I have a Model 3 at the moment. I’ve had it for almost 5 years and it’s generally been great - cheap to run, quiet and comfortable on longer trips but still fun to drive on back roads.

Recently it had its first major breakdown, and although Tesla service did manage to take care of it, it’s got me browsing for new EVs - but now, buying a Tesla is not the foregone conclusion it once might have been.

First, they have been making some truly stupid design choices in their latest facelifts (deleting the indicator stalks and gear selector).

Second, their CEO has now gone completely mask-off fascist.

Third - after a few years for the competition to catch up, we now have genuine alternatives from other marques which are just as good if not better EVs than Tesla’s offerings.

I think my next car will likely be a Polestar 2.

How often do you need to travel the entire range your car allows?

If you do need to drop everything and drive across country in an EV, you should be stopping at service stations to do short fast charge sessions anyway, as with modern fast chargers and battery tech you will typically go from something like 30% SoC to say 70% in only a few minutes. This saves a lot of time on longer trips.

If you are driving an EV by depleting the battery completely and then charging it back to 100% every time, you are doing it wrong.

Por qué no los dos?

Nah, the SWAT would have to arrest themselves.

I’ve tried Copilot and to be honest, most of the time it’s a coin toss, even for short snippets. In one scenario it might try to autocomplete a unit test I’m writing and get it pretty much spot on, but it’s also equally likely to spit out complete garbage that won’t even compile, never mind being semantically correct.

To have any chance of producing decent output, even for quite simple tasks, you will need to give an LLM an extremely specific prompt, detailing the precise behaviour you want and what the code should do in each scenario, including failure cases (hmm…there used to be a term for this…)

Even then, there are no guarantees it won’t just spit out hallucinated nonsense. And for larger, enterprise scale applications? Forget it.

My daily driver is a pure EV, but while I was on holiday a few months ago I was driving a Yaris Hybrid as a rental (which to my understanding is basically a Prius drivetrain in a Yaris body).

Fuck me it was terrible. Every time I applied even mild acceleration it sounded like the valves were going to eject out of the engine, meanwhile it had about as much get up and go as a sedated elephant. 0-60 in four to six business days. On ramps were an interesting experience.

The only saving grace was that we only used about a third of a tank of gas during our week long trip.

I’ll stick with pure electric thanks. No complicated drivetrain with multiple systems to go wrong, no compromised performance, enough range to get me everywhere I need to go, and good enough charging infrastructure (at least in my country) to make longer journeys trivial.

Regarding battery degradation - I’ve owned my EV for 4.5 years now, and its battery is still at 93% of its original capacity. That equates to maybe 10 miles of range lost, from an original range of around 230 miles. At that rate, it’ll still be giving usable range in 10, 15 years from now. It’s even warrantied to keep over 75% of its original capacity for 8 years / 100,000 miles - if it fails to achieve this (likely due to some defect), it’s replaced for free.

And when it does eventually need replacing, it can be recycled into something like a home storage battery - where the power demand is not as high, but still more than enough to power everything in your home for days. Meanwhile, the car can be upgraded to a brand new battery, which will likely last even longer.

Edit: In fact, I tell a lie - I did have to replace a battery on my EV recently. The 12v lead-acid battery, that ICE cars also rely on.

You might have seen a quest, where if you stream a specific game to your friends you get a free in-game item, but these are not advertisements.

…

Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers

I have no interest in streaming “quested” games, and whatever deal Discord has done with the developer to encourage users to engage with such games (and by extension the game’s microtransaction economy), and regardless of what they call it, is by definition an advertisement. If you can’t see that, then you are an ad campaign exec’s wet dream. Either that, or a troll.

Discord enshittification is well under way, just this week I have started seeing ads in the client just above the voice channel status in the bottom left. Cancelled my Nitro immediately, no point if they are going to shove ads in my face anyway.

Currently looking at alternatives, Revolt looks promising, and can be self hosted.

I went from a manual to an EV. For an everyday use point of view there is just no comparison. Acceleration is effortless, start/stop traffic is no longer a nightmare, it’s quiet and refined. It is the ideal daily driver. Even on longer trips I no longer feel fatigued after driving for 4-5 hours (the enforced charging stop helps with that).

I personally would not go back to an ICE car in general, manual or not, for everyday use.

From an enthusiasts perspective, however, this is a different question. I wouldn’t rule out getting an ICE manual for fun/weekend use in the future - the kind of driving where you can actually enjoy the level of fine control and feedback that a manual gives you, rather than just wasting it in traffic. But it would have to be something pretty special.

That is exactly what I did with my dumb washing machine (and dishwasher).

Each has a ZigBee energy monitoring smart plug which is connected to a local Home Assistant instance. Spent an hour or two writing automations based on the power draw reported by the plugs and now I get push notifications that report whenever either machine finishes its cycle (including how long it took).