Blessed by the Potato

I don’t know if it’s just going viral because sometimes things do that, or if there’s a coordinated push from the various conservative social media accounts to attack Canada’s zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate, or if I’ve accidentally trained The Algorithm into thinking I crave the absolute dumbest opinions on cars, but for whatever reason I am seeing a tonne of misinformation on social media about the ZEV mandate.

For those who don’t know, as one step toward meeting our climate goals Canada has set a sales target for a portion of new cars to be “zero emission”, starting next year (2026) with a 20% target, increasing each year until by 2035 gas-only vehicles are phased out completely and the market is 100% ZEV.

You Won’t be Forced to Drive an EV

This does not mean that you will have to buy an all-electric car: ZEVs include plug-in hybrids. So all the vitriolic takes about having to charge on long drives or running out of juice if stuck in traffic in the winter are nonsense misinformation based on misreading what the government means by ZEVs in the mandate. Most cars sold will continue to have a gas engine for extra range, heat in the winter, road trips, etc., they’ll just also have a battery to handle most local driving needs.

There are a bunch of PHEVs on the market today: a Prius Prime or Hyundai Ioniq if you want a mid-sized car; an Escape PHEV (like mine — as much as I criticize aspects of it, it’s a great driving solution) or Rav4 Prime if you want a regular SUV; a Pacifica if you want a van; an Outlander or Sorento if you want a giant SUV. And many more options that will be coming in time for 2035.

Almost 14% of cars sold in 2024 were ZEVs. Now, most of those were in Quebec where there are significant provincial incentives, but if all it takes is $7k to move the needle that much, then the national quota/credit system should help make it happen (and if not, driving a gas guzzler may become a Veblen good). To my surprise, despite a PHEV being the better solution, most of the ZEVs sold last year were actually full battery-electric vehicles (BEVS), about three-quarters. But IMNSHO, that was in part due to availability: the Rav4 Prime is still backordered to hell, the Escape PHEV was just starting to become available in 2024 and I believe the Hyundai options were largely in the same boat, the Prius Prime was still a brand-new model, and many other options were compliance frankenvehicles. As we move toward 2035 and the ZEV mandate starts to force sales towards ZEVs, I think we’ll see PHEVs take the lead over BEVs.

Charging Infrastructure

The next big misinformation point is for posters to wring their hands up and say there’s no way we’ll have the charging infrastructure for all those electric-powered cars in that time… without ever providing data or a calculation to back that fear-mongering up (“Can you imagine?”). Or assuming an unrealistically worse-than-worst-case scenario, like that all cars are full EVs and have completely drained their batteries at the same time and all want to do fast charging at once.

So let’s do a quick back-of-the-envelope exercise. ZEVs need very roughly 10 kWh/day — the PHEVs largely have roughly that much battery capacity, and they charge from a regular household outlet at about 1 kW overnight at off-peak times. The BEVs will have more capacity (call it 70 kWh for their total battery capacity), but the average demand will come in close to that (because most days they don’t drive their full range). They’ll have higher power chargers (level 2), but if we can handwave away that they won’t all be on at the same time, the population-level effect comes out to the same sort of order-of-magnitude of a kW or so for mostly off-peak times.

Ontario has just over 8 million passenger vehicles. Though there would be 10 years before the ZEV mandate kicks in, and more time for all those new cars to work their way into the system (the gas-only cars sold today would still be around then so we’d have two or three decades to fully add any grid or power generation needs), let’s assume the worst-case that a wizard has cursed us to all drive ZEVs tomorrow. 8 million cars times a kW each is 8 GW of power demand, mostly off-peak.

Ontario, on a typical day, uses about 19 GW on-peak, and 13 GW off-peak (NB: 10-year-old data), so we have something like 6 GW — almost all! — of that grid capacity sitting in our back pocket right now. Yes, it would be a problem if all those cars tried to charge on-peak on a hot summer day with peak A/C demand, but that’s not generally how people charge their PHEVs or even their EVs — they plug in after they get home, often with the car having a timer to wait until off-peak rates to start charging. And that’s our magic-wand scenario — the ZEVs will phase in more slowly, so there will be lots of time for the grid (and generation) capacity to grow.

Cost for Canadians

The last point of misinformation is that this ZEV mandate is going to make cars more expensive for Canadians, and that one does has a big grain of truth to it, but is more subtle and complicated than just comparing the sticker price of an electric car to comparable gas-only one. First off, a system of quotas and credits will generally mean the people driving gas-only cars subsidize the costs of those driving ZEVs. Indeed, in other markets Tesla sells its BEV credits to other manufacturers, so those BEVs are subsidized so much that in many quarters Tesla has more regulatory credit income than it does net income (i.e., the cars are otherwise sold at a loss). So yes, it will make gas-only cars more expensive, but the ZEVs should be cheaper as a result, benefiting the early adopters (with the trade-off that ZEVs are more expensive in the first place).

But the up-front cost is only part of what Canadians pay to drive their cars. Driving on electricity is cheaper than driving on gas for almost all ZEVs out there in almost all jurisdictions. Indeed, part of why I opted for the more expensive Ford Escape PHEV over a comparable hybrid or dino gas-only model is that I expect to save money over its lifetime. While social media may complain that the mandate is increasing prices on Canadians, and that’s largely true for up-front costs, there’s a good chance it will actually help them save money, by nudging them (or in later years, shoving them) into buying a car with a lower total cost of ownership — paternal and all that, but helpful for people that only consider the up-front cost of a car.

The Actual Good Point They Miss

However, that lower total cost of ownership will only apply for those people who are able to plug in at home, and that is not going to be everyone, even in a decade. Which is the one really strong criticism of the mandate: 100% is not necessarily the right number for the final step of the mandate. However, I haven’t seen any of the people who are angry at the mandate discuss the flaws in its specifics and how to make it better, they seem to be angry about the very notion of regulating the free market.

Some people won’t be able to charge (and some will steadfastly refuse to for various reasons and irrational personal preferences even when they can), so in those cases they will be paying more for capabilities they aren’t able to use — only having PHEVs/BEVs available with higher up-front costs really will increase their cost of ownership, as they pay for a battery they won’t use and just go to the gas station like they do today.

Now, an argument can be made that despite that, the target has to be 100%: if we make it say 75% to account for the ~25% who can’t realistically operate on electricity, there is no way the right 25% will end up buying the gas cars: lots of people with the ability to charge will just buy gas cars because they want to as long as they’re available (indeed, buying a gas-only car may become a status symbol; gas guzzlers already are). Manufacturers, when buying credits are an option, may just opt to buy the credits and pass along the higher costs rather than innovate. A partial mandate may keep the momentum and status quo going far longer than if we went for the aggressive, full ZEV mandate, and having some people pay for charging capabilities they will rarely use may just be the cost to get us to a more decarbonized future, some proponents may argue.

So 20% ZEV sales next year is a pretty decent jump from 14%, but totally doable. Some small pricing tweaks on both sides will help manufacturers hit their sales mixes, combined with greater volume availability on the models that are popular anyway. But those targets will get increasingly harder to hit without better adoption by Canadians, and better model offerings (and pricing) from manufacturers. And I’m not convinced 100% is the right stopping point, but also don’t know how to better set the right level, and regardless that’s a more nuanced conversation than “ZEVs bad, government forcing you to do bad things!”

Aside: Confused at Car Manufacturers

I’ve done a few deep dives into hybrids and EVs over the years, but my expertise is not in cars or production. However, I know the hybrid synergy drive used by Toyota and Ford (with some shared patents) has proven itself to be reliable, efficient, and smooth. To the best of my understanding of how patents work, that system is off-patent now (and has been for a little while). So why the hell are so many manufacturers trying to re-invent the wheel (or HSD) rather than just throwing that wonderful, proven system into ~all their models? Why does Hyundai use a regular automatic transmission with an electric motor bolted to it (and get sub-par city mileage)? Why has Honda gone through like three different versions of their hybrid transmission? Why does Volvo sin against nature¹ with its PHEV monstrosities? Why is it seemingly so hard to just take the thing that works, and then use it more? (For that matter, it took Toyota long enough to streamline even a tiny portion of its models to hybrid-only, and some models still don’t have a hybrid version at all).

1. I know explaining the joke doesn’t make it funnier but I feel like I should explain: a common criticism of hybrids is that they’re more complex than gas-only cars so they must be inherently less reliable. Which the data shows us is wrong (the various Prius generations own the reliability rankings, and the problem spots on the 3rd gen were the gas engine, not the hybrid system). But more to the point, it’s not actually true for Toyota/Ford HSD hybrids: you add a pair of electric motors, an inverter, and a big battery, but those motors and the power split device then replace the starter, alternator, transmission, and clutch (and I believe something else that is escaping my memory as I write this). Having that electrical generation capacity then lets you take out all the belts, so the A/C and other things can now be replaced with more reliable electric versions (and the power split and electric motors are way more reliable than a conventional automatic transmission). It’s actually fewer moving parts overall, with more reliable versions — it just sounds more complex. Volvo (and a few other manufacturers) are not using that system, they are in fact just bolting a motor and battery on to the car, and keeping all the old parts: conventional engine (indeed a turbo, not even an Atkinson-cycle which is where all the magic of a hybrid comes from and a huge part of why their fuel economy figures suck once the EV range runs out), conventional transmission, starter, etc. is all still there, plus a motor to run the other set of wheels and a battery and an inverter. All those tired criticisms of hybrids we’ve spent decades dispelling they’ve gone ahead and made manifest.

The Value of Simple site has been off-again on-again broken for over a month now. The culprit turned out to be WooCommerce, which in recent versions required more memory and to explicitly define the site’s base URL in the config file (which it hasn’t needed for the last 10 years… but whatever).

Now that’s finally up and running again, I figure hey, I have a few hours, taxes are in, I’ve already got FileZilla and my hosting management site up, maybe now it’s finally time to knock off something that’s been on the back burner for years: adding https to BbtP! (Plus the warnings from Chrome in particular were getting particularly obnoxious about it)

I don’t know how smoothly this is going to go: I have nearly 2000 posts with all kinds of embedded links and images that were hard-coded to non-secure links. Maybe the security warnings will only increase from here…

(I should also probably upgrade my theme to be responsive, but eh, it looks fine on my phone so that can probably wait another decade…)

And the winner of our ultimate cause of Horner’s is… vascular!

I figured once the CT report came back that I had a soft tissue thickening around my carotid artery that it was indeed a carotid dissection causing the Horner’s syndrome. I got to spend two nights in the hospital hooked up to monitors to catch if I had a transient ischemic attack (TIA, in other words a mini-stroke, which a dissection puts you at risk for) while they started me on anti-platelet drugs, and also as a way to expedite getting an MRI.

Then things took a turn for the weird: the MRI did not look like a dissection. There was a thickening there (it’s still the carotid as the culprit behind my Horner’s), but there wasn’t a little pocket of deoxygenated blood trapped in the wall of the artery like you’d expect with a dissection. The radiologist suggested vasculitis instead.

So they did a bunch of blood work looking for the immune markers of vasculitis… and nothing. There’s a few super-rare ones we’re still waiting on the lab to process, but after a lot of head-scratching they let me go with basically a shrug on the exact diagnosis.

I had a bad round of covid about a month before all this started (two months ago now), so the leading theory is basically “covid can do weird and bad things to blood vessels so I guess that’s it.” Maybe it’s a small dissection (which could have been caused by the extreme coughing I had), and maybe I’ve already mostly healed it by now which is why it didn’t have the characteristic appearance on MRI. Maybe it’s an inflammation from the covid itself.

Which leaves me with a bunch of shrugs from a bunch of doctors. We now know I don’t have a brain tumour, but I do have something funky going on in my carotid artery, and that’s causing my Horner’s syndrome. We don’t know exactly what’s happening in that carotid, or what caused it.

Will it get better? shrug.

Will it get worse? shrug.

Will my Horner’s go away? shrug.

They stopped the anti-platelet meds because now there’s no telling if those would help or harm. I’m back home and told to go back to regular life and just be a little extra vigilant for signs of stroke.

The one thing I do know is that this year I’m dressing up as a Zebra for Halloween.

Aside: Hospitals are Hell

I technically work in a hospital (though nowhere near patients), and have ever since I started grad school. I have a great deal of respect for the work that gets done there, the pressures the staff are under and have to juggle (patient comfort, safety, efficiency, etc.), and the limitations of funding and ancient buildings. I don’t mind being prodded, poked, imaged, treated, whatever has to happen there.

But it is impossible to sleep there. The beeps, the lights, the talking, the other patients (snoring, screaming, moaning, watching TV, talking on the phone), and in my case the shining a flashlight in my eyes to check my pupils and taking blood pressure every 2 hours. The first night was annoying but fine — I’ve pulled many an all-nighter, one more sleepless night was nothing I couldn’t handle. But the second night of not being able to sleep was torture.

There’s only so much we can do: while it would be great to build enough hospitals that are large enough for every patient that has to stay overnight to have a private room with a door that can close, that would be a huge investment and not anyone’s top priority for our limited healthcare dollars. However, I believe if I change the trajectory of my life to become an advocate with a single-minded mission to take all the fucking unnecessary beeps off every future piece of medical equipment, we could at least make it so that the wards get quieter as the various monitors get turned over. Indeed, alarm fatigue is a thing so it’s also bad for healthcare quality and safety.

I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, and my pupils were different sizes. That’s gonna need a trip to the doctor, I figured, but it went away when I turned on the big light to get a better look, and again in the morning things seemed fine.

I stayed up late to see the lunar eclipse, and couldn’t focus both eyes on the moon at the same time. Took a few days until I figured out that one eye wasn’t dilating in the dark, but in well lit settings everything seemed more or less fine.

So I finally scheduled that doctor visit.

I wasn’t sure whether this was a GP issue or optometrist issue, so started with GP. She gave me reqs for a bunch of tests and suggested I see the eye doctor, who was able to identify it as Horner’s Syndrome — a collection of symptoms from an interruption in the sympathetic nerve on that side of the face. He asked if I also wasn’t sweating there, which sounded crazy, but I hadn’t been feeling well enough to work up enough sweat to notice. Sure enough, I hopped on the exercise bike afterward and only sweat on one side of my face, which somehow is even more viscerally freaky-deaky than mismatched pupils in the mirror.

Now the syndrome points to a common proximal cause for those symptoms — that sympathetic nerve block. But the ultimate cause of that block could be a dozen things… Most of them bad.

Tumours (brain, spine, neck, lung), vascular complications (esp. carotid dissection), MS (already an S-tier fear for me), or perhaps an upper lobe lung infection or abscess in the jaw or sinuses can all potentially be the cause.

Never thought I’d be rooting for the bacteria.

An MRI will go a long way to figuring out the culprit driving this, and nothing to do now but wait and try not to worry until I get one (it’s in the works).

I don’t know what’s been going on with the last few versions of WordPress, but my sites have been going down a lot. I had barely had things up and running, then a new update, and down again. I’ve disabled every plugin except Woocommerce (for the direct sales over at VoS) and now another update got pushed today and it’s down again (though BbtP seems to be up now, it was down yesterday).

I don’t know what is going on over there, but knock it off! I have a hundred productive things on my to-do list, I can’t keep trying to give CPR to my sites.