iwanttocomment

The EX90 is a new all-electric BEV released for the 2025 model year. Perhaps you drove an XC90 plug-in hybrid?

Three years is plenty of time to assess the reliability of a make and model - and also to get early issues resolved. Take a look at the forums.

As the owner of both a 2012 BEV and a 2014 PHEV (in addition to my "new" 2022), all of which are in perfect mechanical condition, it's tough to look at BEV technology as something that will "greatly improve".

Is my 2022 BEV way better than my 2012? Sure, but it's an entire decade removed (my 2012 is looking like... well, whatever the dog did to it). Is it worse than current 2025/26 BEVs? No, not by much at all.

Keep on rockin' with the Volt until your dog rips up the upholstery. There'll be a three year old off-lease BEV or PHEV waiting for you at a shocking low price when it's time.

The open secret to EV ownership is to buy after the lease. The depreciation is insane, why pay to rent the car for three years when you can buy it outright after the lease return for a fraction of the cost? EVs with active cooling systems last just about forever but people are still "oh no the battery".

(Still driving my 2012 EV - not a typo - and got a can't-miss off-lease CPO deal on a "new" 2022 this year.)

That was the greatest 403 error I've ever seen - the URL is clearly wrong.

Most cellular calls are already using IP data via Voice over LTE (for 4G), Voice over New Radio (for 5G), or Voice over IP (ie "Wi-Fi Calling") on most American providers. There is an automatic fallback to the conventional circuit-switched mobile network if data reception is not available or the call can't be completed using IP.

The transition to IP calling has been happening since 2012 and virtually all modern phones currently support it - no need to put additional restrictions in place for the edge cases where VoLTE et al don't work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_LTE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_over_NR

The link is to the wrong article, a run-down of robotaxi services operating or testing in Austin.

The Texas legislature enacted state-wide legislation that usurped the Austin fingerprinting requirement that caused Uber and Lyft to leave town.

https://www.texastribune.org/2017/05/29/texas-gov-greg-abbot...

In Austin, Waymos are hailed via the Uber app, which will quote you a price which is good for either a conventional Uber or a Waymo, and you get a Waymo if one is available. Same price. The Waymo is actually cheaper because there's no tip.

The issue I have with Waymo is that getting in and out of those i-Paces as a "person of height" is rather difficult - I really have to do a strange contortion - and if I want to sit in the right rear, there's nobody in front to pull the seat up for me so there's not enough legroom. (I've moved to adjusting and sitting in the front passenger seat when I get a Waymo, something human Uber drivers hate.)

At the end of the day, adding advertisements will bite them in the ass, especially with longer movies, because they can't schedule as many screenings per day as they have in the past.

If that doesn't do the trick and they don't backtrack, and you have to catch a movie at AMC (god help you) just come later. Currently, AMC says the movie starts at 7:00pm, we all know to come at 7:25pm to catch the end of things. If they add 10 minutes of ads, make that 7:35pm. You don't have to see the ads, just don't trust the start time.

AMC has provided a unilaterally terrible experience for filmgoers for years, and they should be ashamed to be one of the primary operators in the country. I love and support the independent cinemas in my area, and when I think of AMC, I think of popcorn-strewn hallways, worn-down seats, and having to navigate a depressing half-dead mall in order to go there. While I'm empathetic to those who only have AMC in their area, otherwise, just go somewhere that actually knows how to run a movie theater.

I think it's pretty hard to say by any conventional definition that LLM-assisted work is DIY. I mean, sure, we all rest on the shoulders of the past in terms of knowledge and practice, but having an LLM write code for you truly can't be considered DIY.

I genuinely find it strange that the lab leak hypothesis - and I don't have a horse in this race and I doubt this matter is going to be resolved in my lifetime - is somehow considered more racist than the wet market hypothesis.

"Wuhan has an advanced virology laboratory engaged in gain-of-function research and some idiot screwed everything up for all of us" is somehow more racist than "there's a wet market down the street where they buy raccoon dogs to eat"? The latter just seems far more condescending to me.

"Because they do not have enough money to invest." Sorry.

Hi! No, not unless you want it to make up stories. Thanks!

The Europafilm staff dubbing The Day the Clown Cried was covered in From Darkness To Light, a documentary from last year about Jerry Lewis' The Day the Clown Cried which premiered on American TV back in August 2024. It's honestly surprising to me that this continues to make the news this year.

"Welcome in!" cannot hold a match to the gerundified abomination of "How's everything tasting?"

Ceci n'est pas une pastèque

Adult here! No.

Every article about ChatGPT and cheating, it was like... y'all don't have bluebooks? They were a very regular appearance back when I was in school, and... it's hard to believe that they went away.

I took a trip in a Cruise before they shut down. It was around twice the time it should have taken due to avoidance of legal left turns (leading to a genuinely strange route) and bizarre and jarring sudden braking and acceleration. There was a large plexiglas shield between the passenger and "driver" area, preventing air conditioning from reaching the passenger compartment, and it was hot - it was like riding in a taxi with broken AC. It was a strange and unsettling ride.

I've also ridden in a Waymo, and apart from the strangely small amount of clearance into the rear passenger compartment (I am tall), the ride was smooth and refined.

I'm willing to give Cruise some sort of pass on the San Francisco issue - a body hit by another vehicle had been suddenly thrown into the path of the Cruise at close range, a terrible and confusing situation for any human or automated driver - but based on my experience, they did not generally have things worked out in a commercial fashion and needed to hit pause until they did.

It was a truly strange experience being in San Francisco in the mid-aughts, with the vibes quickly turning away from the idealistic but flawed freaks and geeks (now largely retired) to the brogrammers and techbros of the latter half of the aughts who are still with us today.

It's as if the techbros tried to emulate the positive aspirations of their hippie-tech forefathers and, over the past decade, were just like "naah, forget it."

Once upon a time, we geeks truly believed that computing and telecommunications would bring us together. It's truly depressing seeing this generation of money-addled idiots set us back thousands of years using the tech we created.

Indeed, the Smart was a highway-legal car. In the US, it's been possible for years and years and buy a golf cart functional as a "city car" for far less than $12k that you can only use on residential streets or in planned communities. They're very widely available. Virtually nobody actually does this. At least in the US, it's an existing option that is not a viable market segment whatsoever.

You should consider yourself a lucky individual who has had a very different experience than many of us longtime EV drivers have had.

(I should note that I have occasionally encountered charging stations that had integrated credit card readers, but they have all been out of service.)

For your consideration, the Smart Fortwo electric drive. They really tried. Not a success. While I never owned one, I drove them several times and I liked them!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_electric_drive

I've driven EVs since 2013 across several states and I've never once encountered a functioning public charging station in the US that has a credit card reader and does not require payment and/or access via an app. I'm all in favor of it, and I understand they technically exist, but perhaps your specific locality requires that? It's in no way my experience.

Why are cookbooks legal? Shouldn't they just include the food so that you don't have to cook it?

Kayfabe is the issue. Wrestling exists in the space where any intelligent person says "you're putting me on" and can't entirely connect. Either the matches need to be legitimate sporting events, or the performances need to be even more heightened, so much so that they have clear athletic, dramatic or metaphoric intent.

Ah yes, an article from 2013. "It was a different time."

It's an old, old comment at this point, but it still is never not entertaining that the boss of Nintendo of America is literally Bowser.

While I'm totally in favor of getting BYD and a larger variety of EVs on the road in the US, and I wish I could do a test drive of a BYD, I absolutely can't imagine that importing a $5000 2021 Wuling Hongguang Mini EV, paying the fees, having it shipped (per the article) to Oklahoma (!) and then having it capped at 35mph (!!) would be in any way superior than buying a 2018 Nissan Leaf, which almost certainly would have cost the same price all told and could legally do highway speeds across the country. It is genuinely not clear from the article what advantage the very small and limiting Wuling would have had.

Does anyone know? Why would you take a 2021 35mph-capped Wuling over a 2017-18 Leaf in the US? (IIRC, they were going in the $7k-$9k range at in the early aughts.)

I find the import restrictions on Chinese EVs bizarre, but I find the desire to import a 2021 Wuling Mini EV (where there does not seem to be a price or performance advantage) equally bizarre.

Toyota, Honda, Kia, Hyundai and even Nissan have North American manufacturing facilities.

The animus about those brands all lessened greatly once many of their cars were produced in North America.