Yea that's the thing right, the battery is so very much of the weight that optimizing the other parts are "meh" at this point. What is cool is that the 600Wh/kg solid state batteries seems like they are really finally here soon :) i.e removing 200-300kg from a car in one go will be a game changer.
Range being worse with a fully loaded car than with a lightly loaded car isn't exactly news, and not exactly limited to electric cars. I can clearly feel my old diesel struggling more when I'm driving 3 friends and with loads of heavy stuff in the back than when I'm alone. That makes the gas bill more expensive.
You probably know already, but ICE cars only convert about 20–30% of fuel energy into motion, while EVs are often +90% efficient. So when an EV has to work harder (extra battery weight or colder weather), you notice the drop in range more.
In an ICE, the same load is less visible because most energy gets wasted as heat. This is also why cold weather seems to affect EV range more.
> You probably know already, but ICE cars only convert about 20–30% of fuel energy into motion, while EVs are often +90% efficient. So when an EV has to work harder (extra battery weight or colder weather), you notice the drop in range more.
There's a kernel of truth here in that Otto engines suffer lower efficiency at part load, however I suspect the real reason is that gas car range is "good enough" and refilling is fast, so one doesn't tend to obsess about remaining range.
> This is also why cold weather seems to affect EV range more.
That's because a) some batteries suffer degraded performance at low temperature, and b) ICE cars use the plentiful waste heat for cabin heating whereas an EV needs a heat pump or even resistive heating of the cabin air.
> That's because a) some batteries suffer degraded performance at low temperature, and b) ICE cars use the plentiful waste heat for cabin heating whereas an EV needs a heat pump or even resistive heating of the cabin air.
You are making my point here actually. Combustion engines suffer from the exact same, but because they waste so much energy as heat already, less “extra” energy needs to be spent on that.
I don't think there's a contradiction here. Electric cars suffer degraded range when it's cold (in part) because they're so much more efficient that they don't produce enough waste heat to heat the cabin. And batteries are so much less energy dense than diesel and gasoline that the extra power draw reduces their range to a meaningful degree.
Yes heating impacts range in an EV, but it's not really an efficiency thing, it's because you can't get it "free". If an ICE didn't let you harness the heat, you'd see a similar percent drop in range.
And for extra weight, it's just not true. Making a motor work 10% harder at 90% efficiency, compared to making an engine work 10% harder at 20% efficiency, both of these are going to reduce your range by 9%.
The unexpected benefit which I've noticed when switching from a small, light car to a heavier, medium EV car is that the latter doesn't drive/feel any worse when fully loaded. Makes the trips that much more pleasant.
True! If only grandma wouldn't insist on bringing 250kg of weapons and ammunition with her everywhere I'd get much better range in my EV, but alas this is the USA.
Instead of technological advancements of EV motors, we can immediately use existing pharmaceutical tech (Ozempic, GLP-1) to immediately deliver weight reduction to cars. However, this will be immediately offset by the increase in weight of weapons carried, thanks to Jevons Paradox.
Manufacturers may just keep the battery size and market the improved range instead? Smaller cars in urban and suburban environments have always had lots of benefits, but since many of them are collective in nature, it has largely fallen on tragedy of the commons, and we got larger cars with larger hoods instead.
They might, but so far they don't. Manufacturers are largely switching to LFP (although to be fair they tend to offer a long-range option which ships NMC instead) and the main benefit of LFP is cost. The range of electric cars on the market is largely capped at 500KM/300miles. They could offer more, but they don't.
Not true. Tesla themselves said the way they got the Model 3 to be so efficient was by optimising every single part exhaustively. It’s expensive at design stage but results in the most efficiency gains across the fleet - so worth it (especially something like the motors)
I got the Samsung 25 Edge and did move from a the regular sized phone to "plus" without the constraints and weight that usually follows. I can reach the screen edges that I can't on the same size plus version. Added bonus that i don't get a strain in my pinky from the weight and its still very pocketable. So I'm sold on thinner phones except the wobble from hell when its laying on the table.
How about the myriad of other companies that produce Robots? Like Figure and a large number of Chinese outlets? Tesla is not the winner in electric cars why would they be better at robots. My guess is low cost robots from China will be everywhere..
.. ever heard of BYD? BMW just released the first car on their new platform that is better then Teslas in pretty much every way .. Musk has ruined Tesla with bets on wrong cars i.e Cybertruck instead of pushing price and volume.
This is the best thread response I've seen in a while, made me chuckle because i can't understand how people say they vibe code stuff and it works (My experience is not that) and i just feel out of the loop reading all other HN posts and comments about how good it is.
Pretty much every time Claude code is stuck or more or less just coding in circles i use Gemini PRO to analyze the code/data and feed the response into Claude to solve it. I also have much more success with Gemini when creating big sql transforming scripts or similar. Both are quite bad on bigger tasks, they get you 60% and then i spend days and days to trying to get to 100% .. its such a time sink when i select the wrong task for the llm.
Did some bigger admin tool to do search and matching datapoints etc and decided to only use claude code. First version was wow awesome this saved me so much time .. now 2 weeks later putting back code that was deleted several times, removing 3 copy's of the same code, way to complicated sqls, verbose code and looking how its mixing htmx with some wird own JavaScript.
It really looks as a junior developer solutions, so I'm done using it for more then boiler plate things..
I will come back in 3-6 months and hope its better to understand its own limitations.
I'm guessing it would be less then a week for me to write it on my own.
The biggest issue is that I've now seen the shit it creates so I have zero trust in the code I now have from a security and stability standpoint. I know many have better experiences then mine.
When we want to sell fighter jets and Karl Gustav rockets we send the King of Sweden to pander the deal. There have been some debacle over a few suitcases with bribes as well but hey that's probably a good paying job.
Me as well, I have a drawer of watches and I want to use one but the 1-2 day battery life is just a dealbreaker .. 30 days will probably make me care to put it on again after the charge is done.
I’m always surprised by this, I charge my watch every night when I take it off for bed, I just put it on the magnet snap charger instead of on the wood itself, I’d be taking it off either way. Why is short battery life a deal breaker for people?
Because one of the best things about wearing a smartwatch is that you can use it as a silent (vibrating) alarm that doesn't wake anyone else up.
I've heard some people say that newer AWs can last indefinitely if you charge only while in the shower. That could be good enough. But I still don't want to have to bring another charge cable with me every time I take a trip. One week is good. Two weeks is great. A month is amazing (partly because after the battery degrades for years, it will still be two weeks).
That’s a fair use case I suppose, but honestly I find my smart watch a bit chunky to sleep with. I could buy a $20 smart watch or a fit bit off of amazon or something and just wear that as my bed alarm, but I totally get that has its own trade off.
