I've got to understand your definition of "expensive techno garbage" to be the safety features that are the main thing new to "'regular' ICE cars" in the recent past. Let's look at what they are.

Adaptive cruise control: turns out for the US market, introduced nearly 25 years ago in luxury cars and has been trickling into cheaper vehicles ever since.
Blind-spot monitoring: turns out for the US market, introduced 16 years ago in the Ford Fusion and has been expanding ever since.
Lane-keeping assistance: turns out for the US market, introduced about 17 years ago in some Cadillac models and has been tricking down ever since.
Rear-view cameras, side cameras, front cameras, ultrasonic sensors for backing up and then in the front... also just slowly making their way through the entire industry.

You've got a false narrative regarding the advancement of the technology. You might as well be saying "I want an EV, but I hate those garbage air-bag thingies that everyone else hates so much and now they're putting them in all cars but I'm still going to buy an ICE one with them despite them also having the thing I don't (irrationally) want."

Otherwise... I don't know what your gripe is. My (2025 MY) EV's connected features (ie. smartphone on wheels?) are... uh... the NAV acts like Google Maps and knows about live traffic events and can tell me about nearby charging stations and... uh... yeah, that's about it. If you're worried about tracking, sorry, but that also started with non-EV vehicles in the form of OnStar and has been trickling into every vehicle since.

Dislike EVs for their weaknesses, but this argument isn't a good one.

And because where income is high, cost of living is high, and the marginal cost of children goes from "investment in the future" to "big hole I sink money into".

Yeah where I live, we don't even have separate recycling bins for presorting, the garbage company decided it's more efficient to just let everyone throw all their waste into one bin and do the sorting themselves.

Restaurants it depends on what type. Fast food? Certainly. Places that have sports playing on TV? Not so much because those usually have a lot in common with... bars. Which were 50% of the establishments mentioned. Those do it for (shitty) ambiance, to make young drunks think they're having fun so they stay and drink more.

Okay, let's pause the EV discussion for a moment. You've pushed a little button in my mind and I have to engage.

Whenever someone says something like that it's alarming because it's super reductive and usually indicates a seriously dangerous driving mindset. It disregards the most important driving action: stopping. 4WD/FWD doesn't do anything to aid in stopping. But people invoking safety never mention that. It has almost no effect on the second most important driving action: steering. It's really only about the go action, which is the least important.

Back to car talk. The Hellcat performed the same in winter as the R/T before it, which would have performed the same as all the 6-cylinder SXT models out there that sold very well. All Chargers and Challengers were rear-wheel-drive and therefore tempermental. And yet... all those people buying the 6-cylinder entry-level cars weren't treating them as winter garage queens. That said I won't pretend it they're easy to winter-drive. You have to recognize that on a road that's slick because it's between plows, when you stop in slush at a red light, getting back up to speed is going to involve patience, to avoid fish-tailing. I totally get that having to respect the nature of RWD isn't as good as not having to. But they still were normal cars, not some sort of OMG I have children so I can't drive those!

Again, I accept that there are areas where a Hummer is the only/best option. Some people live and commute through hilly, winding, unplowed roads and have 45-degree inclines in their driveways. I grant that. And I grant that might be you. But if it is, it's you and your statistically unusual driving environment.

Incidentally, the Ioniq 5 is one of the highest-rated safety for small SUV per IIHS for 2025. This thing is no slouch.

Anyway, kudos on this staying respectful and classy. It's refreshing because frankly a lot of EV vs ICE discussions get really heated, really fast.

I don't know where you live but I'm in Canada, but admittedly in a city. I daily-drove the Hellcat through six winters. And a lesser Hemi Charger for ten before that. It's no fun but with winter tires it's do-able if you're a cautious driver. The 5N is a totally different beast. Winter handling is excellent. It's possible that you live somewhere with harsher winters than I've got but to a certain degree contact patch is contact patch is contact patch. I generally don't find "oh, I can't own a Honda Civic or Chrysler Pacifica or any other 'normal' car because I could only drive it four months a year." Those normal cars mysterious sell just fine.

As for afford, this is the zinger. The 5N cost the same as the Hellcat did, only six years later and without employee pricing. So as the EV vs ICE goalposts shift out into the distance, I'd like to reiterate: 5N handles way better in the same conditions that a Hellcat can drive in and is cheaper when inflation is taken into consideration.

So hey, there's a good topic. EVs have less to go wrong. Less to maintain. And if you're stuck in a snow storm, you can pull over and just run the climate control for literal days. Idling an ICE for a long time isn't great and fuel will run out way sooner. The Ioniq in particular has a very large interior. It's actually wider and taller than then Hellcat was, just a little less long. So... if modding is no longer what we're talking about, hey, you know these cars are great, right? I hope that's getting through.

Let's go with the theory that a 3 second car is enough for me and that spending literally tens of thousands of dollars pursuing another tenth of a second on a car like the Hellcat isn't my cup of tea. I was involved with the Hemi community for a long time and while I didn't personally participate in the money-pit game on the Hellcat, I did on the previous one (up from about 350hp base to 420hp after mods so only a couple grand worth) and man, I'm well aware how quickly those bills can add up.

If you're at the track, competing against yourself... sure... there's (much) less to do on an EV. But kind of like the Hellcat was already supercharged and had reinforced drive shafts and transmission and so on, with a race-car EV you should think of yourself as already having done the majority of mods. Unless you have a thing for doing the wrenching yourself, you're already near the end-point of diminishing returns.

Yes, this is the model that has those. I knew going in that I didn't care. They're really mostly just gimmicks for "car people" to gush about in YouTube reviews. I've turned them on for joke value once or twice, but never use them for real driving. Basically the "I will never drive an automatic transmission because I want to feel in control of the car" folks enjoy them. But I'm just a normal guy on normal streets.

Oh, it's stupid fun. Highway on ramps are a hoot. More so than the Hellcat because frankly... I can stomp on the Go pedal and hot 100kph in 3 seconds without making any sound, so there's less worry I might draw... unwanted... attention.

Most days though it's just a normal, well-behaved car. It's funny, because most drives I'm actually playing "the EV video game", which is actually watching the efficiency metrics and trying to make the numbers go up. So driving sensibly. But again, those on-ramps... are stupid fun.

My daily driver went from a Dodge Charger Hellcat (v8 6.2L supercharged ICE w/707hp) to Hyundai Ioniq 5N (EV w/640hp) that is faster, brakes faster, corners better, and literally beats the Hellcat in every driving metric on every track... by a lot.

It just doesn't sound like the Hellcat. Granted. Style. There's a visceral quality to the sound of a high-displacement engine. Granted.

But... I checked my bills. I'm paying an average of $36 CDN a month more on my electricity bills compared to prior to the change. I was spending nearly $300/mo on premium gas for the Hellcat.

It's really, really, really hard to ignore that I spent over $18,000 for fuel in six years in the Hellcat and I'm going to spend under $3,000 in the same time. For a faster, sportier, more agile car with more interior space, more utility, and has its own style.

Where I live, most of our electricity comes from nuclear and hydro-electric turbines at natural waterfalls... we were 91% renewable four years ago. My electricity is clean. My carbon footprint is nil. I don't regret the 9,000+ litres of gas the Hellcat burned. At the time it was the coolest monster car I could afford. But I absolutely, positively won't look back from the 5N.

Sure, sure, it'll cost me time and money if I randomly decide I need to drive across the planet but... the v8 rumble isn't worth it. Any of it.

EVs aren't for everyone and every use-case. Again, granted. But the cases where they aren't better are much more rare than the nay-sayers would have folks believe. If you can, do it. If you truly can't... okay, cool, understood... but maybe support the infrastructure expansion that'll get you there, not undermine it.

I don't think that will help. The issue is that the aluminum layer which would normally selectively reflect back to the optical sensor isn't doing so. I don't think a solid background would change that. The laser will shine through (not reflecting) to hit your paint regardless.

Their population absolutely dwarfs Canada and the US as well, so that isn't much good, is it?

BTW, remember the secret of Ti Kwon Leap- Anger is a weapon only to one's opponent.

I still think we need, given the microamps involved, a hamster powered cell phone charger.

Yes it is. Radioactive materials are made in the planet's core, and float up in the magma. Radon Gas is a normal and natural resource from decaying uranium.

It's as renewable as sunlight and wind.

We already have bottled water, which wasn't a thing when I was kid. Bottled air is next.

I'd imagine most of the AI crawlers out there have already ingested most of the freely available content. I don't imagine many places that have new content who haven't already struck up some agreement with the scrapers. For instance Ars Technica has.

Had this existed three years ago, it might've been interesting.

That said, there's something missing. There's two ways a crawler can work. Either they request content, get told a price and have to reconnect and agree to the price OR they can declare in advance what they're willing to pay and just get approved if you're not asking for more. What's missing is the "soak these bastards for whatever they're willing to pay." If I've set my price to $1 and they connect up declaring "I'm willing to pay up to $3", I just don't get that $2 difference. That tells you whose side Cloudflare is on. And this all assumes AI scrapers manage to don't manage to disguise themselves as something else.