🔥

Lucid now makes an EV that gets 516 miles on a single charge.

Goodbye "range anxiety". VERY rare to drive more than 500 miles in a single day.

Detailed review at link below. This car is expensive, but the tech should transfer to any car maker who wants to hit that number, even in a relatively inexpensive #EV.

🙌🏻

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ultralong-range-electric-cars-are-arriving-say-goodbye-to-charging-stops-a5cf4390

#Lucid

@davemark I wish the 800V charging stations were more prevalent. Going from Waterloo IA to Alexandria MN, I can find 800V/350kW stations heading north to the Twin Cities, but the best I can find going west from there is 50 kW. That would add an hour to our trip. If those could be upgraded, I might be able to convince my wife that getting an EV as our primary vehicle is an option.

@the_other_jon With you, Jonathan. But I am convinced it is coming, and not too long from now. EV is the future.

@davemark I will be able to upgrade my PHEV to an EV next year.
One thing that I am curious about is the long term used car market for EVs. I owned a Prius for 14 years and had to replace the traction battery at the end of that period. It turned a $1000 car into a $2500 one, just for the battery replacement (a DIY refurbished battery would have cost $1000).

How will someone buy an inexpensive car when there might be a 5-10 K battery replacement needed?

@the_other_jon Key to that math, the battery capacity, and cost will both go down.

@davemark My Prius battery was only 1.15 kW and the price had dropped from 5k, when I bought the car, to 2.5k for a replacement from Toyota. Part of that cost was because Toyota had moved from NiMH to Li-Ion. I’m afraid that even reconditioned battery packs will still be 5k. This is better than the 20-30k battery packs cost today, but is still more than the $500 that you can get a used car for today.

@the_other_jon @davemark It would cost us $2,500 to get a properly installed and permitted EV plug at our house, so I'm thinking we might buy a used plug-in PHEV as most of our city driving is _well_ under 30 miles per day. I can then just plug in at 110V to recharge. I feel like this would be far better than our Honda Fit, which only gets ~22 mpg in the city (we may have gotten one of the worst Fits made, though).

@glennf @the_other_jon My 2 cents, I see real parallels between Apple’s coming headset, and the EV market. Early adopter days for both, pricing is sure to come down for all parts of the ecosystem.

@davemark @glennf @the_other_jon the problem with the analogy is that the utility of EVs is obvious. Want your existing car to not need gasoline? Easy to see.

The utility of the headset outside of a few niche cases is not obvious at all. Even in gaming, the most obvious use case, the uncanny valley of control schemes and inconvenience of wearing it doesn’t make it superior to existing gaming experiences.

So why buy one?

@HitokiriEric @glennf @the_other_jon Whether we get it or not (and the short term use cases are not obvious to me), the headset/XR/VR market is said to blow up to massive proportions over the coming, say five years. Long-term use cases show the headset diverging, with the potential for glasses, being replaced by mixed reality, glasses that fix your vision, both long view and micro view. I think the potential is massive.

@glennf @the_other_jon @davemark @HitokiriEric To me personally, the Apple headset would be very useful but I do agree I might be in the niche category for the use case 🙂

I spend most of my day, every day, in front of screens. So I want as large a screen as possible whether it is for work, gaming, or entertainment. The added possibility of being able to have vision correction built-in is a bonus! So I’ve been waiting for these for years (and have been trying most other solutions too …)

Plus, we move/travel a lot and so a tiny form factor device which gives me a huge screen again works for my own use-cases.

The only area that I’m not sure about is shared media/entertainment consumption. My wife and I watch/play everything together. Will Apple cater to this via SharePlay or something similar? Or are we going to be in our own little bubbles even with the Apple headset?

As far as I’m concerned, that would be the factor which decides whether the headset takes off or not.