• 6 Posts
  • 138 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I posted this in the past and it continues to be true. Autopilot is getting worse overtime. Tesla is feeding autopilot driving data into its system to learn to drive better. The problem is, it’s learning its worst habits. Phantom braking, hesitation in turns, unable to keep a steady speed. Every update I try it and rarely last more than a couple miles. It’s not that I want to use it, I just want to see if it’s getting better or worse.

    The wild thing is, turning off autopilot and using lane keep and cruise is fine. They warn you that lane keep is old autopilot so it’s not as reliable, trying to urge you into using full autopilot so they can harvest more data. But that “old” autopilot was built before all the updates that made the full autopilot system unusable to me

    If you’re wondering, I’d like to not be driving a Tesla. But it’s paid off, worth basically nothing in resale, and I got it as a CPO with free charging and autopilot for life. It costs Tesla money to keep it.





  • Not manufacturers, dealers. A legally required middleman in most of the US. They’ll take your $10k car for $7k and try to resell it for $12k. Even if it gets negotiated to a fair price, they still get the opportunity to upsell used car buyers into extended warranties and maintenance plans.

    Tesla is a little different in that they do not have dealers, so they instead do no-negotiatiation sales on their used cars. It’s good for them because they can do the same buy low sell high deal. But when the model is not selling, they’ll have to buy it and sit on that asset for months or dump it at auction.



  • I studied this a bit in my MS and the answer is… probably not. “The grid will collapse” has been an anti-technology or pro fossil fuel talking point for a very long time, whether* its arguing against renewables or against personal computers or against AC units. The most recent was solar. Grid operators were adamant that solar would crash the grid if it accounted for more than 10%, then 20%, then 30% and so on and it never happened. Now it’s onto EVs being the grid destroyer.

    The reality is that production and use is not all that hard to predict. Ultrafast charging will eat some power, but that isn’t going to be the norm for wide EV adoption. Public charging will cost more money and be less convenient than charging at home or work over a longer duration. Home chargers are capping around 30-35 amps, generally overnight when grid demand is low. Couple this with the combined low cost for residential solar to change at even lower rates depending on your state/nation’s hostility to solar.

    Now, if every car was replaced with an EV tomorrow, the grid would struggle. But that’s not going to happen. Adoption will be a long slow process and energy producers will increase output on pace as demand forecasts increase. A good parallel to this is Air Conditioning adoption. That’s another high demand appliance that went from rare to common. The grid has its challenges, but now the AC usage is forcastable and rarely challenges the grid.

    Is it a challenge, especially with higher renewable mixtures, yes. Can utilities fumble? Of course. Will it be a widespread brownout every day during commute hours? Not likely.



  • Trump restarted it last term too. They only managed to build 8 percent of it before Biden revoked the approval again. The company then abandoned the project officially. It’s just a political football at this point. Why bother putting money into something that will stall again in 2-4 years. That’s not even considering the 25% tariff on the oil it would carry, if it were ever finished.




  • I highly doubt this bill goes anywhere. Democrats have a Trifecta in MN. Slim, but still. They were able to narrowly get it out of committee, but getting it to pass on the floor, or even brought to a vote at all, is a heavy lift. Id bet it never makes it to a floor vote and the Rs can say they tried. Committee votes are a very easy and non-significant way to “vote for something” without actually doing anything. Mainly because the overwhelming majority of Americans have no idea how government works and will take it at face value.

    Even if it did somehow pass, no way Gov Walz signs it into law. That sends it back for a 2/3rds vote to overcome the veto and that certainly won’t happen.