The idle musings of a former military man, former computer geek, medically retired pastor and now full-time writer. Contents guaranteed to offend the politically correct and anal-retentive from time to time. My approach to life is that it should be taken with a large helping of laughter, and sufficient firepower to keep it tamed!
Karl Denninger thinks so - and alleges that manufacturers and dealers have effectively conspired to hide the real ongoing cost of their vehicles from purchasers.
I refuse to purchase a vehicle where the "infotainment" screen, if the electronics for it or the screen itself, fails, it is single-sourced at the dealer, it costs $2,000 and the car will not operate reasonably without it because, for example, I cannot select heat, air conditioning and defrost without that screen.
. . .
Likewise manufacturers think they have a right to charge you $300 or more for a key -- why? Because they have locked up the capacity to reprogram them. That's unacceptable too; never mind what happens if I lose the key while on vacation? Now I must be towed to a dealer -- what if the closest one is a hundred miles away? You think I should pay $300 on top of a $200+ tow charge for a $20 or $50 key? No.
The manufacturers and dealers both think they are entitled to screw people in short and they've been doing so on an increasing basis for the last couple of decades.
Look at one other example from that video ITSELF: "I have a 2024 Tahoe that won't start because the battery died. The replacement battery costs $340...."
Ok Mr. Dealer: Why did you suborn the production of a vehicle, and accept it for sale as a dealer, when the battery costs $340? You know damn well batteries are wear items and the customer will have to change it. You may think he's stupid but perhaps he thinks that the battery should be $150 tops and it would be if you didn't have all that start-stop and similar crap on the vehicle! Oh by the way, let me guess -- the system has to be calibrated when its replaced too and you think you have a right to force the customer to do that as well at an additional $100 or more cost without which the car will not start instead of the customer taking 5 minutes to swap it in a WalMart parking lot with a couple of wrenches like is the case for all four vehicles I currently maintain.
"People want reliable transportation they can afford, not $80,000 pickups with features they don't need."
Well then, Mr. Dealer, why did you permit the manufacturers to make the latter rather than the former?
Oh, I know the answer: You believed you were entitled to screw people rather than being in business to serve people with reliable products they want to buy at a rational price with rational operating and servicing costs, not a box full of $10,000 surprises when the transmission or engine blows up three months out of warranty or the "stereo" stops working, its proprietary and cannot be swapped for something else, and because it is tied to essential vehicle functions like the heater, A/C or defroster, forces the customer to pay $2,500 to have to have replaced. The root of the problem is that you think you are entitled to do that to customers without disclosing it up front because if you had he or she would have never bought the vehicle in the first place and you knew damn well every single vehicle on your lot has those sort of forced and undisclosed costs built into them on purpose.
Why do you think plenty of people call your line of business "stealers" rather than "dealers"?
Here's the video he mentions. It's well worth watching, and warns that the entire US automotive industry is facing disaster. If the facts and figures the narrator provides are correct . . . he's not wrong.
Food for thought, particularly if you're considering the purchase of a new or used vehicle anytime soon.
I've never thought that wrapping up my vehicle might be a worthwhile precaution before hiking a trail, but it turns out that in parts of this country, it's not a bad idea.
From the awe-inspiring views of the Grand Canyon to the geysers of Yellowstone, millions of people travel to national parks across the United States every year. The parks are home to countless animals, including one mountain-dwelling critter that can ruin a day in the great outdoors.
Marmots will pillage backpacks left unattended in search for a snack, and at Sequoia National Park's Mineral King trail, the rodents have been known to chew on tubes and wiring on the underside of vehicles.
To prevent damage in such a remote location, officials recommend hikers wrap their vehicles in a large tarp, which looks unusual, but deters marmots from chomping on a radiator hose or a brake line.
. . .
In the past, hikers used to surround their vehicles with chicken wire, but over time, the marmots learned how to evade the wire and reach the vehicles.
"On several occasions, marmots have not escaped the engine compartment quickly enough and unsuspecting drivers have given them rides to other parts of the parks; several have ridden as far as Southern California," the NPS explained.
I'm not familiar with US marmots, but I've had lots of encounters with the very similar species that South Africans familiarly refer to as dassies (actually a species of hyrax). They're endemic on Table Mountain in Cape Town, and have "colonized" the area around the upper cable car station. They unashamedly beg food from patrons at the restaurant there, so much so that they're typically so rotund and corpulent that they can't move in a hurry. That provides the local eagles with a plentiful meat diet, but there are so many dassies waiting their turn at the tourist buffet that the numbers never seem to drop.
No need to tarp your vehicles there - for a start, they're 3,000 feet below, parked on the road leading past the lower cable car station, and besides, the dassies are so well fed by tourists that they'd turn up their noses at engine cables and wires.
Be that as it may, I suppose marmots, hyrax and similar critters have developed all over the world to fill a specific ecological niche. We're simply supplementing their diet by parking nearby. Does that mean that tarping one's car to keep them out is interfering with natural selection?
I was pleased to read that a manifestly unjust court verdict has finally been overturned by the Texas Supreme Court.
The Texas Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Werner Enterprises, reversing a $100 million jury verdict against the motor carrier upheld by an appellate court in a 2014 fatal crash in which a pickup truck lost control on a slick interstate, traveled across the highway median and collided with a Werner tractor traveling on the opposite stretch of road.
. . .
“This awful accident happened because an out-of-control vehicle suddenly skidded across a wide median and struck the defendant’s truck, before he had time to react, as he drove below the speed limit in his proper lane of traffic,” the court wrote. “That singular and robustly explanatory fact fully explains why the accident happened and who is responsible for the resulting injuries. Because no further explanation is reasonably necessary to substantially explain the origins of this accident or to assign responsibility for the plaintiffs’ injuries, the rule of ‘proximate causation’ does not permit a fact finder to search for other, subordinate actors in the causal chain and assign liability to them.”
The high court said that nothing the Werner driver, Shiraz Ali, did or didn’t do contributed to the pickup truck hitting ice, losing control, veering into the median and entering oncoming traffic on an interstate highway.
However Ali was driving, the presence of his 18-wheeler in its proper lane of traffic on the other side of Interstate 20 at the precise moment the pickup truck lost control is just the kind of “happenstance of place and time” that cannot reasonably be considered a substantial factor in causing injuries to the plaintiffs.
I've long been angered by the "sue-at-all-costs" approach by so-called "ambulance-chasers": lawyers who'll hunt down anyone who might conceivably have any case of any kind against another after an accident, then sue on their behalf for often ridiculous sums in damages, hoping that the defendant will settle rather than go to the trouble and expense of an often long-drawn-out trial. They're an entire sub-culture in the legal "industry". During our recent travels, both my wife and I commented on the huge number of billboards in economically depressed areas through which we traveled, advertising the services of lawyers to sue anybody whom they could persuade you had "wronged" or "harmed" or "damaged" you. It appeared to be the major economic activity in those areas, if one judged only by the billboards alongside the roads.
This case is a classic example. The truck was doing everything legally, traveling in its lane at a lawful speed, and nowhere near traffic coming the other way: yet the ambulance-chasers tried (and, at first, succeeded) to paint it, its driver and its owner as guilty parties, responsible for the accident and subsequent injuries and expenses. That they succeeded in a lower court is a black mark against that court, which really should have known better. Fortunately, in this case, a higher court was able to put a stop to that nonsense: but how many times does that happen? How many times can the defendant not afford to take the case to an appeal, and is therefore forced to bear the costs of a settlement?
Shakespeare's prescription for lawyers might have been in jest, but it sometimes seems more than appropriate in the light of how they conduct themselves . . .
Stephan Pastis' cartoon last Sunday made me smile, but also wince a little. Click the image to be taken to a larger view at the "Pearls Before Swine" Web page.
When I first came to this country, back in 1996, that's exactly how I found my way around. I rented a car, bought a big fat Rand McNally road atlas for the whole nation and a few Thomas Guides for big cities, stopped at welcome posts as I crossed state lines to pick up more free maps there, and navigated my way around by keeping the current map open on the passenger seat as I drove. If things got complicated, I sometimes folded the map small and held it on the car's steering wheel as I drove. (A couple of times, cops stopped me because they said that was careless and negligent, but each time my foreign accent persuaded them to give me a break.)
Things have certainly changed. Between in-car navigation systems and GPS and map systems on our cellphones, it's almost impossible not to find the place you're looking for. Nevertheless, I can't help but wonder what would happen on our roads if a major power failure took out all the cellphone towers and other infrastructure on which our vehicle navigation depends. Within a split-second we'd be cut off from all our modern aids, and having to navigate as we did in the 1990's - but few of us still carry road atlases or Thomas Guides in our cars. (I still carry a Rand McNally atlas, but that's because I had to navigate all over the world - not just in America - using maps and a compass, and I've never lost the fear that I may need to do so again. I dislike total dependence on any particular technology.)
How many of you, dear readers, learned to drive using a stick shift, and found your way around using paper maps? How many of your children can say the same?
The Telegraph calls these tactics "suicidal", but they appear to be working to at least some extent.
Since they were trialled over a year ago, most [Russian] motorbike attacks have ended in failure, with the majority of riders killed before they can reach their target.
Yet, those that are successful solve a key tactical challenge in Ukraine: how to cross an open battlefield under constant surveillance from above – and fast.
Russia’s military is said to be planning to systematically integrate motorbikes across the front ahead of new offensives.
. . .
Since autumn last year, there has been a considerable increase in bike-led attacks in Ukraine’s north-eastern Kharkiv region and Donetsk to the east, where Russia largely abandoned armoured vehicle usage after suffering unsustainable losses in the winter of 2023 to 2024.
The attacks are fast-paced, but deeply flawed. For months on end, drone footage has shown the remnants of such failures, which have turned the edges of fields and Ukrainian trench lines into a junk yard of twisted metal and burnt tyres.
It is not just bikes, but all kinds of unconventional unarmoured vehicles turning up at the front, including quad bikes, civilian cars, Chinese-made buggies and electric scooters.
. . .
Motorbikes can travel roughly 45mph across harsh terrain, while small first-person-view drones move at more than double that speed. But the drones have to get from their base to the battlefield, by which time the riders have enough time to reach the trenches.
Pavlo Narozhnyi, a Ukrainian military expert, said: “The riders could have five to 10 minutes to storm Ukrainian trenches and attack, often outnumbering those inside.”
By moving fast and spreading out, bikes and buggies are starting to prove “very effective” against Ukrainian artillery and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), he added.
“They now make up 20 to 25 per cent of Russian assaults. It is hard for Ukraine to sustain such relentless attacks,” added Mr Narozhnyi, who is also founder of Reactive Post, a non-profit that supports Ukraine’s artillery brigades.
. . .
The riders’ task is not to attack infantry, he explained, but get further enough behind Ukrainian lines to attack mortar crews and drone units – more specialised soldiers that are harder to replace, he explained.
Ukrainian soldiers are starting to call this the “run, stab and escape” tactic.
There's more at the link, including some video footage of drone-versus-bike engagements.
It's a logical development, provided that the offensive forces are willing to take heavy casualties among their high-speed troops. What happens when they run out of such troops? I don't know, but I imagine it'll be hard to find volunteers to replace those that are blown up on television every day. Soldiers have a well-developed sense of self-preservation when it comes to suicidal operations. BTDTGTTSTPI.
That might also explain, of course, why Russia has apparently not taken much territory in recent weeks, despite Ukrainian complaints that such high-speed tactics have made defense difficult. Russia's largely eliminated the Ukrainian bridgehead in the Kursk area, but that's about as far as it's gone. Could it be that these tactics are costing them so many casualties as to make a larger-scale assault difficult to achieve? Possibly... but we can't rely on official reports to make that assessment. Propaganda rules the airwaves in that part of the world.
I'm sure most readers have noted a news report that two Mexican nationals were arrested in Colorado after being found driving a van with 180 "boxes", each containing 1,000 rounds of NATO 7.62x51mm (i.e. .308 Winchester) ammunition. That's 180,000 rounds of ammo - rather more than the average range or hunting trip requires!
The photographs accompanying the article weren't clear on what type of van they were driving. For example:
I've bought ammo online for years, and had it delivered to my home. 1,000 rounds of 7.62x51mm. military ball ammo weighs 27-28 pounds, plus packaging: call it 30 pounds per box, to be on the safe side. That means the total cargo load in that van was about 5,400 pounds, or 2.7 US tons, plus the weight of driver, passenger(s), fuel and other baggage - probably well over 6,000 pounds in total.
I'm not aware of any standard commercial van (i.e. not a truck with a box fitted) that is rated to carry that weight of cargo. AFAIK, even the heaviest commercial vans can manage up to two tons, but not more - at least, not without affecting their handling and making them unsafe to drive in certain conditions.
So, what were our two budding ammo merchants driving, and where were they headed? I can only assume they were taking the ammo to cartel customers in Mexico. Was it linked (i.e. for use in belt-fed machine-guns) or loose (i.e. for loading into magazines)? Interested minds are curious.
In recent days, watching TV news footage of motorists driving through very high floodwaters (sometimes halfway up the vehicle's doors), I was struck by the number of electric vehicles (EV's) - both pure electric and hybrid - among those picking their way through the water and debris. As a former sector officer for civil defense in another city and country, I was trained to look for hazards that might not be immediately obvious, and this seems to me to be precisely that: a hazard waiting to turn into a very serious situation.
In general, it's deemed safe to drive an EV through floodwater, because the battery packs are sealed and the motor and drivetrain are well insulated. Sources confirming that include (but are not limited to):
However, that's in theory. In practice, floodwaters contain hazards that often can't be seen or avoided: thick tree branches, potholes, stones and chunks of tarmac that have been washed away from where they were before and deposited in the traffic lane, and so on. If a vehicle hits them beneath the water, they can inflict severe damage, particularly on formerly sealed and/or insulated electrical components.
If an EV's battery casing is cracked, or the insulation of its motor and/or drivetrain is torn away, it can deliver a really severe electric shock to all those nearby - most particularly its occupants, who in a flood situation may be wearing wet clothing, sitting on wet seats, and have their feet in water over the floorboards. Talk about an electric chair waiting to go off!
There's also the unfortunate reality that damaged EV battery packs can erupt in flames with little or no warning, and burn at a very high intensity. If one is stuck inside a car when the battery starts to burn beneath one's seat, one may not be able to get out before being burned - perhaps very badly. Look at how fast the battery fire erupts in these video clips:
There have been videos on social media allegedly showing vehicles striking loose paving stones or other obstructions, puncturing their battery packs, and bursting into flames. However, I could only find this YouTube short illustrating that, which I can't embed. Click over there to watch it for yourself.
Bottom line: if you drive an EV of any sort, please be very careful about driving through floodwater. Under normal circumstances your battery and drivetrain should be fine, but a flood is, by definition, not a normal circumstance! You can't see obstacles that might damage your vehicle severely. I'd hate to have electrically shocked and lightly toasted blog readers . . .
I have to admit, there are times when I think the Babylon Bee's irreverent, satirical take on the news of the day is divinely inspired. They can strike exactly the right note. For example:
I heard some terrible news yesterday. A friend and his wife had a daughter in her late teens or early 20's, I don't recall exactly which. She was severely asthmatic, and had been so from an early age. They were driving through Arizona and New Mexico, heading for Texas, when they encountered a very heavy dust storm, which reduced visibility so much that they had to stop on the roadside. Unfortunately there was also a brush fire in the area, driven by the fierce winds of the dust storm. To make matters worse, their vehicle's ventilation system malfunctioned, letting in the smoke and dust. The combination caused their daughter to suffer an asthma attack. They tried to call for help, but the poor visibility and road conditions prevented any from reaching them before their daughter went into cardiac arrest.
My friend is understandably distraught after that experience, as is his wife. However, he's trying to make it count for something positive by passing the word to everyone he knows that such conditions - or combinations of conditions - can be extremely dangerous to an asthmatic, or indeed anyone with any sort of breathing difficulties such as COPD, etc. Since both my wife and I have breathing-related issues, he made sure to call me and tell me the sad news.
No sooner had I ended the call than I drove to the nearest Harbor Freight branch and bought four of these Gerson P95 disposable respirators, two in Medium size (to fit my wife) and two Large (to fit me).
One of each size will go into our vehicle emergency kits, to travel with us wherever we go. They're disposable, so they're not very high-tech, but they'll do for the sort of incident my friend and his family encountered; and they're low-cost enough that we can afford to replace them every year, to make sure they're still functional.
There are other respirators out there, some a lot more capable - and more expensive - but they're probably overkill for use as emergency travel aids. Shop around. However, I don't think the simple paper or cloth masks we used during the COVID imbroglio, or even the stiffer painting-style masks, will be as effective as this design, with its close-fitting face mask and external filters. I'd rather spend a bit extra for better protection.
In the hope that my friend's tragic loss may help others besides his friends and acquaintances, I share the news with you, and the solution I've adopted. If any of you suffer from, or have family and/or friends who suffer from, breathing-related issues, I strongly recommend that you do something similar to make your travels a little safer.
From American Truckers on X.com, we learn this. Click the image for a larger, readable view.
I don't regularly drive on ice and snow (thank you, Texas weather!), but from my (very) limited exposure to it, I know I don't do well under those driving conditions. I'd never considered the hazards of commercial vehicles, particularly 18-wheeler truck/trailer combinations, when their drivers have the same problem. Now that drivers can come in from Mexico (where snow isn't exactly commonplace, to put it mildly) and drive all the way to the US/Canadian border or even further north, I can see that would make for . . . interesting times on the highway.
How about you, readers? Have any of you run into this problem (hopefully not literally!)? If so, please tell us about it in Comments. It might help keep all of us safer on the road.
Blue-collar workers (on manufacturing assembly lines, transport drivers, maintenance, etc.) have seen some impact from robotics so far. That's generally been in the form of big machines permanently planted in given locations on an assembly line, performing one or more functions under supervision, then sending the article onward to the next assembly station. In terms of transport, artificial intelligence-boosted computerized copilots have already flown, some of them capable of taking an aircraft from takeoff to landing without human intervention. Driverless vehicles are already riding America's roads, and becoming more common. However, the basic structure of the workplace - a "traditional" factory, or transport, or whatever - has not (yet) been fundamentally challenged.
That's about to change. It looks as if Elon Musk and Tesla are in the vanguard, developing humanoid robots that can run their own assembly line, moving and functioning in a human fashion rather than being restricted to one place and one job. Because the robots are now (or soon will be) autonomous, the entire nature of the factory as we know it may change drastically.
Tesla is Revolutionizing Manufacturing—And Few Are Talking About It
"The most under-discussed thing in the analyst world about Tesla is not the new vehicles coming, nor the growing discussions about autonomy, but rather Tesla's next product: their new way of manufacturing.
It's a big deal, a huge step in how products are made today, and I don't think many investment firms have the right research people actually looking into what this impact is and what it's going to enable.
It's going to enable the variable cost to build products to shrink further and further, approaching zero. This is the step function needed for cost reduction to achieve further scale, and I don’t think enough people are talking about it.
It’s going to be how the Cybertruck is made, how Optimus will be made. Tesla versions its factories like they version their product.
They spend time perfecting it and have design reviews of their factory designs just as they do with their products. They have specs and performance attributes they are trying to meet. This is very different from what happens at other companies at the executive level."
That's an excerpt on X.com from this hour-long discussion of what Tesla is doing, and how it may impact other manufacturers and interests.
It sounds very similar to what SpaceX has done with its rocket engine design and manufacture. It has three generations (so far) of its Raptor rocket engine (click the image below for a larger view):
Each generation has been "smarter", lighter, more powerful and simpler than the preceding one. Furthermore, production has speeded up immensely. According to Elon Musk, SpaceX is producing one of the third-generation Raptor engines every day at its factory in California - and that'll have to increase significantly if SpaceX hopes to launch two of its mammoth Starship rockets every month this year. Only ultra-modern manufacturing techniques, using robotics and computer-aided manufacture whenever possible, can hope to achieve that rate of production. Traditional manufacturing, with its high number of human employees, literally could not work fast or accurately enough to produce them. Sounds like a poster child for the new manufacturing techniques discussed above . . . and for other industries too.
This is such a profound statement because a lot of the stories that I hear are related to, like, say Tesla capitalizing on making manufacturing the product—really just honing in so much on the factory that it becomes the product, the you know, and where we throw around 2 million cars per year, five million cars per year per factory, tens of millions of bots per year sooner than people think. The usual narrative is crazy, pie-in-the-sky; they can’t do that, look at Ford, look at BYD, they can only do so much.
But what we’re missing here is that we’ve had decades of just sitting on our asses, leveraging cheaper labor versus going out of our way to really push the boundaries of engineering and manufacturing. And now that we have a company that’s willing to do that because the leader is viewing that as a first principles approach to manufacturing, right? Instead of like, okay, cheap labor is good, but why aren’t we pushing manufacturing and engineering as much as we can to make this as efficient and as productive as possible?
Of course they’re extremely talented, they’re doing something very unique, but it’s also on the backs of 30-40 years of, I’m going to call it laziness. Like, you’re just taking the easy way out, and I get it, more profits, you’re taking care of shareholders—I get it—but you’re not really pushing the boundaries of manufacturing. I think what this leads to is, if companies and leaders truly take this to heart, we’re going to see an explosion in manufacturing across the board. It’s not just going to be a Tesla thing; I think we’re going to see it all over the place.
Another aspect is the introduction of robotics into areas like farming, where human labor has until now been indispensable. We've discussed in these pages robots that dispense insecticide and fertilizer, or harvest certain crops; but now robots are set to play a much larger role, simply because some jobs require labor that is no longer available (or willing to work for affordable wages), and/or are too dangerous to risk human lives. One commenter on the video embedded above said:
As a "small" scale rural farmer (no tractors) our biggest expense is labour, about $28,000 per employee (40 hrs/ week @ $20/hr for 8 months/year). And that is IF we can find any willing workers. IF we can they often make many costly mistakes, take time off for vacations, and productions plummets if it is too hot, too cold, too rainy, or when they are too tired.
Humanoid robots are terrifying to me, but at the same time I can't help but be drawn to the possibility that they could be the solution we have been looking for...
The remote-controlled robot was created by a Nebraska family whose farmer friend pleaded with them to build him a robot so he never had to risk going into a dangerous grain bin again.
Noting on their website that there are around 25 grain-bin engulfment deaths a year, Grain Weevil has adopted the motto “No boots in the grain.”
That’s a motto that sits well with Rabou, who grows wheat and other grains near Cheyenne.
“It doesn’t matter what kind of grain you’re raising, it’s all dangerous when it’s in a bin,” Rabou told Cowboy State Daily. “All you have to do is just collapse one empty pocket, and it can just, as soon as it has pressure on it, collapse and pull everything into it.”
Everything, in the case of many family farms, is likely to be either a good friend or family member. That makes grain-bin entrapment a very personal tragedy, both for the farm family and the surrounding farming community.
Rabou said given the choice of sending a robot into a grain bin or a person, it’s going to be the robot every time.
Add to that experimentation in other countries for new ways to use robots, particularly humanoid ones (for example, Japan has a great need for elder care, and nowhere near enough people to fill all those jobs, so it's experimenting with robotic delivery of elder care instead), and it looks as if traditional blue-collar work across many industries and economies is about to be severely shaken up. That's an important consideration for young people looking at their future careers. Can their chosen field be automated, and is it cost-effective to do so? If so, they might want to look somewhere else.
On the other hand, could the advent of such advanced automation save older industries that have become too expensive with human labor, and can't recruit enough skilled workers to produce their output? We spoke a few days ago about the USA's shipbuilding industry crisis, and how we might have to look to other countries to manufacture our ships. Could the extensive automation of US shipyards change that picture?
Finally, we have to ask what we'll do with thousands of blue-collar workers, particularly those who are untrained or without complex, in-demand skills, who will be left without work as a result of this new wave of automation. How are they to support themselves? Will some sort of universal basic income become a necessary, even an essential element of our society? Will our cities become merely residences for unwanted former workers, while factories migrate from them to new industrial zones organized around and built upon automated systems, with minimal human involvement? Who knows?
How many of you remember this German advertisement for Volkswagen's Polo?
Well, the terrorist who detonated an explosion in a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump Tower in Las Vegas yesterday clearly hadn't seen it - or, if he had, he didn't learn anything from it.
You'll note the comment from law enforcement in that last video clip. The Cybertruck was strongly enough built to contain most of the blast, and vent it upward rather than outward, with the result that (as far as I know) not a single window in the building was broken and no bystanders were hurt. That can't be said of the wannabe terrorist driver of the rented Cybertruck, who was apparently very comprehensively broken indeed - a consummation (or should that be conflagration?) devoutly to be wished.
Elon Musk should think about using that video clip in an advertisement for the Cybertruck. It speaks very well of the vehicle's toughness.
Courtesy of Zendo Deb at 357 Magnum blog, we find that the explosion and fire in the Port of Miami on November 29th was caused by previously water-damaged electric vehicles. This sub-5-minute video report contains all the essential details. Recommended viewing; and once you've watched it, I'll have a few more things to say about it.
First, kudos to the investigator for taking the time and trouble to track down all of the vehicles involved, including the damage they suffered during hurricane-induced floods earlier this year.
Next, consider his comments about how easy it is to modify damage documentation into salvage documentation - even a clean title. I don't know how many vehicles have come out of hurricane-damaged areas into parts of the USA where they could be re-registered without any indication that they'd been flooded, but I'm willing to bet it's more than a few. From my own experience during and after Hurricane Katrina, including discussions with law enforcement personnel, I'd say every such storm sees several thousand such vehicles sold to unknowing buyers in other states. In the case of electric vehicles, the danger of fire or explosion is exponentially greater than for fossil-fuel-powered examples. What if the vehicle that exploded had reached its destination, and been re-registered and sold, and had a mother with small children in it when it finally cooked off? That doesn't bear thinking about . . .
I think we all need to keep this firmly in mind when dealing with used or pre-owned electric or hybrid vehicles. The risk from flooding or battery damage is so great as to warrant extreme care in checking it out before committing to buying it.
Thanks, once again, to Zendo Deb for publishing that video. It's a very important lesson to all of us.
Recently, while browsing about the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, I came across an organization called Emergency RV. They describe their mission as follows:
EmergencyRV is a charitable organization initially established in response to the massive and deadly November 2018 Campfire, which decimated the entire town of Paradise, California and left more than 50,000 residents traumatized and displaced.
For founder Woody Faircloth and his then six-year-old daughter Luna, watching events unfold on television from Denver was not enough. Determined to help, the father and daughter set out to raise funds to purchase an RV and deliver it by Thanksgiving to a family in need.
Word of their kind act spread quickly and within days, press requests, RV donations, offers of legal services, and funds poured in. Before the Faircloth’s knew it, they were delivering another RV and then another. Since then, EmergencyRV has helped hundreds of victims and expanded its mission to help many more victims of wildfire and other natural disasters.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Emergency RV has placed a number of travel trailers at sites where the owners' homes were severely damaged or destroyed, leaving them nowhere to live. You'll find details of some of them at the organization's X.com feed.
I'm going to donate to them - not an RV or travel trailer (because I don't own one), but money to help buy one and/or pay for their other expenses. I'd like to suggest to you, dear readers, that this might be a cause well worth our support.
The entirety of Ford’s normal vehicle profits was undone by its losses on electric vehicles.
Ford’s 2024 Q3 Earnings Presentation delivers the details: The year-to-date losses on Ford’s EV business (what the company calls “Ford Model e”) totaled $3.7 billion. Profits from Ford’s “Model Blue” division, which sells traditional internal combustion vehicles, also happened to be $3.7 billion.
This past quarter, Ford reported losses of $1.2 billion on its EV business. Energy reporter Robert Bryce calculated that Ford likely lost almost $60,000 for every electric vehicle it sold this past quarter. “Ford has been hemorrhaging cash on EVs for the past two years,” Bryce wrote. “It lost $4.7 billion on EVs in 2023 and $2.2 billion on EVs in 2022.”
General Motors and Stellantis are having their own problems with EV's, of course. Only massive government subsidies are enabling automakers to avoid the reality of the US market. As the Mackinac report points out:
A Gallup poll from March found that 48% of respondents would not consider buying an electric vehicle– a number up 7% from the year prior. while a McKinsey reported in June that 46% of Americans who owned electric vehicles were very likely to buy a gas-powered vehicle next time.
Without government tax incentives and subsidies, electric vehicles would be dead on arrival. They can't be produced at a low enough price to persuade people to buy them - let alone their problems with sufficient range, extraordinarily expensive battery replacements, and the like.
Give me an EV that has a practical range of 400-500 miles between recharges (further would be better), while carrying a full load of passengers and/or cargo, in high summer in Texas or deep winter in Montana, with the A/C or heater running full blast, while towing a trailer. Also, let there be an abundance of high-speed recharging stations to allow for long road trips. If EV's can handle that load and those conditions, I'll take a long, hard look at them. Anything less than that, and it's no dice.
I came across this photograph on MeWe (sorry, I can't link to the source post, as MeWe has no facilities to do that). It made me laugh. Click the image for a larger view.
Not a bad bit of parking, if you ignore the hole in the wall. The barrel didn't mess up the running tracks for the overhead door at all!
What I'm curious about is where the photograph was taken, and of what armed force's artillery. The camouflage on the vehicle looks to be German or further east in Europe, but I'm no expert on camo patterns, so I can't be sure. There are only 5 road wheels, and the tall, angled turret enclosing the cannon doesn't fit any US artillery I can think of.
Can any reader identify the service (and, if possible, the SPG) and post more information in Comments? Thanks.
A British study has just debunked the claim that electric vehicles (EV's) are cheaper to operate than gasoline or diesel vehicles.
Electric cars are up to twice as expensive as petrol or diesel vehicles to run, new figures have suggested.
Running an electric vehicle (EV) can cost more than 24p [about 32c US at current exchange rates] per mile, while a diesel vehicle is 12.5p [about 16.5c US].
It costs as much as 80p [US $1.06] per kilowatt hour to charge an EV using a rapid or ultra-rapid device on the roadside, according to data from the app ZapMap.
A typical electric car will travel 3.3 miles for every kWh of electricity used, meaning rapid and ultra-rapid chargers currently cost the equivalent of 24.1p [about 32c US] per mile, calculations by The Times suggest.
Slower chargers cost 16.4p [about 21.8c US] per mile.
This is about double the average diesel car, which will do 43 miles per gallon, resulting in a cost of 12.5p [about 16.6c US] per mile at current prices. A typical petrol car costs 14.5p [about 19.3c US] per mile, according to the analysis.
So much for the promises of greater economy offered with much fanfare by those trying to promote EV's! With numbers like that, I'll stick to gasoline or diesel as long as I can, thank you very much.
This question is for all you mechanics and automotive experts out there.
I drive a 2014 Nissan Pathfinder. Over the past six months the vehicle has seemed more and more “twitchy” in its handling when at speed and on rougher surfaces. This past weekend, my wife and I drove from Iowa Park to San Angelo and back, and the problem appears to have become much worse – so much so that it literally scared us. At times we worried we might lose control of the vehicle.
The problem occurs in specific conditions:
When at higher speeds (60-80 mph);
On rougher road surfaces (not on very smooth surfaces);
When the road curves, or when the driver changes direction;
When the vehicle is under acceleration or the cruise control is applying power to maintain speed (not when the vehicle is coasting without the accelerator being used).
All of the above appear to be necessary to create the specific problem. When they are present, the vehicle can lurch or “twitch” for a second or so when changing direction. It’s very abrupt, almost as if the vehicle is about to go out of control, but it doesn’t last long enough to make that actually happen. Sometimes it’s merely a mild twitch, but other times it can be hard and strong enough to really scare us (both driver and passenger).
I've wracked my brains to figure out what might be causing such a problem. It doesn't resemble a CV joint issue (although that may be part of it), and other front suspension and steering components don't display any obvious problems. I've sent the car in to the dealership for their mechanics to look at, but so far they haven't reported that they've found anything.
Can anybody suggest what might be causing it? If so, please advise in Comments. Thanks!
It seems that in formerly Great Britain, if you want to order a specific model of vehicle, you may have to wait for your place in the quota to be filled.
Car makers are rationing sales of petrol and hybrid vehicles in Britain to avoid hefty net zero fines, according to one of the country’s biggest dealership chains.
Robert Forrester, chief executive of Vertu Motors, said manufacturers were delaying deliveries of cars until next year amid fears they will otherwise breach quotas set for them by the Government.
This means someone ordering a car today at some dealerships will not receive it until February, he said.
At the same time, Mr Forrester warned manufacturers and dealers were grappling with a glut of more expensive electric vehicles (EVs) that are “not easily finding homes”.
He said: “In some franchises there’s a restriction on supply of petrol cars and hybrid cars, which is actually where the demand is.
“It’s almost as if we can’t supply the cars that people want, but we’ve got plenty of the cars that maybe they don’t want.
“They [manufacturers] are trying to avoid the fines. So they’re constraining the ability for us to supply petrol cars in order to try and keep to the government targets.”
The chief executive blamed the zero emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate, which requires at least 22pc of cars sold by manufacturers to be electric from this year.
Sounds like a neat bureaucratic rat-trap. They want to stop manufacturers producing certain types of vehicles, but they can't very well simply forbid them to do so - that would be a violation of the country's free market. Therefore, they mandate that a certain proportion of what they manufacture must conform to a bureaucratic prescription. If they fail to meet that proportion, they're fined very heavily - which they can't afford; so the manufacturers have no choice but to meet that mandate, even though their customers don't want the bureaucratically-approved vehicles.
The customers have no recourse at all, because the manufacturers are caught in a bureaucratic cleft stick. They can't afford to pay the fines for disobeying the regulations, and their customers won't pay the higher prices they'd need to charge to be able to pay those fines - so the customers have no choice but to wait for the cars they want.
I understand that there's a growing market in "car buying holidays". British residents go across the Channel for a week or two's holiday in France or Spain, and while they're there they buy the vehicle they want; then they bring it back with them, and register it in Britain. Apparently a number of models can even be had in right-hand-drive in Europe, so they'll be easier to manage on British roads. I wonder how long it'll take the bureaucrats to block that approach?
I also wonder how long it'll be before our bureaucrats try similar shenanigans here. Some states already are (California in particular). Will American consumers be willing to boycott manufacturers who won't produce the vehicles they want? Up until now, that hasn't been a factor. Watch this space . . .
I was taken aback to read about a new tactic being employed by some California jurisdictions.
In Oakland and beyond, police called to crime scenes are increasingly looking for more than shell casings and fingerprints. They’re scanning for Teslas parked nearby, hoping their unique outward-facing cameras captured key evidence. And, the Chronicle has found, they’re even resorting to obtaining warrants to tow the cars to ensure they don’t lose the video.
The trend offers a window into how mass surveillance — the expansion of cameras as well as license-plate scanners, security doorbells and precise cellphone tracking — is changing crime-fighting. While few cars have camera systems similar to Teslas, that could change rapidly, especially as the technology in vehicles continues to improve.
“We have all these mobile video devices floating around,” said Sgt. Ben Therriault, president of the Richmond Police Officers Association.
Therriault said he and other officers now frequently seek video from bystander Teslas, and usually get the owners’ consent to download it without having to serve a warrant. Still, he said, tows are sometimes necessary, if police can’t locate a Tesla owner and need the video “to pursue all leads.”
“It’s the most drastic thing you could do,” he acknowledged.
In at least three instances in July and August, Oakland police sought to tow a Tesla into evidence to obtain — via a second court order — its stored video. Officers cited the cars’ “Sentry Mode” feature, a system of cameras and sensors that records noise and movement around the vehicle when it is empty and locked, storing it in a USB drive in the glove box.
At present the "sentry mode" feature appears to be limited to Tesla autos - but I'm sure other manufacturers are working on including something like it into their high-end vehicles. That means those brands will also be targeted by police as potential treasure-troves of evidence, if they're parked anywhere near a crime scene.
I'll certainly be very unhappy indeed if I come looking for my vehicle, only to find it's been towed by a police department due to potential evidence that it may contain. They won't be certain the evidence is there - how can they be, when they haven't yet looked for it? - but that won't stop them glomming onto the car and preventing me from using it. There's more. What if they use their possession of the vehicle to go on a "fishing expedition", inspecting all my belongings and possessions and deciding whether they have any problem with any of them? What if I have ammunition, or liquor, or other expensive products in the load compartment (entirely legally, of course, being shopping I haven't yet unloaded or something like that)? How can I be sure I'll get them back? (If you say I should automatically trust police not to appropriate them, you're living in a dream world. Many cops won't - but a lot of cops will.)
I can see all sorts of negatives here for the vehicle owner - but that doesn't seem to bother the police who are impounding their wheels.
