> but plugins get closer to the less efficient alternative (regular hybrid) the more you use them.
As long as most of your drive cycle fits within the EV range of the plugin hybrid, they are cheaper to operate than a regular hybrid. The crossover point depends on the drive cycle and the cost of electricity vs gasoline.
I had a plug-in hybrid SUV that got 2.2miles/kWh in EV mode, which covered 75% of the miles I drove. The net savings were significant vs an equivalent plain hybrid SUV in my area, which would get basically the same gasoline miles/gal.
Using a plug-in hybrid as an EV can and will wear out the drive battery over the lifetime of the car. It doesn't even matter if you don't intend to keep the car for very long as a rational market will price this in. The cost ($10k or more) goes a long way at the pump.
> Using a plug-in hybrid as an EV can and will wear out the drive battery over the lifetime of the car
PHEVs have battery management systems and buffer capacity to protect the battery just like pure EVs. For many, at extremely high power demand, they switch to the gass engine anyways, so if anything the batteries are less stressed.
But the problem is that means you drove a minuscule amount so if you’d bought a hybrid you would have still used very little gas and your car would have been much cheaper.
Generously, the full range of a plugin hybrid is equivalent to about a gallon of gas.
> But the problem is that means you drove a minuscule amount so if you’d bought a hybrid you would have still used very little gas and your car would have been much cheaper.
A 2023 Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV (38 miles EV range) costs less than a 2023 Toyota Highlander Hybrid with the same mileage on the odometer, and far less than Land Rover or other luxury SUV brands.
I bought my Outlander used - also was a great deal.
The real way dumb money loses is by buying new cars, not by choosing an electric drivetrain.
> It's a shame the Lightning got discontinued.
> As an EV owner, it sucks that the main thing holding the technology back is misconceptions and misunderstanding, rather than actual practical matters.
The F150 Lighting (and the Cybertruck) are failing precisely because it was impractical. It was expensive, has limited range when doing actual "pickup truck" work, like hauling tons of construction materials. It was built for the very niche market of buyers at the intersection of luxury pickups and EVs.
People who buy huge luxury pickups tend not to want EVs, and people who buy EVs tend not to want huge luxury pickup trucks.
A practical work truck needs to be smaller, less luxurious, and less expensive, electric or not. If Ford follows through and releases a plugin-hybrid Maverick with 150ish miles of EV range plus the onboard generator, that would be ideal.
A pure EV drivetrain on the other hand is incredibly practical for daily commuter and even long distance travel - assuming you have home charging - but not for hauling tons of stuff long distances.
The lighting is fine for towing, especially the type that people usually do. You can tow up to 10,000lbs and the truck has ridiculous power to pull it.
What you can't do it tow it long distances (>90mi, worst case) without 40 minute stops every 1.5 hours. That sucks.
But the truth is very few truck owners are towing huge loads long distances.
However, if you are pulling your lawn care trailer around town, you will not have a problem, because every day you start with a full charge.
As an aside, the main killer of range for a trailer is a function of speed and drag. Low drag trailers driven at highway speeds (60-65) have marginal impacts on range, regardless of weight.
Again, the whole thing is ridden with misconceptions and misunderstandings. The majority of people who tow stuff, can still tow stuff while reaping cheaper operating costs.
> But the truth is very few truck owners are towing huge loads long distances.
This pattern also applies more broadly. Most people don't actually need to drive 400 miles without stopping, don't actually need an SUV, and in some cases don't actually need a truck. For a huge swath of the population some variation on a hybrid/electric hatchback/wagon or minivan is actually the best match for their needs, but practicality is rarely the prevailing factor in vehicle purchase decisions.
The reason I'm holding out for a 400 mile range vehicle is many fold.
1: Sometimes I actually do drive 400 miles in a single sitting, and I want to be able to keep doing that.
2: The last 10% of charge seems to take the longest. If I can safely fast charge in 20 minutes from 30 to 300 miles range, then I would have no range anxiety even when I'm on a long road trip.
3: I know the tech is coming, and I can wait until it gets here. I don't have an "only" option when it comes to vehicles.
The word "can" in your sentence is making some bold assumptions about my vehicle budget. The R1T Dual with Max battery (the combo that gets an estimated 400+ mile range) is $95,000.
That would be about a $1,300/month loan for 6 years.
I would either need to add $30,000 annual pre-tax to my income or to pay off every debt other than my house to even begin to consider that as an option, and there are so many other things I could spend $1,300/month on.
I will keep an eye on the used market though. I'm sure some deals will come up eventually.
oh sure yeah, they're expensive (although used are getting cheaper!). I didn't read "holding out for a 400m range" as "holding out for a 400m range less than $X". But yes, all the long range EVs, rivian, lucid, are expensive today. I think it will take another year or two for more affordable long range options to come out in the rest of the world, and some unknown years after that for them to hit the US due to protectionism and tariffs.
All that said, the average new car price in the US topped $50k in 2025, which is pretty wild in of itself. These expensive EVs are actually cheaper than some of the optioned up trucks that sell in huge numbers. It all seems crazy over-extended debt to me but, is what it is.
I wouldn't mind so much if all I had to worry about was making car payments, but having an entire life to support and car payments puts some brakes on my purchasing power.
I could swing $600/m if I needed to, but $1,300/m is a cheap mortgage or rent, not a car payment imho.
> However, if you are pulling your lawn care trailer around town, you will not have a problem,
I live in a high CoL area, but I still can't imagine a lawn care business affording an $80k truck. Most of them seem to drive used Tacomas and Mavericks.
> The majority of people who tow stuff, can still tow stuff while reaping cheaper operating costs.
People who are paying $80 to $90k for a luxury pickup truck aren't particularly worried about operating costs.
With perhaps the exception of a few climate-change believers who happen to also run construction companies or farms/ranches (they do exist!), what F150/Cybertruck owners are worried about is signaling to others that they paid $80 to $90k for a luxury pickup truck.
To this day, I've seen 1 Lightning loaded with construction gear.
I've never seen a Cybertruck doing heavy work - they are usually rolling squeaky clean around ritzy parts of town, or getting stuck in snowdrifts in the mountains.
The EVs I see doing work: Ford Electric transit vans.
I don't think that market is a niche at all. From what I can tell, most pickup owners don't use them as a pickup. They use them as a more masculine pavement SUV. So, you'd think, the F150 L and Cyber truck would be perfect.
If you just use it as a pick up a few times a year, it could be worth it. I have furniture that I want to get rid of, and if I had a pick up I would have done it already.
This is Seattle, anything that involves people is expensive. Also You’ll see furniture left on the corner and it will just stay there forever, it’s not like Austin where all the junk is combed though ever morning.
In Seattle, it costs $30 per large furniture item to make it go away using official methods. How much do you have? (And how does that compare to the price of buying and keeping a pickup truck?)
Ya, thats actually quite reasonable. And no, I'm not thinking about buying and keeping a pickup, just because I have nowhere to park it :). But maybe one of those kei trucks that are so popular recently might be worth it, if I can just get used to the steering wheel being on the left.
There's a couple of Honda (I think?) Kei trucks around me. 4WD, low bed, fold-down rails. I don't know about taking them on the highway with a load of furniture, but they're the most versatile-looking 'round-town vehicle I've ever seen.
I really wish we could have something like that, that's less than 25 years old.
Lots of people do exactly that. You can load it all the way past GVWR and it has little effect on the range. It's towing that hurts. Many people use these for business with great success.
> The niche market that does exist wants a Rivian.
Ford's sales for the Lightning were outpacing Rivian, too.
> For EV trucks priced and appointed for everyone else, I'm looking forward to what Slate and Telos make.
I do hear that fairly often. It reminds me a lot of the brown diesel wagon phenomenon. Lots of online interest, very little follow through. I guess time will tell.
> A pure EV drivetrain on the other hand is incredibly practical for daily commuter and even long distance travel - assuming you have home charging - but not for hauling tons of stuff long distances.
You know that electric trains are very practical, not ?
Also, what about these EV trucks and EV vans ?
For me, the more exciting phenomenon is the electric 3 wheeler, AKA the electric auto-rikshaw/tuk-tuk.
Hired 3 wheelers are the primary affordable last-mile option in cities big and small in Asia when you don't have or can't drive a car or 2-wheeler (school children, the elderly, or anyone who doesn't want to deal with the insane traffic). They tend to have 2-stroke engines, a huge source of local air pollution.
But there are increasingly electric versions these days. I asked one e-rickshaw driver whether he saves money by driving it, and he said yes, but also it's a lot more comfortable for both him and his customers vs the vibrations of the 2 stroke petrol engine.
His only concern was the depreciation and it's effect on resale value.
I shouldn't have used the word "tend", but there are still many 2-stroke auto-rickshaws in India. I saw (and smelled) them a year ago. That said, I know many cities in India have banned them, and they are not in production anymore.
Having been in an electric rickshaw, I will take them over a combustion one (2 or 4-stroke) if I have a choice. I hope that the economics in India reach the tipping point where they are the obvious choice for rickshaw drivers.
Overlapping windows seem like a dated skeumorphic paradigm at this point. I almost never want to see just part of a window.
For a long time, I've found that either full screen or tiling (driven by keyboard shortcuts) is a far less frustrating a way to interact with windows, so I almost never use window-resizing. Window resizing is also horrendous when you try to do it with a touchpad.
Agreed. The problem is that native window management is pretty bad in macOS. And the 3rd party tools solving the problem aren't that great on top of being expensive sometimes.
Apple could fix it, but instead they made overlapping windows for iPadOS, which is even dumber considering the smaller display area.
I think it doesn't matter what they do; part of their clientele is fully captive, another part is only there for the status, and the last part is just using it rudimentally, so anything is OK.
I think there are some pretty awesome third party tools. I am incredibly happy with my setup.
BetterTouchTool + Alt Tab + TaskBar is my setup.
All apps used with any frequency mapped to keyboard shortcuts, mostly using right side CMD key. CMD C Chrome, CMD V VS Code, CMD T Terminal, CMD F Figma, CMD S Slack, CMD E Edge, CMD OPT A Activity MTR, CMD OPT CTRL F Firefox and not that many more.
And then for windows, it's left side CMD OPT ENTER maximize, CMD OPT LEFT left screen, etc etc. And then others for quadrants. If I need to multiwindow, it's rarely more than 3 things, and most of the time it's just 2.
Having alt tab mean cmd tab is windows style is huge. Many of these things aren't directly related to window management but I find myself not thinking about it at all, when I used to think about it all the time with Macs.
iOS on iPad has split screen mode now. It's pretty decent. Wouldn't defend it tho.
Alt Tab is alright, but it's not as smooth as native Windows window management. It always has a lot of overlays/orphaned/invisible windows hanging out in there.
Something like that really needs to be implemented at the OS level to be trully competent.
TaskBar is cool but I'm not a fan of needing to have something like a dock constantly taking vertical space while we have the menu bar on top.
After years of using both, I think Microsoft decision to bundle both into a single taskbar is just much better. And the menu bar is annoying when you use multiple monitors.
I personally use Moom for windows layout, which gives you something close to PowerToys and is pretty decent. Still, it is an added utility app that you have to pay for; Apple should ship it with the OS at this point.
iPadOS is almost irrelevant for productivity anyway; there are too many flaws and limitations, and all the software are expensive subscriptions. My point is that they had a blank slate to come up with something better but still decided to just copy what they already had, which completely defeats the purpose of having a newer platform/OS.
In the end, many of Apple's UI decisions looked good when computers were simpler, but nowadays they show their limitations heavily.
Windows has many architectural flaws and not as good software for some niches, but the workflow feels better.
> Agreed. The problem is that native window management is pretty bad in macOS. And the 3rd party tools solving the problem aren't that great on top of being expensive sometimes.
Linux desktops have great ground-up support for tiling window management, whether as an optional behavior (Gnome/KDE/ChromeOS), or strict tile enforcement (i3/xMonad).
> I think it doesn't matter what they do; part of their clientele is fully captive, another part is only there for the status, and the last part is just using it rudimentally, so anything is OK.
It's too bad even technologists often fall into those categories these days.
Yeh, Linux desktops are pretty good nowadays; the problem is just software support. If commercial software were easier to make/sell for Linux, that would be great.
There are not a lot of technologists left, and they are dominated by the crowd anyway. Apple used to cater more to people who really liked computers, but now they try to sell to everyone, so the objectives have changed a lot, sadly.
> I don't understand people who use anything else, to be honest.
Most people don't make their coffee in an Aeropress either.
I've also used Linux exclusively (in my case 25 years), but I also realize that with a few niche exceptions, there are few mass marketed products that feature the traditional Linux desktop as their primary UI.
Desktop OS UI is hard. It takes investment in technology, product, and marketing all focused on a target market. Even with all of those most upstarts have failed to gain traction. Also consider that most people buy laptops for 2 reasons: 1) browsing the web and if they can afford it 2) as a fashion accessory. People will put up with a lot of BS from a product if they feel like the product gives them social status and acceptance.
No Linux laptop really hits (2). Arguably only a few Windows laptops do either.
> Most people don't make their coffee in an Aeropress either.
Stupid analogy, the Linux version of that would be whatever french press you want to use. Buy your coffee ground or as beans and grind yourself, depending on preference. And for my girlfriend there's always the Starbucks equivalent (Debian stable with Gnome).
Apple would be picked by modern slaves and sold in a capsule at 100,000% markup and it only fits their machines. Windows comes with pesticides for the "benefit of the user".
I don't see how their analogy is stupid. Aeropress and french press are pretty similar from an "enthusiast coffee device" perspective. Lots of room for variability in grind size, coffee choice, and specific brewing technique with both methods.
Aeropress is a brand, one I've never heard of. It fits in the Linux ecosystem (maybe as one of the Red Hat flavors?) but as an analogy it is simplified. Linux is so much bigger than that and there's everything from LFS (grow, grind and brew with tools you've sourced and put together yourself), to Android (plain old drip machine). Reducing everything that's the Linux ecosystem to a niche brand of a specific type of coffee maker is dishonest.
I use a french press myself, and never heard of Aeropress. My machines all run Debian with DWM and I never have any problems. My non-technical girlfriend is fine on Debian and doesn't really know the difference. She did mention how fast her laptop boots though.
I am too lazy and not enough of a snob to write several paragraphs on why Aeropress is objectively better and different from French Press, but it is, and I hope someone can step up and do that here.
> Apple would be picked by modern slaves and sold in a capsule at 100,000% markup and it only fits their machines. Windows comes with pesticides for the "benefit of the user".
The exploitation of labor in developing countries in the electronics supply chain is a serious issue, and worth discussing, but it's not the dimension of the subject my comment was addressing.
> Nevertheless, the average private school applicant had only a 18.3% chance of admission, well below the 25.8% average for public school applicants.
As a parent of a student in a private school, this is how it should be. For the amount of support and resources that private school students receive vs their public school peers, the standards should be higher. My child understands this, and knows that they will have to achieve more to get admission to a UC than a kid at a low income public school.
There should be exceptions, for example: very low SES student attending a private school on scholarship - although such students are usually exceptional or else they would not have qualified for private school scholarship.
The working class shouldn't be subsidizing the higher education of the wealthy.
This seems backwards to me. Colleges should be prioritizing strong students for admission and nothing else. Our country needs the best engineers and doctors. Colleges are a scarce, valuable resource and should be reserved for the best students, regardless of why they are the best students.
I agree with this, but I think you didn’t get the point. The point is, the way we measure strength has to be considered in light of the environment. If a student is in a high school where the average strength is 100, and the student has achieved a strength of 200, it shows that the student has tenacity and grit and drive. Whereas another student might be in a high school where the average strength is 200 and has a strength of 200, and this shows that the student is content to be just average. After admission, the first student has a much higher potential of outperforming the average freshman. The first student’s strength could very well be limited by the amount of resources available in this high school, and not by his/her innate ability.
At least, this is what is supposed to happen, if you believe the UC admission officers.
I understand that point and I still disagree with it. There are objective, direct measurements of strength (standardized tests, performance at state/nation-wide academic competitions, admissions essays), and we don't need to resort to this more flimsy chain of subjective comparisons that use "relative strength of student within school" and "relative strength of school across all schools".
You said above that our country “needs the best engineers and doctors.” Are the tests you mention really objective, direct measures of which student is likely to be the best engineer or doctor in the future? What does it even mean to be the best engineer, and how do you test that?
This doesn't describe what UC is doing, however. LCFF is for (1) kids in foster care, (2) English learners, and (3) low income. If you go to a school that has lots of these kids, but you yourself do not have one of these disadvantages, then it doesn't mean that you've risen up out of poverty to achieve relative greatness. It means that you're not an immigrant/poor, but you go to school with a lot of such students. And in the age of grade inflation, getting good grades at a school with lots of low-performing kids is especially easy.
> This seems backwards to me. Colleges should be prioritizing strong students for admission and nothing else. Our country needs the best engineers and doctors. Colleges are a scarce, valuable resource and should be reserved for the best students, regardless of why they are the best students.
It seems unlikely that Americans would be so massively overrepresented in American colleges under this policy...
You seem to be falsely equating private schools with "the wealthy" and public schools with "the working class". Plenty of people are wealthy and send their kids to public schools. They fund them via property taxes rather than tuition payments.
> What really makes me mad is how bumpers were made to protect the car and now they are these expressions of design that you have to protect
Bumpers today are made to protect the car's occupants, not the car.
They are the start of the crumple zone, whose purpose is to absorb and release most of the energy transfer of the crash by deforming, rather than transferring it to the passenger compartment.
Jetson is such a confusing product and it's difficult to tell exactly what they're supporting. Looking at the image download page it seems to be only Orin and newer?
> It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse?
It's not so different from the rationale for many consumer electronics products: novelty for marketing's sake rather than functionality. Similarly, notice the ridiculous trend of removing most physical buttons from car dashboards, started by Tesla and mindlessly aped by the other carmakers.
As long as most of your drive cycle fits within the EV range of the plugin hybrid, they are cheaper to operate than a regular hybrid. The crossover point depends on the drive cycle and the cost of electricity vs gasoline.
I had a plug-in hybrid SUV that got 2.2miles/kWh in EV mode, which covered 75% of the miles I drove. The net savings were significant vs an equivalent plain hybrid SUV in my area, which would get basically the same gasoline miles/gal.
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