JoshuaFalken

I wrote elsewhere about the infrastructure problem, but I'll sum up a couple things. There's around 200,000 gas stations in the United States. If there were an equivalent number of chargers around, having a small battery would be fine. Eventually this will be the case, but you highlight an important factor: closed ecosystems. All these chargers should work for any make of EV car.

As it stands with now, the need for a subscription or specific car or unique payment method is ludicrous. All these chargers should be required to have card readers the same way you can pay at the pump in a gas station. Beyond this, they'd all need to adopt the same charging method so people don't need a bunch of adapters in their trunk.

That said, there could be regulations established to require newly built housing, apartment buildings included, to have electric vehicle charging infrastructure - and more than just a few plugs. Grants could be made available for retrofitting existing buildings. If these things came to fruition, we wouldn't need two hundred thousand charging stations all over the place. It's not out of the question to install an overnight charging spot for every person that has an electric car - it just costs money.

Basically every argument I've seen against low range electric cars is founded in a charging infrastructure problem. Going to a bigger battery in a larger vehicle has significant and more costly ramifications on other infrastructure. It's better to aim for smaller, lighter vehicles with infrastructure in mind.

That obviously isn't their position. They don't own the building they live in nor the business they work for.

The used market is different for EVs than a combustion vehicle. I looked for a BMW i3 a while back and was only finding them halfway across the continent. Maybe that's because people keep them for longer? Not sure that market has developed enough to know one way or another.

I understand what you mean about the average person getting it, and while that is important, I think the primary issue is the limited selection of small EVs on the market. As you point out, if foreign vehicles could be acquired without the steep cost, more people would drive them. As it stands, domestic automakers don't want to make anything but twenty foot long SUVs because of the huge profit margins on them.

As far as ebikes go, I am definitely on that boat. Don't have one myself - call me a traditionalist - but I wish more people would consider them. I agree that in higher temperatures, or humidity which I find worse, it's uncomfortable. Though the benefit of (maybe idealistically) not having a car payment and associated insurance go a long way to making that discomfort palatable.

Personally, I've got a trailer for my bike that I've been using to ride 10-15 minutes to the grocery stores and do errands. A time or two I have even gotten some lumber with it from the hardware store. I thought about a specific cargo bike a while back but decided not to have an entire bicycle for that sort of thing. The trailer is smaller anyway.

The safety factor of riding opposed to driving is the most important factor in my mind. It's dangerous to ride along the side of a multi lane road. Paint doesn't stop drivers from crossing into a 'bike lane'. Even a curb or those plastic bollards are insufficient in my mind. I ride nearly primarily on trails or the type of streets that are small enough not to have any painted lines. For busier routes I use the sidewalk or even the boulevard if there is one.

The more people getting on the ebike wagon could cause better riding options to be developed in the area. That's political though. Even if it doesn't, it's one more person taking a trip not in a car, making it a tiny bit safer.

Don't get me wrong, obviously people like yourself make these long ish trips regularly and you'd benefit either from more range or better infrastructure. If, like gas stations, there were two hundred thousand charging stations sprinkled through the country, less range in the car would be less of a concern.

I know someone from my college days that hung a 100' cord out her third story window to plug in her little EV. Nissan Leaf or something of that class. Worked like a charm for puttering around town.

I'm sure the data isn't perfect, but as far as the averages go, it's accurate for my driving patterns. Those trips you're taking nearly double your yearly mileage, so that would certainly change your average. Without them though, you wouldn't be too far off based on what you've described. I'm fortunate that I live near a train line for my regular trips out of town. Not an option for the vast majority unfortunately.

Another option a couple I know took was a hybrid. Most of the time they don't use the engine, but when they go see family or what have you, they've got the range they need without having to find a charger. Pretty convenient if you ask me.

Eventually we'll have charging stations all over, or maybe light rail, and going hundreds of miles in a day without a thought to battery depletion, but I doubt I'll be around to see it.

A 300 Mi charge would mean if you can't charge daily, you would be able to go a couple of days without having to do so.

Given most trips are less than 3 miles, if you had a 300 mile range vehicle, that's about three months of average driving, not a couple of days. My point was that people don't go on long drives the vast majority of time and don't more than fifty or so miles of range.

I'll use Tesla as the example here only because it's the prominent electric car brand. Directly from them:

A 120 volt outlet will supply 2 to 3 miles of range per hour of charge. If you charge overnight and drive less than 30 to 40 miles per day, this option should meet your typical charging needs.

They go one to say you can get a 10x improvement on the miles per hour when charging from a 240v outlet. Even accounting for installation of a new outlet to the garage or side of the house, this would be far cheaper than buying a vehicle with hundreds of miles of range and using a supercharger every other week.

Sodium could easily replace lithium in EV applications if people would acknowledge that only 2% of trips are more than 50 miles. Though it's probably moreso the auto industry's fault that people have this assumption they need to prepare for a three hundred mile journey on a moments notice.

If manufacturers were putting out cars that had four figure price tags with double digit ranges, they would become the best selling vehicles within a decade and no one would care if it was sodium, lithium, or sawdust. Of course, there is less profit to be made from smaller vehicles and so the corporations won't bother.

While the labels give retailers the ability to increase prices suddenly, Gallino doubts companies like Walmart will take advantage of the technology in that way.

“To be honest, I don’t think that’s the underlying main driver of this,” Gallino said. “These are companies that tend to have a long-term relationship with their customers and I think the risk of frustrating them could be too risky, so I would be surprised if they try to do that.”

Rather than seeing an opportunity to use surge pricing, Gallino says retailers are likely drawn to electronic shelf tags to ensure consistency between online and in-store pricing.

This person must live on another planet.

Sure, the prices won't be changing every six seconds, but anyone with half a mind can see these tags won't be used only when stock or expiry are a factor. The prices will be up on the weekend to start. Then later it'll be changing through the day to get higher prices between 4:00-7:00 when people are getting off work.

The arguments of no longer needing people to do yet another menial task and increasing utility of labels for consumers both have merit, but this alien even says the primary factor:

“The bottom line ... is the calculation of the amount of labor that they’re going to save by incorporating this."

Agreed. The whole idea of these huge payouts could be eliminated and replaced with what exists for everyone else - severance pay. Calculated off a regulated minimum formula, based primarily on how long the person served the company.

I also agree with you that the top and bottom salaries should have a correlation. The C suite making the salary of a shelf stocker in one day should not happen. I think I could accept that the top gets somewhere around 10 or 20 times higher salary. Even 100x would be an improvement to the way it is now.

Like you point out, between stock options and whatever else, an executive salary could be a few hundred thousand, even if their total compensation is tens of millions. In fantasy land it would be nice if, once a company grows to a certain point, say a billion dollars in value, if it were required to convert to an employee owned cooperative entity.

It's a shame things are the way they are. Maybe one day we won't have politicians that can be bought. That's a different discussion altogether.

In an ideal world, the penalties you describe are suitable. Though, gaming industry aside, for the executive level of most any corporation, being a scapegoat and handed a golden parachute is the worst case scenario for them leaving. In many cases floating across the street right into another executive position.

Jail time isn't a likely outcome. It just isn't the world we live in, unfortunately.

I was looking at the Volt a couple years ago but the only ones around were over 25k. Then I started looking for a BMW i3, but, like so many of the cheaper EVs, there's not many for sale. It's a shame these smaller vehicles, even a hybrid, aren't pumped out the factories left, right, and centre.

It'd be so much safer - and quieter - in the city if smaller cars were more pervasive.

It's almost like they knew in the sixties that they were in for some problems and have since been devising ever more complicated methods of disinforming the public in order to maintain their wealth. Does my head in sometimes.

Without knowing any examples of the vehicles that are for sale everywhere except, roughly, half the world, I can't really say much them. What I can say is that compared to the monstrous subsidies the oil and gas industry recieve, it does seem like those tariffs could be done away with. At least on the face of it, perhaps the issue is more intricate than that but I'm sure you grasp my meaning.