“Ireland does not give preferential tax treatment to any companies or taxpayers,” stated a spokesperson from the Irish Ministry of Finances.

I wish the media would eviscerate these people like they used to.

How I wish AI wasn’t such a catch all buzzword.

What a responsible use of public money. I’d love to have these buses in my area, if for nothing else than to reduce noise levels.

These things happen to everyone from time to time.

I myself misworded some comments just the other day in frustration and inadvertently caused an upset. No worries at all. It’s big of you to come in here and correct yourself. It speaks volumes to the type of person you are.

Cheers.

I’ve been using Organic Maps (from F-Droid) and it has a “Keep the screen on” option in the settings. That said, I’ve never had the screen dim while navigating to a destination. The setting I mentioned prevents timeout when you’ve got the map open but not on route somewhere.

I haven’t seen any data suggesting degradation is worse in smaller capacity batteries, but even if it is, degradation as a whole isn’t as a big a deal as might be believed. It was significant ten years ago, but insignificant today.

I’ll take your word for it on the torque point. I don’t remember much about EV torque comparisons but it makes sense on the face of it that if you lose a bunch of the energy, some of the torque goes with it.

On battery replacement due to degradation:

Across all years and models, outside of big recalls, only 2.5% have been replaced. This increase from last year is entirely due to older cars. For cars older than 2015, replacement rates are 13%, but under 1% for cars from 2016 and newer.

Non recall replacements (by year of manufacture):

• 2011 - 30.00%
• 2012 - 15.94%
• 2013 - 9.81%
• 2014 - 6.81%
• 2015 - 3.90%

That’s an order of magnitude improvement in half a decade, and the best of that is already ten years old. Battery technology is only getting better, and with better batteries, we could afford to put smaller ones in a commuter car and sell them cheaply.

I can agree with that. Undoubtedly there’s better value now than what there was thirty years ago. I think my gripe is moreso seeing other countries having 10k EVs available and there not being a simple way to get one in North America.

I’d just like to see us have more options. Without a single contender less than 15,000 dollars, we’re sort of stuck buying bigger and pricier cars.

If the complexity barrier to buy one of these low cost EVs in North America were eliminated, the auto industry would go through an upheaval. The Changli Freeman is a decently built EV that costs $1,200 in China. Less than $4,000 all in and you can import one, but the hoops you jump through are a bit much.

Here’s a good article by Jason Torchinsky on the EV market in China, and unrelated but here’s a good way to get by a paywalled article.

Yes, though my comment was more pointed to how the CAFE regulations incentivize auto manufacturers to create larger vehicles for the higher profits. If the US didn’t start leaning towards trucks and SUVs back then and instead kept innovating what cars could be, the competition in the compact car space would have driven prices further down.

The fact that 27k is considered among the cheapest new cars is partially a result of automakers discontinuing their cars in favour of larger vehicles with juicier profits.

You’re right they are expensive components, though I’d point out the battery tends to be the cost leader of the drive train by a significant margin. The motors are increasing over time, but not enough to surpass the battery.

With this in mind, the average electric car has range of 200 miles, with the most popular model pushing beyond 300. The battery could easily be cut in half in order to lower the vehicle cost.

Don’t get me wrong, I know half the battery doesn’t mean the car would be half the price, but it would be a good chunk. And in today’s market, every dollar saved matters.

Starting at 27,000 dollars though. I wish more effort was put into dropping the price as low as possible. The industry knows that a cheap car would sell huge volumes, but with CAFE, small cars are not where the profit is.

The Ioniq 5 looks nice, but usually hatchback isn’t referring to a crossover SUV sized vehicle so much as a VW Golf sized vehicle.

Speed limiters on commercial trucks already exist. They could be applied to private cars too. Not sure why, on public roads, there is much of a reason to drive 100 miles per hour. Many cars can go beyond that.

I agree about a remote kill switch. That has too high a potential to be abused. A limiter though, one that was fixed and not variable based on anything, would be fine I think.

Just chiming in to say I see your point. Slower cars allow for more reaction time, and therefore safer reactions.

This is an example of dark patterns. It can also include multiple steps to ‘confirm’ a decision, where the confirm button is beneath the decline button, only for the final step to have the button locations (or colours, shapes, etc) reversed. It’s done on purpose to confuse people into giving up. Unfortunately, even if it works one time, it’s justifiable for the company to continue the practice.

The burger turned ten years old back in 2019. Sadly, it looks like the live stream is no more, and perhaps neither is the hostel that was the burgers home.

Sounds like a supply problem with copper. I read a couple weeks ago about some progress with salt based batteries. Progress is being made on that front. Progress that would be exponentially faster if the manufacturer’s wanted to.

Regardless of the materials issue, the industry could adapt. There’s oodles of money to make significant change, and of course they would if they had to in order to continue making money at all. Just like any industry that experiences challenges. Fracking was once considered far too expensive. Then they figured out how to guide drills beneath the surface and what do you know, now it’s mainstream.

Ideally, if this were to occur, the industry would realize what you’ve pointed out and simply reboot all the small hatchbacks and wagons they used to make, as a method of stretching the amount of minerals we have over a longer period of time.

Blue sky thinking but maybe the governments of the world would realize the mineral issue, and instead of allowing 100 million cars to be manufactured each year, they took those minerals and created a transportation network with them that would render personal vehicles irrelevant.

I don’t see that happening in my lifetime though.

The weight is certainly a large factor in the crumbling of infrastructure. A bridge made 50 years ago was engineered based on traffic loads they extrapolated at the time. In the 1980’s, there were around 100 million vehicles across the United States. Today, that number has nearly tripled.

Combine a tripling of the number of vehicles with the increasing average weight - sedan or not - and that’s a much larger number than a lot of infrastructure was designed to handle. As a result, roads and bridges are degrading faster and faster.

This is a primary factor in the push to get people into smaller vehicles, which weigh less. As FireRetardant pointed out, CAFE makes this difficult as manufacturers are heavily incentivized to make these longer wheelbase vehicles. Which, surprise surprise, weigh more.

Every personal vehicle I’ve owned has been used. There’s nothing wrong with them so long as they’ve been maintained. Commercial vehicles might be replaced every ten or twenty years depending on the use.

If combustion vehicles were banned tomorrow, it’s not like the industry would just collapse. The manufacturers have so many fresh off the line vehicles piling up that they could stop assembly today and still have stock for a few years.

They could retool the factories inside a couple years, and resume churning out EVs as if nothing changed. The major issue we’d face would be the infrastructure crumbling around the additional weight, but that’s another discussion entirely.

Imagine how amazing you would feel as a child to have a possession of yours put on display at a museum. Even if it was temporary, you’d remember that for the rest of your days.