Drew Dowdell

Oh, yeah, they never actually put that into production like they did with the Mirai.

There was a Richard Craver and a Fahad Butt a year behind me in high school. At the energy company I worked for we had a Keister, two Cox (married couple), a Dick, and a guy named Halong Wang but shortened his first name to Harry. If you ever get stuck on the tracks, your first call is to 911 and they'll call the RR.

I'm not sure what you're referring to. BMW is the one making a hydrogen engine (though they'll fail too). Toyota builds/built a hydrogen fuel cell. The only difference between a fuel cell and an EV is how you "recharge" it. It's just an EV with a different kind of battery, and it performs decently well. The failure of hydrogen, regardless of if its an ICE (BMW) or fuel-cell (Toyota and others), is that it is expensive to produce both in dollars and in energy input. You never end up with more energy from hydrogen than you put into producing it, thus making it nothing more than an expensive and hard to transport battery system. Lithium and the other rare-earth metals might be expensive to get out of the ground, but you get to use them for well over a decade and a couple hundred thousand miles and they are input agnostic. EV batteries don't care if the electricity is generated by solar, wind, nukes, hydro, or @A Horse With No Name burning scrap wood in a boiler in his garage hooked up to a vintage steam engine.

Do me a favor. Pick up some N95s just to have. This new bird flu. The timeline of cases is eerily similar to the start of Covid. First a case in Vancouver. Now 60 cases in California. A case in Louisiana. Lions and tigers in an animal sanctuary dropping dead. It’s clearly made the jump to mammals. All 50 states have chicken farms vastly infected. It has a higher mortality rate than covid.

And you have other road trip cars to rack up miles on too.

Even though some degradation is expected, with ranges as high as they are getting these days, it's not really going to affect your day-to-day life if you're charging at home each night. A newer EV with a 320 mile range from the factory will still get 265 miles of range if the battery degrades to 80% after 12 years. That's still a longer range than some base model Tesla Model-3s

A commonly held perception about lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles and hybrids may not be true according to a Stanford University study that shows the batteries lasting longer than earlier lab tests had shown. In a paper published on December 9th, researchers from the SLAC-Stanford Battery Center and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory monitored differences in battery health when the batteries were subjected to two types of battery charge and discharge cycled. The most commonly used method of lab testing batteries involves charging and discharging the batteries using a constant current. Another more involved test, called Dynamic Cycling, mimics real-world activity more closely with surges in use followed by rest and regeneration cycles. The researchers found that the batteries subjected to the dynamic cycle test fared better in in health metrics such as the degradation of electrodes and lithium. The team tested four charge-discharge patterns to 92 sample batteries over two years and found that the closer to real world use the pattern was, the better the health results of the battery at the end of the test with up to a 40 percent improvement over the standard test. The results were unexpected because the researchers thought rapid changes in charge-discharge in the dynamic cycling test would cause faster degradation of the battery components. Fear of expensive battery replacement costs had impacted the adoption of electric vehicles despite the likelihood that they will last 12 years or more. View full article

For at least the next 5-7 years, nearly all EVs will need to come with an adaptor of some sort from the manufacturer as the charging network converts. If not NACS to CCS, then CCS to NACS.

Where did you find the car? I'm not familiar with that. The Stage kit for the HHR SS brought output to 290 hp and one of our members here got a stage kit for his HHR SS a while back, but 389 hp is nearly a 100 hp jump over what GM ever offered, and the rest of the car would have needed to be beefed up too.

Oh? The "E-Class" name first appeared with the facelifted W124 in 1993 for the model year 1994 (the W124 was introduced in 1984 but continued with the older naming convention until 1993 when all Mercedes-Benz models switched to a new system, e.g. E 320 instead of 300 E)

After the sudden departure of Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares on December 1st, Stellantis brands are making quick work of reversing some of the embattled CEO's decisions. One such decision was the removal of the 8-Speed Torqueflite automatic transmission from V6 powered Wranglers for the 2025 model year making the manual transmission the only option for buyers wanting the V6. Those needing an automatic could only choose the 4-cylinder turbo, the 4xe Plug-in Hybrid, or the final year offering of the V8 powered Rubicon 392 Final Edition.  Due to enthusiast and dealer outcry, on December 18th, Jeep announced that the 8-speed automatic would be rejoining the options sheet when paired with a V6 for $4,500, the same up-charge as in 2024. According to one report from CNBC, Tavares was the sole reason Stellantis also canceled the Hemi V8 across the board. View full article

Doing what it's built to do. Chew up interstate.

I have an older HP that has been my workhorse since 2016. It technically didn't meet the requirements because it was an older generation intel, but just on the cusp. It still has TPM 2.0 and must have been one of the transitional machines with that generation of processor to get it. I used one of the registry hacks to install Win 11 a few months ago and it works great. It's no longer powerful enough to play games, but it's a great, lightweight business machine for the web and e-mail. I have my newer Alienware laptop for the more powerful needs, but even though it is the same screen size, it's too big to lug around at car shows and such. The HP is perfect for that.