Then they should not be quoting from it at all if they are not going to release it in its entirety as without context quote can have completely different meaning.
If you are a CEO who is making money on torturing and killing its customers by denying them what they prepaid for, it is going to make you a lot of enemies. Absolute majority won't harm you, but will cheer up that one person who will.
Rich people want to be seen, they want to show their wealth, their status and their power. What is the point of having money and power when you need to hide among the plebs? It is like breathing for them. You can willingly stop breathing for a while but eventually you need to inhale. And they are going to start brandishing their wealth and their status again.
After my fair share of car being incompatible with basic CCS (Connector fits, car tells me it does not like the electricity here) I just want the charging to be working without some fancy features which charger manufacturers are going to implement wrong anyway.
> I mean one thing the charging business has going for it is that after the initial investment the ongoing investment is basically 0
That's not actually correct. You need to pay for reserved power in the grid, which can be significant amount regardless if you are using that power or not. So installing big DCFC charger where nobody is going to use it will eat you up on fees for reserved power.
Charging via application brings unnecessary friction and severely degrades UX.
Another UX offenders are QR codes on charging stalls and locking charging cables unless you will find that correct QR code so you can unlock your charging cable. Not that one, that will unlock charging cable in the stall next to you. For FFS why do I need to search for QR codes at a first place...
I can imagine a simple solution - take a cable, connect it to the car and start changing by tapping a contactless credit card reader next to your cable. But I never saw simple solutions, seems like every provider wants to torture its customers with half assed applications.
These alarmist articles has exactly opposite effective, than author intends - it is making people apathetic about climate change. Why should they try to solve it if we are telling them that they are dead?
It is like company founder would go on all hands meeting and said: "yep we are going bankrupt. Thanks for attending." This would not inspire anyone to work harder to save the company, people would likely just start searching for another job.
> Build out the necessary charging infra on a war footing
Why? If electric cars are the future, certainly building infrastructure will make sense for private companies. If it is not profitable for companies to build such infrastructure, then maybe electric cars are not the future but a fashion trend.
> I could accept EV tariffs if they were meant to give domestic manufacturers breathing room to catch up. I don't see that anyone has gotten the memo though.
China is overplaying their hand. They are having massive overcapacity in the car manufacturing, but most of the world can't afford such cars either due to price and/or due to non-existent infrastructure. You can forget on selling 30k EUR cars in Africa, India or Central Asia. You can also forget on selling such cars in most of China. So tariffs will decimate Chinese car industry.
You just described what was happening in 1950s in Eastern Europe when communism came to town and started purging every "evil capitalist pig". It has turned out that loyalty can't be exchanged for merit and all the countries slowly declined until 1990s when communism just imploded.
But instead of paying ransoms, result would be concentration camp. We were calling them "Labor camps" because communism is not Nazism. However sign "Work to Freedom" was used on the entrance of such camps.
- Create O'Neill cylinders whose only purpose will be farming of food. Ideally automated function with minimal crew which can have complete control over the environment so no pesticides needed by design and can be on the sun 24/7 to achieve maximal efficiency in growing crops.
- Mine minerals from asteroids to avoid gravity wells. This will solve dependency on random dictators controlling resources (Russia), accusation of neocolonialism (Africa) and avoid destruction of untouched nature (Ocean floor, Antarctica)
- Move heavy and polluting industry out of Earth and closer to primary inputs from meteorites. This will resolve out of control emissions which will be growing as population in 3rd world countries will get as rich as Western countries.
- Build a satellite swarm shade in front of Earth to reduce amount of sunrays falling onto the Earth and to prevent runway climate change. This can have also triple use as such shade structure can produce electricity in practically unlimited amount and concentrate this electricity into a beam aimed at a collector on Earth / industrial station on orbit or use it as a weapon by aiming such beam onto a target.
It really depends. Spies creating moles in government agencies by giving them money is same principle. An employee just went to work for highest bidder.
Sometimes it is easier, far simpler and even superior not to mimic nature. Consider if it is even possible to have supersonic flight by mimicking flapping of wings.
People can feel scared (paying attention) only for so long. War in Ukraine or climate change, it is happening in a too slow pace for people to keep attention next to their daily life, while they can't influence those events in any way.
Can Putin end the world if he will be afraid enough of losing? Maybe. Can you stop it? No. Then why would you care?
Support is expensive getting good support from China is generally not possible, because it destroys margins. That is making me very curious about aftermarket of Chinese cars, because they might be cheapish today, but incredibly expensive when you will need to fix them.