This is what I don't get. I've spent my whole live using technology to automate work in some form or the other. I've reached for any/every tool that made that processes easier, that made it easier to build and maintain software. Now comes along a tool that can automate a ton of the things I couldn't automate, or it has the "time" to automate the things I never could get around to, it can write code consistently better than I can and faster, it writes the tests I hated writing, it "remembers" to do more checks - more consistently, it runs 10 commands to diagnose an issue while I'll still poking around on the box. It lets me finally tackle tech debt that was _never going to get done_ (I cannot stress this enough).
Perhaps part of the issue is that we’re using coding agents to automate away the thinking part of the job, resulting in more brittle systems where each individual as a smaller understanding of the whole?
Ok, nobody wants to do the boring, repetitive bits. We can automate these, but we always could. And we’re doing instead is destroying the value of any skilled knowledge work, for companies that real all the benefits, and what feels like meaningless work.
Right on. And similarly, you don't need to learn farming to be able to cook good food, just like you didn't need to know assembly language or machine code to be able to write programs before AI.
in this metaphor you still have the problem that a lot of self-proclaimed cooks don't know their spices, think everything must be deep-fried and constantly use too much/too little salt to produce a dish that is edible but not good (nor healthy, for that matter)
I understand the sentiment, but I feel like not using AI for game dev isn’t going to be economically viable much longer, and I wonder why companies don’t just embrace it while it still gives them an edge.
Many artworks (across mediums) have parts where the artist isn't directing their creative decision-making so much as reaching for the nearest stock asset / procgen tool, or googling "leather texture photoshop trick" instead of carefully studying the usage-appropriate types of leather and looking up authentic period nubuck references and hand-painting it to get it just right, etc. Some "art" assets really are utilitarian and fungible subunits in the context of the full artwork they're used in, just like the code one would LLM. And many games are sprawling works, with that much more room for such.
Going whole-hog on artistic intentionality for every little detail is just bikeshedding.
Strong evidence for this: the cottage industry of reusable gadgets in every creative field. Presets and sample packs in music[0], brushes and textures for illustration, models and rigs and so on for 3D. You could go on forever listing it.
Sometimes the sense of satisfaction in creating a piece of art is that it exists at all as an identifiable representation of the original intention. I don't buy these purity tests that disqualify art based on arbitrary measures of craft. That went down the urinal with Duchamp's Fountain.
That is orthogonal to the issue of game developers exploiting technology to disenfranchise labor and produce a shoddy product. There certainly should be economic breathing room in the richest societies on the planet in the wealthiest era of human history for artists to spend time crafting work how they like.
The difference is that game code isn't something that the player sees or needs to care about. It's possible to write two functions that look different but have identical properties for anything that ends up being perceived by the player. For assets, the visual difference is directly exposed to the player. A sixth finger on a hand is an issue in the way that as line of dead code isn't.
Adding to the fact that people who write code are in general much better compensated in most industries than people who produce art, having software replace artists feels like "punching down" in a way that having software replace people who write software doesn't. As a software engineer, Ilif I use AI to write a bunch of code for myself, I'm much better able to understand the tradeoffs to my future employment in a much more visceral way than I ever could for what using AI-generated art might mean for an artist. Even with all of the recent proclamations that code is "solved" and fearful predictions that programming jobs are going to stop being so cushy, the job market for the average software engineer is probably at least an order of magnitude better than it is for the average artist in terms of compensation and job security, and AI or not, I don't see that changing any time soon.
> The difference is that game code isn't something that the player sees or needs to care about
I don't think that's true, I could mention a few examples, the cliché of the Unreal Engine hair style or lights and on the other side of the spectrum, the custom made engine which made TinyGlade what it is.
Game development iterates with what's brought from the coding side.
My point is that the code only affects the experience indirectly because they interact with the output of it rather than looking at it directly. The assets aren't as much of a process as the output themselves.
I'm still not seeing how these are comparable. As a developer, I can come up with the exact details of the behavior I think players should experience and manually write code for it, or someone with no development skills can come up with the exact details they want players to experience independent of the code and have an LLM do it.
For art assets, I would not be able to express the exact details of what it should look like up front to the LLM; I'd either need to implement it manually, or I'd need to let the LLM decide the details of the actual user-facing experience rather than just the implementation of the experience I've defined myself (and manually tested to ensure it's identical). That seems like a fundamental difference in terms of code and art assets; the actual user-facing experience of the output of code is further downstream of the way it's produced than the user-facing experience of the output of art assets.
I still don't see any difference with both, there's no product shortcut, in both cases the LLM makes choices on your behalf. On the coding side, it will pick what is the most likely on the parts you haven't specified (remember that any sufficiently detailed spec is just code) and on the modeling side, it will also pick what is the most likely from the parts you haven't specified.
I'm going to pick a real example to illustrate it. Let's say you want to code a 3d sea with waves and everything, there's 1000 ways to do it with every different style you can imagine. If you just say to the LLM "make me a 3d sea", the LLM will make a lot of choices on your behalf and it will influence the art of the game. Even if you have an art director writing a full page on how it should look like, there's STILL missing details that you'd have to figure out on the coding side (and thus, will be decided by the LLM instead of you if you used one)
Maybe if you did it yourself, you would have picked a different solution, different maths, different shaders and the result would be nothing like the LLM has made.
That's not true though. Bad code will manifest in a lot of ways. Affecting players and how they perceive the game.
See Cyberpunk 2077, the art is pretty good, but the game is extremely buggy. I stopped playing because of that
Sure, I don't disagree with bugs being problematic. As your example indicates though, games that came out well before LLM coding was a thing still could have buggy code. My point is that the actual behavior of the game's code is what players care about, not the code itself. The code is a process rather than the output, and players care about the output rather than the process used to produce it. Art assets are the output the player looks at directly, so it's not crazy that they might care more about it.
> the visual difference is directly exposed to the player. A sixth finger on a hand is an issue in the way that as line of dead code isn't.
But a line of buggy code will be substantially more impactful than a poorly drawn model. An extra finger on a model doesn’t cause your save to be corrupted or a quest to hard lock.
Buggy code, yes, but that's not what I said. Players never look at the code directly, only the end product, whereas they do look directly at the assets. My point is that the scrutiny likely is (and should be, IMO) on the direct player experience, and that ends up meaning that the code itself being sloppy is only indirectly relevant, compared to the assets that they see directly. The comparable output of the code is the behavior, which is possible to scrutinize more directly in most cases.
But the comparison to code isn’t dead code (that would be akin to what? Idk, maybe excess triangles in a mesh that didn’t need them).
But I disagree with your premise, players ABSOLUTELY look at the output of both the code and the visual art. The code is the thing putting it on screen. It doesn’t matter how many fingers a model has, if your engine incorrectly renders it.
The scrutiny here, and the pushback against it, is actually not even about the result, it’s about the process. Even if the AI art was perfect and could not be distinguished from human art, a large fraction of people would oppose it simply because it was generated by an AI.
A standard mind you that very few hold the code to.
> But I disagree with your premise, players ABSOLUTELY look at the output of both the code and the visual art. The code is the thing putting it on screen. It doesn’t matter how many fingers a model has, if your engine incorrectly renders it.
That sounds identical to what I was saying; the output is what matters to players, not the process.
> The scrutiny here, and the pushback against it, is actually not even about the result, it’s about the process. Even if the AI art was perfect and could not be distinguished from human art, a large fraction of people would oppose it simply because it was generated by an AI.
Yes, and that's what the entire second paragraph (which is much larger) in my first comment in this thread was talking about.
There are lots of artists using generative ai in the same way there are artists using photoshop. It’s about control and intent, and it only gets weird with gen ai because you can give away both and still get results. Many people do take the role of a non creative manager, but that doesn’t meant you have to.
I wouldn't buy a game that used generative ai and would refund one that I later discovered had. A quick straw poll of the gaming channels I'm in shows a lot of agreement amongst my friends.
You're not going to know if they used an LLM to write a better shader or if they copied code from stack overflow like we used to do a few years ago.
I'm so excited that LLMs are great at coding. Most of my problems I have with various games I love is that they're written by people who couldn't write performant code at all but are great at building a world and telling a story.
Just look at Escape from Tarkov. Great game but some of the worst software architecture choices of all time. It used to take 4 minutes to get out of match and often 10-15 minutes to get into one and it was all just because of shitty code / design.
It's been fixed now and I'm sure modern LLMs were the reason.
Oh absolutely, I don't have a magic way of detecting these things, but I do what I can. I would greatly prefer the best efforts of a person, regardless of how it turns out, to anything from generative ai. Everyone else can do as they wish, I'm not out to change anyone's mind :)
I'd bet 500 thousand dollars that this sentiment goes away as fast as they were rerunning cold and flu medicine commercials after everyone was sick of giving a shit about COVID.
Too many people fall into the trap of black and white thinking, as if the only way to use gen AI is to type into ChatGPT "make a fun game that makes loads of money plz."
I'm sure there are, but for me this isn't some reactionary mistake. I understand the technology and I thought about it carefully and made a call based on how I understand the ethics of the situation.
I was recently working on audio code, and I needed a function that produced a fast approximation of a sine wave. I asked chatgpt about common techniques, did some experiments to figure out the right performance/accuracy tradeoff, and finally asked chatgpt to help me optimize the function to use SIMD instructions.
If this code made it into a game, at what point did I do something wrong?
I mean, I'd never try to tell you what to do, but as you asked, what you're talking about is the base of the pyramid, that holds up and normalizes the system that's putting artists out of work and enshittifying everything. These companies stole literally everything and used it to build a tool whose economic end goal is to put everyone out of a job. I'm not down with that, but you do you.
I agree that blanket GenAI bans won't be viable much longer, as competition will move much faster.
But also, game development economics are very different from SaaS products. You can't spend a ton of money in tokens per month and expect that the gains from selling those features will support the cost of building them. Game dev margins are already slim-to-negative for most independent studios.
Yeah, I saw an article recently that Blood of the Dawnwalker cost "just" $40 million to create. I thought the phrasing was intended to be ironic, but no apparently that's not even AAA by today's standards. I don't know the exact costs, but my instinct is that quite a lot of it probably went into things that would not have been possible to just automate with AI and end up with the same level of quality.
Expedition 33 was made in ~4 years and was known to have used AI assets as placeholders during development (even left some in for the final build). It also used Unreal Engine's Metahuman for facial animation which uses ML. It was 2025 Game of the year.
Everyone can now make games that no one can play because no one can afford to buy gaming machines anymore because everyone can now make games. Great future we've been handed.
Contemporary AI is not very good at the parts of game dev that are genuinely difficult.
It is fantastic at the code. Monobehaviors are completely solved. I ~never have to look at c# code or shaders again if I choose not to. However, this was like 5% of the problem.
Composing a three-dimensional scene graph in a way that is compelling to a human observer is not something an LLM will ever be very competent at. I worry about those who are in the midst of conflating the capabilities of diffusion models with those of "world" models. The former make it seem as if we are "so close". The latter are more or less non-existent.
>[X] is not something an LLM will ever be very competent at
I'm no longer convinced that this is a particularly safe bet for any value of X. LLMs have absolutely been demonstrated as capable of doing things that they're theoretically the wrong type of model for, like generating images by writing SVGs or simulating brush strokes.
Unfortunately most people vibe coding games are programmers who don't know (nor do they care) about art and design, and so assume that everything but the code is trivial, just colors and patterns for the monkeys to look at as they press their buttons.
And then they wonder why the their ugly-ass game with no consistent art style and no coherent design doesn't take off since it was coded with a superior artificial intelligence, in less time, and must therefore be objectively better.
They don't understand that there's some knowledge that exists within the heads of human beings and their experience that you can't reverse engineer from the human-generated artifacts in the training data. You can't derive Leonardo Da Vinci from a PNG of the Mona Lisa. Am I claiming that all designers are Leonardo Da Vinci? No, so hands off the keyboard. I am saying there are aspects of art that are bound to the human experience in a way that are beyond current LLMs, that can't be replicated through the simulation of mechanics alone.
Say that and they'll just think you believe in ghosts, though.
I think one of the reasons that Jagex is getting so much pushback on AI is because it goes in the face of all that runescape is about. People spend hundreds and thousands of hours clicking on the same things again and again just to level up a digital skill, when bots have existed since just about the beginning of runescape. I think it reminds all those people that they are wasting their lives away and everything around them is constantly reminding them of it.
For as long as there is a customer base that's influential, loud, and (based on the comment I see on HN) much larger than you expected, there will be an economically viable path for slop-less video games.
The moment hints of AI generated content can be found, large amounts of people dismiss products in an instant. That group will only grow as the AI industry keeps making the hardware you need for video games more expensive and bringing it further out of reach of normal people. Mybae in 2030, when hardware is hopefully affordable again, you can ignore these people, but I wouldn't bet my life on it.
I refuse to play any game that uses generative AI for art. Part of playing a game is enjoying effort that the artists and programmers put into it.
Silicon Valley seems to have zero idea what art is and is about. It's probably because they all have absolutely zero artistic talent and are completely deluded into thinking their AI slop is just as good and meaningful as a way to cope.
Everyone is well aware of how crappy the launch was.
From the article:
"Speaking of No Man’s Sky’s updates, there have been 286 of them since launch. Hello Games has released 54 major updates as well as 232 smaller patch/updates across these ten years. That is a total of 286 updates—and every one has been free. Hello Games has never introduced paid DLC, microtransactions, loot boxes, or any such thing. Over the life of the game, they have been updating it at basically a fever pitch—and always for free, and free, the updates shall remain. This is pretty unheard of in the game industry."
These guys have done everything humanly possible to make things right. I think they had things pretty much fixed up within a couple years or so. They are doing a better job than virtually everyone in the gaming industry and have been doing it for most of their existence at this point. Maybe you could stop holding a grudge 10 years later.
this is an understatement (on both fronts) in my opinion.
the launch was beyond super crappy, and "turned it around" is underselling it.
"the engoodening of no mans sky" was a youtube video that came out ~5 years ago and covers the story of the launch up until the point the video was made. since then they've had several more really amazing (and compeltely free) updates.
"Sean we forgive you" became a meme for a reason. The fact that to this day they keep working on the game is truly noteworthy; they could have called it quits at any point in time, especially after NMS got good enough.
Obviously it's not purely ego driven (if at all), so I wonder how the financial aspect plays into that narrative.
I suppose the fact that it sold so much throughout the years gave them enough runway to actually work on it with no worries? And I suppose that people would be skeptical of a new game launch by this studio, thus dooming them to work on NMS for eternity... we'll see how Light No Fire's launch will do.
That and I'm pretty sure they are using NMS as a backport target to test systems for Light No Fire (which is an instant buy for me, Hello Games have completely redeemed themselves in my eyes).
> so I wonder how the financial aspect plays into that narrative.
I've been wondering about this for a few years now. Do they really sell enough new copies of the game to fund development of several new expeditions a year? I suppose they must, but it's still surprising - more so as the years went on.
Honestly though, at a certain point, they could've started charging for the expeditions as DLC and I wouldn't have even complained.
I wonder if the ports play a role in getting additional updates over the years. Every year or so, NMS gets a port to a different platform, with a sales bump, and maybe part of that process includes adding just a little bit more to the base game.
at this point, i think they continue because of the goodwill it builds. as the other comment says, light no fire will be an instant buy for me because of the support they've given no mans sky over the last decade
> the launch was beyond super crappy, and "turned it around" is underselling it.
Everyone says this and I really disagree. It's been a year or so since I last play but I have been playing off and on about every year.
Whenever I start a new game, it feels basically the same. Once I get into the universe, there are way more things to do but nome of them feel like they matter.
The game is a classic example of a mile wide and an inch deep. Every update just seems to bring a new system that feels, in itself, feels about as satisfying as the game did on launch.
Despite the valiant and admirable effort to continue updating the game (and for free), I still don't think it's come close to the game that was promised. It's still the launch game in my eyes; nothing seems to matter. I can just also build a base (or any of the other new features) that doesn't matter too.
It's a fun game for maybe 30 hours a year (300 hours!) and that's an accomplishment but I don't think it's come close to fulfilling it's original promise.
I can't articulate why, and I'm not even a big fan of Minecraft, but it honestly feels way deeper than NMS.
I think it's the fact that NMS has a lot of systems, but they are just separate, and they have a lot of limitations. Ships are separate from bases which are separate from freighters. They sometimes interact if it's explicitly coded, but nothing is allowed to be emergent.
In Minecraft I can put 100 nether portals in my basement if I feel like it, and I can set up a sheep farm in hell. I can pour water into my base and have a mini pool with fish. I can make copper golems that move items, and that opens a whole can of worms.
In NMS, it feels like I have no freedom to experiment at all. For that reason, it's been pretty hard to get into. Everything feels so baked in place. The only thing that really scratched that itch of mine was making big farming factories. But I was not interested after that.
This is totally valid and many people feel similarly. I wouldn't entirely agree that it's only an inch deep (this isn't Elite Dangerous for goodness sake) - but it's certainly sometimes harder than it should be to find the deeper parts of the game.
The Expeditions can really help with this, as they provide a more traditional linear, quest-driven way of going through the game.
This. I really feel that the good will they burned up with the launch - and I'm not denying it was very poorly handled - they've made up for 10x over since then. Every expedition is like a whole new DLC, but they've released every single one of them for free.
“…they never added pay-to-win, they never added microtransasctions or paid DLC, they never made VR as a second game. They didn’t give up on the game or scale their resources back to do it. They didn’t come out and call gamers entitled, they didn’t have loot boxes, they didn’t start work on the next big project or sequel. They didn’t do much of anything except get back to work.”
Just a side note if someone decides to watch that The Engoodening "docu-meme": the channel author reads a very "rich" fanfic involving Sean at the end of the video - you've been warned lol
As for NMS itself, it all comes if you dig survival and building type of games, and you'd to step into Star Trek-style away missions.
I think it's fair to say they started off bad, but redeemed themselves.
In contrast Star Citizen is far more ambitious but shows 0 sign of ever actually landing.
NMS is still a great fun space game to play, the lore / back story of each faction is quite bleak though and the lack of good individual characters does leave it feeling more like exploration sandbox than a really compelling world you care about.
I don't always seem to be able to stick to my values, but this time it was easy to just write them off and never look back.
I think maybe because there's just so many games being released every single day that this is a sufficiently competitive market. It's not like I'm deciding to never take the city bus again.
I'm curious who refused you the refund? I seem to recall it being refunded pretty steadily by everyone who sold it digitally. Maybe I am misremembering.
Still entirely fair to have been turned off by the experience. Plenty of developers or publishers I don't purchase from anymore due to similar shenanigans.
At least it didn't drive you to smoke crack like it did to of my friends. Though ironically he still plays to this day though a lot less than he used to.
i used to know someone who used to play this game; he eventually killed himself. i am sure most people that play this game won't experience it that way.
My friend does have some mental issues. Some of these tedious games really suck them in and it becomes personal when things go wrong and it can trigger an episode. For my friend he almost smashed his PC but instead left the house, went to a bar where he got drunk then met a dude who had some rock and made poor choices. Edit: I should add he looks back at that moment humorously but yeah, NMS drove him to smoke crack.
Decisions here are made slowly, with complete information, and agreement from all parties. Once they’re made they’re then slow to change for all the same reasons.
Until this changes I don’t think Europe has any hope of competing with the US or China on anything they decide is important.
> In 2022 is was £1.89 a litre and spent most of the year over £1.60 a litre
Why are you choosing the 2022 energy crises as your baseline? Not only your choice was arbitary but you managed to choose the year fuel was at its highest as a reaction to the war in Ukraine.
That price was not representative or typical, it was a spike. You can see it here.
Yes well people like to complain, and people have a short memory. If it were really a massive problem you would see a lot more smaller cars, rather than Range Rovers and BMWs.
We will see exactly the same thing again in a few years when people are 'shocked' that prices are rising again. And then expect the government to step in, even though on the interim they've bought a massive car on PCP rather than take some personal responsibility and buy a car that they can afford when inevitably something goes wrong.
That is an interesting perspective. We do not forget how good we have it, because we choose not to put high taxes on gasoline and diesel. Do drivers in the UK tend to forget that taxes are more than half the retail price they pay at the pump? Sometimes way over half. That is a policy decision.
In the US, roads are paid for by other taxes instead. Property taxes for local roads, and general fund monies (income, sales, and inflation) for highways. Unfortunately that hides the real cost of using the roads, and makes it harder for people to make good choices. This seems unlikely to change though.
I think it is a complicated issue. People who do not drive still benefit from having a road going to their house. Either for deliveries, or for emergency vehicles, or whatever personal transportation they do end up using. So we want to spread the cost around a bit so everyone is paying something, in a perfect world as close as possible to how much they benefit from it.
I imagine it also varies somewhat across the US. Locally, our city does not use property taxes for road maintenance, we have a pavement fee which is billed through the utilities system (same one that handles water & sewer, for example). Plus gas tax from the state. It could be argued that the distinction between the pavement fee and property taxes is subtle, though.
I hope we can get the kinks worked out. Even in many 'blue' states, we have created a situation where the road maintenance tax paid by EV owners is twice or more what the typical ICEV driver is paying. I sort of expected that in 'red' states, since punishing EV owners is a political priority, but we see that same crap in Oregon & Washington, for example.
At some stage I wonder if the UK will need to regulate the charger industry. The price gouging is wild in places. If we look at the energy content of petrol, a litre of gas contains about 9kwh of energy, or at average pump prices 1.58/9 = ~18 pence a kwh.
For sure, EVs are far more efficient at converting a kwh of energy into forward motion, but if we assume 35 mpg (9.25 miles/litre) for the gas car, we need about 970wh to travel 1 mile. A modern EV can manage a mile on ~260wh, almost a quarter of the gas requirement.
There are public charging networks in the UK averaging 92p/kwh - we know we need much less energy to move the more efficient EV, but even with this adjustment fuel cost per mile looks like:
petrol at UK average today: 17p/mi
Electric at very expensive public charger: ~24p/mi !!
At many chargers, there are no savings at all. For comparisons sake, that 92p kwh would be just 28.6p on the most expensive domestic electricity supply, and charging at home would be ~8p per mile on the worst possible tariffs.
I've probably done some bad math somewhere here, but I think the broad picture is correct.
The market should sort this out by itself, not saying regulators shouldn’t watch closely, but competition should be enough to do its thing. Cartel formation especially should be watched for vigilantly.
Of course, thats why I've been clear all my assumptions are for 260wh/mi, which I think is a very fair middle ground figure to compare to a 35mpg car - one can pick far more fuel efficient gas cars for this comparison too, the possibilities are endless.
I think your numbers still illustrate the same point though; if you can't charge at home, an EV is not necessarily cheaper to fuel, and the gap between the public charger price and the cost to a private consumer with home charging is still far too big. 98p vs 15p is staggering.
Even in Wales, 25% can't. This isn't a figure you can ignore.
And that's a hypothetical, it relies on landlords playing ball etc. then there's the social issues. On the north of England we have lots of terraces built for mill workers, these aren't owned by the richest on society. So then you're in the situation of charging the poorest more for transport. And these are necessarily on towns with good transport links (think 1 bus and hour).
Many of those "can't" won't have cars. 20% of households in Wales have no car.
Now clearly that 25% and 20% won't overlap exactly, but they will overlap a lot
When 80% of cars in the UK are electric and 20% are those households who rely on public streets to store their belongings for 23 hours a day, then sure that will be a problem
Given that there's only about 2 million electric cars in the UK, yet 18 million homes which can charge electric cars, that's a long way off.
But compared to the US home charging via a mains outlet is much more viable because it's 240v vs 110v. If you plug you car overnight you'll typically have enough charge to last you the next day.
Almost everyone I know with an EV charging at home just reused the 240v dryer socket to avoid paying for a dedicated fast charger. It's often cheaper too to have an electrician fit a new 240v socket instead of the dedicated charger as well.
Home chargers with dedicated sockets is three phase 400v actually over here in the EU and every single home, and even relatively new apartments have that because of induction stoves.
Three phase power is definitely not 100% in the EU. Not even in Germany, though adoption does tend to be higher than neighboring countries.
And FWIW, I find that my induction cooktop works wonderfully on plain old 240V 40A, so I do not think it is a requirement to get three-phase for that ;-).
The US is 240V. We split it into two 120V legs for some sockets, and not for others. Some people do choose to get by on 120V, true, but they are the minority. Usually people who do not drive often.
Most? You mean all. 240V [0] as been the standard in the US basically since electrification started in the late 19th century. 120V has for all practical purposes never been a thing, it has always been an artifact of split-phase 240V. A deliberate choice to offer two voltages to every consumer.
[0] Okay, technically 240V did not become official until around 1967, but the split-phase design was there from the beginning. They capped it at 240V to stop the creeping up that had been going on in the earlier part of the century. This is why you still have a lot of people (not all of them old enough to have been alive in 1967, oddly enough) that refer to 240V as 220.
Sure, but that is the exception proving the rule. Not quite urban legend, you can find people on mikeholt.com who have actually seen one in the wild. Usually because of some shenanigans the local power company pulled to directly connect more houses by giving each one a phase of a three-phase feed.
EVs aren’t exactly new; there’s a deep, accessble secondhand market by now. I’ve been using a 2019 Nissan Leaf as a primary family car for two years now, that I picked up off Gumtree for around £3k. It’s been one of the best (little) cars I’ve ever owned.
Not saying new EVs aren’t pricey, but if you want into electric on a budget (i.e. because you don’t feel like you can afford to fill up on diesel) it can absolutely be done.
If you're savvy you can get a really good discount on a second-hand EV as well because people overestimate the wear on the batteries and assume a second-hand EV will have terrible range.
The id.Polo starts at 22k GBP. The ordinary, petrol-driven Polo also starts at 22k. You can see how massive increases in the price of petrol and diesel might influence purchasing behaviour there...
Minor point: The id.Polo isn't released in the UK yet and prices are not confirmed. VW are not shy about price rises either I believe, so I wouldn't imagine the £21.7k figure in the media lasting more than a year if that price-point does happen.
Also, my god, £22k for a petrol base Polo! That's about £4k above inflation-adjusted prices from ~15 years ago
Diesel was traditionally the fuel of people who did high miles. Ie not the people that can't have an EV 'just in case they need to do 300 miles on a day's, because they probably legitimately are.
You kind of spoil that point by pull £80k out of your arse without looking at comparable diesels though.
The id.Polo is apparently starting at 22k GBP in the UK; the VW Polo's always been a pretty popular car (and also starts at about 22k). I'd expect those to sell very well.
And if they rent or otherwise don't own a home with a driveway? In the UK with its strict electrical codes, your charger must be installed by a loiscensed electrician. So add £1k right there.
Your money saving effort suddenly becomes a major inconvenience to fuel your car.
It is amazing how often the argument parallels one such as, "But I deserve to be able to make a living as a chandler or a wheelwright even in 2026!" I would truly love if we could all make a living doing what we want to do (I'd be doing a lot of different things if that were the case), but that just isn't the reality of markets/technological progress.
Not in every instance, but in aggregate technological progress has clearly been beneficial.
Just look at living conditions, infant mortality, life expectancy or education.
You could be anywhere on the planet relative to me and I can talk to you for free, instantaneously at any time. I have the world's information in my pocket, accessible anywhere at any time. I could go on!
It seems most takes on this are that ends either always or never justify the means, but rarely is their discussion on the option that they can and developing a system of when they do and don't. At least in the general public discourse I've seen involving means and ends.
