Motorcycles and the Shift to Electric Vehicles

Show notes:
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Sondors Metacycle

Full transcript:
Ben:
So, you may not be surprised to hear this, but I've been doing a lot of shopping for electric vehicles this past week.

Starr:
Oh yeah?

Josh:
Oh.

Ben:
And there are some new electric motorcycles and scooters coming out that are very, very tempting. There's one in particular, the Sondors model, which is going to be first released near the end of the year and it's only $5000 and it had a top of speed of 80 miles per hour. The battery is not really rated for doing 80 miles per hour very long. You're not going to commute for 20 miles at that speed, but it's nice to have that in case you just need to hop on the freeway to get someplace really quick.

Starr:
Wow. That's only like $60 per mile per hour.

Ben:
But I really got my eye on it. And my wife's not a big fan of the whole motorcycle idea, but it's been there in the back of my mind for years and this year might be the year that I actually get my two wheel endorsement and do the training course and all that.

Josh:
Yeah, that would be fun.

Ben:
I just didn't want another combustion powered vehicle and so I've been holding off on the whole motorcycle thing until they got electric motorcycles that were not crazy expensive but also not just useless because it only has a batter for five miles worth of range. And I think 2021 is the year that is actually-

Josh:
Is this going to be your big 2021 post-pandemic life change?

Ben:
Exactly, yeah.

Josh:
Nice.

Ben:
Maybe this is my midlife crisis where I actually buy that motorcycle.

Josh:
You should get a hog, though. Be like a-

Ben:
The LiveWire is really nice. That's Harley Davidson's electric, but it's like $30,000 and I just, I have qualms about spending as much on a motorcycle as I would spend on a car.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Maybe that's not the right way to look at it, but it's just, I have problems with that.

Josh:
I'm seeing you with some of the... the trike handlebars or whatever.

Starr:
Oh, like a Chopper?

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah.

Starr:
I'm wondering if the electrics have the same cache. Because I'm trying to figure out if all the Bruce Springsteen songs still apply to the electric motorcycles. Like would you call an electric motorcycle a Suicide Machine? It seems a little bit too environmentally friendly for that. I'm not really sure.

Josh:
Ben totally needs an electric Chopper. It'd be the first.

Starr:
I go on walks... I'm sorry. I go on walks in the morning and occasionally an electric car will pass by me because it's Seattle and there's a couple of them. And it always feels so sneaky. It feels like they're just sneaking up on me because I just hear this low whine and next thing I know it's right behind me. It just feels like they're sneaking up on me.

Ben:
Yeah, I think they are.

Starr:
I don't trust that Elon Musk fellow. I don't trust him.

Josh:
Eventually you'll be just hearing that whining throughout your entire walk, just constantly.

Starr:
Yeah.

Ben:
Yeah, like the state of Washington, I think they recently passed a law that prevents any new combustion based cars from being sold after 2035. I think that's what it is. So yeah, the clock is ticking man.

Josh:
Pretty wild.

Ben:
Yeah. But for-

Josh:
Are consumers going to go for it?

Ben:
I think so. I think so.

Josh:
I think they will.

Ben:
But for those who don't know, the reason why it's kind of an inside joke is I've been interested in electric powered vehicles for a very long time and Starr and Josh are well aware of having-

Starr:
As long as I've known you. As long as Honeybadger's been a company.

Josh:
Yeah. Honeybadger was actually going to be a electric vehicle company initially, then we pivoted.

Starr:
Yeah, we really chose wrong with that one. That was a really bad decision.

Josh:
Yeah.

Ben:
It might have required a little more capital than we put into our initial business, though.

Starr:
Yeah, that's true. Well-

Ben:
So that's my week. I've been shopping for electric bikes all week.

Starr:
Well that's good.

Josh:
This has been another one of those weeks where I don't remember where it all went, what I did, but I know I did a lot.

Starr:
That's sort of the pandemic life, isn't it? I mean, you've been doing all the contracting stuff, right?

Josh:
Yeah. Yeah, I've actually been-

Ben:
Yeah, you've been doing the PHP. The library's really had some improvement this week. That's been really cool to see.

Josh:
Yeah, we're almost to zero issues.

Ben:
Yeah, that's pretty awesome.

Josh:
Including enhancements and features. Although I've got a few that I'm going to be creating, so now we can get on to the fun stuff like adding new things.

Ben:
Oh, speaking of enhancements, we had a really awesome customer just last night, this morning, who sent us a request for new functionality in the Ruby gem to be able to notify the API of deployments. We didn't have that code in the gem for a Ruby app to use as a consumer. We had a command line task for that, but it wasn't exposed as code. So I wrote back to the customer, I'm like, "No, we don't have that but I'll create an issue in GitHub and if you want to open a PR, wink, wink, go right ahead." I woke up this morning and there's the PR. I'm like, "Wow, all right."

Josh:
Yeah, isn't that great?

Ben:
Yeah. And he tested it in his app. I'm like, well that's pretty awesome. We have the best customers. We really do.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
That's awesome. So why are we paying people again? Let's just make it all community maintained.

Ben:
This was a related thread and a couple of tweets going back and forth this week on Twitter and people talking about, "Well, you know, developers are a terrible market. They don't buy anything." And a number of entrepreneurs are like, "Oh, I beg to differ, they actually do buy things."

Starr:
Yeah. But they don't buy things, but their employers buy lots of things.

Ben:
Right. Right. And they definitely are interested in not spending their time on things if they can realize that there's a way to get something that's a quality product. And they are the best customers because when they file those bug reports, it's so easy to fix them. It's great.

Josh:
Yeah, I never get that argument. We buy a lot of things.

Ben:
We do buy a lot of things.

Josh:
We buy things all the time.

Starr:
Yeah, we do buy a lot. So I wonder if it has to do with the age of the developer. Like if you're around 20-something developers, early 20 developers who don't have jobs then, yeah, they're not going to buy much

Josh:
That's just age. 20-somethings don't buy anything.

Starr:
I know because you don't have money.

Josh:
Period. I mean, they buy Netflix and iPhones.

Starr:
Yeah, but as soon as they get one of those sweet startup gigs, they're buying fricking $200 fidget spinners.

Ben:
Don't they have company issued fidget spinners if they're working for that sweet startup?

Starr:
I mean, probably. Probably, yeah.

Josh:
Is that the new retirement gift? The gold fidget spinner? Like the gold watch.

Starr:
Yeah, they give it to you when you're 30.

B...