It’s not so much of a problem due to the average daily drive being a fraction of range. So long as you can charge at home, city life is fine for electric cars.
Most countries still do not mandate that new apartments include charging ports for parking spots. So densely-populated areas will still be plagued with non-EC compatible buildings for decades to come. That's what "city life" mean in several countries.
Cities shouldn't have to mandate carparks, let alone charging in them. Having no car at all should be viable and we should build toward that.
Pre-empting, obviously many places still require cars, but we shouldn't codify cars into the building code. It makes everything that bit more expensive, and it's a waste of valuable city real estate.
At the moment the cost per square meter in Melbourne and my city means a single carspace is worth more than my salary. That's ridiculous.
Electric self-driving taxis are going to be big in the medium-term. Or some other personal transportation method. Static routes and stations are not really up to the job.
(Edit: not that these necessarily need car parks, but they'll need to wait somewhere when they're not carrying passengers)
> Electric self-driving taxis are going to be big in the medium-term.
This claim has been made for years now and a number of big companies like Google, Uber and Tesla have tried to jump into this market, but does this hold up?
I vaguely recall a self driving taxi service being active in some areas, but how are they doing?
Anyway, static routes and stations work fine for big parts of e.g. the Netherlands, but you need a good structure of bus routes and transit hubs. It's a fact that it takes longer than driving for most trips though and IMO the cost should be a lot lower, but that's the tradeoff made.
In my regional UK city, most of my trips look something like: X minutes by car/taxi (although driving you need to park, and taxi you need to wait), 1.5-2X to cycle (direct but need to contend with hills, rain and much increased risk), and 2-4X to use public transport (total time, door-to-door, need to rush to get the thing and wait outdoors for 5-10 minutes) (2X being the ideal case of home to centre, 4X for point-to-point two places outside the centre).
It's not even remotely competitive, and for that reason private cars are used for some ridiculously high proportion of journeys (90% of passenger miles overall).
In the UK only 17% of commuters use public transport, and 5% use "other" including bicycle/motorcycle/taxi.
"Having no car at all should be viable and we should build toward that."
Yeah its sounds great until you need mass transport system to support this idea which means only mega cities can benefit the most when tier 2 and tier 3 cities is having a hard time investment
Tokyo has a great subway system (for the most part--there are locations that aren't that well served) and there's good train service between many moderate-sized cities in Japan. But my experience is that, once you get to a city outside of Tokyo, the public transportation options aren't great.
Not really a bad experience but I was able to walk as a tourist to where I wanted to go because the areas were pretty centrally located. The one time I took a bus to somewhere--don't remember location--it wasn't that convenient.
Kyoto has a lot of buses, so maybe that’s where it was. I’ve found that they’re usually on time and not too crowded, but maybe you had a different experience.
Densely populated areas shouldn't have surface-area-inefficient cars as a main mode of transportation at all! Good public transport and the other 2-wheel modes should do just fine, but of course those aren't as profitable.
Good public transport is the key part and I can tell that in most European cities, not the capitals that everyone visits when they say they have been on country XYZ only hanging on the city center without even venturing into the suburbs, that is quite far from where they were supposed to be.
A lot of people look at Europe through the lens of the tourist areas of large cities. As someone who has spent a lot of time in the UK countryside and smaller towns, there is absolutely not a good public transit system even if there might be a few buses during the day.
Heck. I arrived by train from London to a town where I found the busses to the start of my walk were basically non-existent. Fortunately a taxi pulled up as I was trying to find a taxi service by cell as the train station didn't have any staff.
Bus deregulation wrecked public transport for much of the smaller places in the UK.
One of the positive things labour has done is allowed local authorities more control over this, which should help - I can also imagine them being very bad at communicating this if it does.
Of course I'd prefer a bunch more investment too, more train lines and go ahead with many of the previously touted tram schemes.
It’s a great ideal state, I just happen to think it’s several decades away. Most people reading this will never witness it. We’ve already heavily invested in what you say should not exist. Financial inertia is strong to keep things on that path. However if we, US, shrink our vehicles we can double or triple the throughput of current roads.
Agreed, but they're not that complex to retrofit to a parking space. I can foresee a future where each space has a port and an account card reader - they'd make the buildings more valuable, the supplier to that space has a basically guaranteed income stream, and the government has an easy emissions reduction. Wins all round, so why wouldn't it happen?
The operator could demand an exclusivity contract from the landlord, provide faulty equipment, then charge high fees to repair it, eventually leading to many stalls non-functional until the contract is invalidated in court or the two parties settle, the chargers are ripped out, maybe with purposeful permanent damage to the wiring to make it unusable, and another mildly more honest provider comes in and does something slightly better but not by much.
Or, an enterprising landchad could realize they can charge 10% more kWh than people actually pull (blaming efficiency losses), along with a healthy margin for "maintenance".
Sure, it's a market with massive abuse potential, but we have a world full of them and we regulate to control the abuses. The underlying service is clearly of societal benefit and would clearly be profitable to all parties, so it's worth doing and working out the regulation to make it viable.
Heck I can't plug my car in at home and it's still fine. I simply plan for the fact that I might spend 20 minutes here or there at the charger, at most once a week. Best case I do some grocery shopping, worst case I just sit in the car watching YouTube, either way is fine.
I don't know, I'm kind of annoyed to have to go to the charger. My parents' house has a plug and the car is always full, whenever I need it. It does make a difference in convenience, so I'm installing a charger in my garage in a few days as well.
However, many parking lots have slowish AC chargers nowadays, so it's very convenient to have the car charge for an hour or two while I do my shopping or whatever.
Basically, it's the difference between having to wait specifically for a charge or whether I'm doing my own thing and charging the car as a bonus.
>It’s not so much of a problem due to the average daily drive being a fraction of range
Most people who own a car in cities in Europe also use it for long commutes to visit family in weekends or on holidays, often crossing borders. Range is then a problem since most families can afford only one car so edge cases matter. Maybe the wealthy Benelux and Scandinavia have top EV charring infrastructure but a lot of central, eastern and southern Europe is lacking.
We're thinking of switching to an EV, and we're basically one of the anti-examples that people like to use. Central Europe (Prague), we live in an apartment, we park our one and only car on the street, no street charging options anywhere. I don't commute to work daily and my neither my nor my wife's workplace has chargers.
But it turns out that the Lidl that we go to has a charger, there are like 10 chargers on the 110 km trip to our families (and they both live in houses with driveways, so "granny charging" is available). Our last two holiday stays were in hotels that had chargers.
Just looking at the options, it doesn't seem like range will be a factor at all. And we're actually looking at cheap cars with 50 kWh batteries, not even the current high end.
It is the 1% or 10% case. Like for me going to bigger airport. Renting a car would be complete waste for it to sit a week there. And for range I would want something that can get me there in one go and back also in one go, with week of sitting idle. As adding extra 30 minutes to 1h travel time on top of all time it takes is less than ideal living. And public transport would add even more time or less flexibility those types of trips.
Also there is some possibility that there is no power at for example summer home...
For me it is only the visiting family use case, where rental doesn't make sense. We have car sharing in the city (Miles) which fixes almost all use cases. Driving to the airport only when without kids, as they both still need car seats, that I can't leave. Otherwise car sharing rental is perfect to get to the airport.
Not based on where I live. Many people I know routinely drive hundreds of KM on a weekly basis to their families and renting a car for that doesn't makes sense.
The Hyundai Ioniq 6 has a range of over 500 km, and typical 20-80% charging times are around 20 minutes. Where in Europe can you drive 350 km and not pass a single charger?
Where did I say there are no chargers? Charging on long trips increases the time of the journey by a lot. And many EU drivers don't have money for a new Ioniq 6.
It increases it by 30 min every 3 hours, rounding down. My family used to do 7 hours once or twice a year, roughly 500km, so an EV would have added an additional hour. But we also typically stopped for roughly 30 min for lunch, so it would have only added 30 min to our half-country journey. Add an extra 30 min to the journey if we had a cheap EV with sub 160 km range, or an extra 15m to each stop for a top-up for comfort. This of course depends on charging infrastructure, but I'm betting it's developed enough for most trips at this point.
This was pretty rare for us, though we had family that did 12 hours trips in 2 segments with the same frequency. They already stopped for lunch, so they could in theory have gotten away with only charging then, not adding any time to their trip, but more reasonably it would add an extra 30 min to each leg.
Interested to know how often this stuff happens in the EU.
So my last really long drive was Prague to Amsterdam, last year. We did three stops, first to fuel the car and grab some breakfast, then for a bathroom break and to grab some lunch, and the last one was to get a McFlurry and another bathroom break. The total time spent on the stops was easily over an hour.
If I punch the same trip into one of the EV trip planners online and set the car even to something meh like an MG4 with the 51kWh battery, which is cheap EV that doesn't charge very fast, it's telling me I'd have to stop 4 times (instead of 3 times) and for 1.5 h total (instead of a bit less than that).
I don't know what you do for a living or how much you hate traveling, but for me this is a non-issue. I make maybe 1-2 trips like this a year (and <10 trips around 500 km) and spending like 15 % more time on the road is something I wouldn't even notice, much less care about.
Agree, I've actually seen it done after the offer most frequently - I'm guilty of this too as a hiring manager - the offer always has a mention of background checks being a contingency. It's like buying a house, no point in doing inspections until you have an executed offer that both parties agree to.
It’s funny to see my home town mentioned here in this context after over a decade of quipping online that the noise will always be an issue for drone delivery. I live in a more noisy urban area now and yet, I still can’t fathom the noise of drones buzzing over my house every day all day, or as often as I see Amazon trucks passing by. It would be awful. I think people like the idea of this, but have never actually witnessed what the sound of these devices is like. It’s loud.
And fwiw, college station is no quiet place. We have trains and they can be heard for miles. My house was a couple miles away from the tracks and I could hear the vibrations and horns all throughout the night as a kid. I still remember the cadence exactly even a few decades later.
I’m going to give this a try. I build as a hobby, working my way up to building my own home, and it feels like cad software of all types is always too complicated for me. I shouldn’t need to be an expert in this tool to design a simple house that’s just a few boxes.
I generally don’t like AI, but I could see having a chat prompt “making changes to a car file” that I’ve described in my natural language could be a killer feature. Especially if you let me describe components like layers if a wall. Then use said wall in an area. Basically BIM level of detail.
My kid is still too young for YT and I’m not sure what age group you’re targeting but there’s a huge mass of people that do not like YT for the early years. And try to avoid it for as long as possible. I think this is a niche to tap into if you are interested in monetizing this as a better experience for these types of parents. This could be the toddler to 10+ just whenever parent decides to allow it but wants to do it in a controlled way. I don’t know if I’m in the minority, because I’m kind of in a bubble (fancy private school environment), but a lot of the other parents I know are YT-free homes and even iPad free but that’s at age 6 right now. I’m hoping to stay away from it for at least a few more years with my son. Anywho.
I’d definitely use an app that gave the kid recommendations and some discover-ablilty that the YT algorithm provides (probably with some more pre-filtering) except just as tiles/gifs previews and they had to “request access” to any video to play. Or have some redefined categories as you mentioned. Then once a video was allowed, it would appear as available in the app via yt-dlp or similar.
This does 2 main things I prefer as a parent. I get control over the content. It removes the instant feedback /random access loop of on-demand streaming. For some things it might even be good to control how many times they can watch it , or if they have to ask permission again, etc. Not sure if you could bolt on / use as a base but this kind of customizations for stacher would be perfect.
My family owned a salon growing up, I’m pretty in tuned with this if you need help. I’d just copy the features of another app for starters. Most the features are common and a core expectation of your user (scheduling, etc). You should signup as a stylist on some of these apps to see what they offer, how they solve, and put your own spin on it. ( https://glossgenius.com/ ).
I’m In the US male hair market as a user these days and i think you could add value by increasing LTV of a customer for the stylists. I always wonder by they don’t offer a discount if you book your next appointment during your visit. Or offer a discount for annual prepayments, etc. The goal would be to have their customer 1) repeat and 2) repeat often. You could move the needle with some good incentives and marketing strategies for the stylist. If their walkins converted to repeats more often and their regulars had better “adherence” coming every 18 days on average instead of 20 days on average then you have a strong value prop for any stylist should use your tool and pay you for it!!
>You should signup as a stylist on some of these apps to see what they offer, how they solve, and put your own spin on it.
I'll discuss some more with local salons who use or have used competitors instead i think.
Perhaps it's dumb but I'm a bit skittish about being obvious when i'm looking at features of a competitor worth hundreds of millions. (I think a stake in treatwell went for 180 million a good while ago.)
> I always wonder by they don’t offer a discount if you book your next appointment during your visit.
This as a pre-configured option in the scheduling UI on the business end of things is something i haven't added yet.
I'm guessing this is not an option glossgenius?
Ps: How can I hit you up once i have an easily shared demo?
Well yes for a strictly non-consumer company, since their revenues don't depend on Superbowl, Valentine's Day, Easter, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Amazon Prime Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving/Cyber Monday, Christmas. They probably depend more on Fed rate cuts/rises affecting corporate infrastructure budget.
("Honey I got you that Cisco 4500 you always wanted...")
Whereas for anything consumer e-commerce, you'd want a calendar with variable/sliding dates (e.g. SuperBowl) but that at least keeps the above events in the same quarter YoY, consistently.
It goes against what it was supposed to be, but at this point it would be better off all stored in a cold custodial like the fed or banks, and then we could just trade synthetic shares on a reputable exchange. Decentralized isn’t the feature most people are interested in.
The time a dozen crypto apps is baffling to me why anyone would trust them with their money.
I can’t remember who first said it, but watching crypto evolve is like speedrunning why 150yr of securities laws, practices, and regulations exist.
Counterparty risk (including custodianship) is monstrous in crypto. It’s sort of amusingly ridiculous in the same way most tech trends that are trying to break the status quo stumble into the reasons certain rules and regulations exist.
there is some truth in that, but only some.. The adage that the media forms the message could hardly be more apt here. In the days of world sailing trade ships and financial arrangements, so many parts of the mechanisms were starkly different. The weaknesses and anti-patterns in the trade practice are very different then and now. right? Digital ledgers with public verification enable different weaknesses and anti-patterns, from the start.
This is sad to me as the school bus was some of the best memories of my childhood. I don’t even know why particularly, but I think after being in cooped up in school all day we just got to act like fools and joke around on the bus. We even did this thing where we’d run as fast as we could to get the back seats of the bus.
Having typed all that I realized my kid is in a bus free school, we parents are responsible for transportation, and he’ll never even experience it at all. I’m sure he won’t miss it. Was more of a sign of the times for my era than a necessity for a good childhood but, if you’re on a bus with dozens of peers and all glued to your phones, it does feel like some missed opportunities
https://www.litmotors.com/preorder-aev
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