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kleinbl00  ·  610 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Californians asked to cut power use as extreme heat approaches

    I think people tend to buy cars for their edge use cases

That's the Pareto Principle right there, though - 80% of the time, you won't use that last 20%.

I've long argued that any fool can do 80% of someone else's job. I don't care what that job is. Clearly, Tesla's Autopilot will get you there safely 80% of the time. It's that last 20% that fucks you over, and there's no way around it. That's why Tesla rolled out their autopilot while Google's self-driving technology remains a lab curiosity 10 years later: Tesla and Uber are perfectly happy to sell something that will do the job in anything but an emergency while Google knows emergencies are where lawsuits happen.

An electric car would get my wife to and from work 99% of the time. It's the home visits that might be a problem, but not realistically. Now - what if we want to drive out to the coast? That's gonna be 300 miles, realistically, and if we have to do it in my Porsche I will be the only one having fun, and that fun will last until we make it and recognize just how much luggage we had to leave behind. So I could buy my wife an electric car? But I'd also have to either (A) pay for an extra car for when we want to get somewhere or (B) get rid of my car so we probably won't be buying one.

And that has been my experience with electric cars, and with everyone I know with electric cars: they're awesome if you have a fallback because it fucking sucks to have to rent a car just to take a road trip and makes you feel like a choad. Is that going to change? Undoubtedly. Will there come a time when I don't hate every electric vehicle I could buy? Probably. Will it be a Dodge Charger? Definitely not.

I built my first and second electric cars in 1995. I worked on them off and on through the '90s. They've come a long damn way - longer than we ever imagined back then, thanks solely to the advances in battery technology engendered by the Razr and iPhone. Hybrids? I mean the difference between a Prius and a Chevette is the smugness. I think the future is bright? But I'm not ready to say the future is here.

Now if you'll excuse me I need to go attempt to rationalize an Aptera deposit again.