Could you give some examples of where it's saving you a lot of time? My main time sinks are dishes, laundry, and cleaning. Is it helping out with any of those?
Sure, but there is also China where over half of new vehicle sales are EVs. Denmark is at 70%, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and the Netherlands are all above 50%, a bunch of other countries in the EU are at one third EVs. In India, 5% of sales are EVs but that is double of the year before and all the big car manufacturers in India are now offering EVs. Even Australia is at 14% after stalling on EVs for years. So change is unfolding quite quickly compared to previous years. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ev-share-new-car-sales-by-c...
Those numbers include PHEV cars. As a BEV owner, I consider PHEV to be more ICE than BEV. BEV numbers are not as impressive, but we're getting there, slowly but surely. A bit slower than I would've hoped.
The Danish numbers normally exclude PHEVs. Not that it matters, since PHEVs are almost dead as a segment here. Over the past two years 310k BEVs were sold here, but only 6k PHEVs. The situation in Norway is very similar.
And across Europe BEVs are also about twice as popular as PHEVs. In 2025 2.6 million BEVs were sold in Europe compared to 1.3 million PHEVs. It seems the biggest deciding factor is how good the public charging network is.
My Phev is about 80% ev. It uses a tank of gas a month, replacing a nearly identical vehicle (similar body and same engine - though other things have changed) that needed one or two tanks a week.
sadly thats not the norm. Various recent studies from the EU based on real world vehicle data show that actual savings from the PHEV category are about ~20% less emissions than a pure gas version. Aka, they are just gas cars. Despite manufacturers claiming ~70-80% for emissions credits. The category is today kind of a scam, in aggregate.
It doesnt have to be - bigger battery strictly-series EREVs would likely show better numbers than the weak-ev phevs sold today.
I think it is the norm only because people never run the numbers. At least where I live gas costs me 5-10x more than electric (I live in the US, gas is cheap, but all my electric is from even cheaper wind). It wouldn't be hard to teach them to plug the car in when they are at home anywhere (many people park in a garage with an outlet - if this doesn't apply to you then PHEV doesn't make sense - you don't get enough range for your effort to find a charger)
For most in the US what makes the most sense today is one PHEV they use for long trips and towing the boat. The rest should be pure EVs, which have enough range for the typical trips and the few exceptions they just reserve the PHEV that day. As time goes on more and more chargers will be built and eventually pure EV for everything will make sense, but right not there isn't enough charging infrastructure. (You can get almost anywhere in the US, but the trip is planned around where the next charger is, not where either you feel like stopping or where the battery is low - gas stations are at nearly every exit, fast chargers 1 in 30 exits or something in that range)
PHEVs when you already own them cost vastly less in electric mode. That people don't bother plugging them in is because they don't care about cost enough to bother to see if there is a difference.
It’s also because most PHEVs sold are terrible EVs. Weak, short range, cut to gas all the time. Impractical to use as a pure ev. This style of phev is greenwashing and should be sold as a gas car for emissions rules.
EREVs are a different story, and have a place in the transition for awhile.
This doesn't make them terrible! This makes them great. That means they can run 80% of the time as an EV, yet use the ICE just enough to not ever have stale gas in the tank. As a driver you barely notice, and someone outside will have no clue what mode it is operating in. (wind noise is louder than the ICE)
When there are fast chargers on every corner like gas stations are PHEV will make less sense. However in the world I live in today an EV can do a road trip but it forces you to plan your stops around where there is a charger, while with gas can still assume it will be close when you need it. This will change over the coming years, for now I won't take my EV on a road trip, but my PHEV has done it several times.
PHEV feels good on paper, but in ICE mode they’re terrible. On a recent long road trip they do about 14km/L with a fully charged EV range of 50km. Quite inefficient to lug a petrol engine and a semi large battery all the time.
Indeed. I’m holding on to my 24” Dell P2415Q that I got like 10 years ago because it’s the perfect size for my desk and there just isn’t anything in that size to replace it with.
How’s it going so far? Greenhouse gas emissions only keep rising. There’s no basis to rate humanity’s chances positively based on actual evidence to date, even despite all the positive developments in renewable energy generation and storage.
The ignorance of this comment is breathtaking. How are the crops going to grow if the temperature drops by 15 degrees Celsius? What marine and terrestrial ecosystems can survive a sudden catastrophic change like that? What’s going to happen to the weather patterns after this planet-scale shift? How do you “adjust” to the collapse of your food supply and entire ecosystems?
Grow the crops somewhere else? The earth's climate has always changed - the sea was 100m lower 20k years ago and much of Europe covered by ice. But it doesn't change so much over one human lifetime.
20k years ago, humans hadn't invented agriculture. Our whole civilization has existed in one particular geological time, an exceptional one. There is absolutely no indication that it's flexible enough to be transposed in another, and particularly not at that speed of transition, which is, in geological time, exceptionally fast.
It's still ~1C over a human lifetime which gives you a fair bit of time to adapt. I mean I may fly to Bali next month due to climate but that's just London being crap in winter as usual.
This is like saying fish can survive around 21C so the lower temperature of 19.8C that is keeping it in a -4C freezer for 3.5 hours before searing it for 30 minutes at 200C is fine.
A 1C rise means hotter hots, colder colds, stronger storms and longer or more frequent droughts as well as the general climate of a region possibly changing.
Yes you can find crops that will grow in specific conditions, but you need to know those conditions and if you have a day that kills a crop that can mean you need to wait for the next season. That 1C rise corresponds with a lot more of these crop damaging events as well as changing the efficiency and possibly infrastructure needed in an area.
I'll also note that the last 1C rise is over a generation not a lifetime i.e. 25 years not 80.
Not sure how you haven't noticed, but climate change is already affecting precipitation and drought patterns, it exacerbates heatwaves, cold snaps, and flooding, it affects harvests, disrupts ecosystems etc. etc. Reducing warming is an urgent matter.
It isn’t just intuitive enough, it’s more intuitive and precise than the ICE setup. It’s safer too, as the car starts braking before I even reach the brake pedal in an emergency braking situation.
I've just published https://nohypeai.dev to share what I've learned about the state of LLM agents for software development and help people who are just catching up orient themselves.
It was also important to me to provide a non-hyped, balanced view (hence the name), including pointing people to realistic assessments of the effectiveness of these tools and highlighting the risks and concerns.
I will use this to keep track of all these emerging abstractions. it's a smart play to establish this position between the rapid cutting edge and people who need to be able to reason about it but not implement it.
The case the article tries to make doesn’t stack up for me.
What you get when it becomes easier to generate code/applications is a whole lot more code and a whole lot more noise to deal with. Sure, some of it is going to be well crafted – but a lot of it will not be.
It’s like the mobile app stores. Once these new platforms became available, everyone had a go at building an app. A small portion of them are great examples of craftsmanship – but there is an ocean of badly designed, badly implemented, trivial, and copycat apps out there as well. And once you have this type of abundance, it creates a whole new class of problems for the users but potentially also developers.
The other thing is, it really doesn’t align with the priorities of most companies. I’m extremely skeptical that any of them will suddenly go: “Right, enough of cutting corners and tech debt, we can really sort that out with AI.”
No, instead they will simply direct extra capacity towards new features, new products, and trying to get more market share. Complexity will spiral, all the cut corners and tech debt will still be there, and the end result will be that things will be even further down the hole.
I don't know if it's been documented or studied, but it seems the availability argument is a fallacy. It just open the floodgates and you get 90% of small effort attempts and not much more. The old world where the barrier was higher guaranteed that only interesting things would happen.
It seems there's some kind of corollary to what you're saying to when (in the US) we went from three major television networks to many cable networks or, later, when streaming video platforms began to proliferate and take hold -- YouTube, Netflix, etc.: The barriers to entry dropped for creators, and the market fragmented. There is still quality creative content out there, some it as good as or better than ever. But finding it, and finding people to share the experience of watching it with you is harder.
Same could be said of traditional desktop software development and the advent of web apps I suppose.
I guess I'm not that worried, other than being worried about personally finding myself in a technological or cultural eddy.
Unless I’m totally misreading the article they are saying what you’re saying and then taking it and using it as an argument for why we should care about quality. They aren’t saying quality will necessarily happen. They are saying that because there will be a whole lot more noise it will be important to focus on quality and those who don’t will drown in complexity.
I wrote this many years ago, when I moved from symbian (with very few apps available) to android, with a lot of apps, but having to spend several hours to find a half decent one.
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