Some airlines are cancelling flights left and right, others are jacking up the prices. If the war keeps going on into the summer, there's going to be some very obvious consumer-facing issues. From gas prices, very expensive travel, price hikes in logistics, you name it.
I think the timeline is much shorter than that. These oil-producing nations have not invested in a lot of storage, because they usually ship everything out immediately. Once you no longer have anywhere to put the oil, you have to start shutting down production, and it is not easy to restart. We'll be at that point in maybe another week and a half.
Is there anyone here with a deeper understanding of oilfield geology and engineering? Given that:
- storage facilities in the region are limited and in some cases almost full
- mature oil fields need constant water injections to pump out the remaining crude
How likely is it that stopping crude extraction (and therefore the water injections) will permanently damage the oil reservoirs?
And based on that is it possible that countries with this type of mature oil fields would consider simply dumping the excess crude that can't be stored anymore in the desert or in the Gulf of Persia?
There is one way that production could resume, of course: a public peace that is both real and accompanied by Iranian broadcast of orders to their coastal troops to stand down.
Given the ongoing campaign to assassinate Iranian diplomats who may be willing to negotiate peace whilst leaving hardliners alive, the only question is what kind of inducements will be necessary to get them to agree?
I don't think anything short of the US completely cutting ties with Israel would make Iran consider backing down at this point. And even then, I expect they'll continue directly attacking Israel.
Not exactly a recent change. Since the '79 revolution Iran has had a pretty hostile position against Israel and the US. A big part of that hostility was because the US and the UK overthrew their democracy to install a puppet dictator in '53.
Having anything a rich person in the US wants is a curse. We've overthrown governments for bananas and sugar. We tried to overthrow a government for cigars.
Basically the only reason Norway escaped this curse was they were next door to the USSR and the US knew fucking around there could easily land it in the USSR potentially also taking Sweden with it.
Is this not the heart of the problem? Israel has been killing Iranians for years. Nobody can guarantee that Israel would not break a cease fire when they feel like it.
I fear that both sides are acting completely rational: Israel wants to wipe out Iran and Iran is doing whatever they can to survive.
A few critical items beyond oil are also now in short supply:
Fertilizer, which is kind of important right now since it's springtime and farmers are planting crops around the world.
Plastic, without which modern hospitals can't operate.
Aluminum.
The list goes on, this was the dumbest war in our lifetimes but it's the culmination of a lot of previous stupidity that made it all possible.
The people who started this war are authoritarians and, let's be honest, straight up criminals, who did it to entrench their grip on their own domestic politics.
The sentiment I see is more like, "Are war crimes, mass deaths, a global depression, and maybe WWIII really worth keeping the earlier crimes of Trump and Netanyahu out of the headlines?"
Even if there's plenty of supply, this is still a major supply chain disruption that will have ripple effects. Combine this with all the other major supply chain disruptions.
This might only raise costs a few percent. Yet for some firms that were just barely keeping their heads above water with the tightened monetary policy, and the tariffs, and now spikes in energy prices, this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
I agree this is a major disruption, but I don't agree it's the plastic portion to worry about.
Oil, fertilizer, helium. These are the things I'm most worried about especially for their knock-on effects. Fertilizer is going to have a long tail. Like, don't expect a food spike this year, but expect prices on food to go wild next year. That alone is going to majorly effect everything worldwide.
It's not price, it's availability. You construction will slam to a halt. Plumber neighbour is now hiring security dogs for his supply yard as they now have to deal with theft of pvc and PE pipe, in addition to tweakers going after copper.
But how does this work out in the long run, in the case of AGI?
If AGI becomes available, especially at the local and open-source level, shouldn't all these be democratized - meaning that the AGI can simply roll out the tooling you need.
After all, AGI is what all these companies are chasing.
They are charismatic. They know how to work people.
If you've ever worked with narcissists and sociopaths, you'll soon enough discover that they will do anything to get what they want. And they are professionals at playing people.
They know what to say, how to present themselves, how to make their story, and what strings to pull on the people they try to convince.
Some investors are also willing to suspend their disbelief - thinking that if they are the first to ditch to bag, there's money to be made...as long as they're not the ones holding the bag.
Most other countries are not Norway, it is a very wealthy, tiny market (150 K vehicles/year) with lots of hydro and not representative of the typical vehicle market in Western Europe and definitely not representative of the situation in the rest of the world.
EVs are the future, there is no doubt about that. But that future will not arrive everywhere at the same point in time and Norway is very far ahead of the rest of the world due to a fairly unique set of circumstances: exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick.
"exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick"
How so?
If every oil exporter used some of their oil revenue to switch to EVs, that would, all things equal, hasten the transition to EVs. The U.S. is not doing that.
> the drug dealer that knows you don't consumer your own supply unless you must
So true. There's nothing incompatible at all with:
a) realizing that earth has gifted you with a valuable but limited & polluting energy source
b) realizing that you'd be foolish to get you own country hooked on it, but it's not a bad business if you can get other countries hooked on it.
Instead we get oil rich areas seemingly determined to show off how much of their oil they can waste.
Wow, so now the US oil barons who lobbied Trump to kill renewables and EVs are even worse than Mohammed "Bonesaw*" bin Salman Al Saud? That's really something, if you look at it that way...
Either you're too smart for me or I just can't follow you, but could you please expand a bit on your comment? I find it hard to link it to the parent, but I realize that may be on me.
Sorry, it was referring more to the grandparent comment, that referred to Saudi Arabia behaving more responsibly than the US, and Mohammed bin Salman is of course the crown prince and prime minister of Saudi Arabia.
They're comparing Saudi Arabia to a drug dealer; I don't think they're ascribing any moral virtue to the Saudi regime. They just believe the Saudis are acting more intelligently.
Yes? I don't think you can argue in good faith that the latter causes more total harm and damage than the former. It's really quite something to look at it in a different way..
The funny thing is the US doesn’t really consume much Saudi Oil. The US is a net exporter of oil, though they do import some specific types of oils and export more of others.
The US’s interest in the Middle East oil is a lot about stabilizing oil prices. At least it used to be when there was a rational policy and competent executors.
Transitioning to renewables makes economic sense for the Saudis because they make more money selling a barrel of oil for transportation fuel and generating power with wind and solar.
The US has vast reserves of coal and natural gas. We generally don't use oil to generate power either -- oil is something like 0.4% of the total power generated, because we have vast amounts of natural gas and coal to use instead.
The situation isn't the result of some crafty master plan on the part of the Saudis. It's jusut what makes sense.
The oil market is global and the US is a big part of that but it’s not the only one. You can always make changes to energy sources later and as new technologies are unlocked perhaps we can even skip some headaches now. Obviously there’s the geostrategic angle now which you see play out in Iran and Venezuela.
As other countries move to reliance on Chinese rare earth processing for renewable technology, it drives their oil and gas consumption down which means more oil and gas for those who are still using it.
If you really want to look at this analogy about drug dealers then really what you see is that America is the big boss here and an energy and military super power, and Saudi Arabia is just another dealer under American protection and if they don’t do what we tell them to do they’ll get the boot.
Like the drug dealers where I grew up they are making the neighborhood a really terrible place to live. They might have a nice house right now, but the homes around them are burning.
The US is moving the grid renewable. The guys at top might not think so and yell loudly not to, but they can't stop things, only put the brakes on a little.
They've pumped the brakes pretty hard by cutting EPA standards,
subsidizing coal,
suing to stop wind and solar projects,
cutting green energy grants by $8B,
yoinking solar tax credits,
trying to rewrite the Clean Air Act to block states from regulating emissions,
shield Big Oil from litigation for climate deception,
and repeating Big Oil's lies and disinformation.
Those rollouts are seeing massive cutbacks from what I've read, as half the country is straight up banning new solar. Good luck ever getting that off the books.
I don't think it will be that hard. Banning solar is a feel good thing now that doesn't affect many people - but that means when the next election is gone it won't be opposed when lobbyists (and greens) try to roll it back. Of course each state is different, so some it will take more than a few elections. In some states solar is already widespread enough that you can't ban it because too many people already have it and know enough about it to tell their friends. Those friends who live in other states will start to ask why they don't.
Remember you need to keep the 20 year plan in mind. If you only look to the end of 2026 things are hopeless, but look to 2050 (and compare to 2000) and things look much better.
As I said there, it's inherently something the LLM can't do, at least not without lots of engineering. So I'm assuming you're talking about "as a human" here.
Some of it is just trial and error. You notice it makes an incorrect assumption, it takes longer to find something than it should, and so on. Some of that can be predicted, simply by you knowing the codebase. If you sat down with a new hire to walk them through it and get them up to speed, what would you tell them? It'd be a waste of time to tell them about things they can easily figure out on their own within a minute by looking at filenames and so on. It's the low effort thing to do, but it also achieves nothing.
For example, "A's B component has a default C which should be overridden unless desired". If A is an internal library then you could just fix that if it goes against the LLM's common assumptions, but maybe it's an external dependency and it's not worth it.
Or maybe you're building a game, and there are a few core mechanics that are relevant to much of the logic. Then you can likely explain in a few sentences what would otherwise need hundreds of lines of code read across multiple files. So you put that in an AGENTS.MD file in a relevant folder so it gets autoloaded when touching any of that code.
"If every oil exporter used some of their oil revenue to switch to EVs, that would, all things equal, hasten the transition to EVs."
The premise is all things aren't equal. The oil Norway would have used just gets used somewhere else so what difference does it make what Norway does instead. I don't know if that's the reality of the situation but if it is just an offset, it does sound like a bookkeeping trick doesn't it?
Norway switching from ICEs to EVs objectively reduces global oil consumption+burning by exactly that much.
Norway exporting oil increases oil supply, but doesn't increase consumption. The world's oil consumers are not supply-constrained; the producers are not running at 100% capacity, and they'll happily pick up the slack if Norway just stopped exporting oil for no reason. And there's a large amount of consumption that can't be offset by electrification in the first place (petrochemicals, long distance flight, etc) so there's not even a theoretical future end-state where they require a non-EV-using counterparty to buy their oil to fund their EV usage.
Calling it a "bookkeeping trick" is just verbal sleigh-of-hand.
"Norway switching from ICEs to EVs objectively reduces global oil consumption+burning by exactly that much."
Meaning what they are in fact doing has the same effect as if they stopped producing/exporting oil exactly to the extent that it gets replaced by EVs over there? I could only see that happening if they undersell everyone in the world so they create no new consumers. I guess the truth is somewhere in the middle. I imagine the truth be known though? When Norway enters the market, how much other producers' sales go down?
This would be true but you're not accounting for OPEC and other groups (e.g. historically the Texas Railroad Commission in the United States, not sure how relevant they still are) to balance production and price per barrel to what they think is agreeable.
Oil hasn't been supply constrained since the 50's, it's price is largely based on what producing countries agree on, as well as geopolitics.
Additionally, governments levy a decent amount of taxes on certain end products such as gasoline. They might very well, as they have in the past, decide to simply up their tax revenue as prices of crude and derivatives go down.
Only if Norway's lack of internal consumption must be met with equal and similarly destructive consumption elsewhere.
Consider if others followed their lead. Then oil would be used less for transportation, one of its most destructive and singular uses, and more for manufacturing or medical or less wasteful uses.
Speaking of bookkeeping tricks: Kneecapping renewable energy (wind), cancelling the EV future in the US, and then starting a war in the strait of hormuz will someday be acknowledged as the finest moment of the oil industry, maximizing profit in the face of all reason.
Sure, but there is also China where over half of new vehicle sales are EVs. Denmark is at 70%, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and the Netherlands are all above 50%, a bunch of other countries in the EU are at one third EVs. In India, 5% of sales are EVs but that is double of the year before and all the big car manufacturers in India are now offering EVs. Even Australia is at 14% after stalling on EVs for years. So change is unfolding quite quickly compared to previous years. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ev-share-new-car-sales-by-c...
Those numbers include PHEV cars. As a BEV owner, I consider PHEV to be more ICE than BEV. BEV numbers are not as impressive, but we're getting there, slowly but surely. A bit slower than I would've hoped.
The Danish numbers normally exclude PHEVs. Not that it matters, since PHEVs are almost dead as a segment here. Over the past two years 310k BEVs were sold here, but only 6k PHEVs. The situation in Norway is very similar.
And across Europe BEVs are also about twice as popular as PHEVs. In 2025 2.6 million BEVs were sold in Europe compared to 1.3 million PHEVs. It seems the biggest deciding factor is how good the public charging network is.
My Phev is about 80% ev. It uses a tank of gas a month, replacing a nearly identical vehicle (similar body and same engine - though other things have changed) that needed one or two tanks a week.
sadly thats not the norm. Various recent studies from the EU based on real world vehicle data show that actual savings from the PHEV category are about ~20% less emissions than a pure gas version. Aka, they are just gas cars. Despite manufacturers claiming ~70-80% for emissions credits. The category is today kind of a scam, in aggregate.
It doesnt have to be - bigger battery strictly-series EREVs would likely show better numbers than the weak-ev phevs sold today.
I think it is the norm only because people never run the numbers. At least where I live gas costs me 5-10x more than electric (I live in the US, gas is cheap, but all my electric is from even cheaper wind). It wouldn't be hard to teach them to plug the car in when they are at home anywhere (many people park in a garage with an outlet - if this doesn't apply to you then PHEV doesn't make sense - you don't get enough range for your effort to find a charger)
For most in the US what makes the most sense today is one PHEV they use for long trips and towing the boat. The rest should be pure EVs, which have enough range for the typical trips and the few exceptions they just reserve the PHEV that day. As time goes on more and more chargers will be built and eventually pure EV for everything will make sense, but right not there isn't enough charging infrastructure. (You can get almost anywhere in the US, but the trip is planned around where the next charger is, not where either you feel like stopping or where the battery is low - gas stations are at nearly every exit, fast chargers 1 in 30 exits or something in that range)
PHEVs when you already own them cost vastly less in electric mode. That people don't bother plugging them in is because they don't care about cost enough to bother to see if there is a difference.
It’s also because most PHEVs sold are terrible EVs. Weak, short range, cut to gas all the time. Impractical to use as a pure ev. This style of phev is greenwashing and should be sold as a gas car for emissions rules.
EREVs are a different story, and have a place in the transition for awhile.
This doesn't make them terrible! This makes them great. That means they can run 80% of the time as an EV, yet use the ICE just enough to not ever have stale gas in the tank. As a driver you barely notice, and someone outside will have no clue what mode it is operating in. (wind noise is louder than the ICE)
When there are fast chargers on every corner like gas stations are PHEV will make less sense. However in the world I live in today an EV can do a road trip but it forces you to plan your stops around where there is a charger, while with gas can still assume it will be close when you need it. This will change over the coming years, for now I won't take my EV on a road trip, but my PHEV has done it several times.
PHEV feels good on paper, but in ICE mode they’re terrible. On a recent long road trip they do about 14km/L with a fully charged EV range of 50km. Quite inefficient to lug a petrol engine and a semi large battery all the time.
per-capita or by total volume? i ask because a sibling or child comment says that the number of cars sold in norway is pretty small (in part because the population is small). a quick google says 180k cars sold in norway in 2025 (we can round up to 100% EV) and 34M sold in China. It also says China has 50% EV sales. So by total volume Norway isn't close to the top.
No, it is a real invewtment in the right direction. The oil states in the middle east could have made such investments, too. Lots of EV powered by solar panels paid for with oil dollar. But they did not (in a significant way).
>But that future will not arrive everywhere at the same point in time and Norway is very far ahead of the rest of the world due to a fairly unique set of circumstances: exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick.
Not really. Even in a hypothetical future where all road vehicles are electric, we'll still need fossil fuels for a while. For one thing, it's probably going to be a while before airplanes can go electric. And production of plastics will probably need petroleum for a long time.
Admittedly this data is a little old (20 years), but today's numbers probably aren't that different. It shows, out of US petroleum production, that only 47% is used for gasoline. 8% is used for jet fuel, 22% for diesel and heating oil, 5% for coke, 3% for asphalt, etc. 53% is not a "rounding error".
Not the OP but have a 20-year-old car. The relevant calculation is not cost of annual repair v value of car, but rather annual cost vs annual cost of a new car. Even if you amortize the upfront cost of a new car over 20 years, the increased insurance cost and (depending on where you live) property taxes plus some annual maintenance, at least for me, is substantially more expensive than annual maintenance on my current car.
I did a from-the-ground-up rebuild (including the engine) just after buying it. That cost an arm and a leg but all in (including the original car) it still came to ~half of what a new one would cost. Anything that had been 'improved' on it was brought back to stock. It's been super reliable, I've had it since jan 2020, put a considerable number of kms on it and it hasn't let me down (so far :) ).
As for doing the maintenance myself, I don't have experience with this kind of car at all, I've worked a lot on classic Mini's, Citroens (2CV and DS) and Austin Maxi. But never anything like this so I'm more than happy to let someone else earn a buck on it. But it's been pretty cheap to run so far, fuel, oil, regular service and once a control arm that got bent out of shape.
Compared to a new vehicle I'm considerably better off.
That would not be the case amortized I expect. You can sell virtually any car for $5k as a floor price I’d say. Most yearly maintenance amounts to changing oil. Maybe tires every four years. Every 5-10 years maybe a bigger couple hundred dollar job. That has been about my experience owning used cars. But still well below $5k/yr.
Netherlands. And fuel injection has been a thing since the 1930s for Diesel and the 1950's for vehicles.
Yes, it has an ECU and ooh, gollies there is software in that. But it's completely invisible from an interaction point of view, there are no screens, all the buttons just do what they are told, there are no 'upgrades', no bugs, interfaces, restarts and attempts to kill me through 'assistance'.
It’s interesting to see how people who grew up with smartphones think.
It’s entirely possible to get around without smartphones or paper maps. There are road signs, written directions, verbal directions. The main time I used to use a paper map was driving long distance trips in a foreign country.
I have one, but I haven't used it since I got a smart watch (I mostly used it to track my speed). I actually really dislike navigation apps, since they tend to take you on strange routes that maybe are slightly shorter? To be fair, I haven't owned a car in 15 years, so I rarely drive.
It's actually not clear to me in what sense "banned" is used here. The UK never formally "banned" leaded petrol. They banned sales of new cars which need it, and then later told places which sell petrol that they can only have a small portion of their fuel as leaded, and then (as anticipated) market forces did the rest.
AFAICT it would still be legal for the place on the bypass near me to sell leaded fuel but they don't because (a) the market is too small, not worth it and (b) as a result wholesalers don't offer the product, so if they wanted to sell it they can't get it anyway.
Hmm. The thing is, EU directives aren't themselves law, or rather, in a sense they are but they're laws for the EU member states, telling them that they need to legislate to achieve this thing but without specifying how. The EU can write legislation which is binding on actual citizens, but it mostly writes directives, like this, which just tell the member states to do the legislating.
So, was this directive actually implemented by the UK before it left? Or did they go "Eh, we achieved the intended goal anyway, no action" ?
This way the EU doesn't have to worry about weird edge cases where the EU wants to control Foozling of Doodads but it turns out that in Poland ordinary people often Foozle their own Doodad at home and so their approach needs to consider individual citizens who want to Foozle a Doodad, but in Ireland that's crazy and you pay one of a few dozen Registered Doodad Foozlers to do it at scale, requiring a very different regulation to achieve the same goal.
Thanks. I too have no idea. I searched some FOIA sites but of course "lead" the element has the same spelling as "lead" the verb and noun, so e.g. in documents about fuel "Lead counsel" and "Lead role" aren't about the chemical additive. Maybe somebody asked but I didn't find it, and maybe nobody asked.
The permits are technically called "leaded petrol permits". Unlike "lead", I don't think "leaded" is commonly used with alternative meanings. Another useful search term is "tetraethyl" – the compound in leaded petrol is "tetraethyl lead" (also spelt "tetraethyllead" or "TEL") – while "tetraethyl" can occur in non-lead compounds, in practice the lead-based compound is mentioned much more frequently than other tetraethyl compounds such as tetraethylsilane.
If you read the regulations, they provide for the permits to be issued to members of the Federation of British Historic Vehicle Clubs, since some classic cars have difficulty running on unleaded petrol. https://www.fbhvc.co.uk/fuels says "the Federation lobbied successfully to secure an EU concession for the sale of leaded petrol in the UK, a concession which survives to this day, although current sales outlets are few in number, and the uptake of the product is quite small. In part, the difficulty of setting up a satisfactory distribution for leaded petrol for the use of historic vehicles, is proof of the general truth that a good distribution system for specialised fuels for historic road vehicles is not a viable commercial proposition". It sounds like there may still be a small handful of isolated places where you can legally purchase small quantities of leaded petrol in the UK for use with classic cars – more likely the clubhouse of a classic car club, or a mechanic who specialises in such vehicles, than an ordinary petrol station.
The regulations also exempt military vehicles, but I'd be surprised if there was any remaining use of leaded petrol in the UK military.
The regulations apply to land transport vehicles, not avgas. Leaded avgas is still legally used in the UK for general aviation, despite repeated attempts to move away from it.
> also exempt military vehicles, but I'd be surprised if there was any remaining use of leaded petrol in the UK military.
Modern tanks are diesels yeah. However the UK has a lot of enthusiasts who own (obsolete and of course also de-fanged) tanks. And I can totally believe some of the archaic designs used leaded petrol. On the other hand, even a brand new production tank is very thirsty so realistically if you aren't trying to do a "Brewster's Millions" you would not actually drive your tank very far.
In the US, near a major roadway on a cold morning, the fumes are strong. Not every car or truck is maintained properly and running in cold weather really magnifies that effect.
You might have very good smog checks. Here in NZ I've recently replaced my Tesla's HEPA air filters which includes carbon filter which. I've got them slightly cheaper from somewhat ok supplier. Turns out there's ton of fake filters out there (i.e. vacuum filters).
I was suffering every day I was driving it. Smog is insane everywhere.
Just cross the border to Sweden or Finland, and the share of EV's of all new cars drop from around 90 to something like 30-35%. The EV transition is going to take a while longer in most EU countries.
Of course something to note is the absolute number of cars sold, which has dropped dramatically at least here in Finland. Most people who are priced out of new EV market simply don't buy any new car at all, and the average age of cars is climbing fast. Either way, few people are looking for new ICE vehicles. No point buying outdated tech new, when the used car market has perfectly good ICE vehicles that perform just the same.
EVs are fine and dandy, but it is a luxury class of cars for now and it shows really. Most other countries are far far away from mass deployment of EVs or restricting ICE cars. EVs can win if either a) the car is cheaper than the same class ICE, or b) operational expenses of using EV car would be cheaper. Neither of which is happening yet. And the car do need to have some advantage, since EVs already come with inherent disadvantage of long and inconvenient charging, small batteries, limited locations for charging with buggy and broken stations, not working apps or cards etc.
What's silly is that the reality you describe is a choice that's been made, not something fundamental to EVs. Cars like the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Bolt are supremely inexpensive. China's BYD cars are extremely cheap for what they are.
American/European car makers realized there is a large class of people who are wealthy and will buy a high end EV for status reasons, and started chasing that market instead.
Which Leaf? Leaf 1st gen with 150km range in summer and 100km in winter and which are already decade old? Those yeah, cheap, but also useless. Leaf 2 are nothing like that. Even base model with small-ish 40kWh battery is 30k euro, and 60kWh model is starting close to 40k euro. And for that price it's a small c-class hatchback, competing with way better cars, like large and packed d-class sedans or SUVs.
And charging EV on a commercial station is currently more expensive than filling up a tank of a similar ICE with 95 petrol, per km of range. The only way to charge EV on a cheap, which is possible, is to own a house and charge it on a home line at domestic rates. And owning a house in EU is an expensive luxury.
Unfortunately, infrastructure need to improve a lot before the switch may happen.
The 1st gen Leafs are absolutely not useless. They have a specific use case, which they excel at. That use case is simply different from most cars, which are general use and can drive many hundreds of km. If your use case for a vehicle matches the 1st gen Leaf, it blows away anything else except a bicycle in terms of cost per distance.
In the US, DC fast charging costs ~$0.50/kWh. A typical EV gets around 3.5mi/kWh, which is $0.14/mile. An ICE car that gets 30 mi/gal sees breakeven at $4.30/gallon for gas. Which, while currently higher than the average gas price for most of the US, is less than the average for some states and certainly within the range of possibility countrywide.
Theoretically there is a use case for 100km range car, I won't object that. But in practice such a use case is extremely unrealistic, if alternatives exist at all. 100km range car is city-only car cheap car, basically locked forever to a single location. But cheap car is not a cheap thing in general, it is still 10-20 thousand dollars and requires all the car things - insurance, changing, parking spot, yearly maintenance etc. So with a very few exceptions no one would buy it as an only car. And buying a second car in a city is even higher luxury than a house. And even then, an intra-city car is competing with public transit in many cases.
What this means is there is no real market for 100-150km range cars, with a few exceptions where rich people can buy a stylish, expensive and impractical EV like a Mini EV. They won't consider Leaf 1. And non-rich people wouldn't buy such a limited and impractical car which still costs a lot.
In actual reality, Leaf 1 were popular in the period 10+ years ago, when there was almost no options in that segment. And during that time exactly two categories of people bought them in my country - taxists and people with private EV changing spots or private houses. My colleague bought Leaf 1 as a ICE Clio replacement, but only because he had a garage where he could charge it on a very cheap rate. Taxists the same, they were optimizing like hell. But Gradually, both categories replaced their Leaf 1, and now taxists are on hybrids mostly, and private citizens upgraded to more rational and expensive EVs. There is no market for very short range EVs today. Except as toys for rich.
> But cheap car is not a cheap thing in general, it is still 10-20 thousand dollars and requires all the car things - insurance, charging, parking spot, yearly maintenance etc
A used Gen 1 Leaf will cost you well under $10k for a car with 50k miles on it. The battery is so small, charging empty to full is $5 or less in most of the US and can be done overnight off a normal 120V outlet. There is essentially no maintenance except wiper fluid and blades. Minimal liability insurance on these vehicles is about $150 a year.
You make a great argument that they aren't a general purpose car for everyone. And you're right! I completely agree. They are not a general purpose car for everyone. But they absolutely have their place, and are far less expensive than you make them out to be.
Even the Ford Lightning (by far the best work truck on the market) was modestly priced compared to other Fords.
Ford claims there’s no market for “expensive” $60-70K trucks in the US, but go to any Ford dealership in the bay area, and they’ll have used ICE Ford trucks that cost that much.
(And I don’t mean the giant specialty super duty trucks — these are tricked out suburban kid transporters that look like they’ve never seen a camp ground, let alone a Home Depot).
Anyway, the Lightning was a fantastic model line. I hope someone else builds quarter ton EV trucks moving forward. I’m rooting for Rivian and Slate.
Yeah, visiting my ex-Gf family in Norway, I realized how much richer Norwegians are that it's not even funny. It's not really a market representative of the average buyer. Same how neither Switzerland, Luxembourg or Monaco are.
I am living in a working class neighborhood of apartment buildings in West-central Europe with average to below average earners, and there's zero EVs parked here on the streets, basically 90% of people have old diesel cars. Only when you go towards the suburbs with rich(inherited wealth) people living in single family homes you see everyone has an EV.
The distinction is quite clear, do you live in a house or have your own parking space and possibility to install your own charger? Then EV 100% no brainer. Otherwise people stick to ICE.
I do live in a house, could easily afford an EV and have plenty of solar to keep it charged. And I still don't have one because all of these EVs feel like the worst of the computer world applied to automotive. The last thing I need is a computer on wheels and I'm old enough that I know my current car is likely my last. For my kids it is different, and I'm sure that they'll go electric at some point but I hope that they'll be able to do so without buying a mobile privacy violation instrument.
The Dacia Spring proves that it doesn't have to be the case. The base version doesn't even have a touchscreen, let alone internet connectivity. It is a cheap car, in every sense of the word, but is shows that not every EV has to be like Tesla.
The issue is the small actual range on the Dacia Spring. Great for grocery shopping and going to work in a city setting, bad for long journeys in the winter time. Basically what people want is exactly that type of barebones EV, but with more battery.
That’s genuinely nice that it doesn’t have the multimedia crap. They do also have an “extreme” model with touchscreen and connected services.
At ~220km range it probably has about 100km in winter though. :-/
There is a slight difference between my mobile phone/carrier and the manufacturer of my vehicle, especially when the latter includes cameras, all kinds of telemetry and of course the near certainty over the longer term of compromise of all the data they hoover up.
Ironically society would benefit tremendously from “computer on wheels” because when you inevitably have a heart attack on the road your car won’t swerve onto oncoming traffic or crash into people.
To give you some perspective, the most popular EV in China costs $6000 (Wuling Mini). New. The second most popular costs $10000 (Geely Xingyuan). I tried both, and they are far less crappy than they have the right to be. They are cheap cars for sure, but they're perfectly adequate for regular use.
And Geely Xingyuan has a 40kWh battery in the basic configuration! This is utterly ridiculous for a car that is _that_ cheap.
So China basically murdered the global ICE market. It's gone. There's no going back. Once China figures out the logistics and sales, ICE vehicles will be dead in all of the less affluent countries. Especially because EVs combine almost too perfectly with solar generation.
Out of curiosity, do they support one pedal driving correctly (i.e., let you set it and forget it, and never unexpectedly accelerate from a stop unless you turn it off explicitly).
BMW used to, but broke it on the i4, and presumably all the newer ones. Kia’s implementation is completely broken.
I ask, because that’s the number one thing I’ll check for with future EV purchases, and it’s purely software.
I have not driven the Wuling myself, only traveled as a passenger. On Xingguan it's "normal", just like on Tesla or anywhere else.
The Geely did not come to a complete stop on regen braking, I had to use the brake pedal for the final ~5 km/h. Perhaps there was a setting to override this, but I did not check.
Tesla seems OK. I’m really spoiled by the “complete stop” feature.
The worst (which is what most brands are moving to in the US) is when it’s completely unpredictable. Basically, half the time, the car unexpectedly accelerates from a stop, or fails to engage regen.
On some cars, they even tie regen to a camera, so regen works well unless you are on a curve or cresting a hill. In those situations, the car accelerates or fails to slow down.
yes, there a lot of outdated perspectives in these threads. The world has changed, EVs are the cheaper option now, its just going to take awhile for some places to catch up.
A country where you're looked down upon for driving a Focus RS or other "fun" car seems like a boring, austere place to be.
Perhaps that's why we never hear about Norwegian car culture (as opposed to Germany and the US). Ferdinand Porsche would have resigned to building apple carts.
US car culture has been dead for a long time, at least internationally. People like big American cars made in 50s - 70s for their looks, but since then all I can think of are oversized pickups, Nascar and Tesla which is getting eaten alive by Chinese competitors.
That is unfortunately not the case - see all the ridiculous ginormous American pickup trucks invading Europe as a "look at me, I'm rich" or "look at me I'm (local equivalent to) MAGA" signifiers.
The C8 is great, The Hellcat, Demon, etc are kinda US specific (won't be great on the curvier roads in Europe) but still cool. Modification/Tuning is very alive and well due to lack of regulation in comparison to Europe or pretty much anywhere else..
Car culture is getting killed everywhere because safety and comfort by far outweigh fun in gov priorities but I'm literally considering the US because I'll be able to drive whatever I want. Good luck finding someone running nitrous on the street in Europe nowadays, stretched bikes, engine swaps, etc. It all comes with administrative fees, a lot is forbidden and even if your documents are in order you'll get in trouble because police officers are not qualified or incentivized to deal with severely modified vehicles.
What fun about an ICE vehicle. Loud, slow acceleration, pollution, poisoned garages, transmissions, maintenance, gas is 10x as expensive vs charging at home. It’s shit. My EV smokes Porsches when I need to overtake them.
The only thing gas does better is higher range and quicker fill ups.
I understand that you're being intentionally difficult, and probably think it's quite clever, but clear to the rest of us that the original point was that Norway is an extreme outlier with their immense (oil) wealth, hydroelectricity generation and tiny population density.
And massive oil resources. As a result of this, one of the wealthiest sovereign wealth funds on the planet, which they manage well and for the good of the country.
Their hydro energy company is an aluminum company company, they have so much slack power they export it refining bauxite.
It is worth repeating solar panels covering an area about the size of NH generate enough power to supply all current entire US energy needs.
If you include PHEVs along with pure EVs the total is around 12% total sales for 2025, and 4% total on the road. I'm not sure when PHEVs became available overseas but they haven't been an option here for that long. Heaps of hybrids are being sold but for now still mostly of the traditional non-plug-in type.
As alliao says, this is partly because of the way road user charges (RUC) currently work, though that is slated to change in the future.
Hybrids and PHEVs are more complicated given that they are both ICEs and EVs. A pure EV is much cheaper, and many places in the developing world don't have easy access to oil anyways.
Even in the US, our overpriced EVs are cheaper than comparable ICE.
They’re mostly big, and compete with 20mpg models. At $4/gallon, you’ll spend $40K on gasoline to drive a new ICE car 200K miles. The EV premium is typically $10-20K. These are all luxury cars, so a trimline upgrade is often $10K.
EVs have particularly poor resale value (the technology improves rapidly), so if you’re price sensitive you can get a much better deal by buying something a few years old.
In places where competition is allowed, EVs are much cheaper than ICE. That’ll eventually be true in most places. If NZ lets the Chinese models in, I’d expect them to take over immediately.
Model 3s are Honda Accord class, so compacts, not sub-compacts. I haven't seen many sub-compact EVs in the states beyond the Leaf and the Bolt. I’m kind of excited about the new BmW i3, which will be a more normal 3 series size and shape vs the old i3. I won’t buy it of course, I’ve decided I’m not replacing my i4 before a real self driving car is available.
I can't imagine why NZ doesn't allow Chinese EVs in already like Australia has. I would guess it isn’t really about restriction but rather the smaller size of the market.
nz politicians figured out where the tap is to control uptake.. in the name of RUC right now it's tuned so non-plugin hybrid is cheapest, this separates out the price sensitive crowd...
The funny part is, given the geographic proximity and free trade relationship with China, New Zealand could become EV-dominant pretty much as quickly as they want. And as the infrastructure allows - is that a limiting factor?
Without tariffs, the excellent and inexpensive Chinese electric cars might be an attractive option.
That is irrelevant unless Norway has unused capacity.
If a country adds electric cars using more electric power, then what really matters is how that extra power is generated.
It gets weird in Europe because adding extra load in Norway could easily mean that Poland does more generation using coal.
I'm in New Zealand where the government owned generators are preventing solar installations. One example was via an unobvious regulation that the installation had to handle massively overengineered earthquake rules. Meanwhile we use coal or imported gas when the isn't enough rain for our hydro. And we waste about 10% of our total capacity exporting (via one aluminium plant).
Going all electric with cars would add ~10-15% of electric demand. That's a bit, but not really a deal breaker, and something Norway would easily be able to offset by adding more wind turbines.
I tried to find info on whether Norway is adding green generation capacity. Closest answer I got is that they have stopped adding onshore wind and solar is still negligible.
What is a hydro energy resource, a river? Don't lots of countries have rivers?
(If we're talking about hydroelectric power plants they've chosen to build, that's not exactly a resource -- and other countries could choose to build those too, right?)
You need both the right geography and a lack of either people or democracy in the place you want to build it. That rules out new large hydro projects in most of Europe.
I have a tangential question. Do you find that snow banks near roads are appreciably less black and disgusting now that there are fewer ICE vehicles on the road?
Growing up in America I have memories of our roadside snowbanks becoming black and saturated by vehicle exhaust and it always felt so gross to me. The back half of winter was characterized by blackened, salt-saturated puddles and banks. I wonder if the prevalence of EVs has made things less dirty in the winter.
> The back half of winter was characterized by blackened, salt-saturated puddles and banks. I wonder if the prevalence of EVs has made things less dirty in the winter.
The dominant cause of that is probably brake and tire particulate matter, not car exhaust. And EVs make tire pollution go up (because they're heavier) and brake pollution... I'm not sure if the weight effect there is counteracted by the decreased amount of friction brake use (as opposed to resistance braking).
On my Polestar 2, I was surprised how in actual use, friction braking was basically zero - to the point where when you start a trip the brakes are used for a few seconds to make sure they're still working (and scrub them a bit.) In actual driving - without trying particularly on my part - it's just always regen.
As others have said most of that was probably not pollution related to being an ICE vehicle, but if even part of it was the environmental performance of ICEs is magnitudes better over the last 25 years when it comes to unburned hydrocarbons and particulates, which WOULD reduce visible pollution way more than modest EV adoption. CO2 reduction? not so much with bigger vehicles offsetting gains here...
Could be! I don't know enough to say what the ratio of exhaust to tire particulate is on the average road.
In either case it's a good physical representation of how much particulate we are exposed to every day. Maybe having it trapped in dirty snowbanks is better than having it getting kicked up into the air during a dryer season.
If it's particulates from tires then heavier EVs are probably making that worse not better (partially offset by regenerative braking, but only partially).
EVs produce more tire dust, but much less brake dust and exhaust (even when powered by coal plants).
The net effect is a massive reduction in dust and particulates.
Some modern tire additives are incredibly toxic to fish. They’ve been banned in the EU, but for the very special corner case of driving in sensitive watersheds in the US, it’s possible EVs are worse on that one dimension.
Of course, we could just ban the recently approved additive, and completely solve that corner case problem.
We're struggling with the pollution levels from road dust now though. It's worse in most cities than it ever was with combustion engines. Yes there's lower Co2, but the dust and tire particles are actually more dangerous.
EU is introducing regulations for this kind of emissions which will likely create a market for a few new techs that reduce it (reformulated tyres, modern drum brakes that capture dust, etc)
My hot take for Japan is that hybrids make the most sense until one the major markets (US or all of EU) has significant traction with respect to ubiquitous EV charger infrastructure.
Tesla can fund the project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in the US and make it make sense within the context of a profitable business plan.
Chinese manufacturers can similarly make it make sense financially.
Japanese auto makers who are heavily subsidized by the Japanese government can't easily fund the infrastructure project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in a foreign country like the US or EU and their home market is much smaller.
California has 1.6 charge stalls per gas nozzle. Does that count?
I places like Japan (small, population dense, with small cars) you can use a 120V outlet to charge an EV. Most places have 240V household outlets, and can charge at least twice as fast.
So, if you have a garage with electricity, infrastructure isn’t really an issue. Sooner or later it will be common to mandate a charger per residential parking spot. The chargers themselves are $200. The main costs are permitting and retrofitting, but that matters a lot less for new development.
If one circuit per parking spot seems like a lot of infrastructure, consider the fact that most apartments have at least a half dozen circuits already.
Interesting but North America has different needs for vehicles. Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
FWIW downvoters - I have a PHEV - but I live in the real world and a likely future!
> Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
I don't know about the whole national electric grid, but at my house, I didn't really have to upgrade anything and didn't even notice an increase in electric bill when I started plugging in my EV. I don't think my car is even 20% of my household electricity usage. I'd hope we can increase our national grid's capability by at least 20% in the next 20 years. (Also, aren't datacenters causing that massive demand right now, whether or not the upgrades are even there yet? As I understand this is causing massive price increases?)
> I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
As you kind of hint at, whether or not the vehicle is EV or ICE has nothing to do with whether it has subscription models, tracking, etc. and car manufacturers are racing towards both of those things in a way that makes the drivetrain irrelevant.
1. Infra will need to upgrade in order to handle heavy charging in neighborhoods with wholesale change in the fleet. It would change our electrical use model considerably in terms of times of use -- and we would be adding all the energy used from gas powered cars to the electrical grid - which is somewhat significant.
2. While you are correct technically -- I think what I am implying is older cars (ICE) will be the ones without all the tracking and software - whereas all EVs will have that embedded as they are all relatively new. There is no world where they remove that from new car production.
It's a myth that EV charging requires an upgrade to a 100 amp connection. Scheduling charging to times when you're not using appliances will still result in a charged vehicle by morning.
The Youtube channel Technology Connections has an interesting video where it describes a successful transition to a fully-electric house while remaining on a 50 amp electrical connection. (it requires a smart circuit breaker)
We have a F-150 lightning, and charge it on a 12A, 120V charger. It’s fine for 6-10 trips a week. If I commuted in it to an office without a charger it wouldn’t be fine, but a smaller commuter car would be. (The truck gets 2.5 miles/kWh, commuter cars are at 4-5).
I’m sure we are outliers, but still.
Put another way: growing up with incandescent bulbs, I remember light switches that would turn on 6-8 lamp track lights. That’s half the current our EV charger draws. We had a space heater that drew more than our EV charger currently does.
Houses and neighborhoods are still built with electrical systems provisioned for pre-LED, pre-induction/heatpump workloads. They certainly have enough slack for everyone to plug in a level one or two charger simultaneously.
I wonder if the household share of grid power has gone down faster than total power has gone up, and that's why people are worried about EVs taking out the power grid even when everyone's individual house seems to handle it easily enough.
That's true enough at the level of individual households. If the whole neighborhood switches to EVs, the power grid in general might not be built to handle it.
(Personally I don't expect this will be that big a deal, since switching to EVs is something that happens one household at a time over many years. So, it shouldn't come as a sudden shock, and its something the utilities can make long term plans about. It just means power utilities need to be on the ball about not putting off infrastructure upgrades, and it means somewhat higher electricity prices for residential customers.)
If you've been assuming you need to replace all the oil with the same amount of electrical power then you're seriously wrong.
Electric motors are extremely efficient over a wide speed range, whereas combustion engines aren't very efficient even in their relatively narrow optimal range and the arrangement needed to translate that power into motion further reduces overall efficiency.
While replacing the energy 1:1 would entail roughly doubling US electrical generation you actually want to replace the function and that's maybe 20-25% increase. It's not a trifle but it's very do-able. Especially if you time-shift car charging so that it's happening when humans are asleep and there's slack in the network.
You charge your phone while you sleep right? If you're used to filling up a car at a gas station it can feel weird but you can charge a car while you sleep too.
Its not a 1:1 replacement but its also quite a significant amount of energy and infrastructure that is needed. You still have losses in electrical production from Gas/Solar/Wind/Nuclear to your charging round trip efficiency.
Its a massive change in how things operate in the US - significant amount of money reinvested into the grid and not solvable only through behavioral change. Thats one of a quiver of things that need to be done.
It's poor HN practice to badly strawman others comments.
Dragging up sequestered carbon in the billions upon billions of tonnes and changing the insulation factor of the atmosphere _is_ bad and will lead to no good if not unchecked and somewhat reversed - that's just physics.
Ergo - that should _stop_ and other things should be made that sidestep the issue.
I’m really at a loss with these “we should stop using the abundant natural resource bubbling out of the ground and completely overhaul our entire infrastructure” arguments. We also produce more wind power than anyone else. Change will come incrementally.
You and I are in agreement then - and that change will ideally be away from harmful sequestered carbon.
> I have no idea
> I’m really at a loss
Seriously, starte with IEA reports, the IPCC reports, etc. they really do go into excruciating detail about these things you have no idea about and are at a loss to understand.
And if 100% of EV's sold this year were electric, it would take ~24 years for basically all of the vehicles on the road were electric. (The average age of registered cars in the US is 12 years old).
Estimates are that a 100% EV fleet would increase electricity demand by 20%. So that's < 1 % a year.
Approximately how much demand increases due to increasing A/C usage in the US.
And a lot less than AI/crypto is increasing demand.
And that's not to mention that EV charging is a relatively easy demand to meet -- most EV owners charge when it's cheapest, so you can shape demand via price signals.
So, EVs would reduce electricity usage in the long term (by eliminating the growth in demand from air conditioning).
On top of that, things like balcony and rooftop solar are much more economically attractive if you have a lot of load at your house, so people that buy EVs are likely to also self-generate a lot of electricity.
You can somewhat change the profile by price signals -- however if all vehicles are EVs there is a good portion of that demand that is inelastic. You will also need to be able to handle larger volumes of demand for faster charging stations and that entire effort of infra.
Its all doable but it is not as a simple as every plugs in at home. Its a large co-ordinated infrastructure effort.
You also brought up some other valid issues -- right now we are looking at the being undersupplied for electricity across NA without a wholesale swap to EVs. Maybe the upside of the oversupply of AI is that we have a lot of stranded assets for electrical charging infra/generation afterwards..
So if EV's cause electricity demand to go up by less than 1% per year, it'll cause inelastic demand to go up a small fraction of 1%. If operators can't expand at that low a rate, we have bigger problems.
Full fleet of EVs would be 20-30 % of our annual electricity. Ain't no way we can acomodate for that on any near term timeline especially if you add in all the additional demand on electricity from AI/compute.
Now if had money as a country and had a recent history of building actual physical things for a reasonable cost. Yes may we could get there -- but current state of affairs - broke and limited manufacturing ability.
>Long time before our electrical systems to be able to compensate for that kind of whole sale change. Will be at least 20 years if it ever happens.
There's little to no reason that the electrical grid itself needs to change for the sake of EV's.
The biggest problem is that while slow charging (L2) in your own garage would be perfect for 99%+ of people in the US, and isn't even very expensive, that's a barrier to entry most people do not want to screw with. So, everyone wants DC fast that mimics a gas station experience, even if it's completely unnecessary for almost everyone's use cases.
Land is limited, new builds like that are expensive, slower to earn returns, and make little sense with so few EVs in the US - which leads to a viscous cycle. It's a bit of TotC.
>I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
Consumers do not care about this. If they did, such cars would not sell. No one is going to pay extra for fewer features.
> The biggest problem is that while slow charging (L2) in your own garage would be perfect for 99%+ of people in the US, and isn't even very expensive, that's a barrier to entry most people do not want to screw with.
I feel like this is only an opinion that people who have never actually used an EV have. Plugging in my car overnight at home every few days is infinitely more convenient than needing to drive somewhere to plug it in somewhere else. The actual charge time is irrelevant as long as it's not more than ~12 hrs.
I leval 1 charge my car and that is always enough. Salesmen who sold it to me says he does the same. It depends on your commute, (i typically ride my bike if the weather isn't too bad) and the other trips you make (why I bought it - there is a once a week trip I make outside of bike range)
> No one is going to pay extra for fewer features.
Right, what people want is to pay less for fewer features.
If EVs with all their limitations are going to replace ICE cars for daily use, they need to be cheap. We need the Ford Focus or Toyota Tercel of EVs, with the same set of features (i.e. very few) that those cars had when they were introduced.
Otherwise I'll just go buy a used ICE Tercel or Focus.
When Tesla showed the world that an EV didn't have to look like a middle school science project and drive like a golf cart, it made sense that they went upmarket. They had to recover development costs. That won't work to get mass conversion.
If you can hoof it all the way to Fairfield (2.5 hours from Y Combinator HQ in SF; Muni->BART->Amtrak->taxi), you can get a 7 year old Model 3 for $14k tomorrow.
Oh yeah, because Norway is very representative of the world...
A country that is bigger than half Spain with 10 times less population with one of the lowest electrify prices of the entire world(5-8 dollars MWh) because of huge hydro resources.
A country with huge capital reserves precisely because of oil resources.
Healthcare can only get you so long, if we're looking at life expectancy
If you're less active, eat worse, throwing more money at fixing the symptoms will not fix the underlying problem.
Not saying that Americans aren't paying outrageous amounts compared to others, but when comparing these things, I think it makes more sense to look at countries with population more similar to US.
It's a fun project, but I wish the years weren't locked to 5 year intervals.
EDIT: Actually many years are missing, it seems. For Norway there's nothing between 2000 and 1985, but I guess that's how the charts are pulled?
I also noticed that when you only have these 5 year jumps, certain genres are completely missing. Take US charts - Grunge is non-existent, as it had not yet hit the charts in 1990, and by 1995 it was over.
You are 100% right. I started with the 5 year interval for simplicity, and then I noticed what you pointed out for the exact same reason (I grew up with Grunge so this was very obvious to me as well). I started adding more granularity, so e.g. USA now has the full 2010–2025 charts set. My hope is to populate the whole map with higher temporal density moving forward (the https://88mph.fm/suggest feature is there for that reason too). Will probably have to think of a slightly different UI for the time selector, which is a fun challenge
Eh, bank teller jobs were dying and on their way out long before the iPhone showed up. Back in the early 00s local branches were downsizing left and right. My small rural town went from having three banks with like 4 tellers in each bank, in the mid 90s, to one bank with 1-2 tellers, in the mid 00s.
By the end that bank only dealt with mortgages, other loans, and saving accounts.
Online banking and the rise of card use was a huge reason for that. It is almost 20 years since I last time went to a physical bank to withdraw or deposit money, or pay a bill. Probably even longer for paying bills.
If you have the symptoms, go get yourself checked out. I delayed my colonoscopy for YEARS, hell - I even delayed my doctors visit for years, and I had pretty much every symptom there is. My anxiety was through the roof when taking the blood test, and getting the colonoscopy - as I simply assumed they'd find something.
But, no. They didn't find a single thing. Blood and stool tests came back fine. Not even a polyp was found during the colonoscopy.
The only thing that kind of sucked, was the prep - there's no way around that. But the colonoscopy itself, no problem. I get some mild sedatives, but was completely awake during the procedure - even watched it on the screen.
Thomann had (still have?) this thing called "stompenberg", where they put up some mechanical switching system so that you could play audio files through the actual pedals in the system, and turn on the knobs / parameters.
In the recent years some smaller businesses have started to offer outboard gear in this way. You upload some stem, and can process it through their hardware remotely, and get back the results.
This is cool except that the only ad for this I've come across so far was for analog summing. Remote or not, that concept (going out of one's way to theoretically have something more pleasing than digital summing) always smelled like a scam to me. Like ok, maybe a sample rate a hair above what Shannon/Nyquist demand can't do digital summing with all the right IM distortion of the missing supersonic content or whatever, but 192kHz ought to solve for that! So is it something else to be gained via analog summing?
They have 60+ rack units with little robot grabbers physically controlling the knobs.
Re analogue summing, yeah it does near nothing in reality. What you're missing though is that what people actually want with analogue summing isn't really technically better sound but technically worse sound. Analogue gear might have a little bit of harmonic distortion, a little bit of crosstalk between channels, certain transformer characteristics etc that theoretically make it sound more glued together or warm etc etc. But ultimately summing is summing and those differences vs. digital are very small (and won't always contribute positively either).
I'm not interested in analog summing myself, but I think you're missing the point. It's not about "better" summing. You want more euphonic summing. Analog audio processing often comes with artefacts that give the signal sent through it a more pleasing character, for whatever reason (phase shift, saturation, channel differences between left and right, transient modulation, slew rate, power sag, etc.).
I personally think analog summing is a waste of time, because the differences are too subtle to be worth the investment in setting it up. But that's just my opinion. Some people are really into it (Eric Valentine comes to mind).
Just wanted to point out that in the context of audio equipment (both professional and audiophile) "sounds better" often means "sounds worse but more engaging". Just like a polaroid picture often evokes more emotions than a photo taken with a modern digital camera and a great lens.
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