Since when do gas cars work at -60F without extraordinary measures? Lead-acid starter batteries are more temperature-sensitive than automotive li-ions, and your fuel and oil will gel. You need a block heater. And if a block heater is acceptable for a gas car, why not an EV?
My 1996 Saturn SL1 only goes about 250/350 miles (city/highway) between fillups. It has a 12 gallon tank.
My apolgies -- I copied the wrong number (50K instead of 59F). Nonetheless, there's going to be some band between thousands of degrees kelvin and 50 degrees kelvin that is habitable.
This is a misconception about opportunity charging, and something that a lot of people don't get. If it takes an hour to fully full your pack, if you have an "oh damn, I shouldn't have driven 90mph down the interstate on the way here and now don't have enough charge to get home!" moment, that doesn't mean you have to sit around for an hour. That means you have to sit around for the 10-15 minutes until you get enough charge to get you home. You don't have to grab a full charge every time you plug in.
The same applies to lower-power charging. If it takes three hours to fill your pack, you only need half an hour or so to make up for a miscalculation or screw-up. And it's not like you have to sit around twiddling your thumbs, either. These are generally found at places like grocery stores and the like; you can get your shopping done.
Also, as chargers spread, you get more and more chances for "opportunity charging". That is, whenever you go somewhere, you plug in. It just takes a few seconds, easier than connecting a gas pump. You disconnect when you leave. So even if it's just 15 minutes at the bank, 25 minutes at the grocery store, 7 minutes at the dry cleaners, 13 minutes at the hardware store, or whatever your needs are, it really adds up (in that case, that's 1 hour of charging). And a lot of places offer their power for free, as a loss leader.
One of the nice things about EVs is design flexibility. GM puts them down the center tunnel in a T-shape. Aptera puts them under the seats. Tesla puts them right over the rear wheels. Mitsubishi puts them under the floor. You can basically put them wherever you have spare space that's ideal for your weight distribution to ensure a good ride, rollover resistance, wheel traction, aerodynamics, style, and so forth.
It's also one of the downsides to conversions -- they can't take advantage of this flexibility, so they have to put something bulky and heavy in a preexisting space. In a well-designed EV, due to the flexibility of pack layouts, having the batteries onboard almost becomes a design advantage in comparison to an ICE-equivalent vehicle.
Rapid charge makes a lot more sense than battery swapping (no inventory, and most people *way* underestimate the difficulty and downsides to requiring standardizing something that heavy and integral to a vehicle). Modern batteries can take it -- phosphates and spinels, 10-20 minutes, and with titanates, basically as fast as you can cool them. And the chargers can deliver, too. Aerovironment just unveiled an *800 kilowatt* charger for TARDEC a few months ago.
Really, it's all about cooling. That's where the primary challenges lie. Of course, that's just an engineering constraint -- how to cool the cables and pack as efficiently as possible with as little financial overhead on the hardware costs as possible.
Especially when it's battery technology, which hasn't improved much in... how many decades?
I guess we have to hit every myth in the book on this thread, no?
The best secondary cells on the market in 1989 were the newly introduced Nickel Metal Hydride cells, which, at introduction, boasted 40Wh/kg. Today, the best secondary cells on the market are 200Wh/kg li-ions (which are *way* better than the li-ions from 1999). We're talking a 4.5x increase in energy density and a 10x increase in power density in 20 years.
It's true that for much of the 20th century, battery tech largely stagnated. However, then came along the consumer electronics revolution of the 1980s, and people actually started putting real money into rechargeable batteries. That, combined with our modern understanding of materials and fabrication allowed for a boom in battery technology, which today is about a 10% increase in energy density per year. And that rate is rising, not falling. And EVs will probably make it rise even faster.
There's not enough lithium carbonate that can be produced at *$5/kg* with *today's non-experiental technology*. Which is, of course, irrelevant to the big picture. With lab tech today, lithium can be produced from seawater (in essentially unlimited quantities) for $22-$32/kg. And way cheaper than that for other terrestrial sources (such as Western Lithium Corporation's Kings Valley mine in Nevada) -- just not as cheaply as the Argentinian and Bolivian salars.
So? Well, for example, the Nissan Leaf only contains 4kg of lithium. That's about 20kg worth of lithium carbonate. I.e., about $100 worth. Honestly, who gives a rat's arse if that doubles, triples, quadruples, even quintuples? That's not the impediment to li-ion EV costs. The non-automotive li-ions are limited largely by cobalt costs, while the automotive li-ions are limited by capital costs and labor due to their current low-volume production methods. And contrary to popular belief, the battery packs aren't the only thing that's overpriced right now. The motor, inverter, and charger are, too. They're still largely handmade, very small volumes. The Tesla Roadster's drivetrain is descended from AC Propulsion's AC-150, which will run you about $25k today. However, AC Propulsion expects that if they were made in volumes of hundreds of thousands per year, it'd be more like $3500.
Yeah, but they're proposing to do it with lithium-air, which I find to be a very uninteresting tech. All of the "air" cells tend to be plagued with every downside in the book except for energy density (which they excel at). We're talking efficiency, longevity, power, price per watt, price per watt-hour, and flammability.
I'm much more interested in some of the advances to li-ion (fluorinated metal or layered cathodes, silicon or tin nanoparticle anodes) and lithium-sulfur. Neither are as extreme of an energy density increase, but they don't carry along the associated problems of air cells. And the problem isn't really energy density; it's battery cost. We can design a car to hold three times as many cells as even the Tesla Roadster carries. It'd be heavy, but we could build it and make it work well. The problem is, that pack would cost an utter fortune.
Oh, and sweet -- Some more highlights after further reading:
"Sodium, potassium, silicon monoxide and then oxygen -- either atomic or molecular oxygen -- make up most of the atmosphere." But there are also smaller amounts of the other elements found in silicate rock, such as magnesium, aluminum, calcium and iron.... As you go higher the atmosphere gets cooler and eventually you get saturated with different types of 'rock' the way you get saturated with water in the atmosphere of Earth... Elemental sodium and potassium, which have very low boiling points in comparison with rocks, do not rain out but would instead stay in the atmosphere, where they would form high gas clouds buffeted by the stellar wind from COROT-7.
So... the only one of those things that will be a gas at the surface on the far side is oxygen. The article says the atmosphere may not be breathable, but I have to wonder... why not?
Also, in the case what what condenses in the atmosphere is crystaline (I don't see anywhere which suggests whether they would be or not -- it all depends on how fast it cools), look at the list of the raining minerals:
enstatite, corundum, spinel, and wollastonite.
Enstatite can be a gemstone. Crystals of corundum are otherwise known as ruby and sapphire. There are many types of spinels, a number of whose crystals are considered gemstones. Etc. So *if* what condenses is crystalline, it could literally be raining gems on that planet.
The planet is tidally locked. Just stay on the dark side of the planet. The equilibrium temperature there is 59F -- not bad at all.
One thing that occurs to me is that if the mass transfer rate is as high as they're suggesting -- and I have no reason to suspect otherwise -- it seems to me that this planet would be *highly* tectonically active. Unlike rain, which just runs off, the pebbles will stick around where they fall. This means that the crust will have a lot of weight bearing down on it on the cold side, sinking into the mantle and likely leading to heavy volcanism and tectonic activity. And the erosion of the hot side should lead to an upwelling of exposed mantle material as the planet tries to relax into a sphere.
The awesome thing is, with such a reasonable temperature on the cool side, it could actually be habitable to LAWKI -- except for that likely lack of water thing, (unless there's been heavy cometary activity since the planet became tidally locked).
This planet must have an incredible range of minerals, way unlike anything on Earth -- the star basically mining the crust and even mantle on one side and depositing it after chemical vapor deposition onto the other side. If we ever go interstellar as a species, I wouldn't be surprised to see heavy mining activity on planets like that.
SUVs roll over when put into situations where they should not be. i.e. a SUV will roll if driven off road along a steep hill.
Or into a ditch. Or when trying to swerve at highway speeds. SUVs roll over all the time in the real world. Congratulations to lucky you that you haven't rolled yours yet.
With backing over a child. You might want to drive some new cars.
I'm just quoting accident statistics. And while you perceive you have better visibility in an SUV due to the height, in general, you can't see as close to the front bumper in an SUV compared to a sedan, either.
And BTW, why is it that in some states the insurance rates for SUVs are higher?
Wait, are you defending or attacking SUVs? High insurance rates are good in your book?
Because SUVs have a higher chance or surviving an accident
No, it means that they expect them to get into accidents more and expect to have to pay larger claims. Obviously.
But that survivability comes at the cost of damaging the other car more.
Gee, thanks for supporting the worst solution to the Prisoner's Dilemma concerning auto fatalities.
I needed a SUV to haul stuff (either the doors, sheet rock, other large things to fix up my place or a friends. The coolers, fishing rods, other fishing or camping stuff for trips)
And that makes up what percent of your total trips? And a pickup wouldn't have been better why? Furthermore, you assume "size = weight". While they're certainly correlated, it's not a 1:1 correlation. Design also plays a major role.
Ain't that the truth. When I first started work here, I thought it'd be really exciting, a way to be part of something big. But every day, it's just the same, "Where's my Death Ray command server?" this, "My patience grows thin!" that, "If I don't have my Death Ray command server up by midnight, I shall unleash my pretties upon you!", and on and on. Well, gee, Mr. Big Shot, perhaps if you didn't build the server room deep inside a freaking ACTIVE VOLCANO, perhaps we wouldn't have so many overheating issues.
Bzzt, sorry! If you don't have a direct ancestor, you're not taking an evolutionary approach, and you have to debug full systems integration from scratch. None of their failures would have occurred if it were an evolutionary rocket -- the salt/metal incompatibility failure would have occurred on the parent rocket, the separation kick would have occurred on the parent rocket, and the slosh roll risk would have at least been hinted at by the parent rocket.
there's nothing particularly revolutionary or new about it's design, construction, or manufacture.
Examples: hybrid isogrid/balloon tanks for a "best of both worlds" combination of high payload fraction and ease of handling on the ground; one of the first rockets to use friction-stir welded tanks; an level of automated production unprecedented for orbital rocketry; an almost unreal turnaround time on aborted launches, and the highest performance gas generator cycle engine ever built.
As a driver, I think they need to point out that the idea is to NOT CRASH.
No kidding! In the US we have this mindset that the only way to be safe on the road is to buy a giant armored tank and sit four feet off the ground. And so they buy a huge SUV which has god-awful maneuverability and is many times more likely to roll over. And who cares about the risk you put other drivers in (or pedestrians -- SUVs are several times more likely to back over a child, for example).
If everyone focused on light, agile, and well-built, the roads would be a lot safer place. I think it's quite telling that there's far more variance in crash survivability between vehicles in a given class than between classes -- even within the same price bracket. If the Smart Fortwo can pass crash testing with that tiny little crumple zone, it's pathetic that so many vehicles don't do any better than they do.
Debacle? Since when is this (3 failures, then two successes) unusual for a *brand new, non-evolutionary launch stack*? Nobody willing to risk payloads? SpaceX has been flooded with new private launch contracts recently.
Wait a minute: is your argument that *mass market car manufacture* is a low-capital business?
Building a car company takes a *huge* amount of money. And whether you believe it or not, components *do* tend to be expensive until they reach mass production and production processes mature. And we're not just talking batteries, but everything from motors, inverters, and chargers to even reversible heat pump climate control systems. Even a cheap AC drivetrain will generally run you at least $10k these days, despite their relative simplicity compared to an internal combustion engine drivetrain. They're largely handmade.
Notice the price trends? Tesla is starting with a $109k car. Their next one is going to be $57k. The one after that, $30k. Fisker is starting at $90k. Their next car is going to be $40k. Mitsubishi's MiEV is almost $50k. By 2015, they expect to be closer to $20k.
The coal companies do not have a point. Intermittent + Peaking = Baseload. Intermittent + Storage = Baseload. You can go just fine without baseload if you have either peaking or storage. And, FYI, EVs can act as storage (to some degree; hydro is even better in terms of energy, although mass adoption of V2G EVs is unbeatable in terms of power).
We do not need coal to generate half our power. And coal's share of our generation is falling, even before Cap & Trade. And its competitors get cheaper every year.
So anything which results in increased demand for electricity is going to mostly end up increasing burning of coal.
Wrong. Coal's share of our power is falling. 42% of the new power added to the grid last year was wind, and most of the rest, natural gas.
Furthermore, EVs let you put *more* intermittent sources on the grid, as they can vary the rates at which they charge on a smart grid, and even when not on a smart grid, they're a steady, predominantly nighttime load -- meaning that you level out the day/night loads, meaning that nighttime wind won't just go to waste.
Why is this modded up? It's not accurate. The highest concentration they've found so far is at most 1000 ppm. That's the *highest* they've found, and that's toward the poles. Now, they're *speculating* that it might be accumulating in deposits in polar craters, but they have found no such deposits yet (and previous attempts to find such deposits have failed).
Browse some of the vids on YouTube, or its appearance on Jay Leno's Garage. Awesome vehicle, isn't it? I have my reservation down -- I'm in the 300s (the waiting list is over 4k long).
They're making a 2e (electric), 2h (plug-in hybrid), and 2g (gas-only), as well as a 4-series (4 wheels, four seats, but still with the Aptera philosophy of extreme safety and efficiency).
The thing had a canvas roof. You don't get much lighter than that.
The GP was correct; this car's efficiency would drop like a rock if brought up to spec. Heck, it'd drop like a rock if you merely tested the existing thing on a modern drivecycle. Also, the rear wheel steering was a really, really bad idea.
Ok... I know I should be more attentive but when I first read that headline I thought;
Scientists Levitate Miss USA
I personally believe that U.S. scientists are unable to do so because, um, some scientists out there in our nation don't have magnets and, uh, I believe that our, uh, research like such as, uh, Caltech and, uh, the Harvard and everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uh, our research over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, should help Caltech and should help the Harvard and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when do gas cars work at -60F without extraordinary measures? Lead-acid starter batteries are more temperature-sensitive than automotive li-ions, and your fuel and oil will gel. You need a block heater. And if a block heater is acceptable for a gas car, why not an EV?
My 1996 Saturn SL1 only goes about 250/350 miles (city/highway) between fillups. It has a 12 gallon tank.
My apolgies -- I copied the wrong number (50K instead of 59F). Nonetheless, there's going to be some band between thousands of degrees kelvin and 50 degrees kelvin that is habitable.
This is a misconception about opportunity charging, and something that a lot of people don't get. If it takes an hour to fully full your pack, if you have an "oh damn, I shouldn't have driven 90mph down the interstate on the way here and now don't have enough charge to get home!" moment, that doesn't mean you have to sit around for an hour. That means you have to sit around for the 10-15 minutes until you get enough charge to get you home. You don't have to grab a full charge every time you plug in.
The same applies to lower-power charging. If it takes three hours to fill your pack, you only need half an hour or so to make up for a miscalculation or screw-up. And it's not like you have to sit around twiddling your thumbs, either. These are generally found at places like grocery stores and the like; you can get your shopping done.
Also, as chargers spread, you get more and more chances for "opportunity charging". That is, whenever you go somewhere, you plug in. It just takes a few seconds, easier than connecting a gas pump. You disconnect when you leave. So even if it's just 15 minutes at the bank, 25 minutes at the grocery store, 7 minutes at the dry cleaners, 13 minutes at the hardware store, or whatever your needs are, it really adds up (in that case, that's 1 hour of charging). And a lot of places offer their power for free, as a loss leader.
One of the nice things about EVs is design flexibility. GM puts them down the center tunnel in a T-shape. Aptera puts them under the seats. Tesla puts them right over the rear wheels. Mitsubishi puts them under the floor. You can basically put them wherever you have spare space that's ideal for your weight distribution to ensure a good ride, rollover resistance, wheel traction, aerodynamics, style, and so forth.
It's also one of the downsides to conversions -- they can't take advantage of this flexibility, so they have to put something bulky and heavy in a preexisting space. In a well-designed EV, due to the flexibility of pack layouts, having the batteries onboard almost becomes a design advantage in comparison to an ICE-equivalent vehicle.
Rapid charge makes a lot more sense than battery swapping (no inventory, and most people *way* underestimate the difficulty and downsides to requiring standardizing something that heavy and integral to a vehicle). Modern batteries can take it -- phosphates and spinels, 10-20 minutes, and with titanates, basically as fast as you can cool them. And the chargers can deliver, too. Aerovironment just unveiled an *800 kilowatt* charger for TARDEC a few months ago.
Really, it's all about cooling. That's where the primary challenges lie. Of course, that's just an engineering constraint -- how to cool the cables and pack as efficiently as possible with as little financial overhead on the hardware costs as possible.
Especially when it's battery technology, which hasn't improved much in... how many decades?
I guess we have to hit every myth in the book on this thread, no?
The best secondary cells on the market in 1989 were the newly introduced Nickel Metal Hydride cells, which, at introduction, boasted 40Wh/kg. Today, the best secondary cells on the market are 200Wh/kg li-ions (which are *way* better than the li-ions from 1999). We're talking a 4.5x increase in energy density and a 10x increase in power density in 20 years.
It's true that for much of the 20th century, battery tech largely stagnated. However, then came along the consumer electronics revolution of the 1980s, and people actually started putting real money into rechargeable batteries. That, combined with our modern understanding of materials and fabrication allowed for a boom in battery technology, which today is about a 10% increase in energy density per year. And that rate is rising, not falling. And EVs will probably make it rise even faster.
There's not enough lithium carbonate that can be produced at *$5/kg* with *today's non-experiental technology*. Which is, of course, irrelevant to the big picture. With lab tech today, lithium can be produced from seawater (in essentially unlimited quantities) for $22-$32/kg. And way cheaper than that for other terrestrial sources (such as Western Lithium Corporation's Kings Valley mine in Nevada) -- just not as cheaply as the Argentinian and Bolivian salars.
So? Well, for example, the Nissan Leaf only contains 4kg of lithium. That's about 20kg worth of lithium carbonate. I.e., about $100 worth. Honestly, who gives a rat's arse if that doubles, triples, quadruples, even quintuples? That's not the impediment to li-ion EV costs. The non-automotive li-ions are limited largely by cobalt costs, while the automotive li-ions are limited by capital costs and labor due to their current low-volume production methods. And contrary to popular belief, the battery packs aren't the only thing that's overpriced right now. The motor, inverter, and charger are, too. They're still largely handmade, very small volumes. The Tesla Roadster's drivetrain is descended from AC Propulsion's AC-150, which will run you about $25k today. However, AC Propulsion expects that if they were made in volumes of hundreds of thousands per year, it'd be more like $3500.
Yeah, but they're proposing to do it with lithium-air, which I find to be a very uninteresting tech. All of the "air" cells tend to be plagued with every downside in the book except for energy density (which they excel at). We're talking efficiency, longevity, power, price per watt, price per watt-hour, and flammability.
I'm much more interested in some of the advances to li-ion (fluorinated metal or layered cathodes, silicon or tin nanoparticle anodes) and lithium-sulfur. Neither are as extreme of an energy density increase, but they don't carry along the associated problems of air cells. And the problem isn't really energy density; it's battery cost. We can design a car to hold three times as many cells as even the Tesla Roadster carries. It'd be heavy, but we could build it and make it work well. The problem is, that pack would cost an utter fortune.
The key is price per watt hour.
Oh, and sweet -- Some more highlights after further reading:
"Sodium, potassium, silicon monoxide and then oxygen -- either atomic or molecular oxygen -- make up most of the atmosphere." But there are also smaller amounts of the other elements found in silicate rock, such as magnesium, aluminum, calcium and iron. ... As you go higher the atmosphere gets cooler and eventually you get saturated with different types of 'rock' the way you get saturated with water in the atmosphere of Earth ... Elemental sodium and potassium, which have very low boiling points in comparison with rocks, do not rain out but would instead stay in the atmosphere, where they would form high gas clouds buffeted by the stellar wind from COROT-7.
So... the only one of those things that will be a gas at the surface on the far side is oxygen. The article says the atmosphere may not be breathable, but I have to wonder... why not?
Also, in the case what what condenses in the atmosphere is crystaline (I don't see anywhere which suggests whether they would be or not -- it all depends on how fast it cools), look at the list of the raining minerals:
enstatite, corundum, spinel, and wollastonite.
Enstatite can be a gemstone. Crystals of corundum are otherwise known as ruby and sapphire. There are many types of spinels, a number of whose crystals are considered gemstones. Etc. So *if* what condenses is crystalline, it could literally be raining gems on that planet.
The planet is tidally locked. Just stay on the dark side of the planet. The equilibrium temperature there is 59F -- not bad at all.
One thing that occurs to me is that if the mass transfer rate is as high as they're suggesting -- and I have no reason to suspect otherwise -- it seems to me that this planet would be *highly* tectonically active. Unlike rain, which just runs off, the pebbles will stick around where they fall. This means that the crust will have a lot of weight bearing down on it on the cold side, sinking into the mantle and likely leading to heavy volcanism and tectonic activity. And the erosion of the hot side should lead to an upwelling of exposed mantle material as the planet tries to relax into a sphere.
The awesome thing is, with such a reasonable temperature on the cool side, it could actually be habitable to LAWKI -- except for that likely lack of water thing, (unless there's been heavy cometary activity since the planet became tidally locked).
This planet must have an incredible range of minerals, way unlike anything on Earth -- the star basically mining the crust and even mantle on one side and depositing it after chemical vapor deposition onto the other side. If we ever go interstellar as a species, I wouldn't be surprised to see heavy mining activity on planets like that.
If you'd find something you like doing, you could end up having fun at your job, and kill 2 birds with one stone, maybe ?
So you're suggesting that they work on improving control software for a poultry slaughterhouse? I'm confused.
SUVs roll over when put into situations where they should not be. i.e. a SUV will roll if driven off road along a steep hill.
Or into a ditch. Or when trying to swerve at highway speeds. SUVs roll over all the time in the real world. Congratulations to lucky you that you haven't rolled yours yet.
With backing over a child. You might want to drive some new cars.
I'm just quoting accident statistics. And while you perceive you have better visibility in an SUV due to the height, in general, you can't see as close to the front bumper in an SUV compared to a sedan, either.
And BTW, why is it that in some states the insurance rates for SUVs are higher?
Wait, are you defending or attacking SUVs? High insurance rates are good in your book?
Because SUVs have a higher chance or surviving an accident
No, it means that they expect them to get into accidents more and expect to have to pay larger claims. Obviously.
But that survivability comes at the cost of damaging the other car more.
Gee, thanks for supporting the worst solution to the Prisoner's Dilemma concerning auto fatalities.
I needed a SUV to haul stuff (either the doors, sheet rock, other large things to fix up my place or a friends. The coolers, fishing rods, other fishing or camping stuff for trips)
And that makes up what percent of your total trips? And a pickup wouldn't have been better why? Furthermore, you assume "size = weight". While they're certainly correlated, it's not a 1:1 correlation. Design also plays a major role.
Ain't that the truth. When I first started work here, I thought it'd be really exciting, a way to be part of something big. But every day, it's just the same, "Where's my Death Ray command server?" this, "My patience grows thin!" that, "If I don't have my Death Ray command server up by midnight, I shall unleash my pretties upon you!", and on and on. Well, gee, Mr. Big Shot, perhaps if you didn't build the server room deep inside a freaking ACTIVE VOLCANO, perhaps we wouldn't have so many overheating issues.
There's just no respect in this industry.
Bzzt, sorry! If you don't have a direct ancestor, you're not taking an evolutionary approach, and you have to debug full systems integration from scratch. None of their failures would have occurred if it were an evolutionary rocket -- the salt/metal incompatibility failure would have occurred on the parent rocket, the separation kick would have occurred on the parent rocket, and the slosh roll risk would have at least been hinted at by the parent rocket.
there's nothing particularly revolutionary or new about it's design, construction, or manufacture.
Examples: hybrid isogrid/balloon tanks for a "best of both worlds" combination of high payload fraction and ease of handling on the ground; one of the first rockets to use friction-stir welded tanks; an level of automated production unprecedented for orbital rocketry; an almost unreal turnaround time on aborted launches, and the highest performance gas generator cycle engine ever built.
As a driver, I think they need to point out that the idea is to NOT CRASH.
No kidding! In the US we have this mindset that the only way to be safe on the road is to buy a giant armored tank and sit four feet off the ground. And so they buy a huge SUV which has god-awful maneuverability and is many times more likely to roll over. And who cares about the risk you put other drivers in (or pedestrians -- SUVs are several times more likely to back over a child, for example).
If everyone focused on light, agile, and well-built, the roads would be a lot safer place. I think it's quite telling that there's far more variance in crash survivability between vehicles in a given class than between classes -- even within the same price bracket. If the Smart Fortwo can pass crash testing with that tiny little crumple zone, it's pathetic that so many vehicles don't do any better than they do.
Okay, what's its direct ancestor?
Debacle? Since when is this (3 failures, then two successes) unusual for a *brand new, non-evolutionary launch stack*? Nobody willing to risk payloads? SpaceX has been flooded with new private launch contracts recently.
What are you talking about?
Wait a minute: is your argument that *mass market car manufacture* is a low-capital business?
Building a car company takes a *huge* amount of money. And whether you believe it or not, components *do* tend to be expensive until they reach mass production and production processes mature. And we're not just talking batteries, but everything from motors, inverters, and chargers to even reversible heat pump climate control systems. Even a cheap AC drivetrain will generally run you at least $10k these days, despite their relative simplicity compared to an internal combustion engine drivetrain. They're largely handmade.
Notice the price trends? Tesla is starting with a $109k car. Their next one is going to be $57k. The one after that, $30k. Fisker is starting at $90k. Their next car is going to be $40k. Mitsubishi's MiEV is almost $50k. By 2015, they expect to be closer to $20k.
That's just the way new technology goes.
The coal companies do not have a point. Intermittent + Peaking = Baseload. Intermittent + Storage = Baseload. You can go just fine without baseload if you have either peaking or storage. And, FYI, EVs can act as storage (to some degree; hydro is even better in terms of energy, although mass adoption of V2G EVs is unbeatable in terms of power).
We do not need coal to generate half our power. And coal's share of our generation is falling, even before Cap & Trade. And its competitors get cheaper every year.
So anything which results in increased demand for electricity is going to mostly end up increasing burning of coal.
Wrong. Coal's share of our power is falling. 42% of the new power added to the grid last year was wind, and most of the rest, natural gas.
Furthermore, EVs let you put *more* intermittent sources on the grid, as they can vary the rates at which they charge on a smart grid, and even when not on a smart grid, they're a steady, predominantly nighttime load -- meaning that you level out the day/night loads, meaning that nighttime wind won't just go to waste.
Why is this modded up? It's not accurate. The highest concentration they've found so far is at most 1000 ppm. That's the *highest* they've found, and that's toward the poles. Now, they're *speculating* that it might be accumulating in deposits in polar craters, but they have found no such deposits yet (and previous attempts to find such deposits have failed).
Did you not notice that it takes processing *one ton* of ore to get a quart of water, and this only in specific places in the moon?
Good luck making hydrogen for fuel out of that. :P
Browse some of the vids on YouTube, or its appearance on Jay Leno's Garage. Awesome vehicle, isn't it? I have my reservation down -- I'm in the 300s (the waiting list is over 4k long).
They're making a 2e (electric), 2h (plug-in hybrid), and 2g (gas-only), as well as a 4-series (4 wheels, four seats, but still with the Aptera philosophy of extreme safety and efficiency).
The thing had a canvas roof. You don't get much lighter than that.
The GP was correct; this car's efficiency would drop like a rock if brought up to spec. Heck, it'd drop like a rock if you merely tested the existing thing on a modern drivecycle. Also, the rear wheel steering was a really, really bad idea.
Ok... I know I should be more attentive but when I first read that headline I thought;
Scientists Levitate Miss USA
I personally believe that U.S. scientists are unable to do so because, um, some scientists out there in our nation don't have magnets and, uh, I believe that our, uh, research like such as, uh, Caltech and, uh, the Harvard and everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uh, our research over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, should help Caltech and should help the Harvard and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future.