Sure, but I don’t hear any road noise from my apartment except for the odd motorcyclist or car tearing down the street at full throttle, and it’s definitely not the tyres that I’m hearing.

So yep, quieter tyres are great, but EVs’ lack of an obnoxiously and unnecessarily loud exhaust is definitely a big bonus, too.

Acknowledge that you were, and are still, being silly.

I don’t want to humour you. I want you to stop being silly.

Ah yes, after being caught trying to ignore the fact that you just lied about your original point, now I’m supposedly splitting hairs. And I’m doing that by speaking to exactly what you claimed and by providing actual research study results to back up my claims, which directly disprove yours.

You can call it a theory, or an opinion, or whatever else you want, but it remains unsupported by facts. And, as mentioned, the facts we have access to indicate that the exact opposite is true.

And you understand that you just randomly claiming that your theory is difficult to measure or prove doesn’t actually make that true, right? It’s not a particularly difficult thing to study or analyse. The thing is, the other related studies have effectively already disproven your theory without requiring a separate, singular study.

Your original point, and I quote:

>You joke, but I took my test in a VW westfalia camping van. I’m a better, more alert driver for it.

>I admit that cameras are an important safety measure and very helpful. But I contend they don’t make the driver more capable, they make them less capable. They teach the driver to focus on the screen instead of checking all surroundings. The camera should only be a small part of it.

>Source: every single person under the age of 25 I have ever been in a car with.

Your original point is that cameras make people worse drivers. The evidence indicates the opposite is true.

You didn’t cite anything. If you want to cite something, then cite it. If you want to quote me, then be accurate.

You are not basing your beliefs on evidence. You want me to concede that your unproven beliefs, based on your unscientific personal evaluation and anecdotes is somehow relevant. It’s not relevant. It’s not proven. It’s not measurable. It’s not evidence.

Every study on the subject that I’ve found shows that simply having a reversing camera reduces the likelihood of a hitting something while reversing.

You want to imagine that simply having a camera makes people worse drivers, but that claim is not supported by any evidence. The actual evidence shows the opposite.

If you have some evidence to backup your unfounded claim, then provide it.

You can keep waffling but you’re not making a point.

Cameras improve the chances of a careful driver from reversing into something that they otherwise couldn’t have seen without the camera.

That’s a simple, irrefutable truth.

Ensuring that every new vehicle offers that additional safety device allows the driver access to that additional level of accident prevention.

The evidence supports that.

Instead of making up random quotes and then assigning them to me despite me literally never having said them, you’d be better off looking at the research on the matter.

The problem is you didn’t make a valid point.

The people who are trying to drive safely make use of the tools available to help them do so. A tool which improves visibility by definition allows those drivers to reduce their chance of having an accident.

And of course, the evidence supports that.

You can keep ranting your conspiracy theories about ulterior motives all you want, but the motive behind the mandating of cameras doesn’t change their effectiveness.

A camera improves a driver’s visibility of what’s behind their vehicle. That, in itself, improves the capacity of a driver to determine if it’s safe to reverse without hitting something.

You can descend into ever sillier arguments to pretend otherwise but that is a safety feature. It has been mandated, which means all new cars now have a safety feature which they didn’t previously have to have.

Having access to a safety feature does not make you a worse driver.

You are being silly, and escalating your silliness as you go, it would appear.

Accidents without fault happen all the time, including between capable, attentive drivers. Count yourself lucky if you’ve never been involved in one, but the laws of physics apply to us all. Wrong place, wrong time and you’ll be telling a different story.

There are laws to prevent people from going 100 miles over the speed limit. You can have your license revoked for doing so. Motorcyclists are generally required to take additional tests, face tighter restrictions for things like blood alcohol level, and in most places, are required to wear additional safety devices such as helmets. Breathalysers are often mandated for drivers with histories of drunk driving.

But of course, none of that has anything to do with the fact that humans can’t see through cars. That inability was resulting in accidents, which is why reversing cameras were mandated.

> The regulation requires rearview cameras and video displays on new models, a move aimed at preventing accidents in which pedestrians — often children — are run over because a driver can't see them as they back their vehicles.

No need to be silly. There are physical limitations to what you can see using your mirrors. Children are famously unpredictable and will, completely without the knowledge of a driver, end up in blind spots. Pets too. That’s irrefutable. If you had no knowledge that there was a child in the area, and said child had found their way behind your vehicle before you started to reverse, and despite your best efforts to check your mirrors you reversed and hit that child, that’s an accident, and not the driver’s fault. Those types of accidents happen, particularly in vehicles with poor visibility, and that’s exactly why those cameras are now mandated.

There are areas behind vehicles you cannot possibly see from the driver’s seat without a camera. It’s entirely possible for a child to be standing directly behind an SUV and be completely invisible to the driver, for example. It doesn’t matter how carefully you look in your mirrors, if you couldn’t possibly see that kid.

Having the camera doesn’t take away your opportunity to be a careful and wary driver, it provides you an additional capacity to see things behind you.

The second day of that ‘stroll’ includes a 1200m climb over Dead Woman’s Pass

Rio Tinto is switching to renewables is about as big an endorsement as you can get.

With most modern EVs you could cover that sort of usage by charging your car for 20 minutes once a month at a fast charger. Plug in, reply to a few emails or get on social media for 15 minutes and be on your way.

It’s a damned good thing you’ve brought up this point that as I’m sure none of the thousands of businesses and engineers involved in designing, developing, building, distributing, maintaining and repairing these EVs would have ever considered.

I’m certain they will appreciate your learned and well informed concerns that aren’t at all laced with absurd nonsense fed to you by your chosen media sources who definitely aren’t backed by companies that stand to lose out in the shift to EVs.

And of course, anyone who would prefer to drive a car that is quieter, more efficient, requires less maintenance, has better tech, and allows them to refuel at home, overnight must definitely only be buying that car to show off how green they are.

It would be unbelievable to think that electric motors are already being designed which don’t require cobalt, or batteries which use sodium instead of lithium. Absurd! Impossible! Because nobody has ever considered your brilliant position that using more cobalt will increase the demand for it and that there are concerns about its sourcing.

And of course, the only possible way to get cobalt is through deadly child slave labour and that definitely could not possibly change despite the enormous potential income available to other mining companies that might want to get in on that windfall.

What sensible and original thoughts you offer us, oh learned one.

Those college students still get paid a delivery fee for every delivery. If you in-house the vehicles you end up with more reliable vehicles and lower daily expenses, you also open up the job to people who don’t own a car.

If you lived in a place like The Maldives, you wouldn’t have such a glib opinion.

The reason that scientists are explaining more and more dire risks ahead for us is because we’ve wasted most of the time we had to address both the causes and the impacts of climate change.

Governments and industries around the world have been trying to postpone or avoid the work required to address climate change for upwards of 30 years, and pushing media sources to spread misleading information that minimises the likely impact and cause of climate change.

Ignoring the problem has not helped. Instead it’s given us less time to address the proven effects of carbon emissions.

It’s not a prediction to state that carbon emissions are affecting the habitability of planet Earth or that the associated and continuing temperature rises are causing big migrations of human populations.

Those are facts, proven by mountains of data that even the oil companies identified themselves back in the 70s.

Observing those trends is not predicting the future, it’s being rational about threats to our current way of life.

There’s also evidence that even having solar panels on grazing land is beneficial to the grazing animals and to the land itself by providing shaded areas and because moisture in the air accumulates on the panels and drips onto the earth below them.

Driving around a completely seperate, mostly unused engine in a hybrid, which doubles the complexity and maintenance of the vehicle is no more efficient than carrying battery weight. When the number 1 selling personal vehicle in the US (F150) weighs between 4,069-5,697lb, I think it’s fair to say that vehicle weight is not people’s primary concern.

People already have the option to choose lighter, shorter range EVs, but they tend to buy longer ranges due to range anxiety. As EV adoption continues however, a lot of people are realising that they don’t need the extra range and are buying shorter range EVs the second time round.

Combine that with improvements in battery density, improvements in charging speeds, and tech such as wireless charging, battery weights can and are going down.

It’s funny, the anti EV crew claim there’ll never be enough renewables and the pro Hydrogen crew claim there’ll be so much they we’ll have nothing better to do with it than make Hydrogen. In the meantime, rooftop solar and a home battery can cover most people’s energy needs while getting nowhere near what it would take to generate the equivalent amount of hydrogen.

Or…we don’t waste all that energy making the hydrogen and shipping it and instead just let your solar panels charge your home battery and you just plug your car in to charge from that when you get home.

Your hydrogen dream is unlikely at best because hydrogen just doesn’t make sense for personal transport, whereas my example is already happening.

It’s not cheating, it’s using what you’ve got. Iceland isn’t cheating by using geothermal. If it’s there to use, might as well use it.