Chinese manufacturers willing and able to demonstrate that they're not behaving anticompetitively. Such a thing may not exist, but without being willing to allow them to prove it one way or another, this tariff is arguably in violation of the same WTO rules that we accuse China of breaking. (And, to be clear, which I do believe they do break.)

The fact sheet on the tariff also complains that Chinese EVs are unfairly supported by subsidy, but we have both the EV subsidizing tax credit that we're discussing and also massive indirect subsidies for all fossil fuel vehicles through the massive subsidies to the oil industry, so that's frankly as hypocritical as possible.

You want a cheap EV, but you'll buy a hybrid instead? They're inherently expensive, unless they are mild hybrids. Most people use the go pedal far too carelessly to get good mileage out of those.

It's important to whether your comment was relevant.

All manufacturers will produce whatever they can make the most money selling. Regardless of if it's the best product, the safest product, the most convenient product, the cleanest product, or even the most wanted product. That isn't a good thing.

Sort of? I fuel up every 10 days because I don't drive a lot. It's in excess of $100 CDN a tank. I'm in the realm of $4,000 CDN a year. I keep my cars at least a decade, meaning $40,000 in gas. Let's ignore oil changes and other mechanical maintenance costs. Electricity for the number of kilometers I drive is a very small fraction of that. There's no head-tilting required to justify the cost... just math.

The good news is that progress in the EV sector has been driving the general value upwards. For instance range and reliability are improving. And the FUD about things like battery packs all going bad immediately after warranty ending turn out to be false. (So far. I fully expect that feature will be 'fixed' by auto manufacturers as they dial in the process.) There will be more and cheaper EVs over the next few years. You're looking at the infancy of the product.

How serious is that serious? I mean... the average driver goes ~37 miles a day. Call that charging once a week with today's cars. So... plug the thing in while you're in the grocery store? The build-out of charging networks has been steady, barring Elon's latest episode. That's going to continue, and it's going to continue as it proves an attractor. Grocery stores - for instance - will be getting on that bandwagon because it draws EV users from their competitors who haven't modified their parking lots.

Again, this is an evolving market in its early stages. But it turns out that most of the FUD worries are just that.

What this article is about is manufacturers dragging their feet and blocking that progress is because the shift to BEV redistributes who makes money somewhat. Some of the feeder plants making IC engines may go out of business. Some new plants making batteries will be born. Gas stations will slowly go extinct. Stores will start investing in chargers. Car manufacturers can't predict their share of the market anymore because competitors' products may make it to market faster and may be more popular. When you rely on the fat-ass truck-peen F-150 for your yearly dividend as CEO of Ford, you worry at night that the Lightning may not compete with some other e-Truck. So you lobby. Which sucks for us all. Well... except the CEO. Which is what the article is about.

Not anything about that statement is simple. Is it shared only if the user consents every time the company sends that data, or is it enough to issue a blanket consent for all future sending to a specific site? If the former, you're going to break an awful lot of things that the user might want to do. If the latter, then tapping "I agree" to a data sharing agreement once (which the user probably forgot about years ago) is still consent.

Sorry, but that phrasing absolutely is vague, and there's no way that such a simple statement could ever not be vague. A sufficiently clear explanation would be that they share location information only in an emergency or when the user has explicitly authorized them to share information with a specific external partner by establishing a link between the user's online account and that external partner. That's unambiguous, because it tells what users had to do to grant consent, which gives you at least some idea about whether they understood what they were consenting to and did so deliberately, and makes it clear that they do not share that information in response to any form of boilerplate consent.

This part raised red flags: "except in the case of emergencies or with customer consent." I'm not saying that's the wrong policy, so much as that it is so vague that it could be anywhere from a perfectly reasonable policy to an absolute privacy disaster or anything in between.

Reasonable would be a car company allowing the customer to authorize a specific third-party site to access car data (e.g. TeslaFi).

Unreasonable would be a "By using this navigation system, I consent to data sharing with [car company]'s partners" dialog with an "I agree" button that you have to tap before you can do anything with the car nav system.

Both of those would at least ostensibly count as "customer consent".

Is it dedicated to being a music player?

Whoops. I mean, Trademark. That's what I get for not using Preview.