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Keep Your Eye on the Electric Sparrow
WC as Kato writes "Corbin Motors, the company that made the cute electric Sparrow car driven by Austin Powers in Goldmember, has gone into bankruptcy. SJ Mercury News has details of the dead bird..er Sparrow. Another electric car bites the dust!"
if they tried designing electric cars without abandoning all automobile design conventions.
Not more than you need, just more than you want
Every time this argument is made "that electricity has to be made somewhere!", someone has to reply "Yes, but it can be done more efficiently if its all in one place."
Just like when you're coding, if you have one function in once place, you can tune its performance, if you have your power generation in one place, you can tune its efficiency and polution.
Even if we stay with our current very dirty approach to making power, electric vehicles would still greatly reduce pollution. Small gas-burning engines pollute much more than large plants, which can have scrubbers, specialized parts, etc.
And when you're ready to swap out your file-reader for a SQL database, there's only one place to fix. Same goes with energy production. When we finally run out of oil and are ready to move onto something else (whatever it is), we only have to upgrade the plants, rather than 10 hojillion individual cars on the road.
Lastly, the subsidy comment. From what I've read, Corbin's books didn't have large government grants. There are a few tax breaks and other, pretty minor, incentives out there. However, given the above statements about reductions in pollution and the easing of the future transition to cleaner energy, I'd say that more subsidies is what we need.
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
I saw a bunch of their car/motorcycle things here in Silicon Valley, but I'd never drive one when I could ride a real motorcycle. (And yes, that's a Corbin seat there as well).