Posts by toejam++

What is this computing industry anyway? The dawning era of 32-bit micros

Re: ARMed and Ubiquitous

> Laptops. They could have made thinner lighter more powerful longer-lasting cooler-running laptops than anyone else in the late 1990s.

If only the DEC StrongARM had been on the market when Apple was looking to replace the Motorola 680x0 with a RISC processor.

In the early 1990s when Apple was deciding between ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and SPARC, the ARM processor was very under-powered in comparison. Laptops weren't nearly as popular then as they are now, so desktop usage was the primary consideration. Going with ARM would have hindered their desktop series' performance. And adopting ARM just for laptops later in the decade wouldn't have made sense from a software library standpoint.

Just to give some insight into how Apple viewed ARM at the time, here is a clip from Allen Baum who worked at Apple:

And then, while Newton was going on, some people from DEC came to visit, and they said, "Hey, we were looking at doing a low power Alpha and decided that just couldn’t be done, and then looked at the ARM. We think we can make an ARM which is really low power, really high performance, really tiny, and cheap, and we can do it in a year. Would you use that in your Newton?" Cause, you know, we were using ARMs in the Newton, and we all kind of went, "Phhht, yeah. You can’t do it, but, yeah, if you could we’d use it." That was the basis of StrongARM, which became a very successful business for DEC.

Re: 386 and 68020 had ports of Unix

There was also Coherent from Mark Williams, a Unix V7 clone that ran on the PDP-11, Z8000, MC68000, and 8086 (though Coherent V3 required a 286 and V4 required a 386).

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

Re: the average journey

If you live in a region where public charging infrastructure is too questionable for the routes you take, one solution is to go with a plug-in hybrid. Charge at home using your electrical mains for daily driving and refill at petrol stations while away.

My family has a PHEV and we've cut our petrol consumption by over 95% while around town. For the occasional trip out of town, we can stop off at any regular petrol station and skip the chargers. It is a great compromise.

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Re: Weird origins of the C65

> Which, I suppose, one could argue makes the C65 not a product of management, but of the lack of it(!) and one which means nothing either way about the C128.

I vaguely recall a Usenet post from David Haynie that suggested that the folks who designed the C65 were mostly doing it on their own.

> The C128 does seem like an odd idea in hindsight.

Commodore was really struggling to mitigate its productivity sector weakness with the rise of the IBM PC (and clones). Big problem was, there wasn't much cohesion in their strategy. The Plus/4, the C128, and the C900 were trying to solve the problem in different (and mostly ineffective) ways. IMO, the C900 running Coherent (a clone of Version 7 Unix) on a Zilog Z8001 was probably their best idea, but it was canceled when Commodore purchased Amiga.

I was always disappointed that the C128 wasn't a little bit more like the Apple IIgs. Imagine a C128 with a CPU similar to the 65816 and a VIC chip with a 121 color palette (like the C16), 8+ sprites, and able to display 640x200x2, 320x200x4, and 160x200x8 graphics. Along with a proper CLI shell like ProDOS, CP/M, or MS-DOS had. I would have jumped on something like that in a heartbeat as a teen.

Re: Flogging a dead horse

>> Instead it wasted millions on the C16 and +4.

> These were supposed to be cheap and compete with the Spectrum and make people want to upgrade to the C64, but once Tramiel was gone everyone else who didn't know how to do anything took over and the price was raised so instead of competing with the Spectrum they competed with the C64. Foot-gun moment.

Supposedly the C16 and C116 were supposed to be a replacement for the VIC20 on the low-end. Unfortunately, Commodore omitted backwards compatibility with the VIC20's software library. Software publishers never took much interest in the platform, so it languished. They were turds even before Tramiel took off.

The Plus/4 suffered from the same issue as the C128... it would have been better to have released the enhancements as an optional cartridge instead of building a new model around it.

Bargain-hunting boss saw his bonus go up in a puff of self-inflicted smoke

I was a field installation tech for a network appliance company back around the century mark. The boxes I installed were just fancy PCs running an embedded version of *nix. And they used standard ATX power supplies.

I fly down to an install one day for a customer and I'm presented with computer racks with PDUs with C13 connectors. First question I ask is: what voltage are these? The on-site guys start to look at each other in a panic. Nobody is sure. One guy suspects that it is 120V. So I leave the voltage switch on the PSU in the 120V position and plug it in. *POP*

I do not want to spend the night while a replacement unit is shipped overnight since I didn't bring a change of clothes. So I call the boss up and explain the situation. I then ask if it is okay if these guys drive me to the nearest Fry's Electronics so I can pick up a replacement PSU. I'm given the okay and an hour later the box is fixed, voltage selector is set to 240V, and it is humming along swimmingly.

After that, I brought along a simple voltage tester that would indicate 120V or 240V. Well, at least until the 9/11 attacks. The TSA viewed the tester as a potential stabbing weapon, so into the trash it went when I didn't feel like checking-in my laptop case. Luckily, the company moved to auto-sensing PSUs shortly after.

EU gave CrowdStrike the keys to the Windows kernel, claims Microsoft

Re: Can an AV be effective if not in Ring 0

You need a hook up in kernel-space, but the rest of it can run in user-space. There are some performance drawbacks going that route, but it does lend additional stability to the system.

On a side note, Minix is a good example of an OS that runs as few things in kernel-space as possible.

Biden throws $1.7B at automakers to prepare fading factories for EV production

Given that Airbus has an assembly plant in Mobile, Alabama, it now qualifies as being a US civilian airline manufacturer. It just needs to get better at bribing, errr, strategically contributing to the campaigns of our most honorable members of Congress, just as Boeing, Lockheed, Orbital, and other US aerospace companies do.

Chinese subsidies are granted only to state-owned firms, IIRC, and do not exclude exported vehicles. That's why European and North American automakers are in such an uproar.

Meanwhile, likely to comply with WTO rules, this DOE program is open to automakers based in any country with facilities in the US, not just domestic automakers. Following the link to the DOE, I see both Volvo Group (the non-Geely Volvo) and FCA (Stellantis) listed as grant recipients. So European firms are receiving some cheddar as well.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Re: Good

I second this thought. Both my car and my wife's car include optical speed limit detection systems and they are both wrong about 1% of the time. That doesn't seem like much, but over the course of a week it adds up.

If vehicles are going to become judgemental and critique your driving, they better be spot on when doing it.

So much for green Google ... Emissions up 48% since 2019

If Google is using AI to enhance its search results, the results are not really showing. So I am curious if they're burning up the planet chasing a fad with marginal benefits or if it is actually resulting in a significantly better product?

Musk axes two more senior Tesla leaders, guts public policy team – report

Given that the Tesla charging standard is now in the hands of SAE, who is now tasked with its further development, the automakers and charging networks who adopted the SAE J3400 standard will be fine in the end.

Also, before worrying about the state of Tesla's own charging network, we may want to wait to see if Tesla soon announces the grand opening of a new division based in China that picks up where the axed division left off.

The chip that changed my world – and yours

I've always wondered how the Commodore 900, with its Z8001 running Mark-Williams Coherent, might have fared had Commodore not purchased Amiga.

The eight-bit Z80 is dead. Long live the 16-bit Z80!

The original MOS 6502 definitely wasn't orthogonal. The WDC 65C02 was better, but there were still many shortcomings. The Synertek SY6516 was probably as close as you were going to get, but I don't believe it ever made it beyond development.

As a final project for one of my university comp-sci classes, I wrote an emulator for a 6502-like processor that was as orthogonal as possible. But it required the use of an extend byte so I had room to fit all of my indirect, stack relative, and index register ops that couldn't fit within the first 255 op codes. Some folks considered that heresy, though.

Samsung shows off battery tech it says will see you gone in nine minutes

How many DCFC stations will support such speeds?

It costs a fair bit of coin to install 250 kW charging stations. For a car that can add 1200 km of range in ten minutes, you're looking at what, 2 MW per charger? How much more will each of those stations cost, especially in remote areas lacking transmission capacity or facilities with a large numbers of stations? I can only imagine how much more that'll drive up the price of DC fast charging away from home.

Majority of Americans now use ad blockers

Re: If they had behaved themselves I wouldn't need to block them

Remember those X10 animated popup ads and Adobe Flash ads that would peg your CPU to full? Those were the ads that drove me to start blocking things. If ads had remained unintrusive static images, I likely would have let them through. But advertisers had to push things, so I pushed back in much the same way you did with your hosts file, though I eventually used a SOCKS proxy rather than Apache to protect my whole home network.

Advertisers have no one to blame other than themselves.

Preview edition of Microsoft OS/2 2.0 surfaces on eBay

Re: Worth noting the discovery that made OS/2 1 redundant

Protected Mode on the 80286... that brings back some bad memories. Instead of using descriptor tables to extend the global addressing space, I rather wish that Intel had just included a new flag in the FLAGS register that toggled between 16 byte and 256 byte segment offsets (ie, 0001:0000 goes from 10h to 100h) with the memory mapping muck limited to a V86 mode for legacy code that couldn't handle the larger offsets.

Windows 10 users report app gremlins after Microsoft update

The minimum hardware requirements for Windows 10 32-bit are fairly close to the recommended hardware requirements for Windows Vista 32-bit. Besides a bit of extra memory and disk space, the only big change was the requirement for the NX/XD bit, which was missing from older Pentium M and Pentium 4 processors that were already a generation old by the time Vista came around. For Windows 10 64-bit, the big change was the requirement for the CMPXCHG16B, PrefetchW, and LAHF/SAHF instructions, which were missing from the earliest Opeteron64 processors (those CPUs can still run the 32-bit edition).

I have an old Dell Latitude laptop with a Pentium M Dothan processor and it runs (well, walks) Windows 10 32-bit. If there was a WDDM driver for the i855GE chipset, it would probably be tolerable. But there isn't, so it runs FreeBSD instead.

As for software support, everything that worked for me on Windows XP 64-bit still worked with Windows 10 64-bit. Likewise, everything that worked for me on Windows Vista 32-bit still worked with Windows 10 32-bit.

The Land Before Linux: Let's talk about the Unix desktops

Re: 20 years on

I have had good luck running older Windows 3.1 and 9x software under Windows 10 32-bit edition. There was still a lot of 16-bit code floating around in '98, which doesn't run under 64-bit (x86-64) editions of Windows. If you received an error about 16-bit code, try throwing a 32-bit edition in a virtual machine and try again.

Going green Hertz: Rental giant axes third of EV fleet over lack of demand

Re: One of the problems is that Hertz chose Tesla's

I've wondered if a big reason mainstream drivers dislike EVs is because so many of them have minimalist interiors with a giant touchscreen for controlling most functions. I test drove a Tesla and a Polestar and found both of their interfaces to be quite unintuitive. Meanwhile, I had no trouble the first time I test drove a Bolt, which has a more traditional layout.

I am starting to notice more DC fast chargers near airports' rental car facilities. The last place I visited in November had four 65 kW CCS stalls at the airport. But that's going to be a 40 minute charge if you are near empty. Really only good for topping up. And I can only imagine how long the wait would be during a busy travel weekend. No thanks.

NAT, ATM, decentralized search – and other outrageous opinions from the 1990s

Re: Year End Reminiscing

The cheap sledgehammer approach is what killed ATM at my employer in '99. We were rolling ATM across the campus to support voice and data. Then some 3Com Corebuilder and Superstack kit ended up in our lab. The combination of 802.3ad and 802.1Q across Gigabit Ethernet gave us fat pipes on the cheap, with quality of service to keep voice flowing during the rare edge case where something saturated the backhaul links. Not having to mess with LANE was just icing on the cake.

These days you can teach old tech a bunch of new tricks

Re: PCem is fab

+1 for PCem and its fork, 86Box. I use the WinBox front-end for 86Box, which makes it easy to use.

I had to switch from hypervisors like VMWare Workstation and VirtualBox to full emulators like PCem, 86Box, and Bochs when running Windows 9x because the AMD Zen microarchitecture includes a bug in its Virtual-8086 mode extensions (VME) support that causes Windows 9x guests to crash. My Ryzen 5 4600g (Zen2) is affected, as are older Zen and Zen+ chips. I wouldn't be surprised if the bug is still around in Zen3 chips.

Luckily, there isn't much that requires Windows 9x as opposed to FreeDOS, WfWG 3.11, or Windows 7+ 32-bit, so it isn't too much of a bother. StarCraft is a big one, but there are a few others that include Win16 installers that choke under NT's Windows on Windows (WOW) compatibility layer.

Tesla to remote patch 2M vehicles after damning Autopilot safety probe

The next issue is that Tesla vehicles supposedly do a poor job of enforcing the requirement that Autosteer should only be engaged on limit-access highways without cross traffic. There were a couple of accidents where Teslas crashed into vehicles that pulled onto the road ahead of them or ran off the road when it came to an end.

GM's Supercruise has the same requirement and it will bark and refuse to engage if you try using it on anything other than a freeway.

HP TV ads claim its printers are 'made to be less hated'

That's just how most inkjet printers were. I always hated how my Cannon inkjet printer used to prime the color cartridges even when I had monochrome printing selected via the printer drivers. Money down the drain. I eventually took them out unless I was doing a color print. I also took them out because an empty color cartridge would block monochrome print jobs. And you had to keep the cap on those cartridges when removed so they didn't dry out, which was an expensive mistake.

Intel stock stumbles on report Nvidia is building an Arm CPU for PC market

Speaking of DEC, their FX!32 translator software did a very good job of running Windows x86 binaries under Windows for Alpha. Given that was two decades ago, I can only imagine that translator software has only gotten better.

Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from web pioneer to Google's weird neighbor

Re: Sounds just like DEC

I had a DEC Alpha Personal Workstation running NT4 back in the day. It was such a wonderful machine at the time. Then DEC had to sell Alpha to Compaq, who turned around and killed it. Such a shame.

You're less likely to be openly critical of your primary benefactor, even if you suspect that their intentions may be nefarious.

An article from 2019 suggests that Mozilla's management was aware that Google wasn't playing nicely. The article mentions issues with YouTube, but I personally experienced a number of issues with Maps as well while using Firefox. I recall another article where Mozilla's own metrics reported a mass user exodus each time there was a "hiccup" with a major Google app.

Nuclear-powered datacenters: What could go wrong?

Re: One thing commonly overlooked

Supposedly in earlier drafts of the script, humans were described as being nodes within a giant organic computer cluster. They performed tasks faster than silicon processors, which is why they were kept around. It makes a bit more sense than using humans as a power source.

Yelp sues Texas for right to publish actual accurate abortion info

Re: Pure performative politics

That was Dixiecrat blue, which was a whole different beast than the blue of FDR.

How TCP's congestion control saved the internet

Re: Ah, ATM

The trend towards full-duplex switched Ethernet ports really helped, but so did lower costs and the introduction of QoS over Ethernet. The project to migrate our campus from IP and IPX over Ethernet to ATM came to a grinding halt once Gigabit Ethernet kit started hitting the market. Our shop ended up with some 3Com Superstack and Corebuilder switches that offered a lot more value than the ATM kit on the market. It also helped that IP-based PBX systems started getting decent and that we could set the telephony VLANs to a higher QoS priority than the standard VLANs across the backbone links.

BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year

Re: Rolled My Own....Yup...Please Decrypt!

No, I do not want to drink my Ovaltine.

Not just 3G phones

Early 4G LTE phones only supported data over LTE. They fell back to 3G UMTS or 2G GSM for voice since the voice over LTE wasn't an option yet. If neither 2G or 3G voice networks are available, those phones likely won't be able to make voice calls without a SIP voice app like Google Voice.

Re: I thought they already had.

5G *can* be shorter range than 4G. It depends on the frequency and power of the cell. 5G frequency bands are mostly a superset of 4G frequency bands, which in turn are a superset of 3G bands. If you decom a 3G or 4G network and reuse the band with 5G kit, with all else being equal, range should be similar.

If you're talking about the newly introduced 5G UWB bands, which all operate up on the K, Ka, and V bands, then yes, those are all going to be really short range.

Ford, BMW, Honda to steer bidirectional EV charging standard

"because if you unplug your car, your house goes dark"

In my area, two car households are the norm. Just leave one of them plugged into the house to keep the lights and appliances on, use the other one to drive around. Most folks can find alternate transportation to work or school, assuming whatever knocked your power out didn't also knock out theirs. Small price to pay versus a whole-house generator or dedicated battery backup.

SAE says yes to making Tesla EV chargers an American standard

Re: The thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from

What you're referring to is still a IEC 62196 Type 2 connector and inlet. The European Model S and X just supported a Tesla extension to the signaling and charging specs that facilitated DC charging over a Type 2 cable. That's different than the Model S/X connector used in the North American and Asian markets that was mechanically incompatible with Type 1 and 2 connectors and that eventually became the connector and inlet for the NACS.

In some texts, using pins L3 for DC+ and L2 for DC- is referred to as "DC Low", using pins N & L3 for DC+ and L1 & L2 for DC- is referred to as "DC Mid", and using pins CCS DC+ and CCS DC- is referred to as "DC High". Tesla is the only company to use the former two levels.

Re: The thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from

If anything is going to challenge the dominance of CCS2 in Europe, it isn't going to be NACS. European Tesla Superchargers never offered support for the Model S/X connector, so it would be starting from scratch. It doesn't support three-phase AC charging. The more competitive charging network landscape in Europe would prevent Tesla from throwing its weight around. And the European regulatory environment is generally hostile to anything other than Type 2 connectors.

I'm interested to see how ChaoJi adoption progresses. Both Chinese and Japanese automakers have agreed to ditch their respective fast DC standards, GB/T-DC and CHAdeMOv2, in favor of it. If it becomes the norm across Asia, the potential arises where CCS2 and ChaoJi usage could overlap. If drivers prefer it, that might pressure charging networks and regulatory authorities into adopting it alongside CCS2.

Re: CCS may be a standard, but not a good one

I also agree that it was a mistake to maintain backwards physical compatibility given the rarity of EVs in 2011 when CCS was published. They should have just done what Tesla did with their new Model S/X plug and designed something beefier that was compatible with the existing J1772 EVSEs using only a passive adapter. That's what owners of older EVs had to do when the J1772 standard switched from using Avcon connectors to Yazaki connectors. Or maybe the automakers should have just thrown more money and pressure at Tesla for them to have kicked their new plug standard over to a neutral licensing association.

The funny thing is, you can charge a 1999 Ford Ranger EV with a modern Tesla Destination Charger (EVSE) using only a passive adapter. If you do the majority of your charging at home or at your motorpool, it isn't much of a bother.

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

One reason some people prefer hybrids over BEVs is that the former tend to have more traditional looks and controls. Not everyone likes the modern minimalist interior, the dominating touchscreens, or the quirky styling that many BEVs seem to have. I know a few people who went with a Chevy Bolt or Hyundai Kona EV because they said they wanted a more "normal" looking car.

Another reason is cost. Many PHEVs and BEVs are only available in high end trims and (until very recently) with significant dealer markups. And that's on top of manufacturer price hikes because of high demand. Now that demand is dropping and a glut of BEVs are starting to pile up on dealer lots, maybe that will change. But it will take time.

And at least here in North America, a new wrinkle is the industry switch from CCS1 to NACS ports. I know a few people who don't want to be stuck with CCS1 vehicles, fearful that CCS1 will join CHAdeMO as an afterthought or that NACS-to-CCS1 dongles will be unreliable and bothersome. At least NACS-to-Type1 dongles have a better reputation.

First US nuclear power plant built this century goes online

Re: ROI?

Not only finished, but locked. Supposedly one issue with Vogtle was that the NRC forced them to make an expensive security-related change during the middle of construction.

TSMC says Arizona fab behind schedule, blames chip geek shortage

It isn't as bad as you think. The Phoenix municipal water system obtains around two-thirds of its water from in-state sources, primarily the Salt River, Verde River, and local groundwater, which are all doing better than the Colorado River. The local aquifer is within a state management area, so groundwater withdraws are tightly regulated.

Once the plant is running, around 80% of the water utilized by the fab will be collected, purified, and reused. The fab will reuse about 60% of it, while the rest will be sent to the city's gray water system, which provides water to parks, aquifer recharge facilities, and various industrial customers.

US EV latest: GM, Hyundai compete – in battery plant announcements

Bolt EV

The average time that a Bolt EV sits on a dealer's lot is currently around three days. It is an incredibly in-demand vehicle. With the federal tax credit, it is one of the most affordable BEVs available in the US market. They're incredibly popular as a commuter vehicle.

So of course GM is killing it off. GM suggests that the Equinox EV will fill the role that the Bolt EV does today. But the Equinox EV base trim will around $4000 more expensive. Assuming you'll even be able to find a base trim Equinox EV for the first couple years. It is also larger and has a more touch-screen dominated UI, which is a turn-off for a lot of folks.

I understand GM wanting to kill off something of an odd platform for them. But I've already seen people suggest that this is the EV1 all over again. Not exactly a good image.

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!

Re: FreeBSD is UNIX

While the various BSD flavors are very much UNIX-like, most of them fail to meet all of the requirements needed to obtain Single UNIX Specification certification. If you want to use the UNIX name for your OS, you have to pass SUS certification. The article you posted says the same thing.

FWIW, MacOS 10.5 is UNIX 03 compliant.

Wyoming's would-be ban on sale of electric vehicles veers off road

I also agree that Wyoming's population is too small to pressure automakers to keep producing ICEVs. If it was just them, they'd likely become a dumping ground for used ICEVs from other states as automakers make the switch to EV platforms.

Problem is, these sorts of Republican protest laws rarely stay isolated to one state once they pass. I'd expect other red states to join in. If Florida or Texas did so, I'd imagine that automakers would cave in and keep some ICEV production going.

That said, what do they consider an "electric vehicle"? Do hybrid or plug-in hybrid EVs also count or is it limited to battery EVs, too? If PHEVs were allowed, I could see automakers still moving to EV platforms while offering range extender series hybrids like the BMW i3.

If PHEVs were prohibited, then I could see things get ugly. Automakers are not going to throw much money into updating dead-end ICEV platforms. And when those legacy ICEVs start bumping into federal fuel efficiency rules, they'll have effectively painted themselves into a corner.

This is the end, Windows 7 and 8 friends: Microsoft drops support this week

Re: Windows 10 is not a problem

The only systems I've ever seen that met the requirements for Vista but not for Windows 10 were some older Intel Prescott desktops and Dothan laptops that lacked NX bit support. Those CPUs were mostly old stock by the time Vista came around, but still met the system requirements.

Asus' latest single-board computer packs a 12-core, 4.5Ghz Intel i7

To have a SO-DIMM socket you'd have to give up LPDDR5. Supposedly the signaling voltage for LPDDR5 is too low to work with socketed memory while staying within spec.

That said, this isn't a tablet or laptop with a small battery, so it seems a bit overkill to go with LPDDR5 instead of DDR5 in the first place.

Go ahead, be rude. You don't know it now, but it will cost you $350,000

On the receiving end

I once worked in the support center for a large IT firm. One of our largest accounts often liked to throw its weight around for freebies. Those of us in support would just roll our eyes and kick it up to management for approval, which was generally given.

One evening, I received a call from that account asking for support for a box that wasn't under an active support contract. I knew it was likely a mistake and that they'd bring the support back up to snuff afterward, but I still had to clear the work with my supervisor. The person calling wasn't happy with that response, so he threatened to yank a few million dollars in kit and throw it from the roof of the datacenter.

Without missing a beat, I wryly responded: "sir, that damage would not be covered by your support contract."

Silence.

"Fine, go ahead, call them".

And that account was still with the company when I left years later.

Windows 11 runs on fewer than 1 in 6 PCs

Re: OS X?

One of the largest complaints I have regarding Windows is the inability to choose themes and layouts that mimic older versions. Classic Shell resolves some of the layout complaints, but it is not an option on my work PC.

As others have noted, shortcut key combos and shell commands are more consistent, which is good. But the tab/hint system isn't so great, which is why I find myself going back to the UI for rarely used tasks.

This maglev turntable costs more than an average luxury electric car

Re: Meh

Actually, the problem with laser turntables is that you have to wash them prior to use since a laser will pick up every bit of debris in a groove. Where they excel is regarding rumble, tracking errors, inner-grove distortion, or cartridge distortion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable#Performance

California to phase out internal combustion vehicles by 2035

Re: Not going to happen

> You don't need new generation or transmission capacity when most charging will be at night. A decent chunk of it will probably be locally generated during the day via rooftop solar panels.

According to tonight's forecast at Cal-ISO, California will have around 20GW of extra available capacity versus actual demand around midnight. US building code is pushing for 7.65 kW as the target at home charging speed per parking space. So that comes out to around 2.63 million vehicles.

Based on average EV efficiency and average number of miles driven in California, each vehicle will only need 11.87 kWh per day. So with a typical charger, you'll be done in under 2 hours. If vehicle charging times were staggered between midnight and 6AM, you could support at least 7 million vehicles during that time.

California has around 14 million cars and light trucks. So yes, extra capacity will be needed. And with Oregon and Washington thinking about cutting gasoline vehicles in 2035, too, imports from them may be limited.

Of course, the energy market will likely look much different in 2035. Given the huge push for solar, we may see incentives for charging between 10AM and 2PM when there is a huge glut of solar power.