I have a Model 3 at the moment. I’ve had it for almost 5 years and it’s generally been great - cheap to run, quiet and comfortable on longer trips but still fun to drive on back roads.

Recently it had its first major breakdown, and although Tesla service did manage to take care of it, it’s got me browsing for new EVs - but now, buying a Tesla is not the foregone conclusion it once might have been.

First, they have been making some truly stupid design choices in their latest facelifts (deleting the indicator stalks and gear selector).

Second, their CEO has now gone completely mask-off fascist.

Third - after a few years for the competition to catch up, we now have genuine alternatives from other marques which are just as good if not better EVs than Tesla’s offerings.

I think my next car will likely be a Polestar 2.

How often do you need to travel the entire range your car allows?

If you do need to drop everything and drive across country in an EV, you should be stopping at service stations to do short fast charge sessions anyway, as with modern fast chargers and battery tech you will typically go from something like 30% SoC to say 70% in only a few minutes. This saves a lot of time on longer trips.

If you are driving an EV by depleting the battery completely and then charging it back to 100% every time, you are doing it wrong.

Solution: don’t read that shitrag. It was always a waste of paper, now it is a waste of bandwidth as well.

I’ve tried Copilot and to be honest, most of the time it’s a coin toss, even for short snippets. In one scenario it might try to autocomplete a unit test I’m writing and get it pretty much spot on, but it’s also equally likely to spit out complete garbage that won’t even compile, never mind being semantically correct.

To have any chance of producing decent output, even for quite simple tasks, you will need to give an LLM an extremely specific prompt, detailing the precise behaviour you want and what the code should do in each scenario, including failure cases (hmm…there used to be a term for this…)

Even then, there are no guarantees it won’t just spit out hallucinated nonsense. And for larger, enterprise scale applications? Forget it.

I went from a manual to an EV. For an everyday use point of view there is just no comparison. Acceleration is effortless, start/stop traffic is no longer a nightmare, it’s quiet and refined. It is the ideal daily driver. Even on longer trips I no longer feel fatigued after driving for 4-5 hours (the enforced charging stop helps with that).

I personally would not go back to an ICE car in general, manual or not, for everyday use.

From an enthusiasts perspective, however, this is a different question. I wouldn’t rule out getting an ICE manual for fun/weekend use in the future - the kind of driving where you can actually enjoy the level of fine control and feedback that a manual gives you, rather than just wasting it in traffic. But it would have to be something pretty special.

I use both. Pi-hole running in a docker container on one of my home servers which my gateway is configured to assign as the default DNS for all clients, and uBlock Origin on all my browsers to catch everything else.

Pihole is pretty good at catching ads on platforms that are not suited to browser based blockers (IoT devices, streaming boxes etc) but it isn’t perfect and is best used in conjunction with another solution.