Random EV thoughts.....

Looks like a much smoother ride when stopping and starting vs an oil burner.

Yeah I wonder if that'll have a knock on for driver health. Driving a truck is well know for being a very bad job for physical and mental health.

Long hours, the need for constant concentration and sometimes living worse than a homeless person all combine to some pretty bad health outcomes

It's part of the reason that not many younger people are taking it up as a profession, the money just isn't worth the hassle

Driving a much quieter and smoother truck might take some of the stress out and improve driver health

Hopefully the EU's new rules around charging networks might also have some guidelines for rest stops added on. They could really do with including proper lounge facilities for truck drivers to relax. Shower and changing rooms and maybe some exercise machines to combat the otherwise sedentary lifestyle would also be good

Back on the insurance situation in the UK, thought this video was an interesting chat on the topic

Seems insurers have lost a lot of money there over the past year and are trying to recoup it

There's a lot of people in the comments talking about how all of there insurance has gone up by 30-40%. Doesn't seem EV related, it's a general increase across the board

Hopefully it doesn't spread here. I did a quick quote there for my ID.4 and it's within €15 of when I renewed in January, so the situation seems stable for now

Slight correction to the article, the weight is 510kg, not grams

If they'd managed to pack all that into half a kilogramme then those lads are wasted on campervans, they should be working for SpaceX 😂

More expensive than pure heroin 😱

At least, I assume it is... 😂

These new casting techniques seem to offer a lot of advantages in reducing complexity and weight, which should in turn benefit the consumer with lower prices (assuming cost savings are passed on). But I do wonder what happens when these elements are damaged in an accident and can they be repaired economically or does the car become a write off?

Reminds me of how over the last couple of decades passenger 4WD design migrated from a ladder chassis to monocoque design to relfect the fact the majority of these cars never (or very rarely) went off the blacktop.

Big improvements in on-road handling and weight and hence fuel economy, but if you actually did use them in the rough stuff off road, they often suffered stress related damage and much more difficult (and costly) to repair.

I love how Sandy, having gone to the trouble of putting on a full face visor, forgets to lower it half the time.

Bjorn versus The Sun (the rag newspaper, not the fiery orb in the sky)

TLDR, the sun spliced footage from two of his videos and misrepresented a load of quotes to make it seem like the car ran out unintentionally

Unsurprisingly, the whole thing is BS

Bjorn pointed out that they didn't link to his channel at all so there's no easy way for any readers to confirm anything, and he also doesn't make any money because they chopped footage from his videos and hosted them on their site instead of linking to the originals

So his strategy now is to make some money by trolling the sun, pretty funny response IMO

I think most sane people realise the sun is an absolute garbage paper which invents 99% of their "articles". Pretty much everything on the site now is just reposting YouTube or Tiktok videos and some idiot contract reporter talking nonsense about it (probably for the equivalent of £1 per article)

Unfortunately there's a strong cohort of people who believe the garbage and regurgitate this BS to others. Bit like how there's often posters drifting in here saying they read some article about how EVs are bad. Or maybe Mike down the pub told them about how he was reading up on this stuff, and since Mike can barely read it must have been serious

Moral of the story, don't believe Mike and the sun is a rag. If you're visiting the sun website, ideally don't, but if you do then use an adblocker so they don't make any money from you 😁

Ah now, it has some uses.

For example, it's handy if you've run out of toilet paper 😂

Really makes me wonder, in NI. There is another pillar in a spot with no disabled. 50% of the charging spots are disabled only. They could have made the other spaces disabled size but unmarked or marked charging only and disabled people could park there too.

Park in them to charge, stay with the car and move as soon as I could/space was needed if the second space was in use.

You could go further and say that designating 2 charging spaces as disabled only, where there is little or no alternative for non disabled drivers, is an abuse of non disabled ev drivers.