If lower operating costs doesn’t lead to lower costs to the consumer, it’s not the fault of the self checkouts. Then it’s a lack of competition which would keep margins low. It’s your government at fault for not regulating the market properly.

In my neck of the woods grocery stores all operate with razor thin margins. So I’m fairly sure they’d cut prices if self checkout allows them to. There’s so many people chosing grocery stores primarily based on price.

Why would I care about doing the cashiers work? We don’t have baggers where I live. The work is essentially the same as bagging. In many cases I explicitly want to use self check out because it’s more convenient and saves me time. If I need three items I can scan them and put them in my bag and be out of the store before I’d get half way through the checkout line.

As for theft, in principle I see the problem. In practice I’ve never heard of anyone being charged for it around here.

If we can operate shops with less labor I think that’s just good. We should instead focus on creating other more meaningful jobs. Again, a government issue IMO. We need more teachers and nurses but we don’t pay them well enough.

I’ll be the first to say, if you regularly do multi-day 6+ road trips, staying at places with no over-night charging options, then maybe an EV is not for you.

But even among the people I know in the US, I don’t know of even one person doing this. I think the closest is my uncle driving Norway-Italy a few times. On the flip-side I’ve seen plenty of people writing online about multi-day EV cross continent trips in Europe. Even back when charging infrastructure was much worse.

A single 5-7 hour trip is not an issue in an EV. One or two half hour stops isn’t a big deal for most people. Nice to stretch the legs and get some coffee. You dont have to do all the charging in one stop you know. It makes more sense to stop at places you think it’s nice to take a break, and do a couple more of them instead.

Last trip I took across Norway (~5h) I took more breaks than I needed charging stops (needed just one). I stopped at a nice cafe at the top of a mountain crossing where I was surprised to see fast chargers even there, but I didn’t need a charge to get to my destination anyway.

Personally I’ve had one trip that would be hard with EV. Portland-SF if I remember correctly. ~10h. But I deeply regretted not splitting the trip over two days.

The usable range is 10%-100%. Nobody starts an EV road trip with much less than 100%. Though you may consider cutting a mid trip fast charge somewhere around 90%. Usually for me that’s because I see that I can get to my destination without going up to 100%

Charging stations will eventually be spaced at close enough distances that you don’t have to think about where to stop. In a mature EV market there’s generally many more EV chargers than gas stations along a given route.

And if we do stop for a break, it’s rarely at gas stations

I’m not sure I’ve ever stopped at a gas station to fast charge. I stop at roadside McDonalds (we have kids), cafes, supermarkets (last stop before a trip to a cabin), etc.

How, in this day and age, could you not be aware that fast chargers are put up in more diverse places than gas stations? They’re not stinky. They don’t need to be separate from the businesses where car drivers want to spend their time.

I’ve stopped at a fast charger at a small cafe in the middle of nowhere on the top of a mountain, you could take a wonderful hike there while your car charges. You do know you can walk away from the car while it’s charging… right?

we will regularly do 3-4 hours without stopping at all

My trip to my family cabin is around 3 hours. And the last 30min is through an actually snowy dirt road up a steep climb. And I still have 40% or so left. With skis in the roof. So get outta here with your arm chair expertise.

Incidentally I don’t have to fast charge on this trip at all since we have electricity at the cabin. Super slow but I can get at least 80% which is plenty to get back.

Anyone still bringing up winter in an EV conversation should be laughed out of the room now that Norway is at near 100% market share. And no, you can’t use “Norway is small” as an argument. Road trips are common here to start with, every other family has a cabin in the mountains. But Norway is also part of Schengen. The borders in EU/Schengen are open just like the US. The first post I saw on my EV car models Facebook group was a person planning a trip to Croatia.

The problem is that building nuclear is slower and more expensive than just building renewables. It made some sense when labor was cheaper. But it doesn’t anymore.

Yeah we need to electrify transportation, heating, fertiliser and steel production. What you need to consider is that these all have excellent synergies with renewable energy. Making fertiliser from nuclear power never made sense and never will make sense. But with solar power it’s just now barely cheap enough to make sense. There are already plants up and running. And you then get a huge amount of capacity to balancer solar/wind for free as well. The same goes for transportation, steel production and especially heat. We already have heat batteries in production. Both super high temperature ones to replace fossil fuels in industry, and medium temperature ones that can store energy for months to shift energy from summer to winter for district heating systems.

None of this makes economic sense with nuclear (well, EVs make sense still).

I have nothing against nuclear. I love the tech. But it’s simply dead. And no, SMRs is not gonna save it.