And less reason to order delivery. At least if you own a car, driving to pick your own food up is easier now (less traffic, no parking issues, you are less likely to be in a social event that prevents you from leaving). And one less potentialy infected person handling your food.

And a good excuse to get out of the house for a few minutes.

And an excuse to turn on your car, and prevent the battery from dying.

And a good excuse to just drive for a bit, if you find it highly enjoyable, like I do.

friendly reminder that just starting a car isn't going to prevent the battery from dying. You need to get in a decent drive and a 2 mile jaunt to McDonald's probably isn't enough.

At least here a drive to McDonalds results in a 15 minute wait in the drive through, so there's more charging going on than just the trip. In n Out is even worse, their line fills up the Costco parking lot...

It's better than nothing, no?

Starting the car takes a lot of power from the battery (the battery has to run the starter motor to crank the engine), so if you don't drive the car long enough to recharge the battery to at least where it was before the trip, you'll have less charge than you had before. If you repeat that cycle enough times, the battery will eventually die.

My fire department bought a new ambulance.

Emergency lights use a lot of power, as you can imagine. Even the LED ones. But we also don't want to idle on scene for a while.

So new ambulances (and engines, too) have a nice feature. Leave the lights running. Turn the engine off.

When the battery voltage gets low enough, the vehicle will start the engine, let it run til the voltage is better, then shut itself back off.

Nice, but a bit deadly in an enclosed space due to fumes.

> so if you don't drive the car long enough to recharge the battery to at least where it was before the trip, you'll have less charge than you had before. If you repeat that cycle enough times, the battery will eventually die.

I've not tested the low threshold, but a 20 minute drive seems to be more than sufficient.

I'm surprised why cars still don't include a charge controller that counts the amount of energy in/out of the battery and gives you a battery gauge, or even a simple voltage gauge.

We can do it just fine in cheap laptops (with lithium batteries which require more complex charge management), why can't we do it for cars that cost tens of thousands?

Cars have had voltage gauges for decades. The really aren’t very useful because essentially by the time the battery reads less than its nominal 12v it’s basically dead.

True but it will at least confirm that the battery is dead, as opposed to something else. I remember back when I was a kid my parents' car would not crank (you hear the solenoid engage but the engine doesn't turn) and nobody had any idea what it was (if you're not a car person and this never happens to you it might not be obvious especially considering all the other electricals still work fine on the slightly lower voltage). A voltmeter showing below 12V or a "low battery - <12.2V" light would've quickly cleared that up.

Basically all cars monitor battery voltage. Many models even have a dashboard gauge for it. But what is that information useful for, other than diagnostics? Why give it dashboard real estate? Besides, you can always pop open the hood and check the battery with a $12 multimeter.

yes, but you don't do it for the battery. You're supposed to do it because it circulates fluids

+1 for driving being easier. We park a car on the street in Brooklyn. Normally this is a huge hassle where we have basically memorized when are good times to use the car so we can find a spot again. But twice now we have used the car and found our original parking spot still available.

I have done the opposite. Before this, I would do take out once or twice a week and just pick it up on my way home from work. Never used delivery apps. Since lock down, I use Doordash 2-3 times a week.

Nope, it's seen nearly triple the usual demand in the US.

Here in NL it's exploded. During lunch and dinner times Uber / TakeAway / Deliveroo is all you see on the streets.

For many restaurants this is the only income they have and it's highly encouraged to order some.

Not many people have gone down in disposable income, though. That might be a factor.

Netherlands hasn't had increased unemployment due to COVID?

No we don't have a full lockdown. Many work from home, some in A/B teams and if your business had to close (cafés, restaurants without delivery, pilot) you still get paid except your company can get it reimbursed via the government.

So basically our economy kinda just runs on, even though a lot less is happening.

Restaurants have switched to delivery if they can. Most people I know actually have more money now, since you can't really go out and spend it. And May is usually the month where Dutch people get their 13th month (bonus).

Our economy is in the toilet. Large parts of it at least (that aren't very visible).

We'll see the wave of defaults and bankruptcies in a couple of months.

Define "our".

The economy of the country The Netherlands

Thanks it was a bit ambiguous. I hope your economy improves soon :)

The statistics seem to say otherwise - https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2020/16/fewer-employed-in-marc...

That report says there was a drop of 0.2% in labor participation in March. That's not a lot.

Not yet. A combination of work-from-home, a fairly limited lockdown and a variety of state and city schemes for income support for entrepreneurs, small business and a furlough program seem to have limited the impact for now. We’ll see in 5-6 months I guess.

The thing that I noticed is that because we're more worried about food supplies, people are making sure they're stocking their fridges and being much more careful about ensuring they've got food for every meal - because they aren't just going to pop out to grab something. As a result it's much more difficult to justify ordering takeaway, because you've got to eat the food in the fridge before it goes off.

In addition to less money, as you pointed out:

1. People have more free time from being stuck at home, unable to work, so less need to rely on delivery apps.

2. People get tired of being stuck at home and one of the few permitted reasons to leave is acquiring food.

Here in Los Angeles, food delivery demand is way up. Almost all restaurants have switched to delivery/takeout only, and lots of people are doing delivery for food.

Dine-in service being illegal has certainly made takeout a popular option around L.A. I do wish more people wore masks to pick up the food inside the restaurant, however.

This is mostly accurate in the Bay Area.

People who already had the means to rely on Uber Eats, continue to do so. But the rest quickly realize that paying $22 for a meal instead of $8 isn't worth it

Availability seems to be an issue all around. After an early lockdown surge of restaurant additions in DoorDash, now listings which appear to be available and open have a decent chance of getting your order rejected, or just dropping off altogether. Restaurants are having a tough time right now, and it remains to be seen if poorly-advised re-openings will have any short-term positive effect on business.

There's significant demand, DoorDash, Instacart, and others are hiring drivers to meet demand.