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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • First, let me clarify I bought my Tesla used, before Musk went full fascist, and autopilot came free. The car was updated to the newest hardware for free, since the original FSD equipment couldn’t do it either.

    That out of the way, FSD sucks, and it’s getting worse, not better. When if first come out of beta it was okay. I remember describing it as driving with a teenager, they got the general idea, but would make bad decisions so you had to watch them. Years of updates later and it’s practically unusable to me. It tries to go way under or over the speed limit, it hesitates or slams on the brakes for green lights. It slams on the brakes for cars that pull out with plenty of gap but doesn’t even notice the risky merges. It can not seem to navigate intersections anymore, damn near stopping in the middle of a turn. It actually just updated yesterday and I tried it again, it took me less than 5 miles to disable it again. It is, in my opinion, a hazard to use. I talked to my partner about it and we both agree it didn’t used to be this bad.

    Anyway, the stupidest part of all this, is they changed it so it’s either full self driving all the time or not. You want cruise while you’re in traffic because you know it’ll try to cut in front of someone? Silly idiot, no you don’t. So you now have to have a second profile* for cruise control and lane keep without FSD. And the odd thing is that lane keep and cruise are fine. They function like FSD used to. They can drive the highway with no problem and trust me, I do not have much faith in the car so I’m watching it close. It can’t navigate city streets, but neither can FSD…

    TLDR, my car was a better deal for me than Tesla. After years of FSD access, it’s bad and getting worse, not better. I can’t believe people pay 5 figures for it and maybe that’s why they feel the need to clip perfect drives or defend it.





  • Along with the points already made, selling energy back to the grid further complicates things. Selling energy as a non-utility is not allowed or practically worthless in a lot of states. So it’s really only valuable to the commercial space that can use it. Couple that with retail space like stip malls that rent their locations and there’s little incentive for the property owner to provide solar energy to the renter.


  • Freeze your credit on all three bureaus. IIRC it is free for all of them, just don’t get tricked into enrolling in their credit monitoring service. You’re there to freeze and unfreeze your credit, nothing more. From then on, any time you apply for something that requires a credit check, you need to go thaw each credit bureau temporarily. They all let you schedule thaws, so just open it for a day, apply. And close it back up. Or however long your credit check takes.

    The premium service offered by these data breaches is pretty terrible. In some cases, they’ll have a clause that says if you accept, you can’t sue or be part of a class action suit. If you have a credit card with monitoring included, they will notify you way faster if your credit is run. My credit card companies email me within minutes of an application being submitted. The paid service I got from a breach years ago doesn’t let me know till about a week later.





  • I went to test out a Kona EV a few years ago and the dealer allegedly had one in stock according to the website but when I got there, the guy told me they don’t sell them in my state. I thought that was odd, but he explained it that there was no way to charge them here. I acted dumb and asked why I couldn’t charge at home. He just said it needed a special plug and my state didn’t have those…Not public chargers (of which there were many), the dude tried to tell me my state did not have access to standard RV or Dryer plugs.

    But yeah, there are some great used deals out there right now with Hertz dumping their fleet due to collision repair costs.


  • Dealers are still a big problem for EVs on top of the points mentioned in the article. They complain about it being hard to sell EVs, but also mark up almost every model and push customers toward ICE cars. Dealers are incentivized to sell ICE cars that support them long term with overpriced service intervals and repairs. EVs don’t require as much regular maintenance. States with strong dealer laws like Oklahoma have been fighting against EV adoption by banning direct sales, show rooms, and even service centers.






  • On top of all that, you have to factor in the development and testing costs for the CVR or FDR too. These are usually off the shelf, previously developed components. A seemingly trivial change like bigger storage suddenly costs several hundred thousand dollars to retest and time to recertify by dozens with agencies around the world. If the regulations have not changed, then there is no reason for to go through that whole R&D process again when the same bought and paid for system works.