#evs

[soulblessin]

[hope-for-the-planet]

Electric Buses Have Passed a Brutal Cold-Weather Test

Overhead chargers on key bus routes in Madison, Wisconsin are enabling the zero-emissions vehicles to run despite freezing conditions.

From the article:

Metro Transit, which provides about 9.1 million rides annually, installed overhead chargers on key routes, allowing buses to quickly top off at several stops. Improved battery capacity also lets them go further between plug-ins. The real test came January 23, when the temperature dropped to -4°F, shutting down the University of Wisconsin-Madison — but the buses kept running. [...] Just a few years ago, electric buses routinely faltered in cold conditions, reinforcing doubts about whether they could replace diesel and natural gas-burning fleets in northern cities. Now, with better batteries and strategically placed chargers, Madison is at the forefront of a small but growing number of cities testing whether those doubts still hold. Making the technology work through a long Midwestern winter could reshape how others approach electrification. Some 3.6 million commuters nationwide rely upon buses to get around. With transportation accounting for roughly 28 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, transit agencies are looking for alternatives to polluting machinery that creates a particular health risk around bus stops. Madison is among more than 100 U.S. cities that have pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Electric buses are key to that goal.

[status-quo-hater]

I fucking hate EVs. Not because I hate the environment, but because I actually care about it.

We saw the problem of car dependency fucking up the environment, and in true capitalist fashion; the auto manufacturers said "why don't we fix this with more cars! ☝️😃"

These new enormous electric cars are almost completely irreparable if they break (and they WILL). The manufacturers don't sell replacement parts for them. The cars themselves are overly complex and the price to fix them is often more than the cost of the car. And the people who buy these things are statistically likely getting a new one via trade-in every ~5 years.

And what happens to the old ones? Scrapped. Nobody wants used EVs for all the reasons above. There's already so many of these fucking things in scrap yards. Nobody wants parts from these things because nobody fixes them because they are not made to be maintained and repaired.

I refuse to believe that I am causing more pollution by maintaining and driving my shitbox manual mustang that is 30+ years old when the average "environmentally conscious" EV owner is going to be partially responsible for literally tons of e-waste within ten years. And in ten years, hopefully I'll just get to brag about having a 40+ year old daily, which is objectively cooler than any brand new vehicle.

What we ACTUALLY need to do to save the environment is to kill car-centric infrastructure, so the majority of people don't literally need to drive in a personal vehicle every single day. We need public transportation and we need places you can walk.

Cars would not be so terrible for the environment if there was just significantly less of them being driven.

[f-d-z]

Charge Cars Mustang

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tesla's Dieselgate

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[reasonsforhope]

Quebec passes bill that bans gas-powered vehicle sales by 2035

The Quebec government announced the adoption of a bill Monday that will prohibit the sale of certain gas-powered vehicles by 2035.

"The Quebec government announced the adoption of a bill Monday [December 16, 2024] that will prohibit the sale of certain gas-powered vehicles by 2035.

The ban, which is part of the province's plan to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, will take place in two phases.

First, as of Jan. 31, 2034, it will be prohibited to advertise the sale of a light combustion vehicle of the 2035 model year or later, whether it's a new or used vehicle, including hybrid and plug-in hybrid models.

Then, beginning Dec. 31, 2035, selling and leasing new light combustion vehicles of 2034 model year and earlier will be banned.

"The sale of combustion engines will also be prohibited, except to replace a defective engine in a vehicle already on the road in Quebec," the Ministry of the Environment, the Fight against Climate Change, Wildlife and Parks said in a news release on Monday.

There are exceptions for certain vehicles, including those used by emergency services and rental companies. Also, light combustion vehicles already registered in Quebec can continue to be driven and resold.

The new law does not apply to motorcycles, mopeds, off-road vehicles, such as snowmobile and ATVs, and heavy vehicles.

Québec Solidaire (QS) had requested the bill go even further in cutting GHGs by banning the sale of light gas-powered vehicles earlier, by 2030. But Environment Minister Benoit Charette said in 2021 that it would pose too significant of a risk because by 2030 there wouldn't be enough new electric cars to supply the Quebec market.

The ministry says that adjustments could be recommended after studies of market trends are carried out in 2026 and 2030. The provincial government has set a goal of having two million EVs on Quebec roads by 2030. As of the third quarter of 2024, nearly 33 per cent of newly registered light vehicles in Quebec were electric.

In 2023, Quebec hit a record high for gas-powered vehicle sales, and as Quebec leans into the electric vehicle (EV) market, experts in the automotive industry say the real test for the province will come in 2027 when the rebates for EV purchases will disappear. They will start to be gradually phased out beginning in 2025."

-via CVT News Montreal, December 16, 2024

[allthecanadianpolitics]

O’Toole says China not a replacement for U.S., disagrees with PM Carney on EV deal

Former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole is cautioning the prime minister that despite the need to diversify trade, China is not a substitute

Former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole is cautioning the prime minister that despite the need to diversify trade, China is not a substitute for the United States. O’Toole has been tapped to join Prime Minister Mark Carney’s 24-member Canada-U.S. Advisory Committee, unveiled this week as a formal review of the countries’ trilateral trade deal with Mexico fast approaches. More than a year into a protracted trade war with the United States, meanwhile, Carney is once again emphasizing a shift in the relationship with Canada’s closest neighbour, describing Canada’s ties to the U.S. as a “weakness” in a social media video last Sunday.

Read more.

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland