This is so interesting. I’m a slow and cautious EV driver with an older 1T Minicab-MiEV which runs light truck tyres. My hoon friends look aghast and would never drive such a dinky car. It weighs less than half a standard ICE ute. But I’ve been told my tyres need changing after only around 20k-30k km. Minicabs do have tiny tyres and I do more highway than city driving, so that is likely part of the equation, but it could be that there really is something more to this that EVs run through tyres faster, and not just because of weight. Which sucks as particulates in the environment are often from tyre wear 😞

new EVs are definitely overpriced, but secondhand ones, for the brave, are an excellent option. Ask me how I know 😁

as a buyer of not one, not two, but three second hand EVs from Japan, I can confidently say that they are cheaper once they are older, but guess what… batteries are outlasting most projections by a significant amount.

There are indeed buyers for older secondhand EVs. And while new buyers are paying a premium, this is an excellent democratising feature of this new market.

it is still something to celebrate, it’s only if past this point the new coal fired power stations contribute more than retiring ones and new solar. That’s the metric to watch.

I have Mitsubishi Minicab-MiEV, it weighs about 1T, and is very stable even in high winds, is the battery plus light commercial tyres that really help!

Australia is actually still making solar panels, quite good ones actually

(nowhere near as cheap as China, but less transport costs…)

https://tindosolar.com.au/our-product/tindo-panels/

as an owner of a Mitsubishi Minicab-MiEV, I highly approve of more kei cars everywhere for everyone, they are so. great. BYD has good presence here, PLEASE let us get this in Australia!!

As goes Cuba, so go we all, eventually. In some ways they are fortunate, getting these in place while they are readily available.

Wish three wheelers like this were legal to drive where I live!

I’m not a fan of hybrids, but I drove one once for a week and it was massively cheaper/used less fuel. So I can’t believe there aren’t some benefits overall… but I’m still massively on team BEV. Just keep it simple! Get over your blimmin range anxiety people.

yikes!! ​that’s nuts. In AU they seem to need to be “secondhand” to be imported if not an official dealer import, and the system recently got an overhaul to make everything worse/harder. I just wish we could harmonise with EU rules already, it’s so damn stupid. Plus each state in AU has different rego rules and costs. Insanely inefficient and stupid. But at least we CAN import them, even though we are a tiny minority amongst the child-killers.

astonished there is zero mention of the kei class of Japanese cars. This class is deliberately made small, and I’ve been driving the first kei class EV for years: the Mitsubishi Minicab-MiEV, which were first produced over 15 years ago. Yes the original battery was small, but I got the battery pack upgrade (from an AU EV specialist) which is 30kwh, I live rurally and with much greater distances between fast chargers than you would find in Europe. And it is /fine/.

definitely a large concern.

maybe I should have only mentioned total cost of build-out then. It is good to know that they are generally lasting much longer than their warranty, and of course we keep seeing increase in efficiencies so that older panels really are only a trickle compared to new anyway. What is truly worrying is Jevons Paradox.

while this kind of growth in renewables makes me hopeful, the total cost of build out is what concerns me, especially as solar has a lifetime of only 10-20 years. I feel like that cost in energy terms needs to be taken into account…

I think because it’s somewhat novel, and really very simple. Once you start getting into electrical energy, you add layers of complexity. Think like global supply chains are going to get disrupted, and this kind of low tech is absolutely the right direction to be following imo.

I do occasionally see other Chademo cars, and there are definitely a few that check in on Plugshare, I think we tend to be more regular about checking in as it’s really helpful to know if the Chademo port works for others.

was listening to a podcast last year where they talked about the projections the year before of who would be best for carbon emissions, Kamala Harris or Trump, and it was basically a tie. I didn’t realise the benefit to Pakistan (and Australia, where we basically got solar panels for free for the last few years thanks to government incentives too), was largely attributable to his first term policies. I’m sure he’d really hate to know he’s actually an environmental hero at this point 😂

I have a vehicle that uses Chademo, and at bigger rural charging stations, there are usually 3+ ccs chargers for the 1 Chademo. I expect most build out from here to focus on ccs, and there is the tech to convert ccs to Chademo so I’ll not be left with an un road-trip-able vehicle, so appreciate while you think they are useless, the majority of investment now is increasing ccs.

Good to hear SA is doing good work here, and disappointed VIC sucks on that stretch. There are charging deserts even closer to Melbourne over East too and that sucks.

agree about most the other points especially queuing for chargers. hope that comes!

but that uses energy you should account for, even if you don’t see it in your EV dash.

Meshcore in Australia is taking off and recently made the first Victoria - Tasmania link. Long distance comms are viable within state with many hops - if you are within range of a repeater hooked into the existing network is possible to go hundreds of kilometres quite easily. We have people participating in synchronous conversations that are occurring over a dozen hops from regional to inner urban anew back again. Yes messages do sometimes get lost but people are creating tools to troubleshoot and track. It’s genuinely doing what I had originally hoped Meshtastic would, but could never get messages far enough due to hop limits and telemetry cruft.