SethInMI

This is inevitable. A lot of people just don't want Teslas. Maybe due to Elon's antics, or just they don't want to be yet another Tesla on the road. My wife is one of those people, as long as there is another brand that is matching Tesla on price and features, she will go with that. As more models enter the market, this loss of market share is only going to increase.

Agreed. Tesla Semis are making runs from Fremont to Nevada and back but that is only like 300 miles, and the Semi can do 500. The nice thing about that application is you run over the Sierras, and EV trucks can regen during the descents which is safer and of course far more energy efficient.

Here is an estimate for a straight through drive from Winnipeg to Eloy (stopping overnight would save about 40 min of charge time if you could slow charge at the hotel). You are charging about 15% of the time. It ain't pretty, but it can be done.

It's great to see all this chat about EVs. Some more details on charging since people were bringing it up. As Ryoder mentioned, Teslas have a very asymmetric charge rate. At low levels of charge, they can accept 250kW of power but this tapers off to around 50kW near 80% (iirc). As a result, I don't charge much past 50% as a rule. Here is my ideal all day charge drive pattern: Leave home with 100% battery. Drive 3.5 hrs until at 6% Charge 7 minutes, add 100 miles Drive 1.5 hours Eat Lunch. Charge 30 minutes, get up to ~70% Drive 2.5 hrs until back to 6% Repeat short charge, then long charge for dinner. 2.5 hrs to hotel. Hopefully one with L2 charger so next day can leave with full battery. Otherwise have to add charge in morning.

2023 was an interesting year in robotaxis. In some ways it felt like the technology was finally getting out of "will it ever work" stage and into the "the future is here" stage, but other ways it felt like it was a "maybe this will never work we are giving up" year Ford abandoned Argo. GM / Cruise bit of more that it could chew and is doing a reset (new leadership, layoffs, will they give up too?) Google / Waymo is plugging along. There was a lot of chatter this summer about cars in SF getting lost or confused and people getting pissed off and "coning" them as a form of protest, but despite that, Waymo reported it did more than 700,000 driver-less rides last year, in PHX and SF and LA, which feels like they are more in the "we figured it out" than the "we are still figuring it out" What will happen in 2024? Will Waymo face some sort of scandal of its own, an at fault accident or something else? And then there is Tesla, plugging away on its own "all our cars can be robotaxis" effort, version 12 with AI decision making will roll out sometime this year, but they are still many years away from no person behind the wheel, and the question remains "can they do it at all ever"

Telsa makes this very easy. The car will route you to chargers as needed and tell you when to stop charging and resume your trip. Chargers are spaced out so that there are multiple options. The range estimates that the car gives are quite accurate usually to within 1-2%, so I don't worry about getting to a charger with <10% battery left.

My 0.02 on the depreciation question: This stung me as my car has dropped in value a lot since I bought it 2.5 years ago, but I still view this as a good thing. Tesla was making enormous profits off of the high demand for its cars, and since that demand has cooled it had to lower its prices a lot but is still profitable. Couple that with the tax credit extensions / modifications and you can see where the enormous deprecation forces have come from. BUT this is temporary. Once new e-car prices stop dropping depreciation will come into line with ICE cars (or will be better). And dropping prices for new e-cars is good for everyone (except me of course).

I think the 1400 came from me posting that last week I did a 1400 mile round trip in my Tesla. 700 miles each way, ~1.5 hrs charging spread out over 13.5 hrs of travel. Brent acts like this is the end-of-the-world but really it isn't. edit: even though my wife was annoyed at all the charging we had to do on our trip "we have to stop AGAIN?" she was not pushing us to drive the gas car, and actually has decided to get rid of it and make her next car electric.

No. 5 stops, 1.5 hrs total time. You act like sitting in your car is completely wasted time, but I would disagree. Giving yourself a break every few hours is nice. We watch Netflix on the car screen. But I can't win the "we can get there faster so you suck" argument...although like I said, I likely spend less time fueling per year than you do, so if your time is very valuable, maybe an electric car should be on your list.

I got a laugh out of this line so thanks for that. I got a 480 HP AWD "sewing machine" that is very fun to drive. More fun than my 300 HP Subaru STi was. And I just got back from a 1400 mi round trip to visit my sis in NC. No waiting for charging. Was I in and out in 5 min? No, but 15-20 min really isn't that long. Stretch your legs, get some lunch or dinner. And I can couple that with the fact I don't have to wait that 5 min any other time of year, the standing outside my car freezing in the winter or sweating in summer while it fuels is long past for me.

from the article you linked, I am not sure it won't. Sweden is 90% union-labor, and the Tesla maint personnel have walked out in a labor dispute, so the rest of the country's workers are refusing to support Tesla. So sounds like Tesla will have to make a deal to get anywhere in Sweden anytime soon... Unions seem to be making a comeback these days, at least generating a lot of news. So I don't follow the connection to the Luddites.

I don't want any updates sent to me ; ) In case anyone was wondering how I made this, I wrote a small program that automatically finds and downloads all the individual dropzone web pages on dropzone.com, finds the name and geolocation of each one on the page, and saves them all to a single kmz file. It takes about an hour to do that (I put a few sec delay in between each download), and as long as dz.com doesn't change the format of their website, I can re-run the process at any time. If there is data that is out of date, I think it would be best to update dz.com itself, and the re-run the program to create new kmz file Another alternative would be to add some data to @platypii 's website and work on keeping that up to date. They could provide a kmz download button if you wanted a google earth view.

alright, I think I got it to work, scraping is brittle and a bit tedious. The attached kmz has about a 1000 dropzones. Some DZs didn't have coordinates or I couldn't parse them and they ended up at 0,0. I grouped them by country as they were in DZ.com. There is no additional metadata other than the name of each DZ, I might add a url back to its DZ.com page but I probably won't. As someone pointed out, this data is probably from 10-15 years ago. google earth can be found at https://earth.google.com/ dropzones-full.kmz

I didn't realize the Map version of the dropzone directory was not a feature of this site anymore. It looks the like the data (LAT and LON of each DZ) is still there. I might take a crack at scraping it into a KML file, I have wanted to play around with scraping a bit this would be a good excuse.

fb throws weird shit at me all the time. normally it is mildly annoying, but occasionally it comes up with some good stuff though. I thought this was dark but quite funny.

In most states, EVs already get charged additional registration fees. I pay an extra $150 a year, which is about the amount of sales tax the state would get on $2500 worth of gas sales.

I was hoping for some old school shenanigans, but not much there for that, but the face full of drogue was fun.

yes, this link doesn't work

That has been the overwhelming story of "factory work" in the USA and in other developed countries in recent decades. Not job elimination through automation, but through movement to lower cost countries, like Brazil as you mention, but also China, Vietnam and plenty of others. Will these new robotics affect that trend, or start a new one? I doubt it will be much noticed in this country, as a lot of factory jobs remaining are difficult to automate, the maintaining and re-configuring of existing robots, etc. Sure automation may come for those too, but it will be a slow process that society can absorb. As Brent points out, we as a society have seen massive reductions in factory work over the last centuries and largely it has been a good thing. When the robots come for the jobs in Bangladesh, that will be a milestone. Ethier robots have managed to get really cheap, or the Bangladesh economy has finally "made it".

Cartwheeling out sounds fun, a lot easier to do from a Skyvan. I wanted to do a Bat Hang exit for one of my special jumps but the dzo wouldn't let me. I did my 100th naked. I vote for that. There are ways to retain your privacy if needed, like wear a fanny pack with a cover up and land away from everyone and put it on. Hitting the person after they land with whipped cream or shaving cream pies is a def thing for the 100th and 1000th jumps. People will often do special jumps with their friends on other major jump intervals (500th, 2000th, 3000th or others that feel important). and of course when you die and they cremate you, you can come along on one final traditional jump, the ash dive.

not really a swipe at religion, but I'll preserve the author's intent and drop this joke about language / slang in here:

According to the article I read, they did do plenty of planning, and they had planned to stop at a certain rest area with chargers. Several chargers there were offline, and the advance party tried to sit in an unused available spot to reserve it, which is not nice, and got the cops called on them. There is a reason Ford GM Volvo Mercedes Benz and a host of other manf. have decided to join Tesla and use their charging network. Tesla's network is huge and it is very reliable. Volkswagen, which owns Electrify America, one of the crappy charging networks, is in a tough spot. Do they throw in the towel and join Tesla, or do they stick it out?

Now I think about it, aren't speed fliers just really fast free-flyers? Following the general rule slower fallers before faster fallers, that would but the speed flier after the last free-fly group before the tandems and students.

So with this new KA what are your numbers Mike, if I may ask? Time to altitude and cycle time for a load wheels up to wheels down?