Indeed. Culture is most likely much more of a factor.
Most people credit there being far more differences between the sexes than there actually are. Here's what I wrote on XKCD the last time the topic came up:
Let's keep it simple.
In almost any sentence where people say "Women (verb)..." or "Men (verb)..." and it's about something psychological (as opposed to, say, something involving reproductive organs or a statistical difference in strength / height or the like), 99% of the time it's equally accurate to simply say "People (verb)..." The popular perception of differences between genders (including the effects of both brain structure and hormones) is often vastly different from the statistical reality. Screw Mars and Venus; men and women are from Earth. Psychologically, we're statistically virtually identical in most measures. And in many cases where there are differences that even manage to meet statistical significance, what differences there are may well be artifacts of culture.
Remember that your partner is an individual who has thoughts and feelings just like yours. They are not their gender. Remember that gay couples have the exact same sort of relationship problems as straight ones.
And if you still have trouble viewing the other gender as being of the same stock as you... men, look at your scrotum. See the line down the middle? That's where your labia fused before you were born. Women, look at your clitoris. That would have been your penis.
(The above graph, for people who don't want to follow a link: the left side shows two bell curves with little overlap, while the right shows two that are practically identical. "Figure 0.1. Distribution of performance for two traits that differ with d values of 2.6 and 0.35, respectively. Females are represented by the dashed curve, males by the solid curve. Mean score for each sex is shown by the vertical line at the middle of the curve. The graph on the left shows the sex difference in adult height, which is considered very large and for which there is little overlap between men and women. The graph on the right shows the distribution for a sex difference with a d score of 0.35, which is actually on the large side for many psychological differences. Note that the curves overlap extensively. Of the many psychological differences that have been repeatedly measured, 77 percent are smaller than the difference between the curves on the right.")
I don't know about for motorcycles, but it's at least not only legal for bicycles, but recommended. Regardless that was just an example. Paint the bike bright neon orange, fly a bright-colored flag from the bike, cover it in fur and googlie-eyes, whatever. The goal should be to increase the *visibility*, because that's what drivers use to make decisions when driving. About the only sound drivers don't tune out is that of a police / ambulence siren.
Haha, well, actually, yes, we do have the undesirable record of having the deadliest volcano in modern history, the 1783 eruption of Laki that killed (by one measure) up to 6 million people worldwide, and kicked off so much poison gas that tens of thousands were directly poisoned to death in the UK.;) Ironically, most deaths in Iceland were not from direct poisoning, ash asphyxiation, lava, pyroclastic flows, or anything of the nature - they were from famine from skeletal fluorosis of the livestock (Laki was abnormally proliferous in terms of hydrogen fluoride emissions, and it contaminated the water - affecting people, too).
But most of our volcanic eruptions these days are the nice cuddly kind;) An excuse to stand for a picture with an erupting volcano in the background and look all tÃff for your Facebook profile page;) And to get a good laugh when foreign newscasters struggle to pronounce Icelandic placenames.
Here's my issue with the whole loud pipes thing. Take out a dB meter, pick an arbitrary cutoff, find a nice spot out in the open, and start your motorcycle. Now walk in front of it until you hit your target dB level, then walk around it maintaining the dB level and mapping out the distance you are from the motorcycle.
You'll find that loud pipes give you a quadrant behind the bike that's extremely noisy, noisy for a far longer distance than in other directions. But is that really the direction you want to be throwing off noise? Is that really the most likely direction for an accident to a motorcycle to come from? I really doubt it.
And let's be honest, are audio cues really the best cues? When people are driving along, they're not "listening for other vehicles", they're *looking* for them. If you really want to increase people's awareness of your bike, put little flashing lights or the like on them. But that'd "look gay" or something, right? It feels better to pick a "manly" way that makes you feel better about safety than something would have a lot more effect at getting drivers' attention, doesn't it? I'm not saying that sound doesn't play a role, but it mainly plays a role at the pedestrian level; pedestrians rely on sound cues far more than drivers.
My last problem is, picture what things would be like if everyone started driving their cars around with their hand on the horn at all times because "Constant honking saves lives!" Do you really have the right to create noise pollution so that you can get a greater feeling of safety for a means of travel that you yourself elected to take part in, knowing the risks? Does everyone else have to endure your pollution of the commons for your enjoyment? Do I have the right to jet-ski in a drinking water reservoir or offroad a caterpillar in a national park? The commons is just that - common. Everybody owns it and has a stake in it. Meaning you don't get unlimited access to dump into it without the consent of others, regardless of your intentions.
Yeah, not everything is practical to develop resistance to. I mean, you're not going to have bacteria developing resistance to, say, a flame thrower;) Even yeast, who make the stuff, get killed by alcohol when it's in too strong of a concentration. Don't get me wrong, there are alcohol-resistant bacteria. But we're not talking about a surface protein difference here or anything, we're talking "entirely spored off to stop the alcohol from dissolving the cell membrane". To resist alcohol the cell has to be so encased that it can't do anything else but wait for the alcohol to go away. And it has to be so encased at the time of exposure, not afterwards.
Alcohol-resistant species, most notably Clostridium, can be a problem for people who are sterilizing equipment. But these aren't species that developed alcohol resistance in response to doctors, these are naturally spore-forming species. Alcohol is such a brute force attack, a simple tweak to a cell just doesn't cut it. And alcohol has been a threat to microbes for a long, long time. And even if some species did develop an alcohol resistance and began to pose a threat, that would only have significance to people sterilizing equipment / surfaces. It wouldn't make a difference in terms of how to treat an infection once its in the body; it's not like you're not going to replace your blood with 90% isopropyl alcohol.;)
But maybe 0.1% acquired a mutation which disabled your fail-safe genes. Now what? Congratulations -- the cancer has now evolved to be resistant to your light-induced apoptosis commands. And you're back to square one.
Cancerous cells still have lysosomes and there's always going to be some way to open them. Cancer cells often have defective lysosome membranes that don't activate under normal circumstances, but they're still there, and still full of enzymes to break down the cell. So long as they're there, there's going to be a way to open them up. Or, forget the lysosomes and just pump out enzymes directly into the cytoplasm. It's not actually that hard to kill a cell. The hard part is always killing only the right cells. The key thing with this is, it's basically implanting data-collecting sensors into each cell, so you know for sure exactly which cells are running awry.
Buthey, let's just assume your scenario is right. Let's say you "only" can wipe out 99.9% of cancerous cells with no side effects. Why wouldn't that alone be regarded as an utterly miraculous treatment in its own right? You're not "back to square one", you've just done 99.9% of the job of killing the cancer, pretty much any other anti-cancer method will finish the job for you.
Why wouldn't it be? Light-sensitive proteins are quite well understood.
All of this leads to a really fascinating possibility down the road...
Part 1: Requirements:
1) Genes are inserted into the nucleus of every neuron. 2) Probes which can receive on one or more optical frequencies** and send directionally on other frequencies (which we'll call A, B, and C) are inserted all throughout the target brain. 3) The genes from #1 flash upon synapse**, allowing the probes in #2 to receive the signals 4) The genes from #1 force a synapse when they receive frequency A from a probe. 5) The genes from #1 suppress synapse when they receive frequency B from a probe. 6) The genes from #1 force the cell to commit apoptosis when they receive frequency C from a probe.
Part 2: For each neuron in the brain (conducted in parallel):
1) The neuron's behavior is studied relative to its neighbors in order to learn precisely what factors control its activation levels. This requires a very accurate neural model, and probably requires a lot more more than a simple one-frequency "I'm firing" signal in #2 and #3 of part 1. 2) The neuron is simulated in a computer based on said inputs 3) The neuron is ordered repressed when the simulator doesn't want it fired, and ordered fired when the simulator wants it fired. 4) The system works its way through all of its neighbors that it influences, doing steps #1-3 of this part upon them and putting them under control of the simulation as well. 5) Once a neuron is entirely isolated and can be handled entirely within the simulation, the signal is sent for apoptosis. 6) This pattern continues until the entire brain exists only in the simulation.
And thus you take any living entity and entirely digitize their consciousness, without any single moment defining their transition from the physical world to the digital one, and without "copying" them.
This is a key first step in something I've been thinking about for a long time, and I'm thrilled to see it. I doubt I'll live to see all the steps, or that anyone alive today will. But I'm thrilled to see the first steps taken down this road.
More near-term, one can envision all sorts of incredible properties with an optical communication link set up with cells. For example, imagine that you instrument cells in a cancerous organ with genes that can be instructed individually to force the cell into apoptosis, and which flash on various frequencies corresponding to various cellular activities. You look for cellular activities which correspond to cancerous behavior, and when you see them, you tell that cell to kill itself. You really have something way better than all of that unrealistic "nanomachine medicine" stuff that sci-fi writers have been obsessing over for ages.
Have you actually started learning Dutch and putting forth the same amount of effort to getting a job in the netherlands that you'd put towards finding a job in the US (aka, months of searching and learning the right jobfinding approaches)?
People act like it's so impossible to leave America. But seriously, if you don't like America, you truly, honestly, don't have to stay there.
I didn't like America. I traveled. I found a place I actually liked a lot (Iceland). I applied for jobs. I got one surprisingly quick. I moved. And now I've lived here for years.
There's nothing preventing you from doing the same. If you don't like America, you really can leave!
Oh, and while we're talking about the internet... here's what my highly isolated, incredibly rugged/unstable terrain, tied-for-second-lowest population density, super-high prices for electronic equipment country's internet stats are:
Data compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows Iceland with:[1]
83.2% of households having broadband Internet access in 2009 (2nd out of 34) 99.5% of businesses using the Internet in 2009-2010 (2nd out of 31) 91.5% of the broadband access being DSL in 2010
8% of broadband connections using optical fiber in 2010
The Global Information Technology Report 2010–2011[2] by the World Economic Forum ranked Iceland:
1st out of 138 in terms of Internet users (93.5% of the population used the Internet in 2009) 1st out of 138 in the use of virtual social networks (a score of 6.8 in 2009-2010, where 1 is not at all and 7 is widely) 1st out of 138 in terms of Internet access in schools (a score of 6.76 in 2009-2010, where 1 is very limited and 7 is extensive) 1st out of 138 in accessibility of digital content (a score of 6.62 in 2009-2010, where 1 is not accessible at all and 7 is widely accessible) 1st out of 137 in the number of secure Internet servers (1,711.3 servers per million population in 2009) 4th out of 138 in the extent of business Internet use (a score of 6.58 in 2009-2010, where 1 is not at all and 7 is extensively) 5th out of 138 in terms of international Internet bandwidth (626.8 Mbit/s per 10,000 population in 2009)
Fiber's really been taking off since the OECD study was done, it now even goes out to places like Vestfirðir, where in the whole region the largest town is under 4k people, and some towns are so isolated that they're legally classified as islands during the winter because the roads become impassable until late spring. But the fiber stays on.:) We're currently at about 65% home fiber penetration, and the telecoms are talking about hitting 80% by the end of the year.
In general, we've got superb computer and net connectivity and literacy - even on the little stuff (for example, over here, IE is the number *three* web browser, and it's not even close). Reykjavík uses a direct democracy system for bringing public issues directly to the floor at city council meetings, the new constitutional drafting team was credited with online crowdsourcing the constitution (that's overstating the case, but they did make extensive use of online suggestions and discussions), etc. My only real criticism of the net environment here is that while domestic net traffic is generally uncapped, international usually is, you choose an international data package. So this leads to, for example, instead of using Pirate Bay, people use Iceland-only torrent sites like Deildu for file sharing. And one of the local companies, Síminn, is looking at the possibility of domestic caps too, which would suck. Crazy-fast connectivity is great, but not so great if you can't use it to download whatever you want.
Yes, but Musk isn't going to pony up to put up a terrawatt or two worth of fast chargers at several thousand locations across the US. It's just too large of a task to expect Tesla, or even a Tesla/Nissan/BMW alliance, to do it. You need private interest. Musk may be able to handle densely populated areas of high Tesla sales, but it's never going to get full national coverage - and thus eliminate the complaint of "I can't get there in an EV" - without economic viability.
I know that such complaints usually don't stand up to scrutiny. But it doesn't matter, because they're a gut-feeling complaint from people who are used to gasoline cars and afraid of change. As a consequence, they don't replace their daily commuter that they almost never drive long distances with with an EV, they just buy another gasoline car. The "road trip" problem *has* to be dealt with somehow in order to truly mainstream EVs.
I'm not sure why you say they will never be economical, when I show above that they actually can be economical if there's enough EV traffic in an area. On really busy roads it only takes a fraction of a percent of the traffic being EVs to justify them. It's only on the sparsely travelled areas where it becomes a big challenge.
In terms of size/weight, if we assume the massive, 500kg+ battery pack of the Tesla Model S performance as the upper limit, and if we say that's a real-world range of 250mi, and we need to reach 1000mi to get that "full day's driving, 80A charge to full overnight" EV ideal, then we need two energy density doublings to reach that. That's 16 years, which actually isn't that far out. After about 25 years you get the pack down to a more reasonable, mainstream 250kg. So no problem there.
The real issue however is price. We want to, as it stands, drop the price on existing EV packs to mainstream them. But here we are talking about increasing the capacity (batteries are generally priced per watt hour) fourfold. How much do we need to drop battery prices to truly mainstream EVs - 3fold perhaps? So we need a 12x price performance increase. And despite following the industry pretty close, I have no clue when we're going to get there. Battery pricing per watt hour changes are so irregular. Sometimes the price even goes up. It depends greatly on which of the currently in-development techs take off for the next generation of batteries as to what sort of prices will even be achievable. For example, if we continue to use some form of cobalt-based cathode, the price of cobalt salts is going to continue to limit the potential for price reduction (contrary to popular belief, lithium is not the most expensive element of a conventional lithium-ion battery... nor is it particularly rare, nor is that much used in a li-ion battery). But some battery techs even in use today in EVs don't use cobalt, using things like manganese or various phosphates. And the next tech might not even be li-ion based. Lithium sulfur, sodium ion, lithium air, sodium air, and dozens of others are all vying for that top spot. So I have no bloody clue what future prices are going to be like. We can only hope that something that's both energy dense *and* made of cheap materials comes out on top. Because then it's just manufacturing costs that are the limiter, and those can be reduced steadily with time and scale.
There's one bright light in this tunnel that I think is worth attention - that cycle life becomes less important with increased capacity. The smaller your pack, the more you stress your batteries. Hybrids are harder on their batteries than PHEVs which are harder on their batteries than EVs, and so forth. If you have a 60 mile range and you drive 30 miles a day, your daily discharge is a 50% depth of discharge and you do a full discharge's equivalent every 2 days. If you have a 1200 mile range and you drive 30 miles a day, your daily discharge is a 2.5% depth of discharge and you do a full discharge's equivalent every 40 days. The combination of a shallow discharge (easier on batteries) and few discharges means y
In what world are you envisioning that residential users are going to be installing $100k fast chargers the size of a couple soda machines in their homes? In what use case is that remotely necessary?
If it's commercial then being able to charge multiple vehicles in one day is an issue
In what manner? Do you think the charger is powered by a hamster on a wheel? The as has been stated half a dozen times, the purpose of a battery bank is to average out the grid draw instead of having it suddenly spike hundreds of kilowatts at random intervals.
and then space is an issue all over again.
You're joking, right? These chargers are huge to begin with, which has been repeatedly pointed out to you. 200kW of lead-acid batteries, one of the lowest density techs possible, and 2 1/2 times the capacity of the highest range EV on the market, would still be smaller than the charger itself. And the more chargers you want on a single location (aka, gas station equivalent), the *less* space batteries use, proportionally to the chargers, since you use a common bank. And is orders of magnitude smaller than the size of the gas and diesel tanks that gas stations have to install.
Fast chargers = gas stations. Get that in your head and I don't think you'll have trouble understanding this any more.
The only way in which the charger batteries don't need to be like those of the car is that they can be heavier
That and everything else I just wrote in my previous post and more.
If you have to trickle-charge a commercial charger and it's making numerous charge cycles in a day, its job is actually harder than that of a car which is probably not making more than two.
So you're admitting then that the charge cycle is totally different? Fast charging a bunch of 24 kWh vehicles like leafs is doing a bunch of quick but really shallow (15%) discharges (the shallower the discharge, the less stress there is on the pack; the faster it is, the more stress), and spends about 4% of its day doing those discharges, the rest of the time, trickle charging. It's not even remotely like the sort of charge / discharge cycle of EVs. Your analogy between EV battery packs and fixed station packs isn't even in the same ballpark, they're not even remotely similar requirements in any aspect. A station battery pack is far more like a UPS.
The average is 12,500. 9200 is 74% of that, which I would say is quite fairly described as "not that much below". You drive 3x that much, aka, 2.2x the national average. "freakishly much" describes that well.
You have no ground to stand on, criticizing someone for their drive cycle when their drivecycle is far, far closer to average than yours.
Also, they seem to be mixing up the Model S and the Roadster. And they *are* more than competitive with their luxury siblings in terms of features, comfort, performance, etc. In particular, the Model S has gotten incredible reviews.
Back to the original point: an EV drivetrain is about 3x as efficient as a gasoline drivetrain. So you should divide the gasoline energy density by 3. It still looks like it's a much higher number, but that too is highly deceiving because you're comparing one of the lighest parts of a gasoline car with one of the heaviest parts of an EV and ignoring the rest. Look under the hood of an EV. Tesla's motors are the size of a watermelons and push their cars into supercar territory. No transmission. Just 10% of the moving parts. You can't just pick and choose what parts to compare, you have to look at the whole drivetrain for both. And EVs and gasoline cars aren't all that far apart as it stands when you look at the whole picture.
In such a case, the upper end of J1772 is enough for all but very high consumption vehicles to charge you to full while you sleep, so you can drive another full day immediately after. But that requires multi-hundred kilowatt hour packs which would weight 1-2 tons and cost $50-100k with today's tech
Reading comprehension fail. Immediately before that I wrote:
There are a couple other possibilities for mainstreaming other than fast charging, but I don't see them around the corner.
Other than fast charging. Completely different situation. Not charging on the road with a fast charger, instead charging at home / at your hotel / whatever with a standard 80A home J1772.
But here we are in the land of land yachts.
Once again, reading comprehension fail. Immediately after I wrote "which would weigh 1-2 tons and cost $50-100k with today's tech", I continued:
It'll happen eventually, batteries double in energy density every 8 years or so (price drops happen too but they're more irregular and harder to predict) - but we're not to the point yet where this would be a viable option.
You really can't actually be this bad at reading... can you?
. Even if the charger only needed half as much battery as the car had to make up what it's not getting from the mains, it's still a hard sell.
Stop mixing things up. We're not talking about batteries for home / level 2 chargers. We're talking about batteries for fast chargers. We're talking about the addition of a $20k pack to a $100k charger to be able to buy many hundreds of thousands of dollars of electricity at a much cheaper rate. Why are you having trouble with this?
"Room in your house"? You have no clue what a fast charger is, do you?
These aren't little sockets that cost $50. Those are Level 1. These aren't "a little box on a wall or post" that cost a couple K. Those are Level 2. These aren't even the lower end of level 3 "fast" chargers, which are the size of a small refrigerator or so; a few dozen kilowatts is not sufficiently fast to replace gasoline for travel. If you're talking a 400kW** fast charger, the kind of thing needed to fill up an 85kWh pack to 80% in ten minutes, you're talking a device the size of 1-2 soda machines that costs about a hundred thousand dollars.
These are not things you're going to put in your home
Nor is there any reason to whatsoever. Why on earth would a person need to charge that fast at home? Seriously, what's the use case here? Fast chargers are designed to be the EV equivalent of gas stations - in public places near major roads for people traveling long distances.
This explains why you're confused about fast chargers having batteries, though; you simply have no clue what they are or what they're used for. Even the lower-end level 3 chargers are not for houses.
You made a claim, I made a counter, you made a remark that your claim still stands without presenting evidence. I'm asking you to present evidence.
In what way is a charger's battery pack the same as a vehicle battery pack? It's not even *remotely* close to the same use case. Weight is irrelevant for fixed installations so cost per watt hour is dramatically lower, pack size can be dramatically larger given the use case, which decreases cycling rate, the overall cycling behavior is totally different, the associated non-battery hardware on the charger is far more expensive, changing the ratio of battery cost per unit associated hardware, and there's only one format of battery needed per charger (verses a minimum of dozens for vehicles), with no need for stock, no need for consumer battery acceptance, and no mechanical swap of a massive structural component of a vehicle's body.
So please, explain to me how these situations are even remotely similar? In the vehicle you've got crash-safe, body-integrated, high-energy-density lithium ions with a discharge time of 1-3 hours, attached to 10-40k of associated hardware. In a charger you've got something like lead-acids stacked on a shelf, with a total discharge time of 20-30 minutes (in 10 minute or so bursts), doing so for only maybe 4% of the day, attached to 100k-ish of hardware, and with the battery cost being compensated for by lower electricity rates.
If you think these are the same situation, by all means, I'm all ears.
Not to mention, the charger itself is much more expensive than your whole car, and fast charges vehicles orders of magnitude more often than you have your vehicle fast charged.
Heck, if it's in a spot where maintenance isn't an issue, one may just go with deep-cycle lead-acids and oversize the battery bank. Maybe 200kWh or so. That'd make charging a model S only a 40% duty cycle and a full discharge would take half an hour, which is actually rather gentle for many types of PbA. The overcapacity would give you room for busy times when you have to charge multiple cars in a row from the same charger (if there's more than one charger at a station, it makes more sense for them to share a common battery bank). You can get such PbAs for about $0.08-$0.10 per watt hour. Running at an average of about 4% utilization (see elsewhere in this article), you'd probably get 5 years or so out of them.
It depends. Charging stations can be loss leaders. If you put a low power Level-1 (120V/20A) charging station in front of your store, you pay about 30 cents per hour that a person is charging there. To keep a person in a particular shopping district at a cost of only 30 cents per hour can make very good sense to a city or business; even Level 2 charging (240V/15-80A -> $0.60-$3.20/h) can potentially pay for itself as a loss leader, depending on the situation. And that's just ignoring the reason most chargers were installed in the CARB era: good publicity. And not just from EV drivers who tend to do business with stores that install chargers even if they don't need to use them, just as a thank-you; it earns green cred from the general public. It's the same as a business giving money to support local youth organizations, or sending gift baskets to the troops, or whatever - you spend money to gain additional customers thanks to good publicity.
That's the cynical view. The less cynical view is that a lot of the business owners and towns who install them actually *do* want to encourage EVs.
It's true. It's a ton of work to do a conversion, and what you generally get is a sucky EV. You didn't even mention the climate control issue. It's sad what people put into home EV conversions in terms of time and parts and how little money they get out of them if they ever try to sell them.
EVs are best designed from the ground up. They're really remarkably different in terms of their demands from gasoline cars. You have disadvantages like the additional bulk/mass from the battery pack(s) and the greater need for streamlining due to the range limitations. You also have a number of advantages such as much greater freedom on where to position things in the vehicle (motors are very small, you can put the inverter almost anywhere, you can put the batteries pretty much anywhere you want, etc). So you no longer need that bulbous front end, but it's more important that you have a long, shallow taper in the back. But you don't have to worry as much about rollover because you can keep the battery weight low. The lack of a need for a geared transmission saves you space and gives you greater flexibility in drivetrain structure, but introduces its own issues, like the need for a parking pawl (or at least good handbrake!) because the car always acts like it's "in neutral" when there's no power. And of course there's the aforementioned thermal management issue - important to keep the batteries cool (the faster you want to charge, the more of an issue it is), important to spare energy on climate control, and you have some but not a ton of waste heat from the battery pack, motor, and inverter. So what solutions do you do? There's a lot of creativity that goes into designing a good thermal management system. I think the EV1's was really ahead of its time, with effective heat scrounging and reuse, a reversible heat pump for both heating and cooling, and then they made up for the limited heating power of a heat pump in cold weather by adding an additional resistive heating element as needed, and then put the whole system on computer control so you can preheat or cool the cabin before you get into the car, while it's still on mains power.
Why would a person need "fast charge for daily use"? What's the point? "Daily use" for most people is a couple dozen miles tops, and even low-end EVs at present have about a hundred miles range. And why would people prefer to drive out to a fast charge station when they can just plug in at home or at work? Or are you envisioning everyone having $100k fast charging stations the size of a couple soda machines dealing out the power of a small power plant in their garage? And FYI, a 25 pound supercap wth present commercial tech holds about 100 watt hours. Assuming *no* wind or rolling resistance or hill in the way, wouldn't even be enough to accelerate a 1500kg EV up to 50mph, wherein it would coast down (in the real world, it'd never even reach that fast). If your goal is to have hand-portable batteries, you need to use batteries, because energy density is of the essence. But the question once again becomes, why? Why physically swap out and reconnect heavy, high voltage, vehicular component when you could just simply charge the car directly from another car for the same amount of power in less time?
How about a year from now when you get 50% of your battery life?
Or what about two years from now, when unicorns ridden by fire-breathing kittens come down and stomp your leaf into the star-glitter on which they feed? I mean, while we're discussing grossly implausible scenarios here...
The LEAF has issues with this.. google it.
Given that the battery has a five year warranty, no, it does not.
What about the cost to get the charging station installed?
$1818, installed, if you want a home charger. Or you can use non-home charging, just like gasoline cars use non-home filling.
What if you have a business meeting or training out of town?
What do you do with your mustang when you need to move, say, a washing machine? Wait a minute, do you work around deficiencies in your car's capabilities with alternative solutions because you appreciate the advantages your Mustang provides? Wow, you don't say!
Leaf isn't designed to be a car for everyone. But it is a car that fits the usage patterns for a huge number of households, vastly more than its market penetration. For example, a large chunk of US households are multi-vehicle households, where one is used primarily as an in-town/commuting vehicle. Why, exactly, isn't a car like the Leaf appropriate for that?
*No* car suits all needs. A vehicle that can be used to carry a load of gravel isn't going to be an ideal daily commuter. A car that's comfortable as a daily commuter might not be so comfortable on long trips with the kids. None of the above is probably great for the track. And that track car will suck off-road. And on and on. The fact that tradeoffs exist is why vehicles on the market are so widely varied. I don't get how you don't see that a vehicle like the Leaf fills a very common role in this diverse spectrum. No, it's not some universal, ideal all purpose vehicle. But there is no such thing as a universal, ideal all purpose vehicle. It, like all vehicles, is for its niche, and its niche alone. And despite how you want to portray it, it's not even that small of a niche, it's an extremely common one.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. Culture is most likely much more of a factor.
Most people credit there being far more differences between the sexes than there actually are. Here's what I wrote on XKCD the last time the topic came up:
(The above graph, for people who don't want to follow a link: the left side shows two bell curves with little overlap, while the right shows two that are practically identical. "Figure 0.1. Distribution of performance for two traits that differ with d values of 2.6 and 0.35, respectively. Females are represented by the dashed curve, males by the solid curve. Mean score for each sex is shown by the vertical line at the middle of the curve. The graph on the left shows the sex difference in adult height, which is considered very large and for which there is little overlap between men and women. The graph on the right shows the distribution for a sex difference with a d score of 0.35, which is actually on the large side for many psychological differences. Note that the curves overlap extensively. Of the many psychological differences that have been repeatedly measured, 77 percent are smaller than the difference between the curves on the right.")
Because sexualization of women whenever the topic of women in IT comes up is a great way to interest more women in IT?
I don't know about for motorcycles, but it's at least not only legal for bicycles, but recommended. Regardless that was just an example. Paint the bike bright neon orange, fly a bright-colored flag from the bike, cover it in fur and googlie-eyes, whatever. The goal should be to increase the *visibility*, because that's what drivers use to make decisions when driving. About the only sound drivers don't tune out is that of a police / ambulence siren.
Haha, well, actually, yes, we do have the undesirable record of having the deadliest volcano in modern history, the 1783 eruption of Laki that killed (by one measure) up to 6 million people worldwide, and kicked off so much poison gas that tens of thousands were directly poisoned to death in the UK. ;) Ironically, most deaths in Iceland were not from direct poisoning, ash asphyxiation, lava, pyroclastic flows, or anything of the nature - they were from famine from skeletal fluorosis of the livestock (Laki was abnormally proliferous in terms of hydrogen fluoride emissions, and it contaminated the water - affecting people, too).
But most of our volcanic eruptions these days are the nice cuddly kind ;) An excuse to stand for a picture with an erupting volcano in the background and look all tÃff for your Facebook profile page ;) And to get a good laugh when foreign newscasters struggle to pronounce Icelandic placenames.
Here's my issue with the whole loud pipes thing. Take out a dB meter, pick an arbitrary cutoff, find a nice spot out in the open, and start your motorcycle. Now walk in front of it until you hit your target dB level, then walk around it maintaining the dB level and mapping out the distance you are from the motorcycle.
You'll find that loud pipes give you a quadrant behind the bike that's extremely noisy, noisy for a far longer distance than in other directions. But is that really the direction you want to be throwing off noise? Is that really the most likely direction for an accident to a motorcycle to come from? I really doubt it.
And let's be honest, are audio cues really the best cues? When people are driving along, they're not "listening for other vehicles", they're *looking* for them. If you really want to increase people's awareness of your bike, put little flashing lights or the like on them. But that'd "look gay" or something, right? It feels better to pick a "manly" way that makes you feel better about safety than something would have a lot more effect at getting drivers' attention, doesn't it? I'm not saying that sound doesn't play a role, but it mainly plays a role at the pedestrian level; pedestrians rely on sound cues far more than drivers.
My last problem is, picture what things would be like if everyone started driving their cars around with their hand on the horn at all times because "Constant honking saves lives!" Do you really have the right to create noise pollution so that you can get a greater feeling of safety for a means of travel that you yourself elected to take part in, knowing the risks? Does everyone else have to endure your pollution of the commons for your enjoyment? Do I have the right to jet-ski in a drinking water reservoir or offroad a caterpillar in a national park? The commons is just that - common. Everybody owns it and has a stake in it. Meaning you don't get unlimited access to dump into it without the consent of others, regardless of your intentions.
Yeah, not everything is practical to develop resistance to. I mean, you're not going to have bacteria developing resistance to, say, a flame thrower ;) Even yeast, who make the stuff, get killed by alcohol when it's in too strong of a concentration. Don't get me wrong, there are alcohol-resistant bacteria. But we're not talking about a surface protein difference here or anything, we're talking "entirely spored off to stop the alcohol from dissolving the cell membrane". To resist alcohol the cell has to be so encased that it can't do anything else but wait for the alcohol to go away. And it has to be so encased at the time of exposure, not afterwards.
Alcohol-resistant species, most notably Clostridium, can be a problem for people who are sterilizing equipment. But these aren't species that developed alcohol resistance in response to doctors, these are naturally spore-forming species. Alcohol is such a brute force attack, a simple tweak to a cell just doesn't cut it. And alcohol has been a threat to microbes for a long, long time. And even if some species did develop an alcohol resistance and began to pose a threat, that would only have significance to people sterilizing equipment / surfaces. It wouldn't make a difference in terms of how to treat an infection once its in the body; it's not like you're not going to replace your blood with 90% isopropyl alcohol. ;)
Cancerous cells still have lysosomes and there's always going to be some way to open them. Cancer cells often have defective lysosome membranes that don't activate under normal circumstances, but they're still there, and still full of enzymes to break down the cell. So long as they're there, there's going to be a way to open them up. Or, forget the lysosomes and just pump out enzymes directly into the cytoplasm. It's not actually that hard to kill a cell. The hard part is always killing only the right cells. The key thing with this is, it's basically implanting data-collecting sensors into each cell, so you know for sure exactly which cells are running awry.
Buthey, let's just assume your scenario is right. Let's say you "only" can wipe out 99.9% of cancerous cells with no side effects. Why wouldn't that alone be regarded as an utterly miraculous treatment in its own right? You're not "back to square one", you've just done 99.9% of the job of killing the cancer, pretty much any other anti-cancer method will finish the job for you.
Why wouldn't it be? Light-sensitive proteins are quite well understood.
All of this leads to a really fascinating possibility down the road...
Part 1: Requirements:
1) Genes are inserted into the nucleus of every neuron.
2) Probes which can receive on one or more optical frequencies** and send directionally on other frequencies (which we'll call A, B, and C) are inserted all throughout the target brain.
3) The genes from #1 flash upon synapse**, allowing the probes in #2 to receive the signals
4) The genes from #1 force a synapse when they receive frequency A from a probe.
5) The genes from #1 suppress synapse when they receive frequency B from a probe.
6) The genes from #1 force the cell to commit apoptosis when they receive frequency C from a probe.
Part 2: For each neuron in the brain (conducted in parallel):
1) The neuron's behavior is studied relative to its neighbors in order to learn precisely what factors control its activation levels. This requires a very accurate neural model, and probably requires a lot more more than a simple one-frequency "I'm firing" signal in #2 and #3 of part 1.
2) The neuron is simulated in a computer based on said inputs
3) The neuron is ordered repressed when the simulator doesn't want it fired, and ordered fired when the simulator wants it fired.
4) The system works its way through all of its neighbors that it influences, doing steps #1-3 of this part upon them and putting them under control of the simulation as well.
5) Once a neuron is entirely isolated and can be handled entirely within the simulation, the signal is sent for apoptosis.
6) This pattern continues until the entire brain exists only in the simulation.
And thus you take any living entity and entirely digitize their consciousness, without any single moment defining their transition from the physical world to the digital one, and without "copying" them.
This is a key first step in something I've been thinking about for a long time, and I'm thrilled to see it. I doubt I'll live to see all the steps, or that anyone alive today will. But I'm thrilled to see the first steps taken down this road.
More near-term, one can envision all sorts of incredible properties with an optical communication link set up with cells. For example, imagine that you instrument cells in a cancerous organ with genes that can be instructed individually to force the cell into apoptosis, and which flash on various frequencies corresponding to various cellular activities. You look for cellular activities which correspond to cancerous behavior, and when you see them, you tell that cell to kill itself. You really have something way better than all of that unrealistic "nanomachine medicine" stuff that sci-fi writers have been obsessing over for ages.
Have you actually started learning Dutch and putting forth the same amount of effort to getting a job in the netherlands that you'd put towards finding a job in the US (aka, months of searching and learning the right jobfinding approaches)?
You might be surprised.
People act like it's so impossible to leave America. But seriously, if you don't like America, you truly, honestly, don't have to stay there.
I didn't like America. I traveled. I found a place I actually liked a lot (Iceland). I applied for jobs. I got one surprisingly quick. I moved. And now I've lived here for years.
There's nothing preventing you from doing the same. If you don't like America, you really can leave!
Oh, and while we're talking about the internet... here's what my highly isolated, incredibly rugged/unstable terrain, tied-for-second-lowest population density, super-high prices for electronic equipment country's internet stats are:
Fiber's really been taking off since the OECD study was done, it now even goes out to places like Vestfirðir, where in the whole region the largest town is under 4k people, and some towns are so isolated that they're legally classified as islands during the winter because the roads become impassable until late spring. But the fiber stays on. :) We're currently at about 65% home fiber penetration, and the telecoms are talking about hitting 80% by the end of the year.
In general, we've got superb computer and net connectivity and literacy - even on the little stuff (for example, over here, IE is the number *three* web browser, and it's not even close). Reykjavík uses a direct democracy system for bringing public issues directly to the floor at city council meetings, the new constitutional drafting team was credited with online crowdsourcing the constitution (that's overstating the case, but they did make extensive use of online suggestions and discussions), etc. My only real criticism of the net environment here is that while domestic net traffic is generally uncapped, international usually is, you choose an international data package. So this leads to, for example, instead of using Pirate Bay, people use Iceland-only torrent sites like Deildu for file sharing. And one of the local companies, Síminn, is looking at the possibility of domestic caps too, which would suck. Crazy-fast connectivity is great, but not so great if you can't use it to download whatever you want.
Yes, but Musk isn't going to pony up to put up a terrawatt or two worth of fast chargers at several thousand locations across the US. It's just too large of a task to expect Tesla, or even a Tesla/Nissan/BMW alliance, to do it. You need private interest. Musk may be able to handle densely populated areas of high Tesla sales, but it's never going to get full national coverage - and thus eliminate the complaint of "I can't get there in an EV" - without economic viability.
I know that such complaints usually don't stand up to scrutiny. But it doesn't matter, because they're a gut-feeling complaint from people who are used to gasoline cars and afraid of change. As a consequence, they don't replace their daily commuter that they almost never drive long distances with with an EV, they just buy another gasoline car. The "road trip" problem *has* to be dealt with somehow in order to truly mainstream EVs.
I'm not sure why you say they will never be economical, when I show above that they actually can be economical if there's enough EV traffic in an area. On really busy roads it only takes a fraction of a percent of the traffic being EVs to justify them. It's only on the sparsely travelled areas where it becomes a big challenge.
In terms of size/weight, if we assume the massive, 500kg+ battery pack of the Tesla Model S performance as the upper limit, and if we say that's a real-world range of 250mi, and we need to reach 1000mi to get that "full day's driving, 80A charge to full overnight" EV ideal, then we need two energy density doublings to reach that. That's 16 years, which actually isn't that far out. After about 25 years you get the pack down to a more reasonable, mainstream 250kg. So no problem there.
The real issue however is price. We want to, as it stands, drop the price on existing EV packs to mainstream them. But here we are talking about increasing the capacity (batteries are generally priced per watt hour) fourfold. How much do we need to drop battery prices to truly mainstream EVs - 3fold perhaps? So we need a 12x price performance increase. And despite following the industry pretty close, I have no clue when we're going to get there. Battery pricing per watt hour changes are so irregular. Sometimes the price even goes up. It depends greatly on which of the currently in-development techs take off for the next generation of batteries as to what sort of prices will even be achievable. For example, if we continue to use some form of cobalt-based cathode, the price of cobalt salts is going to continue to limit the potential for price reduction (contrary to popular belief, lithium is not the most expensive element of a conventional lithium-ion battery... nor is it particularly rare, nor is that much used in a li-ion battery). But some battery techs even in use today in EVs don't use cobalt, using things like manganese or various phosphates. And the next tech might not even be li-ion based. Lithium sulfur, sodium ion, lithium air, sodium air, and dozens of others are all vying for that top spot. So I have no bloody clue what future prices are going to be like. We can only hope that something that's both energy dense *and* made of cheap materials comes out on top. Because then it's just manufacturing costs that are the limiter, and those can be reduced steadily with time and scale.
There's one bright light in this tunnel that I think is worth attention - that cycle life becomes less important with increased capacity. The smaller your pack, the more you stress your batteries. Hybrids are harder on their batteries than PHEVs which are harder on their batteries than EVs, and so forth. If you have a 60 mile range and you drive 30 miles a day, your daily discharge is a 50% depth of discharge and you do a full discharge's equivalent every 2 days. If you have a 1200 mile range and you drive 30 miles a day, your daily discharge is a 2.5% depth of discharge and you do a full discharge's equivalent every 40 days. The combination of a shallow discharge (easier on batteries) and few discharges means y
In what world are you envisioning that residential users are going to be installing $100k fast chargers the size of a couple soda machines in their homes? In what use case is that remotely necessary?
In what manner? Do you think the charger is powered by a hamster on a wheel? The as has been stated half a dozen times, the purpose of a battery bank is to average out the grid draw instead of having it suddenly spike hundreds of kilowatts at random intervals.
You're joking, right? These chargers are huge to begin with, which has been repeatedly pointed out to you. 200kW of lead-acid batteries, one of the lowest density techs possible, and 2 1/2 times the capacity of the highest range EV on the market, would still be smaller than the charger itself. And the more chargers you want on a single location (aka, gas station equivalent), the *less* space batteries use, proportionally to the chargers, since you use a common bank. And is orders of magnitude smaller than the size of the gas and diesel tanks that gas stations have to install.
Fast chargers = gas stations. Get that in your head and I don't think you'll have trouble understanding this any more.
That and everything else I just wrote in my previous post and more.
So you're admitting then that the charge cycle is totally different? Fast charging a bunch of 24 kWh vehicles like leafs is doing a bunch of quick but really shallow (15%) discharges (the shallower the discharge, the less stress there is on the pack; the faster it is, the more stress), and spends about 4% of its day doing those discharges, the rest of the time, trickle charging. It's not even remotely like the sort of charge / discharge cycle of EVs. Your analogy between EV battery packs and fixed station packs isn't even in the same ballpark, they're not even remotely similar requirements in any aspect. A station battery pack is far more like a UPS.
Congratulations, you're in the top 10% of US drivers in terms of range driven per day, and shouldn't be purchasing a short-range daily commuter.
Anything else we need to discuss here?
The average is 12,500. 9200 is 74% of that, which I would say is quite fairly described as "not that much below". You drive 3x that much, aka, 2.2x the national average. "freakishly much" describes that well.
You have no ground to stand on, criticizing someone for their drive cycle when their drivecycle is far, far closer to average than yours.
Also, they seem to be mixing up the Model S and the Roadster. And they *are* more than competitive with their luxury siblings in terms of features, comfort, performance, etc. In particular, the Model S has gotten incredible reviews.
Back to the original point: an EV drivetrain is about 3x as efficient as a gasoline drivetrain. So you should divide the gasoline energy density by 3. It still looks like it's a much higher number, but that too is highly deceiving because you're comparing one of the lighest parts of a gasoline car with one of the heaviest parts of an EV and ignoring the rest. Look under the hood of an EV. Tesla's motors are the size of a watermelons and push their cars into supercar territory. No transmission. Just 10% of the moving parts. You can't just pick and choose what parts to compare, you have to look at the whole drivetrain for both. And EVs and gasoline cars aren't all that far apart as it stands when you look at the whole picture.
Reading comprehension fail. Immediately before that I wrote:
Other than fast charging. Completely different situation. Not charging on the road with a fast charger, instead charging at home / at your hotel / whatever with a standard 80A home J1772.
Once again, reading comprehension fail. Immediately after I wrote "which would weigh 1-2 tons and cost $50-100k with today's tech", I continued:
You really can't actually be this bad at reading... can you?
Stop mixing things up. We're not talking about batteries for home / level 2 chargers. We're talking about batteries for fast chargers. We're talking about the addition of a $20k pack to a $100k charger to be able to buy many hundreds of thousands of dollars of electricity at a much cheaper rate. Why are you having trouble with this?
"Room in your house"? You have no clue what a fast charger is, do you?
These aren't little sockets that cost $50. Those are Level 1.
These aren't "a little box on a wall or post" that cost a couple K. Those are Level 2.
These aren't even the lower end of level 3 "fast" chargers, which are the size of a small refrigerator or so; a few dozen kilowatts is not sufficiently fast to replace gasoline for travel. If you're talking a 400kW** fast charger, the kind of thing needed to fill up an 85kWh pack to 80% in ten minutes, you're talking a device the size of 1-2 soda machines that costs about a hundred thousand dollars.
These are not things you're going to put in your home
Nor is there any reason to whatsoever. Why on earth would a person need to charge that fast at home? Seriously, what's the use case here? Fast chargers are designed to be the EV equivalent of gas stations - in public places near major roads for people traveling long distances.
This explains why you're confused about fast chargers having batteries, though; you simply have no clue what they are or what they're used for. Even the lower-end level 3 chargers are not for houses.
You made a claim, I made a counter, you made a remark that your claim still stands without presenting evidence. I'm asking you to present evidence.
In what way is a charger's battery pack the same as a vehicle battery pack? It's not even *remotely* close to the same use case. Weight is irrelevant for fixed installations so cost per watt hour is dramatically lower, pack size can be dramatically larger given the use case, which decreases cycling rate, the overall cycling behavior is totally different, the associated non-battery hardware on the charger is far more expensive, changing the ratio of battery cost per unit associated hardware, and there's only one format of battery needed per charger (verses a minimum of dozens for vehicles), with no need for stock, no need for consumer battery acceptance, and no mechanical swap of a massive structural component of a vehicle's body.
So please, explain to me how these situations are even remotely similar? In the vehicle you've got crash-safe, body-integrated, high-energy-density lithium ions with a discharge time of 1-3 hours, attached to 10-40k of associated hardware. In a charger you've got something like lead-acids stacked on a shelf, with a total discharge time of 20-30 minutes (in 10 minute or so bursts), doing so for only maybe 4% of the day, attached to 100k-ish of hardware, and with the battery cost being compensated for by lower electricity rates.
If you think these are the same situation, by all means, I'm all ears.
Not to mention, the charger itself is much more expensive than your whole car, and fast charges vehicles orders of magnitude more often than you have your vehicle fast charged.
Heck, if it's in a spot where maintenance isn't an issue, one may just go with deep-cycle lead-acids and oversize the battery bank. Maybe 200kWh or so. That'd make charging a model S only a 40% duty cycle and a full discharge would take half an hour, which is actually rather gentle for many types of PbA. The overcapacity would give you room for busy times when you have to charge multiple cars in a row from the same charger (if there's more than one charger at a station, it makes more sense for them to share a common battery bank). You can get such PbAs for about $0.08-$0.10 per watt hour. Running at an average of about 4% utilization (see elsewhere in this article), you'd probably get 5 years or so out of them.
There's probably better alternatives, though.
It depends. Charging stations can be loss leaders. If you put a low power Level-1 (120V/20A) charging station in front of your store, you pay about 30 cents per hour that a person is charging there. To keep a person in a particular shopping district at a cost of only 30 cents per hour can make very good sense to a city or business; even Level 2 charging (240V/15-80A -> $0.60-$3.20/h) can potentially pay for itself as a loss leader, depending on the situation. And that's just ignoring the reason most chargers were installed in the CARB era: good publicity. And not just from EV drivers who tend to do business with stores that install chargers even if they don't need to use them, just as a thank-you; it earns green cred from the general public. It's the same as a business giving money to support local youth organizations, or sending gift baskets to the troops, or whatever - you spend money to gain additional customers thanks to good publicity.
That's the cynical view. The less cynical view is that a lot of the business owners and towns who install them actually *do* want to encourage EVs.
It's true. It's a ton of work to do a conversion, and what you generally get is a sucky EV. You didn't even mention the climate control issue. It's sad what people put into home EV conversions in terms of time and parts and how little money they get out of them if they ever try to sell them.
EVs are best designed from the ground up. They're really remarkably different in terms of their demands from gasoline cars. You have disadvantages like the additional bulk/mass from the battery pack(s) and the greater need for streamlining due to the range limitations. You also have a number of advantages such as much greater freedom on where to position things in the vehicle (motors are very small, you can put the inverter almost anywhere, you can put the batteries pretty much anywhere you want, etc). So you no longer need that bulbous front end, but it's more important that you have a long, shallow taper in the back. But you don't have to worry as much about rollover because you can keep the battery weight low. The lack of a need for a geared transmission saves you space and gives you greater flexibility in drivetrain structure, but introduces its own issues, like the need for a parking pawl (or at least good handbrake!) because the car always acts like it's "in neutral" when there's no power. And of course there's the aforementioned thermal management issue - important to keep the batteries cool (the faster you want to charge, the more of an issue it is), important to spare energy on climate control, and you have some but not a ton of waste heat from the battery pack, motor, and inverter. So what solutions do you do? There's a lot of creativity that goes into designing a good thermal management system. I think the EV1's was really ahead of its time, with effective heat scrounging and reuse, a reversible heat pump for both heating and cooling, and then they made up for the limited heating power of a heat pump in cold weather by adding an additional resistive heating element as needed, and then put the whole system on computer control so you can preheat or cool the cabin before you get into the car, while it's still on mains power.
Why would a person need "fast charge for daily use"? What's the point? "Daily use" for most people is a couple dozen miles tops, and even low-end EVs at present have about a hundred miles range. And why would people prefer to drive out to a fast charge station when they can just plug in at home or at work? Or are you envisioning everyone having $100k fast charging stations the size of a couple soda machines dealing out the power of a small power plant in their garage? And FYI, a 25 pound supercap wth present commercial tech holds about 100 watt hours. Assuming *no* wind or rolling resistance or hill in the way, wouldn't even be enough to accelerate a 1500kg EV up to 50mph, wherein it would coast down (in the real world, it'd never even reach that fast). If your goal is to have hand-portable batteries, you need to use batteries, because energy density is of the essence. But the question once again becomes, why? Why physically swap out and reconnect heavy, high voltage, vehicular component when you could just simply charge the car directly from another car for the same amount of power in less time?
What's your logic?
If they weren't super-expensive, and super-low energy density, they'd be great. But that's not the case on either account.
Where does physics say that? Where does physics say anything about price?
Or what about two years from now, when unicorns ridden by fire-breathing kittens come down and stomp your leaf into the star-glitter on which they feed? I mean, while we're discussing grossly implausible scenarios here...
Given that the battery has a five year warranty, no, it does not.
$1818, installed, if you want a home charger. Or you can use non-home charging, just like gasoline cars use non-home filling.
What do you do with your mustang when you need to move, say, a washing machine? Wait a minute, do you work around deficiencies in your car's capabilities with alternative solutions because you appreciate the advantages your Mustang provides? Wow, you don't say!
Leaf isn't designed to be a car for everyone. But it is a car that fits the usage patterns for a huge number of households, vastly more than its market penetration. For example, a large chunk of US households are multi-vehicle households, where one is used primarily as an in-town/commuting vehicle. Why, exactly, isn't a car like the Leaf appropriate for that?
*No* car suits all needs. A vehicle that can be used to carry a load of gravel isn't going to be an ideal daily commuter. A car that's comfortable as a daily commuter might not be so comfortable on long trips with the kids. None of the above is probably great for the track. And that track car will suck off-road. And on and on. The fact that tradeoffs exist is why vehicles on the market are so widely varied. I don't get how you don't see that a vehicle like the Leaf fills a very common role in this diverse spectrum. No, it's not some universal, ideal all purpose vehicle. But there is no such thing as a universal, ideal all purpose vehicle. It, like all vehicles, is for its niche, and its niche alone. And despite how you want to portray it, it's not even that small of a niche, it's an extremely common one.