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Small Electric Car May Usher In Big Changes
An anonymous reader sends us to a profile in CNNMoney.com on a Norwegian car company that is building a compact, plug-in electric car, the Think City, that will go on sale in Europe early next year. It could hit US markets in 2009. The CEO is working with Silicon Valley VCs and with Google, Tesla Motors, PG&E, and Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway. Plans are to sell the car only on the Web. No dealers, cheap manufacturing plants, and a battery pack that you lease, not buy — there's potential here for shaking up the auto industry the way Dell did PCs.
Dell was very aggressive in marketing on TV (like Gateway) and they both offered similiar products at the same prices. So why did Gateway fold while Dell succeeded?
Gateway didn't get the big business accounts, and Dell managed to steal much of the server/workstation business away from HP. The home desktop market was never really where the money is. Everyone was so competitive that there isn't much room for profit.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
"Hi, I'm an electric car. I can't go very fast...or very far...and if you drive me, people will think you're gay." "One of us, one of us" Don't hit me *guards face*
"Small Electric Car May Usher In Big Changes" Next weeks headline: "Small Snowball freezes Big Bad Gates of Hell"
The Bible: Historically verifiable fact from an observers point of view
Selling via the web may sound cool, but at least one state (Texas) requires that a retail automobile purchase be conducted through a brick-and-mortar dealer. I can't think of any state worse in which to try to sell this car... I don' think they're worried.
No, the question is: Will it blend?
I hope we soon can wire our homes with superconducting (or other high efficiency) wiring and other exremely low-loss transducers, so we can generate power at home and use it for max efficiency. AC/DC conversion and transmission over any distance starts cutting the whole efficiency down to unusable sizes pretty quick. Since home generation is generally low power, but can be steady (even while the home is vacant or people are sleeping), maximum efficiency transmission is an excellent place to improve overall productivity. Perhaps even enough to get over the threshold, turning the distributed power grid into more of a backup than a primary source.
Eventually we'll get high-efficiency wide-area interconnects, but in the meantime, the home is a place which can start the conversion with much lower investment and cooperation from power corporations mainly in the pocket of centralized power generating industries.
Did you make sure your home wiring is all through conduits that can be upgraded easily?
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make install -not war
That is the question. Will it blend?
The game.