How about congestion pricing, which 1) provably works better than anything else and 2) actually generates revenue instead of costing money?

Nah, let's just blow 30 million on a system that will, if anything, make traffic worse.

Your puny 120kW is fine for you and it's fine for most people, but you have to understand that flash charging isn't about the consumer demand, and it's not about road trips. It's happening way faster for that to be the case. Flash charging is about making more money for charge point operators and the car companies.

There are two reasons for hyper-fast charging, and neither one is for road trips:

1) People who live in apartments. If your car has 5-minute charging, you can sell EVs to more of these people.
2) Charge point operators. Charge point operators make a lot more money off of faster chargers than they do off of slow chargers. The economics of running a charging site strongly favor faster charging. Faster charging means fewer stalls needed, less land and queuing space needed, more people stopping because it's more convenient, more people stopping because there's less chance of a queue. Since you charge money per kWh, basically the rate you can make money off of charging is directly proportional to how many Watts you can push out. And it's more economical to push more Watts with flash charging.

In the early days, I expected companies to charge more money for faster chargers. I expected there would be slower chargers, fast chargers, and "premium" hyper chargers that cost more. But in fact, it's going to be the opposite. We will probably see lower rates for faster charging. In fact, this already exists now...some chargers begin charging idle fees once your car gets to 80% and starts charging slower. You pay more, if you want to charge slower!

This is why flash charging is being pushed so hard. It's profit incentive both for the car companies and for the charging companies, not value added to most customers.

Hyper charging is emphatically not needed for road trips. This is why Teslas still charge slow as fuck. Tesla charging speed has actually gotten worse over time. It's because their customers live in America, they tend to own houses and charge at home, and even "slow" fast charging is totally fine for road trips already. That's why Tesla "super"chargers are not even fast. Because for road trips, which is the Supercharger use-case, it doesn't matter that much.

I have two gas cars and an old Kia Niro that charges at 80kW on a good day. I need to drive between Boise and Portland every so often. Most people assume I drive the electric around town, and take one of the gas cars to Portland, but it's the opposite. I only drive my gas cars around town, because the miles are low and gas consumption is basically insignificant. I take the Kia on road trips because it's slightly cheaper (I get the same reimbursement from work) and electric cars are nicer to drive. I just put it on cruise, and it climbs all the mountains with no shifting, no noise, and it goes down the other side perfectly in cruise control, no brakes needed, just put it in cruise and drive.

Even though it charges at a pathetic 80kW, I never really wait on the car. I just plug in when I stop for pee/coffee/cleaning off bugs from the windshield breaks. I probably spend less time charging the Kia than I would filling up a gas car once or twice, because I don't have to stay with the car while filling gas. And that's at a "pathetic" 80kW car. I now understand why American car companies keep putting out cars like the Equinox, that only charges at 150kW, or the Toyotas, that also charge at less than 200kW. I used to think the 250+kW charging speed like the Hyundai's was going to be some big unlock. But now I realize it doesn't matter because most Americans that can afford newer cars live in houses, and we are already at the zero-time-cost point for road-trip charging. The next bottleneck will be when enough people start using EVs that queues start to form at the highway fast chargers, and since land is cheap in America, the response will probably more like what Tesla already does...just put in a fuck ton of stalls so people can charge while they pee, rather than a few hyperchargers that people have to keep moving their cars through.

Which is very similar to how SSDs work. They all include buffer capacity so as the NAND blocks die off, the user never notices. So the 1TB SSD may contain 1.5TB of NAND inside, but you don't know, and you don't need to know, as long as it keeps delivering 1TB of storage.

Different companies have different levels of transparency about battery state-of-health, and there's no standard right now to make sure you can compare between manufacturers. Tesla tends to report state-of-health that drops from 100% relatively quickly into the 90s in the car's life, but then stabilizes at a slower degradation rate over the long term, which is close to the truth about how batteries actually behave. Ford tends to report 100% state of health for a long time. It's easy to assume that Ford thinks the consumer expects their "new" car to stay new for a long time, so they want to show 100% state-of-health to avoid spooking customers and reduce warranty or trade-ins. In reality, Ford just programmed in a certain amount of buffer capacity into the life-o-meter so the customer THINKS the battery is at 100%* health (where 100% is defined as e.g. "above 90%"). Ford doesn't have better battery technology than Tesla, they just have better marketing.

Lightnings are super popular around here with contractors. They spend most of their time driving around to sites doing estimates or doing supervision. Occasionally they need to haul or tow something. Lightning is pretty much perfect for that use case. The ones with diesel trucks often leave them sitting around idling with the air conditioning on all too much.

Not to mention, "maximising share holder profit" is subject to judgement and interpretation, especially with respect to the Buxton Index (the time horizon over which an entity makes plans).

It's very common for companies, even big tech companies like Amazon, to say "we are deliberately going to show lower profits this quarter because we are planning to maximize profits over a longer period of time". This is so common as to be universal. You can just as easily say "We value our company's reputation and believe in our strategy, so we are not going to engage in (unethical practice X) because we legitimately believe it's in the best interest of the company long-term".

This is not to say that moral hazards exist, and most of those moral hazards can be blamed on regulatory environment that creates them. But whenever somebody says "we have no choice but to maximize quarterly profit", it normally translates to "I get a bonus next quarter if quarterly profit is up, and I don't care what happens to the company in 5 years because I'll be gone by then".

So then you keep using diesel trucks on those types of routes then?

I'll never understand why, on a site supposedly full of tech people, the constant framework of technology adoption is that any new technology must be capable of completely displacing all other technologies in all other uses cases, or else it's worthless. That's not how literally any technology adoption has ever progressed in human history.

European trucks are significantly more capable than American ones. American trucks really haven't technologically advanced at all. The last advance was when Detroit Diesel introduced electronic engine management in the 90s.

The US maximum gross weight is 80,000 lb, while the European standard is 88,000 lb, with categories up to over 200,000 lb.

Higher-power European (diesel) trucks also have more power, with up to 770hp, whereas US trucks rarely go over 600hp.

European trucks are also more aerodynamic (counterintutively), and also have more advanced tires and axles, so they get better mileage on a per-truck basis. But this is even more important on a per-ton basis, because weight doesn't make a huge impact on efficiency compared to aerodynamics. A European truck might get 8mpg hauling 88k pounds, vs. an American truck getting 7mpg hauling 80k pounds, for 30-50% more efficient per ton. All of this with lower emissions too.

Not really defending California, because their housing policies are broken and that's easy to see. Prop 13 should be considered one of the worst laws in the history of the country.

But housing and transportation are linked, and always have been. That's why cities and villages are built along rivers. That's why, including in California, companies used to build streetcars...then they would build houses along the streetcar lines. And often they would do a rugpull and fail to maintain the streetcar, but that's another story.

Legitimately, investing in transportation, almost directly, is also investing in housing.

"they" did consult with SNCF (the French national train company), and SNCF told them to build a train between LA and SF. I.e. connect the biggest population centers. That's the logic in places like France: You build where you will serve the most people possible, sell the most tickets possible, get the most ridership possible, for the shortest distance, and then you build out from there.

For better or worse, that logic doesn't work in America. The American logic is: LA and SF already have (limited) rail connections, but other cities in CA are completely unconnected by rail. Also, I5 is an infrastructure crisis, because it's completely overloaded and there's no solution, and a train between LA and SF wouldn't do anything to solve the I5 crisis. Also, America has broken land policies, and acquiring land between LA and SF is just impossible. Also, taking tax money from the whole state and spending it on infrastructure only for in the biggest cities, isn't politically popular. In France, it's just understood that cities get more amenities than rural areas, and that's the way it is. But in America, we like to shovel pork projects at our rural areas out of some kind of sentimental obligation to prop them up. So you have to bribe rural areas and secondary cities to get things done.

So, for better worse, the voters of California approved CAHSR only on the condition that it connect the inland cities. There's a legitimate logic to it. It's just American logic and not French logic.

And the BYD flash chargers include buffer batteries, so the power load on the grid isn't all that high compared to regular DC fast chargers, or even lower in some cases.

Run my dryer (7200W). Charge my car (9600W). Set my thermostat to crank up my AC to super-cool my house so I can reduce my AC use later (8400W).

Also LynxOS, which is used in some semiconductor tools.

A few months ago when I was in Phoenix, when there was a high demand during some downtown ballgame, I requested an Uber through the Uber app in the usual way. After waiting longer than usual, instead of a normal Uber, a Waymo car showed up, sub-contracted THROUGH Uber. In other words, Uber hired a Waymo to fulfil my ride request.

I'm comfortable riding in Waymos, so I was OK with that (bonus IMO), but this could be annoying for people who are not comfortable riding in robotaxis, to have a robotaxi shoved at them without notification. It looks like we aren't far from a future where even people who try to avoid robotaxis won't be able to, because companies like Uber are just going to start using them.

American codes also have healthy safety margins. Wire sizes are approved based on worst case assumptions, and are often sized based on maximum tolerable voltage drop (i.e. lights dimming when you run the microwave), rather than concerns about wire overloading.

The risk is there, but assuming the devices are limited to a certain size, the risk of wire overloading should be minimal.

More precisely, rural electrification in the US is largely the product of the REA (rural electrification administration) created by FDR during the new deal. It offered financing, blueprints, and technical advice, but did not actually perform electrification. It encouraged formation of user-own co-ops, most of which operate to this day. It also did very little in the way of subsidies or public ownership or investment, beyond providing financing. It's a model that works and should be repeated, but just because it was "federal help" does not imply that all federal help is good or smart.

The modern approach of stimulating development by handing out public money is very problematic. One, because we can't balance the budget and we don't have the public money in the first place. Two, either there aren't enough strings attached so it becomes corrupt (like broadband subsidies that disappear into a black hole), or there are too many strings attached and the money never gets spent or it becomes a different kind of grift (like the NEVI which allocated billions of dollars but only a tiny fraction of chargers were built even many years later).

The government is bad at executing. If the government wants to encourage EV adoption it should do something like the REA and encourage the formation of co-ops and private charging companies by paving the way for them, removing regulatory barriers (not adding a thousand like NEVI), and promulgating standards and blueprints.