If I had to bet; they'll put their 3.7L V6 in and run it on the miller cycle with a fixed drive to hit @130+kW or so.
The changes for cooling, etc. will be substantial, but the problem space is already well-known by the team, so the time to market probably won't be as long as we think.
That's probably a quick way to do it, but considering that using a miller cycle means we're going to want the turbo version of the engine, that alone is going to cost like $4k on Fords end. Add a 100kW+ generator with the power electronics to charge while driving, fuel system, exhaust system and cooling system, and we're probably approaching $10k upcharge for the customer.
Gotta remove a whole lot of batteries from that car to make it cost competitive again. Realistically, with an engine this powerful, we can probably cut down to like 30kWh of total battery capacity, which gets us back to where we started financially. And 30 kWh is enough to drive 70 miles all electric, which should pretty much should cover most daily use for people who charge at home.
Now, the questions if we can do that cheaper with a much smaller engine. Ford has a 1 liter inline 3 in the Fiesta and Focus that makes half as much power. Should be enough...
The dreamers amongst us have noted that Ford has a patent (at least an application for one, I don't recall if it was granted) for putting an EREV generator under the bed near the back of the truck. Since it can be a smaller engine and does not require an attachment to the drivetrain, maybe this is feasible.
If they did that, it would remove one of my reasons for not being too interested in the Lightning EREV -- the anticipated loss of the frunk. It still introduces a bunch of mechanical bits and associated maintenance requirements, that is unavoidable, along with a substantial increase in cost.
I bought my Lightning with the intent of keeping it 7-8 years, and it meets my needs very well, so this is mostly just navel gazing for me. The EREV version would have more range that I would rarely benefit from, and be substantially less powerful, which is also a negative from my perspective, in addition to costing a bunch more. My current truck is by far my favorite so far. I hope when I'm finally ready to try something new, there are better options. It's a high bar.
Also bought a Lightning. I use it for plenty of truck related things that don't involve towing and it's great. I like to target shoot on family farm land, and it's awesome to toss my steel targets and equipment in the bed and offroad to the area I shoot on (there's an area pretty far in with a sharp elevation change that's created a large berm). Or going to lowes to get a ton of fertilizer/plants/gardening equipment for my spouse.
I also use it to commute, and it's even better at that (part of that is mine being the Platinum trim). Quiet, smooth, powerful, has Android Auto/CarPlay (unlike GM's products), etc.
They really are a fantastic vehicle for those who don't need to quickly tow heavy trailers 400 miles. Especially on the used market.
I think the issue was that Ford wasn't making much margin on them and they weren't moving sufficient volume to make up for that. (around 20K/yr avg)
I wholeheartedly agree. Shitty companies steal art and then put out shitty products that shitty people use to spam us with slop.
The same goes for code as well.
I’ve explored Claude code/antigravity/etc, found them mostly useless, tried a more interactive approach with copilot/local models/ tried less interactive “agents”/etc. it’s largely all slop.
My coworkers who claim they’re shipping at warp speed using generative AI are almost categorically our worst developers by a mile.
They’ve made plenty of things. I liken them to the Lexus of consumer electronics; expensive for what they are, thoughtfully designed, and conservative in their approach to adopting new trends.
Iphone on your wrist. Most people I know with one have it for two years then once the battery goes they throw it in a drawer and don't buy another one. Most were actually gifted it.
> airpods
They just took the same old earpods they used to give you for free due to ewaste concerns and forced you to buy the disposable bluetooth version if you want to charge your phone and listen to music at the same time.
>homepod
I'm into tech and I'm not sure what this even does. Apple doesn't advertise it at all that's for certain. Its basically a sonos with siri I guess. I know no one with one. I just looked it up. It looks like a chinese air filter, absolutely no signature design language.
>ipad
No one knows why they need one. They get one because there's hype. They use it for three years to look at instagram then its put in a drawer forever. "ipad for education" is a scam/failure; just give kids macbook airs so I don't have to teach new hires what a file is anymore.
All of this is a farcry from the ipod and I feel like apologists like you understand that too.
This sounds like you need to do some homework before derailing the thread. You’re very confidently saying there’s no use for things which millions of people keep buying, so consider the possibility that you might have missed something.
> I'm into tech and I'm not sure what this even does. Apple doesn't advertise it at all that's for certain. Its basically a sonos with siri I guess. I know no one with one. I just looked it up. It looks like a chinese air filter, absolutely no signature design language.
Ahh, man! I'm a HomePod (mini) fan. I've got 4 of the little things scattered around my house. I use 2 as speakers for my TV, which sounds excellent compared to similarly-priced soundbars. Then, yea, it's got Siri for setting timers in the kitchen, can intercom to other rooms' HomePods, can recognize who's talking to do things like send / read text messages, set reminders, etc. For $99, they're actually incredible little devices.
Airpods are by far the best mass-market headphones in existence for apple device owners. The noise cancellation is unparalleled (which is huge if you use public transit or use them in the gym). The audio quality is also among the best you can get for a wireless headphone. This is true of both the Airpods Pros and the Max
Airpods are a joke. Apple killed the headphone jack for no reason, then sold the "solution", and people ate it up. Great business strategy for them to screw their customers for cash, but an abjectly terrible product. They are worse than wired headphones in every way except "they are wireless", which isn't actually a benefit.
> I don't knock it out of my head by having the wire catching on something
> Dealing with the cable and having to pack it back up when I'm done
> It auto connects to both my phone and laptop 99% of the time
> It easily swap between the 2 as I change the focus
Now they aren't perfect, charging can be a bit fiddly over time but they certainly are nicer than the normal headphones. Maybe you just aren't the target audience but clearly they are popular enough for most people.
Bit like marmite, some people love it some people hate it, my wife did not like hers so she got a new gpu instead.
> Airpods
I have used airpods almost every day since they came out including the 1st gen, the pros and the usb-c pros. I will continue to buy them as they are first class experience on iOS
> homepod
didn't even know this existed lol
> ipad
This one is a bit difficult for me. When I was in school I did two years of work using just an IPad, some text books and my Apple Pencil, all my notes were taken on notability and synced with my google cloud AND my iCloud. Any homeworks I could request a PDF copy and fill out easily and submit via email.
Now as a software engineer i really really really really wish that you could program on the IPad (Swift does NOT count) and it was more like a slightly smaller mac, it would crush the laptop market to shreds and nobody would buy a macbook air anymore if that was the case
It sounds like a lot of your opinions are formed within a very niche bubble.
Airpods for example - I see them everywhere, and every person I know that uses them, love them! Especially Airpods Pro 2.
iPad - I think the sales figures speak for themselves. It may not be popular among tech people, given they're used to a desktop environment, but I know many people that use iPads and love them.
Apple Watch, I admit is more of a mixed bag among the people I know and spoken to. But I'd say the majority like it, and have bought another one after their first one gave out/upgraded. Again, the sales figures speak for themselves.
The parent is living in a different reality. They are all hugely popular products, just because he doesn't like them doesn't make it not true. And their introduction made a massive impact. Maybe not on the level of the iPhone but pretty impressive. The vision pro thing is a major flop. Nobody wanted one before it came out and nobody wants or needs one now and it's too expensive. It's a shame, because like e readers they are massively underused as a technology.
TBF, The Vision Pro failed from a sales perspective, no doubt, but after getting a demo at an Apple Store last year, I can see how it is promising tech once they make it a smaller form factor and cheaper.
iPad: i have thousands of music scores on it running ForScore, which I can annotate with an Apple Pencil (the cheap $99 one), I flip pages using a foot controller I built with an ESP32, and I run multiple audio and music apps on it that are extremely useful.
And it just ...works. It sits on my music stand, doesn't call attention to itself, and does the job I ask it too.
Could I do all that with some Android thing? Probably most of it. Truly differentiated tech is rare in the consumer space. It's the experience that counts, and that's what the iPad has.
Hank Green mentioned in passing the other day how ungodly much money Apple is making off of airpods. I still have managed not to get one. But the watch and iPad definitely counts as something after the app store.
Which they didn't really invent the app store either. What they did was break the stranglehold cellphone carriers had on cellphone software, and we should kiss their butts every single week for that. Most people didn't work in mobile prior to the app store and holy shit.
Yeah, I don't want to be uncharitable, but I've noticed that a lot of stem fields make heavy use of esoteric language and syntax, and I suspect they do so as a means of gatekeeping.
I understand that some degree of formalism is required to enable the sharing of knowledge amongst people across a variety of languages, but sometimes I'll read a white paper and think "wow, this could be written a LOT more simply".
> Yeah, I don't want to be uncharitable, but I've noticed that a lot of stem fields make heavy use of esoteric language and syntax, and I suspect they do so as a means of gatekeeping.
I think you're confusing "I don't understand this" with "the man is keeping me down".
All fields develop specialized language and syntax because a) they handle specialized topics and words help communicate these specialized concepts in a concise and clear way, b) syntax is problem-specific for the same reason.
See for example tensor notation, or how some cultures have many specialized terms to refer to things like snow while communicating nuances.
> "wow, this could be written a LOT more simply"
That's fine. A big part of research is to digest findings. I mean, we still see things like novel proofs for the Pythagoras theorem. If you can express things clearer, why aren't you?
Statistics is a weird special case where major subfields of applied statistics (including machine learning, but not only) sometimes retain wildly divergent terminology for the exact same concepts, for no good reason at all except the vagaries of historical development.
I'm surprised at how could you get at this conclusion. Formalisms, esoteric language and syntax are hard for everyone. Why would people invest in them if their only usefulness was gatekeeping? Specially when it's the same people who will publish their articles in the open for everyone to read.
A more reasonable interpretation is that those fields use those things you don't like because they're actually useful to them and to their main audience, and that if you want to actually understand those concepts they talk about, that syntax will end up being useful to you too. And that a lack of syntax would not make things easier to understand, just less precise.
>
I understand that some degree of formalism is required to enable the sharing of knowledge amongst people across a variety of languages, but sometimes I'll read a white paper and think "wow, this could be written a LOT more simply".
OK, challenge accepted: find a way to write one of the following papers much more simply:
Fabian Hebestreit, Peter Scholze; A note on higher almost ring theory
What I want to tell you with these examples (these are, of course, papers which are far above my mathematical level) is: often what you read in math papers is insanely complicated; simplifying even one of such papers is often a huge academic achievement.
These papers are actually great examples of what is problematic with mathematics, just as what is problematic with papers in any other specialised field: how do you judge if this could be ever useful to you?
If you want to understand what is going on there, what is the most effective way to build a bridge from what you know, to what is written there?
If you are in a situation where the knowledge of these papers could actually greatly help, how do you become aware of it?
I think if AI could help solve these two issues, that would be really something.
My opinion on this is that in mathematics the material can be presented in a very dry and formal way, often in service of rigor, which is not welcoming at all, and is in fact unnecessarily unwelcoming.
But I don’t believe it to be used as gatekeeping at all. At worst, hazing (“it was difficult for me as newcomer so it should be difficult to newcomers after me”) or intellectual status (“look at this textbook I wrote that takes great intellectual effort to penetrate”). Neither of which should be lauded in modern times.
I’m not much of a mathematician, but I’ve read some new and old textbooks, and I get the impression there is a trend towards presenting the material in a more welcoming way, not necessarily to the detriment of rigor.
The upside of a "dry and formal" presentation is that it removes any ambiguity about what exactly you're discussing, and how a given argument is supposed to flow. Some steps may be skipped, but at least the overall structure will be clear enough. None of that is guaranteed when dealing with an "intuitive" presentation, especially when people tend to differ about what the "right" intuition of something ought to be. That can be even more frustrating, precisely when there's insufficient "dry and formal" rigor to pin everything down.
If it's actually in the service of rigor then it's not unnecessaryily unwelcoming. If it's only nominally in the service of rigor than maybe, but Mathematics absolutely needs extreme rigor.
The saying, "What one fool can do, another can," is a motto from Silvanus P. Thompson's book Calculus Made Easy. It suggests that a task someone without great intelligence can accomplish must be relatively simple, implying that anyone can learn to do it if they put in the effort. The phrase is often used to encourage someone, demystify a complex subject, and downplay the difficulty of a task.
3blue1brown, while they create great content, they do not go as deep into the mathematics, they avoid some of the harder to understand complexities and abstractions. Don't take me wrong, it's not a criticism of their content, it's just a different thing than what you'd study in a mathematics class.
Also, an additional thing is that videos are great are making people think they understand something when they actually don't.
3blue1brown actually shows the usefulness of formalism. The videos are great, but by avoiding formalism, they are at least for me harder to understand than traditional sources. It is true that you need to get over the hump of understanding the formalism first, but that formalism is a very useful tool of thought. Consider algebraic notation with plus and times and so on. That makes things way easier to understand than writing out equations in words (as mathematicians used to do!). It is the same for more advanced formalisms.
In this modern era of easily accessible knowledge, how gate keepy is it though? It's inscrutable at first glance, but ChatGPT is more than happy to explain what the hell ℵ₀, ℵ₁, ♯, ♭, or Σ mean, and you can ask it to read the arxiv pdf and have it explain it to you.
I say the same thing about the universe. There is some gate keeping going on there. My 3 inch chimp brain at the age of 3 itself was quite capable of imagining a universe. No quantum field equations required. Then by 6 I was doing it in minecraft. And by 10 I was doing it with a piano. But then they started wasting my time telling me to read Kant.
I think we'll see a lot of companies moving away from public cloud providers in the future, but I don't think it'll be because of any privacy-related concerns.
It rarely makes economic sense to deploy workloads onto the public cloud unless you have critical uptime requirements or need massive elasticity.
I have scarcely gotten decent code. The best a model has spat out is 'fine', which is ok for menial tasks.
I have yet to see anyone show me an AI generated project that I'd be willing to put into production.
IDK, I feel like 'vibe coders' or people who heavily rely on LLM's have allowed their skills (if they ever existed) to atrophy such that they're generally not great at assessing the output from models.
The changes for cooling, etc. will be substantial, but the problem space is already well-known by the team, so the time to market probably won't be as long as we think.
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