We’ve all had nights like that.

Do you travel much? Asking for a friend.

Personally, I tend to buy something one to three years old so that it’s already dropped 10k off the new price, then run it for ten years or so until it starts getting unreliable then move on to the next one. It then costs me about 3k to 4k a year to have a car with no problems at all. I honestly don’t know when my electric car will start to get unreliable, but I’m not going back to noisy, smelly and slow ever, I’m sticking with quiet, clean and fast and never using a petrol station again in my life. My partner was a bit more sceptical at first but has very much come round and in a few years we’ll be a two EV household.

Yes. The person I was replying to thought it was somehow bad for the battery to outlast the car. I was making the point that that’s fine. In response to your point about the cost of an engine, I should say that batteries are a far bigger part of the cost of an electric car - it’s really just not very complicated apart from that - very few moving parts indeed compared to a combustion engine. That’s why the car companies aren’t very keen - unless they make their own batteries, they’re not adding as much value when they manufacture them. They prefer to push the hybrids which have the complexity of both and a lot less battery capacity (but very much don’t have the advantages of both for the driver).

Well the original model Nissan Leaf has been available in the UK since about early 2011, which is more like 13.5 years than 11, and I did a quick search for the 2017 Nissan LEAF on more than 100k miles on autotrader and only one of them had lost any battery capacity at all, and it had over 90%. Another one had 120k miles on the clock and was still at 100% battery capacity. You can mistreat a car and it won’t last as long, yes, but it really is the older model that has the common battery problems. The new ones don’t. And there are brands that have much better battery care than the Leafs, with active cooling etc.

You see, the reason we know they’re lasting longer is, you know, science and math, where they measure stuff and do the sums, and given that the old type of battery declined a lot in the first 8 years and the new type isn’t declining, then all you’ve got left on your hands at the end is just an awful lot of FUD about battery life peddled by an awful lot of people who don’t actually know.

Can you elaborate on that?

When did you last lose a car to engine failure? Electronics, gears, suspension, stuff like that, but not the engine. They have to over engineer the battery because the earlier popular electric cars had bad batteries and they have to over-compensate. Hence today’s batteries.

Battery replacement after ten years is for very old EVs shrub much shorter range. The old model Nissan Leaf is what makes these stories. More recent cars have already outlasted the usage that the old pretty bad ones had by a significant amount. Your criticism is like saying you don’t want a mobile phone because the buttons are so fiddly.

I think you’re talking about batteries from nearly 15 years ago, which did degrade significantly with age and/or use. There has been a significant and noticeable improvement since then. The person you were taking to did say today’s batteries.

I feel like you missed the point. The point is that you probably want to stop every few hours anyway so there’s not a lot of point getting a PHEV. You’re buying two engines for the price of two, with the maintenance costs of a gas engine (higher) and extra weight. It’s just fear that gets people to buy PHEV. There’s hardly any mpg benefit over a gas car in real world usage, and there’s hardly any of the lively acceleration of a proper EV. No fun, no cost savings, just all initial expense. Get an EV or stick with your old gas car, PHEV is absolutely not the best of both.

I think I’m frustrating you by being too flippant, and I didn’t mean to, so sorry about that.

Yes, but is there anything in what I said that you actually disagree with?

See, I think we agree, it’s just that I’m being more light hearted about it than you are. Good cop, bad cop, that sort of thing. You’re all “you’re nasty homophobe!” and I’m all “heyy, man, you should appreciate the blow jobs, not hate on them! But blow jobs are not for dictators.”

Sucking cock is a fantastic thing to do for your fellow human, and a true friend loves and appreciates you for it.

But sucking the cocks of dictators, that’s something sensible people everywhere disapprove of. Pretty much every dictator has awful anti-LGBT+ rhetoric and inhumane anti-LGBT+ policies.

In British English, Trump means (1) the sound an elephant makes or (2) a fart, particularly a noisy one. If you trump your own horn it means you’re boastful and think of yourself higher than other people do.

President Trump = President Fart.
Still funny after all these years, despite the looming fascism.

Excellent excellent.

Wishing good luck with the numbers into boxes bit and a safe flight home.

I’ve got bad news for you. I found out that if you fill in the survey it still comes back on every click.

Yes.

Exactly.

One of my friends asserted that they went into a shop in Paris and the staff were speaking in English but switched to French when they saw English tourists walk in, just to be rude to them. They felt harassed because some French people were speaking French in France and wouldn’t believe me when I suggested that they were probably speaking in French before they walked in. They were adamant that they were speaking English at first. Strangely they couldn’t recall anything that the staff had said in English or even the topic of conversation. English is so dominant in their life, even when abroad, that it takes them a while to adjust to the reality that someone else isn’t like them and they take it personally.

This is like that. Someone goes on a dating app, didn’t realise a girl was trans, didn’t spot it in their bio, then got nasty with them. When they got called out for their nastiness, they did the turn-the-tables projection thing, and after harassing a trans person, claimed to have been harassed, and then went online to complain about how bad the harassment is from the trans community.

Yeah, absolutely, very much so, but I don’t want to kiss or sleep with smokers, and that’s OK.