A lot of the older hybrids use NiMH batteries. With that being said, a replacement traction battery for a 2nd gen Prius isn't that expensive, at least compared to newer hybrids/EV batteries. The second gen Prius is practical, affordable, and reliable (assuming proper maintenance).
The biggest issue with the Prius (at least for the years in my price range), is that the driving experience is liable to make one fall asleep at the wheel. They're the perfect cars for monks; if you're willing to forego all earthly driving pleasures, you can get high 40s mpg.
My grandmother drove a Prius, and there was a stir in my extended family as to whether she should still be driving, as she'd been seen going 20mph below the speed limit and was driving pretty far to the right side of her lane.
I got the opportunity to drive her Prius and promptly found myself alternating between going too fast and going too slow. Between the awkward pitch of the windshield and the gross-feeling electric power steering, I wasn't the best driver either. I never have any of these problems in my 2005 Honda Civic LX or my family's 4-cylinder 2011 Ford Ranger. The Prius felt like one of those stoned driving simulators that police departments bring to high schools in an effort to prevent DUIs.
I like the idea of hybrids and EVs, but it's hard to justify completely losing the pleasure of driving for 10 extra mpg. For all I know, newer models may have improved this, but they're still to expensive for me to pay any real attention to.
Finding it's half the fun! Going out walking by a creek/river on a warm, rainy spring day is kind of an antidepressant in its own right. When you find a patch of Ovoids and pick a few, it's just all the better.
Calling the Prologue "Honda's EV" feels like a huge stretch. The Prologue was a rebadged GM vehicle that served strictly as a compliance car for meeting CAFE standards. Now that the CAFE standards have been rendered toothless, there's no longer a need for that deal.
It was "Honda's EV" in the sense that it was the only EV with a Honda badge you could actually buy. The three canned models mentioned in the article never even made it into the market.
Europeans and the Japanese were able to buy the Honda e for a few years - this article wrongly states another unreleased model as Honda's first ground up EV.
There's a few other EVs Honda produced in 90s as well, but e probably in running for first ground up new EV platform that made it to market as mass produced Honda product.
The Honda e was a massively compromised vehicle due to the tiny ~29 kWh net battery and high energy consumption. It was released in 2020 but in terms of utility it's really much more like an early 2010s EV.
> Calling the Prologue "Honda's EV" feels like a huge stretch. The Prologue was a rebadged GM vehicle …
I don't see the OP article call the Prologue "Honda's EV"? Instead, the OP article explicitly says the Prologue was both "designed and entirely built by GM."
That's separate from where the OP article first states that Honda killed three other specific models "that were the company’s first ground-up EVs".
OBBB removed any fines for violating CAFE standards. They still exist technically, but it'd be like getting a speeding ticket but the fine is always $0...
CAFE killed small trucks in part, tariffs in another part, but US manufacturers are the real reason small trucks are dead.
US manufacturers want margins, and they're not getting margins on little, efficient cars. They get enormous margins on gigantic trucks that start at $55,000. Have you noticed that all the sub $20k cars went away from all the manufacturers around COVID?
Ford makes the Maverick, which is a small truck. They were priced very reasonably at release, at $19,000 or so. However, Ford didn't make very many of them, and the ones they did make got up to $15,000 over MSRP from the dealers, who scalped them. Why would Ford want to cannibalize their pricy gigantic trucks when they know that they can get their $50k asking price because there's nowhere else for people to go?
>Why would Ford want to cannibalize their pricy gigantic trucks when they know that they can get their $50k asking price because there's nowhere else for people to go?
Why isn't Ford worried that Chevrolet, Toyota, Ram, or Nissan will bring back a small and cheap U.S. built pickup? Is that because all manufacturers are afraid of cannibalizing their more expensive offerings? Are they all colluding? Or do not many people want small pickups? I guess if the Slate becomes a breakout hit, we'll know that people really want the smaller pickups.
Neither GM, Chrysler, or Ford wants to hurt their expensive offerings. Toyota and Nissan have less expensive offerings, but can't bring them here because the tariffs make them much less margin, and the CAFE standards kill the rest off.
That’s not really sufficient explanation due to vehicles manufactured in the USA, CA or MX being exempt, and yet there are no small vehicles being made and sold in the USA in any large volume (despite clear demand).
My understanding is that this is due to fuel regulations being enacted by size and weight where it’s simply easier to make bigger vehicles.
The Chicken tax didn't kill the domestically manufactured Ranger and turn the Colorado into the huge thing it is today.
CAFE killed them too. You can't have a small vehicle that gets fuck all MPG because it's built like a tank to do work. You gotta have a bigger one that gets slightly worse MPG but has a way huger footprint in order to make the math math.
This didn't just kill compact pickups for 20yr. It also killed the Chevy Astro (the most "fullsize work van" of the minivans) and why you'll never see a car with a giant overhanging cargo area again.
MicroG does an excellent job at reimplementating most of Google's proprietary APIs on the client side.
I don't know how feasible this is, but it would be cool if there were open-source drop-in replacements for Google's server-sided APIs that app developers could use to replace Google's services with alternate servers running open source software.
The best solution for this is to buy a $30 burner phone at Walmart and use it unactivated, tethered to your main de-Googled device. You can use the burner for only tasks requiring Play Integrity.
Make sure to leave one star reviews on all such apps that you run into.
Yes. However, I already carry a tethered hand-me-down quarantine phone where I install my work apps and undesirable apps like Whatsapp (for those loved friends and family that can't or won't install Signal). Carrying a third phone for "Play Integrity" starts being a bit much.
Anything movement that requires people to routinely acquire a second phone is doomed to failure (in the “this will never become a mass movement” sense)
It's pretty cool to see a licensed, authorized LPFM station being set up by hobbyists!
Prior to the PIRATE act of 2020, running a pirate FM station was effectively legal until the second time you were busted. Prior to 2020, if you shut the station down after getting your NOUO, there wasn't any real penalty. Teenage me loved this, and my buddies and I had a little irregularly-broadcasting pirate radio station, using a cheap CZH-7C transmitter purchased on eBay. One time we went on air from our high school's cafeteria during a study hall, and surprisingly, nobody questioned anything! We did have Microsoft Sam narrate our broadcast so that we weren't making a ton of noise.
We never did get our NOUO; instead, we ran into the much bigger reality, which was that none of us had anything of interest to say. After the novelty of hearing our voices on the radio wore off, the transmitter ended up in a closet, where it probably still sits today. Good times!
It would be nice if IA could create a browser extension or TLS-intercepting proxy that end users can run over their own computers and connections, allowing crowd-sourced scraping. It would need an allow/deny-listing feature for sites to passively crawl, and I'm not sure how you could prevent data poisoning, but it would at least get around the issues of blocking.
As if tetraethyl lead in gasoline wasn't bad enough, they also added ethylene dichloride and/or ethylene dibromide, which acted as a lead scavengers, preventing deposits of insoluble lead (II) oxide from forming and clogging up engines/exhaust equipment. Instead, water-soluble-at-high-temperatures lead (II) chloride and lead (II) chloride were blasted out the tailpipes of vehicles using tetraethyl lead. These are mildly soluble at ambient temperatures, allowing the lead to permeate even further than it otherwise would have.
Getting a capture card that supports VGA is another possibility. Or don't and just say you did. Is there realistically any way to know whether a video was screen-recorded or if it was downloaded?
I assume if you download the stream directly it could be shown that your copy and youtubes copy are identical, since encoding a video and compressing it is different every time.
The biggest issue with the Prius (at least for the years in my price range), is that the driving experience is liable to make one fall asleep at the wheel. They're the perfect cars for monks; if you're willing to forego all earthly driving pleasures, you can get high 40s mpg.
My grandmother drove a Prius, and there was a stir in my extended family as to whether she should still be driving, as she'd been seen going 20mph below the speed limit and was driving pretty far to the right side of her lane.
I got the opportunity to drive her Prius and promptly found myself alternating between going too fast and going too slow. Between the awkward pitch of the windshield and the gross-feeling electric power steering, I wasn't the best driver either. I never have any of these problems in my 2005 Honda Civic LX or my family's 4-cylinder 2011 Ford Ranger. The Prius felt like one of those stoned driving simulators that police departments bring to high schools in an effort to prevent DUIs.
I like the idea of hybrids and EVs, but it's hard to justify completely losing the pleasure of driving for 10 extra mpg. For all I know, newer models may have improved this, but they're still to expensive for me to pay any real attention to.
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