Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
https://d.sb/
Mastodon: @dan@d.sb

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Makes sense.

    My wife and I don’t commute very far so an EV is fine for us even if we can only charge it with 120V initially (until we install a proper charger in our garage). We’ve got a BMW iX on order.

    Tesla is opening superchargers to all brands eventually. That’ll help a lot, as will the inevitable changes that’ll happen to gas stations where they replace some pumps with EV chargers.

    Range is definitely an issue, but it’s improving over time. 10 years ago, the average EV range was around 100 miles. I know BMW have tested a prototype car with ~600 mile range, and that tech should hopefully come with their Neue Klasse vehicles some time in 2026/2027. The Lucid Air gets around 500 miles range. Our current gas car (2012 Mazda 3) only gets around 360 miles until the gas light comes on, so it’s not actually that different for us.







  • I hope European-style adaptive headlights become the norm in the USA eventually. Some higher-end cars have a matrix of LEDs instead of one bulb per headlight, and they can programmatically dim just some of the LEDs. If you have your headlights on but there’s a car in front of you (or on the other side of the road, whatever), the high beam will dim just the area the car is in. This happens automatically while you’re driving.

    This is an option in some European vehicles (or may be standard on high end ones) but they have to explicitly disable the feature when exporting to the USA.

    The USA did approve something relating to this, but it must not be sufficient since the European manufacturers are still disabling the feature in the USA.




  • Tactile controls cost more to install

    Not just more to install, but also more to design. Physical controls have to be designed so they fit the aesthetic of the car and don’t look out of place. On the other hand, a touch screen can just reuse a generic UI design across every vehicle made by a particular manufacturer, or even across different manufacturers if the same vendor supplies the same OS for all of them.


  • dan@upvote.autolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldNew Debit Card
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    1 day ago

    The transition to contactless (where you tap your card or phone instead of inserting the card) took so long in the USA though. It only really became popular during COVID and with Apple Pay. Home Depot finally enabled contactless payments recently. In Australia, we were using contactless payment 15 years ago!

    US banking is behind in a few other ways too. Apps like Venmo and Zelle just don’t exist in some other countries since you can easily do an instant transfer through your bank to anyone else for free. Some US banks still use SMS for two factor auth, which is insecure.