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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I’ve had an EV for a couple of years and had to rent a gas car on a trip recently. I was prepared for the expensive fuel, I wasn’t prepared for how shit it was to drive.

    See, an EV’s electric motor and (usually) single reduction gear means you get basically the same acceleration between 5 km/h and 120 km/h. You can put your foot down slightly and forget you’re accelerating because it feels just like sitting in a stationary car on a hill. How far you push the accelerator is how much acceleration you get. Unless you’re getting wheel spin or you’re at the car’s power limit, that’s all there is to it.

    A gasser has an engine with different performance depending on RPM and a gearbox that provides different performance based on which gear it’s in and changes according to it’s own logic. You’re just used to this when you drive one all the time, but for me it was awful the way I’d put my foot down and get nothing, then engine noise, then some power, then a lurch and more power and another lurch and less power. The accelerator pedal is a suggestion, mostly disconnected from what the car actually chooses to do.









  • I’ll just be happy if they have basic things like VoIP and emergency call handling properly defined.

    Australia shut down our 2G and 3G networks, and it’s been an absolute dumpster fire.

    A bunch of early 4G phones drop back to 3G for voice calls, but that’s really easy to check for and that’s mostly old phones anyway.

    The real dumpster fire was emergency calls. It turns out there’s phones in the wild with fully functional VoLTE but internal logic that forces them to drop back to 3G or 2G specifically for emergency calls.

    Other phones can make emergency calls, but only on certain networks - a phone will try any available network regardless of SIM card when making emergency calls.

    Or a phone can make emergency calls on any network - but only if it’s running the correct modem firmware version.

    Or it’ll work on any network if it has a Telstra SIM card, but if it has an Optus card it can’t make an emergency call on Telstra because it isn’t running the Telstra-specific VoLTE code anymore.

    The best part is that this emergency call functionality depends on you specifically dialling the emergency number, so there’s no way to test any device other than actually dialling an emergency.