I’ve often advocated for this, but I don’t anymore, because have you tried to rent a car lately?

Yeah. EVs make a great “second car” for cheap commuting, but for long trips you still need an ICE. Honestly, for a lot of people the most cost-effective solution would be renting a car for the occasional road trip, but lately the rental car market has imploded, so that’s not quite so attractive anymore either.

I plan where I stop for the night (because most campgrounds require reservations) but I don’t plan every fuel stop. I run off the front tank until it’s empty, then I start looking for a gas station once I reach 1/2 on the rear tank. That’s about the extent of my planning. ;)

The problem with battery swapping is the battery is the single heaviest component of the EV, and it’s tied into not only the electrical system but the cooling system as well. It’s like offering engine swapping; it’s a really complex ask. Not to mention that it precludes using the battery as a stressed component of the…

Unattended point-of-sale systems seem like a technology that should have been perfected by now but is shockingly unreliable. With everything from vending machines with tap-to-pay to pay-at-the-pump systems at gas stations, I’m constantly running into errors.

Not only is the Cybertruck extremely polarizing, to say the least (not necessarily a bad thing for a small car company), it involves build processes that aren’t applicable to Tesla’s other vehicles. It’s a weird outlier.

You also don’t want to start the engine if the car is in an enclosed garage, or you’ll quickly convert one lethal problem into another.

Yup. Most cars have a manual way to reset the cutoff, but there’s no way I’m going to be digging through the owner’s manual learning where it is while I’m exposed in the middle of a freeway.

This actually goes back way further than airbags. Fuel injected cars have had inertial fuel pump cutoffs since way back in the 80s, so that the electric in-tank fuel pump won’t keep pumping fuel into a potential fire. This wasn’t a concern before that because most cars had engine-driven pumps that would stop as soon…

I would not touch this for any price, but Jeep people are their own breed, so I expect a bidding war that ends with some fanatic paying $5000.

Pickle fork. If it has an actual useful purpose it involves smacking things with it, not the claimed purpose of removing tie rod ends. Use one of those little screw presses instead, it works 10 times better and doesn’t tear the boot.

I don’t actually care what you do as long as you’re not standing there blocking the aisle because the bins are full, when I’m trying to board.

Cycle Gear is great when I need something in a hurry, or when I need a tire mounted, or for things like helmets that I need to try on. You’re right, though, the stores always look like they’ve been arranged by the Random Stocking Fairy.

This reminds me that a lesson I learned while working for a small, struggling company was that “we’re having trouble with our supplier” almost always means “we have Net 30 terms and we haven’t paid them in six months.”

True, I only flew in there once. The customs checks delayed me enough that I don’t remember any bag delays. ;)

I mean, it happened to me once, in like 2008. That wasn’t enough to put me off checking bags forever, I guess.

I’m not asking you about the show itself. The show demonstrated what you’d expect — that if you starve people and force them to exercise until they collapse they’ll lose weight. What the studies afterward found was that it was nearly impossible to keep the weight off, because the result of all that was that people’s…

They’re pretty rare, but it’s a free country, so by all means keep trying to stuff a giant rollaboard into the overhead bin. Just don’t drop it on my head.

Have you seen the Biggest Loser follow-up study? It’s pretty sobering. Your body will downregulate your metabolism more for every pound you lose.

45. My knees are mostly OK. I didn’t sign up for high school football and thus avoided the kind of knee carnage that happened to most male members of my family.