As the cars are now, they actually use those human-oriented navigation aids for their own benefit. That's how they can operate safely in spite of weather and surrounding drivers and possible map errors. I'm sure more efficient aids could be designed for automated cars, but that's a bridge we have yet to cross. I can't see the ones we have going away anytime soon, until it becomes illegal to drive cars manually.
And everyone who downloaded it illegally will just download CS6 in response. Oh, and half the people who paid for CS5 will probably do the same thing. Great move, Adobe.
You say the surge protectors didn't do much good, but you neglect the fact that without them the drives likely would have failed as well. Besides, those things aren't designed to stop a direct strike, and there's no telling how many smaller surges they protected you against before that incident.
Why are you even mentioning air terminals? Unless your house is actually on top of a mountain, the probability of a direct strike is miniscule compared to that of a power or data line surge. The poster didn't even ask about direct strikes.
Breaker-box-mounted surge protectors are now in the sub-$200 range at Home Depot etc. My house has one of these as well as surge protectors on all the sensitive equipment. Anything that gets past the main surge protector, or gets induced in the house itself by nearby lightning, gets absorbed in the outlet strip protectors. The main protector also helps isolate noise between circuits by filtering small-amplitude transients from appliance motors. I have FIOS so no need to protect the phone and cable lines.
I am also in the process of adding a proper RF ground for my TV antenna and future ham radio antennas, which will be tied into the service ground and surge protector for even better surge dissipation. The antennas will actually have grounding and surge protection worthy of a direct strike.
I prefer to read that comment as putting a metaphorical bullet in the metaphorical head of the department. But you are right, that is how we must do it.
I didn't say it was impossible, I said the political reality is that it will be irrelevant before it is ready for market. Fast chargers will only get faster, battery packs will only get bigger. Once we have 200-mile battery packs (really only 5-10 years away), even most intercity trips won't be a problem. The remaining fraction of a percent of all vehicle miles spent on longer trips will be almost negligible (environmentally speaking) if we can electrify the other 99.99% of miles traveled.
The telecom industry standardizes plenty, sure, but they are not consumer products. They don't have meet the same kind of physical, aesthetic, and price constraints consumer products do. The closest analog is the laptop and cell phone industries where they standardized the plugs (mostly), but you're lucky if the battery packs are compatible with more than one exact model, much less multiple years over multiple manufacturers.
If you're looking for carbon-neutral, there are much better ways to travel long distance than battery power: biofuel or hydrogen-powered cars (either ICE or fuel cell), and most importantly high-speed electric railroads. Battery swapping is basically what the military would do if presented with "We have X technology now, we want to do Y with it, so build a Z to make it possible." But the Y you are talking about, making personal vehicles go unlimited distances using Li-Ion battery technology, isn't the problem. The problem is getting people from point A to point B with as conveniently and efficiently as possible. I won't accept battery-swapping as the best solution unless it's compared to these and other options that aren't restricted to the religion of the personal vehicle.
The reason myself and many other EV advocates argue against battery swapping is because inflates the perceived cost of the electric vehicle transition. If people think all that infrastructure is necessary for BEVs to be at all useful, they are going to question the wisdom of using them at all. The time and money required for carmakers to standardize packs would be much better spent making the standardization unnecessary. The investment in infrastructure for battery swapping would really only serve a tiny, tiny segment of the population, and the overall cost would slow adoption and make it even less profitable.
I want to say any development is a good development, but I'm just not convinced that battery swapping is worth the expenditure of both financial and political capital that would be required to get it off the ground, given how rapidly technology is moving forward.
Some of us aren't that lucky, bro, and are stuck in a metropolitan hell-hole. Actually, there are plenty of parks and even a few other cities within 50 miles of here, so I'm happy. If your daily commute is less than 40 miles round-trip, though, go for the Volt. It would be perfect for your use case, and I hear it is awesome fun to drive.
Your "minimal infrastructure" involves make EVERY SINGLE CAR compliant with some battery standard, and installing these robot things all over the place. Sure, it works in a place like Israel because there's only one corridor and the whole country is small and self contained. But in the US? There are corridors freaking everywhere. Making that system ubiquitous enough that people would pay extra for a compatible car would be next to impossible. When you DO need to move your BEV between cities, waiting for 10-20 minutes won't be a big deal if it's in a nice location. Who would pay so much extra just to save 10 minutes when they do this once a year, or even once every five years?
And once again, traveling between cities in a BEV on a frequent basis is a generally dumb idea--that's what trains, planes, buses, and (at worst) rental cars are for. If such travel is in your job description, stop bitching and by a gas car, it's the only one that meets your requirements. You wouldn't try sailing across the Atlantic in a kayak, would you? But just as important, you wouldn't paddle the canals in a 100-foot schooner. Embrace BEVs for what they are, commuter vehicles designed to punch SMOG in the nuts and reduce our reliance on OIL in general. They ARE NOT magic unicorns come to replace every vehicle on the road right now.
What you point out is precisely the reason why Nissan has been considering giving out car rental coupons to Leaf buyers. It makes a lot of sense; but there are other cases, like when you live in NY and want to go to DC for the week, where getting a fast-charge along the way is the difference between using your nice BEV and paying for a whole week's rental.
What you say about range is correct, but all the decent BEVs on the market now (except the Volt) have a range of about 100 miles and can do round-trip commutes of 35 miles reliably. By your computation that puts it at 15,000 miles per year, which I understand is the expected average for ICE vehicles.
To address the cost of ownership question, I refer you to page 6 of this flyer, with five-year cost of ownership projections in California: Toyota Matrix XRS $41,435 ---- Toyota Prius 5 $41,724 --- Nissan Leaf SL $30,284. Lower maintenance make them pretty close, and government incentives make the BEV much cheaper in comparison.
Can you try planning for the future by anticipating actual technology instead of resorting to knee-jerk reactionary tactics? Seriously, when it does become an issue, we have MUCH better ways to deal with it than shaming people who dare to plug in during the day. Yes, if everyone traded in their cars for electric right now it would be a big deal, but we have about a decade to figure it out before we hit even 1% market penetration.
The charging standard is set up so that the grid can control everyone's rate of charge. If you have a parking garage full of partially-charged vehicles they could easily be synchronized with the rest of the building and throttled so that the average load of the company is flat. If you have to leave in less than 6 hours, pay an extra buck and you get priority charging. Or the simplest solution of all: Install solar panels over your parking lot to charge the cars. Then it doesn't matter what the rest of the grid is doing, and you can sell back the excess.
For a typical commute of 40 miles one way, a car uses 40 miles / (4 miles/kWh) = 10kWh of electricity. At the max L2 rate of 6.6kW, this can be done in less than two hours. If you have a garage of 20 cars all traveling this far, you need 200 kWh of electricity delivered in about 8 hours, which is an average draw of 25kW. While not chump change, a constant load of 25kW is about the same as two or three commercial air conditioning units, hardly a drastic load on the grid, and the actual charging could by throttled so it only happens when the building A/C is off. This is also a pretty extreme scenario, with 20 cars all having long commutes. If there are 20 cars that require charging at work, there are probably 50 more that don't, and that is pretty high market penetration right there.
Frankly this is a non-issue. Some people have to charge at work to make the return trip, some don't. If the employer charges a nominal fee for charging at work, the two groups will sort themselves out on their own. Either way, it's not like cars suddenly drain the grid when they get plugged in--a typical trip uses far less than the whole-battery-charge which most numbers are based on. Right now we're still in the build-out phase, and it's important that people have as many options as possible. The employers who forbid charging at work are shooting themselves in the foot because it limits their employees' mobility. Maybe when 25 or 50% of all commuter vehicles are electric we will have to worry about grid load, but certainly not right now.
It would be a service if the "inoffensive net" was opt-in, which I understand they already have. Put the other way around, it definitely is a restriction and/or a ridiculous political gimmick. Even if you can "opt-in" to the "unfiltered" net, who's to stop them from filtering that version too? Once the filter is up, the difference between "on" and "off" becomes a really blurry line. With an "optional" filter, you can still abuse it to shape public opinion if the majority of households have the filter enabled.
Sure, there are proposals for inductive charging systems, but they are years away from any reasonable standard, and I don't think "fast charging" speeds are even physically practical at the moment. Inductive charging will always be less efficient than plug charging, and given the likely cost of deploying permanent inductive charging stations, uptake will be slow in markets where the plug works just as well. I certainly don't anticipate everyone digging up their driveways and garages to install them. Besides, there is no way they can sell an electric car without a standard 120V "contingency" charger, and that needs a plug. Trust me, friend, the humble plug is going nowhere, and we will be thanking them in a decade that all our cars have the same standard.
Frequent fast charging will only be safe once we transition from conventional Li-Ion and Li-Poly batteries to a totally new chemistry like Li-Air. There is simply no way for the batteries we have now to absorb energy that quickly without overstressing the internal components. I know Ford has a fancy liquid cooling system on the Focus EV battery, but they have no fast charge port whatsoever.
Heads-up: DC fast charging (L3) is NOT designed to replace the normal "slow" L1/L2 AC charging. At least with current battery technologies, frequent fast charging will dramatically reduce the lifespan of your battery pack and is discouraged by the manufacturers. Fast chargers should ONLY show up in places where people need emergency charging or need to make 100-300 mile hops between urban centers. When you do use them, expect to pay about as much as you would for a tank of gas. You'll want to avoid this as much as possible so you can actually save money by operating your EV.
Fast chargers are significantly more expensive to install than L2 (220VAC) chargers because they normally require *battery buffers* to reduce peak load on the grid. Commercial parking lots will almost never opt for expensive fast chargers when the standard L2 chargers provide about 30 miles of range in one hour, more than enough to aid your customers and much easier on your wallet and theirs alike.
The primary charging method of all EVs will still be slow-charging at home, just like you do with your smart phone. It's cheaper, easier, and takes less of your time than waiting around 15 minutes for it to finish at some dingy gas station. There is absolutely no reason to use fast chargers but in exceptional circumstances.
These are the "new options" that you speak of. Parking = Charging is where we need to be, and it will cover the vast majority of EV operating hours. The DC fast chargers are only to fill in the gaps between parked chargers, not some sort of "gas station replacement". The whole point of the electric vehicle is to do away with the gas station model and simply live off the grid, getting power whenever and wherever you happen to be.
What the J1772 CCS standard has going for it is that it's a free-license standard. (And that it can be covered by a single round "fuel cap".) All those cheapskate developing countries don't want to pay CHAdeMO royalties on every single connector they build, so once China starts producing them en masse the cost for the rest of us will come down. Unless CHAdeMO opens up its standard, it will slowly be eclipsed by the free standard.
Or, consumers will get frustrated that they never have the right plug in the right place, and give up on L3 charging altogether, which doesn't help anyone. Really not sure how this one is going to play out.
3. It isnt that hard, there are already prototypes. We refill flying planes with other flying planes and you think this is 'far from simple?
Aerial refueling is far from simple, but it is performed by highly trained operators in billion dollar equipment. And you use that to justify why installing 100,000 battery changers, performing hundreds of millions of changes a year, operated by idiot consumers with cheap vehicles is somehow easy? You might as well say "We put a man on the moon, why don't we all travel in miniature scramjet pods?"
etc etc etc please do go on, the one and only problem is getting an entire nation to roll out stations which is expensive with a slow return on investment and getting auto manufacturers to standardize batteries.
So the only problems are that the infrastructure is too expensive to be profitable and the vehicles are too expensive to be profitable. Sure, that sounds totally viable in a free-market economy./sarcasm.
Why are people so obsessed with having gas stations for electric cars? That defeats the whole purpose. Charge the car at home and at work, like your smartphone. No trips out of your way, no cruising for the cheapest price, no waiting by the pump, just a few seconds before and after to plug/unplug. If you need to go long distance, take a train/plane/bus, enjoy the view and relax for once in your life. And if your commute is too long, then you're not in the target demographic anyways.
For the cost of installing battery-swap infrastructure in a handful of locations, we could cover a city with standard charging stations. Then you could charge no matter where you park. Even installing networks of the fast-chargers on major corridors will end up being cheaper and more versatile.
Besides, you've seen how long it took them to agree on a standard for a charging plug. Just think how long it would take them to agree on standards for whole battery packs. By the time they finish, we'll have 400-mile Litihium-Air batteries and hydrogen fuel cell backups, and no one will care anymore.
You'd be right, except for the fact that it's not hyperbole anymore. Of course not every agent deserves the "thug" label, but how many reports do we have now of inappropriate behavior? Routinely stealing personal belongings, administering "pat-downs" purely in retaliation for non-cooperation, letting through drug shipments, conspiring to masturbate to body scans... Heck, if Mafia thugs behaved this badly they'd get their asses kicked, they have more honor. How much more thuggish do they have to get before you call it what it is?
All this could be dismissed as a few bad apples in a large force if such a large force were actually necessary, but a "dragnet" operation is only useful if it is actually impenetrable, and the current system is definitely not. Thus the same terrorism-stopping result could be achieved with a much smaller, cheaper, less intrusive operation. The abuses are a side effect of an unnecessarily large force, and thus a perfectly valid reason to question its existence.
It occurred to me because we know that normal matter emits gamma radiation as it falls into the black hole, but not knowing the mechanism that causes it means it might be done by all matter, including dark matter. There is probably evidence already disproving this idea, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless. It would have a certain poetic quality, though, if the only time dark matter were visible was during its disappearance.
If they were lobbying against it, don't you think they'd tell people about it? They're keeping their position "under wraps" so nobody gets outraged and forces them to change it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like they just found a killer app in the Canadian market for the bra that doubles as a gas mask.
As the cars are now, they actually use those human-oriented navigation aids for their own benefit. That's how they can operate safely in spite of weather and surrounding drivers and possible map errors. I'm sure more efficient aids could be designed for automated cars, but that's a bridge we have yet to cross. I can't see the ones we have going away anytime soon, until it becomes illegal to drive cars manually.
I LOLed at this.
Well, we learned a little too late then. I don't know of any city centers that have been built in the US since the '70s.
Nobody will mind as long as they tip the cleaners well.
And everyone who downloaded it illegally will just download CS6 in response. Oh, and half the people who paid for CS5 will probably do the same thing. Great move, Adobe.
You say the surge protectors didn't do much good, but you neglect the fact that without them the drives likely would have failed as well. Besides, those things aren't designed to stop a direct strike, and there's no telling how many smaller surges they protected you against before that incident.
Why are you even mentioning air terminals? Unless your house is actually on top of a mountain, the probability of a direct strike is miniscule compared to that of a power or data line surge. The poster didn't even ask about direct strikes.
Breaker-box-mounted surge protectors are now in the sub-$200 range at Home Depot etc. My house has one of these as well as surge protectors on all the sensitive equipment. Anything that gets past the main surge protector, or gets induced in the house itself by nearby lightning, gets absorbed in the outlet strip protectors. The main protector also helps isolate noise between circuits by filtering small-amplitude transients from appliance motors. I have FIOS so no need to protect the phone and cable lines.
I am also in the process of adding a proper RF ground for my TV antenna and future ham radio antennas, which will be tied into the service ground and surge protector for even better surge dissipation. The antennas will actually have grounding and surge protection worthy of a direct strike.
Why is this modded funny? It should be modded insightful. I was thinking the same thing about the summary.
I prefer to read that comment as putting a metaphorical bullet in the metaphorical head of the department. But you are right, that is how we must do it.
I didn't say it was impossible, I said the political reality is that it will be irrelevant before it is ready for market. Fast chargers will only get faster, battery packs will only get bigger. Once we have 200-mile battery packs (really only 5-10 years away), even most intercity trips won't be a problem. The remaining fraction of a percent of all vehicle miles spent on longer trips will be almost negligible (environmentally speaking) if we can electrify the other 99.99% of miles traveled.
The telecom industry standardizes plenty, sure, but they are not consumer products. They don't have meet the same kind of physical, aesthetic, and price constraints consumer products do. The closest analog is the laptop and cell phone industries where they standardized the plugs (mostly), but you're lucky if the battery packs are compatible with more than one exact model, much less multiple years over multiple manufacturers.
If you're looking for carbon-neutral, there are much better ways to travel long distance than battery power: biofuel or hydrogen-powered cars (either ICE or fuel cell), and most importantly high-speed electric railroads. Battery swapping is basically what the military would do if presented with "We have X technology now, we want to do Y with it, so build a Z to make it possible." But the Y you are talking about, making personal vehicles go unlimited distances using Li-Ion battery technology, isn't the problem. The problem is getting people from point A to point B with as conveniently and efficiently as possible. I won't accept battery-swapping as the best solution unless it's compared to these and other options that aren't restricted to the religion of the personal vehicle.
The reason myself and many other EV advocates argue against battery swapping is because inflates the perceived cost of the electric vehicle transition. If people think all that infrastructure is necessary for BEVs to be at all useful, they are going to question the wisdom of using them at all. The time and money required for carmakers to standardize packs would be much better spent making the standardization unnecessary. The investment in infrastructure for battery swapping would really only serve a tiny, tiny segment of the population, and the overall cost would slow adoption and make it even less profitable.
I want to say any development is a good development, but I'm just not convinced that battery swapping is worth the expenditure of both financial and political capital that would be required to get it off the ground, given how rapidly technology is moving forward.
Some of us aren't that lucky, bro, and are stuck in a metropolitan hell-hole. Actually, there are plenty of parks and even a few other cities within 50 miles of here, so I'm happy. If your daily commute is less than 40 miles round-trip, though, go for the Volt. It would be perfect for your use case, and I hear it is awesome fun to drive.
Your "minimal infrastructure" involves make EVERY SINGLE CAR compliant with some battery standard, and installing these robot things all over the place. Sure, it works in a place like Israel because there's only one corridor and the whole country is small and self contained. But in the US? There are corridors freaking everywhere. Making that system ubiquitous enough that people would pay extra for a compatible car would be next to impossible. When you DO need to move your BEV between cities, waiting for 10-20 minutes won't be a big deal if it's in a nice location. Who would pay so much extra just to save 10 minutes when they do this once a year, or even once every five years?
And once again, traveling between cities in a BEV on a frequent basis is a generally dumb idea--that's what trains, planes, buses, and (at worst) rental cars are for. If such travel is in your job description, stop bitching and by a gas car, it's the only one that meets your requirements. You wouldn't try sailing across the Atlantic in a kayak, would you? But just as important, you wouldn't paddle the canals in a 100-foot schooner. Embrace BEVs for what they are, commuter vehicles designed to punch SMOG in the nuts and reduce our reliance on OIL in general. They ARE NOT magic unicorns come to replace every vehicle on the road right now.
What you point out is precisely the reason why Nissan has been considering giving out car rental coupons to Leaf buyers. It makes a lot of sense; but there are other cases, like when you live in NY and want to go to DC for the week, where getting a fast-charge along the way is the difference between using your nice BEV and paying for a whole week's rental.
What you say about range is correct, but all the decent BEVs on the market now (except the Volt) have a range of about 100 miles and can do round-trip commutes of 35 miles reliably. By your computation that puts it at 15,000 miles per year, which I understand is the expected average for ICE vehicles.
To address the cost of ownership question, I refer you to page 6 of this flyer, with five-year cost of ownership projections in California: Toyota Matrix XRS $41,435 ---- Toyota Prius 5 $41,724 --- Nissan Leaf SL $30,284. Lower maintenance make them pretty close, and government incentives make the BEV much cheaper in comparison.
Can you try planning for the future by anticipating actual technology instead of resorting to knee-jerk reactionary tactics? Seriously, when it does become an issue, we have MUCH better ways to deal with it than shaming people who dare to plug in during the day. Yes, if everyone traded in their cars for electric right now it would be a big deal, but we have about a decade to figure it out before we hit even 1% market penetration.
The charging standard is set up so that the grid can control everyone's rate of charge. If you have a parking garage full of partially-charged vehicles they could easily be synchronized with the rest of the building and throttled so that the average load of the company is flat. If you have to leave in less than 6 hours, pay an extra buck and you get priority charging. Or the simplest solution of all: Install solar panels over your parking lot to charge the cars. Then it doesn't matter what the rest of the grid is doing, and you can sell back the excess.
For a typical commute of 40 miles one way, a car uses 40 miles / (4 miles/kWh) = 10kWh of electricity. At the max L2 rate of 6.6kW, this can be done in less than two hours. If you have a garage of 20 cars all traveling this far, you need 200 kWh of electricity delivered in about 8 hours, which is an average draw of 25kW. While not chump change, a constant load of 25kW is about the same as two or three commercial air conditioning units, hardly a drastic load on the grid, and the actual charging could by throttled so it only happens when the building A/C is off. This is also a pretty extreme scenario, with 20 cars all having long commutes. If there are 20 cars that require charging at work, there are probably 50 more that don't, and that is pretty high market penetration right there.
Frankly this is a non-issue. Some people have to charge at work to make the return trip, some don't. If the employer charges a nominal fee for charging at work, the two groups will sort themselves out on their own. Either way, it's not like cars suddenly drain the grid when they get plugged in--a typical trip uses far less than the whole-battery-charge which most numbers are based on. Right now we're still in the build-out phase, and it's important that people have as many options as possible. The employers who forbid charging at work are shooting themselves in the foot because it limits their employees' mobility. Maybe when 25 or 50% of all commuter vehicles are electric we will have to worry about grid load, but certainly not right now.
It would be a service if the "inoffensive net" was opt-in, which I understand they already have. Put the other way around, it definitely is a restriction and/or a ridiculous political gimmick. Even if you can "opt-in" to the "unfiltered" net, who's to stop them from filtering that version too? Once the filter is up, the difference between "on" and "off" becomes a really blurry line. With an "optional" filter, you can still abuse it to shape public opinion if the majority of households have the filter enabled.
Sure, there are proposals for inductive charging systems, but they are years away from any reasonable standard, and I don't think "fast charging" speeds are even physically practical at the moment. Inductive charging will always be less efficient than plug charging, and given the likely cost of deploying permanent inductive charging stations, uptake will be slow in markets where the plug works just as well. I certainly don't anticipate everyone digging up their driveways and garages to install them. Besides, there is no way they can sell an electric car without a standard 120V "contingency" charger, and that needs a plug. Trust me, friend, the humble plug is going nowhere, and we will be thanking them in a decade that all our cars have the same standard.
Frequent fast charging will only be safe once we transition from conventional Li-Ion and Li-Poly batteries to a totally new chemistry like Li-Air. There is simply no way for the batteries we have now to absorb energy that quickly without overstressing the internal components. I know Ford has a fancy liquid cooling system on the Focus EV battery, but they have no fast charge port whatsoever.
Heads-up: DC fast charging (L3) is NOT designed to replace the normal "slow" L1/L2 AC charging. At least with current battery technologies, frequent fast charging will dramatically reduce the lifespan of your battery pack and is discouraged by the manufacturers. Fast chargers should ONLY show up in places where people need emergency charging or need to make 100-300 mile hops between urban centers. When you do use them, expect to pay about as much as you would for a tank of gas. You'll want to avoid this as much as possible so you can actually save money by operating your EV.
Fast chargers are significantly more expensive to install than L2 (220VAC) chargers because they normally require *battery buffers* to reduce peak load on the grid. Commercial parking lots will almost never opt for expensive fast chargers when the standard L2 chargers provide about 30 miles of range in one hour, more than enough to aid your customers and much easier on your wallet and theirs alike.
The primary charging method of all EVs will still be slow-charging at home, just like you do with your smart phone. It's cheaper, easier, and takes less of your time than waiting around 15 minutes for it to finish at some dingy gas station. There is absolutely no reason to use fast chargers but in exceptional circumstances.
These are the "new options" that you speak of. Parking = Charging is where we need to be, and it will cover the vast majority of EV operating hours. The DC fast chargers are only to fill in the gaps between parked chargers, not some sort of "gas station replacement". The whole point of the electric vehicle is to do away with the gas station model and simply live off the grid, getting power whenever and wherever you happen to be.
What the J1772 CCS standard has going for it is that it's a free-license standard. (And that it can be covered by a single round "fuel cap".) All those cheapskate developing countries don't want to pay CHAdeMO royalties on every single connector they build, so once China starts producing them en masse the cost for the rest of us will come down. Unless CHAdeMO opens up its standard, it will slowly be eclipsed by the free standard.
Or, consumers will get frustrated that they never have the right plug in the right place, and give up on L3 charging altogether, which doesn't help anyone. Really not sure how this one is going to play out.
3. It isnt that hard, there are already prototypes. We refill flying planes with other flying planes and you think this is 'far from simple?
Aerial refueling is far from simple, but it is performed by highly trained operators in billion dollar equipment. And you use that to justify why installing 100,000 battery changers, performing hundreds of millions of changes a year, operated by idiot consumers with cheap vehicles is somehow easy? You might as well say "We put a man on the moon, why don't we all travel in miniature scramjet pods?"
etc etc etc please do go on, the one and only problem is getting an entire nation to roll out stations which is expensive with a slow return on investment and getting auto manufacturers to standardize batteries.
So the only problems are that the infrastructure is too expensive to be profitable and the vehicles are too expensive to be profitable. Sure, that sounds totally viable in a free-market economy. /sarcasm.
Why are people so obsessed with having gas stations for electric cars? That defeats the whole purpose. Charge the car at home and at work, like your smartphone. No trips out of your way, no cruising for the cheapest price, no waiting by the pump, just a few seconds before and after to plug/unplug. If you need to go long distance, take a train/plane/bus, enjoy the view and relax for once in your life. And if your commute is too long, then you're not in the target demographic anyways.
For the cost of installing battery-swap infrastructure in a handful of locations, we could cover a city with standard charging stations. Then you could charge no matter where you park. Even installing networks of the fast-chargers on major corridors will end up being cheaper and more versatile.
Besides, you've seen how long it took them to agree on a standard for a charging plug. Just think how long it would take them to agree on standards for whole battery packs. By the time they finish, we'll have 400-mile Litihium-Air batteries and hydrogen fuel cell backups, and no one will care anymore.
You'd be right, except for the fact that it's not hyperbole anymore. Of course not every agent deserves the "thug" label, but how many reports do we have now of inappropriate behavior? Routinely stealing personal belongings, administering "pat-downs" purely in retaliation for non-cooperation, letting through drug shipments, conspiring to masturbate to body scans... Heck, if Mafia thugs behaved this badly they'd get their asses kicked, they have more honor. How much more thuggish do they have to get before you call it what it is?
All this could be dismissed as a few bad apples in a large force if such a large force were actually necessary, but a "dragnet" operation is only useful if it is actually impenetrable, and the current system is definitely not. Thus the same terrorism-stopping result could be achieved with a much smaller, cheaper, less intrusive operation. The abuses are a side effect of an unnecessarily large force, and thus a perfectly valid reason to question its existence.
It occurred to me because we know that normal matter emits gamma radiation as it falls into the black hole, but not knowing the mechanism that causes it means it might be done by all matter, including dark matter. There is probably evidence already disproving this idea, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless. It would have a certain poetic quality, though, if the only time dark matter were visible was during its disappearance.
If they were lobbying against it, don't you think they'd tell people about it? They're keeping their position "under wraps" so nobody gets outraged and forces them to change it.