I keep telling my mother she’s the perfect candidate for an EV. Barely puts any mileage on her car, only recently even learned how to pump her own gas anyway, extremely neglectful of maintenance if she’s not leasing.
She could probably plug her car into a regular outlet once or twice a week and be fine and dandy. But she just won’t entertain the idea.
My wife is also a perfect candidate but her current 9-year-old car only has 17k miles on it and a bunch of cosmetic damage so she’s probably going to drive that thing until they outlaw ICE cars or the wheels rust off.
also Tesla put a supercharger station in my grocery store’s parking lot and now it is a 100% constantly occupied little community of rich people sitting around staring off into the middle distance
I won’t resist an EV when the time comes, but even as an objectively wealthy person I am very demographically far away from the type who could ever get excited about installing solar panels on their own home – my personal sop to environmentalism is that I mostly despise freestanding houses – and they still seem to largely favour that “I’ll nobly take this collective struggle upon myself” demographic.
also I just think that cars should be unreliable and antagonistic in general and I wouldn’t want to spend all my time in a comparatively frictionless one. machinery should absorb and produce antagonism in equal measure, not disappear it
also I should be clear that, compared to my car, I love both my ebike and my motorcycle absolutely to death and I spend as much time on them as possible. mixed mode transit is great imo. cars that are effectively leased from verizon are less great
ended up ordering their elastomer brake kit, the silent pedals mod, and their kit to add some progressive resistance ramps to the clutch and accelerator
untrue. in my neighborhood, the solution people have found is that you run an extension cable from the car, across the sidewalk, into the basement of your apartment building through the window lmao
Ricciardo leaving McLaren’s team is the least-shocking F1 news i’ve heard in a while, but i do hope he finds a spot somewhere. his arc has been one of the more bewildering, i gotta say
Now if only everyone would live in basements and not on, say, the fifth floor…
j/k aside, the amount of power that cars would draw when they are parked (8pm to 8am, if we are being generous) and most of them trying to top up at the same time … not sure if that’d work long term (solar-power not so much available in that timeslot, surprise!) if we are already running into problems before AC is a big thing over here/cold temperatures hit and take away some range/require more topping up per week… but otoh, not much countries have such a bad infra like germany does, so ymmv
The affordable way to paint a car is to get it wrapped. Few hundred bucks instead of $5-10K for paint and you get options like patterns.
You can also go nuts and do the “$50” paint job (its like 150 now) where you thin out rustolium roll on paint to the consistency of milk and then you sand and roll/brush paint the car every day for about a week. There is a website a guy that did it put up that has 1-2-3 year reports on how it aged.
One of my favorite car conflicts of principle was when my dad bought a Honda CRV and he had to make a decision of whether his undying love for driving manual transmissions was more important than his undying hatred of white cars (“Only assholes drive white cars”) when the only one he could find with a manual was white.
(He was also way too cheap to ever get a car repainted.)
