Well, there will at least be historians in other countries covering the downfall in detail, if there is indeed a bigger downfall than has already happened.
Democracies are pretty good at studying the failures of other countries and learning about them.
What's going to happen in the future is that May will be a month of extreme electricity abundance, with a good chunk of the electricity just not being collected at all because the grid doesn't need it, and it will be cheaper to have unused electricity in May than to have too little solar in December.
Doubtful, the tradeoff is solar cost versus storage cost. Pumped hydro and gravity are waaaaaaaay too expensive compared to excess solar panels. Pumped hydro takes massive construction projects, which are very very expensive these days. Gravity storage (non-water, meaning non-hydro) never made any sense at all, the material costs are just way too high.
Iron-air storage is still being proven out, but it still requires so much material that only getting 1-2 cycles per year just won't justify it, because electricity is going to be so cheap.
It's hard to overstate how cheap solar panels are these days. Even in the US, which has costs 3x-5x the rest of the world because of failed protective tariffs.
Cheaper yes, but I don't think Lithium is that cheap, or ever will be. I think storage (even the expensive ones like pumped hydro) will become more useful over time to handle day/night issues. Probably even enough to handle 2-4 week variations in weather. However for seasonal weather storage is going to be too expensive compared to just building a more solar panels that we don't use in summer.
Of course once we have solar that we won't use in summer there will be programs to use that power. I suspect things like ore refining, steel mills, and the like: will start running in summer only. They will go offline in winter for maintenance. (Investors will make a ton of money buying in summer and selling in winter - as they already do for lots of other commodities that have seasonal aspects)
Maybe. Depends on the plant. Nearly every plant goes through shutdowns for maintenance. If energy is a large cost they work with the utility (and vice versa - when the utility needs to shut down a big power plant they need industry to shutdown something at the same time). Many of them take December off for maintenance. My company has long pour iron in the foundry only at night: we get enough of a discount on power as to be worth paying the workers extra to work the night shift (I last checked this 15 years ago - I would not be surprised if this has changed now that the local power is mostly wind and thus has different factors)
Of course every plant is different. There is a big difference between "batch" processes where you can shutdown after any batch, and "continuous" processes where startup/shutdown is a large process since the machines depend on running. They have different abilities to respond. Some plants/processes use more energy than others - obviously if they don't use much energy they don't care about free energy much either. The more energy a plant uses the more they are interested in cheap energy. In some cases a less efficient process may suddenly become better when solar is "free"
It's not "will it" it's just a series of balances, capital costs vs energy costs.
If there's enough free energy and automation there gets to be a point where there will be people will start to disregard the capital costs as well and run 0ish input cost businesses with a vertical stack of stuff that they produced with 0ish input cost.
I think the challenges for heavy industry aren't as much the cost of energy, as it is the capital cost, and a workforce that has lots of options for higher paying jobs.
Heavy industries are usually pretty low on the value chain in economies. They do not provide much return on capital, compared to the high tech options and service options that are available in the US, but not available anywhere else in the world.
The rest of the (non-European) world dreams of the economic opportunities that are possible in the US, from Silicon Valley tech, to biotech, to the financial opportunities. China has been trying to climb up the value chain ladder for decades, and is slowly getting there.
It's mystifying to me why people are fantasizing about climbing down the value chain in the US, to being poorer, and allocating capital to things with lower return on investment. I just don't get it! What's the appeal?
Well, manufacturing capacity was the basis of US military dominance, which was the underpinning of the post WW2 US-led world order. That's pretty clearly eroded, and we're not sure we could win in a war against China, especially not a full-on war of attrition, and they're not sure about that either, and so they're steadily getting more willing to throw their weight around geopolitically, trying to get a setup that's more favorable to them. The difference in shipbuilding capacity is staggering, for example. Even if each of our ships had a 10-1 kill ratio, we'd still run out of ships first.
My read on why we want it back, anyway. I'm sure there are other reasons, too.
I think it's unlikely the next War will be won by tanks and Liberty ships.
Beyond that there's still the economic viability problem in the US. A steel mill worker in the US makes 65k per year. In China they make 12K. This holds true for the rest of the heavy industry supply chain.
As the parent posts points out, what were really fighting against here is baumol's cost disease.
Manufacturing dominance was for WW2, but post WW2 it's really high tech and Silicon Valley that gave us dominance.
Silicon Valley was built on defense contracts for control systems, that's what funded all early semiconductor work, what built the technical empire that led to software's dominance in more recent decades.
And Ukraine is proving that heavy manufacturing competence is not the key discriminator. Now light manufacturing, high tech, and bottom-up organization and logistics are letting a small country defend itself against a far far far larger enemy with 4x the people and an absolutely massive dominance in heavy industry and manufacturing of heavy vehicles.
The biggest weakness of Ukraine is the same weakness of the US at the moment: inability to manufacture large amounts of interceptor missiles for air defense. That's not a heavy industry problem, that's a technology problem, a logistics problem, an operations problem. This requires the skill of Apple, not the skills of GM. And in the time it takes the US to scale up production, Ukraine is going to invent their own far cheaper option from scratch.
And that's because the US has not yet moved beyond the style of military industry built on massive high-capital manufacturing, that's slow moving and design iteration measured in years rather than months. The US is currently repeating the same mistake, but even worse, with its drone initiatives because the rewards are based purely on corrupt personal relationships rather than any sort of competitive process.
Heavy industry and manufacturing are not the model for building a military of the future, or an economy of the future.
If by heavy industry you mean shitloads of steel production, I mostly agree, but if you count things like domestic rare earth minerals processing, semiconductors, solar, batteries, I'm not so sure. I don't know the official ontology of what goes in heavy vs light. If magnets are going to be one of the key strategic resources in warfare, though, we should probably get that supply chain down. And being able to replace ship losses still seems relevant.
And yeah, controls, signal processing, decisionmaking, etc are all going to be big determinants, and we're no slouches in that stuff. It used to take a huge bomber fleet and an absurd number of bombs to score as many hits on target as a single B-52 load can now score, thanks to the ability to strap cheap guidance packages onto dumb bombs, margin of error has gone from on the order of half a mile to single digit yards.
its the k shaped economy. the big opportunities are great if you can get into them, but otherwise all there is is serving coffee to the wealthy. People are already poorer without a ladder or fulfilling work at the bottom
I could see that, if people actually wanted to work in those jobs in large numbers. Yet, poll after poll shows that people don't want to work in the jobs, they just want heavy industry and manufacturing to return to being a big part of the US economy.
People understand that these jobs are worse than what's currently available, yet for some reason want them here.
I want those to be automated. I don't want anyone to have to work in a steel mill - it is hot dirty work that wears out your body. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. However those plants are mostly automated and I know we will need them in some worst case scenarios.
There is a tremendous amount of money in those high capital costs enterprises. High tech can make you a lot of money, but you can also go bankrupt when everyone buys from your competitor - just like everything else. The world needs the things that heavy industry makes, and despite the large capital costs they are valuable. People are still making a lot of money in those industries - even if it is less than the silicon valley can make.
Also industry is only low value so long as someone friendly to you has it. The world really worried about China climbing that latter because they are making some political moves that could lead to war. Maybe they won't, but China clearly is building a powerful military and they are not friendly to the freedoms that the US and western Europe likes. If it comes down to war we need heavy industry.
Pumped storage utility is tied to duty cycle.
You want one cycle per day with some overage, not one cycle per year.
A lot of the cost scales with storage volume.
If you look at the pumped storage projects built and under construction in China, they are all daily focused.
To play devil's advocate: there are also some limited opportunities to retrofit large reservoirs with some amount of back-pump, when there's a sufficient reservoir at the bottom site. Not a ton, but a bit. However even those opportunities, that already have massive dams, may not be economically feasible because solar panels are just so damn cheap.
Solar's zero marginal cost generation, with cheap capital costs, requires rethinking a lot of the economics of electricity generation. Not paying for fuel changes so much, and it will take a while for people to internalize this.
pumped storage is still significantly cheaper for seasonal storage. The cut off is about 2 weeks now -- if you need to pull from storage more than twice a month batteries are cheaper. If you need to pull from storage less than twice a month pumped storage is cheaper.
The problem with pumped storage is most of the places we can use it are already taken and have been for years.
> pumped storage is still significantly cheaper for seasonal storage
Only because most of the costs have been financially depreciated long ago. Try to build a brand new dam nearly anyplace and the costs will be much higher.
hydro generation sites are mostly taken. pumped storage doesn't need flow, just 2 reservoirs (one or both of which can be built) and a elevation change.
> a brand new dam
pumped storage facilities generally don't use dams.
In most practical cases, the cheapest way to provide carbon-neutral seasonal storage is to use the existing natural gas generators and feed them with carbon neutral synthetic gas. That synthetic gas is super expensive, but when you're only running it a couple times a year the gas is a tiny percentage of the cost.
can you explain the economics of that to me, because it doesn't track my understanding.
Are you just talking about total capacity dominated breakeven? The economics of both want daily cycles. Water has a more favorable power/$ scaling curve for storage if you have a site.
Any sort of seasonal storage is horrendously expensive and completely infeasible using economics alone. It's really only a concern once our power grid is 98%-99% carbon-neutral and we want to get it to 100%.
A battery storage facility has watts and watt-hours roughly equivalent. A typical storage battery is around "1C" -- it takes about one hour to fully charge or discharge. The limiting factor on the build price is the MWh -- if you keep the power the same but double the storage the price of the plant still roughly doubles.
A typical daily storage facility wants around 4C, so that coupling between power and energy for batteries is not a significant drawback.
Seasonal storage is not coupled in this way. You increase MWh by increasing the size of your reservoirs. You increase MW by increasing the number of pumps/turbines. MWh is usually a lot cheaper than MW. A typical pumped storage facility today has MWh only being 10-20X the MW which means they're tuned for daily-ish usage (see top line). One tuned for seasonal usage would have that ratio >> 100.
humm, I was thinking about it differently.
I would expect most pumped storage to have variable and diminishing cost per MWh (up to a point). Part of this is the turbines, but also other fixed project costs and economies of scale. If you hold MW fixed, the First MWh of the project is going to be more than the next until you hit diminishing returns due to specific site saturation.
As an interesting side note, China has roughly 80 GW of pumped storage built or under construction. Most of the big ones I have looked at are about "10C".
This is comparable to the GW output from their nuclear reactors built or under construction.
Except the water is in short supply, so where's that magically coming from? The Great Salt Lake is shrinking and specific to Utah. Just look at Lake Meade and Hoover Dam as an example.
Only if there is a very large lake at the bottom. If that lake doesn't exist then you have to build it at great cost. You also lose a lot to evaporation if you do this.
Large enough to replace all that water requirements, without making the lake levels so high that it impacts generation. Which is to say your lake at the bottom needs to have a large surface area when full - much larger than the lake at the top.
US automakers are already unable to compete globally even within the ever shrinking ICE share.
Protectionism makes industries weak and uncompetitive, ultimately hurting the economy of the nation doing the protectionism. The proper strategy to become competitive is to provide a small amount of protectionism so that the industry does not die, but to ruthlessly cull underperforming companies so that only the strongest survive. The continual bailouts of companies, keeping old and incompetent executives at the helm, has destroyed the US car industry.
Capitalism requires killing the underperforming companies. Until we let that happen, or at a minimum cull leadership and boards, nothing will get better. The rot is at the top.
The rot is that a empire selling security can subsidize any economic policy indefinitely and is completely decoupled from anything resembling a free market forever.
I would quibble with the "forever" there. Eventually empires have bad leaders, and Trump is showing how a bad leader can disassemble an economic empire in just a few short years. One can do tremendous damage from the inside, especially when the populace has been cowed by broad misinformation and the checks and balances have been removed by single party rule.
It's fascinating to see new UI primitives and concepts get invented in the LLM era. The sea of creativity makes it hard to even understand most of what each new app does, and nobody describes them well. When I went to the Hermes agent web page, I was left with zero clue about what it did or what it could do. It took a bit of digging to find the right part of the qm page that helped me grok what was going on.
I've become attached to Orca (yc-backed) for managing coding sessions in the past week, but some sort of postgres session db is what's really lacking. So, maybe it's time to try qm.
It is fascinating and I love to see it. Ultimately though, why not build your own? I think that in part is what we're beginning to see-- highly customized and personalized software. I take most of these as inspiration these days and just build my own. Nothing you can't hammer out with a few good Claude sessions.
But why build your own from scratch when you can do it on top one extensible UI platform that already has all of your organizational context, not to mention coding agents already built-in that you can just tell it to build & deploy your personalized workflow softwaree from scratch? ;-)
Because it's fun! I don't "really" use LLM for anything serious yet, but after discovering playing with a custom harness I licked blood. Like going back to edit any message to start a new conversation branch off that, or being able to go back and remove things that turned out to to be dead ends from the history. Not really "useful" [0] for now, I always wondered about that and I was dumbfounded how trivial and tiny a first MVP was. Of course, that's also because it is trivial, it's just chat, it affords none of the usefulness you'd want for any "work", but it's still very interesting.
And for some simple recurring tasks or local housekeeping stuff, having something where I 100% know what files it reads or writes will surely be useful. E.g. if I wanted to watch out for certain topics on HN, I'd rather make something myself that grabs the feed and turns that into a list of titles and topic ID, which is probably 1% of what the front page HTML would be, and then only have the LLM process that output -- rather than telling an LLM to do all that every time. Even if tokens may not be that precious, and the difference in "cognitive performance" not worth speaking of, that would feel way neater to me.
That's an option right? When I say roll your own-- it could be extending another platform. There's definitely different levels. Customization is in reach regardless of where you want to start and stop your stack.
These new experiences are built atop layers and layers of bedrock libraries that we, generally, don't reinvent. Or we reinvent one or two.
What's notable to me is that ux doesn't so far generally have this behavior. That as per this post people just build a new app, a new experience.
I want to believe over time we'll have better composable & malleable ux experiences atop broader platforms for us. That over time the "go it alone" path has other worth ways to innovate that use a more substantial shared base. It's dangerous to go it alone, and doing so equipped with just our wooden sword and some courage and perhaps an LLM wisp is an amazing adventure, but I think the survival rate & impact would be much better if we had more general ux systems that supported better innovation atop them, and if less people did the pure "why not build your own" path.
I understand you take. And I definitely agree that we could use a lot better ux tools than we have right now. Maybe one of these prototypes will lead to that though. I'll look at it more as creative engineering. Not everything is meant to be distributed or consumed. But that doesn't mean that it's not worthwhile to try and prototype different flows and options. I have seen hundreds of harnesses, I've only used a couple-- but they've inspired me to build something that fits me better and works for me. If somebody comes out with something that helps unify the UX experience and provides better building blocks for me to work with, I'll definitely switch to that and rebuild my experience on top of that. But for now this is what we have. Admittedly this reflects my level of experience and my expertise too. I don't have a lot of experience working with building UX frameworks, so I adapt what I can.
People are using the UX systems though, just that it's the agent that is gluing them together now. Under the hood, it's still React plus component libraries like shadcn, lucide, tailwind, axios and so on.
The agents are so good at this, there's literally no point in not doing it that way.
These are all surface veneer but so so so much less than an app. The entire rest of the owl has to be redrawn, and all the guts inside the owl redesigned.
UX does have this, and it has for many years. You might remember Bootstrap way back in the day, and everything looking like bootstrap. These days it seems like everything is based on tailwind under the hood.
Right now shadcn/ui might be the leading candidate but there are plenty including old school bootstrap, material / MUI, a bunch of various flat-themed ui, etc. They often come in the form of a react component library or whatever but they're generally really solid. I also found one in svelte that I can't immediately pull up but it was nice looking too.
It's really hard to focus on the unique aspect of your tool because it runs the risk that people will think it's unfamiliar and therefore not useful to them. That's why a lot of the tool marketing pages look the same even though the tools themselves might be different or innovative
Isn't it a bigger risk for people to see the page, understand nothing, and think it's not useful to them? Having no information, after investing time to investigate, leaves me with a very sour taste and makes me unlikely to give it a fair shake a second time.
I think we need a new area of study around UI/Agent connection. It can kinda be done with tools, but I'd we need much deeper primitives to allow the UI to inform the Agent and vice-versa. Right now we've just given up, replacing the UI with an Agent message view, but I think that's just because nobody is thinking about how the two can compliment each other
I've been playing around with using a hidden markov model informed by a UI state event stream, with the end state fed into the Agent as a hint on each message turn. Then the Agent can make a tool call to add events to the HMM. This has been really interesting, but I haven't struck the right balance to make it actually feel good for the user yet
Isn't this the direction Claude on the web is going towards? It's a mix of message view on the left and specific interactive UI on the right panel. There is also MCP Apps spec now
I sometimes add a PR with the fix for a bug report I make, but the last few have been ignored in favor of the maintainer's own code. So I think I'll stop doing PRs and just point to code lines instead.
At least for me, I often have a hard time believing people’s stated reasons for whatever they’re doing.
The substance <> narrative relationship is backwards a lot of the time. Someone does something for a nebulous multitude of reasons, and then post-hoc fits their decision-making into a logical explanation that sounds nice.
There is some psychology research supporting this as well.
I suppose if you see the narrative itself as part of the release, that might be interesting. But most of the time I’d rather just hear plainly and straightforwardly what the thing is.
Or at the very least, I am very accepting of releases which do not include rationalization / narrativization and don’t think it’s required to include.
It is a very good read. And my only difference in option is that I think Visa of all places would be very knowledgeable about spending and where it all goes.
They have an absolutely vast amount of information about how money flows in the economy, and an interest in finding out where it will flow in the future, and when.
Capital costs and round-trip efficiency are the primary reasons. Even at constant utilization, electrolyzers are expensive enough that it's hard to replace fossil-fuel generated hydrogen at the moment.
Once you 2x-10x the cost of electrolyzer capital by only using it rarely, more generation and throwing away the excess electricity often makes the most sense.
Nuclear ships are similarly super super expensive. The only reason we build them at all are for their unique and wonderful operational capabilities, as in not needing to surface or refuel. Using nuclear ships for power would so expensive that we may need to up our GDPs 10x before such wasteful use makes sense. (Though I'm hoping we do reach such future luxurious lifestyles!)
Storing a month of energy use doesn't make any sense when it comes to renewable grids. Since you don't have to mine/extract and transport an inventory, far far less storage is required.
Which just emphasises the point -- density and thus land use isn't really a major concern
You could store an entire years worth of energy (not just electricity) for a fairly dense country like the UK and still have 95% of the country left for other usage.
Definitely! However I frequently encounter people on energy discussion forums that assume that we need 2-3 months of battery storage, perhaps because they see natural gas or other storage and assume that batteries need exactly the same thing, so I'm perhaps overly eager to respond to claims about month-long battery storage.
I had previously been hopeful that battery storage would allow more shared used of land, but the fire risks of batteries have been pretty severe. And since the land usage requirements are fairly low, there's no need to enhance the risk by putting batteries, say, in enclosed spaces of former natural gas generation facilities [1].
I'm hopeful that we'll see a lot more storage, say a shipping container's worth, at the end of distribution feeders, which helps suck up residential solar with minimal resources, but solving the problem of "who pays for the benefits for all" when the utility is incentivized to keep grid costs high means that nobody is knocking down doors to make that happen...
You'd have to compare the fire risk of a high density battery vs a substation.
But the beauty of battery and solar/wind is that it can be far more distributed. This of course means far harder to take out -- a wildfire near a nuclear power plant could knock out 3GW of capacity, a wildfire near one of 50x 60MW solar plants would knock out 60MW of capacity.
Solar might not be the only solution in a country at a high latitude, but for the contiguous 48 states even in winter solar produces more than enough power per hectare that when coupled with an appropriately sized battery can generate the entire needs.
1 hectare in sourthern california generates about 3.5MWh a day in December. In North Dakota about 1.5MWh a day, battery size for that is a tiny amount of land.
To generate enough solar energy to power the entire US electric needs, on a bad winter day, the US would have to have 60,000 square km of solar+battery.
The US currently uses 150,000 sqkm just to grow corn ethanol
You'd need a decent HVDC connectors from the southern states to the more demanding northern ones.
But even factoring in current prices of wind, solar, battery, and grid, it would only cost somewhere in the $6T range. Over 30 years that's $200b a year, or about $80 per MWh
New nuclear is about $150 per MWh before decommissioning costs
Sure, when you've got a working plant at a scale, cost and reliability less than renewable+storage let me know.
How much does a 5GW fusion plant cost today, how long does it take to build, what's the total cost over say 30 years, and how much energy will it generate in that time, what are the supply chain risks and what are the environmental risks (if there's an earthquake or wildfire nearby how much do you lose)
We know the answer for renewable, and renewable+storage, and nuclear fission, gas, coal, hydro etc.
A month is probably excessive, but there are large regions of the world where its not uncommon for both solar and wind power to be running at <5% for multiple weeks in a row.
There's an engineering tradeoff between having excess generation capacity, for that seasonal minimum, and having more storage. The cost optimal decision on that tradeoff will be determined by the ratio of excess generation cost and storage cost for rarely-used storage.
Until that ratio falls by at least 3x to 5x in favor of batteries being cheaper than generation, extra generation is going to be the way that grids actually get built out. Batteries and generation are both falling in cost fairly quickly, but generation still has the overall edge in learning rate. Cost decreases won't bottom out for at least a decade, because there's been no slow down yet, so I wouldn't expect this ratio to change for a minimum of 20 years, which means that pretty much a full energy system interchange will have happened by the time that this price ration changes.
So there's at least a few assumptions about the current industry and it's future development that underlie my assertion that a month of storage makes no sense, but I'm confident enough that I'd place money on the bet, and there's very very few things I'd bet on.
Edit: one thing that would break my assumption is the industrial development of storage that's super cheap for once-per-year usage. Most storage now needs to be cycled about 300x per year to make economic sense. "Long duration" storage is actually better defined as "economical storage at few battery cycles per year". There's nothing like that in the research hopper, but that doesn't mean it couldn't appear tomorrow and be deployed within a decade. Something that only gets used once or twice a year has to be dirt cheap, even if you could get 10x or 20x normal electricity prices for it.
Doesn't that depend on the sources of energy though? Pretty much constant short and mid term supply like geothermal, hydro, tides, etc vs unpredictable or variable in the short term like wind and solar.
As a society relying on solar, I'd want to have more of a buffer than one that relies on hydro.
Tesla has been around for nearly 20 years. Model S (12 years) has gained 17% of range due to chemistry (rest is system efficiency and simply bigger battery).
BMW i3 went from 60Ah to 120Ah of battery capacity (and slightly more voltage) in the exact same chassis through the span of its life (2014-2022, RIP). It is even possible to put the later 120Ah batteries in the early 60Ah cars and reap the rewards, and is a practice that is actually supported by the cars' software natively.
Your Polestar 2 battery is based on battery technology that is 5+ years old. Right now you can buy a BYD car in China that charges at up to 1500kW - close to 10x the peak charging rate of a Polestar 2.
Things like crash, fire, egress, homologation and pedestrian impact, long term service… these are things western mfgs obsess over, and BYD doesn’t give a shit about.
You can buy BYD vehicles without airbags.
They’re Chinese market vehicles.
It’s like DJI drones, they work, and they cheap, some are even decent performance on paper, but they aren’t “real” in a sense that serious users would demand.
It’s OK if a BYD is bricked with a bad OTA. It’s less OK for the auto industry in the rest of the world.
It’s taken Tesla a LONG time to figure out building computers is easy, and cars are hard. Same for BYD.
DJI is bad example as they are pretty much only consumer drone you'd ever wanna buy. It absolutely decimates competition. It's more like Tesla.
Not sure what you trying to say about BYD. I don't like them as cars, my friends do indeed have reliability issues and early ones are super uncomfortable. Latest ones are tacky with crappy software. IMO there's a lot of hype about them for some unknown reason. You can get vastly better deals over here.
Yeah, when I take a road trip I genuinely enjoy the cadence of charging. 5-10 minutes every two hours, just enough to go to the bathroom or walk around. I get to my destination not materially later, and feeling far more relaxed than when I was doing death marches in a gas car.
This is such a euphemism to pretend that you’d like to wait two hours at a refueling station.
Anyone who’s ever driven between Seattle and Portland and seen the e16b charging lots of people sleeping in their cars knows there is a whole different side to your rosey picture.
EV owners are still internalizing their range anxiety into a benefit.
I get it; I like EVs for their around town purpose, but man it’s almost fantasy to sell it as “5-10 minutes every two hours”.
"This is such a euphemism to pretend that you’d like to wait two hours at a refueling station."
There is virtually no EV sold on the market today that takes two hours to charge to 80% at a HVDC charger.
"I get it; I like EVs for their around town purpose, but man it’s almost fantasy to sell it as “5-10 minutes every two hours”."
The Hyundai Ioniq 5 takes about 20 minutes to go from 10% SOC to 80% SOC in about 18 min with an 800v charger. That equates to about 3 hours of driving on the highway.
So when you say it’s got a 350 mile range, but then make the point you only need to charge to 40% that you would be fine with a single vehicle that had a 140mile range?
I swear buying an EV in 2026 breaks brains. The push back has been so bad because the mfgs pushed the single car lie… but the people that jumped in now need to defend their $60,000 purchases.
I get it, but please don’t think you guys are sneaky about it. We all know what it is.
“5-10 minutes every two hours” … lol, that’s good when you’re going from LA to San Diego. If I had to stop every two hours on a road trip I’d get a train ticket, it would feel a lot faster.
I don’t understand how a self-proclaimed engineer can’t grasp the concept of a non-linear charging curve and also spread so much absolute crap about EVs. Fucking 2 hours of charging, my 28kEUR EV could drive from Prague to Spain on two hours of charging.
"I swear buying an EV in 2026 breaks brains. The push back has been so bad because the mfgs pushed the single car lie… but the people that jumped in now need to defend their $60,000 purchases."
Ev's are not 60,000 purchases anymore. They should be significantly cheaper than ICE cars since they are fundamentally simpler
"“5-10 minutes every two hours” … lol, that’s good when you’re going from LA to San Diego. If I had to stop every two hours on a road trip I’d get a train ticket, it would feel a lot faster."
I would be interested to know where you are located in the USA that a train is faster than driving on the highway, its very rare.
> the people that jumped in now need to defend their $60,000 purchases.
First, you're not assuming good faith.
Second, I got a used Model 3 for $16k. I also have an F150. I _choose_ to drive the 3 on road trips. I am not suffering from whatever mental illness you think EV drivers are.
I took a trip from Germany to Italy over the alps with my EV with only 60 kWh of Battery. In reality the largest amount of delay I got due to other uncontrollable factors like a massive 2 hours traffic jam. in contrast to that I had like 1 20 minutes charging break and one 5 minutes to buy my esim that i forgot for switzerland. The 20 minute break i was gonna take anyways to take a piss and eat some food.
> “5-10 minutes every two hours” … lol, that’s good when you’re going from LA to San Diego. If I had to stop every two hours on a road trip I’d get a train ticket, it would feel a lot faster.
Sorry, now you're spewing nonsense. LA to SD does not require charging at all.
I did more than 120000 miles of road trips in my EVs across the US and Canada, even before they were fully covered with charging networks. So I know a thing or two about that.
A good way to think about charging is not in kilowatts but in miles per hour. Tesla Model 3 peak charging rate is 1000 miles per hour, and the average on 10-80% is around 600 mph. The state-of-the-art Chinese cars can charge at 3000 miles per hour and more than 1200 mph on average.
So if you want to do a 500-mile road trip (~8 hours of driving), that's about 45 minutes of charging time for a Tesla and less than 30 minutes for modern Chinese cars.
But wait, there's more! For a 500-mile road trip, you will have at least 200 initial miles covered by your home charging or if you stay overnight in a hotel with a charging station. So that's even less time spent charging.
And yeah, people usually prefer to do more frequent charges rather than drawing the battery down to 10% to alleviate the range anxiety and just as a safety buffer.
I made plenty of spontaneous trips. But even then I just need to pop into my garage, plug in the car, and it'll likely be close to 100% charged within 1-2 hours. Just enough time for me to get breakfast and read the morning YC news.
And even if you totally forget about charging and you really need to go, that's just an additional ~20 minutes or so. You don't even need to plan the route anymore, with so many charging stations available: https://supercharge.info/
I drive an (awesome, by the way) Honda Odyssey. I can get somewhere in the realm of 500 miles from a tank of gas with that capacious machine.
But I can't assume every time I go leave in my gas-fired Honda that the tank is going to be completely full.
I might decide to fill up before I leave town on a long trip, or I might decide to just head out and start it with whatever's already in the tank.
And either way: Refilling will need to happen at some point, just like with an EV.
And that's fine. I'll probably be stopping every couple of hours or so anyway, if I'm doing it right.
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There was a time when I'd cannonball every trip as hard as I could, but it was exhausting to do that. I'd work so hard to minimize travel time ("I must not waste time!") that I was basically useless once I finally arrived at my destination. It was terrible. When I'd finally finish the trip, I would often be in such a bad way that my brain would be fried, my abdominal muscles would hurt, and I was very drained of energy; I was always a dysfunctional asshole who needed a proper nap.
But nowadays, I grant myself the time to take things a little easier and take breaks. This method's on-road time takes longer than a cannonball, but that's OK: It allows me to still be a functional and sane human once I arrive where I'm going.
I mean: I'm not delivering paid-by-the-mile packages here. Rather, I'm going somewhere because I want to enjoy myself when I get there, or because I have work to do (or sometimes a combination of both). Therefore, I do not have to race.
And now that I'm not trying to race from A to B anymore and I choose to take it easy periodically as I go, the trip itself isn't such an exertion.
I can get some fun and/or constructive stuff done once I finally arrive, or if it's appropriate I can lay down for some properly-restorative sleep like a sane person who isn't feeling like they just pulled an all-nighter working on some deeply-involved project that they stubbornly refused to pull myself away from.
The overall time investment of a road trip (including eventual wind-down and recovery) is about the same, but I find that the results are better for the entire duration.
And that's me, with my gas-powered van that can go an astounding 500 miles between refuelling stops.
I don't need that much range to take a long trip; it doesn't help much there at all. And in my normal daily life, the big fuel tank mostly just stretches out the time between visits to my favorite gas station between home and work.
With the long-trip prerogatives I've described, an EV would normally do fine.
And the rest of the time, at least for those whose living situation can allow it: Plugging in at home can often completely eliminate refueling stops during any series of normal weeks. (When EV owners laugh about not being able to remember when the last time they needed to stop at a gas station was, they aren't joking. It works.)
> This is such a euphemism to pretend that you’d like to wait two hours at a refueling station.
What? I said no such thing. I would hate to wait two hours at a refueling station.
> it’s almost fantasy to sell it as “5-10 minutes every two hours”.
I guess I live in fantasy land then.
Maybe the non-Tesla charging story is crap, but I made conscious choices not to participate in that circus.
I have no range anxiety. I point the car where I want to go, it tells me where to charge and for how long, and it’s earned my trust over many road trips. It hasn’t been wrong yet.
uphills + cold/hot climates, the ranges won't be able to compete with ICE. its basic physics. cold uphill still reduces charging speed, available power, and range, while sustained heat accelerates degradation. Thermal-management systems mitigate those weaknesses by consuming energy and adding cost, weight, and complexity.
meanwhile ICE has gotten ridiculously clean and efficient over the years it is more efficient at the shaft does not settle total-system efficiency, cost, weight, resource use, grid losses, battery production, or suitability for every operating env. Comparing an engine with a motor while ignoring the battery and electricity supply chain is silly
I still do not trust that sitting on a pile of lithium batteries is safe. NMC does not mean non flammable or consequence free. LFP cells can still enter thermal runaway, release toxic gases, reignite, and require difficult firefighting procedures. They also generally trade energy density and cold-weather performance for that improved safety. Also the speed charging ? That dramatically reduces the stability and lifespan of the batteries. Ton of used EVs not being sold because the battery replacement is somewhere between 40~60% of the car's value.
we had ICE for over a century now, its just like a software that gets continuous updates ICE systems are highly optimized, repairable, energy-dense, fast to refuel, and supported by enormous infrastructure. EVs are improving faster partly because they still have major weaknesses to solve. A steeper improvement curve does not prove that the present technology is superior for every use case neither is using the latest javascript framework.
Could you ELI5 these basic physics? I've heard many people make claims like this but there's never any physics that actually follows. I've had most of an undergraduate curriculum of physics, so if it's beyond basic, then don't be afraid to refer to those physical ideas.
> meanwhile ICE has gotten ridiculously clean and efficient over the years it is more efficient at the shaft does not settle total-system efficiency, cost, weight, resource use, grid losses, battery production, or suitability for every operating env
Is 30% "ridiculously clean and efficient"? 35%? I'm not sure I can agree with that at all.
Battery production? That's ridiculously efficient. For a very small amount weight, there's an insane amount of Wh that get shuttled through that material, which can then be recycled into even more kWh of storage than went into the recycling process, due to the continual improvement in battery production efficiency.
Meanwhile, every single gallon of gas results in 20 pounds of CO2 emissions. Fracking oil requires disposing of 2-10 gallons of dirty waste water for every gallon of gas. That's a massive amount of waste for only 20-50 vehicle miles.
> The latest battery chemistries perform incredibly well in cold and hot climates.
Oh? Show me a model of EV that has it is going to lower capacity battery heating and cooling systems.
I’m an automotive EE… I can’t name any. I’m working on things that will go in 2032 vehicles. Surprise, most are ICE, but of the EV vehicles the battery protection systems are becoming more rugged, not less.
Sodium batteries loose only 10% or capacity and doesn't need pre-heating when charging. Latest Chinese LFPs perform well in cold too (I don't know exact deets and tbf they don't do great job publishing them other than marketing fluff). Also added ripple preheating that Tesla has.
I'm surprised they didn't flag and downvote you. There seems to be a certain crowd that seems view EV as sort of a panacea without considering the true realities which involve experience and research to know they are far from replacing ICE
If ICE is the only vehicle for you, because of religious reasons, thats okay. There are large and small countries ( China, Norway) that have majority EV cars and continue to grow. There are 120+ other countries that are buying EVs. Even in US, there are a few people who have bought EVs and realized it works for them.
A person who really needs an ICE car would encourage others to buy EVs because it would reduce oil demand, and with demand destruction, considerably lower oil prices. With lowered demand, Saudi Arabia can supply a barrel for $5 - $10/barrel from Ghawar Field. Which means a gas-head who commutes every day from Yukon, Canada to Guadalajara, Mexico has a significantly lower gas bill.
The only people who wants everyone to buy ICE are fossil fuel shills.
The whole world is in a transition phase. For some it will make sense to jump to pure EV use, for others it won't. That whole “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.” thing...
I have one of each. They work well for different reasons.
EV is the charge-at-home city car that is preferred for every day use.
The ICE is for when two cars are needed and long distance travel because charging stations here are not well sorted yet.
My plan for the future: The ICE car will be replaced with a hybrid with a significant emphasis on battery. Then eventually it'll be an EV as well. We'll get there.
This is the correct use for EV. A second car, around town. Perfect.
The EV push back is because the MBAs decide to market them as replacement daily drivers. And despite the people that went all in being part of the same reality that has caused the massive pushback against EVs… they will defend their purchases to the death.
I have had two EVs for around town. Love em. But not real for only car outside of California.
Very happy with an EV as our only car here in Europe. No charger at home. The car does about 24k kilometers per year, including road trips and vacations. Remember that there are other countries on the planet and lots of other people.
Thats correct, but Americans are conditioned by fossil fuel shills that EVs are not for them, driven by irrational fear of range anxiety. To dispel a lie, we need to spend 100x effort[1]. Its hard to convince everyone to switch to EVs, perhaps we agree with the false premise, but break it down and focus on certain demographics that it will work for.
a) 37% of US households own two vehicles. This is the biggest demographic and they can definitely have one EV.
b) College students and professors/administrators who live close to campus. They drive a lot less, ~5K miles/year instead of 12 - 15K miles/year.
c) Retired people, very old people who only drive around town for shopping, doctor appointments.
As adoption increases, most Americans would have seen first hand that EVs work and they can charge anywhere, electricity is not scarce and every building has electricity (don't need to go somewhere special just to charge it), electricity is not the work of the devil, it is okay to use EVs.
I suspect there's a big of cognitive dissonance here. My guess US has more emphasis on road trips, longer distances, vastly more wilderness areas, etc.
Europe is mostly urbanized it's almost boring. Dunno about China, but I guess they cracked charging infrastructure.
“Oh, but Norway uses EVs a ton!” … cool, Norway is the size of an average US state, the population of Connecticut, over an extremely thin area which optimizes one vector of infrastructure automatically. And makes the majority of its money on oil.
Geez, almost like EV ultra-success stories aren’t even remotely comparable the rest of the world.
If Norway is the size of an US state, what’s stopping every state from being like Norway? Or does it somehow matter for EV efficiency or charging speed how far away the borders are?
I finally met someone who plans to downgrade from EV to ICE. He does 100k km per year, running multiple businesses. Lives 120km outside Dublin. Biggest issue seems to be wait at public charge stations. IMO he needs to get long range EV and get better chargers at home/work. But oh well, I'm not going to stop him if he's going to get luxury sports cars instead lol.
China cold tests their EVs in Harbin and Mohe, where “cold” means -40 (F or C doesn’t matter, it’s the same). They lose some range, and indoor charging garages are more common (for better charging performance), but the tech has gotten good enough that even harbiners (a small city of 20 million people) are adopting EVs at a rapid clip.
It is so rare for EVs to catch fire that it makes the news whenever one does, and these form the core of the anti-EV memes that are popular with boomers on Facebook.
Democracies are pretty good at studying the failures of other countries and learning about them.
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