I know hourcar in Minneapolis is non profit, but don’t have firsthand experience with them myself. This may be of interest to you https://youtu.be/OObwqreAJ48

Subtler, safer, and more damaging to damage the air valve instead.

This is another big factor. Stealerships have learned that as long as the monthly payment looks low they can charge whatever interest they want, and not mention it until after Americans have signed on the doted line.

Edit: Anecdotally, a friend of mine bought a NEW CAR because she was worried she was spending too much on paying off her current one. The monthly payment went down, so she was all smiles. I don’t have numbers, but she must have been close to paying that first car off. But hey she’s “saving” $150 a month!

I’ve actively been shifting my life away from needing a car, but I’m in the same boat. If I wanted a car, I’d want a cheap little electric sedan. But I’ve owned an EV before and have no range anxiety, whereas anti-EV sentiment is all over the US talking about how will I ever survive if I can’t drive more than 300 miles in a day without a 20 minute charge, as if everyone does that constantly and it wouldn’t be 5 hours of driving, which is miserable.

From what I’ve heard, if you’re working from home or otherwise not a daily driver carshare services are legitimately a better deal. Get whatever kind of car you need, when you need it, cheaper subscription than owning a car and insurance and upkeep, etc

Sodium based battery companies are, unfortunately, crashing right now, since lithium production has jumped so significantly that lithium prices have seen a major crash. Since price was the main economic driver for sodium batteries over lithium ones, many companies making sodium batteries are in big trouble right now, since lithium is more energy dense and at price parity

E bikes are the play here. Due to battery weight, EVs have modestly more severe tire (and road) wear

The harder to obtain materials aspect, while long term relevant, is barely a factor right now. Lithium production has exploded and resulted in a massive drop in prices that’s making the main consumer appeal for sodium batteries, price, a non-factor and driving some sodium battery producers out of business

See, this is a cute IDEA I see around lemmy a lot, but a number of cars will see issues related to this. For example, subaru has some vehicles that will kill their own batteries trying to connect, and failing, to services that no longer exist, even while parked. Cutting your connection will prompt the same issue. Is that terrible design? Yes. But it’s also the design used for cars made to spy on you and stop working when they can’t spy on you, that don’t mind forcing you to buy a new car if you disable their spying capabilities.

It’s not like MIT and the Harvard business review have published studies that have shown that AI is actually best suited to replacing executives and management in order to flatten organizations. But unfortunately, management and executives make the decisions on who AI replaces, and they don’t want to be replaced. Hell at the company I’m at right now they’ve been axing low level workers and bringing on or promoting the ladder climbers (read: AI sycophants who do the least work) to manager or department head roles, saying that us grunts can “10x” to fill the gaps, and that all we need is good and creative leadership to direct our AI use. I could go off on things this business is doing to shoot itself in the foot for hours, even without mentioning AI

This. And chromebooks are glorified tablets. Much less capable than a proper laptop, much less for a child to learn than a proper laptop. Google did MASSIVE pushing to get chromebooks into the classroom to get kids hooked on their platform as early as possible

Is this a thing? Because what comes to mind for me is “the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent,” which just happens sometimes

“Self driving vehicles only need to be as good as the average driver, and that’s a low bar” and yet…

Idk these are flatly not comparable situations. A high speed chase ending in a pit maneuver is EXTREMELY dangerous before, during, after, and even around without being touched. A streetcar pushing a parked vehicle a handful of feet at low speed while ringing a warning bell with a driver keeping an eye on the situation is MUCH safer.

Honestly, yeah. Navigating around drivers my general attitude is “I’m not willing to put my life in a stranger’s hands”

Stateside the big one I know is the Minneapolis greenway, which is a proper road reserved just for bikes and occasional buses. There are a handful of rails to trails projects all over, but I don’t think they’re quite what you have in mind

It isn’t every pickup driver, but it’s always a pickup driver. I say this a lot when observing unhinged driver behavior