Forget 'Baby on board'

[Rick Potter]

Only a young lady would get away with that.

[Jim Koepke]

Duke Energy only pays me back $.025/Kwh of electricity I send back to them as surplus, and now charges $15.6/kWh for usage.

Most people paying a rate like that would sit in the dark with the TV off.

In my county:

Cowlitz County PUD's patrons are charged an average residential electricity price of 8.79 cents per kilowatt hour

We are among the lowest 170 rates in the country.

It seems a bit coercive for them to pay you so little while charging so much.

jtk

[Alan Lightstone]

Whoops. Typo on my post. Duke Energy charges $0.156/kWh. Forgot the decimal point.

That being said, they now only pay back 16% of what they charge you for electricity for surplus you send them, that they then resell. Nice business to be in. Their rates they charge customers went up this year, and the amount they pay you for surplus went down even more.

[Steve Demuth]

Whoops. Typo on my post. Duke Energy charges $0.156/kWh. Forgot the decimal point.

That being said, they now only pay back 16% of what they charge you for electricity for surplus you send them, that they then resell. Nice business to be in. Their rates they charge customers went up this year, and the amount they pay you for surplus went down even more.

The rules on feed in tariffs in this country are a complete mess, with both solar advocates and the utilities arguing for - and in some places getting - absurd positions. The advocates think you should get net metering at full retail, with refunds for production over use. The utilities want to pay so little that no consumer would choose to self generate. None of this is helpful. It's particularly not so in a place such as where I live, where a Rural Electric Cooperative that serves almost entirely widely distributed customers on land parcels that range from 20 acres up to thousands - We should be encouraging levelized solar and wind on every farm they serve, either with on-farm batteries, or by building grid-scale batteries.

Currently, my own REC has basically two options for those who want to have distributed generation (which is mostly, but not entirely solar): you can go full net meter (which means you get a credit for every kwh you feed into the grid equal to what you pay for a kwh taken off the grid), provided you don't connect production that exceeds 125% of your annualized usage, or you can build as large as you want (up to 40kw), but be compensated at "avoided cost" rates set by the REC's wholesale supplier at maybe 10% of the retail meter rate. The full net meter option is crazy: there is no way the power a solar system feeds back into the grid for a couple of hours on a sunny day is worth full retail, and paying that rate just shifts the cost of continuous generation off those with solar to those without. But the avoided cost calculation option is absurd in the other direction: we sould be encouraging responsible renewable production, including levelized production, not strangling it at birth.

The absence of a national grid policy on this stuff is an embarrasement.

[Rick Potter]

Well, the decision is made. The free trial period is over and we decided not to spend $100 a month to get the full self driving experience. It was interesting, both super neat and annoying. Each time you over ride it, you get a message asking why, and I gave them my dislikes which were mostly about unwanted lane changes.

I am sure that with all the millions of feedback answers they are getting they will have the system smoothed out in just a few months. If I ever take a long trip in the car, I will see if I can just buy a month. Don't know if they will do that. I guess we will see.

[Alan Lightstone]

Well, the decision is made. The free trial period is over and we decided not to spend $100 a month to get the full self driving experience. It was interesting, both super neat and annoying. Each time you over ride it, you get a message asking why, and I gave them my dislikes which were mostly about unwanted lane changes.

I am sure that with all the millions of feedback answers they are getting they will have the system smoothed out in just a few months. If I ever take a long trip in the car, I will see if I can just buy a month. Don't know if they will do that. I guess we will see.

Yes, clearly still a work in progress. The automatic lane changing is often annoying. It would always try to go in the right lane at a spot where I knew up ahead would be a line of cars waiting to get into the Starbucks and Chick-fil-A. I would always have to change that.

I really didn't have much belief that anyone listens to those recordings you make when you cancel autopilot.

It drives MUCH better now with cars cutting across lanes ahead of you. Huge improvement in that.

Lane changing now has a different, and very annoying bug. It often starts a lane change, pauses, goes back to the original lane, then makes the lane change. Never did that before. It's in the latest software "upgrade". That's a real programming screwup.

So each major upgrade really does get better. It's clearly not a finished product by any measure. And you really do have to be ready to cancel at any time. But it is getting more and more impressive each year.

[roger wiegand]

I was traveling for most of the month so only got to try the FSD on a couple short trips. I thought it was a really impressive proof of principle. Worked way better than I expected and vastly better than the dumbed down "autopilot" lanekeeping you get without paying extra. The glitches and weirdness remaining, however, means that it's still not something I'd use other than as a novelty.

Based on what I've seen it certainly could be made to work, very easily if the other cars on the road were so equipped. Dealing with the irrational behavior of humans makes it much harder. It's already a much better, safer driver than quite a number of people I know.

"What's amazing is not how well the bear dances, but that it dances at all"

[Alan Lightstone]

Yes, until cars talk to each other ("Hey, I'm in this lane, don't change lanes into me..."), and of course the Trolley Car problem gets solved (which it won't) this will still be beta. It is very impressive at times having the car drive to a destination 20 miles away, making 50 turns, stopping at stop signs, stop lights, merging onto the highway, etc... But it still makes some mistakes on most drives.

The WSJ recently said that the average age of a car in the US is 12.5 years, and having cars over 200,000 miles is commonplace. In that context, it will be quite a long time until most of this happens. The majority of cars on the road talking to each other: >20 years would be my guess.

[Rick Potter]

I suppose someday 'they' will tell me I can only drive my '55 T-Bird on Saturdays between 5 and 7 AM. Wouldn't want to annoy other 'drivers'.


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