We have an Outlander PHEV.

As an experiment, we did a fast DC charge at a CHaDMO station, which was $15CAD for a 65 km charge.

After running the numbers, that’s twice as much as the same distance on gas.

It’s the home charging (and short trips) that makes the EV part work. As soon as you outdistance the electricity that came out of your house, gas is half as expensive.

Which is why I think the hybrid is the way to go if you ever have to go any real distance.

That’s not an issue for the Mitsubishi Overlander PHEV

Let me sing you the song of NABR.

Once upon a time, there was the Talon Digest. This was a LISTSERV mailing list, run by a lunatic who curated the daily traffic into his server into an edited daily digest post. Each morning, you’d receive the day’s copy of the Digest, read every single post, and maybe email a response back to the server to be published the following day.

If you had a DSM (Talon, Eclipse, Laser) this was the only game in town. Everyone was on it - the vendors, the big names, the innovators, and the nutswingers and other fanbois.

Todd was pretty judicious in what made it into the Digest, so quality was high. What wasn’t high was immediacy or volume; demand for content way outstripped the throughput Todd and the Digest could support.

So next came a rival set of forums: DSMTalk and DSMTuners. They each had their own personalities, and pretty soon a rivalry broke out between them. Neither of them had anywhere near the editorial standards that the Digest had (nor was any forum structure going to be able to match it) but each had orders of magnitude more bandwidth.

And so began the “great dumbing down” where anyone could post anything. Traffic skyrocketed, but quality per post plummeted.

And then, quietly, a couple of guys started NABR.

NABR was a forum, but it was invitation only. You had to have either accomplished something, or be vouched for by someone who had. It’s defining principle was “meritocracy” - you had to show your work, quote sources, present data - and it could be brutal if you tried to hand wave away bullshit.

But the discussion quality was off the charts. Freed from public view and the need to play corporate, all the big players were there. We could share ideas, work on theories, display prototypes, and learn from each other. Part Lord of the Flies, part Lockheed Skunkworks. Dozens of small time vendors, fabricators, and race teams became real players because of NABR.

But we eventually grew up. Once product lines were established and matured, the need for shared R&D dwindled. Some moved out of the industry. A couple straight-up died. The “import car boom” fizzled and there wasn’t as much money in it anymore. And so eventually NABR too fizzled and died.

Its gone, and along with it all the history of platform development (and no small amount of interpersonal drama too).

Lightning in a bottle that will never come this way again.

Man I’m glad I was there for it!