A lot of their hydrogen tech is very cool. Simple fact is though, in the United States we do not have and “are not going to have” a major hydrogen infrastructure. There was at one point a thought that we would, before battery tech improved and it looked to everybody like hydrogen was the future. Now basically the entire world minus Toyota knows better.

We already have an electric infrastructure. In most cases it can support a large transition to electric vehicles with few or no upgrades, because electric vehicles charge at night when demand is low. A hydrogen infrastructure, to create, transport, distribute, and dispense hydrogen to the population at large would cost hundreds of billions. Trillions perhaps. And so you have a chicken and the egg problem, nobody will buy a hydrogen car if there aren’t hydrogen fueling stations and nobody will build hydrogen fueling stations and the required infrastructure if people don’t have cars.

Electricity is everywhere though. Buy an electric car and worst case scenario you plug it into a 120 volt wall outlet and it will charge slowly but charge it will.

Don’t think there is an ounce of principle in this either way. Toyota bet the farm on hybrids and hydrogen. Turns out EVs are the future, the one thing they bet would never happen. As a result they are now 10+ years behind everybody else in battery technology. If they pivoted and went 100% EV today, it would still be years before the models they start designing today make it to dealer showrooms. And here’s more before they made any kind of the per unit profit that current gas and hybrids do.

So they see laws like 100% EV by 2035 and they panic, because they aren’t ready to do that and probably aren’t going to be.

Thus, they try and stop EV mandates. And that gives them some unlikely allies, namely climate deniers.

It’s too bad that the company that made hybrids popular is now on the wrong side of history.

Not sure about better but I can add a step. Fire up Microsoft word, then write a macro which outputs a shortcut that launches Internet explorer with a URL that loads and local HTML page which after 1 second redirects to a .exe. then click open instead of save as. That only works with really old school internet explorer of course not the modern edge version.

Don’t think there is an ounce of principle in this either way. Toyota bet the farm on hybrids and hydrogen. Turns out EVs are the future, the one thing they bet would never happen. As a result they are now 10+ years behind everybody else in battery technology. If they pivoted and went 100% EV today, it would still be years before the models they start designing today make it to dealer showrooms. And here’s more before they made any kind of the per unit profit that current gas and hybrids do.

So they see laws like 100% EV by 2035 and they panic, because they aren’t ready to do that and probably aren’t going to be.

Thus, they try and stop EV mandates. And that gives them some unlikely allies, namely climate deniers.

It’s too bad that the company that made hybrids popular is now on the wrong side of history.

This one is excellent, thank you for posting I had been re-looking for that for a while.

I would also suggest God’s Debris and I met God on a Train.

All three have a similar idea of questioning the nature of what God might look like. No religious nonsense in any of them.

On a different tack I’d suggest Manna- Two Different Views Of Humanity’s Future. Also a very good read but nothing to do with extracorporeal beings.

They wouldn’t obviously. Especially since VR content is significantly more expensive to develop. But that is an Apple problem to solve. If you want people to buy your $3,500 toy, you have to give them a reason to buy it. Personally if I was going to attract developers I would give them a real sweetheart deal, like for the first two years of the platform the developers keep 95% of the revenue. Yeah that means for 2 years I make no money on software but it also means at the end of two years there will be software to make money on. And make the whole thing bring dead easy to develop on. Have a whole bunch of tools to import existing 3D content or write games or whatever.

I tried one in the store. It’s an amazing experience, the augmented reality is done very well.
The problem is I don’t think there’s any content for it. If it could play 3D movies or games or something, that might be a reason to buy it. But for right now as far as I can tell the main reason to have one is to view 3D photos from an iPhone in actual 3D. And I’m sorry but that’s just not worth $3,500.

The other issue is the competition. Quest 3 is very close in terms of technology, not quite as good but close, and it’s 7x cheaper with a hell of a lot more content available.

Make it $1500 and release enough content that there’s a reason to buy it, and it’ll sell.

Rules are rules of course. But when the car was approved for sale, approved as being rule following, and then retroactively after the fact, after it’s been out for years with literally millions of units on the road, suddenly it’s no good…, that doesn’t seem like fair enforcement to me.

Frequent software updates are part of having a Tesla. If the vehicle is unable to do a software update, then it is broken and would require service regardless of the recall.

Which IMHO just shows that the recall in the first place was just NHTSA unnecessarily flexing on them

Sorry we don’t think like that anymore. Nuance and multiple truths are a waste of time. Elon supports a Republican that means he is bad and everything he does is bad and everything he has ever done is bad and he has no vision or leadership of his own he is just a rich asshole using Daddy’s money to buy cars and rockets and Twitter. Thus he is unworthy of praise for anything at all that he has done since he was born into a life of luxury and anything he touches is automatically shit worthy of being canceled or outlawed.

The warning icons were the exact same size as the car I had before that. No recall on that car, and if anything icons were even easier to see because the contrast was higher and they are closer to your face.

Yes absolutely. The term recall is supposed to be when they literally recall the cars, like bring them back in, in the same context as you recall your dog after he runs around the yard.
No cars are being brought back in. No dealers are involved here. It’s just a bug fix for the next software release.

I also don’t like how the ability to fix bugs is creating a huge number of ‘recalls’. For example, last year Tesla had a ‘recall’ because NHTSA decided the warning icons on the dashboard screen weren’t big enough. Like the icons for parking brake and seat belt. Which is frustrating because the car is operated for years with the original icons and nobody had a complaint.

But if this was an old style car, where those were individual LEDs silkscreened in an instrument cluster, that would never be a recall because it would cost millions to replace every single instrument cluster on every single car. But because it is remotely fixable, it becomes a recall.

This is a very good point. The other issue is security. The little mechanic shop that has no dynamic content, technically should be static pages, so when it’s left alone and not updated for 3 years it doesn’t get hacked by some WordPress vulnerability.

Absolutely. They were so arrogant they never thought it would happen to us. After all, we are in charge of our own networks so why would we expect the enemy to be at the gates? Let’s make those gates out of cardboard so it’s easier to spy on everyone.

Of course then you have things like CALEA mandating a back door, you have cheap telecom companies that will happily buy cheap lowest bidder Chinese hardware and install it "everywhere* without concern for security (after all, it’s not their data being stolen) and now the enemy isn’t just at the gates but inside the walls.

A decade ago, making sure the feds could read everyone’s mail was the national security priority. Suddenly when the Chinese can read everyone’s mail, good security is the national security priority.

It’s too bad there was no way to predict this in advance. Oh wait…

Yeah I’m also not a fan of the arc fault breaker thing. I get the concept, but there should be a calculation of expense caused versus safety increase.

A good example of that in another field is NHTSA is going to start requiring seat belt reminders and nag beeps for every seat in the vehicle. This will increase the cost of every single vehicle, annoy the hell out of drivers who store cargo in the backseat, and the problem it addresses? Yearly 50 deaths and a few hundred injuries caused by unbelted passengers. Most of whom will probably ignore the nag beep anyway- it’s 2024, if you don’t wear your seatbelt because you want to stay alive you’re not going to start wearing it because of a nag beep. Thus you have yet another regulation, yet another little specification box that has to be checked building a new car, and yet another bundle of sensors and wires and harnesses and programming for every single vehicle (which isn’t free, those costs will be passed on to the person who buys the car) all for a change that will probably have zero practical benefit whatsoever but will cause a ton of annoyance when drivers throw their groceries in the back seat. And it may even make the problem worse- The driver who puts groceries in the back will probably buy one of those defeat devices that’s like a seat belt buckle but with no seatbelt and you put it in the slut so the car thinks you are buckled in. And that might actually reduce the number of people who wear the seatbelt in the back.

I agree it should be higher, but I don’t agree that it’s useless. At my place I am using plain old level 1 charging, 120 volts 15 amps. It’s actually tolerable most of the time. I don’t always get up to 80% every night, and I do sometimes have to stop at a supercharger, but it’s usable enough for probably 90% of my charging. 240 volt 20 amp circuit call that 15 amps at the EVSE is 3.6 KW. That would be entirely usable for me.

I think they probably did it this way so it doesn’t mess with panel size and service size calculations too much. Still, I wish it was bigger.

I think there’s some merit to both sides of this. Using codes to mandate quality construction is a good thing IMHO. Even when it increases building cost.

What I dislike is the fact that every little municipality has their own individual special snowflake set of building codes. Some use one version of the national code, others use another version of the national code, others use the national code with a whole bunch of special stuff added on, etc. Then throw in wildly different enforcement and inspections and a handful of inspectors who just want to see it done their way code be damned and it becomes a confusing morass that needlessly increases cost.

That’s actually kind of sad. They should have mandated 50 amps

This is fantastic. It’s not super expensive either. Just an extra 240 volt 50 amp cable with a 14-50 outlet. If done at the build stage it’s a few hundred bucks.