Buttons are better, but dials or levers are better yet. Hitting a stupid toggle button that’s indistinguishable from the rest of the row of toggle buttons multiple times to change the temperature is just a stupid idea. I’m looking at you, Mercedes.

Of course. I'm just saying that trenching will still be the biggest component of costs, followed by site prep (eg upgrading electricity rooms) and hardware.

Smart for them, shit for consumers. Are you saying they shouldn't rely on Visa, Mastercard and Amex too? And why does this apply only to payment processing? Surely they shouldn't be dependent on third parties for any of their critical business functions, then? No use of third party logistics, heat and light and electricity and water and property assets and refrigeration and of course all the actual stuff they sell.

Wait it out, I guess. Supply will ramp up in response to heightened demand, some of the AI players will fall away, but we’re a long way off consumers deciding they don’t want a new phone every so often. It may end up with overcapacity in the supply chain meaning Apple gets to squeeze suppliers harder a few years down the line. I’m sure all the participants are busy running a ton of sensitivity analyses on different scenarios as they try to play this out.

I meant the biggest expense that will fall to the charger operators, rather than to the system as a whole.

I just don’t buy the argument that the cables supplying store power etc will be conveniently located to enable charger deployment just by drilling a few holes. You have to run the charger cables from the site’s electrical room or transformer, and that’s going to be a distance of dozens to hundreds of metres. I wish it weren’t the case, but it really is.

It’s completely mad, the US has vast tracts of land that are high insolation, you could absolutely have done this. It still could happen, and I guess to some extent it still will because the economics will drive it despite Trump’s admin doing their best to hold back the inevitable, but the pace is so far off the mark.

When you consider what still has to be done to get to industrial fusion, it’s clear it’s going to be decades more, as you say. We will need a device that produces sustained net electricity, not just net plasma energy; then a demonstration power plant that actually feeds power to a grid; then proof of materials surviving neutron bombardment at scale; then reliable tritium breeding at power-plant levels; and all of that has to be repeatable in engineering terms.

Fusion will have absolutely no part to play in decarbonisation because fusion is not going to be ready at scale in time, ie the next three through thirty years. Best guess is a first industrial plant selling power to the grid is going to be 2050 or so. We can’t wait till then.

Maybe at some point after that, fusion can take over from solar and wind, but fusion has major disadvantages that you’re skipping over: it’s centralised with all the political, regulatory, financing and single-point-of-failure risks that brings; and above all fusion WACC is going to be massively higher than renewables + storage + distribution. Especially when you consider how build costs for renewables and storage are going to continue to fall in the years up to 2050.

And you’re being altogether far too blithe on opex for fusion. 14MeV neutron fluxes are quite challenging, what with the embrittlement, swelling, activation, first wall replacements, superconducting magnets, tritium handling systems, cryogenics, robot replacement systems, etc.

Between them, they have tons of excellent EVs. The Inster is great and very cleverly done, and the Genesis GV60 is lovely inside

I think the modelling assumption is that the long term sales trend is inexorably up, no matter what happens in the next couple of years. Given how hard-nosed Walmart is, there's zero chance that they've modelled based on vibes or ideology, and so I actually take this as a quite bullish indicator on the future of EV sales in the US.

Plus increased dwell time. Shopping while you charge is the thing.

I'd have thought the biggest expense was digging trenches to run cables to the charging bays. Sure, they have electricity on site, but they've got to get it to the bays themselves. Trenching is quite expensive work.

I thought this was quite funny:
"Here's how simple it is to charge up at Walmart: ...
Open the Walmart app, scan the QR code, choose your connector confirm & pay."

So: not very simple then. It's 2026, and you can't even sort out contactless payments, Walmart? Really? Wny are you making people muck around opening apps and scanning QR codes? Oh, that's right: because you don't support Apple Pay or Google Pay, including in your app. What a stupid, anti-consumer decision that was.

My god, you really didn't read the very article you posted, did you? Once again:
"Undoubtedly, fast charge is an exciting innovation. Capability is up to 2000kW. This compact system is powered by three of our 70kWh lithium-ion phosphate battery rafts. Each has the capacity to store 84kWh. Accordingly, 504kWh is available for use by the train’s four AC traction motors. The system incorporates two battery racks on each driving vehicle. Only two vehicles are in use at any time. The third is a spare"

LFP, not NMC.

What's the cheap way to do overhead electrification in the UK context? Is there some magic that doesn't require you to rebuild bridges etc? If you think engineers haven't already exploited gapping, you're wrong, but it's not a magic bullet and brings its own set of problems such as managing pantograph arcing.