I miss that podcast so much. I hope it comes back when they’re ready

I swear I've been reading this rumor for 3+ years at this point

This is something I’ve had a really hard time drilling into peoples’ heads. Based on current data, the average EV battery built today wont fail in 10-15 years; they’ll just degrade 10-15%. And yeah, in that time period, at current gas/electricity rates, I’ll have saved $30K in gas alone (I saved 2K last year * 15 years = $30K) and it stands to reason that gas prices will continue to climb. Electricity as well but once it hits 20 cents per kWh for me, I’m getting solar.

Yeah it was the v6, I primarily drive at either 80mph or stop and go traffic, and I live in a super hilly area

God, I wish. We unfortunately do about 1200 miles per month and our electricity is cheap (15cents per kWh) so we pay about $70/mo to charge our car. Much cheaper than the roughly $200 I would've been paying in gas had I kept my Accord though, and if we were better about charging at my wife's work where it's free, we'd save a ton more. But she's only in the office once a week and it's hard to line up our driving habits such that it's low enough to charge then

It's actually not as bad as I was expecting. The electricity prices seem to be about right (17 cents per kwh at home, 43 cents at fast chargers), and the idea of having to drive farther to get to a charger is likely a reality for apartment dwellers.

The two shitty parts are that they included the cost of the charger in this which is obviously a one time expense, and they calculated that "mostly at home" users would still supercharge 20% of the time, which seems like a TON. I put 21K miles on my car in the past year, and I supercharged 470/6897 total kWh, so 7%. If you rectify both those things in their math (let's say maybe 10% is average?) then the "at home" EVs clearly win.

But it is absolutely viable to point out that if you can't charge at home (or at work, although I personally wouldn't want to tie myself to an employer to be able to charge my car. I already hate that we do it for health insurance), then it is going to be much more expensive than for people who do, and possibly more expensive than similar gas cars. For example, I had a VW ID.4 for a year and it got AWFUL efficiency for my driving patterns (about 2 mi per kWh) and I exclusively fast charged at the local electrify america station because it was free.

If I had had to pay retail price for the EA charging for the 10,000 miles that I drove, 48 cents per kWh * 5000 kWh, that would've cost me $2400 to charge, which is absolutely more than it would've cost to just drive our CRV instead (25mpg, $3.87 for gas over 10K miles = $1548).

Depends on your housing situation I assume. Mile for mile in a similarly specced car (V6 honda accord vs Model 3 Long Range) my electricity costs are about 1/4 what I paid in gas. But that's because I can charge at home. If I had to exclusively supercharge, they'd be about the same.

Thankfully I don't have to, so I get to wake up every morning to a full car

I can't wait to get solar. Personally I don't have the cash on hand to pay the $40K quote I got for a 16kW system, and I'm not comfortable taking out that big of a loan with the economy being such a huge question mark, but in a year or two I'm really looking forward to it

Jesus, what's your utilization or price per kWh? I use a shitload of electricity (around 2000kWh per month and my utility provider says average is more like 800) and my bill has never exceeded $300, even with an EV that I drive 1200 miles a month

There are definitely situations where it's more expensive, like if you exclusively use DCFCs. My electricity is 15 cents per kWh at home (so that's where i do all my charging), but the local ElectrifyAmerica station charges 48 cents per kWh, which would make my Model 3 cost 13 cents per mile, which is damn near what my Honda Accord costs me in gas (gas is $3.87 per gallon right now. at $3.25 it would be cheaper).

I feel for people who don't have the option to charge at home and I hope that problem gets solved quickly

I've got real world math that basically backs this up (you can find my other comment in this thread if you want all the juicy details): My honda accord got 22mpg and had a 17 gallon tank, and gas here is $3.87. $66 to fill up and drive 374 miles = 17.6 cents per mile. My Model 3 Long Range has 77kWh usable and gets about 3.7 miles per kwh, my electricity is 15 cents per kwh (until i get solar next year), so $11.55 to fill up and drive 285 miles (so 4 cents per mile).

Yes the accord got about 90 miles more range, but cost 3 times as much to fuel and that range only matters (to me) on road trips, and my range has yet to be an issue in my model 3.

In fact I'm going on a 6 hour drive next week and according to ABRP I'll only have to make one 10 minute stop halfway to charge in order to get to my hotel (where I can charge up for free)

Here's my answer for this (with data!): For the month of July, I charged 440.0 kWh. I averaged 94% efficiency while charging, so the chargers actually used 469 kWh. There were 35 charges, for a total of 66 hours spent charging. My total electric cost is 15 cents per kWh (my plan doesn't have peak/off-peak). I did no charging at superchargers in July.

In that timeframe, I drove 1314 miles. 355kWh were used while driving, giving me an average efficiency of 3.7 miles per kWh. You'll note that I used 85 fewer kWh driving, that's because thosed 85 kWh were used to precondition my car, keep the AC running while I'm in the store or on a bike ride, etc. Super wasteful, but it's so cheap that I can't help myself).

So to break it down: 15 cents per kwh * 469kWh = $70 to charge, $12.75 of which was just used for climate control while not driving.

My last car was a 2016 Honda Accord Touring V6 which, in my area and with my driving style, averaged about 22mpg (lots of steep hills, 85mph driving, and stop and go traffic. I live 15 miles from town by interstate and town has lots of traffic).

According to AAA, the average cost of gas in PA is $3.87 (I know that price changes, but the math gets harder if I look up the price of gas each time I would have had to fill the tank so I'm just taking the current avg). 1314 miles / 22mpg = 59.7 gallons of gas * $3.87 = $231.

For extra fun math, looking at purely fuel costs, the Accord would cost 17.5 cents per mile to drive (not including the fact that I'd need an oil change every 4 months, transmission fluid every year and a half, etc).

My current car at current electric rates costs 5.3 cents per mile to drive.

Additionally, i'm planning on getting solar in a year or two, which should bring my cost down to effectively zero. AND, we can charge for free at my wife's work when she's in the office (as well as at the park I bike at), but she wasn't in the office at all in July; we both worked from home full time last month.

TL;DR: my Model 3 Long Range costs about a third as much per mile to drive as my similarly sized Honda Accord did before I sold it

Yeah, I have never found “high demand” data to be particularly useful from companies that don’t sell direct to consumer.

Of course the higher trims are what’s in demand. Like you said, it’s in part because that’s all they’re making, but even for less constrained models, it’s because that’s all the dealership ordered, and most people don’t want to deal with the headache of ordering a specific configuration from the dealership.

I’m much more interested in these numbers from direct to consumer companies like Tesla, Rivian, and Polestar. Are people primarily buying the higher trims of their cars?

I want more “2.5 row” cars like the 7 seater model y. Back row is pretty much only usable for kids, but can be folded down for cargo space.

We have a toddler and would love to be able to fit him in his car seat plus both my parents in a car, but his car seat is massive so we can’t make that work even in our CRV. I’d love to get a 7 seater Y, but I don’t know that I really want to buy another tesla

More competition is great

I don’t know that I fully support mandatory retirement age or term limits, but something has to be done about out how poorly the demographics of government align with the demographics of the nation

I wonder if they’re planning on presenting this data to end users. I don’t mind if an app is using a certain permission, and if they have to get Apple’s approval that is great, but I’d love to know why specifically it needs that permission

Wow, this is super interesting. I hadn’t heard anything about this superconductor or the drama around the papers, so thanks for sharing

AI. It’s soooo much easier to ask an LLM your question. Even if its answer is wrong, at least it’s not an asshole

I really can’t imagine jt be that bad. It should just be an occasional ping, unless you want to track on demand. At least that’s how the Apple Find My ecosystem works. If I don’t check a device’s location, it doesn’t ping for hours, but then if I want, I can watch a device in real time (impacting battery of course). I’d imagine google’s implementation will be similar

That’s early adopter pain for you. In Europe there is one standard, and in the US, we’re getting there. Yes it’ll be a pain for a while that people with CCS ports will need to use adapters at NACS chargers and vice versa, but we’re settling on the underlying CCS technology being the standard, so it’ll just be a matter of connector. Much better than the three standards we had very recently (add chademo)

Can't blame them. It's hard to imagine the other teams making such massive strides that they would put RB's championship at risk. Even if it means they lose a few races at the end of the season, they're still going to win both championships

Is bookwyrm just federated goodreads?

do they think somehow people like me will change our minds?

Yeah. I use Firefox too, and when a site doesn’t work, I open it in chromium

Yeah, heavy cars definitely do worse in general, especially if they’re on shitty tires. I’d love to get snow tires but we only get two or three days a year where the weather is bad enough to justify them, and they’re too damn expensive, so we just stay home when the roads are bad

I’ve owned two EVs, and that instant torque is much more of a pro than a con, even in the snow. Think about traction control: when the computer detects a loss of traction, it cuts power to the motor until it detects traction has been regained. In a gas powered car, you can really only change the flow of gas a couple times per second, because there’s some delay between applying throttle, waiting for ignition, etc. But in an EV, you can modulate the power upwards of a thousand times per second, and it gets applied to the wheels practically instantly. So when you slip in the snow, the traction control can react far faster.

My first EV was RWD and I would say that winter performance was comparable to my FWD sedans that I drove before, because the weight is distributed much more evenly, and that traction control is amazing.

My current EV is AWD and even on all season tires, it’s insane. Obviously no powertrain helps you stop if you don’t have snow tires, but for starting off in rough traction, it’s insane. Comparing my car to our Honda CRV, it’s wildly different. I can basically drive the car like there’s no snow on the ground (except I leave a massive gap in front in case I need to stop). The CRV slides all over the place

Sorry for rambling, I’m just a bit of an EV evangelist, and snow is somewhere that they really shine

I don’t have tinnitus, but I have somewhat chronic Eustachian tube dysfunction that causes mildly painful ear pressure, and wearing my AirPods (or any in ear headphones) helps a ton, so on bad ear days I’ll wear them in transparency mode with nothing playing

Yeah I like that idea, although I could see it needing to truncate in a lot of cases like super long instance names

Hard to be too upset about this. Everything’s getting more expensive, and I’m assuming music rights holders have been squeezing Spotify more and more. I’d love to go back to music piracy, but having an enormous library available at a moment’s notice is worth the extra dollar to me. I do have a pretty huge collection of video game music since the big N refuses to license their music

You mean when scrolling the main feed? Because it already shows the instance address when you click into a post

Sweet! I (like a typical American) just kinda assumed that most other countries functioned the same way as we do

Obligatory “I don’t know” but dont you typically have to own music used for DJing? Maybe it varies country to country but I’m almost certain that in the US, a subscription to a streaming service doesn’t entitle you to DJ with that music

Underwater means that I owe more on the car than it’s worth. I bought it at $52K with a 15K downpayment, and at this point I owe $33K on it. Carvana estimates it’s worth $30K, so if I totaled it tomorrow, my insurance company would give me $30K, but then I’d be on the hook for the other $3,000. So gap insurance takes care of that. In fact, my gap policy says that if I total a car two years old or newer, they’ll pay it off and get me a brand new one as a replacement, and if it’s older than two years, they’ll get me one a year newer.

So I’m paying $8/month for the peace of mind that I don’t have to worry about out owing money in the case of a crash.

Obviously when I bought the car, I wasn’t expecting Tesla to drop the price so much and crater the used market

Yeah, same. I never dreamed that a Tesla would be the cheaper option (summer 2022 at peak prices) compared to a Mach e, ev6, or ioniq5, but my dealerships all had 15k markups, and each car has features I wanted gated behind higher trims, so they were all like 60k+ after markups (don’t remember specifics since it was over a year ago)

Thankfully I got a ridiculous trade in check from my ID.4, so I was able to afford a huge downpayment on the model 3, although thanks to the price drops, I’m underwater again… good thing gap insurance is only $8 a month through my insurance

Yeah, dealers are the last group that I feel sorry for

Yeah, it goes against the grain a bit, but I like a bit of centralization. I don’t want the entire site to be centralized, but I like big communities. I’m a big formula 1 fan for example, and it’s just not helpful for me to be in ten different small f1 communities here. I’d much rather there be one big one that even remotely approaches the quality of the f1 subreddit.

My battery health has gotten awful recently too. I’ve got a series 5, so yes it’s 4 years old, but I genuinely only get about 12 hours of battery life these days. I went through and uninstalled every single app I don’t use, but it’s still awful.

Love everything else about it though, so I set a slickdeals alert to hopefully pick up a cheaper series 8 sometime between now and when the series 9 launches

Really looking forward to this. Played the demo during a Steam next fest over the winter and fell in love. Gato Roboto is one of my favorite games as well

Absolutely legendary quali session. That’s what I love to see

Honestly there’s juuuuust enough latency and occasional streaming artifacts that it just got on my nerve. I’m super sensitive to stuff that that. Also my internet generally is good enough, but my actual LAN isn’t great, because I’m too cheap to upgrade my networking equipment. I’ve got gigabit fiber to the house, but I’ve got a rats nest of cat6 through my walls, a bunch of unmanaged switches, and a mesh WiFi setup, some with a wired backhaul, some wireless (because I wasn’t able to get Ethernet to those rooms), so things like game streaming just don’t work that well for me.

Plus like I said, it just feels less wasteful to put my PC where I’ll actually use it. And it’s not like I’ve abandoned my steam deck; I’m just not using it to even try to play big AAA 3D games anymore because I don’t need to