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

Unless you want heated water. My bathroom water gets pretty damn cold in the winter, but honestly, you get used to it. I don’t have hot water to my bidet, but I survive

Just chiming in as a software engineer. My product DOES support Firefox, but there are some weird animation quirks that my team has been trying to solve, but with limited bandwidth and a full product backlog, it’s hard to justify spending too much time supporting a browser with such small global utilization. Especially since we’re using third party libraries like angular material, quirks on smaller browsers can be a nightmare to chase down

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