Ugh the glass roofs. I don't know why people like them. "Why yes sir, I would love to get beat down on by the hot sun while lacking airflow over me and risk an expensive repair bill from a falling walnut!"
I love it, makes the interior feel light and open and i never experienced it being super hot or baking my scalp, there is a coating on it making it very different from just a clear pane. Model 3, 195cm.
It's fine for a passenger, especially in the back seat. But as a driver, it adds a potentially bright source of light right at the top of your vision, and that can be annoying as hell. I covered my roof and I felt more relaxed since my eyes didn't have to adjust if I accidentally looked too far upwards.
Indoors, we avoid lighting a room with single bright overhead source of light. But this glass roof fad adds it to cars.
What make and model?
I have not sat in a modern car where this have been a problem, ever.
I drive a model 3 Tesla with glass roof and there is simple no issues with Sun glare from the sunsglasses like filter on the glass roof.
Indoors most people indeed love windows, even moreso if they are roof windows.
I agree dont hang a spotlight in your face, but that is hadly the same as the Sun, otherwise how do people their houses walking, running biking without roofs?
I think we're all aware of the number of vehicles out there having the strongly reinforced solid hardtop plus the heavy-duty luggage rack, who never seem to be carrying any luggage up there. Obviously to mitigate a potentially more damaging brontosaurus incident.
I hate them too, its why i went with the toyota bz. They have the very loud fabric rollover cover. It was worth the annoyances of a toyota not yet being fully baked as an electric car to have a way to have the stupid glass roof for my kids and delrte it when i am in there. If tpyota can release a fully baked electric car (one pedal, self driving, etc) i will upgrade
Having lived in West Richland before (in the Tri-cities, on Red Mountain, scrub and all), I don't think thats really true. Well, it is definitely sunnier than Seattle, but nowhere near Phoenix. It is more normal than special.
Barring that, 80%+ of the people in the PNW live near the coast.
Tourism board proudly advertises the 300 days of sun on big bill boards at the airport in Pasco, and the hot summers are honestly worse than Phoenix, as there's humidity
Phoenix can stay hot at night in the summer. Tonight is a good example. It's 90 all night and won't hit the low of 80 until 7am. This is borderline uninhabitable for many.
If you want the worst of both worlds with that kind of oppressive heat 24/7 and high humidity, take a look at Houston.
- In the winter, if there is sun, and you have like black leather interior, it actually helps warm the car up.
-For trucks, having a glass roof is almost essential for seeing if you will fit into a parking garage. Having lived in Seattle, Im glad my truck had one.
- Opening the roof and setting AC to use outside air is the fastest way to vent the car. It doesn't create as many vorticies as opening the windows.
For trucks, having a glass roof is almost essential for seeing if you will fit into a parking garage.
If your truck is that tall, I suggest measuring it and recording the height. After that, you'll find that just about every low-hanging garage, drive-up, bridge, etc. has a height listed. Over 9.5'? Don't try and drive through the Arboretum, as the signs will tell you.
Opening the roof...
That's a sunroof, not a panoramic glass roof being discussed.
Pedantic, but more likely to be a moonroof. A sunroof is opaque, while a moonroof is the clear or mild-to-moderately tinted glass panel we've all grown used to.
I currently live in Seattle and drive a 4WD Toyota Tacoma with a rooftop tent on the back and frequently enter parking garages. I know the height of my truck and was careful to get a setup where the rooftop tent isn't gratuitously high. I think everything is still a little under 6' which is fine in just about every parking garage.
Even if my setup was taller, garages here are pretty good at having the height listed when you enter and anyone with a tall truck really should know exactly how tall it is.
I don't think a sunroof would help me. If I was ever in a situation where it did, I would already be taking too much of a risk of damaging something.
And idea like this is why EVs will still have poor depreciated values even if the battery holds up. Yes it is common for people to ignore all the non-powertrain maintenance items on cars before EVs, but at least in ICE half of them regularly dripped oil down its body and lines and still semi-regularly had somebody kicking the tires and shit when the oil was changed to try and sell you a repair before it fails.
Body, wheels, and suspension components all require maintenance. Just because those components have a less predictable maintenance schedule doesn't mean they don't crap out if problems aren't identified and taken care of. And unless you are driving a short range smart car, EVs weight more than most ICEs, which accelerates the wear and shortens the lifespan of many components.
Don't get me wrong, EVs should be more reliable than ICE still, but in my experiences motor and engine problems are rarely the death knell of a vehicle, body damage and rust are. There are always enough people crashing or junking their cars so that even less reliable motors can be easily had on the used market for cheap, if you don't just swap to something better to start with, but once you get significant body rust 95% of mechanics won't/can't deal with it and repairing metal body shell is a level of skill and tooling that most DIYs aren't going to even attempt.
I don’t understand this criticism. I have owned an EV for five years now. The app and the vehicle display clearly let you know when you are due for scheduled maintenance.
Due to how online the whole platform is, it’s so much better than my older ICE car that has a cryptic wrench light on the dash.
Did I mention that the intervals are also so much cheaper? Tires are the one standout but pretty much every thing else is a dream
There are multiple people in this thread talking about about how their EV requires zero maintenance despite owning them for years, which is just the admitting they are setting up a ticking timebomb of maintenance tasks that are being neglected. And then years down the line they will wonder why their model car has depreciated so poorly despite their battery being in good condition. And they will likely blame ignorance of EVs, rather than considering it is the average owners negligence of maintenance tasks on that car.
What ticking time bombs? Please be specific. I'm an EV owner who has done no maintenance in 26k miles. I want to know which system, if I don't do maintenance, will create some hidden wear which will progress silently until too late.
Shocks, springs, tie rods, steering systems, motor mounts and any other rubber parts, cooling systems, braking system, wheel and possibly motor bearings.
Nothing special for being a car, but an ICE and transmission weren't the only things on cars that move and wear.
There's no maintenance to shocks, springs, tie rods, motor mounts, or wheel bearings. Every one of those announces their failure with clicks or clunks or bouncy ride. I'm not sure when chassis lubrication went away as a maintenance activity but I'm guessing around the '80s. I can remember using a grease gun on my parents' cars but none I owned. EVs obviously eliminate all the engine internals, so no spark plug replacements, no ignition modules, no accessory belt, no timing chain or belt, no engine air filter, no oil filter, no manifolds, catalytic converters or mufflers.
Brakes need to be inspected but my last ICE vehicle went about 90k miles between needing pads. My EV has sealed drums in back (a choice VW made to reduce friction when brakes aren't in use and I think trying to slow corrosion of the components) and conventional large discs in front. If we have issues with the front brakes it will be due to corrosion as I don't expect to put enough wear on them to ever wear through the pads. In normal driving the brakes are only applied at full stops.
I don't expect EVs to have motor mounts like an ICE vehicle, as the motor is a few orders of magnitude smoother (commutation ripple vs cylinder firings) and shouldn't need fluid-filled rubber isolation mounts.
If I think of what I've had to replace on my cars over the years, half-shafts and CV joints and wheel bearings might now be the least reliable mechanical things on the car, plus the oddball failures, like a clock spring in the steering wheel or a window motor.
So I still have to keep tires inflated, rotated and balanced, keep good wipers installed, change the cabin air filter occasionally, and listen to the rest.
My source for my opinion is having done the vast majority of the maintenance and repair of our cars over roughly 4 decades and more than a million miles.
There are plenty of things that still need oil and grease in EVs still, but it is in such low quantities that we could synthesize most of that from air and it still not being a cost of any concern.
Why? There are numerous technologies we have ignored or abandoned for numerous reasons. Many of the benefits of AI is "requires less humans", but in an age where we question what work people could possibly do in the future, human labor isn't that hard to find.
If the amish can do what they do for whack religious reasons, people could manage it with ai for cultural and social reasons. And I never saw an amish person starve to death. And that is if people don't get pissed enough to start burning stuff down and instead try to be peaceful hippie homesteader types.
But notably the amish don't preclude the rest of us from existing. Some subset of humans could turn their attention away from AI but it would presumably still exist and continue to be developed.
I can't think of any economically beneficial technologies that we've collectively ignored. If you manage to come up with a counterexample then that's an opportunity to make some money for yourself. It's a fundamentally unstable state given our economic system.
Supersonic passenger aircraft were operated profitably and no longer exist.
There’s levels of R&D required for many technologies where the question goes beyond could this be profitable to what are the risk vs reward that this specific project will succeed.
Until the oil shocks, and until “normal” planes became faster.
I happen to know a couple older and very wealthy people, and they say that even though Concorde was a lot of fun when it was a novelty, they now prefer to have a couple more hours flight and enjoy a 777 premium cabin rather than the cramped Concorde interior.
Anyway, the proof is in the pudding: if no one but national carriers ever bought and operated Concorde or Tu-144 at scale, it's not because of some Amish-like sentiment in the flight industry, but simply because that didn't make sense money-wise.
> Supersonic passenger aircraft were operated profitably
Were they? IIRC joint project by British and French national airlines, they expected to sell loads, hardly anyone wanted to buy the planes, the two airlines kept them flying out of government embarassment.
Sure, the regulation that guarded against externalizing certain costs might well have been the only thing precluding profitability. Importantly it wasn't some shared cultural value leading to voluntarily leaving money on the table. Rather the regulator imposed it.
We are able to effectively regulate things like the operation of massive aircraft, eugenics, the dumping of toxic waste, or the refinement of nuclear material. But there are also plenty of things that we can't effectively regulate for purely practical reasons.
Were they? Did Concorde provide return on investment? When was the break-even expected? Sure, if we look at it as R&D subsidized by governments of UK and France, then yet, it was profitable.
In particular, the problem with it was that it could not get to supersonic speeds over urban areas, which significantly limited routes where it made sense, and the range was not good enough to cover longer distances.
But after accounting for maintenance & etc were they more profitable than sinking the equivalent amount of money into something else, such as slower aircraft? Notably there are currently efforts to develop new supersonic passenger liners.
And even if we did manage to limit/cull hardware development, what would keep people from continuing to find ever more efficient models runnable on contemporary hardware?
Bleeding edge models are putting the desk-job competencies of multiple professional fields into something with as many parameters as a single large rodent has synapses.
Because "we" embodies a hugely diverse set of beings with different wants, needs, goals, and priorities. Not to mention different morality and ethics.
So sure, let's say you get 95% of the world to not use or work on LLMs. 5% is still enough to build something that brings forth the End Times.
That's the old checklist trope of "Your idea won't work because: [x] it requires that everyone in the world agrees to do something, all at the same time."
> There are numerous technologies we have ignored or abandoned for numerous reasons.
Are there? Nukes are a thing. Chemical weapons are a thing. Cluster bombs are a thing. Biological weapons are a thing. What is not a thing that shouldn't be? We say certain things should not be a thing, but then behind the scenes we made them a thing anyway.
On chemical weapons, most large state actors have got rid of them. Not because of any moral reasons, though, but simply because they don't actually work all that well in modern conventional warfare. This is then framed as an ethical issue, but you only need to look at where the same countries stand on e.g. landmines to realize how much bullshit it all is.
Conversely, where you do still see chemical weapons used, it's usually asymmetric conflicts where "just gas the rebels" actually works much of the time and is much cheaper than other options. Big guys can afford the other options though, someone like Assad, not so much.
I'm baffled that people expressing your opinion don't understand what they're advocating for. Current generation smartphones are able to run AI models, people have managed to run very large models (even if slowly) via streaming from disk. The math for the underlying implementation is relatively trivial.
Abandoning this technology means a cult-like extremist shift in culture against computers, or a global surveillance state of unprecedented scale and invasiveness. Not even getting into how much it requires us to give up on science, given the shared computational needs.
The modern structure of society has effectively given government a complete monopoly on force and violence.
So the second a disenfranchised person responds with violence, it's easy to spin it as their fault, treat them as an instigator, and then respond with overwhelming force with police.
Regardless of your opinions on morality, the Luigi Mangione saga is literally this playbook.
And really, it only gets the attention it does because a majority of people literally despise their insurance providers in the US.
The most ive done with RTS the last decade is watch some mass Beyond All Reason videos (I dont have the hardware for mass battles myself.) LoL and other moba dota-likes I think took the a bulk of the rts competative crowd. Now I feel like the traditional rts community has to butt heads with other strategy genres to take players if they want to approach old school rts levels of success. Trying to pull moba players back seems like it would have massive diminishing returns.
I don't even own a console and im offended by thoae time limits. Should just call it the twice a month demo pass because that is about the best you are getting for it.
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