The Technology Lapped the Argument

Posted on May 4, 2026 by Sci Fi Engineer

*Related video: https://youtu.be/Rt3u7k1Qn2Y

I spent the last years of my engineering career inside the EV supply chain. SiC power modules, fast charging infrastructure, the physics that makes any of this possible. When the market stalled and Wolfspeed went into Chapter 11, I was among the people who lost their jobs to the gap between technology that was ready and deployment that wasn’t managed well.

So I have some standing to say this: most of what you’re hearing about EVs right now is noise. The signal is somewhere else entirely.

What the argument is actually about

The loudest voices say EVs are failing. Mandates reversed, high-profile products stumbled, the market is retreating. Some of that is true. Most of the framing around it isn’t.

What’s happening is a culture war machine doing what it does: taking a nuanced engineering and industrial policy question and flattening it into a yes/no yelling match. The anti-EV drum is politically useful to a coalition that learned to hate the mandate era. That’s a social politics problem, not an industrial one.

The previous administration pushed hard on EVs and that push was heavy-handed. Mandates handed down by people who had never read a cost model. Timelines written by committees with no idea what it takes to retool a supply chain. You can’t magic this into existence. The regulatory overcorrection was real and it wasn’t sustainable. The current environment is closer to “let the market work,” which was always the more defensible position.

That’s not a retreat on EVs. It’s a retreat on mandates. Those are different things.

The one policy thread that actually matters

There’s a legitimate industrial policy question buried under the noise, and it has nothing to do with the culture war.

Chinese battery manufacturers operate at a cost and scale US industry can’t currently match. BYD LFP packs at $81/kWh against North American packs struggling to get below $120/kWh. That gap is structural. It’s the product of state subsidy, overcapacity investment, and a decade of manufacturing maturity that didn’t happen here.

Tariffs are a response to that. Not a new tool — tariffs have always been part of industrial policy. They buy time for US manufacturing to find its footing before the cost differential makes the conversation moot. They slow the bleeding. They don’t end the issue. The hard commercial work still has to happen inside that window of protection.

While the argument raged, the engineers kept working

The two real technical objections to mass EV adoption were range and charge time.

Range has been largely answered for most drivers. The argument was always more perception than physics for the majority of use cases. There’s still a range/cost trade-off at the edges, and for certain use cases — long hauls, thin infrastructure corridors — it’s real. But for the suburban commuter with a predictable route, it was a phantom.

Charge time was the harder objection. It’s the one that lands with people who have driving patterns that don’t fit a neat daily commute.

That objection just got answered. CATL has announced a lithium-ion pack that goes from 10% to 80% charge for a long-range car in 5 minutes — essentially what you spend at a gas pump. With a cycle life as good or better than existing packs. That’s not a lab result. That’s a discontinuity arriving at production scale.

The cost curve has been moving the same direction for years. $137/kWh in 2020. $108/kWh in 2025. Consensus puts it at $60-80 by 2030. And unlike the internal combustion engine, which hit a performance plateau a while ago — where further gains tend to require turbos, complexity, and reliability trade-offs — battery technology still has a long way to run on the improvement curve.

The original technical case against EVs is now essentially closed.

The part most people haven’t thought through

Here’s the engineering insight that gets lost in the political argument: the EV value proposition is not uniform across vehicle categories. It runs in opposite directions depending on what you’re building.

A large pickup truck is a worst case. Heavy vehicle requires a big battery. Big battery adds weight. More weight means lower range. Lower range demands an even bigger battery. The vicious circle compounds fast, and the economics get brutal.

A mid-range car is a much better case. A small car is better still. An e-bike is the virtuous circle running full speed — light vehicle, small battery, low cost, genuinely better than the alternative on almost every axis.

The early EV push got this backwards. It over-emphasized large, expensive vehicles in categories where EV physics work against you, and under-served the mid and lower segments where the virtuous circle runs hard. That product mix failure wasn’t inevitable — it was a choice, driven by margin structure and political optics.

The companies that are finally starting to fix this understand where the physics are on their side.

What I expect to happen

The social politics will move on when the machine finds a new nuanced topic to flatten. It always does. The yelling tends to continue well past the point where it makes any sense, but it does eventually stop.

The regulatory environment is already normalizing. The tariff question is real and separate — you don’t abandon it just because the culture war has moved on, because the industrial competition with China doesn’t care about US political cycles.

Quietly, at the mid and lower price points, there’s no deep quitting. The product mix is starting to fill in where it should have been years ago.

By the time the US political environment fully resolves its feelings about EVs, the engineering will be a generation ahead of the debate. The technology wasn’t right five years ago for most buyers. It’s about right today. Tomorrow it will be better, and the gas engine curve doesn’t have the same headroom left to answer with.

The technology lapped the argument. Almost nobody noticed while it was happening.

Mark Harris is a systems and mechanical engineer, recovering from a career in EV power electronics, and the author of Stranded in the Stars (Book One, The Sea of Suns Trilogy). He writes about engineering, technology, and the creative life at This World and Others. The Unretired Engineer is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@Scifiengineer-09

We Handed Them the Market

Posted on April 20, 2026 by Sci Fi Engineer

Related video: Range Anxiety — The Unreal Reality

I’ve been involved with EV power and propulsion for much of the last 30 years. My latest stint was at Wolfspeed, developing SiC power modules for EVs and fast chargers. When the EV market stalled and the company went into Chapter 11, I was among the people who lost their jobs.

I still think EVs are the right direction. I don’t own one. That’s not a contradiction, it’s the actual story, and the video above is where I work through it.

The short version: range anxiety was always overblown for most drivers, and the auto makers never built the product mix that met the needs of the broad market. Now the industry is driving hard away from EVs, especially in the US, and that’s just wrong-headed. The video closes on that but doesn’t dig into why. This post does.

The Part That Stings

While the US was arguing about mandates and turning the issue into clickbait, China was engineering.

BYD is selling comfortable, adequate-range EVs in the $15–20K range. That’s the vehicle that moves the majority of buyers. Not the Cybertruck, not the F-150 Lightning, not the Rivian. A practical car at a price most people can actually consider.

We handed them that market. Not through malice or conspiracy, but through a combination of policy that optimized for the wrong things and an industry that focused on protecting its margins.

The policy pushed hard for EV adoption with mandates, subsidies, timelines. Some of that pressure was probably warranted. The market would have gotten there on its own, but the question of when and at whose expense was real. The intervention accelerated some things. What it didn’t do was direct the industry toward the product that would actually move the needle for most buyers.

The industry copied Tesla’s playbook; premium vehicles, long range, performance, high price points. That was the wrong lesson. Tesla used that model to fund the manufacturing and infrastructure investment that actually mattered. Everyone else just took the margin and stopped there.

The charger network made the same error I described in a previous video: build for the metric that looks good in the grant report, not the outcome that matters to the driver. 97% uptime. 71% charging success rate. Two different measurements, only one of which tells you whether the thing worked.

Why Big Auto Isn’t Saving Itself

I always loathed the heavy-handed government push on EVs and what I read as gaslighting on the rationale. Mandates handed down by people who had never looked at a cost model. Timelines written by committees that had no idea what it actually takes to retool a supply chain or build an infrastructure.

At the same time, I think some intervention was warranted. Not because the market was wrong about EVs, but because the market was optimizing for the next quarter. And the externalities of the status quo were landing on people who weren’t in the pricing model.

Intervention at scale creates dependencies. The industry made bets premised on the government backstop continuing. When the political environment shifted, those bets didn’t just look bad, they collapsed. And the response has been to drive hard back toward gasoline, as if that solves anything.

US old-line auto companies have been struggling for decades, and the reasons are structural. They’re trapped by regulatory capture and built-in costs that make adaptation nearly impossible.

Start at the sales end. Their dealer networks are regulated state by state, which makes wholesale change all but impossible. Safety regulations run through a system where insurers push regulators to require improvements that the industry develops partly because those improvements push up vehicle margins. Manufacturing plants are at their core decades old, and the capital they represent sits on the books, write it down and you impair the balance sheet. Design is path dependent by habit and incentive: most changes are incremental tweaks to last year’s platform because that’s easy, cheap, and legible to accounting.

And the margin structure makes it worse. Bill-of-material cost for a vehicle increases slowly with size and content. Market value is largely bling-dependent. So the incentive always points toward large, well-fitted vehicles where the spread is widest, and away from the small practical vehicle where there’s almost none.

Meanwhile, the manufacturing model has already been cracked. A new generation of EV makers proved you can build at scale in the US, turn a profit, and drive down the cost curve without the legacy overhead strangling the old players. Big Auto is watching that happen and still can’t follow, because the legacy network isn’t just a cost problem, it’s a constraint on every decision they make.

Moving back to gasoline doesn’t fix any of this. It may help sales volume near-term, but fewer and fewer buyers are willing to pay up for big iron, and as the recent spike in gas prices reminded everyone, the cost of operating a gas vehicle is not as predictable as it felt a few years ago.

The wholesale abandonment of EVs is as wrong-headed as the mandates-first push that preceded it. You’re walking away from the future as it’s getting its feet under it, and you’re not fixing your actual problems in the process.

Different direction, same failure mode: optimizing for the political moment rather than the real problem.

What I Expect to Happen

The market will keep sorting this out despite the policy environment, not because of it.

Amazon is sponsoring the Slate, a small electric truck aimed squarely at the price point where the volume is. Ford is talking about smaller, value-forward platforms. The product mix gaps are starting to fill in, and the players doing it understand they have to meet buyers where they are, which is around $20K for a vehicle that’s good enough and built around what EVs actually do well.

BYD is a harder question. It was built on the back of Chinese state support and practices that wouldn’t survive scrutiny elsewhere, but that doesn’t change what it demonstrates: a level of technical maturity across product fit, design, and manufacturing that very few other automakers can match. Tariffs and regulatory barriers will slow it down. They won’t hold permanently. Some form of that capability will find its way into the US market, and when it does it will accelerate the shakeout that’s already coming for Big Auto.

Charging infrastructure will improve in the corridors where the economics support it and stay thin everywhere else, and that’s how it should work. Where it’s thin, the economics will eventually pull in local investors, the same way any other service infrastructure fills in. It won’t be fast, but it will happen.

The transition will come, just slower and more expensively than it had to be. The destination is probably the same. The cost of getting there is substantially higher, and much of the value being created will go to manufacturers who aren’t American. That’s the envelope effect of all the intervention and counter-intervention stacked on top of each other.

The engineers mostly knew it was going to be complicated. Technical change at a social scale always is. The complicated part is rarely the technology.

Andy Weir’s Genius in Project Hail Mary

Posted on April 9, 2026 by Sci Fi Engineer

Andy Weir has a rare gift: he writes ordinary people — genuinely, recognizably ordinary — who have a skill that is also recognizable, and then puts them in situations where their one extraordinary competence is the only thing standing between them and death (in the case of Project Hail Mary, the extinction of the Human race.) The heroism is quiet and technical and you could almost believe that you could do that in the right circumstances.

You believe it because he’s made you believe in the person first. I saw the movie. I read the book years ago. Both are excellent, and the movie is one of the most faithful book-to-screen adaptations in recent memory.

Like The Martian before it, the film sticks closely to the book in both thesis and spirit. That fidelity matters: both stories rely on the reader/viewer trusting that the protagonist’s problem-solving is real, not movie-magic. Break that contract and the whole thing collapses. Weir earns it on the page; the filmmakers preserved it on screen.

The one genuine gap between novel and film is interior monologue. Novels handle internal states naturally; movies almost cannot. But Weir constructs scenes that externalize internal conflict visually — and those translate superbly.

A couple of minor side arcs from the book are absent, and I think those were wise cuts. They deepened the protagonist on the page but would have felt excessive at feature length.

One thread that bothered me in the book and still bugs me in the movie: Ryland Grace is pulled into the program because in his post-doctoral research he had proposed that alien life does not require water and carbon — and had defended that position to a career-ending degree. When the AstroPhage is first discovered it appears very alien, so Grace is brought in for initial analysis. He then finds it’s made of the same materials as Earth life — which undercuts his entire reason for being there and threatens to sideline him. That it doesn’t is a good twist; go see the movie or read the book for how it resolves.

Here’s where my engineering brain creates further friction. The AstroPhage’s energy density is extraordinary, and the novel acknowledges this and hand-waves it away. I cannot see how any life form built on biology similar to our own could handle those energy levels — it feels bolted in, even if it probably wasn’t. Similarly, Rocky — the alien Grace meets at the target sun — turns out to be exactly what Grace originally proposed: a non-water/carbon life form, which feels a little convenient in vindicating him.

There are complaints about Rocky delivering a specific thematic point about first contact and communication. My view is the opposite (other than the niggle above) that whole piece is brilliantly on point and there would not have been much of a story without it.

None of that diminishes what Weir achieves. He takes relatable people with very human quirks and puts them in situations where they have to fight to survive — and we root for them completely. And here i put the very alien Rocky in the bucket of people…he is about the best alien I have seen in a move ever. I wish I were half the author he is, and I say that as someone who is trying. Project Hail Mary is the rare book where you finish it and immediately want someone else to read it so you can talk about it. The movie earns the same feeling. Go see it.

Your Charger Was Up. It Just Didn’t Work

Posted on April 6, 2026 by Sci Fi Engineer

I put together a short take on this — under 60 seconds if you want the headline — and a longer breakdown of the structural issues for those who want the full picture.

▶ Short version (60 sec): https://youtube.com/shorts/zG-VtW2MUDU
▶ Full video: https://youtu.be/KAHuoShGtrs

There’s a number the EV charging industry reports, and there’s a number drivers experience. They’re not the same number, and the gap between them tells you everything about how this program was designed.

Operator-reported uptime: 97–99%. That’s a contractual requirement under the NEVI program — the $5 billion infrastructure buildout funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. On paper, the chargers are up nearly all the time.

Actual charging success rate: 71%. About a quarter of the time you pull up to a charger, it doesn’t charge your car. In many of those cases, nothing you do will make it work.

These are different measurements. One tells you the charger is technically online. The other tells you whether it did the job. Nobody confused them by accident — the reporting structure was built around the metric that was easiest to meet, not the one that mattered to the driver.

The failure modes are concrete. 60% of failed sessions involve a charger that’s simply out of service — not a user error, not a handshake problem between your car and the network. The unit isn’t working. Hardware degrades, software hangs, payment systems drop, network connections fail. These are expected failure modes for a system like this. The question is whether you’ve built the operations and maintenance infrastructure to catch them quickly. Most of the NEVI deployment didn’t.

New stations run at about 85% success. By year three, the same stations are below 70%. The 2022–2024 installation wave is hitting that curve now. And after year five, operators have no contractual obligation to keep the units running at all — so a lot of that hardware is simply going to disappear.

The regional variation is the tell. Seattle and LA are seeing failure rates around 24–25%. The East South Central region is at 7%. Same national program. The difference is operator discipline — some built real support structures, most didn’t, because the incentive to do so was never in the grant milestones.

This is a solvable problem. The gas station model solved it a century ago: put someone on site, make them responsible for the equipment, give drivers somewhere to wait while they charge. There’s no reason a charging network can’t work the same way. It’s just that the program specification never required it, so it wasn’t built.

Infrastructure problems are always systemic. The hardware is fine. The failure is organizational.

Mark Harris is a systems and mechanical engineer and the author of Stranded in the Stars (Book One, The Sea of Suns Trilogy). He writes about engineering, technology, and the creative life at This World and Others.

The Problem With AI Answers Is That They’re Almost Right

Posted on March 28, 2026 by Sci Fi Engineer

AI slop isn’t obvious. That’s what makes it dangerous.

If an AI gave you complete nonsense, you’d catch it. The problem is when it gives you something fluent, confident, and “mostly” correct — with a flaw buried in the middle that you’ll only find if you already know the answer.

That’s the thing about AI as a research tool: it will give you the consensus view, coherently expressed, at the level of resolution that the training data supports. Where the training data is thin, ambiguous, or where real expertise requires distinguishing between things that *look* similar but aren’t — that’s where it fails. And it fails confidently.

Even when you use the deep research tools there are problems. When I was developing some content for my YouTube channel, The Unretired Engineer I ran into this doing research on Wolfspeed’s financial situation and the SiC power electronics market. I asked a deep research tool to pull together an analysis. What came back looked thorough. The problem was that it took a lot of information that had gone out about the future of the fab and future plans for markets and conflated them with what had happened and what was likely to happen in the near future.

To someone without a background with Wolfspeed and the real status of the SiC, the analysis would have read as authoritative. It wasn’t. It had serious timing errors delivered with confidence. I knew it was wrong because I’d spent years in that space. If I hadn’t, I might have taken it as written.

The fix isn’t to stop using it. The fix is to put yourself into it.

When I work with AI on my engineering writing, or on the physics underlying my novels, I’m not asking it to do the thinking. I’m using my domain knowledge to steer it, to catch the near-misses, and to push it past the consensus into territory where the expertise actually matters. The AI amplifies what I bring. Without that, it’s just averaging.

Use it as a tool. But know what it can’t know — and that’s usually the thing that matters most.

—

https://youtube.com/shorts/mbmKm_JcHQ0?feature=share

Mark Harris is a system and mechanical engineer and the author of “Stranded in the Stars” (Book One, The Sea of Suns Trilogy), available now on [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Stranded-Stars-M-Harris-ebook/dp/B0GT123PLP)

The Engineer’ Return to the Keyboard

Posted on March 8, 2026 by Sci Fi Engineer

Optimization, Systems, and Storytelling: Why I’m Back

It has been a while—twenty years by some counts—since I first sat down to bridge the gap between “This World” of high-tech engineering and the “Others” I build in my fiction.

For four decades, my world was defined by electronic packaging, power electronics, and project engineering for EVs in both the commercial and defense sectors. I’ve spent my time in the trenches of “Dilbert’s world,” working the real details that make everything from electromagnetic guns to nuclear electric space probes real. But as any engineer knows, a system is only as good as its last optimization.

During those 40-plus years, I was an intermittent author of fiction and science fiction, though at times the projects I worked on felt like fiction as well.

At 68, I was “unretired.” (You can see the genesis of this in my YouTube video, EVs Ate My Job.) Through my channel, The Unretired Engineer, I explore how a lifetime of technical rigor applies to the modern world. Now, I am bringing that same focus back to this blog and my novels. Writing is, after all, the ultimate engineering challenge: building a world from scratch that doesn’t collapse under the weight of its own physics.

What to Expect Moving Forward:

Technical Deep Dives: The “how-to” behind the tech in my books, like the propulsion systems in The Sea of Suns.

The Editing Trench: Updates on my current copy-editing passes for The Sea of Suns and the structural work on Under Siege.

System Reflections: Thoughts on remote work, optimization theory, and the reality of a 40-year career.

World Reflections: Perspectives on technology, civilization, and war based on four decades of study.

The Workshop: Occasional updates on making with wood, resin, and whatever else I’m tinkering with.

I’m no longer just “tinkering.” I’m building. Whether you followed me here from YouTube or found my work on Smashwords, I’m glad you’re part of the system.

Let’s see what we can build next.

For 40 years I was an Engineer 15 of which was remote. It’s a tool not comfort food.

Posted on March 2, 2026 by Sci Fi Engineer

The Systems Engineering of Remote Work: A 40-year viewpoint
https://youtu.be/K6ntv7cWEn0

After 40 years in the industry—from the 13-acre “Industrial Beast” Naval Avionics Center in 1982 to project leadership of global power electronics projects, with long stints working from a home office—I’ve seen the data. In this video, I break down why the “Return to Office” debate is often a struggle against Sub-Optimization.

Explore why the physical office provides the “Grit” required for innovation and the “Density of Learning” necessary for junior engineers, while the home office offers the “Gold” of deep work and the objective distance needed for systems integration.

Internal combustion battery…sort of

Posted on April 5, 2021 by Sci Fi Engineer

The center section is essentially 2 combustion chambers back to back, the orange wrap is the ‘stator’ of an electric generator. When the magnets tied to the piston runs through the stator it generates electricity. Then a spring returns the stator to the center and the cycle (2 cycle) starts again.
Green Car Report :Could Free Piston Range Extenders Broaden the Electric Truck Horizon?

One of the ‘cool’ things about a Free Piston Engine is that it can be packaged in a fairly simple block and because of the elimination of the mechanical drive train and residual mechanical controls (valves, cams, etc) the machine can eat different types of fuel and be tuned in a wide variety of ways quite simply. This makes it compatible with battery electric systems on a packaging and mission program ability standpoint.

A simple schematic of the bare bones of a free piston machine. Other uses have been proposed but tying it to a generator and modern power electronics to make it a range extender is pretty interesting. The technology is derivative of the highly refined IC engines of today and the equally long history of electric generators so this should be something that matures pretty quickly.

Interesting Fuel Cell + Ship Tech

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Sci Fi Engineer

Why the Shipping Industry Is Betting Big on Ammonia
Ammonia engines and fuel cells could slash carbon emissions
Article in IEEE Spectrum MCKIBILLO

There’s a lot to like about ammonia. This colorless fuel emits no carbon dioxide when burned. It’s abundant and common, and it can be made using renewable electricity, water, and air. Both fuel cells and internal combustion engines can use it. Unlike hydrogen, it doesn’t have to be stored in high-pressure tanks or cryogenic dewars. And it has 10 times the energy density of a lithium-ion battery.

So there is always a fly in the ointment of this sort of story…

Manufacturers and engineers must overcome key technical hurdles and safety issues in the design of ammonia engines and fuel cells. Port operators and fuel suppliers must build vast “bunkering” infrastructure so ships can fill ammonia tanks wherever they dock. And energy companies and governments will need to invest heavily in solar, wind, and other renewable-energy capacity to produce enough green ammonia for thousands of ships. Globally, ships consume an estimated 300 million tons of marine fuels every year. Given that ammonia’s energy density is half that of diesel, ammonia producers would need to provide twice as much liquid ammonia, and ships will need to accommodate larger storage tanks, potentially eating into cargo space.

So to fully replace oil you need 600 million tons, all produced artificially in new chemical plants. And then there is the ‘pungent’ odor and its solubility in water where it produces a strong alkaline Ph, the fact that it can cause breathing problems etc etc etc.

Not saying it is not an interesting approach but I really have to wonder how acceptable this would be. This seems like a question of ‘what kind of hell are you willing to accept to reduce CO2’ when the reality is that there are a lot of other things to do first and a lot better future directions to take. I like the idea of the age of windjammers returning…as in the last post.

Cheers

Marine Tech is getting Interesting…

Posted on March 12, 2021 by Sci Fi Engineer

Stena Bulk concept “could be as impactful as containerization”

Not so much for the wings + Wind Turbines + Solar Cells but because it is not one hull but Seven (7!) each one of those sub sections is essentially a barge with a rugged locking mechanism that creates a rigid sea going hull once engaged. This way the crew and propulsion section can drop off and pick up sections either all or one or two as they make their rounds and the expensive bit gets much more use as well as being smaller and less expensive, probably safer as well.