September 2012: Subaru of America

Personally I think GM is too late to the Hybrid party and rather than spend and write off all the billions of dollars on their EVs that are actually selling well, they should have stayed the course and not followed Stupid Ford and Idiot47. GM has a 'handful of hybrids' coming - but are they the ones you want? I do not see GM actually doing well in this space as they are already too far behind.

On a more positive note, travel related stuff ... A historic milestone was achieved by Cunard Line within the last week.  When she was built, Queen Mary 2 (QM2) was too big to transit the Panama Canal.  The same was true for other supersized passenger ships.  In the interim, new larger locks were engineered and put into service. https://travelweekly.com.au/queen-mary-2s-first-transit-through-panama-canal-on-way-to-australia/ I saw the QM2 enter San Francisco Bay in 2007 because I was living out West.  It came in on a Sunday and I spent the weekend south of the city and near SFO.  I went there in a rented 2007 Monte Carlo costing less than $25 a day and stayed at one of the cheap chain hotels near SFO costing about $50 a night, which was ridiculously cheap even then. The ship went around South America and sailed northward up the Pacific.  As such, it's not a trip they would be making too often with the QM2. QM2 transited the Panama Canal for the first time just days ago.  She is headed to Los Angeles AND San Francisco.  To clarify the article's headline, Australia is just its next leg - this is the full world cruise.  She was last in Los Angeles in 2006 when she saluted her namesake Queen Mary and last in San Francisco in 2007 and seeing the passage under the Golden Gate Bridge was unforgettable.  These were the only visits to these ports.  With the new Panama Canal locks, her visiting the North Pacific Ocean and its major ports is much more likely to be on future world voyages. In the Panama Canal transit, the nail biter was supposedly going under the Bridge of the Americas - the one with the curved top.  I saw this YouTube with passengers cheering and motorists up above honking. I blame my parents for this!  They took us across the Atlantic a time or two too many when we were kids and this fascination began.

RIP

WTF kind of article is this? Piss-poor grammar and sentences. "By the time the odometer ticked past that 160,000 kilometre mark, equivalent to 160,000 kilometres, 99,000, the pack still retained over 90 percent of its original net capacity." Then it jumps to 91% remaining capacity somehow...? And when jumping to 91% capacity remaining, I don't think they did any math at all. See below for a paragraph that shouldn't be made as evidence of anything. As an engineer, this kind of "facts" should infuriate you.  "Battery health statistics can sound abstract until you translate them into the range figure you see on your dashboard. In this case, the Volkswagen ID. 3 Pro S started life with a usable pack of 77 kWh, and independent testing recorded an initial real world range of 77 k and 272 miles on a full charge. After the long term trial, the car still had 91% of its battery capacity, a figure that aligns with separate reporting that the Volkswagen ID 3 retained 91% battery capacity in a 160,000 kilometre test. In practice, that meant the car lost only around eight miles of usable range, a change small enough that you would struggle to notice in daily driving." 272 x .09 = 24.5 miles. Theoretically losing 9% would lose the owner about 25 miles of range, not 8 miles. It is now a 248-mile range EV.  This looks like some garbage AI-generated article.  Just for the record, I'm not saying that EVs don't have good battery management and degradation. I'm just saying this article was an embarrassing example to stand by.