Clearly shows that either no one understands the whole picture anymore or that it became so diverse custom, that this is the only way of handling this now.
I think though that these companies are more business companies than tech companies and move themselves into this nightmare.
It's even more wild when you realize that other similar-sized enterprise companies don't have all that and either leave bugs to sit around for decades, or randomly break shit trying to fix them.
As someone who's used vim + a shell as my IDE since the start of my time using computers, it's been really awesome (and occasional eye-roll inducing...) watching people discover all these tools now that claude code is sending them into the terminal.
A lot of posts like this are making it to the front page of HN now that new people are exploring this world for the first time. That's great, the more the merrier, but gets a bit frustrating when a post title is written as if it's discovered some new awesome development tool or methodology, and it's just something people have been doing for years or even decades. This post isn't that big of an offender, but I'm thinking more of stuff like this [0] that it reminded me of.
I should try to be less grumpy about it, but I hope people also try to recognize how often these "new" tools they've been discovering have been routinely used long before LLMs. Maybe I'm just hitting my get-off-my-lawn stage, but it's a bit jarring to come to hacker news and see upvoted posts that are just "look, I can color the diffs in my terminal!". I'm glad this person discovered it, but I thought that was table stakes for the community here.
> watching people discover all these tools now that claude code is sending them into the terminal.
Hi, I'm the author of the post.
I don't like replying to comments like this but I think it's important because of how "invasive" LLMs have become and how they might jade your opinion (not you specifically, but everyone) on any type of output such as blog posts, videos, code, etc..
I wrote about this because I've done contract work for lots of companies, spoken with lots of developers and every time they see the output of Delta they are like "how did you make your git diffs look so cool?", so I thought it was worth sharing because there's lots of folks out there who might not know about it.
By the way, this concept of having a terminal based workflow is something I've openly been using, sharing and writing about for around a decade. There's 500+ posts and videos on my site covering a ton of different topics.
You're more than welcome to explore any of the 70+ open source projects I maintain https://github.com/nickjj?tab=repositories, with git histories going back well before LLMs existed. Thousands upon thousands of human written lines of shell scripts, Python scripts, Docker set ups, etc.. Every readme file was written by hand and 99.999% of current day code is by hand too. I've been playing with AI to learn new languages like Lua to solve specific problems but I end up rewriting most of that code afterwards. You can view comments I've made on HN in the past in how I feel about LLM code haha.
I'm a long time vim user and terminally terminal as well. I also feel very mixed
On one hand I'm really glad more people are coming over. There's been an explosion in TUIs and it's helping that people understand how important UX and visual design is.
On the order hand I'm annoyed as things move from unix philosophy and it feels like people are just trying to make terminals GUIs. The beauty of the CLI is its power. I'll give up the UI because it is so powerful. The learning curve is steeper but it's not that bad once you get used to it. And since so many people go through the same experience there's a shared language across many different tools.
Maybe an obvious example of that is how people conflate "vim mode" with using hjkl for movement. Even `set -o vi` in bash is more rich of an experience than what many people think "vim mode" should mean, at least to a vim user. But lots of that shared unix language is getting lost and I'm not a fan of those tools
Having used both terminal and GUI based development environments, the good GUI environments blow terminal based workflows out of the water.
There are pros and cons to each. Vim can do some neat things, but GUI based IDEs are generally useful and easier to use out of the box for development.
The terminal tools are getting popular because people don’t need to do development. Claude is doing the development task. People just need to quickly review code in terminal.
> but GUI based IDEs are generally useful and easier to use out of the box for development.
This is true, they are much better for discovery and affordance, but as you progress with your tooling and tool usage there is a much higher ceiling on your productivity with other tools and their composability. In my opinion, not putting effort into learning tools ultimately holds a lot of people back from their potential.
Yes, for things like Node, I do use tools like the chrome dev tools for debugging and such.
But find a terminal first approach leads me to other tools like curl and jq usage as I go. I see coworkers using a ton of time trying to repetitively execute the code to see those spots in really inefficient ways. And end up completely lost when they could be using tools like git bisect.
Or another good example devops type support is if one web server out of many seems to be misbehaving, I can use aws command line to get internal ips behind the lb to curl to grep and find it in minutes after others have tried for hours. It makes it second nature if your mind goes there first.
I work 99% in a terminal and fire up a JetBrains IDE when I need to do deep debugging. It’s so rare for me though that it’s worth more for me to get good at the terminal stuff. I’m sure this depends heavily on the type of work being done, game dev for example really needs a good debugger. That being said, gdb and others have perfectly fine text mode interfaces, albeit with a steeper learning curve.
As always, the “best” tool is the one your most familiar with that gets the job done. Text vs GUI doesn’t really matter at the middle of the bell curve.
Composition. I don’t think there’s any GUI that can be used for the git email workflow.
Versatility. In most TUI editors, running an external commands is easy, including piping a part of the text and receiving its output. As this is a fundamental unix principle, there’s basically no barrier between what you’re editing and other data on your system. In GUI, everything is its own silo.
Presentation. Code is not linear, but most gui forces use to use one window to see your text files. And when they allow splitting it’s cumbersome to use. Vim and Emacs has a easier way to divide you screen so that the relevant information can be presented at once. And there’s terminal multiplexers for simpler editors.
Why would you say GUI based workflows are better (ignoring LLMs for now)? I would maybe give you debugging with breakpoints but for anything else I love my neovim with tmux setup
I don't think setup time is a fair comparison here. Any dev who cares to use CLI tools has a dotfiles repo that sets up everything in "under a minute".
I mean yeah, there are tools to automate it. I think you may have a point if both of the following hold true:
1. You very frequently have to install your setup from scratch.
2. Preconfiguring something that aids in installing from scratch is not viable or sensible. (Perhaps you work in an environment where you're not allowed access to your personal dotfiles repo, for example.)
But I think most people will fail at least one of these checks.
I find that (neo)vim enable code navigation to be much faster than any GUI as well, once past the learning curve. If you’re going to work with code long term (eg: years), the learning curve pays off quickly.
That seems a little harsh. GUI tools can give us a more vibrant and useful interface.
But, I think the main problem is that although there have been many attempts we have not gotten to a standard way to compose different GUI tools easily or repeat actions.
I completely disagree. Terminal workflows are superior in a number of ways. Most important to me are that they are more composable and more customizable. The learning curve is tougher, but the "skill ceiling" on them is higher. The ease and speed with which somebody comfortable in their terminal based environment will navigate through the tasks they need to do will always exceed what is even possible in a GUI.
I would say that GUIs are superior for a few specific use cases, but otherwise sub par. Step through debugging comes to mind as a good GUI use case, but even that I'm not sure if it's because a GUI is inherently better, or making a terminal based debugger is harder and so nobody has made a good one yet.
Good lord. Absolutely nobody is going to watch boxing divisions based on lung size and bone density.
Did you actually think that lean mass would be a sensible way to separate divisions in a gender neutral fashion? That would, again, just result in women being unable to compete professionally in virtually any sport. They would be relegated to Division N, for some very large value of N. Competing alongside multitudes of biologically male amateurs, where nobody cares and nobody pays to watch. To even entertain this idea betrays a total lack of understanding of the matter at hand.
Right now you are acting like Elon Musk storming into the government and having 20 year olds cut everybody's budget. You may think you're coming in with fresh outsider perspective and an open minded way to look at things and improve them, but everyone actually involved in the domain can see a trainwreck in progress. It's not a good look.
I am quite certain it's not your intention, but you're really coming across as someone who hates women's sports, and doesn't want them to exist. On behalf of my wife and sister and a lot of the women I've known in a lifetime of playing sports - kindly keep your awful ideas to yourself. Women fought tooth and nail for the right to have their own professional sporting opportunities. Don't you dare try to take it away from them.
This "solution" can really only be proposed by someone who has not played sports. This would simply result in women being unable to compete in sports professionally, outside of a couple small niches like ultra long distance swimming and a couple sub-disciplines of gymnastics.
It really depends on the way classes are divided. Dismissing the general concept demonstrates a fear of change rather than a legitimate openness to fair play.
No it doesn't, and no it doesn't. Proposing this concept demonstrates a profound ignorance of what competition at the top level of sports actually looks like.
The concept is just bad, unless your goal is to prevent women from being able to make a living playing professional sports.
The thing is, we're already using a scissor for ability, just a poor one with the exact problem you describe - it renders trans women unable to make a living playing professional sports. Throwing one group under the bus for another cannot be avoided so long as sex or gender are part of sports divisions.
You are clearly out of your depth. Have you ever competed in high level sports? Please don't speak on things you know nothing about. It takes a lot of gall to tell someone 'please let go of the need for this' when they are pointing this out. I will do no such thing, but I likely will give up trying to educate you.
I won't respond further unless you pick an example sport, and propose how your "scissor for ability" would work, in concrete detail. If you do this, I will be happy to explain why this would result in neither women _nor trans women_ having any chance to make a living as professional athletes.
I have competed in reasonably high level sports, and my wife was US Masters duathlete of the year a few years ago (with me as her coach). I think you're wrong, though it's easy to see why.
Currently, with sex-based categories, a woman can be declared "the best in the world" and most people won't waste much time on the question "yeah, but could she beat the best men?" (granted, some will). They will accept that, e.g. she has the fastest time over 26.2 miles in the world right now, even though a few hundred or a few thousand men worldwide are faster.
If you use performance based metrics to create the categories (the way that road cycling does, for example, though still within gender divisions), that "title" would go away, and likely a woman would only be "the best in the world in division X", other than in (as you noted) some endurance, climbing and gymnastics sports where an elite subset of women could potentially be the best of "top" category.
It isn't completely obvious that this is a negative - how much of a change it would be would depend on a lot of other changes (or lack thereof) in how sport was organized. Certainly if it continued to focus on only the top division, then women would be shut out of most opportunities to be professional. But that's not inherent in the design. I do concede, however, that it is quite a likely outcome of such a category structure.
If we are talking about amateur sports where the stakes are low, the concept of slotting athletes into divisions makes sense.
In elite sports, no one wants to see "best in division X". They want to see the best hockey players, the best golfer, the best skier, etc. The money incentives are considerable.
Implicit in what you're saying is that they want to see the best sex-identified athletes in a given sport. If that wasn't true, women's sports would have no audience and we know now (finally!) that this is not the case.
I personally think that we'd live in a much better world where you compete against others who broadly speaking are in the same performance category as you.
But I do appreciate that the transition to such a world would, indeed, destroy women's professional sports, and thus I do not attempt to really advocate for that transition. If it could happen overnight (it cannot), perhaps I would, but that's not where we live.
WNBA is being sponsored by men's NBA and they would not have survived without.
The merr existence is not an evidence of success.
Kids' little leagues also exist, but can't be compared, with actual professional men's sports.
Where is women's American football? Women's baseball? Crickets...
Women's icehockey is in such a state, that there are only 2 decent countries dominating everybody, and they would get destroyed by men's amateur players.
There are only few women's sports disciplines that are actually popular on their own. Like figure skating and tennis. And the athletes would get annihilated by their male counterparts.
The world's best female ultradistance runners, rock climbers (particuarly sport and bouldering, but lead also), ultradistance swimmers, are all on a par with their male counterparts and occasionally better.
Since I personally don't have any interest in team sports of any type, I have nothing to say about your observations, though I will continue to wear my "I'm here for the women's race" t-shirt whenever I can.
I said that I would only abolish them if we could get to the endpoint overnight. Which clearly is impossible, ergo, I would not happily abolish them at all.
I'd happily wear a "I'm here for the D2a race" shirt in such a system.
Most people's paths as sports participants (not spectators) is that they enter a tiered system and remain there. Only a tiny percentage of people rise through that system to become truly national or internationally competitive.
One of the central problems here is that there are conflicts between what's good for the participants and whats good for fans/spectators. They are not always in conflict, but in several important ways, they truly are. 99.99999% of people who run marathons are not Eliud Kipchoge, and are not interested in a system that is designed around his level of performance and competition. But 90%+ of the people who would pay to watch marathons have little interest in a system that isn't built around talents like his. The same is true of almost all sports - solo or team - but it doesn't show up for 80% of them because there is no market for paid viewing of them. Or rather ... there wasn't until YT became what it is today. "The Finisher", a film about Jasmin Paris, the first woman to finish the infamous Barkley Marathons, has had 1.8M views, something it would never have achieved in "legacy" media.
Why would you name it "division 2"? If you're going to test for SRY as the way to assign participants, then you should name the divisions "SRY-pos" and "SRY-neg". At least that would be correct.
That's the exact opposite of what I'm suggesting up-thread.
Categories would be assigned based on performance criteria for the sport in question. One simplistic approach, loosely modelled on how road cycling works, would be to have categories based on race performances - you enter an "open" category, and after N finishes above a certain level, you are required to move up to "division 4". After N finishes above a certain level in div4, you are required to move up to "division 3". And so on. The idea is that you're racing against your performance peers, regardless of their gender (or age).
Let's use the present scissor and the current state of affairs, which at present excludes some women for the sake of others. Which, I'll remind you, comes with all of the problems we currently experience.
His proposal is to make divisions by whatever way it would be the justest way. If that would be the man/woman division for a given sport, than keeping it is part of his proposal. His proposal is not going to be less just than the current rules by definition, but it IS a bit vague.
Management where I work is currently touting a youtube video from some influencer about the levels of AI development, one of the later ones being "you'll care that it works, not how".
We are all supposed to be advancing through these levels. Moving at a pace where you actually understand the system you're responsible for is now considered a performance issue. But also, we're "still held responsible for quality".
Needless to say I'm dusting off my resume, but I'm sure plenty of other companies are following the same playbook.
Sounds like "Nate B Jones" from the "AI News & Strategy Daily | Nate B Jones". He's very enthusiastic about the notion that there are "dark software houses" or something like that where no human writes code, reviews code, or writes unit / integration tests. The human's job is to write specs so complete that the AI can't help but write the correctly behaving software, and that the software developer role combines somehow with the product manager role, and that the skills required for this are fundamentally different from traditional software, and that most people are at tier zero, one, or two of the AI-aided software paradigm, whereas they need to be at level five to not be left behind. His videos are thought-provoking at least.
Would you be willing to bet money that you can beat a properly setup stockfish, no piece odds and even time controls? I'll give you literally any odds you name and let you try an unlimited number of times until you give up. 100% serious.
P.S: You should not take this bet. You will lose. You are mistaken if you think you beat stockfish.
If you're betting against modern stockfish, respectively, that's a terrible bet.
There are some games of knight odds Leela playing superGM's.
For example, Hikaru Nakamura went 1 win, 2 draws, and 13 losses against LeelaKnightOdds at 3 minutes + 2 sec increment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYO9w3tQU4Q
So that's a score of 2 out of 16. Which is apparently actually very good. I know Fabi played a lot of games too, and also lost almost all of them.
And that is with knight odds lol. And stockfish is ever better than Leela, but generally less aggressive and more methodical.
You clarified in another post that you had won back in 2015. I have no clue the strength of engines back then (I imagine still very strong of course), but a decade of growth is a lot. They're completely insane nowadays.
I doubt that. Stockfish 11 years ago as you claim (which around then was rated approximately 2800), maybe. Stockfish today? Stockfish on Lichess is 3000 and that's not even running at full capacity. A fully supported Stockfish running on top hardware is currently 3650ish. It can avoid known draw lines and stalemate lines, and could absolutely crush the likes of Magnus.
This is completely false. I own one. It goes up to the low 80s mph before the gas engine kicks in. Acceleration from a stop is sub 6 second 0-60. Hardly weak. Charges from fully empty to full in about 2.5 hours.
Mine gets a 40-45 mile all electric range. I drive 10-12k miles per year, and ignoring extended multi-day vacation road trips once every couple years, I fill up the tank 2-3 times per year.
My experience with my Prius PHEV is the same. I don’t even have a level 2 charger. I just plug it in in the garage overnight, and most days I don’t use any gas.
The only time the ICE turns on before my EV range is up is if I hit the windshield defrost button when it’s cold. That’s presumably to prioritize getting heat out through the vents quickly. I’ve never accelerated fast enough, nor gone fast enough to trigger the ICE engine taking over. It’s straight up an EV for my first ~40 miles every day.
I rented a BYD M9 PHEV minivan while on vacation in Cancun, Mexico and other than the vehicle winning over my family in, like 2 days, the mileage was amazing. 1000km range, of which, 180km was battery (that's 520mi of gas + 100mi battery range).
PHEVs in the US are gimped by poor regulatory incentives - we should be forcing manufacturers to increase overall range + EV range. If this model were sold in the US by a US manufacturer, I bet the ranges would be halved (and still considered good/decent in comparison to existing alternatives).
That sounds like the real issue, vs. EVs. This sounds like you basically have to plug it in every time you park it. And there’s no way you could do any sort of (even small) road trip without using gas.
(For comparison, our EV6 has about 200-250 mile range, and we charge it about once a week or so, give or take, unless we take a road trip.)
Also, one of the main advantages with EVs is their insane low maintenance, but sounds like PHEVs still have to all the same maintenance issues of ICE vehicles.
> This sounds like you basically have to plug it in every time you park it. And there’s no way you could do any sort of (even small) road trip without using gas.
> Also, one of the main advantages with EVs is their insane low maintenance, but sounds like PHEVs still have to all the same maintenance issues of ICE vehicles.
I keep seeing this repeated, but I kept a detailed decade-plus spreadsheet of maintenace costs for my last ICE car, and ~2/3 of the costs were for components that are common to EVs.
1. Maintenance isn’t just about cost. It’s about the number of things that move and/or need fluids, and can fail/leak. It’s about dealing with service centers trying to upsell you on every little possible thing that could go wrong.
When I take my EV in, it’s for one of two things: I need my tires rotated, or I need new tires. That’s it. There’s no “curtsy inspection” that comes back with literally 40 different things that I could have done to it.
2. Our household has four vehicles: one EV, three ICE vehicles. There’s no way the occasional new tires (rotations are free where we bought our tires) amount to 2/3 the cost of the maintenance needed on our ICE vehicles. It’s probably closer to 1/10.
I think you’re overestimating what all needs maintenance on an EV.
> and am familiar with which items are common to an EV.
This is the overestimating I was referring to. I think you’re either mistaken in what items are common to EV, or you’re overestimating the cost of those items.
There is only one thing that needs maintenance on an EV: tires.
Unless you’re saying that tires amount to 2/3 of an ICE vehicles maintenance. In which case you may want to shop around for more reasonably priced tires.
Not the person you replied to, but I'm not sure how you arrived here. Brakes, coolant, washer fluid, diff oil, gearbox oil, cabin air filter, wiper blades. Did you know EV motors can also require oil changes (at hundreds of thousands of miles, in fairness)?
Nice Michelins for my ICE have been something resembling 1/3 of service costs. Not 2/3 but not negligible either.
Maybe at 1/10 the schedule of ICE vehicles, at least for me. I use regenerative braking almost exclusively (probably 95+% of the time).
> coolant
Yes, I did forget about that one. But frequency is about 50% less often than ICE vehicles. Maybe once every 5-10 years.
> washer fluid, cabin air filter, wiper blades
Agreed on these as well, but I bucketed these in the trivial category, totaling less than a tank of gas once every 6-12 months, and all DIY things that you don’t need to take to a service center for.
At the end of the day, I only care about things I need to take it to the shop for. Which means I only need to take it in for a no-questions-asked tire rotation 1-2 times a year, and new tires every 4-5 years. Everything else I can easily do at home.
> diff oil, gearbox oil
These are the same thing, but you’re correct. But it’s infrequent (maybe once or twice over the life, and around $150.
> Did you know EV motors can also require oil changes
> Maybe at 1/10 the schedule of ICE vehicles, at least for me. I use regenerative braking almost exclusively (probably 95+% of the time).
In practice, my brakes always corrode from road salt and fuel-efficient driving habits and need replacing long before I actually wear them down, so regen brakes are largely irrelevant to brake life.
> Which means I only need to take it in for a no-questions-asked tire rotation 1-2 times a year, and new tires every 4-5 years. Everything else I can easily do at home.
So that sounds... basically the same as my ICE. Two shop visits per year for tire changes, one oil change per year at the same time as one of the tire changes.
There are many things that break or need maintenance on my ICE vehicles that I don’t want to mess with myself: oil changes, transmissions, alternators, belts, engine issue (oil leaks). Engine air filters are about the only ICE-specific piece I don’t mind doing myself.
Re: brakes, where I live, I don’t think salt will play much a factor, and not sure what you mean by “fuel efficient driving” wearing your brakes, but I’m using regenerative braking 95+% of the time.
> There are many things that break or need maintenance on my ICE vehicles that I don’t want to mess with myself: oil changes, transmissions, alternators, belts, engine issue (oil leaks).
Of all those things you listed, they took a total of 3 garage visits (that weren't already scheduled for tire changes) over 14 years. Not what I'd call "many".
> Re: brakes, where I live, I don’t think salt will play much a factor, and not sure what you mean by “fuel efficient driving” wearing your brakes, but I’m using regenerative braking 95+% of the time.
I mean that if you drive in a fuel efficient way - i.e. by not constantly accelerating/braking unnecessarily, your brake life will be much extended. My current car has regen brakes, and I expect the brakes will require replacing just as often as they did on my old ICE car, due to corrosion.
Again, probably only relevant for extremely long term ownership, but someone will need to own and maintain all the high mileage decade-old EVs a decade from now.
My daughter one day told me that her Tesla said it needed oil maintenance. I scoffed and tried to mansplain to her how EVs don’t need oil. Then I checked the car, and sure enough, it was asking for oil. One of the contained oil systems had sprung a leak. That’s on a 6 year old Tesla Model X.
ICE maintenance is pretty cheap, with the exception of tires, which are a huge outlay (but also the most important safety item!). My Honda only needs $35 of oil/filter once a year, maybe $40 of brake pads once in 80,000 miles, and a burned out bulb for a few bucks. Top tires all around though, easily $600-$800. A few one time things around the 100k mile mark, maybe plugs/sparkys/belt or similar, but not regular in any sense, most cars will only have them ever done once.
> seatbelt receptacle, a cruise control buttons, roof exterior rubber trim, a headrest, a window switch, washer fluid spray nozzles, lug nuts, wiper blades, shocks, struts, door weather stripping, rivets holding the front plastic splashguard on, headlight bulbs, headlight buffing, washer fluid reservoir cap, replacement speaker, turn signal switch, windshield repair, backup light switch.
Other than washer fluid, wiper blades, and the occasional headlight bulb, many of these I’ve never had to replace on any of my vehicles (ICE or EV), and the few that I’ve had to replace was maybe once on one car.
I feel like you’re an unlucky sample of 1.
Most of my ICE vehicles needed none of these, and only things related to ICE vehicles (oil/fluid changes, brake pads/rotors oil leaks, transmissions, alternators, belts).
Maybe a bit, but overall my numbers line up with what most sources give for average TCO maintenance numbers. But really, the car was just getting old - having a couple random things to fix per year on a 10+ year-old car isn't unusual. (And my ICE component maintenance was quite low, so you could say I was lucky there, rather than unlucky.)
I think it's your maintenance numbers that are way off, "zero maintenance other than tires" doesn't line up with what any reputable source gives for TCO maintenance costs for EVs or non-ICE components.
I think you also might be overestimating what the average ICE owner has to take care of.
Most Americans don’t keep a car long enough to even pay it off - they’re in an endless loop of trade-ins, meaning that most non-accident damage is covered by warranty.
I’ve had my current ICE car for just over 5 years now and finally paid my first out of pocket repair cost: $40 for a new washable air filter. Other than that, my expenditures have been tires and a couple hundred bucks in oil changes that I didn’t want to do myself.
> I think you also might be overestimating what the average ICE owner has to take care of.
> Most Americans don’t keep a car long enough to even pay it off - they’re in an endless loop of trade-ins, meaning that most non-accident damage is covered by warranty.
No, I think you may be underestimating. According to this article [1] at least, it’s close to 13 years. That’s well into large/costly maintenance items.
Maybe on HN, people don’t keep their cars long enough to need new brakes or transmission flush, but that’s not typical.
Curious for the big examples. Some major things EVs don’t have: oil changes, belts/chains, transmissions, most things related to the engine & drive train are different… seems like the main similarities would be tires, brakes, body work, amenities.
No the GP, but in the 10 years of owning my ICE vehicle I've had these things serviced:
Oil change/Oil filter, Spark plugs, Alternator belt, Aircon belt, Brake pads, Brake fluid, Wiper blades, Wiper fluid, 12V battery, Tyres, an accessory fuse, a jammed seatbelt buckle. Two of the power locks are a bit sticky and probably need a touch-up of oil.
The first 4 are ICE-only, and brake pads are worn less if you mostly use regen. The rest are the same on EVs.
And by far the biggest cost of car ownership (for new cars at least) is depreciation. And EVs depreciate rapidly - enough to offset the costs of oil changes I imagine. And I actually like bringing my car into the dealer twice a year for service. I get to wander around and check out what's new, eat some free snacks, shoot the breeze with my dealer about what's happening in the industry, and then spend the rest of the time on my laptop. Maybe this is sad to admit, but I actually kind of look forward to it.
That being said, if you're in the market for a used EV right now, that depreciation actually works in your favor. I was looking at prices on used luxury EVs recently, and have to admit I was pretty tempted by some 2-3 year old cars selling at less than half MSRP.
Not that I'm disagreeing with your main point, but I will say that Toyota's hybrid design is one of the best ICE engines out there. The transmission is replaced with planetary gears and the starter and alternators are replaced with a pair of motors to control the throttle and continuously variable transmission, making it one of the gentlest engine designs out there.
But yes, there is engine oil to be replaced and whatnot.
And also, to your point, my experience with my PHEV is my short range driving is electric, but it turns out most of my miles is consumed by annual long range trips. If I commuted to work, things would tip more in favour of EV driving. All to say how much EV you get out of your PHEV will depend highly on the type of driving one does.
> Mine gets a 40-45 mile all electric range.
That sounds like the real issue, vs. EVs. This sounds like you basically have to plug it in every time you park it. And there’s no way you could do any sort of (even small) road trip without using gas.
> (For comparison, our EV6 has about 200-250 mile range, and we charge it about once a week or so, give or take, unless we take a road trip.)
its gasoline car. You use 45miles for every day commute while charging overnight, and use gas for roadtrips: 500 miles range + 3 mins put gas into car
Toyotas hybrid uses gas when you accelerate hard to get that 0-60, it’s a combined system horsepower. Unlike phevs, EREVs are only driven by the electric drive, and the gas system is a series generator, so the EV is fully capable & always doing 100% of the work. PHEVs fundamentally aren’t.
Anyway, the real world data from PHEV usage shows you are the outlier, most people don’t bother plugging them in regularly due to their limitations.
Again, false. You can clearly hear when the combustion engine kicks in and it's indicated in the dash. I can floor it in electric mode and it still gets up to 60 in around 6 seconds, no gas involved. Hybrid mode is probably slightly faster but it's a very marginal difference.
I don't believe your last statement because you've been wrong about everything else, and it doesn't make sense. Plugging it in is exactly as easy as literally any electric car, and it simply doesn't have the limitations you claim it does.
I don't know what you've been reading, but you should evaluate the veracity of it as a source and talk to actual owners. I know several others who have one and we're all quite happy with them and don't get gas often
“ The researchers attributed most of the gap to overestimates of the “utility factor” – the ratio of miles travelled in electric mode to the total miles travelled – finding that 27% of driving was done in electric mode even though official estimates assumed 84%. ”
Perhaps the rav4 prime @ 41ml max ev range is a better system than all the other low range PHEVs like it, and has better real world usage data than them. I doubt it though, but I don’t have the data on just the rav.
It's an interesting article - thanks for sharing! The original report is worth reading too. [1]
I agree with the premise. The "utility factor" used to estimate fuel efficiency for PHEVs does not line up with real-world data, which effectively creates a loophole to avoid emissions regulations and keep selling gas guzzlers. This is a problem, and should be fixed.
In regards to which cars are most to blame:
> Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and BMW account for the lion’s share of fines avoided over the past three years, together responsible for 89% of the total.
This is a recent trend where luxury carmakers are using PHEVs to circumvent emissions regulations. The latest BMW M5 [2], for example, is a PHEV with a monster 4.4L V8 engine. Car enthusiasts actually hate it compared to the old model because the hybrid system increased the weight by 1000 lbs. But making it a PHEV is probably the only way that BMW is still able to sell a V8. It seems kind of stupid all around.
The RAV4 PHEV is also a big, heavy (4,500 lb) car with a large (by European standards) 2.5L engine. But I would hesitate to lump it in with luxury cars from BMW, Mercedes, Land Rover, etc. I would also hesitate to apply findings from a European study to the US market, where large gasoline cars are currently very popular (not that every discussion needs to be about the US - but the RAV4 is the best selling car in the US so it's important to that market). Not saying you're wrong about RAV4 PHEV emissions relative to the gasoline RAV4, just that the study you linked doesn't really support making any specific claims about that model. The report only mentions Toyota once, where it is lumped into an "others" category on a chart along with Ford, Hyundai, JLR, Kia, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, and Suzuki.
I know this is an old thread, but a new study just came out [1]. 300% overestimated utility factor. It underscores my point that the category of PHEVs is largely a scam to cheat emissions regs.
However! It somewhat undermines my argument about the rav4, as it seems Toyotas are indeed the most charged / highest UF phevs.
Still drastically overestimated, just the least bad.
If you build a product that most people don’t “use correctly” then you have not built a good product suitable for that use. Blaming the customer and expecting them to change is a losing strategy
There are reasons to buy a PHEV even if you never plug it in. Their electric motors tend to output more power than HEV versions of the same model, leading to more performance and a quieter drivetrain (even with the engine running, it doesn't have to work as hard). You can also run climate control and infotainment while parked without having to idle the engine, which is nice when waiting around on a hot day. Or you can remotely start the air conditioner with your phone.
Basically you can get EV quality-of-life features on a gasoline-powered vehicle.
I probably wouldn't recommend a PHEV to someone who doesn't have a place to plug it in every day. But there are reasons to buy a PHEV beyond just fuel efficiency.
The cars fine. It’s great it works for him. I wouldn’t personally buy one today when lots of options for real BEVs exist, but you do you.
What I do care about, and why I care that he’s an outlier, is that low range PHEVs mainly exist to get emissions credits for manufacturers so that they can sell more gas cars, and those emission savings aren’t real [1]. You could say everyone’s dumb for using them this way, but clearly the ergonomics of the electrical capabilities in this category are lacking in important ways.
And I can’t prove it but I bet the manufacturers have known this for a long time. But adding a plug to a hybrid with a tiny battery was an awfully cheap way to get your existing car counted as “green” for credits, so too tempting.
I was a regular SDE at brex for a couple years and my various documents about comp say I have RSUs, and carta says so as well.
I've never bothered to understand the details since none of the private companies I've worked for have had the non-cash portion of their comp be worth anything but $0 before.
I think you have to be careful with this as well, the word "blocking" in particular reminds me of a protest over the Israel/Gaza war that happened at my alma mater a couple years ago.
Protesters camped out at a central campus thoroughfare, and some protesters tried to stop people from walking through it. Not every protester did this and it wasn't done consistently by those who did, although some people avoided the area entirely just because they didn't want to deal with it. There were certainly other ways to travel from point A to point B on campus, just slightly longer and less convenient ones.
Were people "blocked" from walking through campus? Without disagreeing on any of the above facts, whether people agreed that someone was "blocked" largely came down to who was on each side. So you end up in this annoying semantic argument over what "blocked" means, where people are just using motivated reasoning based on who they want to be the bad actor.
Then you have another layer of disagreement - is it the responsibility of someone walking through campus to make a tiny effort to walk a few minutes out of their way and avoid instigating or escalating? Or do they have every right to walk through a public campus they're a student at, and anyone even slightly getting in their way is in the wrong? This feels closer to a principle people could have a consistent belief about, but again, people's opinions were 100% predictable based on which side of the protest they agreed with
I’m not sure what peoples feelings about have much to do with anything. A protest is not effective unless it impacts some kind of ‘violence against the state’. Usually, this is blocking roads at its lightest.
I hope that you’re young or something… impeding a citizen is violence against the state, as the state gets his power from the work of it, citizens.. which is basically in the western world this describes most protests. Being granted the right to protest by your government is meaningless because if you took away the right to protest, then your people would just protest. The states options to quell unrest are: violent repression or negotiation. over the last 5000 years. We’ve determined that the best way to keep people in their place and the rulers in power is a mix of the two, hegemony look it up.
I scrolled past the intro on the website and got to the very first mention of protein, where it is pictured as the foundation of the "new pyramid". The literal very first long form text that appears after that graphic is as follows:
> We are ending the war on protein. Every meal must prioritize high-quality, nutrient-dense protein from both animal and plant sources, paired with healthy fats from whole foods such as eggs, seafood, meats, full-fat dairy, nuts, seeds, olives, and avocados.
I'm not about to go count all the mentions and provide an exact answer to your question, because this website appears to be saying things that I already know and have been living by for years; it has no value to me personally. But the initial call to eat more protein specifically says "both animal and plant sources".
So I suspect the answer is: they need _at least_ 10x as many engineers to get things done as you would expect. Maybe more like 50x
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