Education helps a little, but not much. The root problem is that car dealers don't want to sell EVs, because they make less money on warranty service, oil changes, brake jobs, etc. So they do their part at "educating" consumers to avoid EVs. And that disinformation is a big part of why EVs aren't more popular. You can't fight that level of disinformation with information, because random people saying that EVs are great doesn't mean much when your dealer says you don't want one, avoids keeping any in stock for you to try, etc.

But forcing the car companies to sell a certain percentage of EVs does work. If they get fined for not selling enough EVs, suddenly their interests are better aligned with consumers' interests, and they're trying hard to convince every customer who could be happy with an EV to try one.

That's what they claim. Realistically, part of the problem was that they didn't guarantee a specific EV model, and not all of them were Teslas. If you thought you were renting a Tesla and ended up getting a non-Tesla BEV that couldn't be charged at superchargers, you were going to be really, really mad.

Another part of the problem was that they neutered the cars by not allowing FSD (and sometimes not even Autopilot) and locking them into chill mode to keep people who weren't used to the extra power from wrecking the cars. But that meant that folks who were actually used to driving *real* Teslas absolutely hated driving the things, because they had inadequate power, and that folks who weren't used to driving Teslas were completely unimpressed and had no reason to rent the things.

But the final nail in the coffin was when Elon decided to take away turn signal stalks and gear shifter stalks in the Model 3 and moved gear shifting onto the touchscreen. No rental car in its right mind would even think about renting out a car built with such a major safety flaw, which meant they couldn't add new vehicles to their fleet or replace them if they got totaled.

Between Tesla and the rental car companies, they did pretty much everything wrong, and then they wondered why it wasn't successful.

Again, the problem is that the market is being manipulated by auto dealers that don't want to sell BEVs. Without that market manipulation being balanced out by government manipulation, the industry will continue to stagnate.

Counting the manufacturing CO2 towards the lifetime CO2 emissions for a car is actually a fallacy. Most of that CO2 comes from mining raw materials and refining them. But once that happens, those raw materials are mostly metals, which are infinitely recyclable, which means you only mine them once, and you can reuse those raw materials for multiple cars over the course of millennia.

Once you take that out of the equation, the BEVs should win every time.

I'm not saying that making the synthetic fuel is a fantasy. I'm saying that it is so completely financially and environmentally non-viable that we'd be morons to even think about actually doing it unless you can get at least a roughly 2.5x increase in the energy output per unit of energy input. Again, there will always be a few exceptions where it makes sense to do it, whether for purity as you note or because we've run out of oil and we still need to fly aircraft, but otherwise, I just don't see it being viable before the last non-antique ICE car dies.

That's an average. The point is that an average ICE car with synthetic fuel pollutes more than an average BEV or even an average ICE car with gasoline. And that last part really doesn't depend on what car you're comparing, because it is comparing a car to itself.

This part, I disagree with. While I'm not in favor of an outright ban, I am strongly in favor of government interference.

The fact is that there are a lot of people for whom the extra cost makes them choose a hybrid when a BEV would also work. Government subsidies can encourage them to buy the BEV instead, and more importantly, can encourage them to replace them on a faster cadence, which increases availability of used BEVs that can be sold to people who can't afford new ones.

And there are also probably a lot of people who automatically assume that they can't deal with BEVs when they really would be happier with them. Assuming chargers are close to fast food, you can grab food, charge, and have a couple of hundred miles of range by the time you finish eating, using restrooms, and start driving again. But many buyers are stuck in the mindset of one-hour charge times, and never give BEVs a chance. Having price pressure from limits on the number of ICE cars that can be sold would encourage more of those folks to at least rent one and try it.

And lately, rental car companies have been running away from BEVs as quickly as they can. That means there are very few BEV rentals out there, so people who want to see if a BEV would work for them can't easily do so.

So IMO, we absolutely *need* government interference, or progress will stagnate. That doesn't mean the laws should make it impossible for people who genuinely need an ICE car to be able to buy one, but governments should gradually limit the number of ICE cars sold as a percentage of car sales so that price pressure encourages people to give BEVs a chance, and so that rental fleets are forced to use BEVs for a significant portion of their fleets to make that possible.

It's obvious that we would get here with the completely gutted EV subsidies that we have now, yes. EVs cost more, and drivers tend to mentally overestimate how many long trips they take, making them believe that EVs are way more inconvenient than they actually are.

It's not obvious that we *should* be here, though. Hybrids are still way worse for the environment than EVs, and infinitely worse than EVs powered by renewable energy.

ICE cars produce 350g of CO2 per mile versus 200g of CO2 per mile for EVs. At last check, synthetic-fuel-powered vehicles took about 4x as much power per mile as battery-electric vehicles. So unless the energy mix used to produce them is *very* different from the average, that would mean that synthetic fuels would be expected to produce 800g of CO2 per mile, meaning that a modern hybrid using synthetic fuels would be about as bad as a gas guzzling 1980s-era SUV burning normal gasoline.

So while synthetic fuels might be useful as an emergency workaround in situations where moving to batteries is infeasible (e.g. aviation), they would still be completely impractical for automotive use, because building out the power grid enough to handle 4x the power consumption of everyone moving to an EV would be economic suicide; building out the grid to accommodate EVs is going to be expensive enough without quadrupling that number.

There is absolutely no sane universe in which the current generation of synthetic fuels should be used unless and until we completely run out of oil, and even after that, they should be used no more than is absolutely necessary. Maybe someday, the technology will be good enough, but we aren't anywhere close to that point yet. Right now, the idea of switching to synthetic fuels is basically pure fantasy from a practical perspective.

Because U.S. automakers' workers don't live in dormitories and work 50-hour weeks for $3 an hour.

Oh, you mean less than a Chinese gas car? Because the Chinese government massively subsidized their R&D and manufacturing costs.

Yeah, potentially. That said, it might be possible to train the immune system to ignore those cells by repeated injection of whichever protein is triggering the immune response in combination with phosphatidylserine. This approach seems more likely to be successful if it is done with the patient's own stem cells, rather than a potentially highly alien cell line. :-)

Then again, if that approach works and you catch the diabetes early enough, it could potentially stop type 1 diabetes progression entirely without the need for stem cells.

That's why most forward-looking states have passed laws requiring new apartments to have adequate charging spaces.

Not really. EVs are actually slightly less likely to be totaled in a wreck than ICE cars, and because they're more likely to have advanced driving assistance features, they're also less likely to get in a wreck in the first place, assuming all else is equal, ignoring minor parking lot mishaps, which are largely vehicle-agnostic.

Repairs can be more expensive, however, and that, coupled with the insurance companies' perception that EV drivers can afford more, is why insurance rates are going up.

Not significantly. The difference between getting hit by a 4,000 pound Model 3 and a 3,500 pound Camry is negligible. Velocity has a far greater impact, to such a degree that getting hit by a Model 3 at 35 MPH would cause roughly the same damage as the Camry at 38 MPH. The weight difference is entirely lost in the noise.

Also not true. EVs don't weigh enough to have a meaningful impact on roads. A Model 3 with a single driver weighs as much as a Camry with three or four extra passengers. Anything below about 6,000 pounds isn't worth worrying about.

Agreed. The incentives are set up in such a way that they're not so useful in practice, because the people who can afford EVs can't get the credits, and the people who can get the credits can't afford the cars, with or without the credits. The income limits should be abolished. Either you're trying to promote EVs or you aren't, and if you really want to promote EV sales to lower-income people, the way you do that is by creating a thriving used car market as all the wealthy people replace their cars, aided by those tax credits.

They actually can't. The costs to build them are higher, and the margins are lower. Tesla makes about $8.5k per car at current prices, which means the manufacturing cost starts at about $34,000, which is more than the retail cost of a Camry.

Well, that's true for everyone. The point is that all it takes is the right person pushing the right buttons and making them see that their elected officials are bought and paid for by big business, and a whole lot more of them will vote.

The purpose of a minimum wage is to guarantee a certain standard of living by forcing companies to pay more than they want to pay for labor. As soon as you water down such a law in response to "pushback" from giant corporations, you have failed to do your jobs. Everyone involved in that decision should be looking for a new one. Remember, those delivery drivers vote.

Yeah, it's borderline.

I thought so, too, on the first read. Turns out only one of them was. The other was just confusing as heck. The first one was the vacation sentence, which I commented on earlier. The other one was this one:

Which is a terrible sentence, but not run-on. It's bad because "of all sorts" breaks the flow. It should be rewritten as "I grow all sorts of berries, lemons, limes, radishes, and lettuce in my garden," or "I grow all sorts of berries, lemons and limes, radishes, and lettuce in my garden," if you have some strange desire to make "lemons and limes" a thing.

It's also unlikely that you grow lemons and limes in a garden. It would prevent the other plants from getting light. That's more an orchard thing. So "in my garden" doesn't seem to connect to that part of the sentence.

I would go with "I grow radishes and lettuce in my garden, along with lemons, limes, and berries of all sorts." Now you have something readable, and it doesn't strongly imply that the trees and bushes are in the garden.

They were trying to show that semicolons shouldn't be used to separate lists that don't have commas in it, but to be honest, my immediate reaction was to assume that if they had already done something as abhorrent as a semicolon before a coordinating conjunction, they probably were expecting something nonstandard like semicolons around phrases with "and". :-)

Either way, that sentence was so irredeemably bad that the comma versus semicolon question wouldn't even get asked. In general, if you're having to ask whether to use a semicolon in place of a comma, you have already failed to write a coherent sentence, and you're just doing damage control. Go back and rewrite the sentence.

In one of those, I would argue that the MLA style is wrong. Question four was a painfully long sentence. They suggest using a semicolon before the coordinating conjunction. Nope. The sentence overused commas where em dashes are more appropriate. They considered this to be correct:

If I had read a sentence like that in a book, I would have set the book on fire long before I got to the point of seeing whether the author used a comma or a semicolon before the coordinating conjunction. So for question 4, the correct answer is "neither".

The problem with their use of semicolon is that "but, to her surprise" is not really related to "she was only taking a few days off", making a semicolon joining inappropriate. The author wasn't trying to say, "She was only taking a few days off, but to her surprise, she managed to fit everything in." Rather, what was actually meant was that "She thought she wouldn't have time for all three activities, but, to her surprise, she managed to fit everything in." The "she was only taking a few days off" was basically a parenthetical assigning a reason for why she thought she wouldn't have enough time.

A much better punctuation is this:

By using em dashes (or parentheses if you prefer) to set off a parenthetical clause instead of commas, the sentence becomes eminently more readable/parseable.

So no semicolons before coordinating conjunctions, please. If you ever get to the point where you're about to add a semicolon before a coordinating conjunction because the first part of the sentence is too long or complex, the first part of the sentence is too long or complex. Find another way to say it.

For example, I would suggest reordering it, dropping the "although", and splitting it into multiple sentences:

And boom. You've just taken a sentence that is painful to read and turned it into a third-grade-reading-level sentence.

But that's just my opinion; it's not the first time I've disagreed with MLA on things, and I'm sure it won't be the last.

It's way worse than that.

• Small fish grow into big fish. Without the small companies getting bigger and eventually buying your high-end packages, why would anyone switch from somebody else's software over to your high-end packages? No. They'll find a way to work within the limitations of whatever they were using before rather than deal with the pain of the migratino. So now you don't have feeders, and as big companies die, they don't get replaced. The very thing that keeps your big fish from leaving now prevents you from acquiring new big fish.
• When growing companies run into the limitations of the other technologies, they push those other technologies to find solutions, and now the other solutions can do everything that your high-end packages can do, but they're not you. I think this part is what you were describing.
• The other vendors provide competition, and likely undercut your high-end packages. Companies start to switch, and now you start losing revenue. So you cut costs to match. And they cut costs further. And you end up in a race to the bottom with the dozen companies that evolved to fill the gap left behind by your company's mismanagement.

So this behavior is very short-sighted and stupid, in my opinion. But if they want to crater their business, that's up to them.