kgwilson

My old 2012 Mitsubishi had a space saver tyre. It got used twice in 11 years. Got me home & to the tyre shop at 80 kph. My new MG4 hasn't got a spare wheel but has a tyre pump & a can of goo. That'll work for a nail but not for a major slash etc. However the car comes with free roadside assist for the first 7 years. There is a button in the roof console behind the rear view mirror & pressing that sends a help message with the GPS location of the car to the roadside assist mob who in Australia is NRMA. NRMA have my details in their database & ring my mobile number to ask what's wrong & advise when they will be out to fix my problem. Hopefully I'll never need to use it.

Well I woke up this morning at about 6:00 so am still woke. I won't be woke after about 11:00pm tonight for 7 or 8 hours & then I'll be woke again. I don't like being woke in the middle of the night.

Russia seems to do this all the time. Make up a story that has absolutely no basis in fact and is easily debunked but the Russian public are fed their official line and anything to the contrary is banned from publication.

A frog walks in to a bank and asks for a loan. The loans officer asks for his name. Kermit the frog says, Kermit Jagger, What's yours? Patrick he says Patrick Whack. How much do you want. I want $30,000.00 says Kermit. 30 thousand, good grief you're just a frog. I have a famous father says the frog, Mick Jagger. He is a good friend of the bank manager, go and ask him, he'll vouch for me. Look says Patrick it doesn't matter who your father is you can't get a loan without collateral. Kermit then fumbles about in his pocket and eventually pulls out a tiny pink elephant perfectly formed and says this is collateral now go and see the manager about my loan. So Patrick reluctantly goes in to the back office and bumps in to the bank manager on his way out to lunch and quickly relates the story in a a very condescending manner & then shows him the pink elephant offered as collateral saying what the hell is this supposed to be. The Manager says It's a nick nack paddy whack give the frog a loan his old man's a rolling stone.

He got out of NZ before he was booted out. He originally headed the tourist board there but made a series of blunders with failed campaigns and high tailed it to Australia claiming to have come up with the 100% Pure NZ slogan that became a famous tourist attraction statement but in fact had nothing at all to do with it. This was his BS claim to get the job with the Australian Tourist Commission & he was sacked from that job & then entered politics where he became a fundamentalist christian happy clapper and Malcolm back stabber. Went on holiday to Hawaii when the country was burning, grabbed peoples hands when they refused to shake his and the final insult of appointing himself to multiple ministries without telling anyone. One of the worst if not the worst Australian PM ever.

Greenlands ice sheet has been there for 2.6 million years.

I just saw that the 2024 Dakar Rally has just been won by Carlos Sainz & he is 61 now. The interesting thing is that it was in an Audi with an electric drive train powered by a generator driven by an internal combustion engine but it saves 60% of emissions compared to a standard ICE drive train so more or less a hybrid. Of course this is not a new concept, diesel electrics have been around for 120 years but now modern technologies have enabled this in rally cars. It is the torque available from zero rpm and getting that on to the ground that blows ICE powered vehicles away.

Trump can and he also has alternative facts. All the discussion on Woke & I still don't know what it is.

Extremes of temperature, wet and dry have always been there from the start of our recorded history mostly less than 100 years ago. It is the long term trends and by that I mean in the last century that are the most worrying aspect and the steadily increasing temperature medians are triggering extremes of heat, cold and wild weather rarely seen before, again in our very short term recorded history

Most ICE vehicles don't get past 200-400,000km in their life time. At that point they are worth very little & even if the engine is still good, the rest of the car is pretty tired and maintenance costs mount considerably. The batteries now being produced by CATL, BYD, LG, Panasonic etc using the same NMC chemistry as they have been for some years now have improved in quality and longevity dramatically. Some Chinese EV manufacturers are now providing a 500,000 km warranty on the battery. This is in China only but shows the confidence they have in the latest battery technology. Much of the improvement has come from battery management software that looks after the battery for the owner rather than relying on humans to manage it. My car has a 7 year unlimited km warranty on the battery. Others, generally more expensive EVs have 8 and 10 year warranties. Tesla built its first Gigafactory in Nevada in 2016. Included was a battery recycling facility. As at 2021 they had not recycled any batteries at all other than damaged ones. This is because used EV batteries have a ready market as battery storage in houses and commercial buildings and are still good for many years. When an EV battery is toast it is recycled as black mass. All of the minerals are recovered and can be reused in new batteries. The first Tesla roadster in 2008 based on the Lotus Elise chassis had a 50kWh battery which degraded to about 70% after 5 years and 80,000km. That is laughable now but those numbers are still being used by all sorts of anti EV people and publications. 1 million km is now a basic standard (at least from CATL) before the battery degrades to 80% of new. Newer technologies are even better including LFP & Sodium and others in the pipeline promise massive improvements. In 10 years time 1000km range will be normal with 5 minute charges giving 400km of range as a minimum. Already some EVs can get over 100km from a 5 minute charge. I am happy with my slow home charger and power from my rooftop solar. In 10 years time I'll be in my 80s & probably not driving much but at least I won't have pumped any emissions into the atmosphere between now and then.

When he won the IOWA republican selection some of the evangelicals were interviewed & asked why they voted for Trump, responded that god told them to.

My EV weighs 1672kg fully charged. Almost all of the modern ICE Utes and SUVs are as heavy or heavier. There isn't much of a 2nd hand market at present but that will change rapidly given the numbers being added to the national fleet. Nearly 15 million new EVs were added to the global fleet in 2023 and there are now about 40 million on the road. If that is what you call a fad it seems like a long term one to me. There are over 400 different brands of EVs globally, 300 of these in China and new ones a popping up all the time.

Public chargers are pretty expensive in Australia. There are not enough of them and there is not enough competition. At home it costs me less than a third of the cost of petrol even though the price has come down a bit from what it was at over $2.00 a litre. Unless you do long distance road trips every week or 3 it is still far less costly to fuel an EV. I charge mine 1 or 2 times a week at off peak rates when I am asleep and I get free power for 4 hours in the weekend so take advantage of that as well. I have had rooftop solar for 12 years but the capacity is only 2kW. I am adding another 6.6kW & then will be able to charge the car almost free during the day. Based on my average driving I have calculated that the investment will be fully paid off within 2 years and that is at current electricity prices. EV costs are still coming down and will reach parity with ICE within a couple of years according to some reports but the total cost of ownership is already well in favour of EVs. The first service of my car is after 2 years or 40,000km & costs about $250.00 & that is just to check brakes, wheels etc replace A/C filters and fluids etc. The motor only has one moving part & requires virtually no maintenance.

Since owning an EV I have never felt so refreshed after driving. Even driving a very expensive luxury car doesn't provide the same feeling. It may be a sub sonic vibration that is always present when driving an ICE car even though you do not seem able to feel it. The electric motor has none of this and it seems so effortless to drive. It makes no difference going up a hill or on a level road. There is no change in engine (electric motor) note and even though it may be hard to detect in an expensive ICE car it is still there. Then of course there is that EV torque that you just cannot get from any ICE car. My first long trip experience was terrible though. It was on the day of the Optus meltdown & I got to Brisbane from home, nearly 400km & was busting for a pee & coffee, but couldn't use the app or the charger as both were affected by the outage. I couldn't even buy lunch. Eventually I went in to a bank and they did a cash withdrawal from my account. Once everything was back up & running it only took 20 minutes & I was off

The fossil fuel industry has been supported by governments all over the world for decades and Australia is no exception. That's how so many massive corporations end up paying little or no tax. A few thousand off the price of a new EV pales in to insignificance compared to that.

There are heaps of you tubers rabbiting on about all the unsold EVs and how they are crap etc. It seems that US car manufacturers were all given billions by the federal government to produce EVs. Then the videos began to appear such as Ford was losing $76,000 for every EV is built. Then 3600 Car dealers wrote a letter to Biden saying the couldn't sell them, the charging infrastructure wasn't there and lots of other problems. The real reason they didn't want to sell them is they don't make any money from servicing and maintenance because they don't need any. Plus the other one about insane insurance costs and comments like $20,000 to fix a dent. GM and Ford, the only US owned manufacturers left have produced a lot of pretty poor EVs & they are not selling many. Tesla on the other hand is going gang busters and the Model Y is the number 1 selling car in the world now. Due to US import policy there are no Chinese EVs in America. China has surpassed Japan as the worlds largest motor vehicle exporter and makes more than half of the worlds EVs and most of the worlds lithium based batteries. Even Elon Musk saw the light and has a massive Tesla factory in China. BYD though is set to overtake Tesla in the next year. The US ICE car industry is looking like going down the same path as the British car industry did more than 40 years ago. The US treasury is still the biggest shareholder of GM after the record $13.8 biillon bailout over 12 years ago..

What we really need to do is have laws preventing the importation and sale of vehicles with engines spitting out high particulate emissions. We do not have ANY laws relating to this and we encourage manufacturers to sell us their dirtiest vehicles. They are cheap compared to cleaner vehicles but we have the unenviable distinction of being at the bottom of the pile in company with Mexico and Russia. The other thing we should do is completely overhaul the laws regarding fringe benefits tax which is currently one of the reasons Australia is out of step with the rest of the world where the average vehicle size is increasing. Don't get me started on those ridiculous giant American Utes like the RAM and F250 that compensate for the lack of personal self esteem of their owners. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-30/sales-of-suvs-and-utes-on-the-rise-in-australia/103174638

She is a bit off the wall as well but better by far than the rest of the nutters they have in their arsenal.

Why would Biden want to visit Trump in Jail?

No but we are trying hard to.

200mm and a small car will begin to float and loose traction, 300mm and most cars & SUVs will do the same. If there is a bit of a flow even though it doesn't look bad the vehicles will get carried away and once off the road and in to the river bed or flow and you are at the mercy of nature. I've been involved in a number of rescues with SES and the excuses are always the same. It didn't look too bad or I didn't think it was that deep, the current didn't look that strong etc. Any good 4WDer will get out and walk in to the flow to check it out. You can't see what is underneath especially when the water is dirty.

I'd also never heard of swooping Magpies in breeding season till I arrived in Queensland & saw people on bikes with wires poking out everywhere from their helmets. Initially I thought it must be some sort of fashion or identity thing.

Another driver ignoring the emergency services call "If its flooded forget it". The number of people who still think they can get through, even with all the publicity and evidence of vehicles swept away drownings and dangerous rescues astounds me.

I believe that SA is now 100% renewable self sufficient and is a net exporter of renewable energy to NSW.

Magpies were introduced to NZ to control grass grubs in the early 20th century. There were no natural predators & there was food everywhere so their population exploded and their range expanded through the entire country & they became the top boss bird. Eventually they were considered a pest & chased out a lot of the native species. I shot heaps of them. I had a cassette tape of a magpie distress call & when I played it they would come to help. They learned that trick pretty quick though. I also had a Magpie trap. It had 2 compartments. Food was put in 1 compartment & the bird got trapped, then another would turn up and get trapped in the other compartment & the process continued. Not surprisingly Magpies in NZ do not like humans but they are not in their natural environment and have done considerable damage. Here on the East coast it is completely different & it did take a while to warm towards Magpies. I now know that they are pretty intelligent and likeable and this is where they belong and are in their element.