The 2019.40.50 software update (end of year, 2019) introduced a large number of new (some would say overdue) voice commands.

This list began with a Facebook post by Stacy Gildersleeve.

Additions/comments by your obd’t servant and others, now including things that worked before the update.

While Tesla’s current voice commands are not at the level of Siri/Alexa/GoogAh, there is some flexibility, e.g., "turn wipers off" or "turn off wipers" are interchangeable.

Tesla largely started the electric vehicle revolution (rEVolution). Here are links to much more information on Tesla.

NDB Technologies claims to be able to encapsulate nuclear waste in solid diamond containers to create batteries that will self-recharge from the continuous breakdown of the nuclear waste and last for years - up to ninety years in a large car battery, up to nine years in a smartphone, up to infinity in small satellites. Well, actually they "only" claim 28,000 years, but that is close enough to infinity when compared with the entire lifespan of industrial civilization.

I have set up a YouTube channel to be able to talk out loud and show things about EVs that make more sense visually. I also plan to interview owners of existing EVs to see how the cars fare with the owners.

Right now the channel has this ugly URL: https://youtube.com/channel/UCdHAnni3LE_VjENUfNvDQiA.

Once I get to a hundred subscribers I can get a URL like youtube.com/IanOnEVs, so please do check it out and subscribe - help me reach that magic first hundred subscribers! You can always unsubscribe after a month or two (but why would you?).

In a recent post on the Beeb (the BBC), Justin Rowlatt reminds us of the S-curve that adoption of almost all technologies undergoes, and has always undergone: the automobile itself, the transistor radio, the internet, the smartphone, and of course EVs. And points out that we are approaching the upstart part of the curve. You can see a similar curve on the left half of a diagram on page 12 in the first edition of Geoffrey A. Moore’s business classic Crossing The Chasm (sorry I don’t have the page reference from the 3rd edition). Both the Beeb article and the book are worth a look!

I was going to write a post dissecting the errors in Michael Moore’s recent documentary, but these guys beat me to it. Read it. Ideally before you watch the film.

For a shorter rebuttal, see this Medium.com article.

Update: the film has been pulled from theatres after many of its errors were pointed out to the distributor. Hoping youtube will do the right thing and take it down too. Even though the damage is done: as Churchill said long before the internet made the problem worse, "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."

Batteries are the essential source for electric mobile power. You can’t get enough sunlight to power any production vehicle, although one very smart team did fly an ultralight airplane round the world on solar power.

Technically, a battery is a composite of two or more storage cells. At home, a single AA, C or D cell is not a battery, but a cell. In home use, the terms are (incorrectly) used interchangeably. But let’s be precise: a battery is a collection of cells harnessed together. A home flashlight may have two, three or four cells making up its battery. An electric car will have thousands of cells, usually divided into "battery modules". That said, let’s talk about the problems and solutions.

One often hears claims that governments "should not pick winners", typically from those opposing any funding to promote EVs. Those who make this claim ignore some very important points:

First, that governments are massively involved already in picking winners: the fossil fuel industry receives trillions in tax breaks and outright handouts, providing mega-incentives to continue producing polluting, climate-damaging oil and gasoline products. Far more than the relatively tiny subsidies given to clean energy and electric car makers, even though between a quarter and a half of all new energy production is in the clean energy sectors.

A new study in Nature Sustainability confirms that EVs pollute less overall: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/23/electric-cars-produce-less-co2-than-petrol-vehicles-study-confirms. No lung-destroying emissions at source, and less CO₂ emissions, even when the grid isn’t very clean; an exception seems to be one country whose grid is 100% dirty, because there nothing will make a difference until the grid is cleaned up. This is not the first time we’ve advanced this position, nor the first time that EV haters have claimed the opposite.