Although I have new respect for Elon Musk due to his scorn for coronapanic and his success with SpaceX, I still don’t love the idea of driving a Tesla (no Apple CarPlay, dashboard replaced by an oddly-placed screen, the image of being a climate zealot (like the jet fuel-pumping Bill Gates!)). Hyundai has all of the bones for a good dog mode, so to speak, e.g., a big battery and an efficient heat pump. This presumably extends to Hyundai’s sister car company, Kia, which just released the EV6 (charge for 4.5 minutes to drive 60 miles… after driving 60 miles to the nearest high-speed charging location).
The clever British have figured out that dog mode already exists in Hyundai EVs. It is buried in the menu structure as “utility mode” and locking the car while in this mode requires using the mechanical key (buried inside the electronic key).
I don’t think I would buy one until I had verified at the dealership that this works on a U.S.-spec car.
One good thing about Hyundai and Kia is that they remain eligible for a $7,500 federal tax credit, unlike Tesla. So if you’re a high-income person you can enjoy the spectacle of low-income Americans being forced to work longer hours to pay for a portion of your shiny new car.
Tesla anecdote: I asked an engineer friend if he still liked his Tesla 3. He said that he did, but his wife (a doctor) hated it, finding the “autopilot” jerky/scary. “I enjoy monitoring the system,” he said. I’m consistently confused by the conflation of attempted self-driving and electrification. Why should we expect an electric-powered car to drive any differently than a Toyota Camry? We used up so much energy plugging the thing in every night that now we’re too tired to turn the steering wheel?
Where will we charge this thing? “Biden’s spending plans could remake the economy, says Nobel Prize winner Stiglitz” As in Aladdin, it will be A Whole New World:
A Nobel Prize-winning economist says he not only endorses President Biden’s expected $4 trillion infrastructure spending plan, but expects that it could break the U.S. out of the low-growth, low-inflation environment that has existed for the past 20 years.
See also “Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan calls for EV rebates, 500,000 charging stations”.
Growth will be history…
Re. Stiglitz. One should be very leery of taking seriously this idiot-savant economic pronouncements his Nobel credentials notwithstanding (maybe especially so). In 2007, he profusely praised Hugo Chavez’ economic policies in Venezuela saying, inter alia: “Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez appears to have had success in bringing health and education to the people in the poor neighborhoods of Caracas. … It is not only important to have sustainable growth, but to ensure the best distribution of economic growth, for the benefit of all citizens…Venezuela’s economic growth has been very impressive in the last few years”
This is nothing new, howevever. His elder spiritual brother, Galbraith, had these brilliant things to share with his fellow central planners/commie wannabes: “Soviet system has made great economic progress in recent years . . . One can see it in the appearance of solid wellbeing of the people in the streets.” (circa 1984)
Perhaps, it’s only natural for Stiglitz to be giving economic advice to the current administration seeing the trajectory this country and its population is on.
One cannot help wondering whether people like this are true believers in the Communist Manifesto, mere opportunists, or both.
Ivan: Chavez did bring health and education to the poor neighborhoods and the distribution was reasonably equitable, right? Chavez never promised a specific level of health or education, so we can give him credit for fulfilling his promise!
Growth will be measured in increase of rioter happiness and number of buildings burned…
phil:
According to the Guardian, the poverty level in Venezuela after hovering around 55% in the early 2000s jumped to 90% in 2017. There was a brief period between 2008 and 2011 that the level dramatically decreased. Approximately, the same redistributional phenomena can be observed in many socialist economies after their respective revolutionary changes, e.g. Russia after 1917 or China during the Great Leap Forward.
So, no, the numbers indicate that the Venezuela socialist redistribution worked exactly as expected, i.e. dramatically increasing the number of impoverished people after “running of other people money”.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/06/on-the-road-venezuela-20-years-after-hugo-chavez-rise
Ivan: I just meant that if you read the language super carefully you could argue that making almost everyone poor and providing them with a LOW level of health and education would be consistent with the Nobel-winner’s forecast.
phil: Sure, if you follow the promise and the result literally, then yes. But, that’s a trivial result as they say in math 🙂
That Hyundai contrivance may indeed work but I think it’s pretty goofy AND doofy. Having to separate the key from the fob means that average person will do it and lose either the key or the fob approximately 27 times per year. If Hyundai really wants that feature, they should make it a lot more convenient and streamlined. Put a little “Utility Mode” button on the FOB that allows you to turn it on, lock the doors and then come back and open them with the FOB by pushing the same button twice, or something along those lines.
Any time I (or particularly my getting-older father) have to separate parts of my keychain, etc., unless I put the parts back together *immediately* – something gets lost. Older people will have an awful with this, in particular. In this video he gives the fob to the little girl who runs away with it. “Don’t toss it in the creek, dear!”
I say no to this implementation. It’s a good idea, but look: we have the equivalent of a 1990s supercomputer in every one of these cars and we’re fooling around separating keys from their fobs to make it do what we want. No. Noooooooo!!
Also, having to dig through that menu on the dashboard with the button on the steering wheel like people do with old Olympus digicams is also unnecessarily contrived and counterproductive. Since a lot of people have dogs, and since this guy and others obviously like the feature, Hyundai should put a nice backlit button somewhere on the dashboard that says: “Utility” with a little glyph of a dog on it. You push the button, select the temperature, get everyone+dog out of the car, push the “Utility” button on the fob, which locks the doors and the “boot.” Then when you come back you push the “Utility” button on the fob again which gives you back your car.
I will now accept a cashier’s check from Hyundai Motor Company for solving their dorky: “Just dig through the menu and do a dance separating the key from the fob” ridiculousness.
Also, as far back in the 1980’s even Oldsmobile had cars with voice annunciators. Why couldn’t Hyundai have the dash button you press, it says: “Entering Utility Mode. Please adjust the settings, exit the car and push the Utility button on the key fob to lock the doors.” And then it flashes the lights to indicate you have successfully entered Utility Mode and the car is locked?
From a 1980’s something Oldsmobile Toronado. They also used to say things like: “Please turn off the lights” if you tried to exit the engine-off, parked vehicle with the lights on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb3gYvJpDK0
It’s 2021 and we have to take keyfobs apart and diddle around with menus to do this stuff?
“Tesla anecdote: I asked an engineer friend if he still liked his Tesla 3. He said that he did, but his wife (a doctor) hated it, finding the “autopilot” jerky/scary.”
Same here. My partner just tells me to use “human pilot” and stop with the Tesla gadgets. On a long drive today, the mountain passes still are missing reflector bumps, having been scraped off throughout the winter by snowplows.
End result? Our Model 3 was “AutoPilot” straddling the rightmost highway lane and also the shoulder, driving on the rumble strip, thanks to the $10,000 “full self driving computer”.