Cars, EVs & transport

Donut Labs, an offshoot of a Finnish company, created an electric motor that is actually part of the wheel. No drivetrain or transmission needed. Check out the stats: 845 hp, over 4300 Nm of torque, and weighs only…

Our home battery (Tesla Powerwall 2) has a warranty that says it’ll still provide 70% of its original storage after 10 years. So still perfectly usable well after 10 years has passed. But if I run the diagnostics today,…

Noah Smith is an American economist. As he describes here in great detail, despite Musk being a bit of a tool, on technology he’s led the world. Which is why he’s now the richest man in the world. The Chinese are…

Semi-autonomous driving technology is already a revolution for older drivers, and those who share the road with them.

Marco Rubio hands Trump a private note in a press conference, about what happened in Venezuela. Trump reads it out loud. Chevron is one of the fossil fuel giants. You can see Rubio almost shit himself, the cat is out of…

The protests in Iran predictably being described as a popular uprising, ‘the people’ trying to take back control of the country etc. We love these fantasies. This all happened before in Iran, in 1978. They had a…

I needed a new drink bottle for work. We had one of these at home and I thought perfect, one simple moving part, easy to clean, potentially usable for the rest of my life. What happened next is another window into an…

"You've had Covid now, why are you still wearing a mask?" (losing count of that one) Compare with: "You've had a car accident now, whey are you still wearing a seatbelt?" The only part of the human brain now in…

Somebody said to me that Tesla's Level 2 self-driving isn't that great (drove me the entire way to work today), that makers like Mercedes already have Level 3 autonomy. The problem is Mercedes' system only works in…

The skill of firing a good shot is like any other skill, pleasurable for the achievement. In that sense I can understand guns. In every other sense I find them boring, and just another example of how humans can turn…

I never predicted the end of my working life would involve working with insurance. I’ve loved it. Insurance is great because it and the actuarial analysis that underpins it completely ignores people’s opinions on…

Trump is driving the Republicans off a cliff. Like I said when he was re-elected, his supposed fascist takeover of the US will collapse all by itself, by the mid-term elections.

The local Trumps are building and building. Pauline recently spent a few weeks (on taxpayer coin, while parliament was sitting here) in the US speaking and networking at major Trump events. I’ve shared here how this…

I did something I had actually decided I wasn’t going to. I upgraded our existing Powerwall for 2 new Powerwalls. Originally the dollars didn’t really make sense, to do it, but the deal the installer offered that…

It was bloody hot today, and I was tired at the end of work. Sitting in the car as it drove me home for 45 minutes, checking out the scenery and some tunes in air conditioned, insanely powerful and effortless, silent…

Helping to care for the vast and growing number of old people in the world is one of the major reasons humanoid robots are under development. I’m sure many will have an immediate reflex ‘ugh’ to the idea, but this could…

Petrolheads think they’re being clever when they call EVs ‘appliances’. None of them can explain what that even means. On all the measures of car performance they themselves have masturbated over for years, EVs wipe the…

This is the ideas about status and identity I post about a lot. For example people who oppose or support renewables, or EVs or petrol and diesel cars, or this or that band, brand of bags or shoes, political parties…

There are usually foundation-level social teams in the status games that define human society, at least in modern times (with the decline of Kings and Queens, at least temporarily). Today that’s the politics of Left and…

The Zeekr 7GT. Coming to Australia this year. The performance AWD version will take you from 0-100 in under 3 seconds, and has air suspension. The aerodynamic efficiency of this car is amazing, it slices through the…

The spoilers are making hay with electricty prices still being high. They’re high because our ‘peaking’ plants, in peak times, are still run by gas, which is hideously expensive. But batteries and pumped hydro are…

Toyota is famous for reliability. I have one. Tesla is even better. I also have one of those. Toyota reliability costs you an annual service. The Tesla requires no servicing.

You can see the boy racer mentality that dominates everyday road driving on display right now in F1. The new cars are more technical, 50% combustion, 50% electric, and require a lot smarter driving to create, conserve…

It’s worth remembering that the current range of EVs is already the same as cars throughout most of their existence, the cars most of us drove in growing up. And that the average person drives about 30 km per day. Range…

Those seduced by the anti-immigration stuff, from Pauline and the LNP, need to remember one thing. Without migrants, Australia (like most countries) is a giant aged care home. Our populations are OLD, and there are no…

This is actually a great deal, and decent EV. In reality they used a Chinese firm's design and hardware (Deepal). Japanese and European carmakers make big bluff and bluster statements about how 'the combustion engine…

Those who are passionate about slow, noisy cars that cost a fortune to feed (combustion cars) needn’t worry. When those cars are no longer sold because they’re rubbish, they’ll still be free to drive them as a hobby, in…

These mega-fast chargers are great, and already operate in China. But this is also a response to nonsense anti-EV people made up (they make something new up every day). The only time an electric car even needs to use a…

Upgraded home storage. What I love about Tesla is the software, though the hardware of their batteries is also still the best out there. And sexily functional, at a time most batteries are using plastic, Tesla is still…

Wonderful short piece to camera from a UK installer of solar and batteries, about how many adults now tell him they refuse to have any Tesla products. Some are even ‘embarrassed’ if their neighbours see them. And how he…

The extended length, 3-row Tesla Model Y has approval now to be offered in Australia. This is an amazing car. To give context, it has 500-600L more interior space than a Toyota Kluger, Prado or Landcruiser. (All back…

In a year that included all the ‘Swasticar’ social media-driven nonsense, this is a remarkable triumph. The Model Y is engineering genius, the Model 3 too (it gets much less attention). Again, this has nothing to do…

There’s a lot of public reporting on the cost of electricty for Australian families. Much less reported is that it’s less than 30% of their energy budgets. 70% is petrol and diesel, for their vehicles. And gas. Those…

Starlink is becoming a vital resource for remote regions, like Pacific islands, poorer nations without broadband and even remote parts of Australia. An NBN spokesperson told me once Starlink is so good they even advise…

Violence is increasing. Populism creates violence, because it's the removal of status distinction between people, leading to continuous and ongoing rivalry, for position and status, in imitative teams battling each…

Again, this is about brilliant engineering, not brands, it’s just that Tesla is one of the few companies prioritising engineering. Tesla has now included its AI, Grok, in its cars. And you don’t have to go buy a new…

The perfect day to sell your combustion clunker and buy an EV. Iran just closed the main shipping way for 20% of global oil, to sweeten the deal for you. Tesla isn’t your enemy. Your combustion clunker funds Trump’s…

The Busby Street developments have been controlversial in Bathurst, but that isn’t saying a lot, as anything that happens in a community now generates a pile-on. That’s social media culture, you can see it in the…

Oil prices surged another 12%, with the conflict in Iran. Owning an EV will save you up to $50,000 in fuel costs alone over the average life of the vehicle.

Another view of the Model Y 6-seater, about to be released in Oz. Seriously considering getting this, to replace our remnant combustion engine in the household, in the Kluger hybrid. The petrol price volatility with the…

Meanwhile in Straya we're still driving around in Tonka Truck utes that are shit *as* utes, with no driver dynamics or comfort for passengers, lethal for other road users in collisions, zero aerodynamic design (they…

From an F1 engineer. The cars this year will be noisier, because some like that, but the engineers say they'll get quieter again because that's just wasted energy, which will make the cars faster if they get rid of it.…

Driving past the servos on the way home, with all the prices north of two dollars per litre for the Texan/Saudi Arabian soup. Then I came home and plugged the car into free Australian sunshine.

When I talk a lot about Tesla, I often get the ‘Tesla fanboy’ label. Because people who say that have had their lives hijacked by social media, and so now everything in their life is a rivalry between opposing teams.…

Seeing quite a few pained posts to local social media groups about petrol prices. Some are angry they’re over $1.80/litre. I see plenty over $2, or even $2.30. And they’ve been high for years. They’re never coming down…

The new BYD Seal 08 will have 1000km of range, and be able to be charged with BYD’s megawatt chargers in just 5 minutes. BYD is following Tesla’s lead and is installing chargers in China and Europe right now. They’re…

There seem to be credible hints that Tesla will release Powershare for Juniper models, in homes that also have a Powerwall, some time this year. Apparently the needed power electronics are already onboard. It looks like…

I don’t post so much about renewable energy and electric cars because I’m some ‘fanboy’ of them. I hate the whole fan/kidult culture we live in, where you join a team as a fan and then fight other teams for status. I…

Watching the first Formula 1 race for the year. This year the cars are very different, they’re 50% combustion, 50% electric. They were hybrids before this too, but not with this much electric. Many purists want just…

It really is a symptom of how fundamentally baked-in stupid social media has made the world that this ever even became a fake debate. We argue over whether to use cars that run on more or less free energy, need next to…

This is cheering. A nuclear war would also likely shut down social media, so the ANZAC nations may also stop arguing about everything, start vaccinating again, driving electric cars and using free energy from the sun…

This will be worrying Trump more than anything else. Those who complain about fuel prices when there are clear alternatives to driving combustion shitboxes? Fools and their money.

Matrix LED headlights, which solve the problem of losing visibility when you have to dim high beam for oncoming cars, are another engineering innovation that Tesla brings to ordinary drivers. Previously this sort of…

Tesla is about to open the factory for mass production of its semi. It'll be able to build about 50,0000 trucks per year. The semi does over 800 km in range. China has been building thousands of electric trucks per year…

It looks like Tesla will release the Model YL 6-seater in Australia today. Perfectly timed, with the pressures on fuel. We’ll probably get one, and will be free of fuel bowsers forever. When these were launched in China…

Tesla did release this model yesterday, and we bought one. We’re now as a family almost completely independent of the need for ruinously expensive and unreliable oil, coal or gas to power our lives. The sooner the same…

It seems that rather than admit petrol and diesel is an energy source that will never be cheap or reliable again, the latest invented outrage we’ll use to try to not change what we do is to say it’s a massive conspiracy…

I know a deeply committed ‘motoring enthusiast’. What George Monbiot calls a ‘boy racer’, which better captures the psychology. The guys (though also women, but less often) whose actual identity as a person is heavily…

You can see just how much our lives are now kidult gangs battling over absolute nonsense. In NZ there was a suggestion that if fuel becomes short, EV drivers should be banned from driving. What logical reason would…

Things getting real. Fuel prices in NZ. Karma is coming for Donald and his goons. The rest of us will pay for his stupidity. You can pay a shit-tonne less by being smart and removing the fossil fuel vampire squid from…

It’s testament to the genius of the engineering design that the Model Y is the biggest selling passenger vehicle in the world, including all combustion and hybrid vehicles, for the third year in a row. And this despite…

Chinese cars are already dominant in Australia. Fleet sales make it look like older Japanese brands are, but they’re not. Ordinary Australians are already buying more Chinese cars than anything else, because they’re…

What concerns me about this is that we already live in a culture where adult life was replaced by adolescent gangs, fighting for their respective ‘brands’ in everything (cars, coffee, clothes, energy, etc.). If petrol…

The US is famous for having a national 55 mph (about 88 km/h) speed limit on its roads. That limit now varies across the country, controlled by States. The history of the 55 mph limit has echoes for us today. Richard…

The over 2000 comments on this one show the sad and pathetic world of the average ‘motoring enthusiast’. Enraged that not only did somebody buy an EV, but a WOMAN did. Outrageous. The guys we all met at school who got…

The continuing surge in popularity of Chinese cars in Australia, easily the dominant vehicles in sales in Australia, and have been for a while. Their brilliant EVs are now rushing out of salesrooms. Tesla’s Model Y is…

Here are some electric Tesla semis, charging at one of Tesla’s truck charging stations. Tesla builds the whole infrastructure when it builds vehicles, including the charging for longer distance travel. The genius of…

For those who like everyday comparisons, Kell just quarter-filled our Kluger (hybrid). The fuel cost $55, for a quarter of a tank. To fully charge the Tesla costs us either nothing, if we use solar and the home…

The same free homemade energy you can drive your car with will also power your stove. I love how people think things like work from home are a choice we get to make, as a society. With no fuel, there will be no choice.

We’re doing nothing in social media society to prepare for this disaster, for fear of enraging the social media mob. Prepare yourselves for what’s coming, folks, because nobody is coming to help. Maybe the anti-EV and…

Some more details about Teslas, we chose them for their brilliant engineering. Their engineering design not only targets everything that makes them incredible family cars, they’re also brilliant driver’s cars with…

Redwood Materials, a company headed by one of the engineers who set up Tesla, takes old car batteries and stands them up in the middle of the desert, linking them and controlling them with software. This creates massive…

Billions more in subsidies to combustion vehicles. Fuel will still be well over $2/litre.

The data clearly shows that electrifying passenger vehicles would make the biggest difference to Australia’s liquid fuel use.

This was always going to be one of the phenomenal benefits of autonomous driving technology. It could extend the driving life of older people for years. At the other end of the driving spectrum, it also allows…

Arson attack against a Western Sydney Tesla dealer yesterday. I worried this bullshit would start again. Basic civil order is the first thing to go with upset kidults, especially when they lose their petrol and diesel.…

Setting up Starlink for a family member reminded me again of some brutally hard truths about human beings and their groups. Like buying a Tesla, it’s the most beautifully elegant and simple process. Everything just…

The best car review I’ve ever seen. A real car enthusiast, not with any axe to grind. He shows what I’ve posted about here before. What makes Teslas such remarkable vehicles is that they take all of the things people…

For many years another anti-EV message was that they have no resale value. How the worm has turned. Some people are selling their used EVs now for more than they paid for them, new. Meanwhile second hand petrol and…

As an engineer, the thing that attracted me most to Tesla, and which I think is genius and rarely spoken about. They managed to take all of the things people usually love about cars, like performance, driveability,…

The real tragedy about Elon Musk being so repugnant to so many people is this. What Tesla are doing and planning to do is almost beyond belief. All of the sub-companies and products, like Space X, xAI, Starlink, the…

To illustrate the nonsense about the range of cars. Few realise that the average range of combustion cars hasn’t changed much in almost 80 years. That upper average of around 650 km in that time is already the range of…

And with the vehicle emissions standards, wait until people see the price of wankpanzer utes in the next few years, to buy when new. All of life involves collisions between people's beliefs, and reality. This is one of…

Again, for kidults reality is just an endless series of shifting trends. Tesla was hugely unpopular in Europe for a while there, when Musk was chummy with Trump. The kidults, like groups of kids in a playground, said…

The supply of fuel we’re still getting all left the Middle East before the war began. It’s about to run out, globally. In populist politics it will all of course be ‘Albo’s’ fault. When really it’s the fault of…

The head of Australia’s largest super fund speaking the truth about housing that Australians never want to hear. ‘Supply’ won’t fix the housing crisis. Nobody is going to flood the market with cheap houses. It would…

It was the response to this fantastic story that highlighted just how stupid the anti-EV groups are. ‘But it was only toilet paper, it’s not heavy!’ It was 36 tonnes. 36 tonnes of toilet paper weighs the same as 36…

Working for a Council, complaints about potholes are one of the biggies. What’s not often said is how much people’s choice of vehicle causes this problem. Modern utes and SUVs are heavy. EVs are often accused of that,…

How good is this? Sharing this one not just for the brilliant engineering, but because it illustrates how cars are being reinvented. Cars are moving away from being ‘mechanical’ devices. The basic mechanical drivetrain…

Saving petrol ad from the 1970s. These worked, though this is before social media. Social media turns everything into warring gangs, the car ‘enthusiasts’ are just as likely now to use double the petrol if asked to cut…

This is a collision testing machine for vehicles, one of the tests that gives them their safety rating, out of 5 stars. As another window into the genius engineering that sits inside Teslas, when Teslas were tested on…

For once I agree with an economist. Fuel should have been allowed to get super expensive, not subsidised, to force people to restrict their usage. Look at Easter, where about half the State still went on their usual…

While the Queensland government spent $500 million drilling for enough oil to supply one service station, NSW is finally really ramping up EV fast-charging infrastructure, electric heavy vehicles and kerbside chargers.…

And noting again that at 15c/kWh, this is twice what most EV users can charge at overnight. So those 2c figures are actually 1c figures. Only just over 10% of Australians have bought electric vehicles. It's…

A fascinating insight into how driving changes qualitatively as an activity, once you’ve had prolonged experience of semi-autonomous technology. Just as these cars change the nature of cars fundamentally, they also…

Toyota is often thought of as the pinnacle of reliability in vehicles. With some justification, they pioneered affordable quality engineering for cars. But this would be about the sixth critical recall issue we’ve had…

I’m going to give concrete examples of kidult culture, rather than just mention it in general terms. A guy at work bought one of these, a BYD Shark hybrid ute. He’s a car guy, has owned over 20 cars. All combustion…

Even a year ago everybody you know would have told you not to buy an EV, because the resale is dire. I’ve posted multiple times here about why that misunderstands both the car market and the change to it now underway.…

After driving an EV your combustion car will feel like exactly what it is. A clunker. You can’t believe you ever put up with it, all that noise and blustering, for so little power.

Towing is another glorious example of human status games. When the BYD Shark was released for example, many people refused to buy it because it ‘can only tow 2.5 tonnes’. But in reality BYD’s engineers in China, removed…

I’ve been using FSD this week on my long commutes. It’s remarkable, the most calming and relaxing drive, knowing you have a system doing the driving that is paying attention in eight directions and across multiple…

This is the much bigger, profound shift that autonomous driving technology is bringing to roads. It’s not just replacing human driving with machine driving, it’s changing drivERS themselves. It’s stripping away the…

Unsurprisingly the majority of comments on this post gushed about how amazing the Oldsmobile is, and how the Tesla has no soul, and how everybody would choose to ride in the old car. That’s kidult culture, rampant…

The robots are coming, and fast (literally). Driven mostly by the Chinese and their engineering genius. But also by Tesla. They’re going to change the world in fundamental ways.

Have a car nut friend who desperately wants an X5. He didn't appreciate this.

I’ve been using Tesla’s supervised self-driving for my entire round trip to work each day, a 130km commute on both urban and regional roads. It’s been absolutely flawless. Coming down Tunnel Hill in Lithgow yesterday,…

A street in Shanghai. Teslas abound, because EVs abound. China doesn't have the obstructive adolescent whine of social media to prevent social progress.

When you add AI to autonomous driving, it becomes much more than just a car negotiating staying inside the lines at the right speed. It's constantly analysing all of the traffic around you and predicting what it might…

A common anti-EV myth is that we’ll need vastly more electricity, if we all shift to EVs. EVs use 3-4 times less energy to travel the same distance, as combustion cars. 70-80% of the petrol or diesel you put in your…

A lovely indication of just how sophisticated Tesla self-driving has become. The driver here wasn’t sure why their Tesla had pulled up well short of the Stop sign. Then it became clear - the car had seen the…

I talk about Tesla a lot because what it’s doing isn’t publicised much. It’s literally reinventing not just driving, but business and culture. Everything it does uses data in ways to reinforce everything else it’s…

Towards the end of my time at CSU, it took on a visionary project called Smart Learning (SL). I mention it because the ideas behind Smart Learning were more or less identical to the ideas that run Tesla, as a company.…

Tiny numbers of people drive all social activity. For example, the ‘love the sound of a combustion engine’ crowd is absolutely tiny, compared to the number of drivers on the road. Listen to all modern cars, the most…

Asking EV drivers to pay a road user charge is like asking people who give up smoking to pay extra tax to make up for the tax revenue lost from them no longer buying cigarettes. Countries making progress with EVs look…

Look at the ad spend for Tesla, compared to other car brands. It's almost non-existent. It also does very little PR. The downside of that is people don't get to see the real novelty of what they're doing. They put the…

I’ve posted about CAR T-cell therapy a few times. It works. Not for all forms of cancer, or at least not yet. But for some, it looks like being an actual cure. Knowledge changes lives. The only thing that ever does.

Why do I post so much about Tesla? They don't talk about the enormity of what they've done. You don't need to be any sort of fan to appreciate it, it will change the world, all of the world (well beyond cars) and it's…

Fuel should have been rationed in Australia starting weeks ago. Much of the population acting like toddler pork chops during Covid makes all politicians too terrified to do anything. Global supplies are non-existent.…

These will be the cleanest oil refineries in the world. Not one drop of oil. They’ll also take about 10 years to build, save nobody in the fuel crisis, cost billions Queensland doesn’t have, and target vehicles that…

I post so much about status because it really is the key that unlocks all human behaviour. Another example, maybe 20-25 years ago I noticed quite a few more luxury European cars circulating in Lithgow. That wasn’t…

When Tesla unveiled its Cybercab in 2024, the car with no steering wheel or pedals and vast interior room that can also accommodate wheelchairs, many were sceptical. But they're now rolling them off the production line.…

We're now deep into 'stranded asset' territory, if you buy a car with a combustion engine. Your secondhand value will go into free fall, nobody will want the vehicle as the transition accelerates.

The softly-softly 'market' approach to transition to renewable energy and EVs won't work. For starters markets are a fiction. And humans simply won't change if important change is needed, unless they're forced to. For…

Taking delivery of one of these on Sunday. Paul Meric is a ruthless reviewer, and here’s his summary, that cuts through all of the adolescent pro- and anti-Tesla nonsense. “I think this thing is absolutely…

Tesla autonomous driving prevents the owner being T-boned by somebody running a red light. Note the car on the right had a red right-turn arrow, which is why it didn’t move forward.

With home batteries I’m seeing time and again the same thing I’m seeing with EVs. Many people avoiding Tesla, because ‘Elon’. It’s your money. I can only advise what a terrible mistake that can be. Tesla is far and away…

The secret to the future of the world is in the contrast between that 5, and everybody else. Going far beyond cars. When you shift things to design and engineering, away from sales and marketing - away from status - the…

Another reason I went with Tesla is that they, by design, allow you to integrate all of your energy use in the one brilliant app. This includes your vehicle use, by far the largest energy use of any family, as well as…

Tesla employs proportionally 4 times more engineers than other carmakers. The money others spend on things like advertising and servicing, Tesla spends on creating and improving its technology. That's the model the…

I’ve been driving the newer Tesla Model Y all this week, the YL. Patrick gets why this is the best car ever made. But it’s now even better, the YL even has adaptive suspension that allows you to move between fast…

Formula 1 now has its own anti-vax movement. The anti-battery/anti-electric crowd. F1 cars have been hybrids for years already, it’s made them faster than they’ve ever been before, while using much less fuel so…

Senior doctors in the US are now demanding that autonomous driving technology be prioritised. They see its impact as equivalent for health to preventing smoking. Humans are appalling drivers, in direct proportion to how…

There's always a team. Take anybody's set of beliefs, and you'll find a social group (I call them teams to capture the rivalry) that those beliefs are the banner for. The overarching master teams in our time are Left v…

Not only the best car in the world, I would say the best car ever made. And people vote with their buying. Best-selling car in the world 3 times, at a time EVs are still scary to many and there's huge anti-Tesla…

When you arrive at Tesla to pick up your new car, you haven’t dealt with a single salesperson in the whole process, and there aren’t any at the Service Centre where you car is waiting either. Just a huge warehouse (the…

Tesla introduced AI to its Powerwall units, to help explain to people in real time what's happening in their energy management. For a lot of people who don't engage with the more technical side of things, it's a…

It occurred to me a while ago that the closest existing car category to put a Model Y or YL into would be GT cars. Grand Tourers (GTs) are cars that combine effortless long-distance comfort, high-speed stability, and…

It became very widespread to say ‘living with the virus’. Which was a phrase invented by a politician, not a scientist. It was bullshit. And this is where it leads. Every person who gets sick now, listen to them, will…

This was the energy use of the new Tesla, driving 62km to Bathurst yesterday. To translate that into a comparision with a petrol or diesel vehicle, the standard dual cab ute (Australia’s favourite cars), if it could use…

In NSW, no P-Plater is allowed to drive the Tesla. But all of them are allowed to drive the Wankpanzer.

I have pretty much zero time for Michaela Cash, on anything. But this exchange with the Australian Human Rights Commission on trans women and pregnancy in the workplace should be watched, so people can really see the…

Volvo make lovely cars. Their new EX60 EV though shows again the elephant in the room. It copies Tesla in just about every detail, including with mega-casting construction. But doesn’t have the self-driving, just for…

The shortage of oil from the Middle East doesn’t just impact fuel, it also impacts lubricant oils. The newer synthetic oils that about 70-80% of all new cars use are predicted to be in critical short supply until at…

Half of all new vehicle sales in Australia in May were for EVs. Game over.

Now the best-selling car in Australia, across all fuel types. Matching it being the best-selling car in the world, 3 years in a row. The reason is simple - it’s a work of engineering genius, in multiple dimensions.…

When ATMs were introduced, there was fear they’d make bank tellers redundant. Like the fear right now that AI will replace humans in their jobs. It wasn’t true. Automation rarely replaces human jobs, there are too many…

What’s another passion of adolescents? Historically, their cars. So we should expect to see that reflected in a ‘kidult’ culture, where adults think, feel and act like adolescents. Australians have more than 4 times as…

I often post about how only catastrophe brings meaningful social change. Cars are a good example. Until World War 1, horses were the dominant way people got around in their daily lives. 8 million horses died in that…

I’v been tracking for a long time what Tesla might be doing with V2G and V2L. The Cybertruck already does it, and there were rumours Tesla was finding a way to allow later-model Model 3s and Model Ys to do it as well.…

Musk is the world’s first trillionaire today, like him or hate him, because he represents something that is missing in our lives. He’s like a hybrid of Jules Verne, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. He promises grand…

A bit longer this, but I’m very tired of the Musk stuff and it needs a longer explanation. There’s a shorter Part 2 of this as a separate post, that explains some things about what Musk is doing that I think are…

Part 2 on Musk. And for the millionth time, I’m not a ‘fan’ of Musk. Nor am I against Musk. I just want to understand the specific material things he does, which I think are revolutionary. There’s critical things to…

A car enthusiast I know was crowing last week that ‘those who went and bought an EV because of high petrol prices will be sorry now the prices are coming down again.’ An EV costs the equivalent of about 12c/L to run. If…

I watched the game, it’s a good game. But as when I watch F1, I also watch the people. You can see here the root of our culture, in plain view. The fanatical desire to be part of some team, and to go into battle against…

The English so often talk about ‘going up’ to bed. Bungalows i.e. single-storey living have traditionally been associated with lower status, with the old and infirm. Again, this is about status. In a show like Downtown…

The grandad of lad culture, leading an entire generation of men into eternal adolescence through broom broom cars, Tonka Truck wankpanzers, and a general all-out assault on all change, has now hit the brick wall of…

An extra dimension to autonomous driving. The what - drive safely according to road conditions and rules - is the usual assumption for what an autonomous system should do. But the *how* it's done i.e. the degree of…

While people keep playing their goodies and baddies status games inside social media bubbles, Tesla keeps building things. In this case its 1000th Supercharger in Australia, in Byron Bay. This is big investment in…

These sorts of demos are so important for people to see the revolution we’re living, or can be living if we allow ourselves. Tesla’s latest update to its autonomous driving, in Australia, on busy night-time Sydney…

Top Gear changed the motoring enthusiast community into a mocking, nasty movement attacking a whole variety of social groups. As well as stifling innovation by going to war on everything that isn’t gas-guzzling, usually…

Lawrence is one of the world’s most famous theoretical physicists and science communicators. No ‘fanboy’. The technology is a revolution. The trip he mentions is over 8 hours of driving, urban and highways, more than…

The seductive and dangerous power of music is that it is the only pure imitation. It doesn’t look like or sound like other things. It is imitation for its own sake, which is why it’s like social heroin. And why it…

Tim is a traditional car guy. A 4x4 guy. Who bought a Tesla. And now has been trying its self-driving. He's blown away. Great engineering makes human hot air irrelevant.

One of the great myths of technology is that it's 'only technical'. That humans only relate with humans, and when they decide something in all that chatter, then you can go and build something. In reality technology is…

A detailed break-down of the revolutionary engineering innovations Tesla has created not just in its products, but in the even more important area - manufacturing. I know most won’t watch this, but it’s worth the time…

It doesn’t matter if it’s windmills, data centres, electric cars, gender, or in this case Formula 1. The social media machine has only one product. Rage. Imitation produces rivalry. Rivalry produces rage. Social media…

Horrendous driving conditions tonight. Driving rain, dark, blinding headlights from the other direction, hydroplaning, hopeless visibility. The Tesla held the road like it was glued down, and could see even in…

A generation ago only serious criminals would even think about doing this. Now it's sport. Imagine driving around slicing fuel hoses at servos. This isn't about EVs versus combustion vehicles. This is about the…

The road conditions this winter have been appalling for driving on my daily commute. Very wet, dark, foggy, huge numbers of vehicles coming the other way because of the Mt Vic blockage, with all that headlight glare.…

And the Tesla Model Y is now Australia's biggest-selling car, including all petrol and diesel cars. Overtaking the RAV4, and not before time. The Y is 10 times the vehicle the RAV4 is.

There are 14 essential technologies that are required to get a car to drive itself. These same 14 are what’s needed to get AI to operate in the real world, in anything (you’ll soon see it in Tesla robots). Legacy…

One bit of advice I’d give to people as homes and lives become increasingly powered by electricity, is the value of sticking within the one ‘ecosystem’. Sticking to a single brand for your different electrical products,…

Human versus self-driving. Guess who wins. (The Tesla saw it happening, slowed down to avoid the wankpanzer human.)

Combustion car sales have fallen off a cliff. Battery-electric cars are showing the opposite.

For the first time in years, there's actually some light at the end of the tunnel with motor neurone disease, one of the most horrific of all diseases. It may not be enough to help people like Jai, but researchers are…

With this change, due this year, Tesla drivers will be able to verbally tell their cars in precise detail what they want them to do. Like ‘go to William Street and park near the post office, in the public car park.’ Or…

For nearly all of history, most people couldn't read. Now most can, but choose not to. It's another one of those point-in-time things that a particular social group takes as essential, only because it was their thing.…

When the iPhone was first released, many thought it was too expensive for ‘just a phone’. Then the world realised it was much much more than a phone. This tech analyst believes Tesla’s self-driving is at that tipping…

I drive the Great Western Goat Track every day to work, currently crippled by the malfunction of a 200-year-old 2-lane bridge. A joke as a highway even with that working. This is the nation’s fundamental artery linking…

Germaine is still alive! But I’ve worked for years to understand the particular genius of her work, separate from all of the fake outrages about her. Most people who I discuss Greer with haven’t read a single word she’s…

Tesla's supervised self-driving has now completed over 12 billion miles (20 billion kilometres) without ONE fatality. Not one. Statistically, the same number of km driven by other vehicles would produce (on crash…

A short highlights package of some of the things Tesla's autonomous driving technology can do. If you can look in 9 directions at the same time, all around your car, 30 times per second, then you win. (And you're full…

The perfect advertisement for why self-driving will be a boon for older drivers. Clueless driving here, shouldn't have a licence. Humans are hopeless drivers.

Why are we still subsidising motorists with petrol and diesel cars? Diesel subsidies alone cost Australians $15 billion per year. That would put an abundance of electric fast-chargers on every major road, with plenty of…

Imagine how expensive your car would be if car companies had to come to every home to build your vehicle from scratch, in your driveway. Cars are affordable because we don’t do that. We build them in factories, with…

Part 2 on why Australia should industrialise house-building, but probably won’t. As always, it’s about status. All societies run on status. The way we currently build homes in Australia is driven by a massive growth in…

The genius of electric motors is that you can alter the torque they put out in the tiniest amounts, within milliseconds. This means that once you have them in a car, software updates can create all sorts of abilities…

Cities are remarkable in a way I only recently came to understand. Throughout all of history humans have struggled to find ways to live together, without violence and death. That’s because humans relating only to other…

Every machine is the folding together of the social relationships of the people who made it, and the people who use it. People and machines are not two separate things. Machines aren’t ’tools’ for people. A machine…

Teslas can avoid potholes too. What's fascinating is that this is a feature they were working on, but haven't released formally yet, but the AI has figured it out by itself. It's an emergent behaviour. There are 10…

Tesla is finalising another genius bit of engineering. If you have the home battery and wall charger and vehicle, it will allow you to use your car batteries to top-up your home battery, as needed. This is a post about…

Was at a tyre workshop chatting to the owner while they were working on my tyres. We were talking about tyre wear on EVs, which can vary depending on how you drive, the road surface etc. He said ‘it’s just that they’re…

Went to a servo this afternoon. I needed a carton of milk. When I got there, the young guy behind the counter was giving a long sermon to some poor young woman about how the petrol prices mean we should be refining more…

I've created this image to explain the magic of an ordinary city street. It's like a special x-ray image of things you normally can't see. A project I've been working on for a while. Behind the simple facade of an…

It takes a diagram to capture what Tesla is really doing, and it goes so far beyond cars. It's a breathtaking idea of using continuous feedback between people and the technologies they use, to create an entire culture…

Roads are public infrastructure. They shouldn’t be user-pays. Imagine saying people should pay at the front door of the hospital, or to get into school every day. Fuel excise doesn’t pay for roads. How many times does…

Humans are such good drivers, hey. When you talk about what ‘good driving’ is, the default in everybody’s mind is race car driving. Being able to drive fast, to corner well, control a car in skids etc. Hardly anybody…

In conversation with people here and elsewhere, so often I see angry rejections of the idea that AI is thinking. A reminder that Hinton’s work on machine intelligence via neural networks is the foundation of AI, and won…

Many of the vandalism against Tesla incidents are actually committed by the elderly, and so often by elderly women. That’s the old 60s counterculture still in play, revolutions never end, they just generate violence,…

It’s a pretty brutal demonstration of just how much trouble the big German and Japanese car makers are in, as the world shifts to electric. Not one German brand, and only one Japanese brand (in position 18). Also a…

I'm never sure it really registers with many just how hopeless combustion engines are. In the history of engineering, they're a genuine embarrassment. On top of this the electric vehicle gives you far more performance.

I'm never sure it really registers with many just how hopeless combustion engines are. In the history of engineering, they're a genuine embarrassment. On top of this the electric vehicle gives you far more performance,…

I encourage people to learn about AI, rather than just emote about it using trending viral themes on the socials. Your brain is a neural network, just like AI. It has up to 100 billion neurons ‘wired’ together. Those…

I often say as a culture we live inside social media. Here’s a direct example. I saw this on a Tesla group. Notice how people literally curate their ‘real-life’ experiences to match how they see things on social media…

I love this stuff. How we mistake measurements for things in the world. Like distance, and time, which are not properties of the world but relations between events in the world. Measurement doesn’t measure the world. It…

Look at what AI can do. For years I’ve thought Formula 1 racing isn’t really racing, that its results are more about entrenched technological advantage in key teams. So with AI I looked at whether the results of the…

“Sally has 3 brothers. Each of her brothers has 2 sisters. How many sisters does Sally have?” “I live half a mile from the car wash. Should I walk or drive?” These are 2 questions Geoff Hinton gives as examples of why…

The times they are a 'chargin'. The Bathurst Tesla Superchargers used to sit empty most of the time, except on busy holidays. (Which is normal, most charge at home.) Absolutely packed today, and a new car arrived with…

Tesla self-driving shows that the debates about whether AI is just a high-powered copy-and-paste machine are nothing but hot air. If AI couldn’t generate its own thought and only copied what it saw elsewhere, Tesla…

Modern mobile phones have NPUs (neural processing units) to carry out artificial intelligence/machine learning operations, on the phones. iPhones and Android phones have had these AI chips for nearly 10 years. The…

A neural network has nodes, which in our brains (analog AI) are neurons, and in AI (digital AI) are weighted numbers. When our bodies or AI experience the world, these nodes form themselves, nobody pre-programs them.…

‘Community opposition’ to AI is like community opposition to Tesla. Tesla sales in Australia are off the charts. And half the Australian population can’t get enough AI. Life on the socials is a delusional outraged…

One of the proliferating waves of nostalgia we’ve seen was the push to return more buttons and knobs to cars. The rationale given was that using a touchscreen is too distracting. That viral nostalgia is now dead, when…

With Bathurst coming up, even if you’re not a car racing fan, there’s a genius to V8 Supercars that I think it’s still super important for everybody to understand. A specific Australian genius, that goes well beyond car…

Peter Brock died 20 years ago, today. A trivia fact I didn't know is that the car he was driving when he died, a Daytona Coupe, was originally designed by an American designer. That American designer's name is...Peter…

"This is the most annoyingly good car in Australia right now. I want to hate this car. I just can't." Wonderful seeing kidult culture completely defeated by genius engineering. Even the small things he doesn't like -…

My posts about ‘gig culture’ get bogged down in the offence people take at their favourite acts being criticised. It’s a wider argument about cultural and social change. The 20th century was a century of revolutions.…

Gig culture, as I call it, was really the emergence of the ‘teenager’ or adolescence as a distinct stage of life. The teenager as we think of that term today didn’t exist before the 1940s. That critical period I often…

“To be honest, IQ levels are higher in China than they are in Australia. Most people in China understand the merits and values of an EV, whereas most people in Australia are afraid of electric cars. It’s true, they’re…

China sold 42% of the world’s cars at the end of 2024. 15 years ago it sold 2% of the world’s cars. This isn’t a competition between EVs and ICEs. It’s a competition to see who will build EVs the fastest. ICEs (petrols…

Chinese EVs are increasingly famous for the incredible extras that are bundled with them, like staggering sound systems, for no extra money. The reason is fascinating, and shows just how far behind we are in the West.…

I've posted about the Zeekr 7X. Coming to Australia this year, a phenomenal car at an unbelievable price. The Europeans and Americans look on with envy at what we can buy now in Australia. They're slapping huge tariffs…

The NRMA have done an excellent debunking of most of the common EV myths. https://www.mynrma.com.au/electric-vehicles/basics/ev-myths

This is BYD's Tesla Model Y competitor, that I've posted about here before. The price looks like being amazing, as always with BYD. Australia is now one of the best places in the world to buy a car.

"First, Facebook was good to you: It showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: Once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook,…

Very close to the reveal of the new Tesla Model Y. A big event, the world's biggest selling car. Autocar has done this rendition based on leaked photos, it should look pretty much like this. The Model Y to me is a…

Actual picture from Tesla now of the new Model Y. Nice job.

There’s no water to fight the LA fires. That’s because an urban reticulated water system isn’t designed to fight massive fires across thousands of homes at once. Another example of the catastrophe of climate change…

Mazda is one of the major Japanese car makers that has been bullshitting us all, telling us that it can continue to make petrol and diesel cars, no need to shift to EVs. In reality, like all the other Japanese car…

Ignoring all of the Elon Musk distraction around Tesla, their engineering is superb. Like the new Model Y, when you build a car all of the component parts have to be bolted and welded together, which takes time and a…

Australia is deeply infected with the ‘car bloat’ virus. “For the people who love big cars, owning one can be integral to their identity, reflecting very specific ideas about American individualism...it’s very easy to…

The catastrophic collapse in birth rates around the world is usually attributed to the young not having enough money to raise families. It is that too, but there’s a fascinating extra bit. We’re in a ‘relationship…

I mostly stopped drinking alcohol years ago for health reasons (it can trigger arrhythmias in me). But I rarely miss it, and what I do miss in taste is rapidly being caught up by non-alcoholic alternatives. Alcohol is…

The price war is escalating, and Australian consumers should be excited. We’re the luckiest car buyers in the Western world. BYD has just reduced prices on its models by thousands, vehicles that were already at almost…

I'll wait for the articles about how how buying a standard petrol or diesel is doing your money, because there's no resale. Heh. Interesting that in a 'cost of living' crisis people still are prioritising new cars over…

What I see every day with utes, including with trailers. This class of vehicle is some of the ugliest driving out there. Had one of these behind me (with a trailer) in a queue overtaking a truck the other day, flashing…

I have many conversations about how FB should be used. That FB is where people mostly go to update each other on what they’re doing in life. Like an interactive set of social pages from the old local newspaper. And that…

Millions will defend travel as the having of ‘experiences’. The funny thing is that everybody seems to go to the same places, at the same time. Almost like they’re copying other people, like buying shoes, phones, cars…

Cars are a cultural thing, social groups align around them. They talk technical, but it's really about keeping the group together. Also why a major change to car technology triggers such resistance.

The price wars continue, again what a beautiful time to be a car buyer if you’re Australian. Sucks to be a European or American right now. Hyundai have slashed the price of its brilliant EV the Ioniq 6 by $20,000. 20…

The real genius of Tesla is its software. It uses software to integrate technology into a person’s life in all sorts of new ways. The functionality and design of the software is unmatched in the industry, nobody else…

China already has fully self-driving electric buses, that operate 24/7.

No, they won’t buy the cars they want. They’ll buy the cars everybody else wants. That’s how humans work. This ‘don’t tell people what to do’ is more libertarian nonsense we hear all the time, from the same people who…

Just look at this amazing technology. America is toast, nobody will want to buy junk US vehicles.

Probably the first time a manufacturer has re-invented a market segment with a vehicle at their first try. You can do most of your driving in this car at full-electric, never needing to spend a cent on fuel. About 80km…

The battle for status is the organising principle behind all human life, at all ages. Status is also identity. Without status, you’re nobody. Also why the fundamental act of a human being is to copy, or imitate. We…

The new Model Y. One of the most aerodynamically efficient cars in the world, which is the actual reason for its sleek design.

Venice is one of the few cities on Earth where you can still live the truth of this. Cities aren’t loud. It’s combustion engines that make them loud. Venice is eerily and beautifully silent (though now overrun with…

The new Model Y. The aerial view shows some of the design not as visible from ground level. There’s a reason this is the best-selling car in the world, its design is literal genius in multiple ways, capturing the needs…

I do get that Elon Musk is putting many people off Tesla in any form. But Tesla is 130,000 brilliant people, doing urgent things the world needs. For example way bigger than its cars is its provision of battery storage…

This is the car Kell and I just bought. Not the actual car in the picture, but the exact same model, colour etc. The Model 3, Long Range. People know I spend a lot of time looking at all the EV options out there. What…

130,000 brilliant people work for Tesla. This is the bullshit that happens when people decide to become a mob. I’ll never be part of a mob.

I wish my dad was here to share stories of life under the actual Nazis, and their fascist electric cars and batteries. People need to grow up.

This will achieve exactly nothing, just like painting swastikas on Tesla buildings. This is the sort of performative rubbish social media has encouraged us to think changes the world. Really it just makes us feel good…

There’s an emerging business in blacking out the ‘BYD” at the front of the BYD Shark, by people who love the ute but don’t like to advertise it’s from BYD. For many, their car is a huge part of their identity, which is…

I saw this created a bit of a fuss online. I think it’s another perfect illustration of how our music is just one more thing we use to form our social groups, to define our status and our identity. It’s what we do with…

Great test of the new BYD Shark under towing. Summary: it’s a monster tower. So good the one criticism was there was so much power, it was difficult to keep it under the speed limit. The other fun thing about this video…

Humans imitate each other. Not just every now and then, it’s pretty much all they ever do, at every age. And why do they imitate? To achieve status. To belong, to have an identity. Imitation gives you membership of any…

Fascinating to watch this cultural shift play out in real time. This is WAY more than just technical arguments about cars. This is society changing at its roots.

The sorts of electricity prices renewables are making possible. The red rectangle is completely free electricity between 11am and 2pm every day. The red circle is electricity at only 8c/kWh from midnight-6am, to charge…

Buying slow gutless vehicles that make vroom vroom noises and need constant maintenance and fuel? Each to their own I guess. Bet they’re a hoot to drive at 800,000km.

In the 1950s, people just off-roaded in their ordinary everyday Nazi cars, without all the GI Joe spec pissing contest of the ute and 4WD. Off-roading is a social activity, a way to create and maintain a social group.…

The anti-Tesla mob must be making Evie happy. Once you’re in a mob, you don’t get to choose what it does.

City and country are not two forms of life. They’re one form of life. Have a look at the UK, the land gets progressively more valuable the closer to London you get. The people who live in the ‘countryside’ see it as a…

The simplest car buying experience I’ve ever experienced, by a country mile. Pleasurable, even. Included a trade-in. Did it all from my couch, on the app. I see Tesla sales are well down globally this month, the big…

Did my calculations long ago for the new EV. If we stick with grid power to charge it at home, at full grid price (not special EV price), it’ll cost about $15 a week to ‘fill’ the Tesla. That’s for 300km of motoring per…

What a window into the mess of our ideas about relationships. I love that many are realising that being alone is not a bad thing. But their reasons here are all about personal development, incredibly self-centred. Being…

What I really like about Tesla, and a huge reason I went with one of their vehicles (already had the home battery) is in that underlined bit. A ‘fully integrated’ home energy ecosystem, to create energy independence.…

A 'wit' shared this with me the other day. Loving the Tesla, loving sailing past poor combustion clunkers madly down-shifting and revving, trying to keep up. Loving no fuel costs, no servicing, loving the 17-speaker…

When people have moved on from the current trending fad around Tesla-hating (and they will, it’s just a fad), I encourage anybody to explore the full Tesla ecosystem. Extraordinary creativity and engineering. Here,…

The top level of the Tesla app showing the solar, house battery and car all currently being charged for free by the sun. The app has many more layers and functionality, the best software I’ve ever used.  Feels really…

I have no energy bills. And that increasingly includes for running the cars, a household’s biggest energy cost by far. Much of the Australian population could be the same. But they‘re stuck in fake wars against EVs and…

Saving the world one haircut at a time. Probably all selling their Teslas now too.

That’s Lithgow to Bathurst. It’s one of the main reasons I went with Tesla, that efficiency almost unparalleled in electric cars. Most of them struggle to do less than 20 kW hours per hundred kilometres. The Tesla did…

I could never go back to a combustion car. The physics says it all. Look at those flaccid torque and power blue and red lines for petrols and diesels. You spend most of your time revving the shit out of the thing (what…

We've had another couple of weeks with wide reporting of a 'stalling' in demand for electric vehicles. All bullshit, to make people think they'll do their money buying one. This is the 6th reporting of a collapse in…

The new car sitting at the bowser, filling up at 0c/L. This is where you’ll mostly charge your EV, at home. Ignore the hysteria about there not being enough fast-chargers. You’ll hardly ever need them.

The only thing stopping Ford’s bankruptcy is its sale of big utes, Rangers and the F-series utes. BYD is targeting both. As Sam said, it’s going to be a bloodbath. Far superior technology, for about 40% less dollars.…

For people with the debilitating condition of range anxiety, more real world examples. To drive to Sydney from Lithgow with an EV battery at 100% to start, you arrive all the way over on the coast with a battery still…

More real world numbers for people thinking about making a switch. My weekly commuting in a petrol or diesel cost $120. With a hybrid I got that cost down to $70. With an EV that cost is now $3.60. Per week. That’s…

Have been watching some 1990s shows. It was such a dreary time, the palette of colour and design. The cars were so often just flat, featureless panels welded or bolted onto the chassis. And it was the transition from…

My $3.60 in electricity for a week of commuting between Bathurst and Lithgow was based on an estimate. I re-did the calculation using actual data from the car this morning. It's $2.40. Per week. If I was working in the…

The latest EV scare campaign, this time driven by lawyers desperate for work. The same happening in Australia. For years the government has sponsored test labs to debunk range claims on petrol and diesel vehicles too,…

The beauty of a home battery is that you get to control your energy costs. As an example, I program the battery to top up if needed between midnight and 6am, when we get super cheap electricity from the grid, and also…

It appears many of those refusing to buy Teslas are...people who were never going to buy Teslas. 'Huge demand'. The Model Y is (deservedly) the biggest selling car in the world, genius design and engineering, with a new…

We have one high efficiency gas hot water heater, and one hybrid petrol vehicle left. Both are on the chopping block, to get the parasites in the fossil fuel industry out of our lives forever. Getting them out of your…

What modern car nuts (mostly just guys of middle-age who used cars as a way of defining their social group as teenagers) don’t understand is that an EV is really a GT car. A grand tourer, gran turismo. Cars engineered…

The team sports of social media can achieve such a level of righteousness, that the team becomes a mob. People call this 'changing the world'. Really it's just being a mob. Looting, arson, vandalism. Some even gun CEOs…

A motoring writer used AI to try to understand the drop in Tesla sales. The AI said 'with 70% certainty' that it was the introduction of the new Model Y, the most popular car in the world, and the delays in changing the…

Great to see the Shark rocket into the Top 10. The RAV 4 is a tired hybrid, you'd be mad to buy one over a Sea Lion 6 for example. And dual-cab utes are literally the worst cars ever built. Hopeless as utes, hopeless as…

Clearly people want to shift to EVs, but range anxiety is still an issue for them. It's why there's such a surge in hybrid sales. Range anxiety in nearly every case is an actual mental illness (it's in the name),…

I'm genuinely curious what all the those who support the anti-Tesla protests have to say about this. There's no washing your hands of it, no half-pregnant membership of the mob. 130,000 employees and millions of Tesla…

What Musk is trying to do with Trump in the US, Australia already did, with Robodebt. He wants to take over government departments and replace them with software. For that, Tesla property and Tesla owners have become…

To give a bit more of the flavour of insanity that passes for public life now, you'll see these Foxtel dishes all over Australia. They're owned by Rupert Murdoch. If you think Murdoch is a cancer on democracy (and he…

This has nothing to do with me owning a Tesla. It's to do with mob behaviour. How many carmaker CEOs could people actually name? Do they know their political positions on things? Do they happily support the brutal Saudi…

Tesla sales in the UK surged by 20% in February. Overall EV sales there are up over 40%. The Tesla Model Y is the second most popular car in the UK, the Model 3 is the 3rd most popular. Sales also surging in Korea and…

Filled up the hybrid this morning. I drive hundreds of km every week, split 50:50 between the Tesla and the Toyota hybrid. The hybrid cost me $100 in fuel for the fortnight. That’s a hybrid, it’d be $200-$300 for a full…

1 year of free fast-charging. Tesla offering 5000km of free fast-charging on run-out stock of the previous Model Y. Incredible bargains out there. In the UK not only have EV sales surged, petrol and diesel sales have…

Mob rule is the addiction to moral panics. Look around and you'll see these appear continuously, at the moment it's Teslas and Elon Musk, a while back it was supermarkets and Qantas, etc. There will always be a moral…

It’s politicians who approve building on flood plains and who do nothing against climate change. They need a distraction, and insurers are always it in natural disasters now. Queue the next mob pile-on. Heck it may even…

The Sealion 7 is now for sale in Australia. Like most BYDs, you're getting a LOT of high quality car for a small price. This is BYD's Tesla Model Y challenger, though it's not as hard to challenge Tesla in the current…

A starter motor. I love that you can't even start a combustion engine, without an electric engine. Same reason you have to idle the petrol, or diesel, burning fuel, while you're stationary, like at the traffic lights. I…

The thought of the MAGAs now buying Teslas to emulate the Great Leader amuses me. The thought of even more social media mob zombies heading out with spray paint doesn‘t. It’s like living in a childcare centre for…

A President doing an infomercial for his largest donor, with the White House as the backdrop. The US is over. Buy a Tesla, they're phenomenal cars. They'll survive much longer than Musk or Trump. Not buying them won't…

We believe what our gang or team leader says we should believe. Nobody is paying any attention to the actual details. It's all team sports, your team against somebody else's team. The team leader can say completely…

Toyota, which has pretended that we don’t need EVs only because it was caught with its pants down (in the background they’ve been in panic mode trying to build them). Its bZ4x is OK, this new C-HR+ looks much better.…

When governance is your job, it’s a bit like how everybody thinks they know about education, because they went to school. Everybody is a supposed expert in government, because they vote. Most don’t have a clue. For…

A brilliant idea. And even if you’re not a renter, it’s a brilliant option to buy a home battery and tap into the super cheap and even free rates some retailers are already offering, even if you don’t want to install…

They can now recycle and re-use every square millimetre of an EV battery. How much petrol or diesel can you recycle in a vehicle? None. 70% of it doesn’t even move the vehicle, it goes straight out the exhaust as heat,…

Listen to this very short clip of the chief vehicle engineer and chief designer at Tesla explaining how they design cars. The genius of what they’ve done, and why I ignore the pile-on moral outrage on Tesla right now.…

Seeing this in the US now, people with duelling cameras on sidewalks, filming each other in Western-style standoffs. Then they mace the other if they get too close. This is the idiot world social media has created, do…

Let’s say people decided that those who drive petrol and diesel vehicles are supporting the authoritarian Saudi regime and causing dangerous climate change, so others should key their cars, set them alight and abuse the…

The car lobby is also the parking lobby. Nothing exercises Bathurst more for example than parking spaces. What causes increased traffic and increased need for parking, is new roads and new parking spaces. It induces…

My experience with EVs is that rather than feel frustrated that they may be slower to charge than it takes to put petrol and diesel in, it's actually hugely refreshing to have an extra 5-10 minutes to stretch the legs…

The survey of Germans which last week showed that no Germans would ever buy a Tesla again, now shows that nearly 70% WOULD buy a Tesla. Nearly half a million respondents now. The anti-Tesla mob hysteria will pass. Just…

Two Australian Tesla owners discussing their car servicing. I honestly do pity those bogged down in social media anti-EV (and now anti-Tesla) tripe.

Model Y pricing announced for Australia. Best car in the world, and biggest seller. $1000 cheaper than the old model, a total bargain. Or you could not buy one because that horrible 'Elon' isn't on your bestie list, and…

It’s so important to remember the magnitude of both the ambition and the material achievement of this organisation. The Chinese have copied it, Tesla was the trailblazer. You can see some of the actual material outcomes…

Listen to the almost nervous, long justification he gives for buying the car, and you’ll hear how the choices we make on cars (and everything) are entirely about fitting in to this or that social group. We never leave…

Reading the real life (joyful) experiences of people who bought a Shark reinforces even more strongly how changing a car culture is like deprogramming somebody who's been in a cult. Unbelievably strong forces of peer…

I used to wear Crocs, and became notorious for it because they were considered socially 'out'. Now they're all the rage. If you look, you'll find everything in life, child or adult, follows this same basic mechanism.…

M3 = Model 3 Tesla. For those suffering from range anxiety, notice he drove Brisbane to Bathurst with no issues at all. And it’s true what he says, the driving is so pleasurable you almost hate getting out of the car at…

Many Australians believe the car industry is a competition between ICEs and EVs. There is no competition, ICEs are being phased out globally. Not one car company is planning to keep building petrol and diesel vehicles,…

Thoughts? How will we fund roads?! (Sorry, another anti-EV myth, that EV drivers don't fund roads. Fuel excise doesn't fund roads, and this shows it.) The only thing I buy at servos is packets of chips.

The ALP is offering $150 electricity bill rebates, and the LNP 25c off every litre of fuel. It's a great example of how big the savings are by going electric. With 25c off every litre of fuel, at current prices of…

This UK car dealer bought a used Tesla with 350,000 km on the clock. Listen to him explain here what servicing had been done on the Tesla in those 350,000 km. (Summary: virtually nothing, except changed tyres and wiper…

Household electricity use is actually quite a small component of household budgets. A much, much bigger component of those budgets is what it costs for people to fuel their vehicles. That’s also part of your energy…

Mercedes debunk the myths around the need for always faster-charging EV times. As they say, the average petrol or diesel fuelling takes 10-12 minutes already. That's as fast as fast EV charging needs to be (and already…

The fascism/Nazi rubbish on social media, in relation to both Trump and Tesla, is historically ignorant (no surprise there, this is social media), but even worse misdagnoses fundamentally what's happening in the US, and…

The piece Waleed Aly wrote about justice 6 years ago is still so important. Do people notice the increasing, even violent righteousness that is dominating how we respond to things now? The Tesla attacks are a great…

Guy in Hilux parks in a Tesla, and doesn’t realise it’s recording the whole thing, including his rego number, as he keys the car walking past. How’s it feel to be part of a mob? Oh you just meant a friendly, law-abiding…

Hybrids are selling like hotcakes, because people want to save money on fuel, and some even want to go full-electric but are worried about range. On both of those counts, unless you’re doing a lot of driving in more…

Copycat stupidity. People vandalise great works of art like this now too, throwing tins of soup and paint at them. Mob behaviour is highly infectious. Their real passion is generating likes and follows on social media.…

It won't be long now until the clown car drives off the road all by itself. No need for you to become a violent gang member and head out to loot and burn anything. No threat of fascism or Nazis, that's all cartoon…

A big plug for AI, if you have any technical problems, say with computers or wifi, or interaction of devices in your house etc. I had a really complex problem getting the car to talk to the home wifi, which was beyond…

lol, is Channel 7 peak stupid in Australia? It’s a tough field. They go to a scary-looking industrial nickel refinery in Indonesia and say this proves EVs are environmentally unfriendly. Nickel refineries have been…

So, who’s getting a battery? Tesla batteries are still the best, which will challenge the Nazi-shy, but that ridiculous hysteria will be a memory soon. This should have been done years ago. There’s an ocean of free…

Electric vehicles preceded combustion vehicles. Combustion vehicles were considered a joke: loud, inefficient, spewing pollution, gutless. That’s because they were a joke, and still are. Rubbish technology. Only cheap…

I challenge those spruiking the superiority of petrol and diesel vehicles to start their car in the garage, close the garage door and sit with it for a few hours. I'll do the same with my EV. We'll compare notes. (P.S.…

Driving an EV, another noticeable thing is the complete absence of either of these gauges. No fuel, and no need to regulate temperature. Battery percentage replaces the fuel gauge (and it can go UP as you drive, good…

Marvel at the engineering. A Tesla electric motor is only around 20 cm long and round. It weighs just over 30kg, you could carry it. Compare that to the combustion engine in the front of a car, weighing around 200kg.…

Probably the only thing combustion car enthusiasts have left to distinguish the technology is the noise those engines make. But have a look around at the overwhelming majority of cars being made today, how much quieter,…

I talk a lot about cars not because I love cars, but because they’re key to understanding our wider culture. Notice the debates around EVs are all about the technical pros and cons people see. But that’s not what this…

It’s ute and 4WD drivers who are least likely to shift to electric. That’s partly because there aren’t many electric utes and 4WDs yet, but the number of people who actually use utes and 4WDs for carrying things and…

The new Model Y is getting 5-star reviews across the board. As Toby Hagon says, ignore the Elon the Nazi rubbish, this is the best-selling car in the world for a reason. Once you drive a great EV like this, you'll…

Tongue-in-cheek, but absolutely spot on in showing how a vehicle is really a membership of a particular social group. Everything is that, when you look.

There's a vehicle driving from Lithgow to Bathurst every day, normally at about 90 km/h. Often has a queue of traffic behind it. I went to overtake them today, and suddenly they were doing 125. This sort of driving…

Classic example (in an otherwise good review) of a misunderstanding I think we're seeing with the Shark. (And yes, it's an older article, posting to highlight thinking in it, not to share a new review.) "Once the…

Once you electrify and network your car, all sorts of things become possible. I’d always imagined parents for example having greater control over their kids’ unsupervised driving (still the leading cause of death for…

‘Ute Man’ is dying. We’ve reached Peak Ute (love that term). It was Scott Morrison’s big tax concessions for utes that led to them exploding in sales. Now with efficiency standards coming for Australian cars (last in…

This can be true, and why I encourage people who are thinking about going electric to skip hybrids and go straight to full-EV, unless they're doing lots of long distance driving in remote areas. For example our trip to…

Zoom out and look at the ridiculous world we’re now living in. A council is offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to install an EV charger, at no cost to the town, and the council votes it down because a majority of…

I’m not sure everybody saw Bob Pepper’s really thorough analysis of the Shark pre-release, which included the issue of steep ascents (the Beer O’Clock Hill and Car Expert viral videos). From just before 4 minutes, you…

When you're in the middle of a wave of outrage and euphoria, like we've had for women (metoo), Tesla, and here for climate change, it feels like you're changing the world. You're not. Sometimes protest movements cash in…

Historically tradies dominantly voted Labor, but were skilfully brought over to the conservative side of politics by targeting young men mostly, with fake wars on women, EVs and utes, Greenies and whatever else could be…

Nissan, like Toyota, has been playing with us. In public they’ve talked down the transition to EVs, because they don’t have any good ones. But behind the scenes they’ve been going flat out developing them to try to…

We have social media zombies bellowing about the Nazi fascist takeover of the US, out there burning and looting and protesting. I thought from the start of Trump’s term that the whole thing would fall in a heap of clown…

Rory talking about how humans change, in this case using cars as an example, it’s about shifting a status quo. When first challenged a status quo will launch a whole range of increasingly bonkers ‘defensive opinions’,…

This ongoing drivel about EV drivers not paying their fair share of road upkeep. Petrol and diesel tax doesn’t go to roads, and the same party promising to slug EV drivers to pay for roads are cutting fuel excise to buy…

Australians for Natural Gas is a fake group invented and funded by the Australian gas industry. (Which is really a foreign-owned industry.) The fact we still call it ‘natural’ gas too goes back to a time in the past…

Tesla is launching cheaper versions of its major cars like the Model Y and Model 3, reportedly from the middle of this year. They'll take some of the more luxury elements out of the vehicles, that aren't needed for…

I took this yesterday, to capture everybody’s two favourite things. Tesla and local government 😉 (Plus that beautiful blue sky in the building facade.) Spot the wankpanzer revving up through the gears to try to get…

Has anybody run self-sealing or run-flat tyres on their vehicle before?

I remember when I posted about semi-autonomous driving technology, and many would say that it will never work because humans will always be better drivers.

Something I posted about here a few weeks ago. Ordinary petrol and diesel cars have been getting so quiet in recent decades, they've had to pipe fake engine noise even into the BMW M5, to satisfy those who like the…

The beaten dog syndrome, when you inherit a pet that’s been beaten by a broom for example, and then for the rest of its life every time you sweep the dog panics and hides. I’ve noticed a similar thing driving the Tesla…

Matt does great videos. But I wonder if BYD really need to step in here and start publishing some more information to drivers about how to best drive a hybrid.  Matt getting just over 300 km on a tank as the full range…

A secondhand Tesla is probably the best value used car out there. This one has done nearly 300,000km and still has 90% of its original battery capacity, and drives flawlessly. It also shows just how much value you get…

All of those who love the sound of a V8, like Jeremy, always forget that the sound they love is not the engine. It’s the exhaust, a metal tube. Invented to get rid of the truly horrible sound of an engine, to ‘muffle’…

I'm over people saying 'cheap Chinese shit'. Apart from it being the gutter-level racism you'd have hoped Australia left behind in the 1950s, it's also factual bullshit. China is the world's factory. If something made…

All major change is the same, we saw the same with the introduction of cars over horses. The status quo will whine and whinge and invent all sorts of fantasy ‘technical’ reasons they shouldn’t have to change. Eventually…

Two of Australia’s most popular cars, the RVA4 hybrid, and the Ford Ranger ute. Under new vehicle emissions standards coming into effect on 1 July this year, the price of the RAV4 could jump by $10,000. The Ranger could…

That's over 320,000km, for the metric nations. And is also true. Petrol and diesel cars have always had a deliberately designed obsolescence, which makes people go out and buy new ones regularly. Find me another…

Ute and other 4WD fans threw every insult and criticism they could at the BYD Shark when it came out, particularly claiming it wasn’t a proper off-roader. It turns out it needs a professional who actually knows how to…

When I say adult life has been completely replaced with adolescent life, politics is a good example. We look at politics the same way we watch a State of Origin game. Red v Blue, even the colours are the same (we use…

Australia subsidises utes and SUVs to the tune of $250 million a year. That’s a big reason lots of people drive them. It’s time Australians went back to driving sedans and station wagons. Both utes and SUVs have the…

One of my mini projects is to explore how all human behaviour is people copying other people, driven by the desire for status. You can explain pretty much everything using that framework, it’s the periodic table of…

The kids drove back from Sydney last night. They didn't charge while down there, and when they got to Katoomba they were already below 30% charge. But the car told them they'd have 22% charge when they got home. And…

Buy a car designed to maximise aerodynamic efficiency, something with a really low drag coefficient. You can see why, here. This is why we used to drive sedans, until utes and SUVs became kidult status games.

Had to do a quick trip to Sydney today, and it reminded me again of how human life is all about status. Driving that Tesla is a wonder of the world. Supercar levels of performance, totally silent gigantic torque on tap,…

Today's trivia. The fuelling network for petrol and diesel cost at least 3 times what rolling out supercharging Australia-wide will cost. The alleged 'range' of petrols and diesels is really the hundreds of billions…

The Anglo world is now the 3rd world.…

Now that even Musk sees what a bullshit artist Trump is, maybe the focus can go back onto Trump and off Tesla. Where the focus always should have been, except social media rots our brains.

Look at that huge surge in sales for Tesla in Australia, in May. Meanwhile all the Nazi-Tesla memes on social media have disappeared exactly as predicted, with no meaningful change to anything. Trump is still there.…

See, now you can buy a Tesla and be batting for the anti-Trump team.

Such a common experience, you never want to go back. I asked Molly how driving the full-EV compared with our older car. (Molly has zero interest in mechanical anything.) She said she doesn’t like the old car now, when…

This car should blow people away, the new BYD Tang-L. A 7-seater. Coming to Australia this year apparently. Can charge at up to 1000 kW, meaning you could add 400km of range in only 5 minutes. The electric motors in it…

More views of the new BYD Tang-L. Not sure if it’ll be called that when released here. The motors are also the most powerful electric motors in the world for vehicles, they’ll spin at up to 30,000 rpm. It will also ship…

What applies to fashion also applies to cars. The distinction between status and functionality. The idea that you can either have a practical car or a stylish car is rubbish. The Ferrari here is clearly the higher…

98% of the vehicles on this ship are petrols and diesels.

BYD and Tesla both doing this, releasing cheaper variants of existing models. You’re not losing much, a lot of it is more premium features gone that aren’t really necessary anyway. $23,500 for a large sedan! Game on.

When I think about climate change, I think about Venus. Venus was once covered in oceans and rivers of fresh water, about the temperature of a lovely Spring day here on Earth. It then experienced runaway climate change,…

How it feels when you park your EV in the Coles car park in Lithgow.

It’s worth letting this graphic sink in, to let basic science and engineering inform car choice, rather than the pissing contest of branding. How much the fabled range of petrol and diesel cars is bought at the cost of…

BYD is an engineering powerhouse, they can generate new cars seemingly out of thin air. The Denza B5 is a plug-in hybrid rival to the Toyota Prado. Early drives suggest it’ll eat the Prado for breakfast, a brutally good…

The Tesla Model 3 and Model Y are the least stolen vehicles in America. That’s delberate design at work again, they’re extremely difficult cars to steal. Every movement of a potential thief is captured automatically by…

Another view of the BYD Tang-L, which should arrive in Australia this year, sold probably as the Sea Lion 8. This is the one where the full-electric version has over 1000 horsepower, does 0-100 in 3.9 seconds, and can…

"...the new Model Y, which was – BY A LONG WAY – Australia’s best-selling EV in May 2025." I don't post this to say I told you so, but to plead with people to stop confusing social media with society. Those eating a…

I know it upsets some, to dismiss trans, or even discuss it. Because like every other public issue today, there has been no discussion. People just joined a team, mostly driven through social media. They support one or…

Fossil fuel rebates for vehicles cost taxpayers more than $10 billion per year. They're the third largest growth item in the federal budget, after aged care and the NDIS. For comparison, anti-EV folk often say EVs are…

Yesterday Lithgow was the coldest place in the entire country, in the morning. Today is even colder. The house is toasty warm, in every room, and has been all night. I heated up its thermal mass yesterday with free…

Sigenergy has become the number one home battery in Australia. Fantastic technology. Personally I don’t think quite as good as the Tesla battery, particularly with Tesla’s software control and analytics, but either are…

Ah Queensland. "If we don't do it somebody else will" is an excuse to never shut down anything. Child slavery and prostitution, drug trafficking. Etc. "The Premier also said his government would fast-track approvals for…

Going back to the distinction between tailored and designer clothes. This is current F1 drivers. All of them, to a man, are badly dressed. All of them to a man are *expensively* dressed, in ‘designer’ clothes. None of…

When the wankpanzerati discover the power of electric motors, but don’t quite get that’s what’s going on. That sweet reference to a ‘gearbox’. Gears are so 19th century.

Imagine if we powered our vehicles with Australian-made energy. Those that do won't be impacted.

A Model 3 for the price of a Toyota Corolla is unbeatable value, the Model 3 is one of the best cars in the world. I've driven lots of different cars, but the Model 3 is like another level of motoring. Mine drove me…

Also why secondhand Teslas in particular are an absolute steal. Better than any new ICE car you could buy, at a fraction of the cost. ICEs not only stop working over time and need continuous maintenance, they become…

Used EVs are the hot buy in America now, people have figured out they’re an absolute bargain. The same here in Oz, you’re getting a luxury supercar for the price of a Toyota Corolla. Just one more of the empty…

I often call petrol and diesel vehicles rubbish technology. To clarify, I mean that in a very precise, engineering sense, it’s not just a casual insult. Here’s one of the specific ways they are. The energy produced by…

Tesla is now moving to a model where you don’t even need to go to a dealership to pick up your new car. The car will drive itself to your home. My car drives me to and from work most of the way now. Of course I…

Tesla is one of those rare examples of the design of something breaking through the imitative behaviour of humans. The Model Y became the biggest selling car in the world at a time EVs weren't even close to being a…

Japanese car manufacturers have been playing tricks, running lots of stories about how EVs aren’t the future. They’ve been trying to buy time while they rush behind the scenes to catch up with the Chinese and Tesla, on…

Rory entertainingly asking us to imagine if EVs were the dominant car, and then somebody invented petrols and diesels. This is the point, EVs aren’t just coming to reduce pollution, they’re coming because they’re VASTLY…

I posted about casuistry a while ago, to me one of the most important and forgotten human inventions. The idea of case-based reasoning. This outrageous injustice to Oscar Piastri is a great example of why it’s needed.…

We could trade our 4-year old Toyota Kluger for a new Model Y Tesla, and the financing of the balance of the trade-in would cost the same as what it costs us to put fuel in the Kluger every week. What we’d save in fuel…

NSW has a rule that potential EV buyers need to know, if they have kids of driving age. It prohibits P-platers driving cars with power-to-weight ratios that are above a certain number. This immediately makes most…

Being determined to keep paying Saudi Arabia and Texas a big chunk of your weekly pay for fuel instead of plugging your car into free Australian wind and sunshine is a special kind of stupid. Nearly $30,000 saved in 5…

Sharing my own data. This is what it cost to charge the EV in June. An average of $5.50 per week. That’s 2-3 return trips to Bathurst every week, 1-2 return trips to Sydney a month and everyday driving around Lithgow.…

A RAM parked next to me today. The size of a tank. I saw the label on the side and remembered when a high litre number meant something interesting or even exciting. Now it seems embarrassing. For comparison, my Tesla…

I’m too old for false modesty. I’m extremely good at music, which might surprise some who see me post so often about music today. Music is one of my gifts, as we all have gifts, it comes as easily to me as breathing.…

Just look at the beautiful engineering of electric motors. Simple, super efficient, incredibly powerful. And how they’re getting even smaller and more powerful over time. Michael Faraday invented them in 1821, they’re…

For those with range anxiety. Brisbane to Bathurst and return, Tesla Model Y.

The range EVs already have now, with current batteries, is equal to or greater than the range of the cars most of us grew up with. The things we forget. What’s even more interesting is that the range of combustion…

I like to share the everyday experiences of owning an electric car, because for most all they hear is the battle cries of various competing pro-and-anti EV teams. For example, in my drive from Lithgow to Bathurst every…

EVs reduce exhaust emissions to zero in cities and towns. And they also reduce the amount of brake dust by up to 83%. EVs use regenerative braking rather than brakes a lot of the time, meaning the electric motor spins…

BYD offers full self-driving for free on its cars. Have a look at how it does. All fully autonomous driving is technically supervised, just like a pilot supervises an auto-pilot. This stuff is already scarily good, you…

I think it’s important to close the loop on social media hysterias, because in the middle of them no thought is going on at all. And then afterwards nobody takes stock of what a delusional and hysterical situation it…

Nearly all car reviews are produced by people with a very limited understanding of the engineering design that goes into the making of anything. Ben Vallack’s review of the first Model Y is a great example of somebody…

Another interesting piece from a couple of years ago about the engineering innovation in both Tesla vehicles and also in their manufacturing of vehicles more generally, where they’ve innovated hugely. I’m not a Tesla…

This child behaviour, fighting over toys, really is the root of all human thought and behaviour. Neither really wants the toy, it’s a sideshow. Each wants it because the other wants it. It’s desired purely because…

My plumber commented the other day that he loved our bathroom ‘because it isn’t all just greys and whites’. This isn’t our bathroom, but I like the use of colour here. The minimalist greys and whites in home design are…

You can only ask your friends and loved ones to avoid infections. There are a million life-saving reasons to avoid all infections. Yes you’ll survive a lot of them, at first. But you don’t go around crashing your car…

Meanwhile in the loony bin of social media society, people spend every day genuinely believing that things like electric cars and renewable energy are some sort of lifestyle choice. Playing team sports with the…

They wanted a car to drive on the moon, so what did they send? An EV. Nearly 60 years ago. Time for many to catch up.

MG's IM5 and IM6 are causing a sensation, and rightly. Gobsmacking EVs, have a read, and includes 4-wheel steering and air suspension, something only found normally in extreme luxury cars. Huge range too, and…

The longer EV batteries are out there in the market, the more they realise how near-indestructible they are. I fact new research shows that driving them hard (as KIA’s engineers did here) actually improves their life.

Couple of guys let their Tesla drive them to lunch, while the car uses AI to at the same time translate their conversation with each other alternately between English and Hebrew. Or you could buy a car that just makes…

The EV not only measures how much energy is used on a trip, if you’ve driven the road before it has a memory of your last trip there. Every little peak and slope on this graph corresponds with a different part of the…

A Tesla Model Y, at Uluru. Range anxiety is a mental health condition.

The Zeekr 7X has arrived. And the price is wow.…

Thanks to David for this. I’ve highlighted the critical sentence. This isn’t just a cheap shot, this is exactly the cultural shift we’re living. Because societies are social, and use social models, the fact ours is…

An Australian showing just how long you can own an EV. His Tesla now has over 800,000km on the clock, he drives over 100,000km per year, using the car as part of a luxury limousine service business. Says the car still…

And again, petrol excise doesn’t fund roads. Petrol and diesel cars have been polluting for free for over a century, that’s the mother of all ‘free rides’. Ditch diesel fuel tax rebate and make billions more than this…

Humans driving cars isn’t going well.

This is the much bigger picture of autonomous driving technology. Humans are incredibly vain and think they’re all wonderful drivers. Driving skill is only one component of road safety, you can be the best pilot in the…

One more of the fact-free urban myths that do the rounds of the internet is that EVs are heavier and therefore damage roads more. Here are the top 3 petrol/diesel vehicles in Australia, and the top 3 EVs.

The reason Tesla succeeded (until now) even though Musk is such a dickhead, is that he allows his designers and engineers free rein to surprise people. Every over-the-air software update can contain the most unexpected…

The ‘split seconds of inattention’ that are given as the cause of the majority of accidents here are the greatest reason to adopt semi-autonomous driving technology. That technology is paying attention every second…

I’ve been posting about this car for a few months now, it’s one of the great EVs. Now available for order in Australia. They took over 1000 pre-orders in the first week. Boom. The top performance model even has air…

All of those 'stories' sponsored by car and fuel companies, about how EV sales are in decline. Yeh, nah. The latest fear campaign is the 'EV Tax'. If that worries you, wait until you see what your favourite combustion…

Sodium-ion batteries have arrived. Even now less than half the costs of lithium batteries, and much longer lifespans. An EV battery using sodium chemistry would run for well over 5 million km (yes MILLION), and still…

Another example of social change. Remember the huge to-do about reducing urban speed limits to 50? Now barely rates a mention. If you drive through these areas now at 50, you can directly feel that 60 was much too fast,…

Just half the line for diesel at Wilcannia. People chuckle because it takes 10 minutes to charge an EV. Hitching the van to a wankpanzer to see the country is the new hula hoop. Also for remote trips, a diesel generator…

Tesla just launched their new 6-seater Model Y in China, a longer version of the current Model Y. All 4 back seats fold flat with the press of a button like the existing Model Y, creating a cavernous 2500L boot space.…

Mazda is in big trouble. Many, many Australians drive Mazdas. Many, many Australians have no idea about the impact new vehicle emissions standards will have on traditional carmakers that don’t make EVs. Most Japanese,…

Fossil fuel companies have their fingers in every pie. Jim Chalmers is gung-ho to tax EV drivers now, parroting slogans from the same industry. The reason I talk so much about renewable energy and EVs goes well beyond…

It’s rumoured Tesla supervised full-self-driving will be released in Australia tomorrow. I will always feel more comfortable sharing the roads with that technology than I will sharing it with the humans I see out there…

Always check the data. The reasons semi-autonomous ‘autopilot’ driving will save many lives is that greater than 90% of crashes on roads are due to human error. This isn’t about driving skill, it’s about unavoidable…

Subsidised home batteries have been a thing for 8 weeks now. Installations are averaging 5000 per *week*. Let that sink in. It’s the equivalent of adding a new Mt Piper power station to the grid every FORTNIGHT. This…

Latest Tesla data on vehicle crashes, using autopilot versus human-only driving. You're 10 times safer, using the autopilot.

One of the first reviews of Tesla Full Self-Driving in Australia. And it’s brilliant. Many have doubted this sort of technology would ever work. Here it is, working. Remember also it’s ‘supervised’ FSD, meaning a driver…

Just had one of these in front of me on the road. Had three bumper stickers, the first said ‘Pornhub casting car’. The second ‘real women don’t have dicks’, and the third ‘real men fish, fuck and drive Fords’. Our…

Gav from NZ does wonderful reviews. Got to test the Tesla full-self-driving. Loved it.

Have a watch of a long road trip through Sydney at night, with a full-self-driving Tesla. Some of the busiest streets in Sydney, including across the Harbour Bridge, in the dark. Hypnotic to watch, and interestingly the…

Wonderful vid of FSD through some of Sydney’s most iconic and busiest streeets at night. Hypnotic to watch. The two ‘errors’ mentioned seem overblown, one in fact may not have been, and more the driver taking back…

Another way to think about autonomous driving technology. How good are you at paying attention? A Tesla for example monitors every other vehicle on the road, and pedestrians, bike riders, animals etc. 36 times every…

The Australian magistrate at the forefront of addressing ‘sovereign citizen’ type arguments in Australia made the interesting observation that many come into the movement after some kind of traffic offence. I post a lot…

Does your car have wasp mode? ;)

If you want to see how humans work, watch any sporting event. People don’t just go to watch the sport. They go to support their favourites. That support creates teams in the stands as well. Being a member of a team like…

If you can convince your GP to give you a supply of metformin to use when you or your family catch Covid, it may save you years of chronic illness. Good luck with it, most GPs I know spend more time selecting their next…

A wonderful example of how autonomous driving is much smarter than humans. The reviewer here happy with the way the car overtakes on the freeway, but says he would have done the move earlier and merged back earlier. But…

Driving at the speed limit is best of all. Speed limits are important for safety, but even more important because they space-out the traffic, creating smooth traffic flow. But few follow them. Humans are hopeless…

John Howard popularised the ‘assimilationist’ view of immigration. The one that constantly bangs the drum about how migrants have to ‘integrate’ with ‘our way of life’. The problem with this view is, who is ‘our’? For…

Does Tesla Mobile Service still exist in Australia? From feedback I’ve seen on various online forums, it appears to have been quietly removed as an option? All the service options in the app direct people to one of the…

Microplastics are a big issue now. The two greatest sources of them are washing your clothes, and car tyres. You can buy filters for your washing machine output now that stop the microfibres entering the sewer system…

Something you won’t ever see an autonomous driving car do.

China is saving the world. Meanwhile here in the West we just produce new identities every day. We join teams and battle other teams for status, which in turn gives us identity. Everyone has a list of ‘causes’ in the…

Car makers know what this data shows. Anybody who's done year 8 maths should. The average broom broom social media person on the other hand, well...

The industry knows it. Electric cars: - are much more powerful - are non-polluting - are silent - run for years without servicing - are dramatically cheaper to run, and - can be fuelled with free energy, made locally.…

America’s decay isn’t caused by ‘authoritarians’ taking over the country. It’s caused by its cultural obsession, its hatred of public regulation and policing. That’s the theme of every Western movie, right there in…

People know I’ve campaigned against DST for years. But this is a world where knowledge has no currency. Only what’s popular survives, no matter how stupid it is. We live with lethal viruses, we do nothing as the planet…

If you’re sceptical status runs all human life, the road should be a great teacher. For example, why is it so overwhelmingly popular to overtake other vehicles, even those doing the speed limit? And why do people being…

AI can now pass the very hardest chartered financial analyst exams in a matter of minutes, including essay writing. Meanwhile an Australian company uses AI to take on online spammers and grifters, by creating thousands…

The easiest social media posts to critique are the obvious hate speech type things, or scammers, or people being generally abusive. But this type of friendly innocuous post is actually the most dangerous symptom of all…

This week Trump, and one of his clown car monkey idiots, Defense Secretary Hesgeth (ex Fox News), gathered all of the top brass of the US Defense forces in a single room. What followed was hilarious and horrific. Trump…

Had a quick drive in and out of Sydney yesterday, and observed driver behaviour as I always do. What I found. About 30% of drivers were consistently below or well below the speed limit. About 40% of drivers were…

So we had our little social media performative hissy fit with Swastikas and Nazi memes, about Tesla. Where people joined teams and cheered on the memes, and the mob riots and burnings. Fast forward a few months, and all…

If you have the terrible mental illness, EV range anxiety, check out the new Tesla Model 3 Long Range.

We think brands like Toyota, Ford, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan etc. are the dominant car sellers in Australia. As an indication of just how out of whack our feelings are with reality, CarSauce went through the car sales…

A Formula E car. All-electric. These cars only carry relatively small batteries, much smaller than modern EV road cars, less than 40 kWh. It's still enough to do nearly 100 km, at very high speeds. They flog an F1 car…

Can see here why Tesla and other EV brands prioritise minimising aerodynamic drag in their vehicles. From 90 km/h wind resistance (yellow line) takes off and dominates forces acting against the car.

It's exciting to be there at the start, to feel the ground shake. But also worth remembering combustion race cars rev the crap out of their engines at the start because otherwise their combustion engines have zero…

What I like about Tesla vehicles is that they reclaim motoring from kidult car enthusiasts, often adults whose identity as teens focused heavily around their cars. The need for EVs to focus on efficiency, to preserve…

Finn, electrical engineer and one of the reasons solar in Australia is world-leading, sounding a bit like me today. Frustrated that a revolution is being stalled by kidults. Using Tesla as an example, people opting out…

Car racing needs something like the penalty try in rugby. Murray here for example had his race ruined, and while Golding copped a penalty, there was no justice for Murray. Officials should be able to restore a position…

The government needs to grow a pair and ban new petrol and diesel vehicles here inside 5 years. We have no local car industry to protect. Leaving it to the 'market' just means leaving it to whatever idiotic thing is…

Pathetic, as pathetic as our attempt to use the 'market' to create affordable homes. The market doesn't exist, it's code for 'letting everybody do whatever they like'. And what does that produce? People copying each…

In the UK, the extreme levels of sacrifice the community had to make for WW2 lasted *15 years*. Rationing didn’t stop until 1954. That’s adult life, identifying a critical threat and acting accordingly, including making…

If you listen to car enthusiasts (people who think a good car is one that makes broom broom noises), the current shift to electric cars is destroying the soul of cars. But you can see how full of shit they are if you…

China is far and away the most popular supplier of cars to Australia. Fleet sales make the usual top 10s profoundly misleading. And it’s still growing so fast. In 2026 *11* new brands launch in Australia. China is not…

Humans are such great drivers. There will come a day people will be astonished we ever allowed individuals to have such leeway over tonnes of metal travelling at high speed while sharing roads with millions of others.

Putting to one side all of the pollution and energy arguments for petrol and diesel vehicles vs EVs, I can promise if you go electric, the majority will never go back simply because driving a combustion engine is a SHIT…

The power of semi-autonomous driving. This footage from a guy letting his Tesla drive for him just outside Dubbo in the middle of the night, pitch black. Suddenly the car slowed and he didn’t know why at first. You’ll…

This appears not to have worked. The No Kings (and Black Lives Matter, and MeToo etc.) symbolic feels haven’t either. What sort of person ‘protests’ ineffectually against adult life? A teenager. This is still the…

My car drove me to work today. The entire way, country highway, overtaking slower vehicles, roundabouts, traffic lights (negotiates amber beautifully), city traffic etc. Absolutely flawlessly, I didn't need to do a…

94% of car accidents are caused by human error. Humans are not good drivers, and if asked what good driving is, will usually describe some variation of car racing, like fast cornering, braking etc. Good driving is…

Self-driving saw the pedestrian before the driver did.

Anti-renewables people dishonestly blame higher electricity prices on renewables. The real cause is the use of gas to generate electricity, with the failure of coal-fired plants. Gas is hugely expensive. As batteries…

400,000 km and still going strong, including the battery. You can drive an EV for years and years without any maintenance. Nathan had some things done on suspension, air conditioning compressor and the motor housing…

Literally the only argument fossil fools have left is "it doesn't make broom broom noises". Which tells you the level of thought going on. Like toddlers in a sandpit. Their cars are slow, cost a fortune to run, are loud…

Isn’t it funny that all of the improvement in cars in the last 50 years, towards them being quieter both inside and out, less polluting, and more efficient converge upon the ultimate solution to all of those things.…

Close up of springs in an anglepoise lamp. More generally called balanced-arm lamps. I’ve posted about these before, and how the human body operates via a similar principle, though using a different mechanism. These…

I'm sure thousands of Australians avoided Tesla home batteries as part of the current rollout, because 'Elon'. Many if not most have flocked to Sigenergy instead, now 'Australia's favourite battery'. A good example of…

A used Tesla is hands down the best value car you can buy. You're getting astonishing value for money.

One of the big criticisms of owning an EV is that it’s much faster to refuel a petrol or diesel car. There is actual data on this, average time to refuel at a bowser has been studied not least by service station owners,…

It doesn’t matter if your car has a range of 1000km unless you’re going to drive 1000km without stopping. Which nobody does.

This young woman posted online that she’d achieved her PhD in biology. The bros in the manosphere weren’t happy. Probably wankpanzer drivers.

Nathan’s Tesla has done 404,000 km. The only maintenance he’s needed is some work on the air conditioner, and on the suspension at 345,000 km. He’s paid not one cent for fuel, or on regular servicing. Fuel savings alone…

Still one of the prime kidult things, an entire street full of cars with parents picking up children from school, all with the windows wound up on a beautiful day, with their engines running for the air-conditioning…

And given that virtually nothing ever goes wrong with the motors, you're looking at a car you could theoretically own your entire adult life. And it'll have the performance of a supercar that entire life, and will cost…

We’ve arrived at the green part of the curve. It gets very fast from here, the hangers-on to the old status quo will be run over in the rush. How change always works. Many still opting for hybrids. My advice? Don’t do…

European and Japanese car makers who spend a lot of time sponsoring anti-EV propaganda here in the West made most of their money selling their vehicles to China. China no longer wants their vehicles, it has EVs. These…

Many EVs use two electric motors as well, so have double the power of a V8 combustion shitbox, the gold standard of ‘grunt’ cars. The electric motor is also about the size of a large glovebox, and gives you all of that…

Peter, Facebook is misbehaving on the other thread. Here's a summary I put together of sub-$50K EVs in Australia (new), plus I added a secondhand Tesla Model 3 (CPO - certified pre-owned i.e. comes with Tesla warranty).

Norway leads the world with EV adoption, nearly all of its vehicles are now EVs. it took only about 20 years to swap them all over. The government there led the change. All real change is led, the idea there's something…

From next week social media platforms are expected to take effective measures to ensure people under the age of 16 can’t have accounts. A great idea, it should be extended to all age groups to rescue our societies from…

F1 was disgraceful this year, the formula is designed to do everything except race. The Brit darling won, but as Dave Hughes describes here the obstacles his own team threw in his team mate Piastri’s way defy belief.…

Car brands are a fascinating study if you want to see how human societies are really just status games. Only five global companies own most of the brands of vehicle that people buy. It’s like laundry detergent, where…

You can watch the entrenched interests of the status quo, in this case American car manufacturers, implode in real time as their industry gets destroyed in front of them. The Europeans are reportedly going to weaken…

The notable thing for me in this story is that the car was serviced 100 times to meet the milestone. The Teslas I’ve shared here before with hundreds of thousands of kilometres on the clock received either one service…

The bizarre thing is that ‘sports’ cars are built to drive on public roads. The people who buy them will drive in anti-social ways, why spend the money otherwise? We need to reframe what ‘good driving’ means, away from…

I decided to catch up on Doctor Who by watching the last series. With the exception of maybe 1-2 episodes, it was appalling. But popular with some of the social media crowd, for whom it was mostly written. The show has…

Because they don’t need to make room for a whole range of mechanical things, smaller EVs actually have more room inside than much larger petrol or diesel cars. I noticed this with the Tesla Model 3, which doesn’t look…

It's so hard to talk about anything today without people defaulting to their team in whatever fake 'debate' has been set up around it. Like discussing Tesla things, it fires up the anti-Elons and the anti-EVs and…

Here’s a fascinating fact for local car lovers.

Let me plug again why you should have air purifiers at home. My favourite - the IKEA Starkvind. Unbeatable on cost, less than $200 for the freestanding model or $250 for the version that also acts as a brilliant coffee…

More than 100 years ago humans already realised what was much better about electric cars. I’ve highlighted some of the main reasons then, which are the same now. So what happened, why didn’t this recognition in 1912…

My boy thoughtfully drove all the way to Bathurst yesterday to get us Vietnamese pork rolls for lunch. I enjoyed watching the car top itself up with free sunshine when he got home. Total fuel cost for the 130km trip?…

The new BMW IX3 electric is part of BMW's 'Neue Klasse' vehicles i.e. they're getting very serious about electric. Seems to be a superb vehicle in every way, great range, handling, efficiency. The stumbling block for me…

Such a fabulous story, thanks @[1792688510:2048:Trevor]. Pollution was a big incentive to shift to motorised vehicles. Fast forward to today and the amount of pollution from modern petrols and diesels is WAY bigger than…

Gas cooking really is seriously bad for your heath. Burning a naked gas flame in the house is like backing your car into the living room and breathing in the exhaust. The gas industry is desperately trying to hold on,…

The drama around blue-green algae and recreational dam use. What’s less known is that it’s the greatest killer in the history of planet Earth. It’s not really an algae, it’s a bacteria, cyanobacteria. And it’s the…

Neighbourhood Watch runs in several countries. The idea being the community more engaged in assisting in the prevention and reporting of crime. So here’s my idea. We need something similar for roads. For example,…

Another of the fear-mongering slogans about EVs is that you have to replace their batteries, and it costs a fortune. Tesla has the data on this. After over 320,000 km of driving, the batteries are still at 90% of their…

Two days after this happened, I was driving to work in Bathurst along the same stretch of road, and a ute towing two dirt bikes overtook me doing at least 20 km/h over the speed limit.

The most popular EV in Australia, Tesla’s Model 3. Can be bought for less than the price of Australia’s favourite car, the Toyota Hilux. But that’s just the sale price: - fuel costs for the EV can be close to zero -…

Chinese EV makers are in an all-out brawl to offer cheaper EVs. Woe is us :) Some of them may go belly-up this year if they can't find international markets, so the discounting will be on in earnest.…

Another legacy carmaker backing hydrogen not because it’s better, but because it means them not having to retool their factories as much. Green hydrogen costs a fortune to make, and wastes astronomical amounts of…

“…even if using the most expensive charging options — and completely avoiding charging at home — driving an EV will save the average person about 70 per cent on fuel.” Fuel is one of the greatest cost of living…

Living things don’t generally use engines. They don’t build a structure, then look for something to move that structure along. They turn the structure itself into the engine, transforming forces like gravity into…

"The Tesla Model 3 is the top-selling sedan in the country...easily outselling the once-dominant Toyota Camry that is tens of thousands of dollars cheaper." This whole article shows the main reason for the delay with…

BYD is planning to release a plug-in hybrid SUV in Australia as early as this year. It will be about the size and price of a RAV4, but have an electric-only range of up to 150km. So people can drive it as a pure-EV for…

If I was in the market for a car right now, this is is what I’d probably buy. The BYD Seal, EV. Designed by ex-Audi engineers, has superb build quality, and the performance version does 0-100 in 3.6 seconds. It has a…

When you look at adult life, socially little changes from your days at school. Take the fake debates over EVs, as an example. Grease put to music that cars have always been a key rallying point for particular social…

"There’s actually something called “the EV smile” — what people get after or while testing out an electric vehicle. I’ve seen it time after time now, and I’ve had it time after time."

This got the anti-EV mental midgets excited yesterday. Some electric cars having to queue for hours for a charge in Chicago in frigid conditions. Some had to be towed away because they ran out of charge. So, the…

As a Part 2 to the Chicago anti-EV piffle circulated by the mind midgets at SKY News Australia, the irony is the same city has seen the same propaganda before. In 2011 hundreds of petrol cars were abandoned because the…

This stuff is dishonest. Firstly it uses the most expensive electricity in the country, in fast-chargers, up to 70c/kWh. That's more than twice what many pay at home for electricity, and more than 10 times what you pay…

EVs are already changing the culture of Australian towns. Many towns are bypassed by big highways with big servos on them. Now those towns are adding chargers and suddenly people are visiting them again. The service…

The huge untold story of petrol and diesel vehicle range is what it costs the country, never spoken about. The range of a vehicle is a property of its energy supply network, not of the vehicle. Without that network, its…

This was the accident I saw yesterday, I only saw the vehicle on its side. It'd be some explanation to see, how this happened, on such a low-speed piece of road.

This very interesting graph compares the cost of driving 100km for petrol and EV, at different prices for electricty. Yellow is one of the EV rates of 6c/kWh now on offer from some retailers. Blue is an average grid…

We need to join the dots here. All of these illnesses that we thought were things of the past are now back, and the reason is very simple. The ‘living with the virus’ we introduced for Covid was actually a destruction…

When I posted about this a few years ago many were sceptical it would ever happen. But here it is. Humans are terrible drivers, this technology couldn’t come fast enough.

Detroit has 300,000 buildings. 70,000 of them now sit empty, because the only thing that made them function was cars. As oil prices went up, people in the suburbs could no longer afford commuting, and the suburbs died.…

I think it’s terrifying Western car makers, who don’t want to change their business models. The public is asleep at the wheel of wankpanzers.

Social media is driving this.

The federal government is putting forward 3 options for a fuel efficiency standard for Australian cars. Something every country in the world except us and Russia have had already for years. Check out Option A, one put…

While it will be great to have EV batteries that fully recharge in minutes, in many ways it's a misunderstanding. As Finn says even current batteries will add nearly 300 km of range in 15 minutes. Having to stop for 15…

There was only one EV again at the Bathurst charging station when I was there today. (Not this one, it was a Tesla Model Y.) I had a chat to the owner, who obviously loved his car. The hysteria about chargers and range…

Alan Fels was in the news this week with his report on price gouging as a key source of inflation. What wasn’t reported was what he said about electric cars.

We spend an average $70 a week on fuel. That’s for well over 600km of driving. If it was just around town driving, it’d be barely $10. It speaks volumes about how dumb public life is now that as petrol and diesel are at…

My greatest pleasure in driving is finding ways to maximise the smoothness and efficiency of the trip. Not changing gears (only cars with engines that have no grunt need gears), or any of the other boy-racer fetishes…

The storm between Bathurst and Lithgow tonight was the closest thing I’ve ever experienced to Armageddon on a road. 20km or more of cyclonic rain, lightning strikes metres from the road and overhead, maybe 100 cars…

An Australian car needs $120 of fuel to travel the same distance for which an American car only needs $100 of fuel. European cars are even better than American. This is why the new vehicle/fuel efficiency standards are…

The car at the back is a BYD Seal EV. Half the price of the boring Audi in front of it.

I love how aggressive BYD is, their plug-in hybrid ute is due this year already, in Australia. BYD knows most of the anti-EV stuff comes from legacy car companies shitting themselves because they can’t shift their…

Australia has a love affair with trades. But almost complete indifference to sophisticated engineering. Like this artificial heart, made of titanium, with the only moving part a single spinning disc suspended in a…

Another astonishing breakthrough by materials scientists. (Disclaimer: my original training was as a materials scientist ;)) Battery development is on steroids right now, put the engineers to work and watch them go.…

Want to see how our clown car approach to Covid has now fucked over all public health? Florida is having a measles outbreak. It's allowing parents to decide whether to send kids to school with measles. If that doesn't…

Many of these new food delivery business models are rank piracy. Often they set up webpages for local restaurants without even telling the owners, and then customers order through these websites, with the food delivery…

BYD, again. Existing car makers will be extremely nervous, as EVs now begin to be cheaper than petrols or diesels, to buy. They're enormously cheaper already, to run.

In the UK, some energy companies are now offering EV drivers completely free charging. All they need to do to qualify is allow their cars to be used for vehicle-to-the-grid (V2G) use, i.e. plug it in at home and the…

Meanwhile, BYD invades Europe. A guy told me EVs are a fad earlier this week. I suggested he invest his life savings in petrol and diesel vehicles. That way he will eventually not be able to afford to be on the…

The stories about slowing EV sales are actually the big existing carmakers like Ford and GM struggling to make them. And the sales of all cars have slowed, due to the economic cost of living problems. In reality sales…

If you go to a car race, you’ll notice the cars rev like crazy at the start. Internal combustion engines have no power unless you rev the crap out of them. What sounds like glorious grunt is actually a compensation for…

One of the cool things about EVs is that on really hot or cold days, you can turn on the car's cooling and heating remotely so that when you get to the car, it's already at a comfortable temperature. No need to run any…

Rubbish technology, which kills you to boot. 11,000 people in New South Wales die every year from vehicle exhaust pollution. Many of the rest get diseases like Alzheimers. And people not only defend it, they love it.…

Prices on EVs are still tumbling. This is the long-range Tesla Model 3, over 600 km on a charge. Dual electric motors, one per axle, so accelerates like a rocket ship too. Nearly $10,000 off now on this model.

From the late-1970s, a political movement created what we today call 'the economy'. To replace what we previously called society. Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were the big drivers of the shift. Thatcher said 'there…

Current car sales figures. EV sales are up over 70% since 2023. The ICE sales here are the filling of back-orders, delays still from the pandemic. ICE sales are flat. Tesla had no backlog, its percentages are all new…

Toyota finally releases its first full-EV. And it’s OK, designed to ease people into the transition rather than be anything revolutionary. Subaru has just done the same with its Solterra, which uses the same platform so…

Say your car is under warranty, and it brings up a message saying ‘problem with brakes, please see your dealer’. So you take it to the dealer, who finds no problems with the brakes. And charges you for checking. That…

Australians need to decide just how gullible they are. The car companies opposing this change have been selling vehicles overseas to meet the same and even higher standards, for years. In every other country in the…

BYD is a force of nature right now. It plans to release 4 (4!) new models in Australia in 2024. It already has 3 so that’ll be 7 in all. The next will be the Seal-U, a mid-range SUV to challenge the Toyota RAV-4 hybrid.…

Guess how much Sydney motorists will pay in tolls between now and 2060? $195 BILLION dollars 🤔 Governments should just build public infrastructure, like they used to.

Why people really need to ignore social media as a window into reality. EV sales are booming, and where? In the outer, poorer suburbs. They’re saving people a FORTUNE. To quote from the article: “I can do my entire work…

Like I say, watch BYD. They're here to crush petrol and diesel car companies. And not before time. EVs are already astronomically cheaper to run, BYD is making them cheaper to buy too. Game over. And look at what…

BYD also cater for the top-end of the motoring market. Like their U8, in the Toyota Landcruiser class. Except it's bigger than a Landcruiser (over 5m long), and can do 0-100 in 3 seconds. It can also 'tank turn' (turn…

He also has a tin of striped paint and a left-handed screwdriver for sale.

People forget that it took 25 years for service stations to appear, when petrol and diesel cars were introduced. EVs launched with already hundreds of km of range, and people pretend that's a big issue. Given that an EV…

Really good review of the BYD Seal here. Conclusion? BYD is offering us cars as good as luxury European marques, for the price of a Toyota. $80,000 cheaper. The ICE car industry is dead in the water.

More views of the BYD mid-size SUV, the Seal-U. Will be available as both a full-EV, and plug-in hybrid. BYD are beautifully designed and engineered cars, at astonishing prices.

If you leave things to the market, the market happily turns your country into nothing more than a quarry for the rest of the world. Which is currently what we are. No leadership, for decades. Tony Abbott gleefully shut…

Drove through Leura today. Had to dig out an older photo, to remember what it looked like before. Now it’s completely overrun by tourists. Almost mind-boggling numbers of cars and people, the streets 3 or 4 deep around…

BYD have phenomenal engineering and design resources. Now they’ve released a supercar too. 0-100 in 2.36 seconds. I mention BYD a lot because they’re now the really big disruptor with EVs, they can get them to scale…

Review from a couple who bought a Tesla Model Y. I saw petrol at $2.50 a litre over the weekend. Anybody who pays that and is still anti-EV? People need therapy.

Chinese EV makers and Tesla are crushing traditional car makers. Honda and Nissan, arch enemies, working together now on EV development. Japanese car makers have been ridiculously and surprisingly slow to move on EVs.…

In Asia they use strong government to drive investment and innovation. More than a decade ago they identified electric cars as the way of the future, and began developing EV batteries. They now pretty much own that…

Some BYD cars are already cheaper than their petrol/diesel equivalents. And this trend is really accelerating, by 2027 EVs should regularly be cheaper than ICEs. It's absolutely beyond me why somebody would now buy a…

Like anything from Rupert, as factual as saying the moon is made of cheese. Our EVs cut our cost of car ownership almost in half, and they’re only hybrids. Paying virtually nothing for fuel and maintenance with an EV,…

I do understand the drivers of petrol cars like the sound of them. If gutless cars farting is your thing, that’s a fetish that’s legal. But diesels? They sound like tractors, no redeeming features at all. 

Rod decided to do his own road repairs, because his Ferrari kept bottoming-out (we all feel for him). Part of a trend that’s obvious everywhere. No money for councils to fix roads, the public and their 5-car families…

I remember when self-driving was considered a fantasy. Now any car with ‘adaptive cruise control’ (they call it that for legal reasons I think, to emphasise they still want the driver to be paying attention) can do a…

From a (glowing) review of the BYD Seal from the UK. But here making the critical point that we in the West outsourced most of our manufacturing to China during the ‘free market’ delusions of the 1980s-early 2000s. And…

If your German is no good, what this diagram shows is the network of infrastructure needed to get energy into your car, for the current fuelling options. To the right of each car is the outputs (pollution). EVs at the…

And this calculation is done assuming people only have one (petrol) car in the gas and petrol home. Common sense will win this, it’s just a matter of time.

Barely 10% of Australians now smoke. That will be the future of ICE cars too.

Ben Chilfley Dam, autumn. Social media warriors blame the Council, and say ‘it’s only on the edge of the dam’. The world is cooking. And is full of dumb cookers. Never swim with blue-green algae, unless you want motor…

This is what the chassis of an EV looks like (in this case a BYD Seal). The battery forms the floor, and because it’s so low down in the car, you don’t really notice the weight. It’s weight higher up that impacts a…

I’m so bored by rock stars and music more generally. Also why I’m so critical of gig culture. The reason we have no kids doing subjects like maths or science now is that all of our role models are fucking musicians. And…

The sort of bullshit you see all over social media. Of course most mechanics ‘don’t want to touch EVs’, they don’t have a clue what to do with them. (And they rarely need fixing anyway.) Just as butchers don’t want to…

The NRMA’s new charger on the Nullarbor. The Tesla obviously arrived without going flat, no range anxiety there.

I fell asleep behind the wheel a few years ago, with the whole family in the car. (They were all asleep in the car at the time too, we’d had a very early start.) Thankfully we were only travelling slowly and ended up in…

Mobile phone maker Xiaomi has just released its first electric car, the SU7. And it’s a corker, rave reviews from motoring experts. Superbly engineered and built, Porsche Taycan-type performance. Up to 800km range.…

Lots of criticism of EVs from those who say they can't tow because it destroys their range. To take a common towing vehicle, a Toyota Landcruiser. Towing a caravan for example about DOUBLES its fuel consumption. Petrols…

Big jump in fuel prices again overnight. I see north of $2.40/litre for 95 or 98 in Bathurst. The true definition of range for any vehicle: how far can you afford to drive it? 🙂 Imagine being an Australian arguing to…

Humans like to form teams, and then to compete with other teams. The underlying principle of all of society, if you look, we learn it at school but our adult lives are this too, whether it's the cars we drive, the…

Ed is an economics journalist from the UK. If you’re interested in cars and the future of the car industry, this short piece is a must-read. Brilliantly entertaining too.

The source of all real wealth is building things. Engineering. Not the economy or its market (both fictions). Not supply and demand. Building things, at scale, to drive costs down. That’s how Henry Ford made cars…

Have posted a few times how our bodies are not pulled down by gravity. That we’re all ‘weightless’, here on the surface of the Earth. Part 2 of this story is just as interesting. The motive force for all of your body…

Baby steps, the penny has dropped everywhere except social media. The 'range' thing is still a distraction, many still not aware that you don't need a service station for most EV driving. You charge at home.

This should make people think long and hard about any resistance to EVs. Tally up the real-world experience: - over 666,000 km using the same battery - the owner only bothered getting his FIRST service at 200,000 km…

In a sign of the major shift underway in buying habits, the Tesla Model Y outsold the Toyota Hilux in Australia, in March. The Hilux has been Australia’s top-selling car since 2016. This month Tesla increased the pain…

EVs are already on-par with ICEs on price. And way, way ahead if you include fuel and maintenance costs. EV batteries, by far the most expensive part of an EV, are projected to drop in price by 50% this year. Meanwhile…

The basic engineering that explains clearly why EVs will always be a far superior performance vehicle, as well as dramatically cheaper to run and maintain. They have HUGE amounts of ‘grunt’, way more than any combustion…

We've owned a Corolla hybrid hatch for more than a year now, and it must be one of the best fun driver's cars out there. Very low centre of gravity so it hugs the ground, I've never experienced a faster car around…

Comment about a hybrid vehicle. A very common misunderstanding among the anti-EV crowd. An EV is a vehicle that uses electric motors. *Where* it gets the electricty from is irrelevant. Because electric motors are so…

A while back Elon mocked Chinese EVs. He's not laughing now. He's about to lay off 10% of his workforce. And as he says here, Chinese car makers are going to 'demolish' every other car company in the world (ICE and…

In Nevada, JB Straubel, one of the founders of Tesla, has now set up a new business to recycle lithium-ion batteries. About 95% of a Li-ion battery can be recycled, meaning for every 100 EV batteries for example they…

Nissan is advertising the new X-Trail ePower heavily. It’s a ‘series’ hybrid. Meaning the petrol motor acts only as a generator for the electric motors, that drive the wheels. There are also parallel hybrids where the…

The average NSW price for E10 this morning. The 'cheap' ULP option. There's so much public anger about supposed price gouging by supermarkets (mostly a myth), while oil companies have been rogering consumers for years.…

BYD's Sea Lion is rumoured to be released in Australia this year as well. It's a mid-sized SUV, one of the most popular car segments. And glorious EV, kick those petrol prices to the kerb. Designed by ex-Audi and…

Musk is a CEO. CEOs answer to boards. CEOs who go to war with nation States are on a fast-track to redundancy. He owns 20% of Tesla stock, which makes him the majority shareholder. But it means 80% of the company is…

Like I said. The Chinese have arrived. No amount of racist porkies about 'cheap Chinese crap' will be either true or effective, at saving traditional car companies. Or even EV car companies.

The fascinating battle in play. The best selling car in the world last year? The Tesla Model Y (top picture). Yep, an EV was the best-selling car in the world. Now, the rival, BYD. The Sea Lion, bottom. Release…

Another of the hysterical fear campaigns against EVs is that they ‘have no resale value’. As the article explains, when a new technology is being rolled out the resale will be lower at first, until prices of new…

The entire family surviving a 75m fall onto rocks is some sort of testament to the strength of a Tesla. And its battery, there was no fire. A petrol or diesel car would likely have exploded.

A litre of petrol contains 8.9 kWh of energy. A standard petrol car might use 7-10 L/100km. So 62.3 - 89 kWh of energy, for every 100 km travelled. A good EV will use 14-20 kWh of energy to travel 100 km. While a petrol…

There’s enough energy in a standard tank of petrol to power an EV from Sydney to Perth, and back again. The petrol car is so inefficient that it won’t even get out of NSW on the outwards-trip, on one tank. Some chuckle…

Damn these too-quiet cars! lol…

Delighted to see the BYD Seal already making inroads into Bathurst. A beautiful car with kickass grunt, great range and low price tag. Some lucky person now has zero fuel bills to boot. Aren't those recessed door…

A technical guy I know recently bought a BYD Seal. A no-nonsense bloke. His review below (note he uses standard grid power to charge at home, you can get much cheaper rates again than what he's using). I got a BYD Seal…

Was slowing down for a red light next to a big semi the other day, listening to it change down through about 10 gears to come to a stop, and then up through about 10-15 to get moving again. Electric trucks are a dream…

Saw a 50-minute video demonstrating somebody's full-autonomous Tesla driving yesterday. The driver still has to supervise, but this is now like aeroplanes, or even trains. Much safer with a machine in charge. Anybody…

Thanks to @[1257795447:2048:Christine] for the heads-up. BYD launch its hybrid ute tomorrow. 100 km full-electric range, up to 1000 km if you use the petrol and electric together for longer trips. The US now looking at…

This is the first of 2 mid-size SUVs BYD will launch in Australia next week too. Another plug-in hybrid for those with 'range anxiety'. (By the way there are much cheaper ways to be rid of range anxiety. Like reading a…

Bigger than a Hilux or Ranger. Uses much less fuel (none at all for around-town driving, where it can do full electric for up to 100 km). 1000 km on a tank of fuel for longer trips. And more powerful/faster than a…

The Tesla Roadster in matte black - tell me you wouldn’t like it in the driveway.

I know many are thinking about EVs for their next car. To share my thoughts on the relative merits of the two biggest options right now, Tesla and BYD. Other makers like Kia, Toyota, Subaru and European brands make…

One of the last refuges for anti-social bastards is driving. I have to drive a lot of kms every week, and nowhere in society do people behave more appallingly than on the roads. Few follow a speed limit. They don’t…

I almost felt sorry for the guy in the WRX this morning, as he disappeared rapidly behind me in the rearview mirror when the lights went green. It might damage him emotionally, to have this done to him by a Toyota…

Many diehard EV-sceptics are clinging to hydrogen as an alternative. It's almost as appallingly inefficient as current petrols and diesels. And it costs a fortune to produce, and is even more technically complex than…

Beyond me why people still buy straight petrol or diesel vehicles. When your beliefs cost you that much money, it's time to read a few books.…

I’m not sure Australians know that Chinese cars now outsell Korean cars from Hyundai and Korea here. BYD’s sales have jumped sixfold in just a year, for example. Meanwhile the US and Europe do what they’ve always done,…

Cars destroyed city life. Barcelona is just one city fighting back. This is what cities used to be like. Now they’re loud, the air is filthy, and vehicles dominate everything. When Bathurst launched a ‘Streets as Shared…

Japanese carmakers are making a motza with hybrids, which is why they keep spruiking them. Mostly targeting the mental illness of 'range anxiety'. Don't be fooled though, they're using the money to tool up for full-EVs.…

In China, some cities are now almost completely silent, because everybody is driving EVs. I don’t think we recognise what a profound change that is. Plus the air is beautifully clean. Here it is, up close.…

Top Gear is the home of petrolheads. One of their original hosts is now calling out the ongoing, deliberate campaign to try to undermine EVs, funded by fossil fuel and car companies and their associated media outlets.…

Review of the BYD hybrid (Sea Lion 6), just released in Australia. The reviewer was almost embarrassed that he couldn't find one thing wrong with the car. Superb engineering, amazing price. About 90 km electric-only…

Cars on a dock in China this week, ready for export. This is going to disrupt and possibly even destroy much of the Western car industry. Any damage is richly deserved.

You can get the BYD Sea Lion for $5,000-$10,000 less than the top of the range RAV4. It also has twice the power, can do nearly 100km completely electric, has a much higher interior spec, is bigger, and can do 0-100 in…

“…a social trend of “petro-masculinity” in which men flamboyantly use fossil fuels to express their opposition to social progress.” Also the more aggressive style of driving the vehicles encourage that’s mentioned here…

Thanks to @[1112555254:2048:Dan] for the tip. A BYD Seal, an absolutely superb car which insiders liken to a Mercedes in quality, costs $50K in Australia. That's almost giving it away. In the EU and soon US, the price?…

One of the dumb things about the huge popularity of SUVs and utes is how hopeless they are in terms of wind resistance. They're about as aerodynamic as a brick, and you can see the difference on windy days for example,…

China will now do what Tesla’s Board and shareholders refused to do. $84 billion is beyond a sick joke for any CEO. Tesla’s EV development has stalled while this dipshit has been off prosecuting his culture wars on…

By my count there are about 40 petrol bowsers in Lithgow. There are now 10 EV chargers. Some may think that means we need a lot more EV chargers. But most local drivers in a town won’t use fast-chargers, they’ll charge…

When petrol and diesel cars were first released, they were hugely expensive. Way beyond the reach of ordinary people. There were also no service stations, for 25 years afterwards. If social media had existed then, no…

I saw a candidate for election say this. "[Aborigines] were not an advanced civilisation and DEFINITELY would have had to have some form of colonisation by someone in the 18th century." I think many Australians probably…

Up to 70% of road accidents are caused by human error. Humans love to believe they're brilliant drivers, but no human can ever drive (or fly) as accurately or consistently as a machine. There's no need to go as far as…

I've seen car nuts spend a couple of hours washing their car. But some extra minutes refuelling is apparently the end of civilisation.

The tragedy of AF447, where an Air France jet smashed into the Atlantic, killing everybody on board, is a window into the need for proper automation in flying and driving. The jet crashed because the autopilot cut out…

Australia is in a lot of trouble with energy. We’ll run out inside the next decade, unless urgent action is taken. The previous government had 21 energy policies in 10 years. TWENTY-ONE. How many of those did it…

Great short video on the main benefit of semi-autonomous driving technology. It makes individual drivers drive in ways that benefit traffic as a whole. Excellent explanation of how even one driver can trigger jams in…

This group has lots of videos of ordinary street-legal family EVs embarrassing every muscle car thrown at them. The comments are hilarious, 'if the muscle car had a better driver/wheels, it would have won', 'yeh but the…

Secondhand petrols and diesels keep their value more because you're being ripped off when you buy the same cars new. New petrols and diesels go up in price with every model, which is what keeps secondhand values for the…

One of the arguments for privatisation is that it saves the taxpayer money by shifting responsibility to private organisations. But the taxpayer ends up paying even more, in user charges. Driving is now much more…

Australians are in love with hybrids because they want full-EVs, but are anxious about range. Most full-EVs have 400-600km of range already, and unless you're doing a long trip that's plenty for at least a couple of…

The Tesla Model Y is a brilliant mid-sized SUV. It’s also the world’s best-selling car. You can buy the base model in Australia now for less money than a Toyota RAV4 hybrid. It’s a much better car than a RAV4 hybrid.…

I share energy things because many of the public are missing out on the fantastic innovation out there, living in a fog of social media propaganda. One of the great things about Tesla is their superb software. Whether…

The big carmakers are still dominating sales (left hand side). This is what gives people an impression that traditional cars are still preferred. But their growth year-on-year is flatlining (right hand side). The huge…

From within our own region. Loved the response from the ute-driving moron in Rockley. We worship the ute-driving moron, by all buying gutless utes we don’t need that handle like tractors on the road, and guzzle fuel.…

I know that what people most want to see on FB and other social media, is what’s happening in other peoples’ lives. It’s what I refuse to post here, and thought I’d explain why. Do we think about what it means, to…

Last Thursday one of the big generating units at the Loy Yang coal power station tripped, just before 2am. This caused a frequency collapse in the national grid (red line). That's a very bad thing, it can stop…

"First, Facebook was good to you: It showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: Once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook,…

The public mostly wants to go electric. And it could, right now, except for nonsense slogans funded by ICE car and fossil fuel companies about things like ‘range’, making them anxious. So they’re going hybrid to try to…

Scientists are excited, because it appears China has reached peak fossil fuel, with electricity from renewables now becoming its dominant energy source. Massive investment in renewables and EVs in China has done what…

Come on snow. Last time it snowed, the government is now so obsessed with ‘living with’ disasters, they left the road open. It was like ice skating with cars out there.

Remember those stories about collapsing demand for EVs and yards full of unsold cars? Yeh nah. Just lies, as always. Still setting records for new sales, and this is the US, one of the least EV-friendly nations on the…

America is toast. I welcome our new Chinese overlords, and their ‘authoritarian’ free energy and cheap electric cars.

Loved this from Transurban: "...a state-owned tolling entity would add a level of bureaucracy without benefiting motorists." The same Transurban who spent $36 billion building the tollways, and is charging taxpayers…

The Model 3 is Tesla's cheapest car. They've just released a performance version that is brutal. 0-100 in 2.9 seconds. Superb handling in corners. So fast and powerful that it makes even experienced race drivers feel a…

Tesla’s Model Y, a mid-sized SUV, is the biggest selling car in the world. People love mid-sized SUVs. BYD is after them, it’s launching the SeaLion 7 in Australia this year. It’s slightly bigger than the Model Y. And…

Ford researched American driving habits, when considering their EV models. More than 50% of Americans only travelled over 200km, 4 or LESS times, every year. The 'range anxiety' debates on EVs assume everybody is a…

West Connex was promoted, as all new freeways are, as the answer to traffic congestion, in this case along Parramatta Road. It’s been fantastic for people like us, who rarely go to Sydney, a super easy (but bloody…

I mentioned this one earlier in the week. Mid-sized full electric SUV to compete with Tesla's Model Y. And of course with the hybrid RAV4. BYD doesn't muck around, they're looking to double sales every year, to overtake…

Another ex-pollie going to a plum job in the resources sector. The conflict of interest sticks out, to use a phrase of my grandfather's, like a pair of donkey's balls. Perrottet was one of the main drivers of 'living…

We’re living in the middle of a revolution. A revolution that we can’t see, because our eyes are blinded, by the Wormtongue of social media. Did you know that 100% of car sales are projected to be electric, in under a…

Some days feel like being at work. The line that is still potentially live (the street still has grid power), laying on the street, is behind two sets of signs to prevent people driving on that part of the street.…

Somebody told me once EVs only do OK because they’re ‘subsidised’. Actually wankpanzers are by far the most subsidised vehicles on the road. $250 million a year, for these multi-tonne piles of shit.

Petrolheads often use the concept of the ‘driver’s car’. They use it to suggest only they know what good driving is, and everybody else should defer to their expertise. It’s bog standard protecting of social territory.…

It’s only when people retrofit combustion cars as EVs that you see just how much complicated rubbish is normally in an engine bay. I don’t call combustion engines rubbish to be provocative. I mean it literally, from an…

"When it comes to batteries, roughly 70 per cent of the original energy produced at the source performs useful work in the vehicle. With hydrogen, that drops to between 25 per cent and 30 per cent, while internal…

My favourite headline of the day. Petrol car catches fire while parked in a spot reserved for EVs.

Ideas constantly improve things. Mostly it’s unnoticed because everyday things seem simple. Like my new dishbrush. I paid a bit more for this one, but was a bit sceptical because it didn’t look very strong. The bristles…

Tesla’s dog mode not only allows you to leave air con or heating on in the car for dogs (or older kids), for hours if needed. (An EV can run heating or cooling for days.) The Tesla app on your phone also allows you to…

If you want a sense of the reality of what’s happening in the car world, rather than the social media bubble filled with whining petrolheads, have a look at the staggering number of EV utes under development. The Nissan…

I talk about EVs so much not because of any fetish for them. But because they’re a window into our culture. Take the Chinese EVs. The true genius of China isn’t in design, they plagiarise most of that from Europeans.…

Another cultural observation. I often hear ‘cheap Chinese crap’ when there’s talk about Chinese goods. The Chinese are master manufacturers, just as the Japanese learned to be, very quickly. Or BYD, now making big…

The BYD Seal and Tesla Models 3 and Y are the leading EVs to buy right now. I’ve done an exhaustive comparison of the 3 and the Seal, competing sedans. It’s very hard to split them, both are a jaw-dropping bargain for…

BYD will have two mid-sized SUVs in Australia this year. I mention BYD because seriously, we’re living inside a revolution right now. The quality of the engineering here is premium/world class, and the price defies…

As somebody who works in governance, the greatest danger by far to human life is what is sometimes called populism. Governing only by what is popular. It sounds harmless, even democratic. Try raising your kids or…

The Chinese engineering juggernaut continues on. An updated version of the BYD Seal due this year already, with big increases in charging speeds, addition of semi-autonomous driving technology and rumoured even fancier…

BYD is hammering lazy and entitled traditional car companies. We should celebrate this.

Tesla is famous for its brilliant charging stations. BYD is partnering with Ampol to provide BYD drivers with a similar wide access to charging. I love that a revolution is being built right under peoples’ noses, while…

A very common sight at the Bathurst Tesla superchargers. No vehicles. It might look like nobody is interested in EVs. But it’s showing the reality of something I post about here. Nearly all EV charging is done at home.…

The trucks that deliver fuel to service stations in Australia every year use approximately 8 BILLION litres of diesel, just to fuel the tanker trucks. That’s before one drop goes in your tank. When vehicles shift to…

Nissan’s profits dived 99% in a single quarter. The reason? Like other Japanese makers, it’s way behind in building EVs. This is again where getting your news and view of the world from social media completely distorts…

The crazy thing is, this difference has existed for nearly 200 years. Electric motors were invented well before combustion motors. Combustion motors were considered a joke when they began. The only reason they ever…

‘Where were you when this revolution happened, mum/dad?’ ‘Um, I was on social media posting fake facts about electric cars catching fire and running out of charge.’ Soak up the revolution. Don’t look back in regret that…

Tesla’s quicksilver colour, with black alloy wheels, is easy on the eye. You can buy one of these for much less than the cost of a wankpanzer ute. And it’ll need no servicing, no fuel, and win you every green light…

Tesla do brilliant software, this is just one small analysis the Powerwall does. Showing how much money we haven’t needed to pay for electricity since installing solar + Powerwall in December 2022. On track to pay off…

In the 1970s, there were over 20,000 servos in Australia. In the year 2000, there were 8370. Now there are only 6400. It’s important to understand this. You don’t get rich running a servo. The big reduction in number of…

In China, more than 60% of EVs are already cheaper than petrol and diesel cars. Outside China governments are in bed with old car manufacturers and oil companies, who fund social media campaigns that get millions to…

The Tesla app, part of the car section. Defrost mode gives you a heated car with defrosted windscreen, turned on from the house. Bioweapon defence mode turns on HEPA filtering of outside air (good for bushfires or heavy…

Our kids have always had zero interest in alcohol. And only a passing interest in cars and driving. These are different times, which we too often see through the lens of the old. Trying to force rites of passage from a…

Important to understand this story. Firstly it doesn't mean people are buying petrols or diesels instead. Like the rest of the world, they're buying hybrids. 'Range anxiety' has them spooked, they want an EV, but are…

The best EVs currently available are in the medium car part of the market. Tesla Model 3 and Y, and the BYD Seal. You can see how EVs are smashing all opposition there. BYD mid-sized SUVs will start to add even further…

BYD have updated the Seal. Major changes to the charging (from a 400V to 800V platform, which will significantly increase charging speed), addition of new semi-autonomous driving features, and a new flash interior. And…

Housing is unaffordable because governments stopped building public housing, through ideologies of ‘the market’ doing it instead. The market will never build affordable housing, how many people have you met who don’t…

Had to do a quick run Into Sydney yesterday, and always find being on the roads gives some of the best insights into human behaviour. Like these newer adjustable speed limits. A great idea, when they monitor traffic…

Great honest assessment after nearly 100,000 km of driving a Model Y, from somebody who isn’t a Tesla fan. Notably, obviously zero fuel costs, except cheap home electricity. And not one service or repair needed, in…

The new trains look very flash and will have more functionality. But these old silvers really stood the test of time. Still extremely comfortable and quiet. I was amused to see a US city proclaiming its first ever…

We're going to see more of this, car companies also offering charging options. Tesla of course has its own superchargers. This is clever, subsidising home charging instead. Much cheaper and easier for the company. Free…

This is Jonnie Irwin. People who watch UK lifestyle shows will recognise him. Jonnie died earlier this year of lung cancer, aged 50. Had 3 very young boys. I mention it because many assume lung cancer is only about…

If oil companies were confident in the future of petrol and diesel, they'd be flooding the world with cheap fuel right now, to encourage people to buy more petrol and diesel vehicles, to obstruct the take-up of EVs. But…

You can see here that in 1916 it was only Rockefeller's cheap oil that knee-capped an obvious technology. It's taken us a century to come to our senses. It costs trillions to drill and refine and transport oil, to get…

A lot of people still don’t get this. We’re using by far our least common form of driving, long-distance trips (and towing) as the model for fuelling cars. Nearly all the driving we do is not that. EVs can already do…

When I say people never leave high school, I mean that the social models we learn there are what shape all adult life as well. At least now. And that model is the constant battle for status. Which is really the battle…

Just one of a huge numbers of ways you can slice and dice your energy use, with the Tesla battery software. You can see the clear increase in use (blue) in the winter, with heating. And the clear decline in solar…

We've only just started scratching the surface of what Chinese industry has for us. This is an absolute boon for Australians, we'll get these cars for tens of thousands less than the Europeans and Americans, whose…

It’s an excellent time to buy a used EV. Don’t be scared by big price drops for secondhand EVs, these are because the price of new EVs is plummeting too. Secondhand petrol or diesel vehicles hold their value more…

The reason Australians will be getting unbelievable bargains on Chinese cars is that they have enormous industrial capacity, but their own domestic market is full. Thus the big push on now for exports. These are…

Petrol and diesel cars were the EVs of their day. You have to force the old status quo out.

Offer people super-cheap, phenomenal quality cars, and guess what? They buy them. Western carmakers are literally asleep at the wheel.…

Public health often uses the same idea of ‘the public’ as shorthand for ‘everybody’. But societies don’t work like that. They run on social status. A tiny handful of people drive behaviours. Take alcohol as an example.…

Michael Faraday. One of the great geniuses. Invented the electric motor in 1821. American oil men stole a century from humanity, blocking this wonder while filling the world with noise and pollution.

The Bathurst 1000 will never be a river of gold for Bathurst Council because it’s not a Council event. Council owns the track, not the event. It gets a track hire fee, but not some enormous cut of the race revenue,…

Cover the fields AND the car parks. Australian fields are desperately short of shelter for stock and plants.

Plug-in hybrids (PHEVS - hybrids with bigger batteries that can do electric-only driving for most weekly drives) are hugely popular now, because of 'range anxiety'. They're great cars. But this could be a problem,…

This is ‘range anxiety’ at work, again a social media fiction. These platforms are wrecking balls through societies. The Chinese may save us (they’re smart, they don’t allow these platforms). Incidentally ‘slowing…

Australian owner of a BYD Seal gives their impressions after 10,000 km of motoring. Note the total silence of the cabin as they talk too. This car is a genuine unbelievable steal at the price you pay.

Humans are incapable of following a speed limit. If they did, traffic would flow much more smoothly. Which is why eventually more control over driving will shift to networked cars, and away from drivers.…

A good example of how social media has dumbed down the world to probably terminal levels, is imagining in my childhood if somebody had said 'we'll give you a car with much more power, that needs no maintenance, makes no…

NSW really can be the arse-end of the world. The only jurisdiction on the planet with average speed safety cameras that doesn’t use them for cars. FINALLY after a big surge in road deaths, NSW politicians have…

Watching Oscar Piastri continuing to win while the entire British media and F1 establishment (also heavily British) criticise him for not letting his Brit team mate win (miles behind). Typical Brits, can’t win it on the…

The Chinese are on track to completely smash the Western car industry, with Tesla. And that industry has nobody but itself to blame. VW also owns: Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, Ducati, Bentley, Cupra, Skoda and Seat.…

Again, enjoy the revolution happening right in front of us.…

A few times this week I sat and watched the traffic. And was amazed again at the sheer number of wankpanzers (big utes) rolling by. A perfect example of how we never leave high school. People own these vehicles for only…

Ths shows the whole new set of possibilities EVs bring to something like camping. An EV carries enough energy to run an entire house for days. So sleeping in air conditioned/heated comfort while camping is a doddle.…

Social media reviews of things aren’t always that great, a lot of opinion and not a lot of knowledge. But I like watching EV reviews from people who’ve never driven an EV before, and who are EV sceptics. This is for a…

We’re back at the evil supermarket ‘duopoly’ again. Australia doesn’t have a supermarket duopoly. Aldi and IGA for example have been other options for years. Aldi is cheaper than either of the Big 2. But people mostly…

BYD has had to commission a second 7000-car ship, to deliver its growing global expansion. It's planning for 7 more ships. What I love here is these realities carrying on despite the absolute brain-dead rubbish…

You’re 7 times more likely to die if your car is hit by a Wankpanzer, than by a sedan or smaller vehicle.

From one of the major teaching hospitals in Sydney. Of course nurses have been saying this for a long time already, and voting with their feet, leaving the profession in droves. Now the BMW X5s are leaving the car park…

I think the Tesla Model Y is probably the best car in the world. Probably why it's now the biggest selling car in the world. Nothing else can really match it for the blend of style and functionality and technology, at…

I share different EV posts for those who aren’t as familiar with them and interested in what’s out there. This is the Model Y’s interior, you get a sense both of the sort of space available, and also the premium feel of…

Ben does lovely calm, reasoned videos on EVs. He’s not an EV nut, he owns petrol cars too. But he says the same thing I did earlier this week, that the Model Y is easily the best family car in the world. (Best car full…

I often call combustion engines puny and gutless. It’s not just slander, it’s engineering. Combustion engines only provide significant power or torque at one tiny place on the rev curve, at the black arrow. At higher…

One of the long list of ridiculous reasons people give that EVs aren't the way to go is that there aren't enough public chargers. I've posted before how that's a misunderstanding, that most EV charging will happen at…

Tesla is rolling a new car out of its Shanghai factory every 30 seconds. Deliciously, these are the best quality cars Tesla produces, because of Chinese engineering. Their first cars came out of American factories, and…

You can’t miss it out on the roads now, more EVs every day. More joy for those drivers. Ditch your jalopy.

EVs are going to revolutionise off-road driving too. The problem with 4WDs right now is they need a lot of torque at low speeds. But as I post about a lot, you have to rev the guts out of a petrol or diesel to get that…

Range is the wrong measure for cars. A petrol or diesel vehicle gets long range by putting enormous amounts of energy into them, 80% of which then goes straight out the exhaust, unused, as pollution.

The BYD Shark is finally arriving. Shots fired! A ute you can use as full-electric for 100km of range i.e. double what you need for most peoples’ every day driving. And then the petrol engine will act as a generator for…

Had a look around a McLaren Artura the other day. It’s a hybrid supercar. They add the electric motor to improve the acceleration of the V6. Looks amazing of course. But it costs north of $250K. You can get similar…

First review of the BYD Shark. Reviewers astounded at what BYD have done here. Have a watch, an incredible vehicle. Other ute makers will be literally shitting themselves. How’s 0-100 in under 6 seconds sound, for a…

Have used our Kluger hybrid for 2 longer trips, Broken Hill and the Gold Coast. For a family car using a combustion engine, it’s about as good as it’s ever going to get. Beautifully engineered. The hybrid means it uses…

Electric charging stations will be modelled more on airports than service stations. Petrol and diesel fuel stations are more like the Tinder of energy supply. Wham bam, 10 minutes, out of there. Energy brothels. Here’s…

I think it’s important to hear ordinary Australians speak about their experience of buying EVs. To cut through the fog of misinformation on social media. Like this guy’s 20-second summary, who’s now owned his Tesla…

There are now a lot of people with long-term experiences to share of owning an EV. A couple more today, Teslas again though all the EVs are good. Tesla I think are the best combination of engineering, efficiency,…

This is such an important window into long-term EV ownership. 165,000km of driving. No servicing required that entire time. Battery still with 90% capacity. The car looks brand new, both inside and out, incredibly…

In Western Australia residents pay twice as much in vehicle registration to the State budget as the State collects in gas royalties every year. The international gas industry is laughing at us. Electrify everything,…

Perfect example of how EVs are much more than differently-powered cars. They carry enough usable energy to run an entire home for days. That gives you enormous potential to do all sorts of things with them.

Elon Musk’s nonsensical big product launch yesterday and this story are interesting contrasts. You can see here the phenomenal ability of Chinese industry to bring rapid changes to market. Historically car makers…

KIA and Hyundai make superb EVs. They’ve been too pricey until now. But this is really big, the EV5 wil compete with the RAV4 and Tesla Model Y. That mid-sized SUV is a huge segment, and KIA is being aggressive on…

First Australian review of the BYD equivalent of the Tesla Model Y (biggest selling car in the world). The Sealion 7. It’s the Seal, up-converted to a mid-sized SUV. And it’s brilliant. What will really make Tesla…

One interesting thing to consider when buying a car (which should be an EV of course), is insurance. Teslas for example are expensive to insure. But it’s not an EV thing, becaue BYDs cost about half as much to insure.…

They should invite BYD and Tesla to enter a team each in the V8 Supercars. Sadly it won’t happen, not least because the electrics would be half a lap ahead already on Lap 1. And for those wondering how they’d recharge…

When they’re not building incredible cars for unbelievable prices, the Chinese dance in the streets. They’re not free like us, or something.

Europe's car industry is under assault from much cheaper (and better) Chinese EVs. You can see here the often reported drop in 'demand' for EVs is actually Western governments removing subsidies for those vehicles,…

The early BYD Shark ute reviews are starting to come in. I knew it would be good. I didn't realise just how good. It's a Ford Ranger killer. (The Ranger is the current gold standard ute.) Twice the power and also bigger…

The new BYD Shark I’ve been mentioning has a 2.5-tonne towing capacity. This is a deliberate choice by BYD. It has nothing to do with ‘grunt’. The Ford Ranger and other utes for example will tow 3.5-tonnes. The BYD…

It's a great time to be Australian. The new BYD Sealion7 (their response to the Tesla Model Y, the world's biggest selling car) *starts* at nearly $90,000 in the UK. They haven't released pricing for here, but it will…

The US and Europe looking at tariffs to try to save their car industries. It won't work, and they know it. Those industries are facing extinction. They've run every scare campaign imaginable, like EVs catching fire,…

If the BYD Shark is a Ranger/Hilux/Navara/BT-50/Amarok killer, the BYD Sealion 6 is a Toyota RAV 4 killer. The RAV 4 is a huge car internationally. The Sealion 6 is so much better it’s embarrassing. The motoring experts…

Just to add another contender for best EV (there are many new Chinese cars coming to Oz, we're very lucky). The Xpeng G6. A competitor to the Model Y i.e. mid-range SUV. Superb quality, much bigger than it looks in…

Here's the bind Western carmakers made for themselves, by not building EVs much much sooner. Superbly engineered and amazingly cheap Chinese cars may destroy the Western car industry. The West will try tariffs. But…

NZ'ers discovering that the new BYD Shark ute is $24,000 (that's 24 THOUSAND) dollars cheaper than the Ford Ranger Raptor. And it's faster than the Raptor. And a much higher quality vehicle, in the engineering sense.…

The Germans at least tried with EVs. But they’re way too expensive. Most German cars have been for years. Asia figured out how to do German quality for about half the money, decades ago. Welcome to the Asian century.…

BYD again are incredibly fast to respond, with their vast toolmaking and engineering resources. The Sealion 7 is their Model Y competitor, to be released in Oz early next year. (Doesn’t it look great). They’ve upgraded…

At least 10 new Chinese EV companies are looking to come to Oz. Australians have no idea of the smorgasbord of riches coming our way. I post about it a lot, China’s EV industry is creating family cars with supercar…

My RDO today and I’m on school pick up, sitting watching a whole line of wankpanzers with windows up and engines running, to run AC. On a glorious Spring day. Says a lot about the whole culture of those vehicles.

It’s rumoured that the world’s biggest selling car, the Tesla Model Y, is going into first production of its new version (‘Juniper’) from tomorrow. The picture below is just somebody’s guess how it will look, based on…

They were talking about cars today. I tried an experiment, asking people if they would ever buy an EV. ‘Why would anybody do that!’ ‘The batteries cost a fortune when you have to replace them!’ ‘Even when you charge…

Because most anti-EV morons take their queues (knowingly or not) from the Prime Orange Moron, I see this as the end of hydrogen cars. Hooray for that.

Volkswagen is in serious, serious trouble. (Note VW also owns: Å KODA, SEAT, CUPRA, Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley, Porsche and Ducati.) The 3rd biggest car maker in the world. This is a story you'll see repeated with other…

To give an indication of how remarkable the Model Y is as a car, it’s the biggest selling car in the world even though Tesla does next to zero marketing for it, or any of its vehicles. It’s word of mouth, people buy…

Like I’ve been saying for several years. Just saying. Best place in the world now to be a car buyer.

EVs are already achieving ‘price parity’ with diesel and petrol vehicles. And that’s just on purchase price. They’ve been much cheaper the whole time, when you factor in zero fuel costs, and virtually no maintenance.

KIA have done a fantastic job with the new EV5. Beautifully engineered, with suspension perfectly tuned for Australian roads. Refined inside and out, good range, and the most important thing for many - it's not…

F1 hybrid engine. Hybrids are the fastest race cars in the world, both F1 and also sports cars. Hybrids were introduced at Le Mans in 2012. They've won every race since. When you drive a hybrid though, you very quickly…

Another reason BYD has settled with 2.5 tonnes of towing for its upcoming Shark ute is that the 3.5 tonnes advertised by other ute producers is dangerous rubbish. The GCM (Gross Combination Mass) for towing with these…

The social basis of technology was my postgraduate work. It’s one of the reasons I talk so much about cars. Vehicles are central to our culture, and to our identities. Take the modern ute. Useless as a ute. Useless as a…

Gav (from NZ) does some of the best vehicle assessments in the world, certainly some of the most entertaining. This is a short excerpt from his look at the new KIA EV3 (full link below). He’s talking about how…

One of the profound changes EVs bring is the degree of remote control and diagnostics drivers have. Tesla pioneered this with the extraordinary Tesla app (which if you have a Tesla home battery also integrates with your…

Fuel bowsers should be in units of energy, not litres. Then people would see that a petrol or diesel vehicle uses about 10 times as much energy to achieve the same range, as an EV. 1 litre of petrol is about 9 kWh of…

The interior of electric semis are much nicer places for drivers to be. Without the need for a huge lump of an engine taking up most of the cabin, it becomes almost a mini-house. The driver can get up and stretch their…

This is the Xiaomi SU7. Xiaomi make gadgets, like phones, TVs and washing machines. Their car is an indication of how astonishing the Chinese EV car industry now is. The CEO of Ford loved the car so much he had one…

The Stop, Revive, Survive campaign is based on research on driver fatigue. You’re supposed to stop and have a break of at least 15 minutes, every two hours. Think about that in relation to the need to spend 30 minutes…

Volkswagen’s 3rd quarter profits were down 42%. Toyota has had 8 straight months of declining profits. These are the big players in world car production. Ignore social media nonsense, EVs are destroying the traditional…

Artist’s guess at the appearance of the new Tesla Model Y (biggest selling car in the world.). I don’t think it will look quite like this, but they probably have key details right. This is a family SUV, with the…

BYD sold more than 2000 Sharks in its first day of release in Australia. An additional 1000 were immediately ordered from the factory, and even more are being organised. Some suggest it may become the biggest selling…

The Zeekr 7x is one to look out for next year. Another full-electric mid-sized SUV to compete with the Tesla Model Y. The Y will have to work hard to equal it. The Zeekr has 636 horsepower (yikes). 0-100 times are as…

A bit more on the Zeekr 7X. I said Zeekr are known for luxury interiors. You can see the 7X’s here, and I can only talk about a fraction of what’s included. All seats (front and back) are available as heated, cooled,…

But it's OK for a tradie to pay nothing for their training, and also earn an income while doing it. Dutton couldn't care less, he's using this to try to attract the ute-driving tradie vote, the young men Trump is also…

Overhearing a colleague telling their teenager to 'use your gears, not the brakes', when driving downhill, to avoid 'wearing out the brakes'. You won't wear out the brakes. And they're cheap to replace anyway. Revving…

Heh, re-write this headline as ‘Fears Australia will be inundated with cheap, high-quality cars’. The Americans and Europeans are green with envy. NewsCorpse is a rotting maggot-ridden sewer at the heart of all Anglo…

The fascinating thing about car suspension is that it has to do 2 important things, which are fundamentally opposed. There is no actual way to resolve that tension. Most of all, a car has to stay on the road to keep you…

On suspension, some interesting recent examples. Teslas are famous for having bad suspension, by which is meant uncomfortable. They’re ‘sprung’ for cornering and speed, Tesla has a bit of a hoon culture. BYD on the…

Over 300,000 drivers of Fords and Toyotas angry over defective vehicles. If these were EVs, imagine the headlines.

The German car industry is predicted to lose up to 2,000,000 workers by 2035, due to the shift to EVs.

One for fans of hydrogen vehicles.

I share renewables stuff because it saddens me that we’re all living through the greatest revolution in centuries, and many aren’t even noticing. Take this, the other night, those with a battery could sell energy back…

It’s one of the genius design elements of the Model Y. The glass roof means you still get the big open sky as you sleep. Also incredibly useful if you’re just visiting friends on a trip, you don’t need a room. Some who…

One of the things that makes me chuckle is just how aggressively Ford and GM (Holden) are developing electric vehicles, in the US. Many of the ICE knuckle-draggers in Australia are the Ford/Holden brigade, completely…

The country everybody loves to hate, China, has stopped buying Western cars. It doesn’t need them, it has world-leading EVs. They must look at us and laugh, we said the world needed to move to EVs, so they said ok,…

Harry is a famous UK YouTube presenter, on cars and driving. Noticing secondhand prices on high-end petrol and diesels have collapsed. Because new model petrol and diesel cars are *always* more expensive. A strong…

Car enthusiasts will tell you every day of the week that a ‘driver’s car’ is the ultimate type of car. What they really mean by that is a car that is good at going fast around corners. Basically a race car, driven on…

Most country towns owe their existence to one or more extractive industries. Agriculture and mining the two biggies. I don’t see them surviving with barista coffee and tourism. It also makes the claims that this is…

I still remember this having cachet, as a kid. It meant a car had grunt. Not a V8, but still respectable. Now it’s embarrassing. Many cars with barely 1-litre, 4-cylinder engines on the road have more power than cars…

I find off-roading usually a bit of a wank. Take the most extreme form, rock-crawling. The thing that always makes me chuckle about this, is if you just hopped out of the car and went on foot, you’d be over the obstacle…

SeaLion7 (BYD Tesla Model Y rival) reviews now coming in. A beautiful piece of engineering again from BYD, near flawless. And for the price, just astonishing. Mid-sized SUV with luxury comfort and supercar performance.…

Normally a 4WD copes with loss of traction to wheels by locking the diff, so that power is then split evenly between the wheel in the air and the one still on the ground. EVs are much smarter than that, you can see it…

Watching the V8s (on TV) in Adelaide this weekend. The formula struggles now to find a relevant car, nobody much drives Camaros or Mustangs. They don’t even make the Camaro any more I don’t think. Make it a contest…

It’s a measure of just how crazy social media society is, that super-powerful and silent cars powered by sunshine are a hard sell.

The EV causing the most buzz globally is one I shared before here, the Xiaomi SU7. Xiaomi makes mobile phones, so this car came out of nowhere. It’s astonishing, even by the astonishing standards new EVs are setting…

In the inevitable transition to electric cars, the existing industry throws up one fake scare campaign after another. Like ‘they all catch fire, or ‘range anxiety’. Or now, ‘they have no resale value’. One of the most…

Combustion clunker fans often say 'EVs are powered by coal-fired electricity!' Even where they are, they use only a third of the energy of a combustion clunker. If we kept coal and gas-powered electricty, and all…

This is what the Bathurst Tesla superchargers still look like most days. Not because nobody owns Teslas in Bathurst (there are lots), but because fast-chargers are used mostly by travellers, not locals. Unlike petrol…

Two clear things here. Full-EVs are still only a small part of the Australian market. But that rate of growth tells the real story. Many are hesitant to be an early adopter, for any product, and that's a sensible risk…

You know EVs are taking off when you see them driving in Lithgow. I saw an Xpeng G6 this morning, fabulous mid-sized electric SUV. One of the most advanced EVs on the market, but still around that $60K mark. A steal for…

KIA are doing a fantastic job with their EVs. And not expensive. This is their EV5. More than other electric car makers they’re creating a more seamless transition to EV driving, including more conventional buttons…

We will probably buy a Tesla next year. Because I finished school almost 40 years ago, I don’t play the “we don’t like Elon so you should all avoid him” games. This video is a great set of reasons (there are others) why…

I have 2 hybrids. Brilliant cars. But when you own one, you quickly crave full electric. The petrol component just feels like a noisy dead weight. Ask an F1 engine designer (also hybrids), and they’ll say the same…

If everybody would just follow the bloody speed limit, traffic congestion would be dramatically reduced. Speed limits act as a spacer between vehicles, if everybody is doing the same speed traffic can’t form, nothing…

Take a front-row seat to the collapse of the Western car industry. Or at least of those companies who don't build EVs. The Germans and Japanese are in all sorts of trouble.

I had a look at Origin's new subscription model the other day. Very interesting, you get to trial any car they have on their list, and can switch it with 30 days' notice if you want to try another one. Gives you an…

Some say 'but China still burns coal, it's the problem'. Approvals for new coal plants in China fell 92% in 2023. In the first 9 months of 2024, 86% of all new power sources added to the Chinese grid were renewable. In…

Lots of people hate Elon Musk, and fair enough. But have a look at this for the magnitude of the engineering achievement at Tesla. Who cares who the CEO is.

Again, look to China for where we’ll be going next. Car dealerships from legacy Western brands in China, like BMW, Mercedes etc are closing in their thousands. 2000 per year in 2021, 2022 and 2023. 4000 in 2024. That’s…

There's so much focus on the price of gas and electricty in cost of living. But by far the greatest energy cost for households is petrol and diesel. Driving an EV can cut your energy bill at least in half, and by as…

Richard Hammond says EVs are ‘ boring’, and he much prefers his 1968 Mustang. Probably thinks music stopped in 1978 too. Likes the ‘vroom vroom’ noises (a car farting). To me what’s most boring is people getting to…

How's a 1.5 million km, 15-year warranty sound? Car batteries are already superb. And they're getting even better every day. People who worry about the batteries are not engaging with the reality out there.…

As an indication of how fake the 'debate' is between fossil fuel and electric cars. Electric cars use batteries. But fossil fuel is also a battery. Both are the chemical storage of energy. The difference is, 70-80% of…

Just sayin'. https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/motoring-news/legacy-automakers-in-trouble-nissan-stellantis-and-volkswagen-struggle-to-stay-afloat/news-story/5a807368fbf644b7628e3c0902c5d198

Shows how the status quo simply won’t change, unless it’s forced to. It’s been clear for years that electric cars would be the way forward, traditional car companies mostly ignored it. Now they’re having their Kodak…

I think a very good and not often asked question is why 'performance cars' are even allowed on public roads. It's clear they're designed to use public roads as race tracks. Also sometimes called 'driver's cars', a very…

Get into it, Bathurst. Everything from BYD Sharks to BMW i4s, BYD Seals, Teslas, Polestars, KIAs, Hyundais etc.

Peter Dutton often uses Canada as an example of nuclear power driving down power prices. It made the Canadians laugh with disbelief. He's a dangerous bullshit artist. The fact he's competitive in the next election is a…

A more common driver behaviour I’m seeing now is widespread total impatience. If there’s a line of traffic behind a slower vehicle, and then an overtaking lane arrives, it’s now common for people further back in the…

The roads are a fascinating place to observe. The bigger and more expensive cars have become, the more aggressive driving has become. Huge SUVs and utes are the main drivers (ha) of increased aggressiveness. Humans play…

BYD’s latest plug-in hybrids will do 2100 km on a tank of fuel. Hybrids will disappear over time, they’re a transition technology for most driving, but BYD is keeping an eye on the ‘range anxiety’ (mental illness) trend…

9 out of 10 people who go on this show say they’re ‘escaping’ the same thing. Traffic. Cars are said to be for the purpose of taking us places we want to go. But the places we want to go most are places without cars. If…

The difficult thing about discussing ideas with friends and family is that every idea is actually a social group. Groups which help give people their sense of identity. In the past this often meant the rule of thumb,…

Ed is a UK technology and financial journalist. Great breakdown of the carmageddon happening to Western car makers. All their own fault.

Observe the culture we live in, and you will always find status driving nearly everything that happens. Whether it’s homes, food, cars, watches, or whatever, there’s an increasing push towards high-status luxury or…

There are between 68 and 70 new EVs coming to Australia in 2025. Here they all are. Enjoy the revolution, folks. And it is one, I still meet people who honestly think this is some sort of competition between EVs and…

The Shark wins car of the year. Hugely deserved, it's reinventing that stupid category.…

Planning relative energy independence for both the home and cars has been my main ‘bucket list’ in recent years. My ‘living my best life’. I funded it by foregoing idiot selfies in front of world tourism landmarks, with…

The solution to most of society’s problems is to tell engineers what the problems are, and then to get out of their way. If you don’t believe that, I encourage you to read history much more carefully. How’s an 8 million…

Just saying BYD Auto Australia, if you as the second-largest battery company in the world did for home batteries what you’ve done for cars, offered the same fantastic technology but much cheaper, you would absolutely…

It amazes me people are worried about battery life in cars, they’re already warranted for eight years or 160,000 km as a fairly standard warranty. As the research is increasingly showing and peoples’ experience with…

Tesla has some of the best electrical engineers in the world. They're scathing about Peter Dutton's nuclear plan, correctly pointing out that the grid won't function with that much 'baseload' power, and millions of…

EVs were 10% of car sales in Oz in 2024. That number is projected to be 20% within two years. The number of fast-chargers doubled in 2024. We're on the 'ramping up' part of the innovation curve.

In recent history South-East Asian countries bought nearly all of their cars from Japanese car makers. Chinese EVs are now taking them to the cleaners. South-East Asia is hugely focused on reducing air pollution.…

Back to the marginal cost curve for renewables, to one of the miracles of our lives. SWB = solar, wind, batteries. You can see that the lowest cost SWB grid generates between 3 to 5 times *more* energy than our entire…

VW is in the top 3 car companies in the world. Its current debt is $240 billion, one of the largest private debts in history. Their existence is in the balance. All because they didn’t shift to EVs much sooner. They…

The Japanese car industry is in free fall, as is the German car industry. Honda and Nissan now looking to merge to survive. Though merging 2 companies with virtually no decent EVs between them just makes one bigger…

The Zeekr 7X is confirmed for Australia next year. This is a very special car. Mid-sized SUV, so competes with the world’s best-selling car, the Tesla Model Y, which is about to have a new model within the next few…

Pretty standard day in the warmer months. Used no grid power at all, exported enough to run 3 or 4 other homes. Maybe you got some of our electrons. That’s a few hundred kms of EV driving also, in just the amount we…

You’ll see this in many new EVs. It’s a monitoring camera to check if the driver is falling asleep. Just one more safety technology that is desperately needed for driving, so many accidents are related to fatigue.…

Jeff is the Chief Scientist at Google. Sharing the stats on Waymo self-driving cars. Humans are hopeless drivers, but geniuses at self-delusion. They’re also hopeless at flying planes, which is why most of the time,…

I added the price of electricity in red, for EV drivers.

I worked with somebody who told me it didn’t matter how far off in the distance a car was, they had to speed up to catch them, because they couldn’t bear anybody being in front of them on the road. That’s probably about…

When humans gather together in groups of any size, they play status games. First within the group itself, for status within the group. Then between groups. Paradoxically (for many) this means that the more we ‘connect’…

The new Prado a good example of why petrols and diesels tend to ‘keep their value’ better, for now anyway, in secondhand sales. It’s $10,000-$13000 more expensive than the previous model. (It’s also not a great car.)…

Insurers in Australia now have let people know that replacing an EV battery is cheaper than replacing a petrol or diesel engine. Battery prices are plummeting, and EV prices will go below the prices of petrol or diesel.…

“We are about to witness the greatest disruption the automotive industry has ever seen. There’s a perfect storm brewing right now. And most people are completely unaware of what’s happening. Every single legacy…

That fixed distance? Will NEVER happen with human drivers. Semi-automated cars? Easy.

4WD culture carries an assumption of getting closer to ‘nature’ (whatever that is). When in reality it’s using the landscape as a theme park for cars. Doing terrible and increasing damage as it goes, and grows (and it’s…

15 years ago China had 2% of the global car market. Look at it now. And what cars does China make? EVs. Game over. That percentage is still climbing, and fast.

At the same time the public has been glued to years of reality cooking programs, home cooking has actually fallen off a cliff. The same has happened with things like gardening, where lifestyle homes and garden shows…

We don’t need yet another enquiry into why petrol is so expensive. It’s always the same reason - fossil fuel companies are arseholes. We already know how to fix that, the NRMA would be doing its members and us a favour…

Cost of living. Had a few days on the coast. Figured out when we got back that petrol would have cost us over $200 for the trip, if we hadn’t moved to hybrid vehicles last year. It cost us less than half of that.

Tesla say they’re very close to releasing full self-driving. The important thing here isn’t fully autonomous driving, it’s that the push for it is delivering amazing driver-assistance technologies, even if it’s not 100%…

NSW desperately needs a change in March. This man is the main driver in the collapse of Australia’s public health defence against Covid as well.

This is if you use grid power. Way, way less than paying for petrol or diesel. Plus you get more power and torque, total silence (it’s bliss), and almost zero maintenance. Electric cars will do a million miles without…

I enjoy watching people posting about electric cars to social media, because it always prompts a pile-on from Flat Earth fossil fuel fans. Always the same idiot grinning emojis, with comments like ‘hope it won’t catch…

For the fossil fuel Flat-Earthers. The chance of a petrol car catching fire is about 1.5%. An EV’s chance of catching fire is 0.03%. 50 times lower risk.

The phrase ‘range anxiety’ for EVs. Petrol and diesel cars don’t have great range. They have thousands of service stations. Filled daily by huge fuel tankers travelling back and forth from the refinery (actually now…

Skipped the ’watch with free Covid’ sessions at the cinema and finally saw this yesterday. Great fun movie, amazing flight scenes. A few things: 1) the mission at the centre of the movie is a copy of the destruction of…

Loved our Pathfinder. Best family car on the market when we bought it (price was a steal, sub-$40,000 for a 7-seater), and it did 7 years with us without skipping a beat. Nissan do beautiful V6s, which is why they…

Reading more sites discussing EVs. One of the most common questions always seems to be ‘how much does it cost to replace the battery?’ It’s an easy one. Zero. Batteries are warranted for well past the usual lifetime of…

The 120-hour driver training for young people now is very interesting, and says a lot about what 'good driving' is. Car enthusiasts will always tell you good driving is something like race car driving - fast, picking…

I am provocative on this, but as an engineer I’m a bit tired of the rubbish. Just look at the difference in efficiencies here. If you put $100 of petrol or diesel in your car, $80-$90 of it goes straight out the exhaust…

Another way to look at the future of vehicles is to compare actual energy use, per km. While it takes the same energy to move the same mass the same distance, what that leaves out is efficiency of conversion of the…

One of the coolest electric motors people own right now, is the ‘digital’ motor in a Dyson vacuum cleaner. Dyson needed powerful and small (see pic of James Dyson comparing the size of a traditional household electric…

EVs again. Range is a biggie for many. The average EV even today has enough stored electricity in its battery to power the average Australian vehicle for two weeks. (Newer Teslas - 4 weeks.) And costs less than $20 to…

Social media is destroying societies. It sounds a big claim, but only a handful of years ago Trump used it to mobilise an insurrection on the Capitol, in the world’s most famous democracy. But social media’s damage goes…

You have to watch this show. (SBS has it streaming on demand.) Guy Martin is one of the UK’s leading petrol heads, ex-motorcycle racer. Lovely, funny guy. This doco is so entertaining, and shows him exploring the world…

Let's unpack this one (declaration - I worked at a nuclear power facility, as an engineer). - we would need over 15,000 new nuclear reactors to power the world - these reactors cost over $20 billion to build, EACH -…

Hydrogen-powered cars is another topic that generally has a ratio of 0% engineering, to 100% bullshit. It won't happen. Hydrogen may be used for larger industrial purposes, including jet planes. But for cars hydrogen is…

The marriage of two of my most obvious favourite things. Engineers, and electric motors.

To get a sense of how little maintenance is required for EVs, have a look at Tesla's maintenance summary page for its vehicles.

The battery in a Tesla car will last for between 500,000 and 800,000km. That's between 3-5 times more kms than the average Australian drives a car before upgrading. 30-50 years of motoring. It's just finishing…

Toyota does this so well. And it won’t cost you $5,000 extra like it will in a Tesla right now. My Toyota still drives me to and from work every day, for most of the trip. Safer, and saves me fuel too.

Tesla get a lot of attention with electric cars, for good reason. They saw what was coming and went hard, early. Look at those stats, who would bother with an old combustion clunker? This car would beat a Formula 1 car…

Henry Ford is famous for having said that his customers could have any colour they liked for their Model Ts, so long as it was black. There was a reason for that. Firstly Model Ts began in a range of colours, but when…

What a load of steaming bull turds. The fantasy that all we need is a 'market', consumer choice, to drive prices down. That rubbish is what has been driving prices UP, for years. I've used all of the energy comparison…

Forget the politics, do the sums. Go electric, even in stages. I notice the same people who opposed all progress on energy for the past 20 years are now trying a new argument, that going electric is too expensive, a…

More new EV models. 600km range (enough for about 3 weeks of motoring for the average Oz driver), costs about $36 to 'fill'. Estimated launch price here around $70,000. You'll save at least $20,000-$25,000 in fuel over…

Jafari said every electric vehicle in Australia is sold out, and that they’re “often sold out within hours of being made available to the Australian market”. “Demand far outstrips supply, Australians are lined up ready…

What I said all through this wave turned out to be 100% true. Including that National Cabinet and the CMO were flat-out lying to us. To me it’s important to close the loop on the things I say here, because maybe people…

My honours year in engineering was research on these superconductors. Great that they’re now at least at liquid nitrogen temperature. You don’t need to replace the whole grid with them, just key sections. Engineers…

Drove the new M8 yesterday. It was very pleasant, freeway driving all the way from Penrith to the Eastern suburbs. The thing with these mega road projects though is that they ignore that what creates traffic is roads.…

The disaster that people won’t speak about. Look at the collapse in student attendance in schools, driven by mass infection and illness from Covid. Only 42% of Australian kids were at school for more than 90% of the…

The ridiculous tax on electric vehicles will be fought in the High Court starting this week. At a time when Australia and the world desperately need to shift to this technology, taxing it is, as the headline says, one…

One aspect of cost of living that isn’t spoken about as much is financial illiteracy. Many people in their 40s and 50s still manage their money the way they did when they were 17. Using my favourite example again, of…

The federal government heavily subsidises the use of diesel fuel. The public money it spends on doing that could buy 125,000 Australians a free Tesla EV every year.

When a commercial plane flies, it occupies an area in space. But it also occupies an envelope of time. A schedule. This spaces planes out to allow them all to fly as quickly and as safely as possible. This is a key…

A variation on people not following speed limits, is people speeding up when overtaking lanes start, to stop people passing them. Just incredibly stupid and annoying behaviour. And HUGE numbers of people do it, despite…

Nissan has come up with a new type of very interesting hybrid. Instead of the petrol and electric motors working together, the petrol motor only functions as a generator for the electric motors and battery. This gives…

People never worry about range with petrol and diesel cars, because we have service stations in most places. But check this: - there are 7000 service stations in Australia - Australia has over 20 million vehicles -…

Hybrid update, our Kluger. Latest fuel consumption figure is 4.8L/100km. For a 2.3 tonne 7-seater car. That's with majority highway driving (Lithgow-Bathurst), which is actually less efficient with a hybrid because you…

More than 11,000 people die each year in Australia from diseases caused by the breathing in of vehicle exhaust emissions. And yet people still cheer on crap petrol and diesel technology, which not only kills them, but…

Lovely exponential curve. Not even the pandemic slowed the momentum much. You can be on the wrong side of this history, it'll just mean costing you a lot of money and pride. And think about the benefits: - no more…

Range is a concept that makes sense for petrol and diesel vehicles, they were designed to have longer range not just for longer trips, but because we didn't want people having to go to the service station every day.…

Even the Americans are seeing it. The 'range' issue is just another distraction, absolute nonsense. It makes the cars heavier and much more expensive as well.

The range of a horse and cart was way beyond what the cars and trucks that replaced them could offer. Unpacking the slogans and spin that now dominate our lives, nobody said ‘I can’t buy a car, what about the range?’…

Torque vectoring is sophisticated engineering that varies the amount of torque (turning force) going to the wheels of a car, depending on conditions. This means the car gets optimum grip and drive, because unlike a…

This is the $3.6 billion Tesla gigafactory in Nevada. This is a post about why I post about electric cars. It’s not just because I like them (though I do, I think people will wonder in a few years why we ever drove…

Some of the details. Toyota may not survive, which is huge. It’s the biggest carmaker in the world, together with VW. German car makers are scrambling to go electric now to avoid the same fate. The transformation…

The Tesla Model 3 is already significantly cheaper than owning a Toyota Corolla, over 5 years of ownership. (It has next to zero maintenance costs, and electricity is much, much cheaper than petrol or diesel.) The…

And again, the people with actual skin in the game - the car companies - know. Read this to find out about the amazing innovation going on, in multiple dimensions. “Taking the skin off the Model Y, it was truly a work…

I am a broken record on this, but the changes happening are so interesting and so in contrast to the public discussion, I think it's amazing. Just look at that line. If you're a standard car maker, this is when you go…

This is a very useful, practical article (ignore the ‘Error’, the link works) that explains what a 10kW solar system can run in your home. 10 is large, many have less than that, but because the cost of panels has…

I use Tesla as an example for EVs, because they’re the world leaders. What they’re doing is remarkable in all sorts of ways we never hear about. For example a few years ago, they hired an ex-LEGO executive to head up…

Mazda’s MX-60 is a classy new hybrid. It’s also the most powerful car Mazda has ever built, showing again that the image of EVs and hybrids as somehow lower in ‘grunt’ is just ignorance. Almost twice the power of a…

Two of Australia’s most popular cars. The Toyota RAV4 hybrid, and the Toyota Hilux. Get the Hilux for the bloke because of extra ‘grunt’ (scratch balls), and the hybrid for the missus. But *drum roll*…the RAV4 hybrid is…

The ultimate test of power (including towing) in a petrol/diesel vs a hybrid or EV, is to put the same vehicle up against itself. Want to guess who wins?

Had to take back roads home tonight, because of an accident on the highway. The way the car ate up those roads reminded me why hybrids are the ultimate car for driving, though they’re mostly seen as ways to save fuel.…

Supercars may have a problem here. The racing worked best when drivers were driving highly modified versions of cars ordinary Australians drive. Hardly any Australians want to drive American muscle cars. Including…

“Recently, General Motors made news by announcing the retirement of the Chevrolet Camaro. Hoping to go all-electric by model year 2035, the manufacturer is in the midst of a huge company-wide transition toward electric…

Next stage here at home of driving energy costs down will be replacement of all windows and doors with double-glazed uPVC versions. The windows in Australian homes have traditionally been rubbish, though at least most…

70% of the average family’s energy bill is the fuel they put in their car. Petrol or diesel. You can see here that even if you use existing grid power, and switched to an EV or hybrid, your fuel costs for cars would be…

I wouldn't advise anybody to train as a number 6. They're going to need some in the transition, and some EV technicians, but it's a dead-end otherwise. California for example (twice as big an economy as Australia) is…

One of my interests well before Covid too, people probably remember. Clean air, which would also fix Covid. One of the greatest sources of this pollution in NSW, alongside cars and trucks? It’s in the article - wood…

Australian data. A 2.5 tonne hybrid on average uses even less fuel (significantly less) than a motorbike. And unlike any other type of vehicle, you'll get maximum power across the whole rev range. The average petrol or…

Watch this space. Musk is a wally, but his company isn’t. They’re planning to decimate the traditional car industry. And those traditional makers will only have themselves to blame. Any fool knew EVs were the future, 30…

Beautiful Lithgow, as an example. There are over 10,000 households in Lithgow. Pretty much all of them own at least one vehicle, many own 2 or more. Average fuel price for a year is about $5000 per vehicle. That means…

A trick people use is to suggest that going electric will take some enormous amount of minerals (which they imply either don't exist, or will cover the world in mines). Lithium is one of the key elements mentioned.…

I still remember when dual-cabs were invented, we had a few growing up. The thing about them, which I remember my dad talking about (as a builder) is that they’re not good utes. Trays are small and too deep for a lot of…

As a kid I remember wondering, why can cars do speeds that are more than twice the actual speed limit? Isn't that a waste of energy and engineering? And the answer is - yep. But they had to do it for a reason that isn't…

This is the only way to make a combustion engine a useful thing. Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive, a marvel of engineering. Using this, the power used by the driver is completely decoupled from the power source (mechanical…

Volkswagen, the world’s largest car maker, is investing $200 billion in its electric vehicle strategy. This is one of its electric and hybrid factories. It wants 20% of its vehicles sold globally to be electric, by…

Current projections (I think it will go even faster) say that half of cars bought will be electric, by 2030. Less than 7 years away. In Germany, the projection is 40% of sales by 2025, two years away. Here’s the current…

One of the many objections to EVs that people throw up is that they can't work in more remote parts of Australia. In fact, as the Americans show here, they make even more sense there than in the cities. They save even…

This Haval piece does a good job describing the amazing best of all possible worlds of hybrids. Always thought of as just being about fuel efficiency, but actually the best type of car for performance too.

Have been to Harvey Norman twice in two weeks to buy things. It was deserted, you could have heard a pin drop. I asked the salespeople how business was going, and they said terribly slow. The ‘economy’ is imploding. One…

Every 6 years the ABS analyses weekly household expenditures in Australia. One of the interesting facts to come out of it is that Australians spend as much or more on recreation and alcohol each week, as they do on…

Cars are a culture. And often a not very nice one. Look at car posts on FB, for example, of any kind (including about EVs), and you’ll always find that laughing emoji. When you open the comments, the people who post…

If this had been electric vehicles, all the smirking petrolheads would be having a field day. Social media magnifies everything that’s stupid a hundredfold. For example an ordinary petrol car is 100 times more likely to…

A nice way to see the inefficiency of combustion engines is idling. An engine will easily do 1000 rpm while sitting at a red light, idling. The pistons in your engine are going up and down 17 times per *second*, while…

It's a shame Australia is increasingly moving towards the US in its culture, politics and tastes. Like the RAM. Americans (sorry my American friends) make almost universally rubbish cars. (We don't make any at all now,…

In 2022, oil industry profits doubled to $219 billion. At the same time they hiked our fuel prices to $2 per litre, and they’re still there. And people fall over themselves to defend them, and drive the vehicles that…

This weekend you can watch the ultimate example of a hybrid car - Formula 1. The fastest cars in the world. F1 cars are hybrids. They’ve been hybrid for nearly a decade, and not only did it make them much more fuel…

The rai line over the mountains was electrified in the 1950s. Nearly 80 years ago, we understood that electric motors are not only much more efficient, but need much less maintenance and are also more powerful. We’ve…

Autonomous driving cars are very close, in fact you can see Bill Gates driving in one in this short video. Around London, so a very challenging environment. It performs beautifully. Cars and trucks are the only form of…

A terrible crash between 2 utes on the Barton Highway, 4 dead. 94 percent of motor vehicle crashes are caused by dangerous errors made by drivers. Many of them excellent drivers too, it’s not about skill. With…

Cars fixed a major environmental problem. Horse shit. At the time cars were introduced, major cities were overwhelmed with the amount of horse shit in streets, as you can see in the photo. Cars went on to make the air…

Hybrids are marketed to the public almost exclusively as fuel-saving vehicles. Some reflections on driving one now for nearly a year, and why I think that marketing is a mistake. Firstly because for quite a few…

The Tesla Powerwall home battery has had another price drop, this time to $12,900 (uninstalled). Still the best home battery, including for its outstanding software. The software is as if not more important than the…

The Americans are shifting to two-thirds of all car sales to be EVs in just 9 years, by 2032. From a starting point of only 5-6%. Notice the EPA there doesn’t need politicians to agree to it, it just sets vehicle…

The myths about public and private. All innovation and economic growth has its origins in the State. The State even invented the ‘private sector’. Biden understands this, and now industry is starting to boom again…

A good example of the power and versatility of electric motors is a household cordless drill. One of these has about twice the torque (turning force) of a professional track cyclist. And you can hold it in one hand.

You can also use a home battery with no solar panels at all. For example, you could use it to store off-peak electricity overnight, to use in your house during the day. That alone can cut your electricity bill in half.…

The loon petrol head brigade joined forces here with the crazy 5G loons, and a variety of other conspiracy nuts. Social media, mobilising stupidity now on a mass scale. Usually funded at arm’s length by the fossil fuel…

It’s always surprised me that Lithgow has a reputation for being an unpleasant place to live. The valley is beautiful. It’s also known as a ‘hole’, probably by people who failed geography in high school. It’s a valley.…

The Streets as Shared Spaces program in NSW is part of a global urban design push towards ‘placemaking’. Taking back urban space from the car. Making those spaces shared spaces again, for everybody, not just cars.…

One of the many advantages of semi-autonomous driving in cars is that they could be programmed to never allow driving like this.

Fun little tidbit in this story. The Tesla app allowed Kyrgios not just to track the stolen car, but also to slow it down.

Driving a manual has been synonymous with driving enjoyment and skill for so long that I think it was forgotten there's only one reason cars had gears in the first place. Because their engines are gutless. They have no…

This is the greatest engine ever built. The Mercedes turbo-hybrid F1. The battery is on the right. Normal combustion engines run at a thermal efficiency (how much fuel energy they convert into movement) of 29%, max,…

The Owen Magnetic Tourer. Probably the world's first hybrid vehicle. 1915. The technology lost without trace after that for more than a century, replaced by absolute rubbish petrol and diesel cars. Now hybrids are back.…

These 3 trucks are slugging it out in the big pickup category in the US. The RAM 1500 and Chevy Silverado are already on sale in Australia, and Toyota is contemplating selling the Tundra here as well to sit above the…

There's a fun story about the Toyota Tundra hybrid in the US, which explains why we've been so slow to see hybrid utes here in Oz. Unlike the V8 competition gas guzzlers there, the Tundra makes almost no noise. (While…

Formula 1 is planning something pretty amazing, even if you’re not into car racing. They’re taking their current hybrids (best engines in the world, I may have mentioned, once or twice). But they’re making them even…

I’m fascinated by hybrid cars. The human body is also a hybrid. You have the energy generated by your metabolism, from what you eat. But that energy is hybridised with gravity, captured by the elasticity of your…

As always, the smirking emojis on these posts are petrolheads, with their superior knowledge of cars. The biggest car companies in the world with their century or more of experience know nothing, next to the smirking…

Bathurst paper this morning, the national petrolhead capital! Petrolheads will be coughing up their Fruit Loops. EV sales have tripled again in Australia this year, from last year. My hybrid was singing this morning,…

This is more of the subtle politics that infects all of our lives now. Trying to paint solar power as a rich person’s way to escape skyrocketing power prices. There are internet-free loans that will pay for your entire…

It’s a pretty classy affair all around. Driving like fucking morons, 4 young people dead. Then some of the parents immediately crowdfund the tragedy for money.

Any of the passengers in this car could have said ‘whoa, slow down’. They didn’t because they didn’t want to look like killjoys. And so now they’re dead. This is exactly the psychology that is preventing people doing…

This is a problem already solved by engineers, the business model is the stumbling block, carmakers need to step up. These stories excite the smirking emojis because they think it shows that EVs aren’t the future after…

This story reminded me of the car crash story, were parents were crowdfunding for cash the same day the kids died. A married couple expressing disappointment that the cash gifts from wedding guests didn’t cover the cost…

Mind-blowing. A new car every 30 seconds, and aiming for 15 seconds. Really worth a watch, to see the phenomenal engineering going on.

The whole article is full of errors. For example Rowan says batteries are full of ‘rare earth elements’. There are no rare earths in batteries. Only in motors, and even some of those now don’t use them. And who cares…

One of the engineering wonders Tesla has introduced into car making is the use of die casting to create whole sections of vehicles in one quick press. Until now carmakers assembled vehicles a piece at a time, using…

Another bit of anti-EV spin is that they lose range in extreme cold and heat. The spin often says this is due to battery performance. It’s actually because people use heating or cooling in the car. And EV manufacturers…

A plug for the Tesla battery, they've done a superb job with it and much of the genius of it is in the in-built AI. For example, if you have an electricity plan that is time-of-use, where you pay different rates for…

TSMC stands for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The most important company in the world. Semiconductors are chips, the chips used in all our devices now. Not just computers, our cars, TVs, vacuum cleaners,…

Australia has some of the worst petrol in the world. It's one of the reasons we're slower to move to EVs, because car manufacturers dump their rubbish on us. But look at the second graph. Improving emissions standards…

And then this one, an international laughing stock. Even countries *with* big existing car industries are wayyyy ahead of us. 20 years of philistines in government here has taken a country that should be the richest in…

More for the fans of the private sector. Also the thinking that's driving our Covid (non)-response. This CEO (Stockton Rush) is on the missing sub, experiencing the joys of the absence of 'red tape' as he runs out of…

Backs up what I’ve posted here for a while. The next 5-10 years could be pretty nasty, with energy prices and grid stability. Invest in yourself and your home. It’s the best way you can spend money that will also make…

The ABC shared this video of a rail car imploding at 1 atmosphere (i.e. our everyday atmospheric pressure). Implosions are the opposite of explosions, they don’t throw things in every direction, they make everything…

Tesla’s Cybertruck looks a bit like it was made in Minecraft. But the specs on this thing are something. Designed to be Tesla’s ute. The glass is armoured. It’ll do 0-100 in 2.9 seconds. It’ll be able to tow up to 7…

The Vision AVTR is a Mercedes concept car. The AVTR uses four electric motors nearly inside each of its wheels. Each motor and each wheel can operate independently of the others, meaning the car can move sideways like a…

Wilcannia is a famous outback town. Like all outback towns, the history is one of expansion of some empire. Nearly always mining (Broken Hill, Lightning Ridge, White Cliffs) or agriculture (Bourke, Wilcannia to some…

A gigafactory makes electric cars and batteries. China is building one gigafactory per WEEK. The rest of the world every few months. There are over 300 currently being built or in planning.

Cockburn a good example of our relationship with the outback, and with the bush more generally. It only exists because of mining, it was a place where trains and drivers exchanged when transferring mining ore out of…

Word for word what I’ve been saying about cars in Australia, for several years. Notice how Australian life has changed, the Toyota Corolla used to be our most popular car. People considered smart things, like fuel…

Grid-scale batteries coming in a rush now. Three are listed as possibly coming to the Lithgow LGA. Tesla 'megapacks' are common batteries used (as in the pic). 3 MWh (enough to power 3600 homes for an hour). Can be…

We LOVE to imitate, to copy what others do. It’s unavoidable, because it’s based on our deepest desire. To desire what others have, particularly if those others are people we admire. We know kids do this, but all adult…

I remember driving through what we call ‘the bush’ one day, and thinking about how empty our landscapes are. Empty of people, and increasingly of plants and animals too. You’ll find handfuls of people living there, and…

Sometimes when people say ordinary folk can’t afford things like solar panels, induction cooktops and electric cars, I scroll through what the same ordinary people pay for second-hand caravans, to tow behind their…

Many living in climate denial have put their faith in hydrogen, to avoid the bog obvious answer right in front of them, of solar and wind. (Actually what motivates them is that they just don’t want to agree with the…

We've arrived. I do a lot of hours behind the wheel each week. Nothing I see has ever convinced me humans are better drivers than machines.

Was out for my lunchtime walk this week, and saw an older person zip by on their mobility scooter. And it made me think, for a lot of the journeys even young and healthy adults do every day, something like this would be…

"Australians now travel further throughout Australia than ever they did before, as tourists; in recreational vehicles of all kinds they penetrate into the remotest areas, driving thousands of kilometres to see…

Most of the early settlers to Australia were from the UK. So here’s a mystery. The famous Australian accent doesn’t sound like *any* of the UK accents. Not even blended in some way. Know what it sounds just like?…

I have a long commute each day on regional roads. Each day I think about the total cowardice of the NSW Government, the only State government in Australia that doesn't use average speed safety cameras for cars, only for…

There’s a strange idea that EVs will only become viable when we replace all of our petrol stations with EV charging stations like this one. But there’s a huge flaw in that way of thinking. For petrol and diesel…

There are many more homes approved than are ever built. In the industry it’s called ‘land banking’, where developers get a lot of building approvals, and then don’t move to construction until they feel they’ll make the…

The collapse of the dollar is another thing driving petrol and diesel prices sky-high. We have to buy all of our petrol and diesel from overseas, and a falling dollar makes it massively more expensive. So tell me again…

Australia copies Americans with cars now. The F-150 Lightning, the fully electric mega-ute, has been a smash in the US. They had to upgrade the line to triple production. I think mega-utes are ridiculous cars, but this…

Posted about this one a while back. I think they have stock now. Fantastic car, incredible warranty. Has the petrol engine as hybrid for longer trips, and like other modern hybrids that engine is used together with the…

One of my favourite anti-EV tricks on the endless sewer of stupidity of social media, is to show an electric vehicle being towed, as proof they’re not practical. Here’s a petrol vehicle being towed. Petrol and diesel…

A story of three photos. Of European genius and American swindling. Have posted before that the electric motor was invented over 100 years ago. By Michael Faraday, holding the glasses. The first workable cars were…

Energy, and range. The reason petrol and diesel vehicles tend to have higher ranges is that the fuel they use has enormous energy density, as you can see. Every litre of the fuel contains enormous amounts of energy. By…

5% is the 'tipping point' for any innovation after which it really takes off. I advise the anti-EV nuts to invest heavily in petrols and diesels right now, because the car companies aren't. Nothing like owning a…

Some have 'range anxiety' about getting an EV. Apart from the fact nearly all Australians travel less than 40km per day, which is easily charged at home from a power point at the end of the day (like your phone), if you…

This sort of innovation is happening everywhere. One of the most sad barriers to it expanding is community opposition, through lunatic ideas people get via social media. When I grew up most people paid no attention to…

This article was an excellent window again into the almost impossibly complex world that is the real Australia. And how we who think ourselves advanced because we can build cars and aeroplanes and computers, have not a…

Much as I think these cars should be banned (you’re 47% more likely to die if your car is hit by one of these than by a regular car or ute), they at least have a full-electric option. With a range of over 800km.

Auto-obesity is a thing. The trend to drive tanks means huge numbers of models of cars now no longer fit in standard car parking spaces. These new huge cars are lethal to pedestrians and other vehicles. Not long ago…

Fewer than 5% of Australians tow anything - a trailer or caravan/camper trailer or boat. And yet so much of the EV narrative is around range, and range is mostly an issue for people who tow. Which relatively speaking is…

The worst possible, most brainless thing to be happening here. The roads will become a killing field. One of these flew past me yesterday on my way home, doing about 20-30 over the speed limit. 3 tonnes of metal, the…

I have the semi-autonomous functionality turned on in our car for nearly all the driving I do. You’d be mad not to. Many drivers I see out there on the roads aren’t safe, I’d much rather those cars were driving more…

Driving is changing fundamentally. No longer will it be isolated people behind the wheel, with their lapses of attention, deliberate ignoring of road conditions and rules, falling asleep etc. No other mass transport…

People who constantly chop-and-change lanes are 6 times more likely to have an accident, and in almost every case don't get where they're going any faster. The gaps they swerve into are also the main thing that keeps…

People who constantly chop-and-change lanes are 6 times more likely to have an accident, and in almost every case don't get where they're going any faster. The gaps they swerve into are also the main thing that keeps…

Next time you're queued at the lights, watch what happens when they go green. The cars will move off one at a time, from the front, each one waiting for the one ahead to move first. This isn't necessary, technically all…

Bathurst in the 1930s. Right at that point where horses were being replaced by cars, and both were on the roads. The guy in the foreground with the horse and cart will be saying 'ha, look at those cars, always catching…

The people and companies who sat on their hands and did nothing for 30 years against this end-of-civilisation scale threat will now increasingly try to alarm us all about how impossible it is to fix things in the small…

If you have a Tesla (I don't, but am always tempted), you don't need to get your car serviced. If anything does go wrong, you just tap this in the app, and they either fix it over the internet (there are hardly any…

This stuff really works, I used to hate constantly dipping lights when driving at night. Have trialled this, and I no longer need to bother. Car does it for me, and then returns to high beam when safe.

Swaps places with Toyota from year to year as the world’s biggest car maker. But what would they know next to some guy somebody saw on YouTube. The combustion engine was dead when it was invented in the 1870s (50 years…

Australia lagging here, as in so many other areas. I’m sitting here right now with a temperature of nearly -5 outside, and I don’t even need a heater on, the temperature is about the same as when we went to bed last…

One of Australia's most popular 'cars' (more like a tank). A friend was driving one last night back from Melbourne, and it broke down in the middle of nowhere. 5-hour wait for help. The tow truck driver that eventually…

Elon Musk became the richest person in the world in under 10 years, selling electric cars. Everybody knows this. Many don't seem to understand what it means though.

I love that you can't even start a petrol or diesel engine, without an electric motor. And that they need to sit running (idling) even when they're not going anywhere, otherwise you need to fire up the electric motor…

@[1112555254:2048:Dan] and I both noticed this trend. There's a huge, extremely rapid shift to electric mowers, line trimmers and other garden tools. Why is it happening so fast? Because no idiot turned it into a team…

Here’s why I post about cars so much. As a social and cultural phenomenon, not just a technology thing. Cars are the most anti-social part of democracies. This brilliant idea, of town and city planning removing the…

20 mph is about 30 km/h. I remember the huge fuss when we moved to 50km/h here. Now hardly anybody thinks about it. Getting cars out of the centre of our lives will be fought every step of the way. It’s a fight for our…

Have a watch, fascinating and moving. How social media is driving stupidity deep into individual families as well as institutions. And breaking them apart. These platforms need to be shut down.

Exactly. Range isn’t a property of a car, it’s a property of the fuelling system. It costs trillions of dollars to give petrol and diesel cars range, with refineries and pipelines and tankers and service stations. It’s…

Populism is the political system we now live under. It’s not Labor, Liberal, National or Green. It’s not Left or Right. It’s much simpler than that. It’s a politics that says what is most popular, is right. It replaces…

From the UK. The value of new petrol and diesel cars drops 30% in the first year after you buy them.

Shows how much energy each source contains per kg. The tiny energy density of a lithium battery shows the extraordinary efficiency of electric motors. EVs already get close to the range of a petrol or diesel vehicle,…

Petrol prices are eye-watering right now. When I was planning the solar system for the house, I was looking ahead to having full-EVs as vehicles. Here’s the system this month, nowhere near peak production yet. Green…

To help cut through the sloganocracy that replaced our democracy, there are now already almost as many public charging stations for EVs as there are service stations for petrol and diesel cars. But even more…

Ford is bringing a plug-in hybrid version of the Ranger to Oz in 2024 or 2025. It will have more grunt than any of the current petrol/diesel models, electric motors have huge torque. It’ll tow the same 3.5 tonnes. Pure…

Ordinary cars waste huge amounts of energy in braking, as heat. You can see it, the brake discs glowing red. EVs and hybrids capture 90 percent of this energy and use it to recharge the battery. Instead of only using…

The new fighting in the Middle East should remind us that we have to ship most of our fuel from there. Over $50 billion of it, per year. And it’s sending ordinary Australians broke. But we can power our cars with our…

Amortisation. Why things like solar and hybrids/EVs make you lots of money, at a time money is very tight for people. The ticket or sticker price can seem high (and is dropping fast anyway), but you have to do the…

Say you buy a new car, and drive it for 100,000 km. If it's a petrol or diesel car, the fuel over the lifetime of the car will cost you around $25,000. if you buy an EV, the electricity to drive 100,000 km will cost you…

You need air to burn things, and turbos provide a lot of extra air, by sucking it out of the exhaust and back into the engine. They don’t make a petrol or diesel much more efficient (you might get to 40-50% efficiency…

If you want a sense of just how enormous the 'grunt' of an electric motor is, check out the Aspark Owl. It can go from 0-100 km/h in 1.69 seconds. Imagine how that feels in the car.

Reality, vs social media. “…electric vehicle sales had topped Bloomberg NEF’s mass adoption tipping point on track to 30 per cent of sales by 2027; AEMC research showed most domestic batteries will hit the affordability…

You won’t convince most No voters to change their minds, because they’re not using their minds. As with EVs, climate change, renewables, Covid and everything else, they’re cheering on their ‘team’. It’s team sports,…

KIA’s EV options are now 5 different model of all sizes, change is happening fast. And beautiful cars too, I think the smartest car company in the world right now. The Koreans are making amazing cars.

I’d trust a self-driving car over a human-driven car every day of the week. I travel hundreds of kilometres every week, and the human driving I see is appalling. We already have self-flying planes and self-driving…

I still see people buy standard petrol and diesel cars now, and wonder how much thought they’ve put into it. Not only are they massively more expensive now over their lifetimes, we’re very quickly approaching a point…

“People are choosing bigger and bigger cars, then it turns into a bit of an arms race where people then feel less safe if they’re in a smaller vehicle, and so they want a bigger vehicle, and then everyone else feels…

CEO of VW, the largest producer of diesels in the world and second-largest producer of petrol vehicles.

Not only are ICE cars rubbish, they’re even more rubbish than they’re advertised to be. Not actually difficult to do these measurements yourself. VW criminally lied about the performance of its diesels (Dieselgate).…

I post a lot about cars because they’re the centre of a whole universe of social behaviours that need to change. The car is the most anti-social part of societies, and ‘drives’ (pun intended) a whole swathe of other…

New nasty wave of Covid brewing. A little true story to motivate you to not catch it. "A nurse said Long Covid made her so forgetful she thought she had early-onset Alzheimer's. She would get in the car and forget where…

Wankpanzers are combining two vacuous Australian passions, travel and big cars, to destroy Australian beaches.

I drive this road every day, and it's made me think about whether we've got lazy with road building. Lots of hilly bits like here, where instead of cutting the road into the topography of the land, to prevent large…

Battery research is going gangbusters. Sodium-sulfur batteries are what Toyota is rumoured to have ready to go within the next few years too, 4 times the range, much cheaper to make, and much faster to charge. That will…

The French are looking to cover all their large car parks with solar panels, generating as much electricity as 10 nuclear plants. At a *tiny* fraction of the cost. And no nuclear waste. And shaded parking for all.

We have one of these, a ZR hybrid. Not only does it drive brilliantly (it smokes everything at the lights, because of the huge low-end torque from the electric motor), but it corners like nothing else, as many hatches…

Social media has made all needed social change almost impossible, bogged down in endless fake debates. The smartest thing the ALP can do right now is target households with full electrification for their homes. Heavily…

You can see here that even if we decided not to use renewables, shifting to EVs using our current grid electricity would still cut the cost of motoring by 50%. Add renewables and that’s 70-80%. And that doesn’t even…

I was sceptical about tyre repair kits they ship with a lot of new cars now, instead of a spare. The ones that pump sealant into the tyre while inflating it. But I’m a fan now, actually preferring it to a spare. Saves a…

Terrible. I’d suggest getting an EV, never needs a mechanic, or a starter motor :)

Great Central Coast company, converting prime movers to EVs. You can see how they swap out the battery when it needs charging, takes only a few minutes, much faster than filling the truck with diesel. Swap-out stations…

Yep. Again, it's not that I love cars particularly or even renewables. It's that these obvious facts of physics and economics are hidden by the bullshit of social media. Energy is also central to all economies, so if…

Nothing flushes out society’s dumbest people faster than any social media post about electric vehicles. Have a look at the comments, usually with smirking emojis.

The pro-petrol/diesel crowd trawl FB looking for any mention of electric vehicles, and then it starts. The same dumb things said over and over. Not one of them here for example even understands what a PHEV is, that the…

MG was a famous British car company, bought by the Chinese, who turned it into innovative EV designs. Prices are dropping with every new model, soon EVs will be cheaper than ICEs to buy. They’re already hugely cheaper…

Imagine if this had been a self-driving car, there'd be calls for them to be immediately banned. It's fascinating how we attribute skill and morality with humans and machines. Nobody says (though I think they should)…

I focus on cars and renewables because they’re the centre of a new industrial revolution. And therefore of a whole new society. Our petrols, diesels and coal-fired power are 19th century technologies, over a century…

BMWs have auto-emergency braking as standard. The driver obviously had it switched off. Something he can contemplate as he spends the rest of his life in jail, a tragedy in every way. I always have all the…

The Greenies over at Goldman Sachs (that's a joke). Again, if you disagree, I strongly encourage you to invest your life savings in petrol and diesel vehicle companies.

If you run out of petrol or diesel, is it because your car doesn't have enough range? Or are you just a wally for not filling it?

One of these passed me on the road today. Haval is doing great business, it’s the old Great Wall Motors. An example of how fast China learned to make cars, these are great vehicles. High quality, and cheap. And the…

Tesla Powerwall sales in Australia are booming. The thing I love about the Amber wholesale company is that it allows people with batteries to sell their excess power into the grid at peak times, which is the only time…

My EV did 900km on its latest tank. 45 litres. These labels are on the number plates, one of the things less understood about EVs is that they don’t have to be fully electric to be an EV. In a hybrid the petrol motor…

Chinese car makers are growing fast. Chery is one I'd never even heard of, but it's the biggest exporter of cars in China. This EV (they have petrols and hybrids too) gets excellent reviews, on price and equipment and…

As a kid I used to wonder why cars could go up to 260 km/h, when by law you could only drive at 110 km/h maximum. The reason is that petrol and diesel engines are so hopelessly weak, that they make them much larger so…

Have done over a year’s driving now in the Kluger hybrid. The money saved in petrol has easily covered the difference in price to the regular petrol model. Every km we drive now is pure profit. And hybrids give you that…

Have posted about gears many times. I think it’s such an important thing, because ’driving a stick’ is such a totemic thing for many ICE-lovers. The only reason ICEs have gears is because the engines are so inefficient…

Another reason people think petrols and diesels have more grunt is the sound they make. The roar of a V8! The sound an ICE makes is the car farting. Exhaust gases. Like choosing a human partner by how loud they fart. So…

Watch Jeremy Clarkson, who generally hates EVs, race Tesla’s 7-seater family SUV against a 600 horsepower, V10 Audi R8.

This is the main mechanicals of an EV. Beautifully simple. Electric motors (in red here) on the axles so no energy losses through having to translate motion to the wheels. The drivetrain in an ICE is so ridiculous,…

The main reason petrol and diesel cars were built to have a relatively high range is so they wouldn’t need to go to the servo very often. There are only 6500 servos for over 10 million vehicles in Australia. If they…

All burning of fossil fuels is grossly inefficient. Two-thirds of the energy is lost as heat. For example a petrol or diesel car’s fabled ‘range’ is actually bought by putting over 3000km worth of energy into a tank,…

Many mistake the prices for the early adoption of a new technology with the mature price, as it gets rolled out. A Model T car cost the equivalent (in today's dollars) of nearly $30,000 in 1909. 15 years later it cost…

Sales of Teslas by year.

Tesla have the market almost to themselves because the rest of them can’t get their act together. (Ferrari is a highly niche market with huge markups.)

I don't generally like American cars, they're mostly woeful. But Tesla is different, innovative engineering. Have a look at their new Roadster, the fastest car in the world. The acceleration you see in this short video…

This is a Tesla semi. Will do a few posts on this, because it’s revolutionising trucking. A range of over 800km. And here’s the main thing that has the trucking industry excited. Using one of these instead of a diesel…

Tesla semi again, so many amazing stories about this one. The engineers designed the truck to drive just like a car, so that (get this) the truck is less likely to disrupt other traffic. They recognised that a lot of…

Final on the Tesla semi for now. Jay Leno had a long chat with Tesla engineers and took one for a test drive. Quite a long video but fascinating at every moment. Little brilliant design details, like steps into the…

Here they come. I wouldn't want to own a traditional car company right now. Many of them are slowing down their EV plans not because they think EVs don't have a market, but because they can't produce them fast enough.…

They're already cheaper, if you count the total cost of owning the car over its lifetime, including fuel and maintenance. Like a fleet buyer, that's how they calculate the actual cost of a vehicle, and how we should…

The smart thing Tesla understands is that a big part of making the shift to EVs will be a social shift, not engineering. The engineering is a no-brainer, ICEs are rubbish and the sooner they’re gone, the better. Tesla…

Towing, something very few people do in % terms, is another anti-EV favourite. (Electric motors are much better at pulling weight than ICEs, and towing impacts range for both.) Engineers have already solved it. They add…

Look at the number of EV models out there already, and how many are from Asia. Tesla doesn’t even make the top 20, in number of models.

New EVs now in local car yards. The invasion has begun 🙂 Quite cute that one too, like an early VW.

Have a peek into where we’ll be in just a few years. Worth remembering Australia doesn’t make a single vehicle in this country, so what happens overseas will happen here. That’s where we buy our cars.

These plans are becoming more common, with the huge amount of renewables in the middle of the day pushing wholesale prices below zero, to negative. OVO still makes money from this, giving you electricity for nothing,…

An EV will run a heater for 60 hours or more if a car is frozen in place like this. It doesn't need to waste any energy keeping a ridiculous combustion engine idling to generate heat, for starters. You'd get about…

Oh dear, oh dear. I dunno, these petrol cars. You'd think after more than a century they'd have figured out how to stop them catching fire.

Thanks to Trevor for the link. ‘Range’ is a total furphy when talking about cars. It can be as little or as large as engineers design it to be. EVs were the first proper cars, you can see Thomas Edison standing next to…

Again it's not a particular interest in energy that makes me post about it. It's because energy is the centre of societies, everything they do. The black line is the US. Australia (not shown) is close to that black…

I was laying in bed this morning looking up at the ceiling fan, and realised it’s been running non-stop, for days, to provide gentle airflow. Completely silently, without fuss, using hardly any power at all. And it made…

The famous Le Mans 24 hour race introduced hybrids just over a decade ago, thinking it would just be a good way to say they were doing their bit for climate change. The hybrid won, and hybrids have won every race since.…

Another chapter of ‘how crap combustion engines really are.’ Using a new petrol mower for one hour produces more air pollution than driving a car 70km. Garden tools like mowers produce 5% of the air pollution in the US…

I never warn people of speed cameras or radar traps, because I’m so sick of people paying no attention to speed limits that I think they deserve every fine they get if they ignore them. To me it’s not just about safety,…

Race cars rev like crazy at the start of a race because petrol engines have zero power except at high revs. It’s exciting, goosebumps, the sound. Though that’s just the cars farting, literally. Some equate the sound…

Alan Kohler pointed out last week that the biggest story of the year was one nobody covered. China became the world’s biggest exporter of cars, in March. It was already the world’s biggest producer of cars - it has such…

Watch all of this play out in real-time. BYD (another Chinese manufacturer) is less than 12 months’ old in Oz. Only Tesla now sells more EVs than it does. The different Chinese brands are competing with each other here…

The pace of change is so fast there’s almost a new announcement like this every single day. All of these projects will be completed inside 5 years, some inside 2. It’s very quick to install a big battery, remember Tesla…

I love when people experience EV performance. Quite honestly, there will come a day in my lifetime when everybody will wonder how we put up with petrol and diesel cars for so long.

70% increase in public chargers in 2023 alone. The NRMA is contracted to install these every 150km on key long-distance routes. It’s critical to remember most EV charging will happen at home, these fast-chargers are for…

Seems worth a try for some cleaner, more powerful cars, almost free electricity, and clean air.

I’ve had a few people ask me why I’m so critical of social media. There are many reasons, one of which is that my work takes me into places where the direct impact of social media on real world things happens. Like the…

One of my kids gave me a stern look and warned me not to share pictures of them on social media this Christmas. I almost never do that anyway, so it was never going to happen. We’ve raised them well! Transacting…

Electric and hybrid aircraft are already on the market. They may represent a boon for flying, for ordinary people. Right now the aviation industry is heavily centralised at massive airports, which have access to the…

A great friend loves Peugeots. He kept an entire farm shed full of old Peugeots, so that he’d have a supply of spare parts, as many were no longer supported. This will become the only way to keep your ICE running.…

People who are close to these accidents know the lifelong trauma they cause. I’m on that road every day, it has average speed safety cameras installed, and has done for years. And the NSW Government is too gutless to…

Truck and train crash 70km from Broken Hill. The truck driver is 75! The two train drivers died.

Car crash investigation completed.

Driving those case numbers down, a day at a time.

Paul McDermott (the comedian, ex-DAAS, Good News Week etc.) contracted Covid just before Christmas. He’s double-vaxxed. His story is worth reading (extract below). “On Christmas Eve I posted my PCR test results showing…

Up to half of truck delivery drivers for supermarkets are sick with Covid. The PM’s response: “We need truck drivers to keep on trucking”. While sick, presumably. We’re well beyond farce.

Remember when politicians pretended schools had to be open in a pandemic, because of childrens’ education and mental health? They don’t even pretend that’s the reason now. The PM, yesterday. In the meantime,…

Just let the kids run the countries, and banish all the middle-aged lawyers, businessmen and party hacks. Then we won’t need children driving forklifts and trucks.…

Two tired concepts in public conversation are: 1) narcissism, and 2) toxic gender. Both take wider social and political issues and try to make them about individual psychology. Which suits those who are in society's…

LEGAL BLOOD ALCOHOL LIMIT TO BE RAISED. With only 1000 road deaths a year in Australia, most not even alcohol-related, there is plenty of spare hospital capacity to deal with alcohol-related accidents. The legal blood…

For Valentines Day, back to my (unpopular) suggestion that the essence of all love is jealousy. (I took this from Proust, blame him.) If you're not jealous, you're not in love. We treat jealousy as some character flaw,…

Tired of hot air from the LNP, Cannon-Brookes decides to offer to buy AGL and shut the coal power stations himself. Ballsy. AGL are blocking the bid for now. It shows how the transition to renewables is appealing not…

In my lifetime already I predict we’ll look back at internal combustion engines and wonder what the hell we were doing using them as long as we did. Rubbish technology, hopelessly inefficient, thousands of moving parts…

Try buying a car right now, supply can be months away. Sometimes several years. Just one of many things in the ‘Economy’ grinding to a halt. The fact things are functioning at all globally is largely down to China’s…

This is WITH the 20 cent cut to fuel excise. Electric and hybrid car sales are going gangbusters. Reality always catches up with spin.

Some were a bit annoyed with the idea that car mechanics will mostly become extinct. (But they will.) I expect them to be equally annoyed with the coming extinction of manual vehicles. We mostly won’t even have gears.

The secret sauce of Lithgow for those who don’t live here, is that it’s one of the few places where the entire town is a community. Most larger and newer towns are fractured now by cars, people live in widely dispersed…

The bigger you make your roads, the more traffic you’ll get. Traffic breeds traffic. No government understands this. Most motorists don’t get it either.

One of the urban myths I’ve heard from several car enthusiasts now is that around the world there are electric car graveyards, where electric cars are dumped because it’s more expensive to replace the battery than buy a…

I’m glad to be at an age where pox scars from pus-filled lesions won’t impact my dateability.

Another hike in interest rates coming today. I think it’s worth remembering that this only matters because much of society has no money and is living off debt. And that this is why the gutting of the living standards of…

Show me the money. What's a nurse earn? "...a full-time GP in Australia earns on average between $200,000 to $350,000 per annum. As we said above, if you get transferred to a rural area, work more shifts during evenings…

Another example of how Australia just slept through a disastrous 10 years, under the previous government. We're seriously on track to becoming a third world country.…

This is the end of petrol and diesel vehicles. And the comparison is even more dramatic if you use solar rather than ordinary grid power, where the cost to drive 100km drops to $1.28. With current petrol prices, that…

Orwell often said politics is mostly about language. One of my favourites is one the boy racers of the world use, to argue against speed limits, ‘drive to the conditions’. What it really means is ‘we should be allowed…

Lots of talk of ‘wage-price spirals’. The fear that paying ordinary working people more will drive inflation. No concern at all about capital-price spirals in housing, for the past 30 years, driving prices higher and…

3 decades of spin has prevented people finding out about the genius of electrifying our energy and transport. For example, cars. Electric cars will not only be vastly more efficient, require almost no maintenance, have…

One of the main reasons cars dominate cities, is that city design has been handed over to property developers. A car is a dream to a property developer, because they can keep building millions of houses on unoccupied…

Driving through the Australian countryside again yesterday, I think we’re blinded by too many landscape paintings. The thing that should jump out screaming at us (I think), is that there’s nothing in it. Trees here and…

My dad and his friends emigrated to Australia at the start of the 1950s. They were part of that big wave of post-war immigration, that gave Australia the hugest rush of European culture and energy, after the war. They…

People may have seen me posting here for a few years now about how the political battles between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are actually something else. The continuation of the driving force of our history, the battle between…

I like to share vehicle technology, because I’m convinced people are not really aware yet of the revolution underway. Mitsubishi’s new Outlander PHEV (plug-in hybrid) is a case in point. It has an 84km full-electric…

We bought one of these. Kluger Hybrid. Obviously fuel costs are a part of the decision, plus cheap (and local) servicing. But it’s also a ‘self-driving’ car, which people know is a real interest of mine. It isn’t…

Anti-vax roid rage. This anti-vaxer apparently stopped a car carrying a doctor who administered Covid vaccines, and this is what he did. The bodybuilding community is a hotbed of ‘natural health’ numpties (this guy is…

Novated leases are a massive government subsidy to petrol and diesel vehicles. Good to see them under the spotlight, so we can finally start to get affordable full-electric vehicles in Australia. We have 3 decades of…

I think heat pumps are incredibly sexy. They can deliver up to 15 times as much energy as they consume. Which makes them actual producers of renewable energy. A country can cut its entire energy bill literally in half…

This is the car I posted about a couple of weeks ago. Completely sold out in a fortnight. You hear so much whining about things like electric cars and renewable energy. But that whining represents only about 5% of the…

By global standards, Australian homes are absolute rubbish in terms of energy efficiency. Like our car fleet. For the same reason, property developers lobby relentlessly to prevent higher standards, and the fossil fuel…

One myth car lobbies put out there is that electric vehicles are a major fire risk. The data shows clearly how stupid that one is. Car fires by vehicle type: * Gas/petrol: 1,529.9 fires per 100k sales _ 199,533 total…

Excellent run-down. New petrol and diesel vehicles will quickly become stranded assets. Fuel prices are about to climb quickly again, OPEC is planning to cut supply to boost prices and profits to themselves. And the…

Here’s Michael Faraday, genius, who invented the electric motor in 1821 while working on laws of induction, which those who’ve done physics will appreciate. Over a century ago. A thing of almost sublime beauty, with…

Here’s Michael Faraday, genius, who invented the electric motor in 1821 while working on laws of induction and discovering electro-magnetism, which those who’ve done physics will appreciate. Over a century ago, and half…

This is the KIA EV6. Mid-sized family electric car. Drive one of these next to a Porsche or Ferrari at the traffic lights, or any muscle car, and it’ll smoke them, you can watch them in the rear-view mirror as you drive…

Thanks to @[1112555254:2048:Dan] for this one. You have to watch if you want a real-world demonstration of everything I've been saying about electric cars. 'Smoked'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eGhjhx8O9M

I do a long commute, about 120km round trip per day. So I tried an experiment. One week I did the whole week in manual control of the car. The next I used cruise control for most of the driving. The result? I used 20%…

Hey @[621123725:2048:Adam], LNP were blocking it then, and they're still blocking it now.…

I’ve never been comfortable with children driving cars, children having children, or children drinking alcohol. Makes me sound old-fashioned, but actually it’s just that I was a teacher too, and saw firsthand how…

Those who say coal and oil are cheaper energy always leave out the part about the Australian taxpayer subsidising those industries to the tune of over $11 billion per year. Even with those subsidies they're still way…

If you lower the speed limit on busy roads, traffic as a whole flows much faster. Going slower actually makes you go faster. Speed limits are mostly designed to smooth the flow of traffic. My experience on the road…

Huge news. This gas field is enormous, 10 years ago it was a licence to make billions. Now our 2nd biggest energy company is pulling out without even starting it. Just as other companies sold coal-powered power stations…

These beauties have been electric almost from the start. Electric motor in each wheel. Massive torque, from 0 km/h. Remember that idiot PM we voted out saying electrics wouldn't tow your boat?

This is probably the world’s best car, the Mercedes EQS. All electric, but what’s interesting about reviews for this car is industry journalists now saying they won’t qualify a car as ‘luxury’ unless it’s electric. The…

Cars fascinate me so much because in many ways they’re the centre of what we call our economy. And as this and so many other industry analyses say, you wouldn’t want to be spending much on a petrol or diesel car now,…

This has been one of my pandemic projects, though it started well before the pandemic. Electrifying the household. It’s nearly 100% done. Solar panels will go up before Christmas. Ditched gas space heating over 5 years…

“The EV future will be revolutionary, and it's a revolution car people will want to be a part of.” This is World Car of the Year, the Hyundai Ioniq 5, full electric. While Tesla gets most of the EV attention, at the end…

Somebody defined the economy as ‘driving to a regional town to have coffee, to see if it’s different to the coffee at your local coffee shop’.

Australian vehicles use about 40 olympic swimming pools of fuel every day. Over 90% of that fuel is imported. That’s almost a billion dollars per week, going offshore. When the vehicle fleet shifts to electric, all of…

Teaching the kids to drive, and they sometimes ask about manual gearboxes, and whether they should learn how to drive them. I always say no, because when the national vehicle fleet transfers to electric in the next…

For the first 25 years of motoring in the UK, there were no petrol pumps. People had to buy fuel in 2-gallon cans from retailers, lug it home and fill the car. I mention this because often electric cars are criticised…

Have mentioned buying a Kluger hybrid and discovering by accident it's also a self-driving car. I do a daily round-trip commute of over 120 km. So in the past week I tested the self-driving technology. With me of course…

I love a truck and driver parade in Bathurst.

Rain or shine. Behind all of the umbrellas is the drivers.

Fuck OPEC. Those who cling to fantasies about continuing with their petrol and diesel cars need to remember that OPEC is little more than a mafia group. That's who you're making rich. They've been running the world for…

I imagine if this was an electric vehicle charging station, how it would be plastered over the news everywhere by the petrol and diesel fetishists. Funnily, electric vehicle charging stations don’t tend to blow up, nor…

Read this, these utes are already on the boats on their way here, arriving within weeks. Why are businesses lining up to buy them? They’ve done the sums, it will save them LOTS of money. At least 5 times cheaper over…

My first real insight into the genius of electric motors was a line trimmer (whipper snipper) my dad bought me more than 30 years ago. The Ryobi Electro Scorpion. It’s still going strong, and hasn’t once in more than 30…

Bathurst car races. Then, 2-3 days later. If you take comfort from ‘it’s only 19 people’, it’s worth remembering most people aren’t even bothering to test, and those that do don’t even have to report the result now. And…

Saul Griffiths is on a mission to electrify everything. Which is what we need to do if we’re not all going to be incinerated by climate change. And we have to do it fast. He’s an engineer, and amongst other things he’s…

Every time I walk through the car park of doctor surgeries past the expensive European cars, I'm reminded that they're public servants and are not held to account like any other public servant. The scale of the rorting…

Out of interest I rang the local Mitsubishi dealer to ask what the waiting time is now on the Outlander hybrid. 13 to 14 months. The reason for this (which the salesperson didn't tell me, but I already knew) is…

This is Tesla’s car-making plant in Shanghai. It had the capacity to roll out 750,000 Teslas per year. They’ve just upgraded that to make it 1.1 million per year. It’ll reduce waiting times in Australia significantly,…

The International Energy Agency projects net income for oil and gas producers will double in 2022 to US$4 trillion. Always follow the money. That’s the 4 trillion reasons to electrify everything. They use their spare…

Something not often mentioned by the ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ energy folk is firstly that we obviously still manage to have water when it isn’t raining. We use storage. But the big sleeper here…

Another way to look at Australia’s problems, through the lens of engineering. The largest countries in the world graduate more engineers every year than Australia graduates students in ALL fields. Yes they’re much…

What struck me again in the middle of the Bathurst floods yesterday is how destructive ‘the economy’ is. A sensible society would have looked at that river yesterday and said ‘I think people should take a day off, this…

Great summary piece from Finn (electrical engineer) on how car batteries will become a central part of our new grid. And covers the new terms, V2L, V2G and V2H.

A petrol car is about 25% efficient. An electric car is 90% efficient. It's your money (going to Texans and Arabs, if you go with petrol, and diesel.)

Have decided on a Tesla Powerwall. It will likely never fully pay for itself at current prices (though I nabbed one before the recent price hike), but with electricity prices projected to rise by as much as 80% next…

The fastest way to rein in inflation is to put some sort of price control on gas and electricity. That’s what’s driving much of the inflation. Not peoples’s wages, which haven’t gone up in a decade. The fastest way to…

I decided to share information about electric cars without selling our house. This guy is making money sharing it, I give it away for free.

Technically 45 degree angle parking was invented because it fits more cars than either parallel or a shallower angle, like 30 degrees. It was also thought to be easier for drivers to rejoin traffic, without having to…

This was the world’s first drive-in petrol station, opening in 1913. At the time there were already 500,000 cars on the road. Just as context for those who think the fact there isn’t an EV charger on every corner…

Many think peer pressure somehow ends when we leave school. That’s not true, in fact it’s the main way all of life works, even more so with adults. The primary driver of what people do, is what everybody else does. The…

Elon Musk is a wally, but one thing I admire about him is that he actually builds things. Good, innovative things, like the Powerwall 2. And satellite broadband, cars and trucks, rockets, solar roof tiles etc. All…

A few people asked me to say a bit more about home batteries. I’ll talk about the Tesla Powerwall 2, because it’s what we have, but there are multiple brands out there now. But the Powerwall is probably still the best…

My workplace has a big Christmas party this afternoon. Covid is rife in the building this week, but the party will go ahead. Who knows how many will then take Covid home for Christmas. I won’t be going. For my own…

Putting a large solar system on your house, even including a battery at today’s charges, costs less than buying a small car. How many households now have 4 or 5 cars? What’s the gain, in having those vehicles? How does…

This sort of story gives a whole new context to the driver-assist technologies now being included with cars. These accidents wouldn’t happen, with that technology.

If you’ve had Covid and are having memory problems, you’re far from alone. Another recent story I heard was a guy who’d had Covid, driving to work at 8pm thinking it was 8am. And a woman getting lost driving her kids to…

An electric taxi in the early 1900s, New York. There’s an assumption that electric vehicles today are the new technology, replacing petrol and diesel. But electric cars were built 50 years before either petrol or diesel…

“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology.” Carl Sagan (Exhibit A - electric cars, and Covid.)

I enjoy all the Flat-Earther electric car memes. I encourage the Flat-Earthers to invest all of their money in combustion vehicles, as quickly as they can, so that they’re unable to afford the electricty to post to FB.

Just a handful of comments on an article The Australian released saying sales of electric vehicles have tripled. Imagine being part of this community of fruit loops.

I bet this proposal will be denied. I watch the UK news as much as the Oz news, and they tried a similar thing there. And failed. Modern conservative parties are business lobby groups in disguise. Their priority will…

I destroyed the motor on a few tape decks growing up, because I constantly rewound songs. Sometimes to work out a guitar part, but more often because most songs are about 90% padding. There will only be a few moments…

Henry Ford. Introduced a 2-day weekend for his staff, figuring with more free time they'd spend more money, on his cars. That's exactly what happened. Every worker is also a customer at multiple businesses, including…

If you or I went outside and deliberately ran somebody over in our cars, and killed them, we would go to jail for much of the rest of our lives. Leaders such as these 2, who quite deliberately have killed over 2 million…

The new Sydney ring roads feel fantastic because the contrast with the old traffic jams is so nice. But in the longer term they’ll be a disaster, moving in exactly the opposite direction to urban design worldwide. As…

Roads create traffic. Every road we build to try to reduce congestion just increases the congestion. We don't need bigger roads because everybody bought more cars, people bought more cars because we built bigger roads.…

It might be surprising that I actually love cars. But I also think you can either have mass car ownership, or a functioning society. You can't have both. Notice how high on the list cars and roads are for those with…

Cars give you the freedom to go pretty much anywhere in a country. But that freedom bites back much harder against you than for you. Once people can use vehicles to go anywhere, there's nothing any more that makes their…

This is Nordlingen, in southern Germany. Over 1100 years old. (Trivia - also the city shown from the air at the end of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.) Look how beautifully self-contained cities were before…

The gun debates are about agency. One side says the gun has no agency, it's all people pulling the trigger. The other side says guns kill people. I suspect there are ultimately so many gun deaths in the US because it's…

The famous Australian 'Bell Bird'. The Bell Miner, technically. The greatest bully in the Australian bush. Birds sing to create territory, and Bell Birds sing without a pause, all day. A forest where you can hear bell…

"Up until about 1880, he said, cities functioned more like networked villages. A person likely worked, relaxed, and shopped all within about 20 minutes of their home. Cities of that era of course had plenty of their own…

Have been driving a lot more during the pandemic. Nobody follows speed limits, almost without exception. We have average speed cameras in place for trucks, turn them on for cars. Our hyper-individualism doesn't even see…

NSW the only State not to do this. What possible justification can people provide for not monitoring average speed? Been in place for trucks for years. The car lobby will suggest ‘driving to the conditions’ (i.e. using…

No individual makes traffic. Lots of individuals driving together make traffic. There's no separate 'we' making that traffic. To even make sense of traffic, they need to send somebody into the air to report on it, to…

This is Bathurst. People know I love patterns, and what they show. Bathurst is not unusual for modern cities, no strong pattern at all, it's sprawl. What does that mean? It means what it shows - no cohesive social…

Much of China is still an entirely different model of humans in the landscape. One that Europe used at one time, too, the village model. People and other living things living in close proximity, in an integrated way.…

One more aerial shot for the day. Florence. Old cities could still be high density, and even have roads of sorts, without all the problems cars cause today. Access to the near vicinity (paths) rather than access to…

If there's a place on Earth most infected by the car virus, it has to be Los Angeles. Staggeringly that's suburbia you can see down there, criss-crossed by major highways. This space would be entirely dysfunctional…

I prefer older-style towns, where there were more trees than cars. Now each household has 3-4 or even more cars, often parked all over the nature strip too. And the general quality of gardens is dropping I think, lots…

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." Oscar Wilde

Here's a ripper on agency, Ben. Who did the killing here? The truck? The teen boys? The truck driver? The parents? The bin? Etc.

This is a drawing, using just a blue pen like you'd use at school or work. Nothing else. Oscar Okonu. The soul of this man is now living in ink as well as flesh, art extracted it and gave birth to it in a new material.

Rich countries are like cars who refuse to slow down for roadwork. Movement is their pathological obsession. For the whole of the pandemic they've tried to run 'normal life' alongside a pandemic. Now they're doing it…

Speed bumps one of my favourite examples of how morality and technology are not 2 separate things. Speed bumps only exist for moral reasons, to slow drivers down who won't do it of their own (moral) accord. There is…

One simple (and non-political) way to understand why Melbourne has needed to lock-down more than Sydney in the pandemic, is to look at how much movement occurs in each city. A city with more movement, means more people…

I used Westconnex for the first time last weekend, as well as the cross-city tunnel. All very smooth, and bliss to avoid Parramatta Road. But whoa, $40 in tolls! Public-private partnerships (PPP) are really just spin,…

Was I: A. Trying to get to work, or B. Filming a car commercial?

I'm seeing the same Economy-driven nonsense in other natural events now, not just the pandemic. For example yesterday, this was the travel advisory for the highway. I was on that road yesterday morning, there's no way…

Schools are by far the greatest drivers of social mixing. Look at the mobility plummet when schools are closed. Remember how many demand schools be open in a pandemic, when virus is in circulation. I call those people…

This is how society tends to develop. A bit like some kids put on weight before they hit a growth spurt, social things go through ‘mass’ phases - mass transport, mass shopping etc. - before then re-building ‘local’…

All on board fully vaccinated, 2 doses. 'Vaccines are our only way out of this pandemic'. Don't buy a used car off people who say that.

Have a look at this city in Morocco, and then these trees exhibiting what is called 'crown shyness'. Trees leave distinctive gaps between themselves, in their crowns. It's a pattern almost identical to streets in old…

John Thaw, as Inspector Morse, stating the often unspoken truth of our great housing market democracies. Roads and cars enslave us, and houses even more so. We’ve ‘economised’ all the basics of life, turned them into…

Cities before cars turned them into car parks.

Guess which strategy NSW is using? Control by suburb. Like trying to fence wind. They're not following the health advice, if you believe that I have a great second-hand car for you.

My favourite thing to watch is Nordic Noir. Watching a lot of shows with sub-titles made me think, notice that no matter the language or ‘culture’, the world people live in looks almost exactly the same. The houses,…

The proposed truck driver’s blockade on Tuesday takes populist craziness to a whole new level. If you read these people online, they’re totally unhinged. I think the community anger would be nuclear.

My grandmother died this month. My last remaining grandparent. Nanna. Because of Covid she got no funeral, though at some point we’ll get together and commemorate her. That’s her on the left, holding either me or Mike…

The government released a ‘roadmap’ out of the pandemic yesterday. The metaphor tells you everything. Nobody uses roadmaps any more, we all use GPS. Real-time data adjusted to constantly changing conditions. Somebody…

Well now, the zoomed-out version shows 5 lots of fines for Revenue NSW, score. It is good to see normal service returning in NSW, where the blokes are at the pub, the ladies homeschooling, the alcohol and gambling and…

The new Premier said these words yesterday. Orwell used to say that politics is all about language. Look at that word - 'alongside'. What does it mean? The problem is, Covid doesn't live alongside us. It lives INSIDE…

So often the smart and right thing to do won’t be the popular thing to do. Have a look at this excerpt from a BBC interview in 1967, of a female government minister introducing drink driving laws. Don’t go along with…

Why masks matter. The limo driver who leaked Delta into Australia, in NSW? (Because Gladys didn't require him to wear one.) So far, that's led to 169,000 Covid cases, more than 1000 deaths, and billions in lost economic…

Denmark shows one way we can stop cars destroying where we live.

Stadiums are an excellent example of how little space people need, and how much space their cars need. Our cities are big car parks, cars have taken them over.

Penrith hitting 48.9 degrees yesterday made me think yet again - where we need to get to with climate change isn’t everybody who dismisses it suddenly believing it. We need to get to them saying ‘ok, maybe there’s a…

These always look scary. But it’s possible we misunderstand that viruses are active agents. It’s not in their best interest to wipe us out, we’re their hosts. They need us to survive. Usually pandemics arise in extreme…

A road is a nothing space. It takes you to another place, its purpose is always somewhere else, any spot on a road is meaningless for itself. Driving on a road makes you immobile with your attention fixed permanently…

I’m not sure I explain why DST bothers me so much, how it connects to other ideas. My objections to travel, or to the idea that we’re not responsible for what our ancestors do, or to cars and maps, or a ‘climate’…

It’s surprising how blindsided we are sometimes by social change. For example, I wonder if it’s sunk in yet that this may be the last generation to ever get their driving licence and own a car?

One thing that interests me more all the time is how basic realities eventually overpower anybody’s opinion. For example cars again. I love them, but I criticise them a lot, because they’re a nonsense in the modern…

Continuing on a car theme. The transition from horses to cars in cities took only 10 years. The horse manure crisis was a level of pollution absolutely dwarfed by modern car pollution.…

What if the real problem with domestic and family violence is love? Just as cars and guns kill, but only a small number of us, what if the real problem in deadly relationships is our ideas about love, which become…

This from a discussion on domestic violence. Our domestic situations are isolated, and isolation breeds violence. Cars helped us do it. We need to think much wider than the gender politics that wants to turn this into…

Sometimes different issues converge. For me, right now it’s coronavirus and domestic violence (DV). In the past infectious disease like TB was often treated in open-air sanitoria, see pic below. Researchers are now…

Today conservative parties in the Western world aren't really parties, they're lobby groups for big corporations, with simple messages - lower taxes, lower regulations. Corporations funded the overthrow of these…

The problem with using case numbers to guide our Covid-19 response is that it's like driving only looking in the rear-view mirror. It takes about 2 weeks for people to show symptoms and get tested. They show us…

Brilliant! V8 racing will go on, but virtually, and broadcast live in HD. Thinking happening everywhere you look. https://www.supercars.com/allstars/

I'm watching the V8 e-series, and it's fascinating. Unable to race because of the pandemic, they're doing it virtually. They even went from an Oz track to Monza, in the space of a few minutes. Easy to chuckle at it as…

Even the economists saying don't ease lockdowns. Except for this one, check her out on Q&A, feral. Who's left that's driving the 'open up' pressure? Mostly businesses losing money. Watch Gigi also get a slapdown with…

Oscar Wilde defined sentimentality as "the luxury of having an emotion without paying for it". Disasters seem to prompt waves of sentimentality, where we try to emote our way out of the problem. 'Positivity' will fix…

Think I'm exaggerating when I say people don't give a shit about schools and kids? Gladys' daily press conference, talking about getting people off public transport and back into cars, or onto bikes, or walking. Great…

Notice the fine print here. It’s not fans, it’s the sponsors. Big money is driving our re-opening, not science. Remember how we were going to relax a restriction, then wait 3 weeks to test how it goes? All gone.…

Ruby Princess docked on 19 March. It’s just about Australia’s entire pandemic. It kickstarted transmission in all modes, and from early May all NSW has really had is overseas (plane) arrivals driving numbers. The only…

What bothers me about the whole vaccine thing is that medical experts are poor guides for pandemics. We might get a vaccine that gets us through COVID-19, but there are plenty more pathogens just waiting to whack us.…

Have been driving to work because of the pandemic. One thing I’ve noticed again is just how many people completely ignore road rules. Had a person go past me yesterday who was doing about 140 km/h. Couple of P-platers…

Vienna decided to take on the car lobby. Pics speak for themselves.

Why we need to think? Society is made of ideas. Ideas aren't just 'about' things, they are what all things are made of. Like a car engine, what's it made of? You could say metal and oil etc. But that metal and oil exist…

The big orange man-baby has just done a drive-past of his supporters outside his hospital. Think about this - his car has about a half-dozen secret service agents in it. Windows must be up for his safety. So a known…

Nearly 70 years ago. But is this moment now gone, like we often think with time? That it ‘flows’ and what was in the past is now lost forever? Nope. That moment in 1954 is still happening right now as you look at the…

My photo for every modern election. The Simpsons know. It’s not Left vs Right, that stuff is long over. People are at war with their own institutions. Populism. They’ll vote for anybody who promises to stick it to the…

If I had to give relationship advice to anybody, it would be find the person different to who you are in all the right ways. That person is Kell, for me. Her music is rubbish, she watches rom coms, she hates windows and…

In NAIDOC week, read Gammage’s book to completely change how you think about this whole topic. Aboriginal Australia was nothing like what you might have been taught or imagined. It was a manufactured Garden of Eden, a…

Modern cars are too well made, and too comfortable. I say this because I think the reason cars are destroying our communities is because they’re not just modes of transport. Cars are the way people never have to leave…

A story with two of my favourite characters. Tourism and cars.

Many people look at politicians as evidence the world is broken. Me, it’s more people like the couple of anti-social dickheads who walked my street last night randomly pushing over peoples’ garbage bins, forcing people…

Evidence lurks in interesting places. We wonder how society ends up split between millions of ordinary folk and ‘elites’. In the last 30 years almost no movie that people actually went to see has won best picture at the…

Around the World in 80 Days won Best Picture at the Oscars in 1957. It would never win today. To me there’s a lot to be learned in thinking about why.

Do you get anxious about whether you have enough super? Super is I think one of the great shams of the finance industry, who naturally want you to invest as much money with them as you can. The idea of ‘lifestyle’…

Queen playing at the Oscars. Might actually watch it for the first time in years. Has a rock act ever played the Oscars, before now?

I hit a safety barrier head on at over 100 km/h about 16 years ago. The only injury was a bruised thumb, from the air bag. Without the barrier I wouldn’t be here. The car lobby is extremely powerful, and extremely…

Watching the Oscars makes me think about 'making it'. About 'recognition'. It's a whole room who have devoted themselves to making it. To being recognised. The funny thing about recognition is, that's all it is. Being…

Closing the loop. Entertainment beats virtue-signalling. Is there anything more pompously ‘correct’ than the Oscars?

How often are real-life situations really between what’s good and bad? Hardly ever in my experience. In real life we evaluate everything we do, what brand of cheese to buy, what to let our kids watch, whether to buy a…

What Einstein sort of meant by relativity. If you raced a F1 car against a Toyota Corolla, which car would win?

I have a daughter now old enough to drive. It's a tension for me, because: 1. I don't think kids should be driving cars. 2. I think society already has way too many cars and drivers. 3. The greatest killer of…

Look at that piece of ridiculously complex, inefficient junk on the left. There will come a time I'm sure when we'll wonder how we ever put up with stinking, loud internal combustion engines. 100% torque available from…

I figured out that the Australian definition of a long weekend is, “an ordinary weekend, with a day of driving added to it.”

I don’t like the term re-wilding, because it’s not about letting the landscape be ‘wild’, just about letting far more things live in it. It turns out all landscapes need as many animals, plants and people in them as…

There are plenty of people out there who think ‘real’ driving is driving a manual. Gears in cars are actually only there because internal combustion engines are crap technology and have narrow power bands. Electric cars…

@[580567321:2048:Kate] told me about the association researchers are seeing between algal blooms and motor neurone disease. A lot of our lakes and rivers are increasingly heavy with algae, I know the big recreation…

Did you know the pressure of the air on your body is the equivalent of a one tonne car sitting on you? Just as vacuums don’t suck, air pushes into them, when you breathe the air pushes into you, there’s a lot of…

What happens when maths and physics get too far apart. We're usually taught that 60 and 120 degrees here are the size of the angles. But you can't measure an angle, you can only measure the deviation it introduces in…

I reckon every behaviour you can see on the road is matched by a different way people live and act in society. Have a look at this, our roads tell us every day how to solve society's problems. (It won't be individualism…

A global map of the internet. I've been driving my family mad excitedly watching the NBN being installed in our street. You see, for me, what holds the world together isn't politics, or love. It's technology. That fibre…

When cars didn't own cities.

It's a long time since Railway Square in Sydney looked like this. The blissful time before cars ate the world.

Tesla once said "if you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration." I think he's right and I'd add to that - resonance.Resonance is the way objects interact, and humans…

When even the head of the AMA is calling it a dud, how does it survive? The LNP shut down the car industry for costing taxpayers a helluva lot less than private health insurance.

This is the next step for the 'sovereignty' movement. Sovereignty moves inside the individual. Seriously nasty in many ways, these people do things like shoot policeman asking for their driver's licence. Notice they…

Bacteria can swim like animals, photosynthesize like plants, and cause decay like fungi. One or another of these microbial geniuses can detect light, produce alcohol, waft hydrogen and fix nitrogen gas, ferment sugar to…

Those socialists down in Victoria, I dunno. The role of a State government is to help the gambling, alcohol, toll road and property development industries, not to do things like this. Loving that vehicles are being put…

Have you ever noticed that mobile phones make us immobile? We have to stop what we're doing to use them (why they're dangerous in cars). Not a criticism, I think they're misunderstood. Why do we desire and use them so…

Electric cars are a great step. But the bigger problem I think is - there are far, far too many cars. More mass/public transport options is an option, but even more than that is changing cities and towns so you don’t…

Saw an ad, "Not Ready to Retire? Become a part-time school bus driver." They should have added "and you'll be ready to retire in no time."

Hmm, did wonder about this. If nothing else, clubs may struggle to get any insurance at all. "Studies have been done in the US - in just one game of (American) football, a child receives about 50 blows. Some of them are…

I like walking on roads when they're empty. Part of it is to reclaim the space from vehicles. But it's also because of one property they have that I find interesting. Road space is unbounded space. The function of a…

A car is an institution. I think all successful technologies are institutions. For a car: - the car company itself is an institution - the parts and spares industries are institutions - road building and maintenance are…

MND is motor neurone disease. A really, really nasty thing (Stephen Hawking was one of the most famous sufferers of it). This bacteria is in all our waterways and dams, and the warming climate is making it much worse.…

Imagine if trains, buses and planes ignored rules. It rarely happens, those forms of mass transport are strongly regulated in multiple ways. 95% of drivers I see on the road ignore speed limits and other rules all the…

The anger people feel for institutions is raw. In this case none of the institutions being blamed have actually done a thing wrong. But it’s pretty standard, and I think why around the world populism is winning.…

More on ideas. What are technologies made of? Ideas. From the materials they’re made from to the expertise in putting them together, it’s all ideas. I don’t think we often see ideas as material things. That pink car is…

In 1952 London had a 5-day smog emergency (picture). About 12,000 people died from the filthy air. Sydney is in the middle of a week of filthy air, the rest of us have been too. The damage that does to lungs and blood…

I still think blood pressure became a medical thing because it's fairly easily measured. A case of measurement driving medicine, rather than medicine driving measurement.

Self-driving cars are already hugely safer than humans driving cars. It's interesting that we hold them up to a much higher standard than human-driven cars. Cars are much more than just modes of transport - they're the…

Cities were so much more interesting before cars destroyed them. Most people alive today would never have experienced life in a city not governed by vehicles. (Thanks to Alex for the photo.)

I love cars, which might surprise some people. What I don’t like is our one-dimensional thinking about them. So here’s a filter - could you survive without a car? Many of us actually live that question firsthand. As…

One of your holiday places I think @[783412914:2048:Kyle]? Its become a bit of a must-go place. “During the Christmas holidays the quiet village - about 180km south of Sydney - transforms into one giant car park.” No…

Apple have been asked to look at ways to make their devices less addictive. But I think we’re looking at this backwards, it’s not the technology (technology isn’t a thing). Why are people so glued to screens? My guess…

The train strike interests me, to see how people respond. The government in this case has been trying to create an impression in the public mind that recent chaos on the trains is due to lazy drivers calling in sick. As…

They’re doing stunning graphics for stats these days, check this out. I was in a serious car accident about 15 years ago and don’t know how I survived, luck more than anything. You always assume these things happen to…

Average speed safety cameras for cars, again in the news. NSW is going it alone in not using them (the Nationals don’t like them). These cameras would change our roads in the most profound way. Much smarter and fairer…

Cars are evil, part 79.

It is interesting how we will tolerate carnage caused by human error, but one mistake by a machine is scary. It says something about how we view identity and machines and moral responsibility. This technology will…

Some of the work being done with autonomous vehicles in Australia. Notice that part of the new world being developed is not just making vehicles individually autonomous, it’s to network them to each other and connect…

This was genuinely useful in the paper today. Shows traffic volumes over Easter on the M1, at what times, from last year. If everybody reads it, it'll be interesting, the peaks might just all shift to the quieter times…

Moloch, a Canaanite god. Worshipped in Carthage, by some accounts, in the form of a giant bronze statue, which was heated to red hot, and children were then thrown into the statue as sacrifices. Barbarism, you might…

Notice how we tend to see freedom as freedom *from* something? As if we are more free if we have fewer connections, rather than more. It’s the paradox of freedom, we are usually more free the *more* we form…

A telescope helps you see things that are ‘far away’. So it works with space. But if you point it to the stars you’re seeing things that happened anywhere from 1 minute to billions of years ago. So a telescope is a time…

One of life’s precious jewels I think, right under our noses. Life-changing. Takes a few words to describe, sorry. What is awareness? In simple physical terms we often think it means ‘I am aware’, meaning ‘me’, up here…

“But this is not, or not really, an article about speed, or cameras, or even cars. It is about the rise of the antisocial bastards who believe they should be allowed to do what they want, whenever they want, regardless…

Watching old movies makes me think about how much language has lost power. Paradoxically the proof is in how accepted and even ignored swearing is today - 100 years ago telling somebody you found their behaviour…

Sitting at the station in the afternoon reminds me of the many beautiful things cars destroyed.

Like a dog returning to its vomit, I’m back at cars. There’s still more to do. We need our networked villages back. Try walking where you live, be it town or city, and just listen, and you’ll notice we’ve become used to…

Patterns appear, and nobody plans them or designs them. So they’re pretty mysterious, but maybe also the secret to understanding society, because society is these patterns. They’re not designed or planned by…

Why I love libraries. One of the only places in society now which is still relatively silent. Our world is so noisy. Motors and engines mostly, the din is constant. But music too, too much music. Music as noise, music…

More tribal mind/patterns. After 9/11, many Americans shifted to their cars to avoid planes for travel. This led to a spike in road deaths of about 1600 above the average. Most of those people would still be alive if…

I love villages, I think they're the healthiest and nicest form of human settlement. Everything at just the right human scale, not so small as to destroy privacy but not so large that people feel alone. And a balance of…

The healthiest weight is ‘overweight’. There are a lot of assumptions in the diet and exercise industries that have no basis in reality at all. Driving a lot of that ‘research’ is really nothing more than an aesthetic…

So language people, why do people ‘have’ sex? They don’t have gardening, or shopping, cleaning or driving.

An interesting question - what *is* language? Is it a material thing, or not? If it’s not material, what is it? I think words are real, ‘material’ things, like chairs, or cars. Words have real physical effects, saying…

Like Serres, my first love is music. But I’ve mentioned before, it’s starting to feel like noise. Noise is the way to occupy territory, as birds and other animals know. Music is about territory, that’s its main…

My first degree was in an area which is hardly even mentioned to young students, but is the cutting edge of nearly all science and engineering. Materials engineering. It’s new materials which have been the real driver…

Patterns again. Who creates traffic patterns? We do, obviously, but as individuals? It’s much more mysterious than that. Patterns are the path to what some call God.…

China has 25,000km of high speed rail services. Let that sink in. My bet is the country that commits to building things will win, over the country that commits to cutting taxes. The Anglo countries live a fantasy that…

More modern morals. Is shopping a moral activity? (I think all activities are.) For example: - does online shopping screw bricks and mortar retail, but keep thousands of cars off the road and save poor people money? -…

Traffic ‘calming’. A big area of my own studies and research, how non-human things have agency. We like to say they don’t, but our societies wouldn’t function if that were true. We could ask drivers, for example, to…

Got lichen on your roof? Lichens are amazing things, that may provide a model for understanding everything in our world. Lichens are not a single organism. They’re a symbiosis of multiple organisms. Evidence is…

Glad this is at least being tried. Though I think just banning cars may not fix things. But look at the difference to the quality of life in the city when they’re gone. Our cities and even towns a long time ago now…

Rest In Peace. Everyday wonders - the origins of that phrase is one of them, I think. For the earliest Christians it was actually dormit in pace - to ‘sleep in peace’. Why is this an everyday wonder? I think I posted…

My trip home every day. First class, quiet comfort, spectacular views. Costs me $2 a trip, can have beer or wine, hot or cold food. Cars nearly destroyed train travel, it’s very sad going past the old unused stations in…

A wonder from the English countryside. The hedgerow. We use fences now, but the hedgerow is way more than just a natural fence. I think it shows an entirely different relationship between people and the landscape. A…

Bit of Henri Bergson magic. Bergson pointed out that space and time aren’t two separate things, they define each other. For example, something ‘far away’ is space, right? No, said Bergson, it’s also time, because it’s a…

I know, I’m a broken record on this. But it’s like Daylight Saving, I think things are changing. Our towns and cities have been ruined by cars, and finally that’s becoming clearer to more people. Have a look at these…

I just spent a few days in Melbourne. It made me angry, because it reminded me again of the unforgivable vandalism that was done in ripping up Sydney’s tram network. Walking in central Melbourne is pleasant, the trams…

To the driver of the Council street sweeping truck who’s been driving and beep-reversing up and down the street for the past 20 minutes, before 7am, Merry Christmas to you too.

Cars need to be reined in, without screwing the poor in the process, who need them the most. Cars are filthy (because the internal combustion engine is shit technology), they take over every space they're allowed into,…

Thanks @[606028898:2048:Jason] for this one. If you think unions are corrupt and of no use to you, then you've been got at by the people who have been trying to destroy them for the past 40 years. That's exactly what…

Dyson makes beautiful (and eye-wateringly expensive) things. Their current crop of fans are interesting because they're also air purifiers. For a lot of years air purifiers were mostly for chronic allergy sufferers, a…

Hoping they do use average speed cameras for cars and bikes at some point. There's something unhealthy about a law that's barely observed, as a motorist there are days you feel like you're the only person on the road…

Talking about road safety brings up interesting comparisons with air safety. Private planes are nearly as dangerous as cars. Commercial flight (much, much safer) went the way that driving and cars are being dragged…

"It may shock you, but Americans spend more than $2 trillion every year on car ownership — more money than we spend on food. What’s even more staggering is that for all the money we spend on them, the 250 million cars…

Probably the most tragic thing about this Oscars moment was Beatty's and Dunaway's face reconstructions. Is there anybody with a real face left in Hollywood?

Many, many people are despairing with politics. But that's what they want, to make people switch off politics. When people do that, it paves the way for the rich and powerful to do whatever they like. Politics isn't…

Which car has right of way here Amy Thompson (or anybody else)? Been a few years since I did the test, apparently lots of older drivers get this one wrong.

3 laps into the new F1 season, and it already looks even more boring than last year, which takes some doing. All the technical changes make it even more impossible for anybody to overtake, and only two cars can really…

I wouldn't mind the AMA 'dabbling' in a little medical science too, occasionally. Plenty of what Evans says is backed by genuine cutting edge medical science, just not by doctors because they're not always connected to…

Often we see fads as things for kids. Yo-yos, types of clothes, pop music one hit wonders like Gangnam Style, etc etc. But adults like fads too, and it's growing. Types of phone, types of fitness activity, types of…

Air pollution costs Australia between 11 and 25 billion dollars a year in health costs. And we're one of the better countries. A real sleeper health issue. The National Pollutant Inventory…

Bus driver: "the whine in the diff on this bloody thing is worse than my ex-wife."

It's strange that we wouldn't tolerate this for flying, but we do for driving. There are lots of things that could be done, but the biggest challenge of all is getting people to give up the individual focus of cars and…

Still love this one. If you measure the pressure in the tyres while a car is up on a lift like this, and then again when the car is on the ground again, which pressure will be higher?

We need cool heads to prevail. TVs seem to be the greatest risk. Some numbers for America: - you are 35000 times more likely to die of heart disease than from terrorism - you are 34000 times more likely to die of cancer…

Imagine this. You set up a TV show where people take cars/fridges/furniture/dishwashers, do a few hundred dollars worth of repairs to them and then sell them for up to thousands more than the original price. Consumer…

"The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras. The government won’t fix the roads, so these desperate entrepreneurs fill in…

Number 4 would actually be my number 2. My number 1 would be people whose definition of a speed limit is whatever the person in front of them is doing, plus 20.…

The real reason electricity prices are going up? Gas prices are going up, the two are directly linked, because gas turbines are the newest additions to the power generation system. Look at the graph, it's a perfect…

We don't often think about the gigantic amount of fuel our passion for flying and travel uses. The larger planes, like the 747 or A-380, carry over 300,000 litres of fuel. So when you take one of these and fly to London…

Luck and morals, real thought-provoking topic. Three examples, and funny how we make morality something separate to the practical everyday lives we lead. I don't think it's separate at all. 2 drunk drivers, both caught.…

"The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the average American, but we don’t buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff. My family owns three cars, not…

A question about ethics. If you have the flu, do you offer to give somebody a lift in your car when you'll be driving for an hour or more, and not tell them you're sick?

This is one reason I'm looking forward to more automation in cars, what's sometimes called self-driving cars. (A bad name for them, because the idea in most cases is to help the driver, not to replace them.) I once had…

Here's some of the potential of 'self-driving' cars. You could program one of these to help teach young people to drive. On top of that they would also help prevent young people from killing themselves on the road,…

A 7-seater is considered a 'people mover' today. That was barely half-full with some older cars, and people were seated in comfort.

This is how the financial services industry does its work. Firstly the obvious advice to people who might run out of money at that age is to stop bloody spending it on overseas holidays and new cars. Secondly the…

I know people love my Daylight Saving rants. Here's another angle. The only argument anybody ever gives in favour of Daylight Saving is "I love it". Is an argument for beating your wife, that you love hitting women? Or…

Easily the best way to teach kids about intertia is to put them on a bus with a bad driver.

Homer's car is today's world. Art is so important. Just gotta pay attention to it.

Another tragic story in the news today about a cyclist killed by a motorist, whose attention lapsed for a moment. Bikes on roads is an emotional issue for people. And putting to one side whether there should I be more…

Air pollution in India. It’s not well known that nearly half the air pollution caused by vehicles doesn’t come from the engine. It comes from the wheels. Both shedding the tyre compound, and throwing up dust and tyre…

Traffic is fascinating. Seriously 🙂 Look at all these intersection options, and the traffic flow efficiency of each. This is a fairly passive approach, not including the input of drivers in real-time, which is changing…

Girl. n. Person who closes all air vents in a vehicle.

When you study trigonometry at school, you're actually studying deep history. Modern curricula separate maths and history though so you're never told that (hardly anybody even remembers the connection). Angles are the…

This is a really clever idea. The one hiccup that comes to mind is how much it depends on the cars driving in perfect formation, for it to work.

The planes we fly in are on auto pilot a lot of the time, have been for years. Just a matter of time.…

How much of life is just school repeating itself over and over. No matter how old people get. The same cliques, the same desperation to outdo other people in terms of possessions, status - whether it's cars, houses,…

https://agenda.weforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/cars.gif

Not a zealot on this, I love cars too. But I don't think it's well enough understood just what shitty technology the internal combustion engine is, and how we desperately need to get rid of it.

F1 is a joke, another example. Only two cars in the field have a real chance of winning. If those blow up, somebody else gets a look in. Has nothing to do with the skill of any of the drivers, Ricciardo embarrassed…

Being in Melbourne with its trams is always fantastic. What you notice more than anything else is how many vehicles it keeps off the roads, there's noticeably much less traffic and noise and pollution. Sydney is run by…

Not been a big fan of US cars, but the suspension on this one must be first rate.

Ah the Brits. Always the xenophobic losers. The 'reliable' German beats the 'ability' of the Brit. When it was Bradman the Brits did what they always do when they don't have the talent - they spoiled. Like Hamilton the…

A little bit risky to see history through the lens of human development, but is the Western world stuck in a rut of adolescence? Adolescence is a time of ruthless comparison, of defining yourself according to others and…

The internal combustion engine has done a lot for the world, but it's loud, inefficient and filthy. If you ever get a chance to be in a city that doesn't have it (like Venice), you realise what we've lost. More than…

I sat next to a Muslim woman on a plane yesterday. She looked very uncomfortable, and was obviously aware of being stared at by many people, in fear. She hardly spoke a word of English and needed my help to figure out…

Car park. Death is a great leveller.

V8 Supercar app would be really great if the Channel 7 telecast wasn't always delayed. As it is using the app spoils everything because it's real-time, and the telecast isn't.

Automatic driverless train crashes, killing 20 people. It's the fault of the engineer who set up the automatic driver, right.

Hmmm, new Jaguar, $195,000 drive away. That's a relief, wouldn't want it to become an expensive car with extra dealer charges.

Why is the front seat cool in a car and uncool in a bus?

F1 would be better if the cars sounded less like mozzies and more like V8s.