Possibly. The key is an information inefficiency that the MoltBots or other AI agents can dispassionately observe that the markets (which are also mostly bots) can't. But interesting point!
The right question is how much human code can a human push now vs prior to AI.
Everything we've done in coding has been assisted.
Prior to this current generation of web applications, we had the advent of concepts like Object Orientated Programming and prior to that even C was a massive move up from Assembly and punch cards.
AI has written a lot of code. AI has written very little high velocity production code by itself (ie. for people with no coding background).
1. AI has pushed a lot of code
2. AI has pushed almost no code without the oversight of human software engineers
3. Software engineers are pushing a magnitude more code and producing more functional utility and solving more bugs than ever before
I don't know what the future holds, but I do think that this is not a new trend to use software to help humans build faster, and I don't think software has the ability to fully replace humans (yet).
From my personal account, I started with PHP and Perl (high school and college) and then graduated to Ruby on Rails (early dev career) and now its Python and JS.
I would say Ruby on Rails was a 10x on raw PHP in terms of feature specs per hour and AI is a 10x on Ruby on Rails (and its derivatives).
We're probably 100x the developer productivity on a per developer basis from the early days of Web 2.0 with PHP, just a personal anecdote though.
> We're probably 100x the developer productivity on a per developer basis from the early days of Web 2.0 with PHP, just a personal anecdote though.
Only if you compare create a website in PHP 20 years ago vs using wordpress. But to create a project like wordpress from zero now is as difficult as it was 20 years ago.
> Only if you compare create a website in PHP 20 years ago vs using wordpress. But to create a project like wordpress from zero now is as difficult as it was 20 years ago.
Roll to disbelieve on this one. There's no way that creating something like WordPress 20 years ago, before any modern-day web application frameworks, was anywhere near as easy. I'm not even talking React/Next or whatever - this was before RoR, before Django (or at least very early versions of both).
I think it's pretty impossible to look around and not notice that technical advances have improved a lot of things in the world - why does it sound credible that programming itself hasn't improved at all in twenty years? Even look at languages like C++ today compared to 20 years ago, they're massively different - do you think all those changes to the languages are neutral or negative in terms of productivity?
Quality does not change as fast :)) Actually, most of the times, when things go faster, the quality drops as fast.
> There's no way that creating something like WordPress 20 years ago, before any modern-day web application frameworks, was anywhere near as easy
Wordpress was 10% about coding and 90% about community. This 90% part can't be automated by AI or fast-tracked using RoR, Django or whatever. So much that none of the hundreds of wordpress alternatives created in the past 2 decades got any closer to replace it.
> Wordpress was 10% about coding and 90% about community.
I completely agree. I just didn't think we were talking about that aspect, just how long it takes to actually build the code of WordPress.
You might be saying that making the technical-building aspects of most technical products go faster won't necessarily have as big an impact as many programmers believe. Programming isn't the core of most products to the degree most programmers think, and instead the core of most products/companies is more about product thinking, sales & marketing, etc. I agree with this sentiment a lot.
That aside, I think there's no question it's faster to program in Python or C++ right now, than it was 20 years ago. Things really have improved on the programming language front (and related libraries, and other advances).
This can be solved by using Levenstein distance or doing some funky calculations involving a diff-like algoritm that git uses for example. It is by no means a hard problem to solve.
Your reply is pseudo-intellectual Slashdot-style Frist Posting, to which I venture:
Can AI FirstPost on HN better than humans? If so, why do they seem to lack the curiosity and gumption to make their own 'Ask HN'? Is there a matching preference to snipe internet points with replies?
Do they also use real names or pseudo real names believing such action will not boost their LinkedIn profile? Have they A/B tested the optimal level of passive aggression in HN replies vis avoidance behaviour of potential future relationships?
These trends are converging but the most valuable contribution of HMDs imo is remote social presence. It’s not their only contribution, and the economic revolution of web3 would have happened without HMDs imo.
I agree this is one facet, but other is we now have a trustless ownership protocol (ie. cryto + NFTs) that will lay the foundation for people "caring" about the stuff and status you have in the metaverse.
The virtual stuff you "own" in virtual environments are going to be siloed in individual companies' ecosystems. Just like GTA Online is never going to give me any sort of benefit from the fancy sword I have in World of Warcraft, neither is Facebook/Meta going give me any benefit from the couch I have in whatever system Microsoft or Valve puts out. NFTs are never going to materialize into that sort of cross-ecosystem unified ownership because no large company benefits from honoring assets obtained in another company's ecosystem.
This is already happening. You're thinking about this in reverse.
The web 1.0 and 2.0 way of thinking if we build the product, then we own the community.
The web 3.0 way of thinking is there are existing communities out there (BAYC, Punks, etc.) that we can enable to use our product and come into our space.
Okay, but these people are already on Twitter and Twitter doesn't do any work to verify that they "own" the NFT for their BAYC avatar or whatever. But they like Twitter, so they hang out there anyway even though anyone could "rip off" their NFT and tweet it or use it as their avatar.
It seems to me that they need Twitter (and Discord, etc) way more than the other way around. No enabling required.
BAYC is light years beyond everything else in the NFT space. The way they've built a community and played up their cool factor to make you want to be a part of it all is impressive.
Their parties this last week in NYC for NFT week pretty much locked them as the model to strive for. I don't know if others can do it, but they've set the standard.
C'mon. This is very "rich nerds desperately trying to be cool", it's not an actual thing that normal people will ever care about. We already have status symbols that you can show off in the real world.
At every cryptocurrency party I've been to, the people (i.e., the normal ones, not the true believers) stop coming when the free drinks and food stop flowing. I wouldn't confuse that with a "cool factor."
Never say never. A “stuff” import seems like the kind of feature that would have to be copied by other platforms as soon as one does it, but there’s a chicken and egg aspect.
I disagree with the whole “value of ownership” thing. Making knock off nfts is trivial, so this relies on people caring enough about provenance to police this and shame people that have knock offs in their virtual environment.
Digital goods can be copied for free. It’s the killer feature of digital. No more scarcity!! Any system that fails to embrace this will be outcompeted long term. See the music industry.
What stops me from minting an NFT that says I own anything I want? If platforms are only honoring NFTs minted by other platforms then they might as well just share that information in a database.
Same way you can't just print out a copy of the mona lisa?
People care about status and authenticity.
Imagine a virtual world where
1. You have the validate you are an avatar you own
2. You can be anything you want
The virtual world 1 is way more interesting because it's authentic and the people of status will want to use it and people of less status will build towards being higher status.
Who arbitrates which NFTs-based claims are respected versus not? How does one decide authenticity? And once you have an answer to such a question (relying on some preexisting system of ownership in the real world), then why should we care about tokens?
E.g. if someone _does_ try to create an NFT for the Mona Lisa, our ability to refute / accept its authenticity is premised on the knowledge that in the real world, the French Republic itself owns the work. How would we trust that the keys associated with minting the NFT were controlled by the French Republic? Presumably we'd need some public statement of attestation from an official French government body, and perhaps with the concurrence of others, to have confidence that this wasn't a rogue intern at the Ministry of Culture, or a hacker that got control to some official accounts or pages.
But applying this logic to "avatars" seems to be either broken or creepy. Who has the authority to say that you are or aren't you?
Right, it's just shoving some arbitrary data in a decentralized database. People will still need to get together and agree on which bits of data to care about, and at that point the blockchain is adding very little value besides a cumbersome way to transfer ownership.
The value is that the blockchains (or analogous tech) maximize durability and odds of societal consensus across time and space. For example, I would put higher odds on the Ethereum blockchain still existing and being citable in a century or two than most centralized authorities today. (These may be low odds in absolute terms, but in relative terms I think the Ethereum chain wins.)
I can only speak for myself, but I do not feel any particular predilection towards "social consensus" when I'm told that a think has cryptocurrencies mixed into it. If anything, it's a negative signal that tells me that someone has undisclosed financial interests in whatever they're trying to tell me about.
Sure, the argument made by crypto people is that is a transitional condition and in a few decades society at large will in general consider information on blockchains (or their descendants) as authoritative in many situations.
Sure, I can understand the vision. I guess the more salient "why?" question is the one that still feels lacking to me. Current easy money aside, it's not clear why society as a whole would be willing to cast aside the last 250 years of physical ownership and financial infrastructure in exchange for digital ownership(?) and immutable ledgers with irrecoverable error conditions.
Sounds like the same fallacy as preppers getting ripped off buying Krugerrands at a premium to keep value safe after a complete collapse of all civilization. When it is like putting platforms on the boughs of a tree to stay safe when the trunk is cut and felled. It fundamentally misunderstands the order of dependencies.
I think that’s actually it’s own fallacy: presuming that one can predict the dependencies and survivorship of various elements of society in a scenario where one or two larger ones go through a disruptive transition. This is a contradiction in many cases, because if you could know how such a disruption was actually going to play out, it would be unlikely to actually happen. If our kids are growing up in a world that is fundamentally different than ours in terms of sovereignty, it is very hard to know what the side effects of that transition will be.
You’re presuming a scenario where the structure of government changes is the same as a civilizational collapse. That’s not a given.
Okay, Ethereum is still around, but all it says is that in 2023 you bought a string of digits that referred to a special hat in Fortnite. But it's 2040 now and the special hat has linkrotted away because Fortnite got taken over by Zuckerberg.
It’s hard to say if the link rot will be a problem. Not to mention, many of these ownership transactions won’t be links. The point is being able to agree on something, not have access to the underlying. The latter is a somewhat orthogonal concern. No matter what Zuck does, it won’t be possible for people to deny who owned the hat, regardless of if the underlying bits of the hat have gone away. And of course, for the things that people actually care about, these bits will be preserved, or over time the ownership will be understood to relate to new, probably better bits.
Who arbitrates which NFTs-based claims are respected versus not?
> Future metaverse platforms will partner with high quality communities
How does one decide authenticity?
> That's the whole innovation behind the blockchain. Decentralized ownership claims.
And once you have an answer to such a question (relying on some preexisting system of ownership in the real world), then why should we care about tokens?
> For example, you could care about the token for the specific "metaverse" you're playing in
Who has the authority to say that you are or aren't you?
> I think you're touching on a very philosophically deep question of who you are. You think that the things you are and that you own are inherently yours, but I would argue your stuff and even your identity is all a social construct.
> For example, if you woke up tomorrow and everyone around you collectively agreed to say that you're insane and that you're an alien. Are you going to trust your own memories or are you going to trust the people around you.
> But I think you're missing out on the core innovation of blockchain which mimics the same way we determine who owns anything, which is completely a social construct.
The people who decide which NFTs matter are the communities and cultures you participate in, and entities who have sovereignty over you. Which is no different than anything else.
Right but the point the grandparent I was adding to, and also what I understand delecti is saying is roughly: Meta or a similar platform is an "entity who has sovereignty". For users to have a coherent experience in the platform, it may essentially be required that the platform exercises some decision-making power on what NFTs to respect and which not to. Do I get to bring in and use item X just because I say I own it, or not? Once the platform is exercising a choice on how/when to recognize ownership or not, the ownership system is no longer "trustless" and why should we bother with the complexity?
I would agree a centralized authority like Facebook basically “owning” what gets blessed is a world where the promise of these technologies has not been met. The hope is that we can have a more egalitarian outcome where there are a variety of actors who align based on shared interests to agree on what contracts to recognize and confer benefits based on. Of course, one challenge with realizing this can be seen elsewhere in this thread, where people are dismissive of the entire concept (and ironically have boxed it in as a Facebook thing now, effectively ceding the entire territory before the first battle.) It’s important that technologists get sped up on what is at stake and the likelihood that correcting a misstep will be hard or impossible for future generations if a singular entity “wins” this emerging space in the next several years. There really won’t be another platform turnover to try to correct the error and disrupt the existing players as there has been for the last several computing platform changes.
We're perhaps escaping the reasonable scope for a thread like this, but can you point to something that describes a potential version of "the metaverse" where no such authority exists in any form?
To my layperson's view (this is def not my wheelhouse), either such an authority exists (even if it's a foundation backed by several "actors who align based on shared interests"), in which case we're going to be required to trust it so we may as well drop the overhead of the blockchain, or no such authority exists, and there's a potentially high degree of fragmentation among platforms recognizing different subsets of ownership (or identity, or canonicity of speech or whatever), in which case ... is it a metaverse or just a bunch of distinct rooms?
> There really won’t be another platform turnover to try to correct the error and disrupt the existing players as there has been for the last several computing platform changes.
What makes you say that with such apparent confidence?
I think the web and Internet have some centralization obviously but they are good counterexamples to a theoretical corporate monopoly or duopoly over a computing medium.
As far as “the final platform” bit, it’s an opinion but if you presume we get to a point where most humans are having their auditory and visual systems being overridden by a hardware/software computing stack, it’s hard to think of a breakout event from that that is analogous to eg PC -> mobile. There will be competition and iteration, but overall the inputs and outputs to that system are (body state) -> (photons, sound) and that seems like it won’t really change for a long time, if ever, so harder to disrupt at the root.
It's unlikely there will be one "world" with overseers and moderators, just like the internet is not one website.
The "metaverse" (not Facebook's) can be an open source platform where anyone can create their own worlds which accept the items they've added support for. This is the direction Decentraland is going in.
The core libraries to build your world will be open source and standardized, like a game engine, but the actual content will be up to the creators.
What use are NFTs in such a world? If it's permissioned anyway, and there's only a few approved vendors, you can do this with a database. Suppose you already developed a Roblox/Fortnite/Minecraft metaverse, why do you want NFTs on top of that?
It's pretty easy to setup your own private WoW server where you can give yourself all the best items. Why do people then spend hundreds of hours grinding for them on official servers?
Sure, but WoW doesn't use NFTs to enforce scarcity.
What does a Google/Facebook/Microsoft metaverse want NFTs for? Once you start enforcing permissions on which issuers the metaverse honors, the metaverse might as well skip the whole NFT thing and use a database.
Well yea, if one company runs the Metaverse they don't need NFT's. NFT's are for places like Decentraland and other Metaverses running on Ethereum where there is no centralized manager of the world.
It's unlikely there will be one decentralized world (maybe a lobby of some sort, akin to a website directory on the early internet), but instead an Engine + SDK that allows anyone to build their own worlds and choose what NFT's are useable inside it. These worlds can be registered to Ethereum and then users can easily explore and congregate in whatever worlds they wish.
The ultimate scarcity is human attention and creativity - so in the limit that will always be a thing that is a form of wealth. The ownership of digital assets (NFTs or not) is fundamentally an output of a system where someone chooses to expend creative energy into making the asset, and traded that opportunity cost off based on the expected outcome. A scenario where that work would not be something they could capture value from by enforcement mechanisms of scarcity would lead to some of these efforts not happening. (Not all of course, many people do amazing CC licensed work. But it doesn’t pay the bills.)
But digital is a realm of infinite copying, and where true ownership of bits means that you can never show them off (like Shkreli and that A Tribe Called Quest album). NFT 'ownership' is an additional layer on top of the data that can easily be stripped away, as the exclusivity only exists in the minds of those gullible enough to actually value it.
I am very tired of watching humans constantly try to impose real-world economic scarcity into a digital land of infinite plenty. Rather than fight the nature of a digital economy, why not embrace it?
People who want to create works that can be infinitely copied, will. People who want to create works that have various kinds of cultural norms imposing scarcity, will. There is no “fight”, it’s just saying that you’d prefer less options for people to choose how to expend their creative energy. Nobody is stopping a person from turning the knob all the way to “infinite free copies,” but the idea here is to make a knob that is granular, multidimensional, and under their control, as opposed to under the control of a few centralized actors.
Besides, NFTs actually embrace your philosophy: allow copies, and shift scarcity elsewhere to things like social status. It is not DRM, obviously. You should be a fan.
While they permit infinite copies, the ownership bit strips away potential egalitarianism. Scarcity needs to be stripped and not an option. There shouldn't be a knob that allows one to select 'infinite copies', that should be the default. And ownership should either be collective or none at all.
Permitting ownership enables an unnecessary layer of stratification that humanity is best without, in a rare environment that actually allows for the lack of it.
You don't get to decide that. Your prejudices and carefully bonsaie gardened imperatives about how you think the world should work be do not change that fact any more than the tantrums in congresses and parliaments demanding encryption that doesn't work for "bad guys". It is fundamentally about information and its shapes.
Such is the nature of idealism. It is a shame we allow a world of plenty to artificially lock up value so a few people can feel better than others
Alternatively, why is a piece of data not allowed to just be? You can see this everywhere, even outside the digital world and in the realm of the mind. An idea is never allowed to stand on its own merits, we always have to attach our bullshit culture to it
You have a fundamental misunderstanding. The point is you simply will not get certain creative works in this model. They will not be worth the opportunity cost. There is no reality where you get “no scarcity” as well as “all the creative works you would have gotten with scarcity.” (Ie, probably most of those which have led to our present day wealth.)
Your proposed world is to say we ought to just not have people create lots of stuff they would have otherwise, in the name upholding a philosophical principle. Which is fine, but own that, and don’t act as though its the just the deficiencies of others leading to a world where you do not get a endless stream of value from them.
I'm willing to lose "some" creative works because of a lack of scarcity. Speaking from experience, artists will always want to create. That is the creative drive. There is no reason that work should not be accessible to all if the technology allows for it.
If it would mean less profiteers, less fakers, less pretenders, less sharks, less debutantes, less tourists... I'm all for it.
There are plenty of ways to profit as an artist without locking up one's work to a privileged few
Will the artistic landscape be different? Sure. But it would be a worthy change.
What you’re saying is that the artists who are currently paid for their work either will create it gratis or we can live without it. A fairly bold claim to make that this would be a worthy change, given the loss of creative work and loss of quality of life to those who create it that it would yield. Particularly when the counter argument is just to let artists produce work on their own terms, which will arguably be a better local maximum of the version of the world you advocate for and the one we have today.
Like the answer to all of the juvenile notions of "the rich" - because they are the ones making, running, and maintaining the goddamned servers in question!
NFTs are dumb but so is the concept of no ownership in a way that conflates definitions so.
If it is popular to have say a World Tree in a pool as your spawn point and said map is a popular one you would still have instance ownership even if the map itself is free software. Having your own instance would be found preferrable to most compared to a common flooded one with millions clipping through each other and trolls rampant.
> If it is popular to have say a World Tree in a pool as your spawn point and said map is a popular one you would still have instance ownership even if the map itself is free software. Having your own instance would be found preferrable to most compared to a common flooded one with millions clipping through each other and trolls rampant.
I don't really understand how lack of ownership strips the ability to shard instances.
> because they are the ones making, running, and maintaining the goddamned servers in question!
They are, because they are most capable. But do not underestimate that others do so as well, often in a much more just and equitable fashion. (See: The Pirate Bay/private trackers vs Spotify or Youtube)
And watch what you call juvenile, that perspective explains the world so much more clearly than any explanation that the guilty might offer
Honest question, if you were running Amazon, how do you protect against bad actors or poor performers? Do you leave it solely to the discretion of the managers? How do you judge manager performance, solely by morale?
> Honest question, if you were running Amazon, how do you protect against bad actors or poor performers?
define poor performers.
I've work for abusive corporations that were setting impossible goals and called employees "poor performers" and fired them when these impossible goals were not met.
And so defining the level of work required in law is usually not going to help anyone. This is why unions exist - so the people that know the workplace and subject matter best can negotiate to make the job fair.
... which is the ridiculous thing. As much as unions do have problems, I think a better fix to all of this would be a law that just said "all warehouse employees must be a member of an independent labor union". Amazon has fought tooth and nail to keep their warehouse workers out of unions.
(I don't love this sort of law, but it'll probably give these workers a better outcome than they have now, and likely a better outcome than the law that we're talking about here.)
> if you were running Amazon, how do you protect against bad actors or poor performers? Do you leave it solely to the discretion of the managers?
You take the explicit metric and make it unsaid. Over the course of a few months, if a worker isn't meeting their "goal", they're given a generic performance warning. If they don't improve, they're terminated.
This is why workers need a way to push back on quotas.
> instead of the workers knowing the metric out in the open, you hide it from them and secretly judge them on it?
I'm not advocating this. But it's how most management is done. Pushing back only on quotas, without otherwise empowering the labor force, will almost certainly lead to such a regression.
Quotas are fine, as long as they are reasonable, and workers don't need to skip food and bathroom breaks in order to make them.
The problem seems to be that Amazon has ahead of time decided the level of "productivity" they want, as well as the amount of money they want to spend on labor, instead of actually measuring bad/average/good productivity on its own, and then setting quotas (and expectations of labor cost) based on that.
Is having quotas itself a problem, or is it that the quotas are too demanding and rigid? From what I've read, it's very hard for most people to meet them, and injuries are common. Turnover is also very high. Quotas do have the benefit of being objective, which is good for workers too. It's harder for a manager to fire someone for discriminatory reasons if they're meeting an objective criteria, for example.
It seems like instead you could make the quotas challenging, but not to an extent that they're impossible for most people to meet without injuring themselves. You could also have some (but not infinite) flexibility to allow for bathroom and lunch breaks.
I'm really excited about the new PHEVs (plug-in hybrids) coming out of Asia. I think that there is a much better chance that PHEVs are the road to mass adoption than pure electric in the short term (ie. 10-15 years).
Electric still has the issue that you have to charge for like 40 minutes on a long road trip, which personally seems more frequent than I would like. It takes a 6 hr drive from LA to SF and makes it a 7 hr drive, that's quite material when you're trying to get from one place to another.
The new Rav 4 Toyota Plug-in Hybrid is really amazing. 42 miles on electric, gas for the long road trips. It also is the fastest production Toyota (I think?).
42 miles is really a lot of miles for most daily commutes. In the near future we'll have electric chargers at most commuter destinations so that's really a 84 mile round trip which is hopefully enough for most daily commutes. I suspect as electric improves in general, PHEVs can also squeeze out more from their pure electric side.
With all that being said, I'm still drawn to the Tesla as my next vehicle only to support Elon and his manic missions to improve humanity. But all things being equal, it's hard to ignore the superior build quality and convenience of the new Japanese PHEVs.
"I think that there is a much better chance that PHEVs are the road to mass adoption than pure electric in the short term (ie. 10-15 years)."
I think you are correct - you just missed that the 10-15 years was 2010-2025. It has already happened.
We are on the verge of a hockey stick of adoption of purely electric cars.
The frustrating recalcitrance of incumbents (like Volvo and BMW) was their attempt to recoup billions in investments in the last 1-2 generations of vehicles - costs that had already been sunk.
That is why after 10 years of concept cars and "e-initiatives" and weird tron-cars we finally have actual electric cars coming out of Audi/BMW/Volvo.
Is that the case? My impression is that PHEVs have been very rare in the last 10-15 years. Even now the selection seems very small. I’ve just started looking into them and it seem like the market is just barely getting up and running with some decent 2021-2022 models.
The market seems so small in 2021-2022 in fact because so many models have already been shut down. That to me is a strong indicator that the PHEV transition window is already closing and anyone thinking about it in 2022 is late to the party. GM has very explicitly stated that about the Volt, it's PHEV model that pretty much exactly met this transition window, starting in 2010 and being discontinued in 2019. GM concluded that the need for a transition vehicle was over and people were going to buy pure EVs moving forward.
(Anecdotally, as a buyer that invested in a Volt in 2011, I feel the exact same way. The Volt was a wonderful choice for 2011 but in 2022 I see a lot fewer reasons you wouldn't just buy a full EV.)
It depends on the region. Local news in Australia is on how lack of incentives for electric vehicles means there are very few models available. The cars are there, just sold elsewhere where the market is. Crank up your emissions standards or carbon requirements and the cheaper electric cars appear, with the old petrol models dumped in the backwaters.
A Model S can do LA-SF without a stop. A Model 3 can do it with a very short recharge stop (20min).
The new EQS should be able to do it very easy non stop.
Are you really driving 6 hours without stopping for a drink and without any bio-break?
One thing to add here is that huge nonstop marathon drives are generally unsafe - most all people can’t maintain alertness for that long. I have done the 7-hour hell drive in the past, but I probably would have been better off had I been forced to stop for ten or twenty minutes every two hours or so.
Recently did an eight hour drive in a model 3. We stopped more frequently than the Tesla strictly required - once for a bathroom break and a quick coffee, once for food, and once for a more substantive charge.
The nice thing was that by timing the shorter stops to also be at a supercharger, we did the electric equivalent of a ‘splash and dash’ - we got ~2 x 15minutes of charging time ‘free’ - as we’d stopped anyway, and the additional time spent to plug in is about 30 seconds.
I suspect people who think that a Tesla would be substantively worse than an ICE car for long trips are either far edge-case car users… or are seriously underestimating them time they spend not driving during a long trip, and then compare that unrealistic best-case situation with the likely case for an EV.
I cope with long haul driving better than nearly anyone I know. I still find the gas stop every 3.5 hours or so essential. I get out of the car, walk around a bit, get something to drink and a snack to eat, and it makes a huge impact in how I feel and how alert I am. I have no problem doing 18 hour days multiple days in a row so long as I do this.
a break or breaks totalling at least 45 minutes after no more than 4 hours 30 minutes driving
They are professional drivers.
To speed up EV adoption, improve road safety and make an attainable mileage goal for EVs we could use legislation to require a 30 minutes break after three hours of car driving.
This would be unpopular and initially hard to enforce, but if you were in an accident after driving without a break for six hours then you would not do it again as the law would make you the dangerous driver and your insurance would not help.
Trucks have a tachograph, this could be mandated for cars too.
Well.. I would say something nasty to you for something so stupid, but I won't.
You want to force everyone to take a 30min break automatically? How about i want to drive somewhere that takes 3h50 ? Or whst if there are more drivers in the car and we can stop for a quick change of drivers? Or.. whatever. I agree that driving without pausing and resting is bad but your solution is worse. It is my car, i should be able to stop whenever i want to, not when some system tells me to.
Even if you can shorten the stop times by changing drivers, it is a big relief to get out of the car for at least a few minutes, literally stretch your legs, visit a bathroom and perhaps get a coffee or a snack.
I mean, you may find it a big relief to get out. I prefer to get to my destination faster. Or, if we do want to get out, plan to stop at a cool restaurant or something instead of at a random supercharger location.
BTW: Did you know you can bring snacks and even coffee with you in your car? Those don't have to be purchased on route. You'll even get lower prices and a wider selection.
> more and more restaurants see this as a business opportunity to offer charging while eating.
In the US, the infrastructure costs to get fast chargers next to most good restaurants is prohibitive. Especially good restaurants that are between major cities.
> As a German...
No wonder you are so opposed to the idea of a 6 hour journey without taking a break. In the US, a road trip usually involves planning to minimize total stops. It's not uncommon to bring snacks/drinks/coffee with you in thermoses/coolers.
(Also, nitpick, the word you want to use is "horrible" not "horrend" if you want to sound correct to the widest group of English speakers)
No wonder you are so opposed to the idea of a 6 hour journey without taking a break. In the US, a road trip usually involves planning to minimize total stops. It's not uncommon to bring snacks/drinks/coffee with you in thermoses/coolers.
(Also, nitpick, the word you want to use is "horrible" not "horrend" if you want to sound correct to the widest group of English speakers)
That was intentional, to create an exaggerated phrasing of the statement. Beyond stating a truth, that many Germans would consider it offensive to eat and drink in their cars, I also wanted to make some fun out of how protective some of them are, as well as making some fun of those, like Americans, who think their car is a great place to eat and drink :)
I am very aware of the differences in driving habits between Germany and the US, having driven in both (though not taken longer road trips in the US). There is certainly a significant size difference between the US and Germany, but considering how large the EU is and crossing borders inside the EU usually isn't any different from crossing state borders in the US, there would be large distances to drive in the EU too.
Still, I think road tripping is larger in the US. Might be interesting to consider the reasons for this. To a large part probably, because the open borders in the EU are a more recent thing. Also, because passenger trains are still a very important means of transportation. And in general, population density seems to be higher, it is very easy to find something interesting much more nearby.
For Germany specifically, you also have to consider driving speeds. If traffic isn't too heavy, there are still many sections of the Autobahn without limits, so travelling at 100-120mph is quite common. Which on the one side makes for quicker progress but also, you don't want to try to eat or drink at those speeds :)
many countries have regulations around fatigue driving, look them up and adapt them to your own driving schedule. Usually it's around a break every 3hrs of driving. Some countries have them longer possibly due to lobbying but often are justified also by their quality of road and landscape etc etc.
Charge speed is a lot faster than you think and getting better. Play with abetterrouteplanner.com where you can select the vehicle, conditions, and the route.
People also conflate 5 minutes of refueling with 5 minute stops. EVs charge while you go the bathroom, stretch your legs, eat, and anything else you and you passengers might do while stopped. I find in practice if you're roadtripping with more then 1 other person it's basically impossible to go longer than 3 hour legs and stop for less than 15-20 minutes. That's puts you right in range where you spend less than 10 minutes waiting for the car for every 3 hours travelled.
> People also conflate 5 minutes of refueling with 5 minute stops.
This is definitely something to emphasize. Because of the difference in the refueling too, gas refueling is by necessity a "serial" task: you need to watch the vehicle every minute of that refueling because it is a dangerous substance with bad edge case behaviors, including but not limited to accidental over-fills that at the very least are obnoxious for over-charging you (if not the immense physical danger it might put you and your vehicle in).
EV charging is an easy parallel task: just like you don't have to watch your phone for every minute that you plug it in. You aren't wasting 15-20 minutes staring at a gallon counter and checking your car for leaks of explosive liquids.
Obviously there are lots of unsafe drivers out there (and lots of us on our worst days where we feel such unsafety a calculated risk) that will risk it anyway and try to parallelize tasks while refueling with gasoline, but I know I have at least one story where that went wrong (a fuel line bust while buying snacks). Electricity is so much tamer in comparison.
Tesla's Model S has a range of over 400 miles and it can recharge 180 miles in about 15 minutes. So this is mostly a solved problem, all that is left is pushing these specs down to more economical models. I would be surprised if in say 3 years we do not see comparable specs in Tesla's baseline models. Everybody else will lag a few more years, but they will get there as well.
Isn't that for the city driving test? I am not sure which metric Tesla is using, highway or city, the website isn't clear, but at 30 MPH, on flat terrain and with the AC off, I would expect considerably more than 400 miles for their long range model.
With respect, I just don’t understand this use case. You focus on 42 miles as being a lot of range for most cases, but exclude the ~300mi range BEV because it’s… not enough?
Less than 5% of daily trips are over 30mi [1]. One study found 70+ mi trips are barely 1% of journeys [2].
Also your example of LA-SF as an example of it being a real drag on time is instead perhaps the canonical best route, for Teslas at least. That’s the corridor between where they are manufactured and their largest market, SoCal. SuperChargers are plentiful, including the super fast 250 kW version that can do 1000mi/hr (when you are at low state of charge.) It also has in the PCH a beautiful view that you’ll want to stop and take in.
So there’s no way you’ll actually spend an hour out of your way, but if you do, why would that single hour actually be material, when the trip is less than 1% of your journeys? Why pick a PHEV for your edge cases?
Rent another car for that trip. Or take a flight (SF-LA fact: that’s also the busiest airline route in the country [3] by aircraft flown; second busiest by passengers moved)
I get the whole “I probably won’t, but I like knowing I could” sense of spontaneity but it just seems a waste to have two separate propulsion systems and the associated complexity just for that.
> With respect, I just don’t understand this use case. You focus on 42 miles as being a lot of range for most cases, but exclude the ~300mi range BEV because it’s… not enough?
You can disagree, but it's a reasonable point
Let's subdivide trips into A <42 mi, 42 mi < B < 150 mi and 150 mi < C. (These numbers assume no charging at the other end. We can tweak the actual numbers up by assuming charging at the other end.)
We can ignore, for our analysis A. Those are 100% plug in. By your sources, 95-99% of trips are in the "A" column, depending on charging on the other side.
So, you then ask "why is it material to stop for a supercharge on 1% of the trips". In this case, you kinda seem to have lost the thread. Why worry about your gas emissions if it's only 1% of the trips? Why advocate renting a second ICE car for a long trip instead of just having a single car where the switchover point to burning gas is just 250 miles shorter a trip?
But really, it's how do you estimate B vs. C. If B is 99% of the combination, a pure EV may be best. If you think C is 99%, then a PHEV is best. In between, you have to make your choices. And those numbers can be highly personal. If you live 400 miles from the grandparents and (the other way) the city you like to visit for a weekend every month, it's clear you want a PHEV. If you those numbers are 100 miles, you probably don't.
I would say it's not "clear" at all, you're putting the cart before the horse.
The long range model S can drive from SF to LA on a single charge.
Even taking into account a supercharge stop, it takes <10 minutes to charge enough to extend your range to make it to grandma's house. In practice, that's faster than a stop at a gas station.
Obviously grandma will need charging at their house to do this^, but if you're driving 400+ miles you're usually going to stay the night which means you can plug into a normal outlet and charge over night.
Obviously, you can quibble about what the cutoff distances are. It doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of travel is under 42 miles.
As for speed of filing up, that's insane. One undisputed benefit of ICE cars or PHEVs is that gasoline refill is (a) everywhere and (b) significantly faster per mile.
Going from an empty tank to a full tank often takes less than 5 minutes, counting time getting on/off the highway.
I’ve often heard people say about range/charging anxiety: “just use your electric car for your commute around town and for long trips keep your gasoline car or rent one”
PHEVs do that all in the same car. Since much of the charging stations have been monopolized by Tesla in the US, I think PHEVs are the solution to infrastructure growing pains.
Tesla has not "monopolized" charging stations in any reasonable understanding of the word. They spent somewhere south of $1B to built their own infrastructure. Any other company could have done that, but they chose to drag their heels instead. Even still, they could _still_ do that (and maybe EA will be that network). Electricity is pretty much everywhere, and there's definitely room for lots more long distance chargers. I don't understand how anyone could think what Tesla has done with it's supercharger network is a bad thing....
Should they? Why should one private company be forced to build infrastructure for other companies that are intentionally dragging their heels? GM doesn't run gas stations
It would be great if they could be altruistic to let anyone use them, but altruism isn't really a good path to profits in our society
Ok, then the government should be doing it and investing to meet current and future demand. A private company (in a non-regulated market) can't be forced to do so.
I am not suggesting that Tesla has prevented anyone else from building charging stations. I am using the word monopoly in the non-antitrust sense here.
< I'm really excited about the new PHEVs (plug-in hybrids) coming out of Asia. I think that there is a much better chance that PHEVs are the road to mass adoption than pure electric in the short term (ie. 10-15 years)
OT: I have a question about PHEVs that I haven't been able to find a clear answer too. Maybe someone here knows.
It is generally considered bad for an ICE car if you go too long without driving it [1]. That article says you should drive it for at least 10 minutes at highway speeds every two to three weeks.
If I had a PHEV, I could easily go for months where I drive a few times a week, but always entirely for trips that can be done without using the ICE engine. That would prevent the problems mentioned in that article that aren't specific to the ICE engine, but the fuel and fluid problems could still be an issue.
My question is do the PHEVs handle that automatically, such as by keeping track of ICE usage and automatically running the ICE engine occasionally on trips that could normally be done without it? Or is this something I'd be expected to keep track of, and say, skip plugging it in every now and then to force it to use the ICE engine?
My PHEV ICE engine turns on from time to time and keeps on running for short periods of time.
I believe it last happened on Friday when I started the car and it was on for roughly 10 minutes. Have to say I was really wondering "what's wrong with the car" :)
The Chevy Volt (or Opel Ampera in my case, but same thing essentially) keeps track of fuel age somehow and will run the engine to burn fuel if it sits in the tank too long. The other points in that list don’t seem applicable.
I say this to people and they say “but Teslas are so expensive.” And then they end up buying an Audi or BMW, and when they later test drive a Tesla, they regret their decision.
Tesla charging options are only plentiful is some parts of the US. In other regions of the US they are sparse even along interstates. In some regions with this property, like the mountain west, road closures that incur very long unplanned detours are a thing you have to plan for even as an ICE driver. Those detours can take you a long way from a charging station but you can find a gas station in just about every podunk town of 300 people.
There is a chicken and egg problem here. In parts of the country that rely on sparse networks of gas stations for their cars, few people would buy a BEV unless all of those gas stations simultaneously added chargers in the complete absence of local demand.
You don’t need a supercharger to charge or even to fast charge. Other chargers work too. There are CHAdeMO chargers in a lot of places (need an expensive adapter, $450, but very worthwhile purchase). Mountain west? I’ve been seeing CHAdeMO all over the place… Grants, NM. Pagosa Springs, CO. Santa Fe, NM. Lewiston, ID. Taos has a surfeit of Tesla (non supercharger) connectors, most free! Or there’s J1772, everywhere practically, a slower option best for when you need to stop for other reasons, and the adapter comes with the car. Chargers are popping up everywhere. And electrical outlets are in every building pretty much so sleeping in the right place helps too.
You misspelled "California". In major US cities, you are lucky to have one super-charger per million people. If you live in an apartment (as many people do) and cannot charge your car in the parking lot (which, due to power load requirements, most people cannot), you don't have a great way to keep your Tesla filled up.
Superchargers are not the only way to charge a Tesla though.
And about apartments… you’re replying to someone who managed very well with two Teslas in an apartment for two years with no at home charging options. We rarely used the local supercharger, although it helped when fast charging was needed. J1772 chargers are plentiful and cheap (sometimes free).
Nowadays we found a way to make a 110 cord reach, and while slow, it easily keeps two cars well charged.
This is real life experience for me. It’s worked great.
Currently living in one of the poorest and least populated states in the US, where EV ownership is near nil, and there are plenty if chargers in my town. If this isn’t the case where you live, you could always help encourage your local businesses, government, and other entities to consider installing chargers. They sometimes just don’t know there is any interest.
It will be interesting to see what opening up SuperChargers to non-Tesla vehicles is going to do for availability though. I often see the sites near me full or near-full as it is.
> The new Rav 4 Toyota Plug-in Hybrid is really amazing. 42 miles on electric, gas for the long road trips.
For comparison, the Nissan Leaf E+ is quoted[1] at a full-charge mileage range of 239 miles.
> Electric still has the issue that you have to charge for like 40 minutes on a long road trip, which personally seems more frequent than I would like.
Agreed, stopping often to charge can be a hassle, but if you only have to stop once from SF-LA (perhaps taking a break and having a bite to eat while away from the wheel), that'd seem fairly reasonable.
Worth also noting apparent conflicting reports about the emissions claims made by PHEV manufacturers; see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54170207 ("Plug-in hybrids are a 'wolf in sheep's clothing'") for two different points of view.
With a Tesla it’s only 20 minutes to get 80% charge. It would be more than sufficient to do the LA to SF drive. I’d imagine most people would want to stop at least that long during the drive just to stretch their legs.
It's still a logistical challenge in places without high charging accessibility though. That 20 minute charge might add another 20 minutes or even more depending on where it's located.
Are you referring to lineups at the charger? Or having to deviate from your route due to charger location?
I have heard stories and seen pictures of people waiting to charge in California, but I have never personally waited for a supercharger on my many road trips. The infrastructure needs to be built out to keep pace with EV adoption, but my understanding is the california problem is more about how long it takes to get building permits in the state than any lack of desire to add chargers.
As for poor routing, the fastest chargers are rarely more than a few hundred meters from major routes. A couple times they have been more convenient than gas stations. The only charger I've been to that was more than 2-3 lights away from the highway is Owen Sound, Ontario, but that city is known as a travel black hole and doesn't have a ring road or fast way through.
I understood the comment to be referring to requiring a detour for charging. That was also my reason for not buying a model 3. I put in some normal trips that I take, and while it was technically doable, it took me routes I usually avoided due to traffic, tolls, or sometimes weather conditions.
I know my routes are niche (which is why the traffic is on the other road), but for me it just didn’t make sense yet.
I tend to road trip in very unpopulated areas, so in my experience there isn’t much route choice. There is only 1 highway you could ever use. I also find the only times I’d bother with an alternate route are inside a single battery charge (either under 300 km or the start/end leg of the trip).
Your use case is quite interesting. Got an example?
The lack of waypoints in the Tesla navigation is their biggest missing piece of software currently. The navigation is extremely good about recalculating both the directions and charge plan as as you go even if you deviate from the suggested route. I sometimes cheat a little by navigating to a midway point. For example, I set Orangeville as the destination leaving Kitchener-Waterloo for Sudbury since I didn’t feel like going through Toronto.
In the mountain West of the US, there are semi-frequent major highway closures due to weather conditions, serious accidents, etc. It is not uncommon for the shortest paved detour to add 120 km to your trip. That's not a big deal in an ICE vehicle, since every one-horse town near the detour route has a gas station. That fact has saved my bacon several times even with proper planning. People who live out there are accustomed to this reality. Adventurous people can sometimes find much shorter alternative routes using ranch/mining/forestry trails but those don't always exist and you definitely won't be driving your Tesla on those roads.
The worst detour I've experienced in recent years was a serious accident in the middle-of-nowhere Utah, which closed the highway in both directions for almost 24 hours. The shortest paved detour around the accident added 150km of nothingness to the trip.
40 miles is close to a sweet spot 99% EV daily driving range. The current 20-ish PHEVs aren't up to snuff.
In the short run (5 years), I agree that PHEVs are the best use of the available battery materials supply if we want to get to low hanging fruit of 90% consumer trips are EV.
Teslas are great and they absolutely should pursue the research on full-EV vehicles because that is the 10 year future. But how many PHEVs could be made out of a P-100's battery? 10?
... that is assuming the mainline autos hadn't been dragging their feet for 20 years putting a goddamn electric plug on their hybrids, and not pushing the technology.
That Toyota so stringently resists even a plug in for their platforms in 2021 (for example, the new Toyota minivan is a hybrid with no option for a plug) is so mindboggling it must be intentional.
Having to charge for 40 minutes during a 6 hour trip is a non-issue in my opinion. During a 6 hour trip one has to eat at least one lunch/dinner which should account for 40 minutes. And likely an additional stop at a rest room or leg stretcher for 10 minutes somewhere else.
Electrical charging stations will be everywhere, very soon ,very fast. All restaurants, gas stations and kiosks will have plenty. To attract customers and to earn an extra buck. It's very cheap to install compared to tanks and pumps for flammable and hazardous liquid fuels.
I'm considering switching from my current car subscription (because they got bought out by Fair, and since then the service has turned to shit). Hybrids like that sound nice but I'm still eyeing Tesla because they are the only ones who have a reasonably autopilot system.
Many others have lane keep systems that are designed to kill -- if you accidentally fall asleep at the wheel or become incapacitated, it will shut the lane keep system off and crash, instead of attempting to coming to a clean stop and putting on emergency flashers, which is what Tesla does.
PHEVs could make a lot of sense in areas of the US like the Midwest and non-urban West where routine commutes are short (and thus mostly electric) but occasional road trips are common.
We got a Rav 4 plug-in a couple of months ago. It's fantastic - it sometimes gives us 45 miles entirely on battery, which means most of our trips don't use any gas at all.
When we were looking at plug-in hybrid options nothing else even came close in terms of mileage, which I found really surprising. It was our top criteria when selecting a vehicle.
I wonder if there is a way to pair this with the betting markets and use AI to arbitrage various future bets going on?