Nah, even if it’s popular, there’s no way for them to make enough to compete with Ford. It would be years before they can get the capital investment to spin up that kind of output.
I have a deposit on a Telo, and they’re talking about a few thousand models in the first year. I’m around 6000 on the list, and I don’t expect to get one until the second or third year of production. Ford sold over 7000 F150 Lightnings this past quarter, and their market is still growing.
It’d change everything. Fascism can’t survive the death of the guy at the center. Nobody else has the ability to create a faux populist upswell. The second string guys would fight amongst themselves and fracture the party.
Since Trump is very old and loves McDonald’s, we’ll probably see this happen one way or another. It’s a medical miracle it hasn’t happened already.
There would be weirdos on the fringes decades later saying how Trump tried to make America great, but they’d be largely ignored.
All that comes down to abstraction. Lots of stuff has been implemented in bare metal without making the distinction. Every DOS program was almost entirely bare metal except for loading it into memory and some disk I/O.
Firmware is just a subtype of software.
ROM doesn’t really exist anymore except on some legacy stuff. Certainly not on the ATmega series you were talking about. At most, these things have fuses that can be intentionally burned out after flashing so they can’t be overwitten later.
“What do you mean I’m not allowed on the airplane?”
Yes, they don’t want any fucking software, at all. That’s a very absolute statement.
Firmware is just software. I’ve done this stuff, it’s all just software.
Needed to make two charge stops in the Chicago area. The first stop wasn’t too bad.
Second stop was a disaster. Went to a dealership, but you had to go inside and ask the staff to turn it on, but they were closed on a Sunday. Went to a casino resort that supposedly had a charger, but they had moved it to the employee-only lot after offering it to the public for awhile. Went to a grocery store, and the app wouldn’t work. Went to another grocery store, and that one finally did it.
Now, some of that is just bad charging infrastructure that can be fixed, but making two 30 minute stops on this journey isn’t ideal even if the chargers all worked properly. At 100 miles of range, you pretty much have to for this distance, and that’s only one way.
At around 200 miles of range, I wouldn’t have needed any stops on the way there, but would on the way back. At 350 miles, I could have made it there and back no problem. I think that 350 mile number is the sweet spot. If you calculate off 20% for cold weather and 30% to stay within the ideal 10-80% charge range, then you can still get far enough that you ought to be taking a 30 minute break, anyway.
You could run basic brushless motor and BMC firmware on a 99 cent 8 bit Atmel ATMega 328. That code requires almost nothing to run. It’s all the extra shit baked in that needs all sorts of processing power.
So what you’re saying is, there’s software.
Brushless DC motors are the most efficient way to make an EV. The controllers on those require software. Battery charge balancing also needs software; it’s dangerous to just feed voltage to lipos.
You can’t have anything like a modern EV without software of some kind. You can make a glorified golf cart, but its range/efficiency would be shit.
Removable batteries aren’t going to happen. The extra mechanical parts needed to make it happen take up space that could be more battery. This isn’t a couple of AA batts, here; the voltage and weight mean everything has to be chonky.
Doubly so for a company like Slate that wants to keep things cheap. They need to pick existing parts off the shelf as much as possible. Removable EV battery parts don’t exist.
We put in a preorder for a Telo. It’s more expensive, but the extra range alone makes it worthwhile.
My wife drives a Mini EV, which has around the same range as the base Slate. It’s enough to get them to work, but I had to do a long range trip a while back and I’d never choose to do that again.
Hummer EV is a halo car. They’re intended as “hey, look at me!” and nothing more. Its 0-60mph time is listed near an Ariel Fucking Atom. Which isn’t just ridiculous on its face, but seems downright dangerous considering the weight and driver visibility of a Hummer.
Best headline I saw for it was “the EV for people who hate EVs”.
2nd most electric pickup. There’s limited competition. Just based on history, the F150 Lightning isn’t likely to reliquish the title now that it has it.
Some day, car companies will figure out that they are software companies with a manufacturing arm.
It’s also important to note that Teflon (PTFE) is used in a multitude of stuff, and there’s no easy replacement. Got a 3D printer? The tube connecting the extruder motor to the hotend is probably PTFE.
The PTFE industry isn’t going to collapse just because we all switch to different cooking pans.
If that’s why the movement is a joke, then why are there several upvoted posts here saying that one is a legit reason?
Still true. For many larger platforms that have frame on body construction, the van and truck are almost identical except for the shell put on top. But you’ll see a lot of shared parts even in unibody stuff.
I do think minivans should be more common as being more practical, but I don’t see how they’re safer. They also tend to be less fuel efficient due to aerodynamics. They tend to have a lower floor with more or less the same ceiling height. That gives them a larger frontal cross section compared to an equivalent sized SUV.
This applies to vans and trucks, as well. Trucks based on the same platform tend to have better mileage than the van.
It’s good to remind people that if they have a durable good that works fine, but its original manufacture was problematic, then it’s generally better to keep it as long as it’s doing its job. Even if the replacement is less problematic, it’s impossible to make anything without some kind of impact. Keeping durable goods going is better.
Important for this thread is that cast iron, at least right now, is usually made in coal fired furnaces. It’s an incredibly dirty industry. Now, if I need a pan I will tend to prefer cast iron and then use it forever. But don’t throw stuff away that’s perfectly functional.
There isn’t a lot of difference between age groups and Trump support. Some, but not a lot.
Women aged 45-65 (mostly GenX) stick out as being more pro Trump than other women. Men are about the same across age groups.
https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-gender-and-age-analysis-of-2024-election-results/