Hmm, curious, I remember seeing way more Crown Vics and other Panther platform vehicles from the 90's onward then Tauruses, even into the late 2000's. Wonder if it was just a regional thing where I lived...
As far as I was aware the others didn't sell in any close to the same numbers. The Crown Vic and it's Panther platform siblings were the basis for taxis and police cars across the US and Canada for a long time, and they could be had second hand for for a few months pay cheque back in the day.
I think you're romanticizing that era a bit. The most commonly sold CUV's today are smaller length and width wise then station wagons or sedans way back when. The Crown Victoria was considered a regular sized sedan for it's day and it's as long as a crew cab F150. The land yachts easily match the footprint of the super cab F150 with shorter beds today, they just seem smaller because they're lower.
Reasonable so, slump tests have been in use for as long as I can remember. There's a couple of other tests that need to be performed as well for fresh concrete. One for air content in the concrete, then temperature and volumetric weight.
IIRC the big tests that occur are the cylinder samples that are taken as well of the concrete and allowed to cure to full strength before destructively tested anywhere from a week to a month after pouring.
>a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced
Maybe? At least in my experience, once the cost of patching buggy software goes down, it typically means that the people become more willing to ship software with more bugs with a fix it later attitude.
Disagree, we do have the Bach's and Rachmanioff's today: John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Bear McCreary, Yuki Kajiura, Hans Zimmer, and probably a slew I'm not even aware of today.
We're in the greatest era of symphonies IMO, it's just that they're hiding in surprising places; movies, TV shows, games, etc.
I'm a little confused why you think that's wild; It's pricing is inline with other BEV's in the Canadian market at least; it's comparing with the Model Y, the Equinox, the Blazer, the Mach e, the Ioniq 5, the EV6, the BZ4, and the Aryia.
Typically speaking you're going to spend $10,000 to $13,000 more then an equivalent gas car for a BEV vs a comparable gas car in Canada.
OEM volume pricing is $20 USD or so for system builders like Dell, HP, etc last time I saw it, but that was a long time ago. So technically yes it was purchased if you bought a system, it was just built into the price.
> Remember that gas stations weren’t on very corner when the gasoline car was invented, either.
Yeah but gotta keep in mind when the first gas cars as tools came out, you didn't need a gas station on every corner either. You bought your fuel from the drug store. Even then a lot of early 'gas' cars were readily modified to be multifuel; kerosene (which was available everywhere due to use of for lighting), naptha, coal gas, mineral spirits, but you could modify the car to run off moonshine if need be.
But okay, let's just say for a second that there were no world wars, and in this universe petroleum wasn't discovered until a good chunk of electric infrastructure was built out.
I'd probably wager that liquid fuel engines would probably catch up to the electric vehicles pretty fast and likely surpass it in popularity in 30 or 40 years. You can pack a gas motor that outputs 20x more power into a package that's the same size as a DC motor. For farmer's that's a vehicle that can till deeper or a larger piece of land in a single pass, for merchants that means more goods you can carry in a single run.
For the wealthier class probably the electric would've been attractive but keep in mind that one of the biggest reasons wealthy urbanites owned cars at the time was for racing. Electrics in the original timeline were considered to be more ladylike because you didn't need the muscles to manually crank the engine (and risk punching yourself in the face when it turned unexpectedly). Probably in this timeline though, because electric motors are more advanced, you bypass that problem much more quickly and now you've got a vehicle that's only slightly more maintenance, but way more capable. And when the first times when a gas car out runs electrics of that era and makes said wealthy BEV owners look slower... yeah.
Yeah I'd assume that BEV's would advance more but ultimately they'd probably just hit the plateau of what battery chemistry and DC motor design can with pure analog systems, probably with either NiCD or NiMH chemistry. The next big leap with chemistry from those to lithium didn't really hit mainstream until the advent of extremely battery management circuits came about. And without WW2 in this universe driving the need for transistors...
>I also think your use of your personal anecdote isn’t a very convincing argument by itself. BEVs aren’t right for you as of today, in a world which isn’t a part of this hypothetical. You also pointed out that you are a minority outlier by having odd requirements like “I don’t have data on my smartphone.” Do you think that’s common? I think most people even un in developing countries have smartphone data access.
Last I checked, it was about 15% to 20% of Canadians that don't have a data plan on their phone, so that's 1 in 5 to 7 Canadians. So you're not wrong, but in a city of 1 million, that's close to 150,000 to 200,000 people. Minority yeah but not exactly one that can be readily ignored, that's still a lot of people.
Granted though, Canada has public WiFi access points basically everywhere so it's not too hard to get away with it.
>Over half of homes in US housing stock are single family houses with implicit access to charging. Daily commutes are around 40 miles. I argue that we should logically see ~50% of new vehicles being EVs but we are way below that number and I put that on customer familiarities and preconceptions.
I'm Canadian, and hypothetically that's true here too. In practice it's not as clear cut as that.
Detached garages here for the most part are built with only a single 15A circuit running to it, so even a full level 1 charging working it can cause the breaker to trip when someone turns on the lights or runs the garage door opener. Upgrading it needs permitting to be filed and signed off by a master electrician, and typically also involves trenching and replacing of conduit, even if all you want to do is just add in one additional 15A circuit. And detached style garages were the norm for housing builds until around I wanna say 2000 to 2005 ish, when attached garages started becoming more the trend.
If I had to guess, I'd say that's about roughly half of the single family homes in that situation here, so chances are that if the family wanted a BEV with a detached garage, you're spending $1800 to $2500 on top of the cost of the materials and labour for the EVSE install itself. Most electricians last I asked were charging roughly $2000 parts and labour included (which is really high, most because AFAIK because the moment the word EVSE leaves the client's mouth, electricians add the Rich-Person-Tax onto their quotes). $4500 extra on top of an already more expensive car is a tall order.
The other half of houses circa 2005 to 2018 are probably in better shape but those typically only have 100A panels so... if they don't have additional equipment outside of stove, dryer, etc then they're probably okay to install a level 2 charger. How many of those can or can't, I don't know. But for me at least it does complicate the math quite a bit because I'm somewhat more partial to getting a heat pump over at home BEV charging if I had to chose.
The other issue that spans all wealth levels is households that for whatever use their garages for storing junk instead of their cars. I don't understand it but it's, remarkably common to see. And the city I live in makes it illegal to pull charging cables across or over sidewalks so that makes that bit of a issue.
That being said that's me commenting on the Canadian side. I don't know how much of an issue it is for Americans in general. US households AFAIK adopted 200 amp panels as standard 20 years ago so that shouldn't be as much of a problem.
>Really step back and imagine a world where the modern EV [1] was first to market and a gasoline combustion engine was second.
.... you worded that extremely poorly. Being first to market is completely different then someone's personal first experience. Between that first sentence and the follow post, it's like reading the question what if the smartphone came out before the electric telegraph.
If you're trying to say like a future time when we've got fast chargers everwhere with no need for an app, and at home charging is common which makes BEV's 80% of the market? Sure that makes sense. Probably it's going reality by 2040 or so.
But for me right now, as is, I'd probably still sticking to ICE, or MHEV engines for a while. No easy access to home charging, and I don't have data on my phone which makes fast charging way more complicated. And I don't drive enough KM in a year to make break even point in costs reasonable.
And I've test driven BEVs and I could afford to buy a BEV. The advantages don't outweigh the drawbacks in my situation at least, and there wasn't enough there for me to want to just put objectivity aside.
I'd call the that country that adopted EV's first and gasoline second... extinct after WW2. If nothing because the country wouldn't be able to launch an airforce to counter the bombers hitting your power plants. If not that then there's the constant contention of having to pull power lines forward and leaving them vulnerable to artillery fire while the petrol tank hit and run with impunity.
Plus now you have problems moving tonnes of food, water, ammunition on BEV vehicles that no longer have reliable charging access. Being unable to supply your military is more or less a death knell for any fighting force.
Even setting aviation aside, a lot of the reason why gas engines were adopted was because agriculture was among the first to do so, they were less finicky then ox and horses. Rural areas didn't have access to electricity like cities did at the time though; It was a lot easier to have a tin of whatever liquid fuel (gasoline was a byproduct of kerosone production at the time).
>Honestly I can't comprehend Americans thinking their constitution is some holy grail. It's old and has been written centuries ago without all the experience we have in modern democracies. Eastern Europe too has made very bad choices with similar setups and democratically elected presidents.
I don't think it's the Constitution in of itself that's a holy grail. Just look at how hotly debated the 2nd Amendment is, especially among Americans.
I think the true holy grail is the process to amend it, because that requires a relatively clear majority of Americans to agree to change it; well beyond 50% if I remember American civics correctly. It's a living document, changed as needed. It just hasn't as of late because the process is arduous on purpose to prevent heated decisions from being rushed through.
Part of it being that a lot of ISP's don't have static prefixes, they do get rotated pretty often and have no guarantee of CIDR size that you're going to get. By default my ISP will only give a single /64. You have to go out of your way to request more subnets and there's no guarantee that the ISP will honor that request.
It's really problematic to try and base a non trivial network setup, when you have no guarantee of how many subnets you can run. Today I've got 256. Tomorrow it might be 16. Or 2. Maybe just 1 again. ISP's can be weird when they smell monetization dollars in the water.
So I have to run a ULA in parallel to the publicly accessible networks specifically for internal routing, and then use a DNS server to try and correct it. Which works great! ...except when you run into this little niche operating system called Android. Which by default doesn't obey a network provided DNS server if you've got privacy DNS enabled. So if I've got guests over and I want them on a network in my place to access some sort of internal resource, then I've got to walk them through disabling privacy DNS.
Either that or I need to go out and buy a domain... for my internal network...and then get a TLS certification for my private internal domain.
I get how IPv6 can be great. But a lot of the advantages are also overhead I don't want to deal with.
Short hand is a good example; I've lost count at the number of times I've typo'd short hand addresses because my eyes skip over a colon. At this point I've gotten into the habit of just writing out the whole address, leading 0's included because the time saved from not making a mistake reading the address often faster overall then making mistakes with shorthand.
They shine best I think as alternatives to the 50cc segment; 60kph max with round trip taking 5km to 10km. At that point the limitations aren't a big deal. Anything beyond that's... iffy.
Authorized software means authorized for that car's VIN number. Basically it's the same issue with parts in Apple products that are serial number locked.
If for instance if you damaged a headlamp, and then went to an authorized BMW dealer, bought the correct brand new OEM BMW head lamp assembly from the parts department of an authorized BMW dealer, and followed the replacement procedure to the letter in the BMW service website... it won't work. The headlamp assembly is not authorized to talk to the rest of the car even though it's OEM, untampered, with stock firmware.
The headlamp has to be reprogrammed with the correct VIN number in order for the rest of the ECU's in that particular car to recognize it as authorized.
UN Regulation No. 155, and 156, and the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) are requiring car manufacturers to implement cryptographic validation that allows only authorized software from the manufacturer to be run.
Just my sense as an outsider, but a lot of interest in voluntary reunification got chilled after seeing China's actions in Hong Kong. A lot of it stems from lack of trust for the CCP to honor it's idea of a one county two systems form of governence.
I don't know how much the Taiwanese would be willing to fight and die in a military invasion though.
The whole point of the navy is to be able to control waterways. The whole point of being able to control waterways is to be able to economically ship large amounts of material and people; in the case of warfare, soldiers, bullets, food, water, fuel, etc.
An unmanned fast attack sub is going to be useless for defending your logistics fleet from strike fighters and anti ship missles. Even a dingy that has a guy in it with a rocket propelled grenade can send a cargo ship to it's grave. You have to have a surface ships with powerful defenses to protect them.