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Since the links in TFA were quite unhelpful: it's a small 2-seater electric car that's intended for short trips only. The $7000 gets you the car and there's an unspecified fee to lease the battery.

Overview: http://green.autoblog.com/2011/10/31/crowd-sourced-streetscooter-electric-vehicle/

Picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/think_on_tour/4194887078/in/photostream

Swapping out batteries could get rather complicated, although a "quick change-out" might be possible.

It not only "might be possible", it is currently being done. http://green.autoblog.com/2010/04/27/better-places-battery-swapping-electric-taxi-test-takes-off-in/

It was covered on Motorweek more recently, too.

Tesla sued Fisker in 2008, for a car design: http://green.autoblog.com/2008/04/15/breaking-tesla-sues-fisker-over-electric-car-design/

Tesla sued TopGear in 2011, for a car review: http://www.iol.co.za/motoring/industry-news/tesla-losing-top-gear-court-challenge-1.1162112 "Tesla losing Top Gear court challenge"

See the spectacular Jeremy Clarkson review the Tesla in 2008 and compare it with its car design origin (Lotus Elise) http://www.spike.com/video-clips/c3neux/top-gear-reviews-the-tesla-roadster

Tesla sues who next?

They couldn't find a facility? Wasn't the whole point of these programs to build new facilities?

Fisker has a facility in the United States - in Delaware. They will use this facility, much like Tesla is using the old NUMMI facility in SoCal, for their mass manufacturing. The problem, so Fisker claims, is that they wanted to use a contract manufacturer for their initial production run (presumably while getting their main facility running, and by debugging their mfg processes with the early production run), but could not find a suitable contract manufacturer in the U.S. It's not like just any ol' company can build a car, and those that can are already doing just that: they go by the names of Ford, Chrysler, GM, and Toyota.

You may be correct on the Chinese fire sale. However, your assertion that the taxpayers of the United States are going to see all that money recouped is patently false at this time. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703916004576271382418887092.html http://www.autoblog.com/2011/04/21/report-fed-mulling-summer-sale-of-gm-stock-would-take-big-loss/ The stock owned by the government needed to be sold at $50/share to break even. But what's 11 billion dollars when you want to raise government spending by another 1.6 trillion? A rounding error, to be sure.

Hundreds of dollars per month. You are either purposely making stuff up, or horribly bad at math.
I suppose you could be spouting off someone else's fake numbers, which would just make you ignorant.

Anyway, lets do some math:
24KWh battery (Nissan leaf, and we'll give you the entire battery, just for grins).
I'll even grant you a ridiculous number for power cost (average wholesale energy cost in TX $0.045 / KWh) we're talking peak so lets go with $0.10 / KWh
24KWh*$0.10/KWh*30days = $72.00 Oh and by the way you can't drive your car now, because it's going to take 6 hours to charge back up.
Nissan said the cost for the battery is $18K (not $9k as widely reported) http://green.autoblog.com/2010/05/15/nissan-leaf-profitable-by-year-three-battery-cost-closer-to-18/
So to break even is 20 years (or 10 if you assume the cost ends up dropping to $9K).
Neat that's to break even, no where near an order of magnitude.... And now you can't drive your car because it's an expensive battery...

That's quite a straw man that rally2xs sets up. There may be a few "envirowacko's" out there but practically no one is saying you have to live in a cave and read by candlelight. We just need to switch to a different energy source and change some habits.

And I don't get the "trillions wasted" argument either. Instead of spending money on fossil fuel energy we're spending on renewable energy. It still pays people wages and buys materials from suppliers and all the other things that businesses do. It's just different than the current economy. As a bonus you get rid of a lot of pollution and environmental disasters like the BP oil rig and mountain top removal coal mining and you get out ahead of the curve on peak oil and coal. Do you know that the price of solar cells has dropped something like 60% in the past two years and is likely to drop below coal within the next decade. Battery technology has some exciting things coming down the pike. The trillions of dollars will be spent over the four decades or so that it takes to eliminate fossil fuels. We'd be spending the money anyway on them anyway. Oh ... reading further it looks like you think the government will be spending all of that money. Most of it will be private sector money but even government money gets spent on wages and supplies. It all goes into the economy.

You know, 70% of the US economy is consumer spending. Those people receiving Social Security are spending that money on food and living expenses and maybe some frills. More consumer spending. How much would it hurt the economy if you took that money out of it? The problem with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care act is it didn't go far enough. It should have been Medicare for all. The US spends about 17% if its GDP on health care and the rest of the OCED countries spend around 10%. The most cost effective and highest user satisfaction medical system in the US is the VA health care system where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are on salary.

I imagine you're pretty outraged by my statements but that's how I see it.

Maybe the people who have died because of our use of fossil fuels should be haunting us.

Abiogenic petroleum? Good luck with that.

Basic research continues to be done and alternative energy sources are quickly becoming competitive with more traditional sources.

http://green.autoblog.com/2011/08/21/solar-energy-match-coal-price-2015-china-globally-2020/
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/08/23/302008/in-brazil-auction-wind-power-is-cheaper-than-natural-gas/
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/09/241120/solar-is-ready-now-%E2%80%9Cferocious-cost-reductions-make-solar-pv-competitive/

I think this might be what you were looking for:
http://www.autoblog.com/2009/08/01/driving-like-a-jerk-reportedly-helps-reduce-traffic-jams/

Which refers to:
http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2009/07/jerks-actually-reduce-risk-of-traffic.html

Leaf http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/energy/26067/

Mitsubishi http://green.autoblog.com/2011/04/22/edta-2011-85-miles-is-the-best-case-scenario-for-mitsubishi-i/

If I want a urban rickshaw I'll buy a scooter with storage. If I want a car I'll buy something with 300+ miles range.

When did the Nissan LEAF's range get downgraded from 100 miles to 73 miles? Is it by the same process Top Gear used to determine the Tesla Roadster's 55 mile range, or by these guys 313 miles (official range is 244 miles). If we want to start using the actual range instead of the advertised range as the range number, can we also start using the actual mpg for cars instead of the advertised number?

For reference: I've owned a plug-in converted Prius for over a year and a half and speaking from experience, my assisted mode (electric motor constantly assisting gas engine) is roughly 32 miles. In the summer I rarely dip below 100mpg, but in winter I am lucky to get 80mpg. EV range is roughly 18 miles in summer, but it doesn't even work in winter (Prius limit, not conversion kit limit). I used $143.28 worth of electricity (including taxes and delivery fees) keeping my car charged, and filled up on gas once every 5-8 weeks.

It allows me to make my weekend trips for kids sports, shopping, and various errands near the neighbourhood without using a drop of gas. Now that I've had a taste of what an electric car would be like to own I want one. Making trips to the gas station seem so inconvenient now, my car sits in the driveway for 12-18 hours a day; sometimes it sits there all day. It sits in the parking lot at work for 8 hours a day. Why can't that time be used to trickle charge my car so I don't need gas?

The electric charging infrastructure already exists, it's pre-installed into every home and office parking lot. The same just cannot be said of hydrogen. Hydrogen isn't a power source, it's a power medium like batteries. Hydrogen cars today have a range similar to electric vehicles. The hydrogen version of the BMW 7 series has a range of about 125 miles; just 25 more than the Nissan LEAF's range (if we only use advertised ranges). The Tesla Model S can be equipped with a 300 mile battery pack for a vehicle MSRP of $77,000; the BMW is worth $1,000,000 (though is has an attractive lease option).

Hydrogen just adds a level of complexity that simply doesn't exist for electric vehicles. EVs will not replace all cars, at best today they can be a second car, or a single car for someone who lives in a town where everything is less than 30 miles away. Commuting, doing errands, short (less than 100 mile) trips is what you'd get an EV to do; if you do more of everything else (road trips, on-the-road salesman, long drives, etc) then don't buy an EV.

It's rumored that Toyota and Honda have been selling their hybrids at a loss, mainly to keep their CAFE average in conformance as they were selling more SUVs

I will see your a rumor and raise you a cite:

According to the Japanese newspaper Nikkei (via Green Car Congress), each hybrid that Honda and Toyota sell earns the respective company about $3,100 in profit.

In fact Toyota has been meeting this persistent rumor with the same answer - they are turning a profit on the Prius - since 2002.

That is a very interesting observation. I had not thought about the styles of automobile manufacture being controlled by marketing. I tend to like the build quality more than anything else, and that makes or breaks a vehicles potential beauty from my perspective. I really like the Ford Five Hundred, for example. I find that the interior panels of the cabin, although dull in their shape, fit together with no gaps. the lines seem to fit together in a way that makes the cabin feel solid, without touching it to experience it's structure. It is perplexing, I find the design to be beautiful even though the styling is devoid of any flow between accents and without any romantic curves. The parts are well toleranced and well insulated, so I enjoy the interior more than a Chevy Cobalt, which has loose-fitting components that warp over time as well as rattle. I think that most people have issues analyzing interior cabin spaces. For instance, Wards interior design awards gave a win to the Chevy Equinox in 2010 for the 'popular truck under $39k' category. http://www.autoblog.com/photos/review-2010-chevrolet-equinox/#2362381 When I look at the interior, I notice many mistakes. The dash electrical panel is accented by silver plastic/brushed nickel, however the other panels are trimmed in black plastic. This inconsistency extends to feature trim as well; features like the cup holders are trimmed in chrome, but the air vents and gauges are not. In fact, some air vents are trimmed in black plastic, and some are trimmed in brushed nickel/silver plastic. Although the flowing lines of the panels use black plastic as a border during the transition from the door panels to the dashboard, the flow stops at the dashboard console. It then uses silver plastic to border the lines as they transition to the shifter panel, which has a distinct break in flow and feature trim (accented in chrome, not silver plastic). To me, the whole thing is atrocious. But it won an award, so what do I know?

Brazil's ethanol industry

Brazil imports record amount of ethanol

"So, where's Brazil getting all of this ethanol from? The United States. According to Platts, almost all of Brazil's imports were U.S. corn-based ethanol, as prices were deemed to be the world's most competitive".

And what is so hard about explaining the same rationale later on to whoever is concerned?

Are you being disingenuous on purpose? I just finished saying that there are some people who are against any amount of force, regardless of the justification. I am not against the cop being filmed, what I am against is the jackoffs who edit their video to show only the physical confrontations, then post it to rile other dumbasses up over those 'dirty pigs'. To my mind, those people are the true pigs.

Basically if I discovered a bloody knife in my house(with a murder victim lying outside on road) and decide to throw it away since I didnt want people to suspect me of wrongdoing, I can still be charged with destruction of evidence. But if an officer pre-emptively destroys evidence, that is all fine.

Where did you learn to debate, the internets? Seriously, again, I don't have a problem with cops being filmed, I do have a problem with how that film is used to unfairly smear all law enforcement everywhere. But hey, if it bleeds, it leads, right?

There are protocols for dealing with possibly armed suspects and they do not involve "punching" or kicking him in the face.

Indeed. So tell me, would it be better for them to draw their firearms and blow him away if he continues to refuse to co-operate? Cops are trained to end conflict situations decisively, as much for their own safety as for that of innocent bystanders. If you don't like that, co-operate physically but ask to see your lawyer, dumbass.

So the job sucks with all its restrictions and responsibilities? You have all the option for NOT signing up. Unlike the army, you are not being drafted.

Oh, did they fire up the draft again while I wasn't looking? Why is it that volunteering to fight and risking death for our freedoms overseas is noble, but volunteering to fight and risking death for our freedoms right here at home is despicable? I realize I'm whistling into the wind here, since I'm going against the prevailing /. groupthink, but I just get sick of hearing cops being trashed from little punks who generally couldn't protect themselves physically from a three year old with a grudge, no matter how l33t their sk1llz.

There are plenty of good and mature officer who miraculously manage to get the job done in a more reasonable way.

Yes, there are. And here's some news for you: even these officers will use reasonable force when necessary, to keep themselves and others safe.

Here is a clue. There is a video on youtube about a cop pulling a gun on a guy on a bike for some minor traffic violation.

http://www.autoblog.com/2010/04/19/motorcyclist-arrested-for-recording-cop-brandishing-gun-with-hel/

And yep, true to the form, the guy was arrested for recording the cop violating the law/protocols. Go and justify THAT, I dare you!

Wow, you just proved my goddamned point, you jackass. The cop *barely* had his gun out of the holster, didn't even point it at the suspect, and it was clear the suspect was 'backing away rapidly' before the cop pulled his gun...preparing to flee the scene perhaps? Should the officer have thrown himself at the bike instead to get the guy to stop?

Where are the YouTube clips of the millions of other traffic stops in which people co-operate right away and the officer doesn't have to draw their weapon? No, the guy recording things should not have been arrested for recording the video, but I strongly doubt that that's all he got arrested for. And I would be deeply disappointed in the human race in general if that officer even got reprimanded for his conduct, which appeared perfectly reasonable to me.

-CCarrot (that's right, go mod-stalk me. I stand behind my words, even if I have to post AC)

Basically if I discovered a bloody knife in my house(with a murder victim lying outside on road) and decide to throw it away since I didnt want people to suspect me of wrongdoing, I can still be charged with destruction of evidence. But if an officer pre-emptively destroys evidence, that is all fine. They are officers after all! They don't really wanna do this job! They were drafted and being forced to do this, so we must cut them some slack while they take out their frustrations on non-armed normal folks.

"There are consequences for wrong decisions? oh no! Gosh, armed forces have to pay with their lives if they make a wrong decision, but *I* don't want there to be any consequences if I do some stupid stuff! Gosh!"

There are protocols for dealing with possibly armed suspects and they do not involve "punching" or kicking him in the face.

So the job sucks with all its restrictions and responsibilities? You have all the option for NOT signing up. Unlike the army, you are not being drafted. You get no sympathy from me. If you have such a thin skin and lack of basic understanding, perhaps a change of career for you, may help you and the world as well. There are plenty of good and mature officer who miraculously manage to get the job done in a more reasonable way.

Here is a clue. There is a video on youtube about a cop pulling a gun on a guy on a bike for some minor traffic violation.
http://www.autoblog.com/2010/04/19/motorcyclist-arrested-for-recording-cop-brandishing-gun-with-hel/

And yep, true to the form, the guy was arrested for recording the cop violating the law/protocols. Go and justify THAT, I dare you!

would you trust WiFi to drive your car?

Do I trust the drivers of the other cars?

Cars are these strange things that drive our minds crazy. I don't know how much is cultural (i.e. movies, etc.) and how much is psychological, but there are few areas in life where the disconnect between reality and subjective is so dramatic.

Everyone thinks he's an above-average driver. Of course, that's statistically impossible.
Almost everyone overestimates his (or her) ability to handle a car in unusual circumstances.
Very few people can correctly judge road and weather conditions and their impacts on things like brake distance.
Most people do not have a correct sense of speed anymore if they've driven at speed for a few hours.

and so on and so forth. Car accidents are within the top reasons of unnatural death in most western countries, but most of us feel more uneasy going on a rollercoaster (which cause what, a dozen or so deaths a year, world-wide?) or on a plane (around 1000 deaths per year, world-wide) than taking the car to work (1,200,000 deaths per year, world-wide). Yes, that's the real numbers, here and here are some sources, or google your own. Plane crashes fall way below the rounding error margin of car crashes.

Really, you would have to put really bad engineers with pre-historic computer equipment and unstable wiring into those cars to make them worse than human drivers.

Just recently they've had government testing of their new car battery prototype, as well as testing by the independent firm Dekra.

http://www.allcarselectric.com/blog/1058119_its-official-dbm-energys-electric-car-battery-is-real

http://green.autoblog.com/2011/04/05/dbm-energy-record-breaking-kolibri-battery-passes-government-tests/

This is reassuring as their claims are seemed so extreme:

"Mr. Hoffmann also cites estimates that the mass-production cost of a 98.8 kWh version of the pack would range from 800 to 1,000 euros, or from about $1,100 to $1,400, which is thousands below current costs."

http://rumors.automobilemag.com/cars-computers-best-buy-sell-electric-vehicles-45795.html

> Thank you for having the vision, the money, and the balls to do these great things. ... Geeks everywhere.

I thought Musk ended up getting in fights and/or lawsuits with many of the geeks he's worked with. (Eberhard of Tesla; Thiel and
Levchin of Paypal)
http://blogs.reuters.com/small-business/2009/06/22/tesla-founders-feud-a-cautionary-tale/

And didn't he recently announce he was broke?
http://www.autoblog.com/2010/05/30/teslas-elon-musk-says-hes-broke/

Hope he doesn't fly the geeks to Mars and then charge them extra to bring them back.

What's 10 billion when you already have 50 billion? Still more money than he could spend in his lifetime.

Lol, omfg... ur serious?

I could piss away 50 billion in 3 months. I just sat here and wrote
down the first week and I'm already thru 10 billion... and that's not
even into the investing portion of the spending spree.

First day... I'm a car nut, so I'd buy every car on my 'list'. First 10
cars burn up over $20 mil. Probably close to $30 mil if I'm doing a
"i want it now". Actually, this is an *edit*, while I was thinking
about it... just the Ferrari's alone would burn thru $20 million.

The remaining list would soak a half bil easily. And that's just cars.

Vehicles... like this one,
http://www.autoblog.com/2006/01/22/gm-futurliner-rewrites-barrett-jackson-record-books-hammers-to/
I would try to buy, he lives about 10mi away...
http://maps.google.com/?&ll=33.609301,-112.199248&spn=0.001087,0.00182&t=h&z=20
$4 mil, gone...

First day of vehicles could hit $1 billion, pretty easily.

Second day... boats. cmon. another half billion easy.

Third day... planes. Really? 1 Good one, quarter million.
Gotta get the Marine One quality copter, another $241 million.
I guess I could just buy the old one?
http://www.taxpayertreasurehunt.com/index.php/Cancellation_of_Marine_One_Procurement
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/vh-71.htm
http://www.top5pedia.com/Top5%20Military/MostExpensiveAircrafts.html

Then you have to do what most rappers forget to do,
http://www.tmz.com/2011/04/11/nate-dogg-foreclosure-pomona-house-died-dead/
http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2010/06/04/rapper-chamillionaire-ridin-into-foreclosure-on-houston-mansion/
http://www.allmandandlee.com/bankruptcy_blog/bankruptcy-law/even-rapper-jay-z-battles-foreclosure/
set some of that money aside in an interest bearing
or investment grade account to pay for storage of all
that stuff you just bought.

I think I'd run out of money before 45 days... but
90 days is just a comfortable, I'm sure it'd be all gone
by then amount of time.

So, whomever thinks, $50 billion is more than someone
could spend (laughably) in a lifetime... doesn't have a lot
of imagination or desire.

-AI

The gas turbine takes in air continuously and produces smooth power. This one has some kind of of ring that closes incoming air. Once it is spun and if the inlet is closed it is going to create very interesting airflow, and that is some how harnessed into self ignite the fuel air mixture. It will probably have a very narrow range of operating rpm. Starting would require us to spin this up to the operating rpm before it would produce power. So forget about low end torque or any such thing. It will produce power only at one speed and at one rate. In a gas turbine you could indirectly control speed/power by controlling the fuel flow rate. This one might not work at any other rpm or even fuel flow rate. Run it, charge the batteries and shut off, is going to be the mode of operation.

So the efficiency is not going to be three fold increase. That claim comes by including the gains made by reducing the engine + transmission weight. But there is going to be electric motors and batteries added. So the claims are a little over stated. On the other hand it does not depend on any intricate seals like Wankel engines or other unknown things. Gas turbines are well known since WW II. So it is a good promising technology, but it is not likely to be any better than many other unusual engines people are fiddling with. A better picture: http://green.autoblog.com/2011/04/08/wave-disk-generator-engine-wave-of-future-video/

But seriously (outside of racing) the idea is not for everybody to own their own packs - check out Better Place Tesla has said the S will be compatible. Admittedly the fact it "can be done" isn't really the point, until there's one on our near your commute route.

I would really like them to go one step further, and divide the battery into about 4 separate packs, so they could be lifted by a single person, but just as importantly so you can only carry 1 or 2 packs if that's all you need. It would greatly reduce the weight of the car, increasing efficiency and performance. My commute is only 20 miles round trip, which is about the national average IIRC.

"Production" consists of 100 cars worldwide. That's less than one tenth of the number of EV1 cars produced.

Until I can buy one at my local VW dealership, it ain't real and it ain't relevant. The world is full of "someday I'm gonna make this".

In any event, I have serious doubts it will meet US safety standards. As for the mileage claims... a low cD and a low frontal area and all that are nice, but you can't cheat physics. It takes a certain amount of energy to move a car around, and there's no getting around that. Even a little 50cc scooter only gets a little over 100mpg, and we're being told a two-passenger car capable of going 100mph with a vehicle weight of 1750 pounds gets three times that? I doubt it. In fact, I'll just plain call bullshit; that figure has to include propulsion from a full battery pack. Show me distance traveled where the battery pack has the same state at the beginning and conclusion of the run while burning 1 gallon of fuel; THAT is the "miles per gallon" that can ethically be claimed.

All that being said, it's not a bad-looking car (as eco-pharisee-mobiles go). I'd like to see it succeed, but first it has to be real and it has to be honest. There's also the little matter than I'm 6'2" tall with a 36" inseam. If it only fits oompa-loompas like the Lotus Elise (which I absolutely do not fit into, and believe me I've tried), forget it.

http://www.autoblog.com/2006/06/26/epa-unveils-hydraulic-hybrid-ups-delivery-truck/

epa's been shopping this around for a long damn time

seems like a good excuse to give Chrysler some limelight since they're still so... ...

and don't even get started on what get its own page in Wikipedia. Their editors are more than a bit fickle. One growing issue is the apparent changing of how they handle hybrid cars. Apparently someone got their panties into a bunch and has declared what hybrid/alternative fuel vehicles deserve their own page and which ones do not, see the related article at http://green.autoblog.com/2011/01/19/electric-car-pages-on-wikipedia-in-danger-of-disappearing/

Anime characters, episodes of such series, music artists, individual songs, all those things have warranted their own pages. It all comes down to, which editor did you run afoul of and how good of week did they have.

You might not really understand how it works.

You are going way off topic here. Who cares if you say that DUI may refer to something other than alcohol, or that you can be ticketed for speeding? This story is all about compelling people to have their alcohol level measured to get the drunks off the road. You might claim that the police don't need any breathalyzer or blood test evidence to arrest you for DUI, but if that is true why are they going to these lengths to ensure that they do get the evidence? And if you are wrongly arrested for DUI, surely it is in your best interest to have the evidence to prove in court that you were not under the influence.

It is not always illegal to drive under the influence of alcohol

Correct. You need to be over a certain alcohol level. If only they had a way to measure this!

Additionally, roughly 75% of fatal accidents do not involve alcohol.

So 25% of fatal accidents do involve alcohol. It seems reasonable to want to eliminate that portion of the fatalities. Of the remaining 75%, how many of those are caused by excessive speed? That is why they give out speeding tickets to stop people from doing that. And how many accidents are caused by people being distracted by texting on their phones? Well that is why many places around the world are outlawing that practice to. They are not doing it to just annoy the public. They are doing it to save lives.

While you are wrong about what the police are supposed to do (well, you are correct in spirit but that isn't actually the mission of the police), how do you explain their utter failure in changing the number of fatal traffic accidents since the 80's despite the hugely increased focus on alcohol use? Finally, you might be tempted to ask me for citations. Luckily, google is your friend.

I tried google as you suggested. One of the first matches indicates that your statistic is wrong.

That's not the same. Trains aren't routed. They do extremely well with long distance deliver effectiveness. They do extremely poorly with short distance efficiency. Two completely different problems. Trains solve weight*distance/energy. This purports to solve #ofdestinations/energy.

I dunno. A slight variation on trains and this could work well. Just make smaller trains. Actually, that's what they should do - these induction motor powered tubes can't really be routed over ground as easily as trains can be, for lowering cost in places where weather isn't an issue.

And someone said below that we don't want a train station leading into every supermarket... but we already have large dropoff areas for Semi Trucks at the back of most supermarkets (dunno about in cramped cities, but around where I live that's how it works).
If you can make the train station small and give it automated offloading, it could be pretty compact.

And really, linear induction motors are a terrible idea. If they are talking about making passive moving elements with linear induction motors on the tunnel side of things, then you need a continuous line of copper coils all the way down the tunnel. If you instead put a regular electric motor *inside* the moving element (the pill/traincar thing) then you only need enough copper to wind that motor, plus the wires to deliver the power. That is an enormous reduction in the amount of copper needed, and allows heavy mover cars to have bigger motors, and small mover cars to have smaller motors.

The more I think about this, trains absolutely make the most sense.

If we re-think train systems for dynamic routing and robotic unloading, this could all be pretty simple. Much better than all these tubes. And it could still be underground sometimes.

Check out the train system this volkswagen factory uses in the middle of a large city:

http://www.autoblog.com/2010/11/09/video-inside-volkswagens-cutting-edge-transparent-factory-in-d/

The *real* problem with an automated material delivery system is preventing terrorists from loading up a giant bomb into one. And that is something that has frustrated me for a long time. We could do lots of great things with technology if it weren't for the potential for abuse being so high.

-Taylor

I'd prefer the one designed by Porsche: $1 Million Advent Calendar.

I would have thought that with constant stop-and-go driving, regenerative braking would be a huge win. The article says it's a 35% fuel savings. But apparently even that isn't enough for them to switch all their new vehicle purchases to hybrid.

Now, some enterprising person could build a car body from scratch and truly verify if Adam and Jaime got it right.

http://green.autoblog.com/2008/04/13/new-record-at-shell-eco-marathon-2-843-mpg/

Does that look like a car to you?

That is my whole point. There is something better already. Even as for as 2,843.4 miles to the gallon. Now that is an improvement. http://green.autoblog.com/2008/04/13/new-record-at-shell-eco-marathon-2-843-mpg/

According to this, fast charging increases the rate at which dendrites are formed. A 6-min charge cycle would severely limit battery lifetime. I'm not looking forward to replacing 300 kg of batteries every year.

According to this, the faster you charge a li-ion battery, the more dendrite growth you get. So you're looking at replacing the battery rather soon with these 6-minute recharge cycles.

We just need to be more creative about it.

http://www.autoblog.com/2010/08/13/swedish-man-may-pay-largest-speeding-fine-ever/

No, and I wouldn't expect anybody would. It's sufficiently traumatic after the fact that the victim's memory wouldn't be reliable. There is however an NHTSA study from a while back that indicates that under certain situations that hybrids are more likely be involved in collisions with bicyclists and pedestrians than more traditional vehicles are. NHTSA study indicates hybrids have higher pedestrian crash rates

The main problem with the study is that there really aren't enough hybrids out there yet to know reliably what's going on, but the numbers are there.

You're being sarcastic, but this used to be true. Rapid changes in China's internal economic policy have created a growing "middle class" whose buying habits are much like those of American consumers. That includes a new interest in automobiles, as status symbols and otherwise, resulting in China becoming the largest car market in the world. That's right: China now buys more cars than anybody, and that wasn't true just a few years ago. 33 years ago there were only about a million cars in all of China. There are now four million cars on the streets of Beijing alone, and the Chinese bought 13.6 million cars in 2009. Americans only bought 10.4 million.

Would like to know where you got your numbers because if you had done a little more digging into U.S. sales you would have seen that most would conclude the current state of the U.S. economy is too blame. I did find the 10.4 million for 2009, but also found a 16.7 million for 2006, 3.1 million more than China in 2009. That info combined with the fact that the numbers for 2008 was 13.2 million and 2007 was 16.1 million you start see why I and many others might conclude that the Chinese economy is almost caught up to the where the U.S. economy was (and hopefully will be again..... hopefully)

If I had a login to motorintelligence.com like the forbes article above me I could probably give you an even more comprehensive picture, but this is all google could dig up for me in a few mins

Why do you people keep pushing one that requires registration?? Here, Watch some Leno

My 5.7L V8 gets 23 mpg average in daily driving. I figure that's good enough that I don't need to trade it in over green guilt for some lawnmower that might get 5mpg better. Further improvement gets real diminishing returns, cars are only driven so much each year. See for example http://green.autoblog.com/2009/07/23/greenlings-where-are-the-most-important-mpg-increases-at-the-u/

HOV stickers are no longer available for hybrids in the state of California and even current Prius HOV stickers will expire in a few years. What h4rr4r is saying is correct. http://green.autoblog.com/2010/07/09/california-extends-unrestricted-use-of-carpool-lanes-by-evs-unti/

As for you pace car idea, here is the execution in real life:
http://green.autoblog.com/2007/08/25/what-happens-when-highway-drivers-are-forced-to-go-55-mph-its/

I don't see the problem with that (the article says "it's not pretty").

On some roads (e.g. the M25 motorway around London) reducing the limit when it's congested improves traffic flow.

In construction zones on British Motorways there are often "average speed cameras", which measure vehicle speed over the whole length of the zone. It's not possible to cheat that, and IME it's quite relaxing to sit at 40mph (or whatever) without having people jostling to go a few mph faster.

* The cars will be scrupulous about obeying traffic laws and speed limits. But even with a small part self-driving cars, they will act as pace cars and slow and smooth traffic for everyone. Even more so, as they'll be recording everything happening around them, and other drivers know it. Pace will be slower, but people will arrive sooner.

I don't know what you're smoking, but when I was in Germany, the blitz camera (for speeding) in my part of town didn't cause people to go slower except in the very spot it was in. It caused enough rage that it was actually shot at night on multiple occasions.

In America, I live near a highway still marked an antiquated 55 mph, and everyone goes at least 70 mph. In my experience, there is nothing magically special or wise about the arbitrary speed limits, except they are set way too low in order for the cops to generate revenue on demand.

Your little do-good buggy will a) in fact slow me down on the highway causing me to get there slower and b) cause road rage in someone that will drive that little piece of shit off the road, taped or not.

As for you pace car idea, here is the execution in real life:
http://green.autoblog.com/2007/08/25/what-happens-when-highway-drivers-are-forced-to-go-55-mph-its/

My god, I have to read before I post something.

We all make silly mistakes at times. :)

Again, if you compare high speed performance, the prius is lot slower.
Top speed of 320d ED is 228kmh, and that is much more than prius.
So it is bit faster off the line, and lot faster at highway speeds.

But off the line is what most people care about. You experience 0-60 often -- for many people, multiple times a day. But even on the Autobahn, the average speed is 83mph. In most people's real-world driving, they never even hit their top speed. Since 0-60 is the number that matters, that's the number I reference.

So if you are, I don't know, going to the vacation with full car, and floors it on highway, doesn't it drains the batteries ? If I remember right, the capacity of priuses battery pack was around 4-5kWh. It is not much when you are requiring full power.

No, it doesn't drain the batteries. Actually, the Prius pack capacity is a lot less than that -- 1.3kWh, of which only 0.3kWh is available. Remember that issue with low depth of discharge being required on small batteries that I mentioned? That's it right there. But it's more than enough to buffer periods of peak demand. The key is that the energy consumption difference between acceleration and cruising is huge. Cruising at low highway speeds in an efficient car may take ~12kW of engine/motor power. Kinetic energy is 1/2 mv^2. So to go from 90 km/h to 120 km/h in a 1250kg vehicle takes 303,819J. Spread out over, say, 4 seconds, takes an additional *80* kilowatts. So the performance needed for strong acceleration is *way* more than that needed for cruising. In a hybrid and plug-in hybrid, the engine needs to be able to provide the power needed for cruising, while the battery needs to be able to have enough buffer for acceleration and the motor enough power to perform the acceleration (although conventional "parallel" hybrids mix the roles of the electric and gas engines). Now, one might say, "what if the buffer runs out"? But in that four-second acceleration that brought you to 120km/h, even if your generator wasn't able to provide *any* extra power to the pack during this time frame (which, obviously, it does -- a lot), you only spent 89Wh (plus pack losses -- overall, a bit over 100 Wh). That's only a third of your pack, for a pretty hefty acceleration. Throw in that your generator is producing significant power during this time period and you can see how it's not a problem.

In conventional hybrids, they rely on that power from the generator more for the peaking loads due to the smaller buffer. In plug-in hybrids, the generator is typically made smaller (although there are reasons for larger generators at times), since it has more time to buffer.

Man, it is not EGR.

"
Prius also brings many new firsts to the Toyota lineup. To help increase fuel efficiency, the 1.8-liter engine is beltless, uses an electric water pump, a new exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) system, and an exhaust heat collection system. "

I don't know if I remember it correctly, but doesn't battery pack for tesla costs around twenty thousand $$$ or even more? That is quite a lot.

The cost of a Roadster battery pack is tricky -- namely, because you can't buy one now except in a Roadster ;) Tesla offers a 3 year, 36,000 mile standard warranty (and optional extended warranty) and does all the service themselves, so they have no need to sell them outright yet. Musk stated a year ago that the pack alone would at the time cost $36k -- but that's not in small part due to all of the hand assembly involved. The individual cells by now (160Wh/kg laptop-grade 18650s) are under $300/kWh. Due to their costs significantly going down, both in terms of batteries and production costs, Tesla offers a $12,000 "future battery r

Well of course it's possible to interfere with the antenna from a phone. The issue here is how easy it is to do (accidentally) and how severe the effect is.

To use a car analogy, this is like if Lexus made an SUV that was prone to oversteer and rollovers during normal driving, and their response (instead of a recall) was "yeah well you can make any SUV roll over! It's a universal problem! See!" followed by a professional driver performing crazy stunts in order to flip some other manufacturers vehicle.

One is likely to happen accidentally, and one is much less so.

Well of course it's possible to interfere with the antenna from a phone. The issue here is how easy it is to do (accidentally) and how severe the effect is.

To use a car analogy, this is like if Lexus made an SUV that was prone to oversteer and rollovers during normal driving, and their response (instead of a recall) was "yeah well you can make any SUV roll over! It's a universal problem! See!" followed by a professional driver performing crazy stunts in order to flip some other manufacturers vehicle.

One is likely to happen accidentally, and one is much less so.

Other sources (http://green.autoblog.com/2010/05/27/details-on-nissan-leaf-battery-pack-including-how-recharging-sp/) claim an estimated 70% - 80% capacity left after 10 years.

But let's assume for a moment that the "battery dead after 8 years" is correct. Then it still looks like a good deal. On top of that, advanced battery technology as used in the Leaf is still getting cheaper, as more vendors get into the business and competition drives down prices. So you may get a pretty good deal on replacement batteries a few years from now.

Except it really doesn't work. We've tried.
http://green.autoblog.com/2009/05/08/newsflash-dumping-iron-filings-into-ocean-wont-reduce-co-sub-2/

It had been proposed sometime ago that geoengineering might help fight global warming. One plan in particular that drew a lot of attention was the dumping of hundreds of tons of iron filings into the ocean. Through wave action, the seas absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and the theory went that iron dumping would encourage phytoplankton population growth which would, in combination with zooplankton, take in CO2 and deposit it on the bottom of the briny deep. ... ...
While it seems that impressive bio-blooms could be created, much of the zooplankton poop and other carbons bits didn't create the strong sedimentation effect expected on the briny bottom.

Other stories here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16390-climate-fix-ship-sets-sail-with-plan-to-dump-iron.html

BMW makes cars, which are not "green" by any standard. You want green, invest in buses, trains, bikes, etc. Not more cars. This is pretty clearly a greenwashing attempt by BMW.

Well unfortunatly you like the rest of the world measures "green" by little stamps on the back of cars that say "hybrid" ... should say toxic battery for disposal. BMW from a systems prespective; the one that matters when going green is the greenest auto maker in the world. The manufacturing of the product, recycling of materials is noted as making the largest "green" impact; CO2 footprint wise. http://green.autoblog.com/2009/09/06/dow-jones-names-bmw-the-greenest-automaker-again/

If you are a bicyclist going 15 mph and you suffer a collision with a motor vehicle going 35 mph, there is a very significant difference in the amount of force exerted by the impact depending on whether you are going against traffic (50 mph) or with traffic (20 mph).

  Actually, no. But thanks for playing.