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after, say, five years, by which time all the cells will have had to be replaced at least once.

Citation needed.

Actual data collected from Tesla car owners shows that the battery packs still have over 90% capacity after 220000 km (160000 miles).

https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1110149_tesla-model-s-battery-life-what-the-data-show-so-far

Do you have some reason to think that a land-based installation will lose capacity much faster? Seems like land-based should be better than car-based as you don't need to worry about weight.

P.S. When the Prius first came out, I heard this claim that the car would be insanely expensive because the battery pack would wear out and need to be replaced at huge cost. I sure see a lot of taxi services using Prius cars, so I'm assuming that in actual use a Prius is not insanely expensive. Taxi services won't use a car that costs too much.

According to this, a Prius battery pack will last at least 10 years and isn't expensive to replace:

https://www.torquenews.com/1083/can-toyota-prius-battery-last-250000-miles

recalling the new 2019 Subaru Ascent for missing spot welds

- I can drive on the HOV lane and reduce my commute time by half.

They will eventually put a stop to that when too many people use the HOV land.

- Maintenance required is dramatically reduced (i.e. no oil changes.)

Statement not supported by facts.

- No more weekly trip to the gas station (I couldn't care less about the $30 it costs to fill my tank; I make that much money in a very short amount of time.)

Except that you are stranded for hours while your piece of shit electric recharges.

Oops, not 117K, but 127K. Still a great deal less than 160K.
Here is a short explanation of why the doc/lawyer did NOT get what they really wanted, which was a great deal more.
And had they gotten what those 2 wanted, there would be lots of lemon vehicles with plenty of sharks like you out there.

Diesels naturally produce more particulates and NOx, neither of which is particularly controlled in the EU.

Or, you could just google it, like I did:

http://www.torquenews.com/1083...

Do they? How does an autonomous car know the difference between a wet road and a flooded viaduct?

http://www.torquenews.com/397/...

(note that's from 2011; it's now available on multiple models)

He cited figures from the National Fire Protection Association that 150,000 gasoline car fires occur per year. With 3 trillion miles driven per year, that works out to 1 vehicle fire for every 20 million miles driven. The record for the Tesla Model S so far is 1 vehicle fire per 100 million miles driven. This means gasoline car drivers are at five times greater risk to car fires than are Model S drivers.

What about other EVs? Nissan has about 4 times as many Leafs on the road worldwide (~80k vs ~20k), and the only reference I can find to a fire was one that was destroyed in a forest fire in Colorado. Interestingly, while the car itself was burnt to a crisp, the battery pack supposedly remained "structurally intact." What is Tesla doing worse than Nissan? Is it just the relative size/capacity of the battery packs? Different chemistry? Structural protection? Not enough data points to be statistically significant yet?

http://insideevs.com/a-seriously-burned-out-nissan-leaf/
http://www.torquenews.com/1083/why-does-tesla-model-s-catch-fire-crashes-not-chevy-volt-and-nissan-leaf
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/business/tsunami-reveals-durability-of-nissans-leaf.html?_r=0

The connector issue is actually a good point.

I hadn't really looked in to the e-car connector wars before, but we have a VietNam of conflicting charging connector standards in the US, and it's even worse when you look a the global picture.

Tesla's "supercharger" connector is just one more vendor-proprietary standard in the war.

Choose... wisely (and some prescience wouldn't hurt...)

I'm sure all those houses that burned down in Queens had piles of batteries laying around, that's what caused the fire. I'm also sure it's impossible for a normal car without a HV battery pack to catch fire for any reason, including flooding.

Meanwhile, two dozen all-electric Nissan LEAFs failed to catch fire after the 2011 tsunami that hit Japan.

(Maybe the Fisker Karma is just a piece of shit. Don't blame the HV battery.)
=Smidge=

Not to mention they may burst into flames when flooded with water, not too comforting if you are preparing for the next storm surge.

but the water will put out the flames right? see, self-correcting!

Not to mention they may burst into flames when flooded with water, not too comforting if you are preparing for the next storm surge.

Like Jobs, he saved his beloved baby Tesla Motors from the brink of oblivion.

And unlike Steve Jobs, he first put it there himself, and only "saved" it by pissing in his investors' and customers' pockets and telling them it was raining.

...Which might be forgivable, if he had put himself as far out on a limb as he put them. He didn't; through the process of milking his investors (big and small), he managed to hold on to almost every penny of his personal multi-billion-dollar fortune. And frankly, even THAT could have been forgivable, had he not also leveraged the Department of Energy for an additional $465 million of taxpayer funds.

Ostensibly this was a loan; realistically, with an anticipated total market of 1 million electric cars by 2015 (the DOE invested in 2009), even if every one of those came from Tesla, it would have to pay almost $500 from the sale of *every car* to pay this "loan" back. Hell, they finally made the FIRST payment on this loan this month after more than 3 years. How? Not from being profitable. Not even from being frugal. From a $200-million influx of investor cash, which investors are only putting up because they know it's all but secured by the US government (having seen how Washington says, "How high?" when Detroit says, "Jump.") -- in other words, if (rather, when) they don't pay that money back, you and I will.

Screw Elon Musk. I'll happily let the Brits get a head start on private-sector space travel if it means we don't have to reward the fetid values and practices on which Musk builds his vision.