Preach brother!

Actually the batteries in most EVs know their actual remaining capacity for safety and operational purposes, it’s calculated and probably not as accurate as an actual test, but good enough for our purposes. Problem is that it’s usually either obscured (my LEAF uses “bars” that don’t directly correlate to a fixed…

Capacity remaining depends on a lot of different factors, but there are ways to determine it. Unfortunately like cell phones, the tech has improved over time, and the early ones are usually the most susceptible to degradation over time.

To be fair Daimler basically destroyed Chrysler management and sucked them dry while giving them leftover technology and platforms in return, then took all their management personnel back and sold them off to Cerberus who might have been willing to fund a turnaround until the market tanked Cerberus basically cut…

because it’s a powerful Dodge and people love powerful Dodges

the SandFox team from Estonia have converted an old GAZ-M20 Pobeda into an electric car, which has earned my Official Badassery Seal of Approval.

Exactly, when I was a kid I wanted all the HP, then I got a reasonably powerful car and quickly learned it’s rarely usable and that’s actually MORE frustrating than when I had a “normal” car. Being Superman sounds like fun till you realize you’ll spend most of your time holding back.

5th Gear: I feel that this is just the shine starting to come off of Tesla. While they were and in some ways still are a groundbreaking company, how long have we discussed that their stock price made seemingly no sense in relation to the company performance, and was mostly based on future dreams and promises.

It does have a reasonable range, but they are also aiming for the Audi of luxury/performance they are known for, so ultimate mileage wasn’t their key metric. The extra money over cheaper EVs is partly an Audi tax, but mostly because you also get two motors, air suspension, and a true high end interior. That means less…

No. From the press release this is just a new version of their CAN bus architecture. The “network” that connects the different components inside a car. They don’t go into a ton of detail but sounds like it’s a faster network that also probably supports more complex communication protocols for future-proofing.

Great point. We also assume there is a “right” decision. I mean we like to make up these moral quandaries and somehow assume the car wouldn’t be “smart” enough, but in the end the car will do whatever it is programmed to do, and those “decisions” will likely be far better than ours if for no other reason then the…

I think that’s the point you’re missing though, sure places where people already use taxis a lot will still make sense when they’re automated, but that’s actually fairly small pockets of the country (or world) right now, the magic dream promised by these companies was that autonomous cars would make it cheaper to rent…

I’m never going to give anyone a pass on safety, and they should be asking questions and looking at data, the town would be far better off hiring a company to advise them on nuclear safety and maybe develop a monitoring plan of their own, (airborne sampling is stupid though, worry about the water) but as someone workin…

Yucca Mountain is for high level radioactive waste, the actual nuclear material this site was working on, not the low level material they want to put here, which is the secondary material like the buildings and equipment and similar which could have come in contact with radioactive material, or have contamination…

Neutral: Actually I don’t have a major problem with autonomous cars as it will be a long time before self-driving cars are either outlawed or heavily restricted, so my “fun” vehicles are going to be useable for probably the rest of my life, and to be honest why would I want to buy an autonomous sports car? Will it…

Good god no, the physics of crashing a 7000+ lb RV doing 60 against even a 2000+ lb sub compact head on at the same speed would be at least as bad as this test and probably worse. That’s like saying bullets can’t hurt you because of the difference in mass, it just doesn’t work that way.

Straight 6 engines typically have 7 main bearings vs 4 for a V6, so they are typically more robust, e.g. you can beat on them harder, or at least that’s my understanding of the biggest advantage.

I am admittedly biased here (I’ve only ever owned one non-Mopar vehicle in 25 years of driving and my avatar is of the first defunct Chrysler brand), but they’re not wrong here. Jeep is Jeep, enough said. Outside that for as much as Jalopnik looks down on them they are typically the “other” brand, and it has done them…

While true, there are two issues. One is that new batteries will be available. This will get better as the technology matures, but it assumes a manufacturer will be producing the right battery pack in 10 years or so, they let you swap it out (some are software locked to the car), or that the aftermarket shows up to do…

Problem is there’s a lot of variables in that metric. My 2013 leaf went from around 90% when I bought it in 2017 to around 60% today. Missed the battery warranty by 3 weeks, and I rarely fast charge or charge to 100%