kgwilson

My MG4 is the first car I have had without a conventional handbrake. It took a bit of getting used to. The rotary gear selector is D N & R & pressing it in the middle selects the parking brake. It is all automatic for hills etc & has an auto hold process when at traffic lights. Just tap the foot brake a bit harder when you stop & it puts the parking brake on & the brake light stays on then just use the accelerator to move off. Hill starts are exactly the same. In one pedal drive mode you don't need to touch the brake pedal at all. The car just comes to a complete stop & the park brake is automatically applied. It also has an emergency stop 1 or 2 finger operated brake lever right next to the rotary selector which is also electronic but uses an independent system & can be held on manually if required. I have only used this once to see how it worked. All very weird till you get used to it but I wouldn't go back to the old manual handbrake now.

Chicago is one of the coldest places i have been as well. I was changing planes there and there was a blizzard outside. Temperature was minus twenty something fahrenheit & windchill well below -30 or about -35 deg celcius. There were 3 doors to get to the outside (2 airlocks). When I breathed in my nasal hairs froze & I felt like I couldn't breathe at all. You could throw a boiling hot cup of coffee in to the air and it would freeze instantly and fall to the ground as ice crystals. This was back in the late 80s.

Chinas power is in its economy. The last thing they want is to be drawn in to any conflict that will stop or severely reduce their European and American customers. Xi has been flat out garnering friends from the latest APEC meeting in Peru to oppose Trump & his proposed tarrifs. A major war is not good for business. Putin is a megalomaniac and any attempt to use Nukes will result in him falling out a window at the vey least. His Oligarc mates will see to it.

Electric motorbikes have been around almost as long as electric cars. The bigger ones have stunning performance with low mounted batteries providing a low CoG & superb handling.

Putin is a dictator who would really like to be a Tsar of a revised Russian Empire that would include all the republics lost in 1990. No Russian dictator has ever given a toss about how many Russians die so long as it fulfills his aims. Putin is also like Trump, a complete and utter malignant narcissist. That's why they seem to get along though Putin is all over Trump like a cheap suit.

He always looks pissed. I have never seen him look anything near sober.

Digital displays have got a lot better since the days of Falcons. Now with so many electronic things in a car to control so many things, the hard part is remembering where everything is and what it actually does. It took me weeks to work out all of the different functions till I finally gave up & left it all as standard. One of the best features though is Adaptive Cruise control. Set it to the speed limit & it adjusts for traffic flow and corners etc. Traffic Jam assist is a low speed type of Cruise control which will automatically stop & start in heavy traffic situations & also keep the car within the lane. Basically the car will drive itself in these situations. You could read the paper while the car negotiates the traffic. Mind you the posh English woman who lives in my car tells me to put my hands back on the wheel if I ever let it go.

My car has a tactile button to turn the HVAC on or off & one for instant demist, but for adjustments it is a large 10 inch screen with huge well labelled screen buttons to tap for things like air direction (face, feet, screen) and a large ribbon display for fan speed about 200mm long so tapping it anywhere will adjust the fan speed or just hit the auto big button etc. Motoring journalists need to move into the 21st century. Far better than physical buttons IMHO.

I noted when the press interviewed MAGA nutters or even more conservative less bombasic republican voters they all seem to claim Trumps policies were better especially the economy inflation and cost of living. The thing is all of these things are better now under Biden that at any time under Trump. Inflation is under 3%, growth was at 2.7% in the 3rd quarter of this year. This is better that most countries. Cost of living rose dramatically after Covid but that happened world wide. Prices will stabilise but they won't come down. This would cause deflation, something that will have a very negative effect. If Trump goes ahead with tariffs on ALL imports & deports all the immigrants who currently do all the shit low paid jobs then I can see a major disaster ensuing. The minimum wage is still $7.50 an hour. The gap between rich & poor continues to widen.

If Trump carries on the way he did in 2017 making threats to leave NATO, etc the best thing the Europeans could do is ignore him. Europe is as big an economic block as USA and they have already begun to shore up NATO with additional funding and are providing a lot more aid to Ukraine. There are a lot of large and pretty sophisticated Arms manufacturers in the UK, Sweden, France & Germany. BAE Systens is the 3rd largest in the world and arguably produce the best nuclear submarines. Trump was told by the EU Secretary General last time that he needed to be more conciliatory & pleasant to friends stating "after all you haven't got many". A concern amongst a lot of democrat voters was that Trump would take the US away from alliances and back in to an isolationist state as it was after the great depression till they entered the war. Trumps rhetoric certainly displays this. The world for a huge number of Americans starts and finishes at the US border. They have one of the lowest passport holder %ages in the world. Most only have passports to go to Canada. In 1989 it was only 3%. By 2017 it was nearly 40%, now its 47%. Those thinking of leaving will already have a passport. 50% don't think there is anything else in the world except the USA & everyone else wants to move there especially rapists, murderers & child molesters. They know it's true, Trump told them. The Republican Party is now the Trump Party. Not one of the earlier Republican Presidents endorsed him.

As far as i know these hydrogen powered vehicles use fuel cells to convert the hydrogen to electricty & then power the car that way so in a sense they are EVs using a clean fuel to produce the electricity. They are not ICE cars burning hydrogen. The technology has been around for a long time. The big issue is the ability to store the fuel as in its liquid form the pressure is immense. That is being overcome with new technology.

There are always budding entrepreneurs whenever emerging technologies look like being successful. Many of them fail or don't get sufficient backing to go ahead. Some get enough money to proof of concept and even prototypes and then are abandoned. Ideas and reality are two different things and investors want good returns. This is happening also with all the startups in the race to produce electric aircraft, automated air taxis etc.

Heavily shopped? It is probably done by a 75 year old with alzheimer's. A 6 year old wouldn't have made any of those mistakes.

Most of the people who write reviews on productreview are those who have had a bad experience so the results often look bad. Most of those who have had a good experience don't go near these review sites. BYD didn't do anyone any favours when the cars for our market arrived with Ling Long tyres which are absolute crap designed only for driving around town on smooth asphalt. Plenty of owners have now changed them for better quality tyres designed for Australian road conditions and EVs. My car came with Bridgestone Turanzas specially designed for EVs with very low rolling resistance

True but it does indicate they have confidence in their product. In China & Thailand, MG are now providing a lifetime warranty on the traction battery capped at 20,000 km/year. This is backed by the battery manufacturer, CATL who have introduced 1.5 & 2 million km warranties for some of their new truck & bus batteries.

There is a price war on at present so a good time to buy an EV. New models are due out in the new year so it is a good time to buy if you have the money. I could buy my car now new with a 10 year warranty for 10k less than I paid for it in September last year with a 7 year warranty.

They are called Faraday cages and can be bought on Ebay, like 2 of them for $10.00. Pretty cheap insurance. Most new cars sold these days have keyless entry fobs. I bought a new wallet recently and it has shielding for all my cards.

This is a new innovation for destination charging installed in the carpark of the university of Surrey in just 3 hours. It was delivered on the back of a truck. 12 EV chargers with a solar panel covered roof. It is slow charging (7.7 kW single phase of 11/22kW 3 phase) but perfect for all day parking places or even Supermarkets. It is bring your own cable, plug in and scan your card. The one in the video is also grid connected but it could be off grid with battery storage.

the 4 seasons become less pronounced as you move closer to the tropics. When I lived in NZ, Summer was dry, warm & pleasant with a few hot days, Autumn was very colourful with deciduous trees showing brilliant colours, the days warm but nights cool. Winter was wet and cold with frosts often followed by fog & not much sun & Spring was absolutely fabulous with new birth and new growth,lots of spring flowers like daffodils everywhere etc. Here on the NSW North coast at 30 deg South, the seasons while still there blend in to each other & lots of plants that have dormant periods in Winter don't do well but you can grow sub tropical fruits and other things. We do get the odd frost, this year we had 3 that I know of but by 8 am it's gone. Summer is the worst season with high humidity and stifling temperatures at times in January to March. Autumn is the best time for easy living though with no requirement to find cool places or turn on air conditioning to feel comfortable.

Government subsidisation has and is happening in all economies. The US government owned GM for some time after it went bankrupt and propped all the others up. The only US car maker never to have gone into bankruptcy is Ford but they also took government money. A third of the US car industry is now owned by Stellantis, a Dutch company. The Australian car industry never made a profit if the subsidies were removed and apart from that it was foreign owned and the owners demanded even more subsidies to keep it going until it all got too expensive and too hard for such a small market. The Chinese labour market is well controlled but they now have a huge middle class with money to spend and a pretty big wealthy class with plenty of billionaires. In The US the so called free economy allows for people to get paid $7.50 an hour with no holiday or sick pay. 4 people in the US have more wealth than the bottom 40% of the population. The crazy part about it all is many of those 40% support Trump and his policies will make everything worse for them & better for his billionaire supporters like Musk.

Most new cars now have E-Sims in them. As there are multiple computer systems in all new cars they need to be connected to the internet just like your phone or home computer for updates and improvements. The hype about the Chinese wanting to access everything you have is complete rubbish. Their success is due to being commercially competitive and being better than the Wests traditional manufacturers. Oldies will remember when we called everything made in Japan as "Jap Crap" & it was, till they became better at most things than we were. Now the Chinese have turned the world on its head once again, originally producing poor copies of Western products but now dominating the world in most things. The USA is scared shitless about what has happened. Musk pre-empted it by building Teslas in China & so did Apple. Every iPhone & Apple computer is now made in China. Biden has announced a 100% tariff on Chinese vehicles & is moving to ban them altogether citing Chinese spying through software embedded in them. He knows that the Chinese vehicles are way better & cheaper than US made cars & will totally annihilate the US Auto industry. This Chinese spying stuff is of course complete garbage as it was with the ban on Huawei 5G equipment. Huawei just happened to be the best and cheapest 5G gear available undercutting everyone else so we banned it and lied about them being able to listen in. If the Chinese wanted to do this it would already be happening given that almost all of our electronic equipment for private & commercial use is made in China. The hype & hysteria is being generated by the US just like it was back in the McCarthy era when Reds under the Bed and the Communist tide coming to take over led to the devastation in Indo China where the US and us hanging on to Uncle Sams coat tails led to millions of deaths for no valid reason at all. The era of globalisation is now fast receding back to protectionism & if Trump become President the US will begin to recede back in to isolationism, somewhere it hasn't been since before WW2.

Because solar come in various forms using mirrors to melt salt or to heat water to produce steam to drive turbines and to heat various minerals and objects which then release the energy when it gets dark or cold. PV solar is the most common now and it it stands for Photo Voltaic Arrays where electrical energy is generated in PV cells by sunshine.

A mix of solar, wind and storage is quite capable of maintaining a 24/7 supply of electricity. In less than 5 years California has installed more than 10,000 Megawatts of storage batteries an increase of 1250%. In 40 of the last 45 days (20/4/24) clean energy exceeded grid demand during the day. This is just a start but remember that California has a population of 45 million with per capita energy demands far exceeding Australia. https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/04/25/california-achieves-major-clean-energy-victory-10000-megawatts-of-battery-storage/ If they had decided to go nuclear, apart from the astronomic cost the plant would not even be half built by now and they have nuclear experience with 2 plants operating now and 3 in various states of de-commissioning. Remember the cost of decommissioning a nuclear power plant can be multiple billions of dollars and take between 15 & 30 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning#Costs

I heard some comments the other day that the US is going to ban Chinese car imports on the pretext that they are somehow able to be controlled from China and now there is talk of mobile phones being able to do the same thing. This means that there will be no more mobile phones as they are ALL made in China including iPhones & Samsung & every other popular brand. While I am at it the current proposal to shut down the 3G network is a fiasco. Some other countries have shut down the 3 G network such as the UK but they still have the 2 G network operating to account for all the millions of low end devices that use it. The proposal to ensure all phones are capable of VoLTE (Voice over Long Term Evolution) is also a major problem as some new and very expensive phones don't actually use VoLTE in 4G but use a conversion process to use the 3G spectrum so they will be incapable of making emergency calls with no 3G. When Telstra was asked how many roaming phones were in Australia they had no idea & took the question on Notice. When they checked the answer was 2.3 million. The Telcos are quite happy with the shutdown as it will force many people to upgrade their devices when they shouldn't have to. Check this out

Never a more honest or succinct statement from a woman of Bettes stature. Spot on.