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Comment Re: The new CATL batteries are wild (Score 1) 292

Except you cannot plan for every emergency.

Why do you argue like this? Yes, it's true. So what. Petrol cars go on fire more often than battery cars, but both can do it. If your car goes on fire, how do you get to the hospital? What do you do to prepare for it?

The answer to the last question is that you don't prepare for it because it's so exceedingly rare that anything specific you do to prepare is silly. However, if you just prepare for your car to break down (again, more common with ICE cars, but possible with an EV too) for example by having a second car, or a friend who lives nearby and will drive you or lend you his, then you are fine.

None of this is changed by the arrival of EVs and the stuff that is changed by the arrival of electricity was already changed decades ago. In the end, you argue like this just because you won't admit that there is no problem and that the argument is long lost.

Comment Re: The new CATL batteries are wild (Score 1) 292

Not at all. You can *still* unplug and leave, you just won't make it to where you want to go without recharging, just as you can leave a petrol station with not enough petrol and will have to get petrol somewhere else.

Luckily, as I said earlier, since you will always ensure you have double the charge needed to get to the nearby hospital, this will never be relevant in the case of a pregnant wife.

Comment Re: The new CATL batteries are wild (Score 1) 292

Yes, at any moment when charging you can just disconnect and drive. I don't know where you are being fed information from but huge amounts of it are wrong. This is something I have literally done with a charging car. Press the release button, take out the cable and drive.

Comment Re: The new CATL batteries are wild (Score 3, Informative) 292

I'm just trying to get across Canada, but yes now that you mention it.. How does a person with an EV have a pregnant wife. What if you just plugged it in and she goes into labour? Call an ambulance because of your poor planning?
 

How does a person with an ICE car cope if their wife goes into labour just after they ran out of gas? Simple; if'' this is a risk, they don't. As long as your wife is close to due, you don't. If your car gets below double the range needed to get to hospital you stop and charge it.

If you just put it into charging and your wife goes into labour, you simply disconnect and drive to the hospital.

Comment Re: 500 miles? (Score 1) 136

I'm not selling; I'm providing info for an engineering trade off calculation. I'm also marvelling that something that is the first generation of a new technology is already outclassing a massively mature technology in the ICE powered tenders for quite a number of applications and is considerably cheaper in a number of applications.

Comment Re:Should be easy to find the users (Score 1) 135

Sounds like this would be a fantastic way to punch the current regime in the nose. Leave a Starlink terminal in 'wide open' mode somewhere sitting on a crate of C4 with a (non-internet connected) remote detonator. When the Republicans show up to arrest and shut down, you create a massive crater, expediting their trip to the virgins.

Right. This requires thought and pre-planning though and that seems to have been lacking.

Comment Re:500 miles? (Score 1) 136

Not in the US (UK) but mentioned them precisely because I know they are an upper limit and because that's where these trucks are coming first.

I agree US limits are more dangerous and it does partly explain why they have more accidents, however I guess it's also true that much US long distance driving is easier than European with longer stretches of more open road. Also, by the time you've driven 10 hours, you can have crossed several countries here and still be in the same state over there. The differences are not just that American life is cheap.

Comment Re: 500 miles? (Score 1) 136

You missed, two boxes down in your table, that after 8 hours driving you have to take a 30 minute break (during which you recharge). That's 11 hours on duty but not actually 11 hours of straight driving. It's not the clearest source, but it's actually stricter than the one I looked up which allowed 10 hours driving in 14 hours of duty.

Comment Re: So since you got kicked out of the non-profit (Score 1) 83

So what you're saying is Musk is here today to impose what clearly doesn't work on his competition because he has a serious conflict of interest with his own for-profit AI company that nobody uses for coding because the nutjob that owns it overrides his own engineers and inserts weird shit about white genocide into the system prompt when it doesn't speak his personal version of "truth"?

Yes, I think that's a good summary of this particular situation. Both of the parties here are evil, Musk is clearly showing how you should never partner with him and OpenAI is getting what they deserve for knowingly setting up in that context. However it misses the wider context that there are also much more other different competition out there. If OpenAI dies completely, but their systems are released as Open Source and inform systems like ollama, openclaw and so on then that's a net gain.

Even if OpenAI simply dies completely and due to this that's probably a net benefit. We have seen from their recent lawfare attacks on Claude and other commercial competitors, they are a net negative even in the commercial AI space.

Overall, the main thing is that there should be appropriate justice and that the principle that companies that represent themselves as working in the public good should not be able to abandon that and still profit are far more important than our justified and reasonable dislike or even hatred of Musk.

Comment Re:Trailer with battery/solar (Score 1) 136

I wonder if the range can be extended by having extra battery in the trailer.

Generally, simply not by any useful amount. Adding more battery always adds more weight which reduces range. At some point, you are at a flat stage where more battery adds the same amount of range as it reduces. The largest battery cars are a bit below that in normal operation but not by much so it just isn't worth it.

Comment Re:Doctor Evil 2.0 (Score 1) 287

All valid points. And believe me, I'm all onboard with solar. I genuinely wish I could install them on my house, but my roof/yard just aren't viable.

Glad to hear; I think it is worth being clear that the nuclear vs renewables argument should be about emphasis and priorities much more than straight up one or the other. I do think, given Russian attacks on nuclear plants, we seriously need to think about the risk of nuclear weapons attacks on nuclear power plants and the amount of radiation that could spread. Unfortunately the non proliferation argument seems to be lost, so the only possible solution is probably to make it clear that any civilization that targets nuclear power plants will utterly cease to exist.

The counter-argument I have is that you still need baseload. I don't think we're even approaching a point where we can start talking 100% renewables 100% of the time. The industrial base is going to drive most of that delay. Things like aluminum smelting require absolutely massive amounts of 24/7 power.

Smelting is a good special case, however I think you are underestimating the risk of the nuclear power option compared e.g. to wind. An entire 3GW nuclear plant can *all* trip at the same time for the same reason (e.g. an earthquake, a reactor leak, even if contained, a terrorist attack and so on). They just have to be more sensitive to shutdown. Widely distributed wind (with a spread wide enough that there is always wind somewhere - e.g. Morocco to Scotland, Southern Californa to Alaska - doesn't have that problem because the failure of one turbine or even farm is unlikely to stop production.

Building such a system nowadays, I'd want to build next to a local hydro plant, add a local battery with an hour or two of capacity reserved for me and a few more used to keep the local grid stable and then have a diverse supply. The key thing is that the penalties on the utility for supply failure have to be more than enough to motivate them to put my supply before the consumers.

This is purely my opinion: Even if we install leadership that doesn't have their head up their ass when it comes to power generation, I don't believe I will live to see the day where the last "traditional" baseload plant ceases operation. I hope we're well on our way by that time, I just don't see it happening.

Nuclear baseload has been a big problem for the grid. It just isn't flexible enough and the need to absorb huge amounts of energy during periods of low demand is really difficult. I kind of agree with you though. In fact the opposite. Once there is a very high renewable grid, with a fair amount of distributed storage and once all of that grid, including local solar generation is able to be remote controlled properly, as we adapt to and create more industrial processes with demand that can be based on energy price, for example future hydrocarbon fuel productino from water and atmospheric carbon dioxide then actually a nuclear base load plant becomes much easier to handle.

The main thing, though, is that what is missing from most grids worldwide is enough wind energy. We want to see wind providing something like 150% of night time energy demand and then start to optimize the rest for a completely new, much cheaper, energy world.

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