For those thinking that’s not enough. That’s federal. He still has to be sentenced in California state court. Could end up with an even longer sentence.
I feel like we’ve had this discussion elsewhere… :-) I apologize for the long reply, if so.
Here’s why I think battery swap makes sense:
For the vast majority of people, cars are a means to an end. Like the saying: people don’t want a drill, they want a hole. They want to get from point A to B, get something done, then come back and get on with their life.
Charging for 10-40 minutes at a time adds friction to the A to B and back process. People are used to stopping for gas, gritting their teeth at how expensive it is, filling up, then moving on and not giving it another thought.
Charging while shopping/parking, etc. is fine, except when the spots are all taken. As more people get EVs, this will happen more often. There’s no point having an infinite battery if you can’t find an open charger when you’re running into a store.
L2 charging at home is convenient. They should keep letting people do that. But it adds $500-$2K to the cost of switching from ICE to EV. It’s also not easily available to people in rental apartments and high-rise condos. Some landlords are adding L2 chargers, but now you have to deal with charger congestion. Same with L2 chargers at offices, grocery stores, and parking lots.
Not having L2 at home means L1 (take forever), public L2 (see above), or having to pop into L3 chargers every few days (broken units, congested, expensive, affects life of battery).
L2 charging off home solar and battery is the BEST (zero blackouts, zero monthly power bills 🎉, and feeling superior to mere mortals). But now we’ve added $5-$30K to the switching cost. Definitely a luxury. Also, Fuck You Todd, you supercilious prick.
J1772, CHAdeMO, CCS1, CCS2, GB/T, NACS. Just shoot me now. Try explaining that insanity to Grandpa without feeling like a tool.
Most decently made ICE cars last a long time (10-40 years) and have a resale/trade-in value. The things that lower the value over time (engine, cylinders, transmission, radiator, catalytic converter, exhaust) don’t exist in EVs.
The main thing that can wear down and affect resale in EVs is… the battery. By most accounts, 10 years and number of fast-charge cycles is the limit. Then you either replace the battery or take a big loss on resale.
A lot of hybrid Priuses had to have battery replacements once they hit the 10-year mark. Nissans used to show the number of recharge cycles adding to anxiety levels over how much time was left on the car.
Here’s why swapping makes sense: it removes all of the above.
Every issue becomes a non-issue if there were universal swap stations sprinkled around neighborhoods.
Like most things, there’s a trade-off:
I’m getting a nasty old battery on this swap.
I don’t actually own the battery in my car. That affects the resale value.
There is no single battery pack standard. It’s not a scalable solution.
The first one is mitigated by the fact that the solution is to just swap again. Or even better, have a smart BMS that reports back to the swap station data on charge depletion. That way it knows to take the bad battery packs out of circulation or refurbish the cells. It can also setup economics where the older packs cost less to swap, for people willing to trade fuel cost for convenience.
The second is where I think the logic is inverted. The battery locked inside my car is degrading over time and is actually dragging down the resale value. Taking it out of the equation means the resale value is now based on other attributes: wear and tear on motors, telematics, and consumables (tires, brakes, etc) all of which will be cheaper to replace than the battery.
The third one is the most important. We’re 10-15 years into the EV adoption cycle. It’s not too late to plan ahead, if people actually demand it. NACS adoption announcements show us it’s possible for carmakers to agree on a single standard.
Notice I haven’t mentioned distance travel. That’s because stopping for a long charge can be a positive experience for some people who could use the physical break, but a pain in the ass for those who need to get to their destination quickly. Depends on which camp you fall into.
The distribution of non-Tesla supercharger networks in the U.S. is so uneven people have to decide whether to take an EV or ICE, depending on how close their destination is to a major highway. Yes, we can build out thousands more stations, but that’s not addressing the concern of those who just want to get from A to B and don’t have hours to spare.
Outside the U.S. the situation is much better, which is why EV adoption is going more smoothly (helps having a better selection of models). Also, in many parts of the world, public transportation is actually viable, so NO CAR is an option. But the A to B time and resale value concerns stand for many people looking for their next car.
Back to EVs. Here in the U.S. if you drive on a busy holiday to a major metropolitan area, once you get there, you’re risking spending a substantial part of that trip waiting and worrying. For a spot to open up, for how long to budget for charging, and how much to trust the app telling you there’s an open spot.
Personal anecdote: Today, I wouldn’t buy an EV in Southern California unless I could charge at home. Next time visiting, I’ll rent an ICE. It’s that bad.
When it comes to charging stations, I personally like talking to people and have had great conversations with some colorful characters while waiting, but that’s also time I’m not spending on the purpose of the trip.
Again, battery swapping would solve all that.
The first time I saw it in action was 7-8 years ago in Taiwan with Gogoro scooters (www.gogoro.com/gogoro-network/). Saw someone ride up to a 7-11, pull out their battery, pop in a new one, and be gone in 60 seconds. I was sold.
Bottom line: the best user experience is not having to spend a minute thinking about charging. Ever.
[ Again, sorry for the long soliloquy. This is the sort of topic best hashed over a pint while someone points at how daft I’m being. ]
One of the things they glided around was whether a lot of this on-device stuff needs a special processor chip with AI+security to work?
The Pixel phones (especially newer ones) made by Google have them, but the vast majority of Android phones don’t.
So either these features only work on latest Google phones (which will piss off licensees and partners), or they’re using plain old CPU/GPUs to do this sort of detection, in which case it will be sniffable by malicious third-parties.
And let’s not forget that if the phone can listen to your conversation to detect malicious intent, any country can legally compel Google to provide them with the data by claiming it is part of a law-enforcement investigation.
In 1991, Look of the Year was hosted by real-estate mogul Donald Trump at the Plaza Hotel in New York, which he owned. Former US President Trump and Copperfied were among the 10 judges.
I was thinking about how I missed having an indoor thermometer that measures humidity. It’s such a small specific thing, one I’d never think of getting unless pushed to it (which I was by one particularly dry winter). But I like having one now....
Kevin Roberts remembers when he could get a bacon cheeseburger, fries and a drink from Five Guys for $10. But that was years ago. When the Virginia high school teacher recently visited the fast-food chain, the food alone without a beverage cost double that amount....
I was running between work and meeting friends for drinks last week. Lost track of time and it got past 10pm. On the way home, saw a Burger King drive-in. Haven’t had fast food in years (we eat at home a lot). What the hell.
Two discoveries:
A small Whopper meal was over $15!
My stomach didn’t appreciate it all night and most of the next day.
For that kind of money, you can do much better. Lesson learned.
Last week, NASA announced it is working with a technology development company on a new propulsion system that could transport humans to Mars in only two months – down from the current nine month journey required to reach the Red Planet. Gizmodo reports:...
They stopped it because of the risk of fallout if a launch vehicle loaded with radioactive material exploded. Wonder how this new idea is going to get around that problem?
IIRC, the concern with Project Orion was that if nuclear fissile material exploded in the upper atmosphere, it could get trapped and basically poison the entire planet, making it uninhabitable for a really long time.
The problem may not be solved with deregulation alone.
1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) is among companies that are suing the wife of former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak for allegedly obtaining over US$346 million worth of luxury goods through misappropriated funds.
Jho Low, one of the key figures behind the 1MDB scandal (supposed contributor to the PM’s funds) is said to have funneled even more, investing in Hollywood movies and dating actresses and supermodels. He is still a fugitive. There’s a fascinating book on the whole thing: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_Dollar_Whale
Watching it, my first thought was if it could also be used as s display for a large calculator? Guessing the computation part would require electronics, but then again, there used to be geared tabletop calculators.
For the longest time, if you needed a CPU, your choices were basically IBM, Intel, DEC, or Motorola (ignoring small, embedded systems). Then some academic papers came out on the value of a ‘reduced’ instruction set. That led to Sun SPARC, IBM POWER, MIPS, PowerPC (and a few other) processors, most of which eventually disappeared.
Another group called ARM came along and offered not just an alternate reduced instruction set, but also the baseline code needed to implement all that. This way, you could cobble together your own CPU for exactly what features you needed (memory, disk, networking, GPU, etc). Having a baseline sped up development a lot, but you had to license that stack and pay ARM royalties.
That hummed along quietly until Apple and NVidia decided to create their own ARM-based chips. All of a sudden, ARM became known as a beefy, power-efficient option for phones, desktops, laptops, and servers.
In 2010, a bunch of academics dusted off the old RISC papers and came up with RISC-V. Companies were started to follow the same model as ARM: modules you could cobble together to make a custom processor. Except all of it was open-source and you didn’t have to pay the ARM license fee.
AI/ML processors are now the new thing. The big race is between Intel, ARM-based processors, and RISC backers to see who can come up with integrated, power-efficient AI processing features and quickly roll them out to customers. That world is divided between beefy processors used for training in data centers, and small, efficient ones used for running inference at the edge (ie phones, cars, gateways, etc).
A lot of people have talked about the possibility of forking Mastodon to get the many improvements their communities need. Making such an effort successful is another discussion entirely.
Hiya, just quickly wondering how people store their coffee? Mine is in a tin box I got second hand, cos I thought it looked nice. Any rules regarding storing grounded coffee? I don’t store much at the time, it’s just if I grind a little too much and what not. I’m assuming the general thumb rule for this is to store it in a...
Paul Pelosi attacker sentenced to 30 years in prison (www.bbc.com)
The man who attacked the husband of former US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been sentenced to 30 years in prison....
Slightly less than two drinks = positive effect on programming ability (lemmy.world)
arxiv.org/abs/2404.10002...
Ford asks suppliers for ideas to cut EV costs in an all-win-or-lose push for profitability (electrek.co)
Happy Friday, Lemmy. What are your plans for the weekend?
This weekend I aim to relax as much as my children will let me. But my younger daughter turns one on Sunday. So, we’ll likely celebrate that.
Another EV Factory Has Unionized Boosting Labor’s Push In US South (www.bloomberg.com)
Dangerous? Signal Blasts Google Effort to Use AI to Scan for Scam Phone Calls (uk.pcmag.com)
Google’s AI model will potentially listen in on all your phone calls — or at least ones it suspects are coming from a fraudster....
Former teen models accuse magician David Copperfield of misconduct (www.theguardian.com)
Some allege harassment, one claims she was sexually assaulted. His lawyers deny the allegations...
What song grounds you when you feel like you're living through a hurricane?
VW just released details of the 2025 VW ID. Buzz's US trims (electrek.co)
Are there any household gadgets you found unexpectedly useful after you'd gotten them?
I was thinking about how I missed having an indoor thermometer that measures humidity. It’s such a small specific thing, one I’d never think of getting unless pushed to it (which I was by one particularly dry winter). But I like having one now....
Americans are choking on surging fast-food prices. "I can't justify the expense," one customer says (www.cbsnews.com)
Kevin Roberts remembers when he could get a bacon cheeseburger, fries and a drink from Five Guys for $10. But that was years ago. When the Virginia high school teacher recently visited the fast-food chain, the food alone without a beverage cost double that amount....
Destroying friendship (file.coffee)
NASA's Proposed Plasma Rocket Would Get Us to Mars in 2 Months (gizmodo.com)
Last week, NASA announced it is working with a technology development company on a new propulsion system that could transport humans to Mars in only two months – down from the current nine month journey required to reach the Red Planet. Gizmodo reports:...
[Highlight] The Cubs draw 6 bases-loaded walks in the 5th inning and take the lead 6-8 over the Pirates. (streamable.com)
Was your starting word "the word" yet? (lemmy.world)
I see now it was on christmas for me, 24.12.2022....
Malaysian ex-PM"s wife sued over $346m of luxury goods (www.bangkokpost.com)
1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB) is among companies that are suing the wife of former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak for allegedly obtaining over US$346 million worth of luxury goods through misappropriated funds.
I made a 3D printed mechanical digital clock (lemmy.world)
Youtube video...
Open Source RISC-V projects
Been studying RISC-V for… I think a year now. Bought the booklet outlining the ISA’s modules, and have been working down from there....
This Jerk Parks His Cybertruck in an SF Crosswalk Every Day (brokeassstuart.com)
NIO & GAC Become Partners On Charging & Swapping - CleanTechnica (cleantechnica.com)
The Trouble with Forking Mastodon (wedistribute.org)
A lot of people have talked about the possibility of forking Mastodon to get the many improvements their communities need. Making such an effort successful is another discussion entirely.
How do you store your grounded coffee? (slrpnk.net)
Hiya, just quickly wondering how people store their coffee? Mine is in a tin box I got second hand, cos I thought it looked nice. Any rules regarding storing grounded coffee? I don’t store much at the time, it’s just if I grind a little too much and what not. I’m assuming the general thumb rule for this is to store it in a...