https://peertube.tv/videos/watch/79aee3f2-90ac-45a2-bf0b-5f14829eea75 Hey everybody, happy Sunday! I hope that wherever you are and whatever you are doing, you're safe, you are well, and you are with people you care about who also care for you. I was going to come out and tell you that the air quality here today is measurably better than it was last week when I did my Sunday Musing inside. But in the last half hour or so, the wind has changed and now I can smell forest fire smoke again. It's not as bad as it was last week. It's not a point where I would, you know, I need to feel like I need to be inside for my own safety. But it's definitely, it's definitely not pleasant again. It's that definitely a feeling in the back of one's throat anyway. That's not why I'm talking to you today. I've had a busy week. We've been working on lots of side projects that have just, I think, kept my brain active and made me feel a little bit more like good things are happening and that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. It's not the light I wanted to be at the end of the tunnel, and there's still lots of things up in the air regarding my wife's job and our future and all of that stuff. But I think progress is being made. I did a really cool thing this week with a printed circuit board. I did a really cool thing this week discovering a bug on our Ford Charge Station Pro, a bug that I thought I'd got a wrap around. And now I'm realizing that it goes a little bit deeper than perhaps I initially thought. But fingers crossed I'll be able to squish it entirely and make things better for everyone. But today's Sunday Musing is one that has been on my mind for a while, and it's something that I feel like I'm seeing more and more of. I think partly because I made a video about my truck nearly being written off by the insurance company and what that meant. And people have been reaching out and going, how did you deal with this? You know, how did you keep your vehicle on the road? If you haven't seen that video, go watch it on the main channel. It explains a lot. But off the back of that is a thought of: do you worry about your EV being replaced? Do you worry? And this is primarily for people who live in the US, I know, because other markets are still getting new EVs launching all the time. We're getting new EVs occasionally here, but kind of the general consensus here, I'm hearing from a lot of people, is this fear that if I get in an accident, if somebody crashes into my vehicle while it's parked or something happens to it, I will never be able to buy another one of those vehicles, or I won't be able to find the specific type of vehicle that I really want. And I know that's particularly important to a lot of people with the F-150 Lightning. My particular F-150 Lightning is a rare beast because it's the dual charger, extended range battery pack. It's got all the option boxes ticked that could be ticked at the time it was built. And it wasn't a build to order like my first truck, but it was definitely one that I had to look very carefully to find. And very few of them come up for sale, because if you buy the Lariat extended range, all the option boxes ticked, you tend to keep hold of the truck. And so people who have had accidents, who I know their trucks have been written off for whatever reason, are now having to make difficult decisions about what vehicle do I go with next. Do I try and find a used truck that matches mine, or do I just go for a Silverado, or do I go back to gas? And I know people with other cars — Nissan Ariyas and certain Kia or Hyundai models — are saying the same thing. I'm worried that if something happens to my vehicle, or something has happened to my vehicle, and the vehicle that I wanted to buy is no longer made — worse still, the vehicle I wanted to replace it with is either difficult to get or expensive, or the examples that exist don't have the particular specs that I wanted. Or perhaps, you know, the actual horrible realisation is a replacement vehicle that is like-for-like is now going to cost more because there are no longer any incentives and automakers are getting rid of all of their discounts. And it's kind of this nightmare scenario for a lot of people. And if you're watching this in other countries around the world, feel free to have a little bit of Schadenfreude at America's part. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. I think a lot of America — not many people who watch the show, but many Americans — brought this on themselves. And the rest of us are paying the consequence, which is less, less cool. But I think you get my drift. We are at this point right now where automakers are pulling out of the EV market in the US. A lot of vehicles are no longer being made. A lot of replacement vehicles are no longer available. Insurance companies are eagerly writing off vehicles willy-nilly, either because they don't fully understand what that vehicle needs in terms of repair, or because the repair skills and the parts are not available. We've talked about that before. And the thumbnail I'm using for today's is a BMW wrapped up in bubble wrap, because I think a lot of people, some, you know, a lot of people feel like that. They worry. I need to be really careful. I need to treat my vehicle really carefully in case the worst thing happens. And I know from my own experience that when I'm driving either of my EVs right now, the Bolt or the F-150 Lightning, I'm — I'm — I'm ginger. I'm not driving super slowly, but I'm definitely being much more mindful of what other people are doing than I was when those vehicles were still easy to get hold of. And I don't know, that feels — with a little bit of frustration, a little bit of anger, but also a desire for us as a community to step up and develop our own solutions. It's one of the reasons why I spent a good half of this week developing a printed circuit board that should be arriving next week, and the parts should arrive today or tomorrow, to help me build a module that will allow me to do something cool with my truck that it didn't — it couldn't do with the equipment that I've got in it. So keep your eyes peeled for that one. And the same reason I tweaked the charging station, you know — and actually, once someone had figured out how to get root access, I'm going to credit them because it wasn't me that got root access. But once I got inside, I was able to do things, and I have done things, and I've learned some things that I'm not ready to discuss that may be related to how the unit operates and some of its bugging and debugging and logs and how they were written. And how having someone nerdy like me around may have actually made it more prone to having this bug that was already in the code surface. But I'm glad it's surfaced, because I've been able to deal with it and squish it, and now we've fixed it. Anyway, that's for another video. As I said earlier this week, we have a really cool long-time loaner vehicle coming very soon that I didn't see coming. It's kind of blown me away out of the water. But there'll be videos on that this week, hopefully, and also some videos on some other cool stuff we've got planned. So let me know your thoughts in the comments down below. Tell me if you worry about driving your EV because something might happen to it and you might not be able to replace it. Does that keep you up at night, or am I just weird? Thanks for supporting the channel. The amazing list of people scrolling by right now support us financially, and you can support us financially from Patreon, from one dollar fifty a month, or on YouTube, or you can send us a Ko-fi. You can send us an old-fashioned check. You can buy swag from our swag store. But you don't have to support us financially. You can also just interact with our content on YouTube or on PeerTube. Reach out to us on Mastodon. Join Mastodon. It's an amazing community. It's getting bigger. It's not owned by any one person, so it's a lot less likely to be subject to the whims and desires of big corporate entities. Let's just leave it at that. It's really cool. And yeah, join Mastodon. Talk to us in Discord. If you're feeling up to it, try Fluxr. We kind of haven't really been in the Fluxr chat room for a while, because I'm waiting for the people behind Fluxr to actually build a stable server, and then I'll migrate everything over, and then I'll be in Fluxr a lot more. Anyway. Tell the important people in your life that they are important to you, and I will see you this time next week. Keep evolving. Mon, 17 Aug 2026 05:09:08 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://peertube.tv https://peertube.tv/client/assets/images/icons/icon-1500x1500.png https://peertube.tv/videos/watch/79aee3f2-90ac-45a2-bf0b-5f14829eea75 All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://peertube.tv/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.