Apologies if things were unclear. The context of this discussion is "getting away with murder". The original poster way up there apparently thinks that the punishment she's receiving doesn't fit the crime. I would tend to agree. In that context, what's happening is that she's getting off very light and people are calling for much worse. When I talk about punishment, I mean the much worse, such as putting her in prison for decades, for life, or executing her.
The rule of law is far more important than individual justice. If letting a wrongdoer go free is necessary to preserve the rule of law, then yes, it should be done. It's not a nice situation to be in, but that is the best way out. The alternative is essentially mob rule, figuring out a way to punish anyone who's unpopular enough to get people to call for blood. That way lies madness.
If I shoot somebody in the leg and they survive, that is attempted murder.
If I shoot somebody in the leg in exactly the same way in every respect and that person dies because he's a hemophiliac or he has cancer or he's on special medication or any number of other reason, that's actual murder and I might get the chair.
Or take the famous case of Houdini. If I punch Houdini in the stomach because he says he can take any punch, and he wasn't ready and this kills him, that's murder. On the other hand, if he saw me coming and tensed up first, it's not. Same action, different outcome, different crime.
Point being, the law cares about both actions and outcomes, not actions alone.
How about this: you drive 25MPH over the limit and hit a pedestrian, who had plenty of time to get out of the way but didn't because he froze due to fear.
This situation looks to be almost the precise opposite of what was done by the woman in question. Reckless disregard is when you do something with no intention of causing harm, but the action was so risky and irresponsible that you end up killing someone by accident. Ms. Drew had every intention of causing harm (although probably not death) through actions that, on their own, were relatively innocuous.
There wasn't anything about the GM program that indicated it could be done, and a lot that wasn't. I'll concede that this is not absolute proof, but it's still a good argument. All the available evidence suggests that GM made the right choice with the EV1 in every respect except PR. Had they pushed ahead with mass production, evidence is that it most likely would have flopped, hard, and cost the company considerably more than the one billion dollars they lost on the program in reality.
I brought up anarchy because it's what punishing this person implies.
It may or may not be reasonable to cover the law such that this offense can be punishable the next time it happens. That's really a separate debate, but I'm not arguing against it here.
What's unreasonable is deciding that this person must be punished even though her action was not against the law. By all means, advocate that the law should be changed. But if you believe in the rule of law at all, this person should be set free!
As for the definition of "murder", you can quibble over the English definition but clearly what she did is not covered by the legal definition, otherwise the prosecutors would have charged her with it.
Sorry, but it's not "murder". It was a terrible thing that she did and she should be punished for it, but it was not actually murder.
In any case, we live under the rule of law. And one consequence of that is that sometimes people do terrible things that are not covered by the law. In that case, these people should go free. It's terrible, but it's vastly superior to the anarchy that results when there is no rule of law.
I never said GM tried to sell them. I said that it showed they could not be sold at a profit. You do not need to actually sell a product to do this.
As for the rest, if the electric vehicle concept was ready to make money for anyone who decided to make one in 1998, why didn't any other car companies do it? Perhaps GM was stupid, but every single major automobile manufacturer on the planet? No way.
Sure, hybrids started out as research vehicles and then became successful production vehicles. The EV1 was severely limited and people would not have purchased them in quantity. The first fact does not contradict the second.
People tried to buy the EV1 and were turned away. I don't know the quantities that they would have been sold at, but GM never ever tried. If they were going to sell them below cost, limit access, and screw over owners (in the owners minds, GM made it clear they weren't evern going to sell a single one and let anyone keep it), they should have just left it a prototype. A road running prototype should have been used only for what Honda and Toyota did. Get something that would make money at 100,000 units a year on the road, even if it's only at 20,000 units a year for a loss.
Of course GM never tried selling it. They determined before that point that it was not worth selling.
You don't think that the only way big companies decide whether a product is worth selling is to release it and see whether anyone buys it, do you? That's not how the world works. The whole EV1 project revealed to GM that this car was not going anywhere. They never tried selling it because it would have cost them an enormous amount of money to try, money which they were basically guaranteed to lose.
The "long" waiting lists were meaningless. First, they were not very long. It's hard to find good information on this, but the best information I was able to find was that roughly one thousand people were on the waiting list. This sounds like a lot compared to the roughly one thousand EV1s that were actually produced, but it's a miniscule drop in the bucket compared to what demand needs to exist for a car company to make money on something. And keep in mind that this "long" waiting list of one thousand people was at a price which was enormously subsidized by GM. Jack the price up to a more realistic level and watch those people evaporate. You quote "only" 20,000 units a year. The EV1 did 5% of that figure over its entire lifetime. Average production was something like 2% of that level per year.
GM should have released it widely for sale, or not released it. To step one toe into the market gives not only a failed vehicle that people know them by, but also incredibly poor business practices that screwed over actual customers and potential customers (ones that walked into dealerships with money, and were turned away). GM screwed up in multiple different ways.
So how do you propose that they gain real-world experience with electric vehicles? Should they just magically know everything ahead of time?
Running a pilot project like the EV1 is a perfectly reasonable way to go. It's not GM's fault that the people who leased the things with full foreknowledge that it was a research project, they would not be allowed to hold on to them permanently, and that there was no option to buy, decided to forget about all of that and complain loudly despite being told all of this in advance.
Let's line up the facts here. GM put down one billion dollars of its own money to research electric vehicles. They subsidized roughly 50% of the cost to every single lessee. The leases explicitly stated that there was no option to buy. At the end of the program, GM's experience indicated that demand and technology simply couldn't be made to meet at the time, and so they elected to discontinue the program. Due to the liability concerns from losing control over a thousand experimental vehicles, they enforced the no-purchase clause of the leases and destroyed the cars. The people who had them at 50% under cost really liked them and got upset that GM was doing exactly what they said they would do when they leased the things.
At what point in all of this is GM at fault in any vaguely reasonable fashion? Sounds to me like GM's customers were just a bunch of whiners who either couldn't be bothered to understand that they were participating in a res
All this means is that your trajectory change ought to be done with serious overkill so as to definitively push it outside of the entire error basket. If caught years in advance this will still men an absolutely miniscule impulse.
Re:No its worse than that
on
Evolving Rocks
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· Score: 3, Insightful
But "evolved" does mean changed. It is the biologists who have specialized the word far more tightly than its original meaning, not the other way around. Just because biological evolution by means of heredity and natural selection is on our minds doesn't mean that is the exclusive meaning of the word.
A production-ready car that was up to production safety standards probably would have cost at least another billion dollars to design and certify, so jack that price up even more.
And that would be news to me. I thought they were road worthy (as in being NHTSA crash tested).
I think I may have misread this initially. I see now that they were fully crash tested. However they did have many other faults and therefore were not production ready, although they were up to safety standards.
But are all of them so stupid that they won't build electric cars even though everybody wants to buy them?
I think that the US auto makers have done the embrase-and-puke method of preventing competition. I know people that hate foreign cars because they read Unsafe at Any Speed and link the Corsair to foreign products. Aircooled rear engine is unsafe at any speed. I happen to own one of the last aircooled mass-production vehicle sold in the US (which also happened to be rear engined), and it is unsafe at any speed, but mainly because I'm the one behind the wheel. American turbos in the '70s and before were so horrible that no one wanted turbos when the Japanese brought over some decent ones in the '80s. The EV1 was done poorly enough that it actually made people more grumpy about electric vehicles. "If GM can't make it work and destroys everyone they sell, what hope does some podunk maker like Toyota have?" It continually amazes me, but most people I know that only buy American cars use a failed American car project as one of the reasons that the foreign car makers are bad. Not that I think the makers really could pull off that purposefully, but it is a nice side effect they enjoyed.
And we all know that the US is the only country in the world that actually matters....
Come on, now. Apply a little brain. Even if GM some how managed to destroy the entire American market for electric cars via its ineptitude, why didn't some Japanese or European manufacturer build one for their home market? The fact that no electric car has been sold in the US might be attributable to the things you say. The fact that no electric car has been sold in Japan or Europe... not so much.
I have no idea why you're comparing the EV1 to the Insight and Prius.
For someone that has such insight, sometimes you really miss the ball. Name three cars sold for an (unconfirmed) loss that was expected when the project was started. I'll give you a hint. EV1, Prius I and Insight. Can you now see a similarity?
And yet the Prius has made a crapload of money for Toyota in the long run. GM expected the same of the EV1 but it turned out not to work. More to the point, the vastly different characteristics of a hybrid mean that its success means nothing about the EV1's potential success.
Sure, hybrids started out as research vehicles and then became successful production vehicles. The EV1 was severely limited and people would not have purchased them in quantity. The first fact does not contradict the second.
The EV1 was a fully electric car, which is an utterly different kind of machine altogether, one which simply was not (and is just barely getting there now) ready for prime time.
The hybrids weren't ready for prime time, but Honda and Toyota did it anyway. And you know what? They didn't screw it up like GM. That's my point. GM screwed up, and looking at another set of money-losing cars show how it could have been done, if GM didn't have its head up its ass.
This just makes no sense. Hybrids were very much ready for prime time. A car which goes just as far as a regular car, which fills up at regular stations, and which requires zero special equipment at home? People were willing to buy hybrids because they offered nicely improved fuel economy at a small premium in price without sacrificing range. People were not willing to buy EV1s bec
Given that EV1 production ceased nearly a decade ago and no major car manufacturer has seen fit to take up the cause, I'm going to have to say that electric cars probably weren't going to be profitable at the time, considering that none of them seem to think that they could be profitable now. Perhaps they're all a bunch of morons, but I doubt it. I can believe one of them being stupid, or several of them, but all of them? No way.
It's telling that the real successes for alternative cars in the past decade have been hybrids, not electrics. Hybrids are much less radical and eliminate essentially all of the massive downsides of pure electrics. Even the Chevy Volt, being marketed as an "electric car", is really just a standard serial hybrid with the ability to charge its batteries from external power and some mind-bending PR applied.
Get our screwed-up tort system fixed and perhaps this stuff could have happened. As it stands now, having a few hundred experimental vehicles on the road is a tremendous liability risk. GM was willing to take that risk when it was part of a program designed to lead to a production-worthy car, but once that program ended the risk became unacceptable.
Except that GM's experiment with them showed that they could not be sold at anything remotely approaching a profit. Nothing to do with aftermarket parts, and pushing on with such an obvious boondoggle would not do anything for the public good. But believe what you like....
You talk about GM refusing to sell, service, or support EV1s outside of the tiny corner where they were running their project. Yet you completely ignore why they did this. I can only surmise that you are either being disingenuous or, more likely, you simply don't know.
So allow me to inform you. The batteries in the EV1 were extremely sensitive to cold, which ruled out most of the US due to the phenomenon we call "winter". There were also concerns about how they would respond to humidity, which ruled out all of the remaining places which get humid. Take a map of the US, eliminate all of the places which ever get cold or humid, and what remains is essentially GM's approved EV1 area.
This alone should tell you that the EV1 was not ready for full-scale sales and production. But it goes a lot farther than this. The EV1's design wasn't up to the rigorous safety requirements that any production car must meet. As a research project this made a great deal of sense. As a production car, obviously this simply could not work.
GM spent a billion dollars on the EV1, and leased them for half of what they would have charged if they had been trying to make money at it. A production-ready car that was up to production safety standards probably would have cost at least another billion dollars to design and certify, so jack that price up even more.
Of course GM never intended to sell any EV1s. That's pretty well implied by "research project". It was intended to give them experience for building an eventual production model electric car. The experience it gave them was, alas, that a production model would be impractically expensive. The truth of this should be obvious given that no car maker has ever built such a thing in the decade since the EV1 project was cancelled. Perhaps GM is colossally stupid. Given how much money they've been losing that proposition is pretty reasonable. But are all of them so stupid that they won't build electric cars even though everybody wants to buy them? No, they are not. Nobody is building electric cars because technology and demand simply haven't met yet.
I have no idea why you're comparing the EV1 to the Insight and Prius. The Insight and Prius are hybrid cars. That is, they have a gasoline engine and a small set of batteries to augment it, as an efficiency measure. The EV1 was a fully electric car, which is an utterly different kind of machine altogether, one which simply was not (and is just barely getting there now) ready for prime time.
They had to pry those EVs out of the hands of their owners because they were leasing them at a tremendous loss. The EV-1 program was done for research and to gain experience. The company subsidized every single lessee to the tune of something like 50%. When it became clear that the EV1 would never develop enough demand to be profitable, GM wasn't willing to continue massively subsidizing these people and supporting a miniscule fleet of cars simply out of the goodness of their hearts.
If the speed increase due to optimization is the same as the speed increase due to a hardware upgrade, then the benefits are the same....
I don't know why everyone thinks that a hardware upgrade's benefits will be wiped out nearly immediately but carefully optimizing the software will last forever. It just makes no sense!
I can only conclude that Slashdot is home to a cult of optimization worshippers.
Well, the guy who brought up database optimization said that "we", which implies at least two people, spent "weeks" optimizing a database which was too slow on spinning media. Multiple people with the appropriate expertise spending that much time is going to cost many tens of thousands of dollars.
Perhaps they had "far bigger problems". Didn't sound like it though.
My favorite example is Gigabit Ethernet, which tops out at 400Mbps for uni-directional communication even before you take into account Ethernet framing overhead, much less overhead for whatever network protocol you're using. What a scam!
Slashdot Mirror
You're simply making the same point I am.
Yes, there are differences between those actions.
There's also a difference between harassing a girl and having her ignore you, and harassing a girl and causing her to commit suicide.
Apologies if things were unclear. The context of this discussion is "getting away with murder". The original poster way up there apparently thinks that the punishment she's receiving doesn't fit the crime. I would tend to agree. In that context, what's happening is that she's getting off very light and people are calling for much worse. When I talk about punishment, I mean the much worse, such as putting her in prison for decades, for life, or executing her.
The rule of law is far more important than individual justice. If letting a wrongdoer go free is necessary to preserve the rule of law, then yes, it should be done. It's not a nice situation to be in, but that is the best way out. The alternative is essentially mob rule, figuring out a way to punish anyone who's unpopular enough to get people to call for blood. That way lies madness.
But the act committed depends on the outcome!
If I shoot somebody in the leg and they survive, that is attempted murder.
If I shoot somebody in the leg in exactly the same way in every respect and that person dies because he's a hemophiliac or he has cancer or he's on special medication or any number of other reason, that's actual murder and I might get the chair.
Or take the famous case of Houdini. If I punch Houdini in the stomach because he says he can take any punch, and he wasn't ready and this kills him, that's murder. On the other hand, if he saw me coming and tensed up first, it's not. Same action, different outcome, different crime.
Point being, the law cares about both actions and outcomes, not actions alone.
How about this: you drive 25MPH over the limit and hit a pedestrian, who had plenty of time to get out of the way but didn't because he froze due to fear.
You go to jail for a long time.
Better?
This situation looks to be almost the precise opposite of what was done by the woman in question. Reckless disregard is when you do something with no intention of causing harm, but the action was so risky and irresponsible that you end up killing someone by accident. Ms. Drew had every intention of causing harm (although probably not death) through actions that, on their own, were relatively innocuous.
There wasn't anything about the GM program that indicated it could be done, and a lot that wasn't. I'll concede that this is not absolute proof, but it's still a good argument. All the available evidence suggests that GM made the right choice with the EV1 in every respect except PR. Had they pushed ahead with mass production, evidence is that it most likely would have flopped, hard, and cost the company considerably more than the one billion dollars they lost on the program in reality.
That's an interesting interpretation of the law or morality but I don't think you'll find that it matches the real world even a little bit.
Forget to feed your baby and he cries a lot and shrugs it off: no consequences.
Forget to feed your baby and he dies: you go to prison for a very long time.
Go 25MPH over the speed limit and get caught by a cop: expensive speeding ticket.
Go 25MPH over the speed limit and kill a van full of girl scouts: you go to prison for a very long time.
Plan to kill somebody and screw it up: go to prison for a little while.
Plan to kill somebody and succeed: get the chair.
Need I go on? Outcomes matter.
I brought up anarchy because it's what punishing this person implies.
It may or may not be reasonable to cover the law such that this offense can be punishable the next time it happens. That's really a separate debate, but I'm not arguing against it here.
What's unreasonable is deciding that this person must be punished even though her action was not against the law. By all means, advocate that the law should be changed. But if you believe in the rule of law at all, this person should be set free!
As for the definition of "murder", you can quibble over the English definition but clearly what she did is not covered by the legal definition, otherwise the prosecutors would have charged her with it.
Sorry, but it's not "murder". It was a terrible thing that she did and she should be punished for it, but it was not actually murder.
In any case, we live under the rule of law. And one consequence of that is that sometimes people do terrible things that are not covered by the law. In that case, these people should go free. It's terrible, but it's vastly superior to the anarchy that results when there is no rule of law.
I never said GM tried to sell them. I said that it showed they could not be sold at a profit. You do not need to actually sell a product to do this.
As for the rest, if the electric vehicle concept was ready to make money for anyone who decided to make one in 1998, why didn't any other car companies do it? Perhaps GM was stupid, but every single major automobile manufacturer on the planet? No way.
Sure, hybrids started out as research vehicles and then became successful production vehicles. The EV1 was severely limited and people would not have purchased them in quantity. The first fact does not contradict the second.
People tried to buy the EV1 and were turned away. I don't know the quantities that they would have been sold at, but GM never ever tried. If they were going to sell them below cost, limit access, and screw over owners (in the owners minds, GM made it clear they weren't evern going to sell a single one and let anyone keep it), they should have just left it a prototype. A road running prototype should have been used only for what Honda and Toyota did. Get something that would make money at 100,000 units a year on the road, even if it's only at 20,000 units a year for a loss.
Of course GM never tried selling it. They determined before that point that it was not worth selling.
You don't think that the only way big companies decide whether a product is worth selling is to release it and see whether anyone buys it, do you? That's not how the world works. The whole EV1 project revealed to GM that this car was not going anywhere. They never tried selling it because it would have cost them an enormous amount of money to try, money which they were basically guaranteed to lose.
The "long" waiting lists were meaningless. First, they were not very long. It's hard to find good information on this, but the best information I was able to find was that roughly one thousand people were on the waiting list. This sounds like a lot compared to the roughly one thousand EV1s that were actually produced, but it's a miniscule drop in the bucket compared to what demand needs to exist for a car company to make money on something. And keep in mind that this "long" waiting list of one thousand people was at a price which was enormously subsidized by GM. Jack the price up to a more realistic level and watch those people evaporate. You quote "only" 20,000 units a year. The EV1 did 5% of that figure over its entire lifetime. Average production was something like 2% of that level per year.
GM should have released it widely for sale, or not released it. To step one toe into the market gives not only a failed vehicle that people know them by, but also incredibly poor business practices that screwed over actual customers and potential customers (ones that walked into dealerships with money, and were turned away). GM screwed up in multiple different ways.
So how do you propose that they gain real-world experience with electric vehicles? Should they just magically know everything ahead of time?
Running a pilot project like the EV1 is a perfectly reasonable way to go. It's not GM's fault that the people who leased the things with full foreknowledge that it was a research project, they would not be allowed to hold on to them permanently, and that there was no option to buy, decided to forget about all of that and complain loudly despite being told all of this in advance.
Let's line up the facts here. GM put down one billion dollars of its own money to research electric vehicles. They subsidized roughly 50% of the cost to every single lessee. The leases explicitly stated that there was no option to buy. At the end of the program, GM's experience indicated that demand and technology simply couldn't be made to meet at the time, and so they elected to discontinue the program. Due to the liability concerns from losing control over a thousand experimental vehicles, they enforced the no-purchase clause of the leases and destroyed the cars. The people who had them at 50% under cost really liked them and got upset that GM was doing exactly what they said they would do when they leased the things.
At what point in all of this is GM at fault in any vaguely reasonable fashion? Sounds to me like GM's customers were just a bunch of whiners who either couldn't be bothered to understand that they were participating in a res
All this means is that your trajectory change ought to be done with serious overkill so as to definitively push it outside of the entire error basket. If caught years in advance this will still men an absolutely miniscule impulse.
But "evolved" does mean changed. It is the biologists who have specialized the word far more tightly than its original meaning, not the other way around. Just because biological evolution by means of heredity and natural selection is on our minds doesn't mean that is the exclusive meaning of the word.
A production-ready car that was up to production safety standards probably would have cost at least another billion dollars to design and certify, so jack that price up even more.
And that would be news to me. I thought they were road worthy (as in being NHTSA crash tested).
I think I may have misread this initially. I see now that they were fully crash tested. However they did have many other faults and therefore were not production ready, although they were up to safety standards.
But are all of them so stupid that they won't build electric cars even though everybody wants to buy them?
I think that the US auto makers have done the embrase-and-puke method of preventing competition. I know people that hate foreign cars because they read Unsafe at Any Speed and link the Corsair to foreign products. Aircooled rear engine is unsafe at any speed. I happen to own one of the last aircooled mass-production vehicle sold in the US (which also happened to be rear engined), and it is unsafe at any speed, but mainly because I'm the one behind the wheel. American turbos in the '70s and before were so horrible that no one wanted turbos when the Japanese brought over some decent ones in the '80s. The EV1 was done poorly enough that it actually made people more grumpy about electric vehicles. "If GM can't make it work and destroys everyone they sell, what hope does some podunk maker like Toyota have?" It continually amazes me, but most people I know that only buy American cars use a failed American car project as one of the reasons that the foreign car makers are bad. Not that I think the makers really could pull off that purposefully, but it is a nice side effect they enjoyed.
And we all know that the US is the only country in the world that actually matters....
Come on, now. Apply a little brain. Even if GM some how managed to destroy the entire American market for electric cars via its ineptitude, why didn't some Japanese or European manufacturer build one for their home market? The fact that no electric car has been sold in the US might be attributable to the things you say. The fact that no electric car has been sold in Japan or Europe... not so much.
I have no idea why you're comparing the EV1 to the Insight and Prius.
For someone that has such insight, sometimes you really miss the ball. Name three cars sold for an (unconfirmed) loss that was expected when the project was started. I'll give you a hint. EV1, Prius I and Insight. Can you now see a similarity?
And yet the Prius has made a crapload of money for Toyota in the long run. GM expected the same of the EV1 but it turned out not to work. More to the point, the vastly different characteristics of a hybrid mean that its success means nothing about the EV1's potential success.
Sure, hybrids started out as research vehicles and then became successful production vehicles. The EV1 was severely limited and people would not have purchased them in quantity. The first fact does not contradict the second.
The EV1 was a fully electric car, which is an utterly different kind of machine altogether, one which simply was not (and is just barely getting there now) ready for prime time.
The hybrids weren't ready for prime time, but Honda and Toyota did it anyway. And you know what? They didn't screw it up like GM. That's my point. GM screwed up, and looking at another set of money-losing cars show how it could have been done, if GM didn't have its head up its ass.
This just makes no sense. Hybrids were very much ready for prime time. A car which goes just as far as a regular car, which fills up at regular stations, and which requires zero special equipment at home? People were willing to buy hybrids because they offered nicely improved fuel economy at a small premium in price without sacrificing range. People were not willing to buy EV1s bec
Given that EV1 production ceased nearly a decade ago and no major car manufacturer has seen fit to take up the cause, I'm going to have to say that electric cars probably weren't going to be profitable at the time, considering that none of them seem to think that they could be profitable now. Perhaps they're all a bunch of morons, but I doubt it. I can believe one of them being stupid, or several of them, but all of them? No way.
It's telling that the real successes for alternative cars in the past decade have been hybrids, not electrics. Hybrids are much less radical and eliminate essentially all of the massive downsides of pure electrics. Even the Chevy Volt, being marketed as an "electric car", is really just a standard serial hybrid with the ability to charge its batteries from external power and some mind-bending PR applied.
Get our screwed-up tort system fixed and perhaps this stuff could have happened. As it stands now, having a few hundred experimental vehicles on the road is a tremendous liability risk. GM was willing to take that risk when it was part of a program designed to lead to a production-worthy car, but once that program ended the risk became unacceptable.
Except that GM's experiment with them showed that they could not be sold at anything remotely approaching a profit. Nothing to do with aftermarket parts, and pushing on with such an obvious boondoggle would not do anything for the public good. But believe what you like....
They avoided millions in liability risk from having experimental products rolling on the roads outside of their control.
Let's add some more facts to this discussion.
You talk about GM refusing to sell, service, or support EV1s outside of the tiny corner where they were running their project. Yet you completely ignore why they did this. I can only surmise that you are either being disingenuous or, more likely, you simply don't know.
So allow me to inform you. The batteries in the EV1 were extremely sensitive to cold, which ruled out most of the US due to the phenomenon we call "winter". There were also concerns about how they would respond to humidity, which ruled out all of the remaining places which get humid. Take a map of the US, eliminate all of the places which ever get cold or humid, and what remains is essentially GM's approved EV1 area.
This alone should tell you that the EV1 was not ready for full-scale sales and production. But it goes a lot farther than this. The EV1's design wasn't up to the rigorous safety requirements that any production car must meet. As a research project this made a great deal of sense. As a production car, obviously this simply could not work.
GM spent a billion dollars on the EV1, and leased them for half of what they would have charged if they had been trying to make money at it. A production-ready car that was up to production safety standards probably would have cost at least another billion dollars to design and certify, so jack that price up even more.
Of course GM never intended to sell any EV1s. That's pretty well implied by "research project". It was intended to give them experience for building an eventual production model electric car. The experience it gave them was, alas, that a production model would be impractically expensive. The truth of this should be obvious given that no car maker has ever built such a thing in the decade since the EV1 project was cancelled. Perhaps GM is colossally stupid. Given how much money they've been losing that proposition is pretty reasonable. But are all of them so stupid that they won't build electric cars even though everybody wants to buy them? No, they are not. Nobody is building electric cars because technology and demand simply haven't met yet.
I have no idea why you're comparing the EV1 to the Insight and Prius. The Insight and Prius are hybrid cars. That is, they have a gasoline engine and a small set of batteries to augment it, as an efficiency measure. The EV1 was a fully electric car, which is an utterly different kind of machine altogether, one which simply was not (and is just barely getting there now) ready for prime time.
Unlike certain people, I don't get all my information from Michael Moore and his wannabes. Just doing my part for Team Reality.
They had to pry those EVs out of the hands of their owners because they were leasing them at a tremendous loss. The EV-1 program was done for research and to gain experience. The company subsidized every single lessee to the tune of something like 50%. When it became clear that the EV1 would never develop enough demand to be profitable, GM wasn't willing to continue massively subsidizing these people and supporting a miniscule fleet of cars simply out of the goodness of their hearts.
If the speed increase due to optimization is the same as the speed increase due to a hardware upgrade, then the benefits are the same....
I don't know why everyone thinks that a hardware upgrade's benefits will be wiped out nearly immediately but carefully optimizing the software will last forever. It just makes no sense!
I can only conclude that Slashdot is home to a cult of optimization worshippers.
Well, the guy who brought up database optimization said that "we", which implies at least two people, spent "weeks" optimizing a database which was too slow on spinning media. Multiple people with the appropriate expertise spending that much time is going to cost many tens of thousands of dollars.
Perhaps they had "far bigger problems". Didn't sound like it though.
My favorite example is Gigabit Ethernet, which tops out at 400Mbps for uni-directional communication even before you take into account Ethernet framing overhead, much less overhead for whatever network protocol you're using. What a scam!