kgwilson

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.

The price drop is for all purchasers not businesses. My model which was $50,400 on the road is now $39,990 on the road. At the time I got a State incentive of $3,000 so it was $47,400 all up. The price had already dropped to $47,900 on the road now there is a factory bonus of $8,000 to bring the top spec car to under 40k. There is a facelift model due out in early 2025 so the price drop is to try to get rid of current stock before then. Deals like this happen all the time with all manufacturers. Mazda has been offering big discounts on unsold 2022 models. There are also some good prices on demo cars with only a thousand km or so on the clock.

This is just confirmation of what EV and battery manufacturers have been saying and demonstrating with battery warranties. My MG4 came with an unlimited km 7 year warranty on car & battery. That has now been extended to 10 years and in Thailand & China the warranty is extended to a lifetime warranty. I don't know if this is for the original owner or whether it is transferable to second and subsequent owners. It is capped at 20,000 km a year which is fine for most people so won't apply to taxis & hire cars or probably any used commercially I imagine. After 1 year and 16,000 km my car is reporting battery state of health as 100%.

Even an old Lee Enfield 303 would be better but a modern high velocity small bore hunting rifle with a good calibrated scope would be way more accurate. Then again this is a America with about 500 million guns and 300 million stupid people.

There are lots of them and most are cheaper than Telstra They bulk buy bandwidth from Telstra and sell it to customers at a cheaper rate. Still uses the Telstra network. My mobile plan is with Amaysim which uses Optus. I get unlimited talk & text nation wide but only 4GB a month in data which I hardly ever use. Unused data rolls over and I currently have a credit of over 150GB. The plan costs $30.00 for 90 days. Similar plans are available from other Telcos with Telsta as the carrier but they are more expensive than Optus. I have found that most places I go to I have coverage although Telstra seems to cover more remote areas but there are exceptions. I was on a 4WD driving course west of Dorrigo & there was good Optus coverage there but no Telstra coverage at all.

Budget direct is usually one of the cheapest for cars & property. My house & contents was with Youi as well but the premium has gone ballistic in the last 2 years with 36% & then 24% increases. I used compare the market & got a much better deal with Budget Direct & I saved nearly $500.00. There is a first year special discount of 30% & there is no flood cover that I had before but I don't need that as we are not in a flood prone area. Next year I will do another check. Loyalty to an Insurance company or in fact any supplier of goods and services is a thing of the past. if you are still using the same organisation or even brand for anything for many years you are almost certainly not getting the best deal any more. Comparison websites are good but they all have affiliations with various companies so only provide information from those companies. They have to disclose this and it is sometimes not easy to find.

She probably has bigger hands than him so he wouldn't want too many clips of handshakes going viral. I find it interesting how Kamala was virtually invisible for most of her vice presidency allowing Joe to take the limelight and finish his time after a pretty long and distinguished career. She may not have initially considered running when Joe put his hand up for the almost obligatory 2nd term but she certainly has grabbed the baton and shown the world her obvious capabilities, eloquence and can easily rile Trump into making a fool of himself, though he can do that on his own without assistance. I read somewhere, might have been here, that it is easy to tell when Trump is lying. He plays the accordion when ever he lies. Since I read that I've noticed he does it almost every time he speaks.

We had some very warm Summer like temperatures in late August on the 30th parallel but today it started sunny & got to 19 deg at 11am, then the Southerly kicked in & it was 16 deg by 1 pm. With the wind chill it feels like 8 deg & that's bloody cold for mid Spring in the sub tropics.

Youi

The parts supply for brand new models of any vehicle is always a problem. This doesn't just apply to EVs. My MG4 was one of the first in Australia but there were virtually no parts available at that time & the supply from Shanghai was very slow mainly due to the factory having such a backlog of orders for new vehicles, supply of spares was on the back burner. A year later that has changed somewhat. The Bridgestone tyres it came with were specifically made for EVs with very good rolling resistance. When my car was new they weren't even available at all in Australia. Now no problem. I imagine the same was the same for a windscreen. I am getting one replaced next week as I got a stone chip & that turned in to a crack. The new one was sourced within a day. The cost is around 3k which is ridiculous but this is common for any vehicle with all the electronic stuff as all the sensors have to be recalibrated etc. Attached to the windscreen is a box of electronics including 2 cameras, a forward collision radar, a GPS, an emergency call system with its own eSIM and cellular system antenna. The full process is going to take 3 - 4 hours. The cost of insurance is no different to any car. It cost me $712.00 for fully comprehensive cover of 50k. This year the cost has gone up by $15.00. I don't know where the EV high Insurance cost rumour started but it is wrong. One problem is that there are few trained technicians able to fix the electrics and batteries which in the early stages led to EVs being written off when there was relatively minor damage. This is changing as more technicians get trained. The high voltage battery consists of multiple modules and individual modules can be repaired or replaced. The HV battery on the MG 4 is designed to be easily removable so it can be dropped from under the car on to a trolly and worked on, tested and replaced. The complete HV battery weighs about 400 kg.