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Last week Monday VW opened up its pre-orders list for the ID.3, its first all-electric car built on its MEB platform. A week later, and 37,000 customers have put €1000 [~1,176 USD] in advance already.
There are a couple of reasons for the apparent enthusiasm. First the range, going from an official 330 km [~200 mi] (45kWh battery) standard range over 420 km [~250 mi] (58kWh) medium to 550 km [~330 mi] (77kWh) for the long range battery. Practical range is estimated at 260, 330 and 430 km. [~156, ~200, and ~260 mi],
Second the price. The standard version comes in at €21,000 [~24,700 USD] in Germany (€30,000 [~35,300 USD] list price, €9,000 [~10,600 USD] subsidy). Medium range has a list price of €36,000 [~42,300 USD], for the maximum range the price is not yet known, but below €50,000 [~58,800 USD].
The car is rear-wheel driven by an 150kW motor, with top speed limited at 160 km/h [~100 mph]. Torque is 310Nm, delivering 0-60 kph [~37 mph] in 3.7 seconds (1st version; the standard version 9 seconds).
No talk about autonomous driving though: only lane assist and adaptive cruise control are provided.
Delivery of the car starts in September. There are no plans to bring the ID.3 to the US. Volkswagen said it is on track to deliver 70,000 ID.3's by year's end, and an additional 30,000 upcoming ID.4 SUVs along with that. Tesla, in contrast, sold more than 90,000 of its cars last quarter alone.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday July 29 2020, @08:58AM (6 children)
> If you could find out which northe European country it was I'd be interested to know.
I think it was Denmark, back in 2017:
Source: https://www.thedrive.com/news/11089/denmark-ev-sales-plummet-with-tax-break-elimination [thedrive.com]
> It won't be Norway, as with hydro, leccy's almost free there, and the cars are massively popular.
They are also heavily subsidised, so that buying and running an EV is apparently 75% cheaper than an ICE vehicle.
The cost is apparently to the tune of $13500 per tonne of CO2.
When someone is paying you to buy and run something, don't be surprised if demand increases, but again, artificial. If the subsidies are reduced/removed, and costs reach parity or overtake ICE vehicles, demand will most likely drop again.
Source: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-09-02/busting-myth-worlds-hottest-electric-car-market [zerohedge.com] (the source may be biased, but it is the only one I could find right now)
> It might be here in Estonia, 5-10 years ago were bigging up EVs all the time, I think even /Top Gear/ magazine did a think on how keen we were. I've not seen much about them recently, whe idea has appeared to die. I've never been in the market for one, so haven't followed it that closely.
I remember reading something similar to Denmark about Estonia as well, however I can't find any article.
A side note: While trying to dig up these old links, I was amazed at how useless search engines have become. Google, Bing, duckduck go, no matter which you use, they all return the exact opposite I search for. I explicity search for "EV demand drops due to reduced subsidies", and all they give me are glowing articles about how demand for EVs are doubling/exploding due to subsidies/demand. No combination of search terms netted me a single article about demand dropping when subsidies were removed.
I only managed to tease out the above two articles due to remembering the original site I read the articles on (zerohedge), and searching directly there, then following links. If it wasn't for that, I would have not found any evidence for the existence of articles I knew had existed before.
It is quite scary how much they control/suppress the flow of information, I feel a bit like I'm in 1984, trying to discover bits of history scrubbed from the public view, and quite frankly, this information is not even particularly sensitive or important in the grand scheme of things. I'd hate to think what they do with actual important information.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday July 29 2020, @10:56AM (3 children)
> ... amazed at how useless search engines have become.
Amen! Preach it brother! It's utterly shocking that as AI has advanced 10-fold in tech, and 10^5-fold in availability, that the results are orders of magnitude less useful. Worst of all, they present the results as if they're trying to be more helpful than ever.
Can someone please resurrect HotBot or AltaVista?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday July 29 2020, @11:35AM (2 children)
HotBot is now a VPN peddler, and AltaVista redirects to Yahoo! which is powered by Microsoft Bing.
Baidu and Yandex are your only hope now.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday July 29 2020, @11:55PM (1 child)
However, AltaVista used to be Digital. As I am an ex-DEC Alpha owner (personal, bought it myself, not just used at place of work or study), I'm always going to have a soft spot for anything Digital.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday July 29 2020, @11:56PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by quietus on Wednesday July 29 2020, @12:14PM (1 child)
I think you might be going off in the deep end there a bit, with your control of information thing.
It is expected that with more data, it becomes harder to search those data, for starters. Then, there is the question: why invest in improving your search engine capabilities when there's really nobody on the horizon with either fresh ideas, or the ability to execute them? An effective search engine requires a heavy investment in hardware and network infrastructure after all.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday July 29 2020, @07:51PM
> I think you might be going off in the deep end there a bit, with your control of information thing.
Perhaps, however I have my doubts. There is bad signal to noise ratio, then there is irrelevant information, but to not match a single list of words accurately to this level I swear takes conscious effort
> It is expected that with more data, it becomes harder to search those data, for starters.
Why would it? Does grep become less effective the more data you have? I sure did not find that. It still matches what I ask it to, if I grep one file or 100,000 files.
It is one thing to give me a lot of noise amongst data I want, it is something else to provide me search results that are utterly irrelevant. If I search for "reduced" I don't expect to see "doubled". Not a single search result in any of the first 3 pages I looked at had the word "reduced" anywhere. Even when I added "-doubled" it still returned exactly the same results, with the word "doubled" right there in the title.
I search for something in quotes, I expect it to return me exact matches. If I don't, I expect it to return all results containing all the words specified. If I provide a negation, it is to be applied.
I don't need a search engine to think for me, to interpret my search request, nor to assume things. I need it to just search and return matches.
It has been a solved algorithmic problem for decades, now it is just a matter of efficiency and scalability that needs to be handled.
> Then, there is the question: why invest in improving your search engine capabilities when there's really nobody on the horizon with either fresh ideas, or the ability to execute them? An effective search engine requires a heavy investment in hardware and network infrastructure after all.
Most of the investment is in the web crawling, storage and web frontend. You need to do that whether you got a plain rule based search engine, or some fancy AI that tries to second guess what the user wanted to search for. It would be cheaper to not have bothered with the fancy additions and kept it as a rule based engine.
I know it can be done. Google used to be that way. Hell that (along with the simple search page) was the main reason we actually switched to it way back when. Yet it seems they have forgotten what they were all about originally. Bing seems to just slavishly copy google, but not as well, and the others seem to be wrappers around those two engines,so you get the same results no matter what you use.