Just last weekend my kids were climbing the magnolia tree on the side of my house and I noticed dozens of little bees flying along the ground underneath it. My kids were a little freaked out even though I reassured them that the bees almost definitely wouldn't sting them.
I also noticed dozens of tiny half centimeter diameter holes in the ground under that magnolia tree which I guessed were little bee burrows. This sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to identify what type of bee these were. Long story short, there are way too many types of bees (30,000+ according to my research) for a non specialist like me to be able to pinpoint a species. But whatever type of bee (miner/sweat) they are going to go absolutely nuts when that magnolia tree blooms in the next couple weeks.
Hypothetical. I'm in my rural California home late on a Friday night, having finished a bottle of wine and ready to go to bed when I suddenly realize a wild fire has started near my home, does my car let me escape this natural disaster?
It doesn't even have to be that convoluted. Any sudden dangerous situation: natural disaster, break in, medical emergency(positive or negative what about a baby being born) where a car is the only solution and a reasonable, but inebriated, person makes the better of two bad decisions is going to need an override. I don't want to be pessimistic but this really seems like the sort of thing where a few people will die, lawsuits will happen, congress will mandate an override/make it optional, it'll be gone in maybe 10 years. It's madness but seemingly this is how things are done.
GP said there is no rule yet, so the answer is “today, yes.” If you’re asking about the future, the answer is “to be determined.” But I think you knew that.
Pardon my ignorance, what is GP? If you have other sources please share, I only read this article, which bluntly states "Your current vehicle stays surveillance-free, but shopping for a 2027 model means accepting this digital copilot.".
GP=Grandparent.. the comment above the comment on yours.. but there is none.. so I guess we can assume article? There are better ways to phrase like "the article" or even "OP" (Original Poster - assuming poster & author are the same). This isn't a reputable domain though, so probably time to move on.
Interesting,are either of those two orgs you linked pushing the age verification policies that the article is rallying against? I would assume so since you posted them here, but it's unclear from the links Wikipedia pages you linked.
I doubt they're pushing it; but if we're seeing roughly simultaneous introduction of similar laws in many countries then those organisations are probably organising the forums where the lobbying is being done.
Do any US automakers have anything in the pipes using Sodium-Ion batteries? A quick search turned up info on a plant mass producing the batteries in Holland, MI but no mention of when they would be available. As someone in the market for an EV within the next year or 2, and also currently enduring a month long stretch of temps in the single digits and below, cold weather performance has suddenly become a huge consideration.
Likely No. Undecided with Matt Ferrell recently did a video on how sodium ion batterys startup in the US (not necessarily for EVs, but other power applications) have had challenges largely due to the falling price of lithium making sodium batteries less competitive on price the past couple years: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nrTCgZmUFCY
OTOH, there are seemingly more lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery ev options now - rivian now uses LFP, Ford mustang mach-e has had a LFP variant since fall 2023 (and should have other models using LFP in 2027), I think the 2026 chevy bolt uses LFP, etc.
> The US administration has basically told them to do so.
Any US automaker relying on Trump staying in office is playing with fire. Yes, you may see reduced or zero press releases and budgets for EV research being "reallocated" on paper so the toddler in chief doesn't get a public tantrum - but assuming there will be free and fair elections this year, it is highly, highly likely that Congress will be solid blue and reinstate a lot of what Trump has cut down, only this time as an actual law that is far harder to cancel than executive orders.
And everyone not hedging for this possibility will wreck their company's future.
There is no realistic path to a veto-proof majority for Democrats in the midterm elections. If there was, Trump would be impeached and removed before EVs were addressed.
Don't expect any movement on EV legislation unless and until Democrats take back the White House in 2028
I would prefer that when the dems dive back into EV subsidies, they fly them under the radar instead of using tax credits for buyers. Lots of people actually believe that their fossil fuel is not subsidized, so we need to use the same techniques to actually help manufacturers bring competitive EVs to market.
It would be better to remove all subsidies, so the true cost is revealed to and paid by the consumer. It would be a bit difficult to remove all fossil fuel subsidies though, since that would include a large part of the defence (sorry war) budget that is spent keeping the oil flowing.
It would be better for governments to provide tax credits / subsidies to battery manufacturing facilities than it would be to directly subsidize consumers. The hope being the cheaper battery component cost gets passed onto consumers.
Vehicle sales subsidies frankly just end up rolled into the price as a markup.
The Canadian government here partially has the right idea in only subsidizing vehicles under a 50k CAD ($36k USD) price tier -- unless they're manufactured in Canada. But I don't think that barrier is low enough. Should be $40k or even less. Our subsidy also takes the form of a direct cash subsidy instead of a tax credit -- which is regressive and helps people less in lower income tiers who don't pay much in income taxes.
Axed EV subsidization, openly called EVs -- and climate change -- a scam, and then made noises about cutting emissions standards, and aggressively pursued fossil fuel expansion?
That and threw tariffs on the auto makers parts and imports such that their businesses are under threat?
GM just axed the Bolt again. The only domestic affordable EV. Stellantis killed all of theirs, from what I hear. And Ford has pulled back as well.
I don't understand your questions, please rephrase them.
Anyway I'm still curious about the mechanism the administration used to direct manufacturers to stop producing EVs, and how they could invoke such a power without covering Telsa or Rivian. Nothing about the administration would surprise me, but I'm surprised there hasn't been more noise made about it.
Why isn't there ever such thing as "direct action"? Seems like a bold claim.
Anyway that doesn't answer my question, I was asking the other poster what was targeting EV manufacturers except for Telsa or Rivian. Seems like blatant Musk and Scaringe corruption if that was so.
LFP battery production in the US only recently reached larger scale; so I expect it will be a while before they get around to sodium ion. With all the tariffs, they'd have to license technology and build local factories to get started. That will probably be a few years at least. Or the tariffs might become more reasonable at some point and they could import battery cells a bit sooner than that. But probably not until the end of this decade.
Cold weather performance with heat pumps and lithium batteries is fine. Don't worry about it. I wouldn't try to hold my breath until a US automaker produces a sodium battery EV.
It’s only “fine” if you live in the southern US where freezing conditions are rare and/or never drive anywhere near your winter range and you have a garage charger or some other easy access to a charge station. Anything outside of those conditions and winter range issues are painful.
Nah dude, I live in Canada, we're having a record cold winter here, and it's really not bad. My car (Polestar 2) is one of the least efficient, has no heat pump in my year, and only has a ~225km effective range in winter (~300 in summer) but .. I have zero range anxiety, there's no pain, it's not annoying. The number of times one is driving that far in a single trip is miniscule, but there's DC fast chargers all along the highways that take the edge off, and there are cars with far larger range anyways.
Canada must have a better fast charger network than the US, because I have to deal with range anxiety whenever I’m visiting family or camping/cabin or even just driving through a reservation in the winter. When you’re staying somewhere that is 30% (battery charge) away from the nearest fast charger and you lose 10% per day, you start budgeting trips pretty fast.
Why do you imagine that average miles per day matters? I don’t drive anywhere near 200 miles/day, but any time I have to drive across the state (or farther) in the winter I have to recharge a lot more frequently, and the charging stations are busier and fewer in number (usually more are out of service in the winter either because the snow has drifted over them or because the cable was left in the snow and is now frozen over or a plow damaged the unit). Worse still, if you don’t have a charging cable in your parking space, you will have to drive to a charging station much more frequently (because the idle battery usage is much higher).
But yeah, if you have a garage with a charger and you never exceed your winter range then it’s fine, per my previous comment.
More than 60 million Americans own a home with a garage (where a charger can be installed) and most are within 100 miles of a fast DC charger. Edge cases continue to shrink and be solved for, electricity is ubiquitous and batteries keep improving rapidly.
I think proportion is more useful that quantity. 66% of housing units (that's all forms of housing, not just single-family homes) have a garage or carport. Also, given that there are ~145 million housing units, 60 million would be a bad situation.
> most are within 100 miles of a fast DC charger
That's not good enough. No one can spend 3-4 hours to drive 200 miles round trip, or even 100 miles, to charge quickly.
There needs to be a good solution for the 33% of households that don't have access to EV charging as part of their home. Until it becomes really plentiful, part of the solution may involve fast charging that only the 33% can use or that favors the 33%; people who can charge overnight at home should charge overnight at home.
Fast chargers colocated at grocery stores people shop at at least weekly are a solution, Tesla did this (Meijer partnership), as did Electrify America. Walmart is rolling out charging at most of their US stores. Home charging is a solution, but so is workplace level 2 charging.
Can you charge at home? Do so. Can you charge at work? Do so. Can you charge at a grocery store or other location your task will take longer than the charging? Do so. This works for most Americans, while charging infrastructure continues to be rapidly deployed. The gaps will be filled, how fast is a function of will and investment.
Chargers at grocery stores and other places of public accommodation that have lots of parking and customers who stay a while are good options. I don't know how many are enough; even fast chargers take orders of magnitude longer to use than a gas pump.
At least in the midwest very few grocery stores have fast charging. Usually the fast chargers are along highways on the outskirts of cities, and even then they’re almost always at gas stations.
Agreed. However, the number of people who live 100+ miles from a fast charger rounds to zero. Something like 85-90% of the US population lives within a metro area, and even in the least "EV friendly" states probably has a fast charger within 10-20 miles at most.
Yes, things are rapidly improving. My claim was that cold weather is a pain today. Also “living within 100 miles of a fast charger” is small comfort to those who don’t have a convenient way to charge at home.
For the record, I’ve been an EV owner for 5 years in the northern US. I still like my EV and things get better all the time, but I don’t understand the people in this thread saying that cold weather battery performance is fine.
My argument is more charging infrastructure and sodium ion chemistries should solve this relatively soon, and both are on arguably steep trajectories. My 2018 Model S 100kw has decent cold weather performance even cold soaked after 8 years of ownership with resistive heat for both the cabin and battery pack (glycol heater), I expect state of the art to keep getting better.
I used to keep a 100ft 120V heavy duty extension cord in the frunk to charge due to how few charging options there were in 2018, and no longer have to (having driven across most of the continental US).
If an EV is not feasible today due to limited charging options, certainly, procure a hybrid until battery chemistry and charging infrastructure improves in your area. I admit cold weather performance might be hard for some, but Norway has achieved 99% BEV monthly sales, so it can be done. It’s just a matter of where you are on the global adoption curve.
No one disputes that most days most people drive less than their winter range, but I don’t see what that has to do with anything. Most people survive cancer most of the time; I still wouldn’t characterize modern cancer treatment as “fine”. We aren’t settling for the 50th percentile.
For consumer products, handling the 50th percentile is excellent. There's nothing wrong with a car that is "only" suitable for half the population.
Needing to buy a different kind of car and dying from cancer are ever so slightly different experiences. But thank you for the kind of absurd HN take that inspired my username.
But most of the EVangalists who post seem to have a very unrealistic viewpoint that says 33% of the (US) population is an edge case and that no one needs more than 200 miles of range because there are chargers every ten miles and no one goes on long trips anyway, especially unplanned (since they only have 80% of their range even when plugging in every night).
> Needing to buy a different kind of car and dying from cancer are ever so slightly different experiences. But thank you for the kind of absurd HN take that inspired my username.
It’s not absurdity, it’s analogy. If you can’t distinguish between the two then HN may indeed not be for you.
It's an absurd analogy. It doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. You wouldn't call a cancer treatment that fails to cure a minority of people "fine", so EVs aren't "fine"?
And yet, some of the biggest proponents of EVs live in frigid areas of Canada and the US. As it turns out, range loss is not really a huge deal for a lot of people, but being able to get in your car and drive without worrying about whether it will start at all is nice. No plugging in a block heater, no worry about fuel gelling, no warm up time. And you can pre-condition the interior so it is warm when you get in. With a modern EV you could lose 50% range and still have plenty for your daily commute. Even a fairly long commute.
Norway regularly sees -30C in winter and EVs account for like 99% of sales there, it made the news that in January only 7 ICE cars were sold in the entire country.
It's also a different country with a different culture, etc. Norwegians drive roughly 50% less than people in the US. There's probably a bunch of contributing factors, but the point is that reduced range is less of a problem if you drive less.
I'll be the first to say we need less range anxiety, and Norway is awesome. But we need to be careful comparing the US to Norway here.
Yes, they buy some, with roughly the same percentage of new car sales being EV. However, those regions have a significantly higher percentage of households with multiple cars, and they have overall a significantly higher fraction of ICE cars in service than do the warmer areas.
This means you can't really make deductions about EV performance in very cold weather in those very cold regions without getting data on what the EVs are being used for. It could be most of them are in households where they have ICE cars to handle things where they need long range or when they need to tow or haul things, and the EVs are just used for things where loss of range and capacity doesn't matter much.
Probably has a lot to do with the incentives—tax rebates for EVs, taxes for ICE cars, cost of fuel, availability of fast chargers, etc. I’m glad Norway is pushing hard for greater adoption (and the US should too), but these things don’t make for a meaningful comparison.
Well no, and I agree with you - but I think it's a fair rebutal to someone saying that EV's can't work somewhere where it's really cold, like the only reason people in the northern united states or canada don't buy EVs is purely because of the cold - that's a factor, sure, but I think there's a lot of other reasons other than cold.
I’m the person to whom this rebuttal was originally made, and I did not say that EVs can’t work in the cold (I own one and I live in a northern state—they work, but not flawlessly).
I was only disagreeing with another commenter who claimed the status quo was fine. There’s a pretty big gap between “not fine” and “not workable”.
From what I've seen with projects like this, the successful ones do a good job of 'sticking to the mission' of faithfully recreating the original game in a modern engine (openMW, daggerfall unity, all my points of reference are TES related)
The neat part is that they are open source, so anyone who wants to take it in a different direction can fork it. The multiplayer version openMW being a great example of this.
I've had the desire to contribute so many times, but each time I was blocked. I don't think Wikipedia accurately measures how much contribution they lose because of the hostile treatment of new editors and what I believe are poorly implemented editing policies. Their policies likely haven't been revised since a decade or more, they should do a survey about it.
I'm not trying to defend Wikipedia at all costs, but you should also think about how much spam and trolling would happen on their platform if they didn't have these annoying blocks for non-registered users.
I run a pretty simple SaaS with a free tier and the amount of spam that I have to manage is high; I don't want to even imagine how difficult it must be to run a website where anybody can edit pretty much anything.
In that specific case, logged in users are still allowed, however you cannot create new accounts when visiting from that range, so you have to already have an account, or go somewhere else to create one.
When anyone can create a large number of sleeper accounts, it isn't really. Its not like you provided ID when you made your account. So the compromise is that if you accured enough reputation you can ask for an exception.
That was my first thought, but then again, players with a large fan base are more likely to get a wildcard into an event they don't directly qualify for.
Or players with that potential are likely to get resources investment earlier in the pipeline making them more able to perform well on non-subjective criteria
It's one of those things where it's technically correct but the headline is misleading. When you say "a triangle" without any qualification as the headline does, people are going to interpret that as a good old fashioned triangle. Using the term without clarification that you mean spherical geometry is kind of underhanded writing, imo.
I think it's just a normal ages-old pattern for writing headlines that pique people's curiosity. It's super common in popular math in particular, because math is always about generalizing. There's a fine line between that and actual clickbait meant to actively mislead.
I also noticed dozens of tiny half centimeter diameter holes in the ground under that magnolia tree which I guessed were little bee burrows. This sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to identify what type of bee these were. Long story short, there are way too many types of bees (30,000+ according to my research) for a non specialist like me to be able to pinpoint a species. But whatever type of bee (miner/sweat) they are going to go absolutely nuts when that magnolia tree blooms in the next couple weeks.
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