sparkyshocks

It might be cheaper in some settings.

For certain food styles, I buy bulk spices sometimes because I don't like to pay for an entire jar I won't use, knowing that most of it will go stale by the time I'm through the jar. Being able to buy tiny quantities is sometimes way cheaper.

I'm also mismatched in my conditioner and shampoo remaining where I can buy the matching set and let the difference persist, or I can try to buy a single catch-up bottle of whatever I have excess of, to hope that they even out by the time I get to the bottom of a bottle.

Basically, I can imagine where it might be preferable (for both cost and convenience) to buy an arbitrary amount of something rather than buy a fixed factory container of that thing. I know I already do it for certain things.

Doesn't look like anything to me.

Grid scale storage is actively being worked on.

Chemical batteries, like rechargeable lithium ion batteries, are a big part of it. Sodium ion batteries and iron air batteries are coming up, as well.

Somewhat related are rechargeable fuel cells and flow batteries, that similarly store chemical energy that can support two-way charge/discharge cycles.

Gravity storage, like pumping water up into a reservoir and then using it to drive turbines on the way down, or elaborate elevator shaft type systems, can store some energy but require lots of land and material, or require very specific geographic features not commonly found.

Kinetic energy storage, turning lots of heavy flywheels and then recapturing that momentum to produce electricity when needed, is also on the grid (and kinda mimics the rotational inertia of the turbines traditionally synced across the grid).

Some other storage technologies include capacitors, pressurized gas containers, and thermal heat storage with molten salt that can be used to make steam to drive turbines on demand.

But all of these solutions are difficult to scale up to the point where they make a significant difference in addressing the mismatch between supply and demand at different times of day. We gotta do all of it, and right now the most cost effective solution is chemical batteries, so that's been growing at an exponential rate.

It's like a dumpster filling up, where you have to pay a waste management company to come haul that stuff away, at least if people can't find a way to take it off your hands for free.

The non-Honda traditional automakers are getting dragged, kicking and screaming, into actually providing EV options.

Kia and Hyundai's E-GMP platform has a few hundred thousand vehicles on US roads. They have had reliability issues on the charging unit, though, so I'm not sure if the newest ones have fixed the problems there. Still, they're moving a decent volume, and electric represents a big chunk of their overall sales now.

GM saw a huge increase in EV sales in the past few years with a lot of newer models on their main BEV3 platform (including the Honda and Acura EVs). I'm a bit biased against GM generally, but I have no reason to assume that their EVs are somehow worse than their ICE vehicles.

Volkswagen, Volvo, Mercedes, BMW, and some other European manufacturers have been trying to make inroads with EV consumers, with mixed success.

Ford recently acknowledged that its Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning were designed sub-optimally as EVs, with too many unique parts and designs for each model, through their traditional way of doing business through existing supply chains and vendors. Left unsaid in that interview, though, is how much they were held back by dealers trying to jack up prices on EVs or discourage their sale (knowing that they get better service revenue on ICE vehicles).

And even though Toyota has tried a whole bunch of other stuff seemingly to avoid building pure battery EVs, they're launching all electric models of the Lexus ES and the Highlander and finally getting on board.

I think we're at a critical point, and current U.S. government policy might be discouraging EVs, but EVs have plenty going for them, even with government hostility. I'm hopeful we can see gasoline consumption drop in the U.S. over the next few years.

We have the storage technologies, the only thing missing is money.

When discussing large public projects whose scale is larger than anything before seen, the money is mainly an accounting placeholder for the real resources that need to be expended.

Grid scale storage has been expanding at an exponential pace, but the sheer magnitude of the materials and engineering work that needs to be done to make a dent is pretty huge.

Bloomberg projects that total cumulative installed capacity should hit 2 Terawatt hours by 2035, noting that would represent 8x the number for 2025. But when you compare those numbers to just how much electricity is produced or consumed, with 22,000 TWh per year, we're talking about demand periods measured in minutes, not even hours, much less days.

At scales large enough to make enough of a dent to show up in global energy stats, we need to recognize that even infinite money would run into the real resource constraints of how much capacity we as a species have for pulling minerals out of the ground, processing them into useful materials, and engineering them to be useful energy storage solutions (whether pumped hydro or other gravitational systems, compressed air, flywheels, or whatever battery or fuel cell chemistries can store energy in an efficient way).

We have some technologies, but need things to improve significantly before storage can actually meet the needs for power that meets demand at any given moment in time. In the meantime, matching supply and demand in real time is a true engineering challenge, not just a monetary challenge.

But because of the unsubstantiated hatred of anything Chinese

That might apply for the Chinese manufacturers you've listed, but the others are available in the US, even the ones with significant Chinese ownership (Volvo/Polestar mostly owned by Geely, Mercedes Benz owned significantly by Chinese investors). Many of these companies simply choose not to go through the trouble of importing or manufacturing some of their EVs for the US market, despite continuing to manufacture/import other EVs for the US market. See, for example the Kia EV6 GT (no longer offered in the US, despite other trim levels continuing to be sold), the VW ID.7 (canceled plans to bring into US and Canada), Polestar 2 (no longer available in the US), Ford F-150 Lighting (the recently discontinued electric version of literally the top selling vehicle in the United States), etc.

A big part of the problem with the US isn't that there aren't choices, it's that many of the choices are bad. Lots of EVs are expensive, and competing for the expensive luxury market. Even then, some of those brands are struggling. I don't know what the future holds for Rivian or Lucid in the U.S., but those companies aren't exactly making money.

Without sales volume, they won't hit the economies of scale necessary to actually profitably sell those cars. Lucid is absurdly expensive while the company loses money on each sale. Rivian has similar problems, although they might actually turn the corner to profitability soon. Polestar is probably in the same boat for the US market, but is propped up by its owners and partners for now.

So no, I don't think that US EV new car buyers are suffering from a quantity of options. It's just kinda a quality problem, where the consumer has a lot of mediocre choices, and only a few good choices.

Honda is a company built around manufacturing internal combustion engines. Anything that uses an internal combustion engine is fair game: lawnmowers, motorcycles, ATVs, generators, and regular old cars.

So it's been hard for them to shift their culture to where they don't actually use the thing they're best at, the foundation for their company's whole history.

See also BYD that eventually got into making cars simply because they were so good at making batteries.

Supreme Court struck down tariffs enacted by the President under one particular law, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which Trump used to add tariffs to almost everything coming in from every country.

There are longstanding tariffs that are authorized by other laws, on specific countries like China, or on specific goods like lumber or steel or vehicles or semiconductors, unaffected by the Supreme Court ruling.