Slashdot Mirror
The Quest for the Car of the Future
Lux writes "Where will the car of the future come from? It's unlikely to come from anywhere you'd expect it to. Wired's money is on the car of the future coming from NASA. 'New technology that promises to revolutionize the automobile as we know it is emerging from research institutions and startups — and these innovations won't set you back $100,000 like a Tesla will... One experiment involves small electric motors located in the wheels of the CityCar, a tiny, nimble and practically silent vehicle with wheels that turn 360 degrees, enabling it to slip neatly into tight urban parking spaces. Others are looking to revolutionize the automobile's engine, not replace it.'"
Yes, it's still an urban legend that you can violate the laws of thermodynamics.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Love to see the stills of a simple 20 mile per hour crash, let alone higher. A four wheel drive would literally drive right through it without slowing at a guess.
I clicked on the link in the google 100 mpg car for the 13 most fuel effecient vehicles. I had to laugh. I bought a chevy 3 cylinder metro 10 years ago. It got me about 44 hiway/38 city new. Has about 100,000 miles on it now and the gas mileage has drppoed somewhat. I'm getting the same or better than mos of these "fuel effecient" cars. My friends laughed at me. I laughed right back when they discovered their monthly gas costs would last me 3-4 months. Don't turn on the AC though.
> Might it be possible that there are methods of living that do not require us to live distantly from useful and necessary services?
Possible, but improbable, especially in the US. The most significant problem is couples who want to live together, but who don't necessarily work in the same place, combined with the fact that, with dispersed land-use patterns for housing, mass transit has no hope of keeping up, because the population is widely spread out at a low density. So, if half of every working couple can't live near where they work (because if they moved there, their other half would have the same problem), and if these people can't use efficient, high-capacity transit (because they want to live in a low-density residential environment), you're left with figuring out a way to move a lot of individuals to dispersed destinations. And that's *before* you take into account transportation for shopping or recreation.
Maybe both you and your (future?) partner can both live and work near public transportation, for both of your entire careers. That's great, but it's not typical.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
The crops we use for Biodiesel are not viable alternatives to fossil fuels - we should begin growing hemp - it's much more suited to that kind of application seeing as how you can get 4 crop cycles to every 1 crop cycle of corn. HempCar
Am I a looney who wants them to legalize marijuana? Sure! But there's greater uses than smoking it.
-You have been modded appropriately-
I can't help thinking that all of these futurist projects assume near damn near ideal conditions of road, weather, distance and terrain.
Or money that people would rather use to build roads instead of to subsidize train systems. A lot of people who are against subsidizing public transportation seem to conveniently ignore the fact that we are already subsidizing private transportation. (I am not lumping you into this category.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
They are improving only a few percent a year, with no signs of any acceleration in this trend. If anything, it is slowing. The reason is that batteries are actually pretty simple devices. Even the first ones over a hundred years ago weren't all that bad. Like the internal combustion engine, the simplicity of the device led to even the earliest designs being reasonably functional...and leaving little room for improvement.
One can never say never, but within the limits of our knowledge, it is unlikely that batteries as we know them will ever improve two-fold.
For whatever reason, the Federal Government of the USA refuses to recognize that fact.
I bet they wouldn't even have to subsidize hemp farming like they do for [most food crops in the USA]
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!