Science/Techno Babble Random, Random

[Suliso]

Long charging is a lot less of a problem than you all imagine. If you own a house you charge overnight on a regular slow charging (better for batteries anyway and cheaper too). Will rarely need fast public charging except for road trips or commercial use. I hope to see public long charging available widely at parking houses and workplace parking lots.

Hybrid was a good idea when introduced, but now it's a dead end technology I think. It's helping with CO2 only marginally...

[Suliso]

The most basic Tesla model 3 (other makers are similar) claims a range of 263 miles. Let's be realistic and assume very hot or very cold environment and/or non ideal driving, so 200 miles. How often does one drive more than that in a single day? Depends from your lifestyle of course, but maybe 5-10 days per year? Perhaps more often deep in the countryside. I wish I had some statistics on this...

[Suliso]

The biggest problem here in EU is that a very large proportion of people live in apartments and then indeed charging becomes an issue. As I said before the solution would be a widely available slow charging + a network of emergency fast charging. It can't be just fast charging, because indeed the fast one is still 20-40 min and if you had to do it very often that would get old fast.

[Jeff from TX]

The most basic Tesla model 3 (other makers are similar) claims a range of 263 miles. Let's be realistic and assume very hot or very cold environment and/or non ideal driving, so 200 miles. How often does one drive more than that in a single day? Depends from your lifestyle of course, but maybe 5-10 days per year? Perhaps more often deep in the countryside. I wish I had some statistics on this...

Granted, this is a limited problem. But I have driven close to 1,000 miles without stopping in the past to go back "home" to Texas. Heck, just getting through W. Texas is a huge distance, and there ain't much there to stop at. Some towns are 80 to 100 miles apart, and there isn't anything between them. So, yes, it also depends on where you drive. In a city, quite practical. In rural America (granted, there aren't that many people there), it is an issue.

[Suliso]

You're very unusual. I don't think I have ever in my life driven more than 300 miles in a single day.

[ponchi101]

The sole reasons to have an electric are: environment.
And ultra fast acceleration (Model S Ludicrous mode).
The environmental issue is what will drive the technology, but up to a point. Remember, your electric is only as clean as the power house that charges it. But in the USA, I believe the solution is indeed two cars. One electric, for the city, one gas powered, in case you need to get groceries in Texas.

[Suliso]

The sole reasons to have an electric are: environment.
And ultra fast acceleration (Model S Ludicrous mode).

Under right circumstances would be cheaper as well. That is definitely cheaper to run, but not necessarily paying off the extra what was paid buying it.

As for acceleration Model S Ludicrous mode is competing with Lamborghini and the like, but even a regular Model 3 will have a better acceleration than a gasoline car in the same price category. It's just a nature of an electric motor.

[skatingfan]

You're very unusual. I don't think I have ever in my life driven more than 300 miles in a single day.

Driving more than 300 miles in North America is pretty easy.

[mmmm8]

I was impressed when I was in Bergen and I saw way too many Tesla's and BMW i3's. Tesla's must have made 1/4 of all cars. Lots of Nissan Leaf's too.
The Tesla of choice is the Model S. Around $100K, so yes, it works if the population is rich.

Yes, but there's also a decent amount of Smart cars and other smaller vehicles that are much more affordable (I've only been to Oslo). It's not cost-prohibitive to buy an electric car. They have electric charging stations in pretty much any parking lot in Oslo - the city makes it very manageable to drive electric (whether that or demand came first, I don't know)

[ti-amie]

So IG, Facebook and What's App are down for many people. Last night 60 Minutes aired an interview with a whistleblower re FB, not to mention all of the negative publicity they've gotten lately.

[ti-amie]

This FB outage is starting to look more serious than first thought.

...The cause of the outage remains unclear. Madory said it appears Facebook withdrew “authoritative DNS routes” that let the rest of the internet communicate with its properties. Such routes are part of the internet’s Domain Name System, a central component of the internet that directs its traffic. Without Facebook broadcasting its routes on the public internet, apps and web addresses simple could not locate it....

Madory said there was no sign that anyone but Facebook was responsible and discounted the possibility that another major internet player, such as a telecom company, might have inadvertently rewritten major routing tables that affect Facebook.

“No one else announced these routes,” said Madory.

Computer scientists speculated that a bug introduced by a configuration change in Facebook’s routing management system could be to blame. Colombia University computer scientist Steven Bellovin tweeted that he expected Facebook would first try an automated recovery in such a case. If that failed, it could be in for “a world of hurt” — because it would need to order manual changes at outside data centers, he added.

In other words no one can talk to the FB routers and vice versa because the "routes" don't exist anymore.

https://apnews.com/article/facebook-wha ... _medium=AP

In related news there's this.

[ti-amie]

[Suliso]

Yeah, I also find absence of Whatsapp very annoying. I mean I do have other options to communicate, but under normal circumstances Whatsapp is the only app I use. Almost everyone I know has it so difficult to change to another one.

[JazzNU]

You're very unusual. I don't think I have ever in my life driven more than 300 miles in a single day.

I assure you that it is not remotely unusual, in fact very common. I assume this is either a difference in how our countries/continents operate or about the size of the countries.

A very healthy number of people in the US, by the time they've reached let's say their mid-20s, I think have been on a road trip longer than 300 miles. Probably waning a bit now since less and less of them actually know how to drive by the time they are 21, but road trips were always very popular among college students. So if you didn't take a road trip with your family (you very likely did), then you probably went with your friends.


I'd done 300+ mile road trips like 10 times before my 8th birthday. It's just very common here. Done it more times than I can possibly count. And driven it myself many many times. And, for me, the number of trips would jump almost exponentially if that 300 miles becomes 250.

[dryrunguy]

You're very unusual. I don't think I have ever in my life driven more than 300 miles in a single day.

I assure you that it is not remotely unusual, in fact very common. I assume this is either a difference in how our countries/continents operate or about the size of the countries.

A very healthy number of people in the US, by the time they've reached let's say their mid-20s, I think have been on a road trip longer than 300 miles. Probably waning a bit now since less and less of them actually know how to drive by the time they are 21, but road trips were always very popular among college students. So if you didn't take a road trip with your family (you very likely did), then you probably went with your friends.


I'd done 300+ mile road trips like 10 times before my 8th birthday. It's just very common here. Done it more times than I can possibly count. And driven it myself many many times. And, for me, the number of trips would jump almost exponentially if that 300 miles becomes 250.

I've probably mentioned this before, but just in case...

The best trip I ever took was a road trip. It was 1996 and leading into the July 4th weekend. It was a Tuesday afternoon, and I had oodles of comp time, so I told my boss I was taking the rest of the week off. I was all by myself and drove without maps (until Friday at Noon, when I needed to figure out how to get back to Washington, DC, where I was living at the time).

I had a Honda Del Sol at the time (removeable top) and drove shirtless most of the time. I ate at Ma and Pop restaurants. I drove on mountain roads. I saw the best drag pageant I have ever witnessed in Nashville (only three contestants, and the one who finished third made her entrance by being lowered from the ceiling on a swing wearing a dress made of playing cards... the competition was BRUTALLY ferocious). I walked around downtown Memphis. I saw fireworks on the Mississippi River in Little Rock, AR.

When Noon on Friday rolled around, I was in rural northeastern Louisiana. So I whipped out the map to plot my route home.

After driving through Mississippi and Alabama, I walked around downtown Atlanta just days before the beginning of the summer Olympics. I pulled up in front of the apartment I was renting Sunday evening. Then, I went back to work on Monday.

I highly recommend it.