I think people missed the whole point of these cameras intirely. By having cameras if and when something happens there is something to show what heppened. As it was i was thinking the other day they need cameras with live feeds to the ground and a screen in the cockpit. If someone tries to do something both the pilots know and the ground.
On top of this think about if the plane crashes. Currently we have nearly worthless flight recorders. Having tape of what happened on the plane would be great. One could see if it was an explosion from somes shoes or a fuel tank blowing up or the wing flew off. Eliminate tons of questions.
There is no privacy issues here. Your on private property. They can do what they want. It not like you should be doing anything that you wouldn't want people to know about. Your on a god damn plane sitting with a few hundred people. If there is something you would do on that plane sitting there that doesn't bother you for all those passangers to see but does for it to be on tape i'm really curious what it would be.
Why must people turn everything into a privacy invasion when it's not anything close to being that and is simple a good thing.
hey, person got lucky, something happened on a bus at my school once and they went to the tape from the fake looking camera box and the person got in deep shit.
Stop trolling, you can put the recovery cd in and it will fix windows and everything is fine. You can update windows and your apps are fine, unless the app has an issue with the latest version. Nothing you said is valid.
I basicly picked a randomly low number. But it's not to far off. I never said.01% of people run linux. That was the percentage of people buying that laptop.
Lets say.75% of the world runs linux, this is for sure a overly high number. out of them you have to start thinking how many are buying a toshiba laptop. I'm going to say not many are buying laptops at all. I very much doubt my number was very off. There aparently is 1 person doing it. if toshiba sells 100,000 of these things, which would be impressive, I wouldn't expect more then a dozen people to be running linux on them.
Linux is no where as popular as slashdot people want to think. It's simply the truth, it's off the radar on any form of readings. It's less then 1% And the majority of linux installs are on servers and home made PCs.
Why do people think this is some sneaky move, and look at MS. It's simple WinXP pro, for example, is 1.6gig installed, thats almost a gig bigger then a normal disk. So install takes a long time as it resets everything up. Having it on a dvd not compressed and allready set up makes perfect sense. It's for a laptop, very static hardware. For a regular user being able to put a disk in and it copys everything over and your good to go is a great thing. I also bet this was more of toshiba idea then MS's. They arn't building these things with the intent of dual boot, just doesn't make sense to worry about something 0.01% of those who buy one will do. Why not make it nicer for the 99.99 percent that will use it like normal.
Also to other, I don't think any PC maker has included a straight off the shelf version of windows in nearly a decade. No computer I have bought or seen bought by someone had a true real version of windows with it. When you buy a computer from any OEM it comes with a quasi version of windows. This is no differant. Except if the HD crahses of have to re-install you can now do it in a few minutes instead of over an hour.
Someone needs to step outside and fast, get some fresh air and catch up on the world. He may soon be eating Mac-n-cheese and chopped up hot dogs 5 times a day and never get out of his PJs.
so there would be 2 manuafactures. 1 running US midsize ICBM, and the other running Russian midsize ICBM's . Maybe in time some other countries might get in.
All rockets are rear wheel drive if you will. Don't know if they are 2 door. Might be tight getting the roll cage in. Definitly going to have stick rules on the spoilers, though they may have to lift the ban on movable spoilers.
Be real curious to see post race burnouts. Though it sucks to be someone who did a mid or pre race burnout:)
it's not game over, the universe will survive, just not our board. In time a new universe will pop back up like before, if it was reset. or another planet would reform and the game would slowly come back, though good chance it would be a bit differant game play.
"The fact that our (US) military does not pay that much attention to survivability of ships is a sign of a trend: we are now focused on smacking around those weaker than ourselves (Iraq, Afghanistan) rather than fighting an even battle (WW2)."
The navy is not concerned about sea battles. Chances are we will never see one again. The only nations with any form a a serious navy, USA, UK, RUSSIA are all freinds. Just by the nature of current war they aren't going to happen. You will never see 2 battle ships going at it again. The navy is a mobile launching platform. Launch planes and missles.
There is almost nothing a ship has to worry about. Most any attack will be twarted before it can do anything.
You want us to pick fair fights? with who, the UK russia, why would we they are are freinds. The nations we have to worry about don't have much to phase us with. We arn't going to not attack a country for what ever reason because they can't fight back. Do you want us to give them some of our weapons to even the playing feild and give them some bases in the US and canada to give them a head start?
Personaly I prefer just not getting in wars, but they happen.
The president also has a consumer confidence factor. When people are confident about the president and feel good about how he/she is doing they usualy spend more and in general the economy does much better. Everyone felt good about things in the clinton years, that helped things alot. Look at 2000 as it looked like a GWB might win the economy headed south. There is a very defind tread of his doings in polls and the economic slide. The economy will be shit till it is gone since no one, and for good reason has any faith in him being able to make it any better. Just the fact he thinks tax cuts would help things shows he is clueless. Anyone who can look at economic history knows tax cuts are the worste thing you can do.
The president plays a big part in the economy, via what i said above and through the process of their actions, wars, taxes policy, buget cuts... all play into consumer minds and economic issues and are things he has control over in one form or another.
"They would do better to put the money into smaller "airstrip" size carriers (UK HMS Invincible) instead of the "airfields" (USS Nimitz, etc) they have."
Well simply, the US doesn't want Aircraft carriers with dumb little ramps at the end. Besides if your going to build one you might as well build one to handle all ones needs. We do have ships that are platforms for verticle takeoff vehicles.
The brits can get away with the small ships since they largely use Harriers (sp). The also don't have the amount not even have the size of planes the US launches off their carriers.
There is little that is bad about the big carriers, unless your going sight seeing in a small harbor. Fuel isn't much an issue, so it takes an extra few pounds of uranium every 20 years, not a big deal. Also the military gets there money no matter what they do. If they didn't spend it on a carrier it would go to other weapons, it's not going to get used for anything else if they don't use it.
"Okay, i gotta know, what's the highest known G force _involuntarily_ encountered by a human, and how exactly did it happen? "
I belive some race car drivers have experianced 100 G's in crashes. Ones where the slammed into the outer wall at nearly full speed (ala 200mph). I remember some TLC or discovery special investigating how a driver survived such a crash.
10 G's isn't to bad. Jet fighter pilots can pull 4-5 G's momentarily before blacking out. Those 10 G's would be very very short, not like holding a high speed turn for a while. I think some roller coasters pull 3-4 G's in some turns as well.
I agree reliability is great. Also the idea of stuff that will last makes me happy. I decided not to go for the Al frame cause of fatique. At the same time my bike is heavy, and I already weight enough. I do often wish when going up a hill to have less weight. I think the desision between the 2 is very hard. But in the end I think being able to ride my bike home is better then carrying it home.
" I'm writing this/. post from a 700MHz Celeron. I put my box through *much* heavier usage than a typical business user. I frequently surf the web in mozilla while my software compiles with OpenWriter and Gimp open on other desktops. I've sometimes wanted more RAM (I have 192Mb) but I don't need a faster chip.
OTOH, I doubt much cheaper than a 2.0GHz Celeron is still made, except for the Via chips without hardware floating point."
Hah, when i first read the 700 i was thinking bus speed. My how things have changed. But I know what it's like, i ran a PII 400 with no problem. I upgrade cause i wanted differant computer and needed more CPU for some things.
Also you're correct. low end is in the 2 ghz range anymore cause they don't make the slower ones. and the 2ghz celeron ain't much more expensive then a much much slower older chip. few bucks can get you 1500 more mhz.
The paper clip is very efficient do to it's well integrated design. It takes very little cycles. It's when you try to kill it you suck up cpu as you go through menus and do everything you can to kill it.
OK, well i have to say in office XP one click and he's gone for good. But i know in previous releases he was a bitch, or a bubble, or a dog....
Don't know about that. If I remember correctly Helios was built mainly from carbon fiber. It used A few main Carbon fiber peices and stretched fabric material over them. The plan flexed a great deal, it had to or it would snap. If anything it might have failed because it didn't have enough flex. When the thing flies it looks almost like a U though not as extreme. When it hit turbulance it flexed all over so as to not break. If I had to guess the hooked up something wrong like a bolt and it broke in rough air. Or maybe they didn't account for the pressure differance with altitude for the fuel cell system on some part and it burst and that was the end of the game. This would be easy to do since people take atmospheric pressure for granted and only think about their hoses from the standpoint of the inside pressure. remove 15 psi/ 101 KPa from the outside and your relitive presure goes up and kaboom. The would have used as light of stuff as possible so they might not have had enough margin or error. Even on one little overlooked part. It only takes a mistake on one part. Or maybe they simply blew up the fuel cell stack, or something froze and cracked.
"The Honda Insight DID in fact hit the market before any other hybrid vehicle in the USA. And it got rave reviews, and continues to get rave reviews. Admittedly, most people don't like the aesthetics that much, but I think the novelty appeal appeases most owners anyway."
In the US but the prius was out first by years in japan. Also the insight is a very mild hybrid, so its not the best thing to use for this example, but since it is a ugly little car that few people would want it makes a good example for this. Also it was only out in the us a short bit before the prius.
"GM released the Impact as the Saturn EV1, even though it was expensive, somewhat short on mileage, and somewhat experimental, and they still found a market for the lease program. Their success with simply getting them on the road helped to prototype technologies for newer cars, and it at least gave them some experience with how the technology behaved once implemented on a relatively decent scale."
First the EV1 was sold as the GM EV1, the first and only car to carry the GM name. The program was a huge failure. GM spent 1 billion dollars on it. They built 1 thousand cars. So think about how much each car cost them, then that they were leasing them for almost normal lease prices. GM lost a crap load of money on it just to come to the same conclusion everyone knew before hand, EV's are a waste.There was never a market for them, the range was only acceptable to a few people.
" Simply making them available would be a good start."
No it would not. When fuel cells come to market if they do which i don't see for the forseeable future (IE a decade) they have to come out and work perfect and be there for everyone. If 1 company comes out before everyone else with them and their cars have proplems or are simply not something people want the whole market is shot. It would be like GM's half ass attempts at bring Diesel cars out in the 70's the cars sucked so bad the market in the US was destroyed from there after. When hybrids started coming everyone new they had to suceed. Thats why their developement took so long. The prius is said to be way over built cause they couldn't chance it breaking. Ford is spending years upon years tuning the Hybrid escape to ensure no problems. Imaging if the Honda insight made it to market first, the image of hybrids would have been ruined. People would think a small impractical ugly car every time someone said hybrid and wouldn't like the idea of hybrids. Worse yet imagine if the insight had problems and needed repair all the time, the market would be destroyed. Thats why automakers when it comes to a big switch make such switches on cars people want, and make sure as heck it aint going to fail. You don't ever see to much new tech introduced on econbox/cheap cars do you. If they did people wouldn't want it becuase it would be seen as crap.
The fuel cell industry can't handle someone trying to just get fuel celled cars to market and hoping to work the bugs out later. If someone does that they will probably fail. As is the fuel cell car industry is seeing their odds for happening twindle, hybrids using IC engines, and or Hyrdrogen powered IC engine cars are looking better and better as the realities of the fuel cell cars come more aparent
"Relatively straight and flat interstate, cruise control set at 70, I slowly start to overtake a vehicle going 69 or 68mph"
You're the type of driver that pisses off the mass population. What you just described is one of the reasons cruise control needs to be banned. It takes you forever to make that pass. In the mean time all the traffic behind you is getting jammed up because both lanes are blocked. You are suppose to get around cars quickly even on the highway. Otherwise congestion occurs. A curtious driver would accel enough to get around the other car quickly then go to their normal speed. In PA it's now ilegal to take to long to pass a car, if you don't do it quick enough your considered to be blocking the passing lane or just hogging it and you will get ticketed, you must over take a car rapidly. If there is only a 1 mph diff between you, and often it's less when you get dueling cruise controls, it will take you a long time to pass. Fortently there is now cops that can point out this problem to you personaly.
"And if *you* would RTFwebsite, you'd find that two of the vehicles (previously fuel cell vehicles-- donator of cells got out of the business) are hydrogen IC engines, not "smaller oil burners". At least one vehicle used urea injection systems to cut emissions. At least one vehicle used titanium brake pads. Several vehicles used biodiesel."
Thank you for responding to the poster. to clear a few things.
3 teams had urea injection systems working. My school PSU was one. Also we used Titanium Brake rotors, not pads. All the diesel teams were required to run B35. In the past we ran LSD but to reduce the effort in setting things up the officials standardized on B35 only.
Ford has put a ton of money into this competition. We were using one of their main test facilities for 2 weeks, thats not cheap to do. I can't thank them enough for how much they helped.
"f you're buying an SUV you've already shown you don't care about the environment. Ford would be more likely to use this on cars than on SUVs."
You very much need to be beat over the head with a baseball bat. Many Many people people who care about the environment buy SUV's. Guess what, SUV's help the environment to. 1 SUV can carry what it would take many econo boxes to carry. I can fit7 people comfortably in a explorer, I can barly fit myself in a civic. And at best 4 people. An explorer like many SUV's meets LEV. The same as the econo box. LEV is not percentage, it's an amount. 1 explorer can be driving down the road producing the emissions of 1 econobox, but to move the same amount of people or stuff it takes 2-3 or more econoboxes. So now the explorer is putting out 2-3x less emissions then the small car solution.
Also SUV's arn't that bad mileage wish. Sure if you compair a suburban to a insight it's bad. But take your normal SUV like and explorer or smaller and compair it to a normal midsize car. the differance it a few MPG.
then there is also the practicality issues that make an SUV a good choice.
People who make statements like you do don't know shit.
Also ford is planning to use this technology on SUV's. The have the hybrid escape coming out for fleet use at the end of the year.
"Why then did Ford and other automakers suddenly announce fuel-cell cars, and hybrids? Because someone actually started selling hybrids to the American public - cars that weren't styled too strangely or overpriced (due to low production volume.) Can you say fear of the Japanese again? Kudos to Toyota and Honda for actually putting THEIR money where the market is. Boo on Ford for announcing a hybrid Escape well over a year ago, and (evidently) pushing the release date back by another year... AGAIN.
SUVs retail for 20k to 40k. Your typical hybrid retails for around 20k to 40k. A hybrid Ford Escape that gets 40mpg for between 20k and 40k is definitely doable... and there's definitely a market for them. Standardizing hybrid-electric drives would go a long way to lowering the cost per unit. People want these kinds of cars. But they can't buy what isn't on the market, and no American auto maker is willing to upset a good deal and cannabalize their existing sales of pure gas autos. It's much cheaper for them to spend money on PR and lawyers than it is for them to implement a conversion and face competition in a new market"
There was no suddeness at all about plans for hybrids. All companies have been working on them for a long time. Just because one company gets one to market first doesn't mean when the others say their going to be selling hybrids too it's because of the first company. Companies like ford have been at this for longer then anyone.
I want to escape to come out soon to, but I also want it to be a sucess and work great. so more time spent in developement is a great thing. Having been around it I can say it will be great.
Stop with your Japan is great American car makers are evil crazyness. They are all working at it. They all have been working at it for some time.
"Because they already built an 80MPG Taurus sedan: tied for first place in the 1999 competition and won first place hands down in the 2000 competition."
West Virgina and Maryland won in 2000, not wisconsin
UC davis in 2001
Wisconsin won in 2002, and not hands down. They one overall with a good margin, but that was do to their report and oral presentation. In actualy competition points they did not to much differant then the rest of the top 6, the might have not even one if not for those points, I would have to check.
Slashdot Mirror
I think people missed the whole point of these cameras intirely. By having cameras if and when something happens there is something to show what heppened. As it was i was thinking the other day they need cameras with live feeds to the ground and a screen in the cockpit. If someone tries to do something both the pilots know and the ground.
On top of this think about if the plane crashes. Currently we have nearly worthless flight recorders. Having tape of what happened on the plane would be great. One could see if it was an explosion from somes shoes or a fuel tank blowing up or the wing flew off. Eliminate tons of questions.
There is no privacy issues here. Your on private property. They can do what they want. It not like you should be doing anything that you wouldn't want people to know about. Your on a god damn plane sitting with a few hundred people. If there is something you would do on that plane sitting there that doesn't bother you for all those passangers to see but does for it to be on tape i'm really curious what it would be.
Why must people turn everything into a privacy invasion when it's not anything close to being that and is simple a good thing.
hey, person got lucky, something happened on a bus at my school once and they went to the tape from the fake looking camera box and the person got in deep shit.
Stop trolling, you can put the recovery cd in and it will fix windows and everything is fine. You can update windows and your apps are fine, unless the app has an issue with the latest version. Nothing you said is valid.
I basicly picked a randomly low number. But it's not to far off. I never said .01% of people run linux. That was the percentage of people buying that laptop.
.75% of the world runs linux, this is for sure a overly high number. out of them you have to start thinking how many are buying a toshiba laptop. I'm going to say not many are buying laptops at all. I very much doubt my number was very off. There aparently is 1 person doing it. if toshiba sells 100,000 of these things, which would be impressive, I wouldn't expect more then a dozen people to be running linux on them.
Lets say
Linux is no where as popular as slashdot people want to think. It's simply the truth, it's off the radar on any form of readings. It's less then 1% And the majority of linux installs are on servers and home made PCs.
Why do people think this is some sneaky move, and look at MS. It's simple WinXP pro, for example, is 1.6gig installed, thats almost a gig bigger then a normal disk. So install takes a long time as it resets everything up. Having it on a dvd not compressed and allready set up makes perfect sense. It's for a laptop, very static hardware. For a regular user being able to put a disk in and it copys everything over and your good to go is a great thing. I also bet this was more of toshiba idea then MS's. They arn't building these things with the intent of dual boot, just doesn't make sense to worry about something 0.01% of those who buy one will do. Why not make it nicer for the 99.99 percent that will use it like normal.
Also to other, I don't think any PC maker has included a straight off the shelf version of windows in nearly a decade. No computer I have bought or seen bought by someone had a true real version of windows with it. When you buy a computer from any OEM it comes with a quasi version of windows. This is no differant. Except if the HD crahses of have to re-install you can now do it in a few minutes instead of over an hour.
Someone needs to step outside and fast, get some fresh air and catch up on the world. He may soon be eating Mac-n-cheese and chopped up hot dogs 5 times a day and never get out of his PJs.
so there would be 2 manuafactures. 1 running US midsize ICBM, and the other running Russian midsize ICBM's . Maybe in time some other countries might get in.
:)
All rockets are rear wheel drive if you will. Don't know if they are 2 door. Might be tight getting the roll cage in. Definitly going to have stick rules on the spoilers, though they may have to lift the ban on movable spoilers.
Be real curious to see post race burnouts. Though it sucks to be someone who did a mid or pre race burnout
"Thats not a reset, thats game over."
it's not game over, the universe will survive, just not our board. In time a new universe will pop back up like before, if it was reset. or another planet would reform and the game would slowly come back, though good chance it would be a bit differant game play.
"Thats just it, theres no reset button."
Get enough nukes, some wire and a big switch and one can make a reset button for real life.
The bummer is the boot time after the reset is really long.
"The fact that our (US) military does not pay that much attention to survivability of ships is a sign of a trend: we are now focused on smacking around those weaker than ourselves (Iraq, Afghanistan) rather than fighting an even battle (WW2)."
The navy is not concerned about sea battles. Chances are we will never see one again. The only nations with any form a a serious navy, USA, UK, RUSSIA are all freinds. Just by the nature of current war they aren't going to happen. You will never see 2 battle ships going at it again. The navy is a mobile launching platform. Launch planes and missles.
There is almost nothing a ship has to worry about. Most any attack will be twarted before it can do anything.
You want us to pick fair fights? with who, the UK russia, why would we they are are freinds. The nations we have to worry about don't have much to phase us with. We arn't going to not attack a country for what ever reason because they can't fight back. Do you want us to give them some of our weapons to even the playing feild and give them some bases in the US and canada to give them a head start?
Personaly I prefer just not getting in wars, but they happen.
The president also has a consumer confidence factor. When people are confident about the president and feel good about how he/she is doing they usualy spend more and in general the economy does much better. Everyone felt good about things in the clinton years, that helped things alot. Look at 2000 as it looked like a GWB might win the economy headed south. There is a very defind tread of his doings in polls and the economic slide. The economy will be shit till it is gone since no one, and for good reason has any faith in him being able to make it any better. Just the fact he thinks tax cuts would help things shows he is clueless. Anyone who can look at economic history knows tax cuts are the worste thing you can do.
The president plays a big part in the economy, via what i said above and through the process of their actions, wars, taxes policy, buget cuts... all play into consumer minds and economic issues and are things he has control over in one form or another.
"They would do better to put the money into smaller "airstrip" size carriers (UK HMS Invincible) instead of the "airfields" (USS Nimitz, etc) they have."
Well simply, the US doesn't want Aircraft carriers with dumb little ramps at the end. Besides if your going to build one you might as well build one to handle all ones needs. We do have ships that are platforms for verticle takeoff vehicles.
The brits can get away with the small ships since they largely use Harriers (sp). The also don't have the amount not even have the size of planes the US launches off their carriers.
There is little that is bad about the big carriers, unless your going sight seeing in a small harbor. Fuel isn't much an issue, so it takes an extra few pounds of uranium every 20 years, not a big deal. Also the military gets there money no matter what they do. If they didn't spend it on a carrier it would go to other weapons, it's not going to get used for anything else if they don't use it.
"Okay, i gotta know, what's the highest known G force _involuntarily_ encountered by a human, and how exactly did it happen? "
I belive some race car drivers have experianced 100 G's in crashes. Ones where the slammed into the outer wall at nearly full speed (ala 200mph). I remember some TLC or discovery special investigating how a driver survived such a crash.
10 G's isn't to bad. Jet fighter pilots can pull 4-5 G's momentarily before blacking out. Those 10 G's would be very very short, not like holding a high speed turn for a while. I think some roller coasters pull 3-4 G's in some turns as well.
I agree reliability is great. Also the idea of stuff that will last makes me happy. I decided not to go for the Al frame cause of fatique. At the same time my bike is heavy, and I already weight enough. I do often wish when going up a hill to have less weight. I think the desision between the 2 is very hard. But in the end I think being able to ride my bike home is better then carrying it home.
" I'm writing this /. post from a 700MHz Celeron. I put my box through *much* heavier usage than a typical business user. I frequently surf the web in mozilla while my software compiles with OpenWriter and Gimp open on other desktops. I've sometimes wanted more RAM (I have 192Mb) but I don't need a faster chip.
OTOH, I doubt much cheaper than a 2.0GHz Celeron is still made, except for the Via chips without hardware floating point."
Hah, when i first read the 700 i was thinking bus speed. My how things have changed. But I know what it's like, i ran a PII 400 with no problem. I upgrade cause i wanted differant computer and needed more CPU for some things.
Also you're correct. low end is in the 2 ghz range anymore cause they don't make the slower ones. and the 2ghz celeron ain't much more expensive then a much much slower older chip. few bucks can get you 1500 more mhz.
" That paperclip needs a lot of CPU cycles."
The paper clip is very efficient do to it's well integrated design. It takes very little cycles. It's when you try to kill it you suck up cpu as you go through menus and do everything you can to kill it.
OK, well i have to say in office XP one click and he's gone for good. But i know in previous releases he was a bitch, or a bubble, or a dog....
" And the next one won't be as flimsy."
Don't know about that. If I remember correctly Helios was built mainly from carbon fiber. It used A few main Carbon fiber peices and stretched fabric material over them. The plan flexed a great deal, it had to or it would snap. If anything it might have failed because it didn't have enough flex. When the thing flies it looks almost like a U though not as extreme. When it hit turbulance it flexed all over so as to not break. If I had to guess the hooked up something wrong like a bolt and it broke in rough air. Or maybe they didn't account for the pressure differance with altitude for the fuel cell system on some part and it burst and that was the end of the game. This would be easy to do since people take atmospheric pressure for granted and only think about their hoses from the standpoint of the inside pressure. remove 15 psi/ 101 KPa from the outside and your relitive presure goes up and kaboom. The would have used as light of stuff as possible so they might not have had enough margin or error. Even on one little overlooked part. It only takes a mistake on one part. Or maybe they simply blew up the fuel cell stack, or something froze and cracked.
Shit happens.
Belive me I know this, I have been working on hybrids for years :)
"The Honda Insight DID in fact hit the market before any other hybrid vehicle in the USA. And it got rave reviews, and continues to get rave reviews. Admittedly, most people don't like the aesthetics that much, but I think the novelty appeal appeases most owners anyway."
In the US but the prius was out first by years in japan. Also the insight is a very mild hybrid, so its not the best thing to use for this example, but since it is a ugly little car that few people would want it makes a good example for this. Also it was only out in the us a short bit before the prius.
"GM released the Impact as the Saturn EV1, even though it was expensive, somewhat short on mileage, and somewhat experimental, and they still found a market for the lease program. Their success with simply getting them on the road helped to prototype technologies for newer cars, and it at least gave them some experience with how the technology behaved once implemented on a relatively decent scale."
First the EV1 was sold as the GM EV1, the first and only car to carry the GM name. The program was a huge failure. GM spent 1 billion dollars on it. They built 1 thousand cars. So think about how much each car cost them, then that they were leasing them for almost normal lease prices. GM lost a crap load of money on it just to come to the same conclusion everyone knew before hand, EV's are a waste.There was never a market for them, the range was only acceptable to a few people.
" Simply making them available would be a good start."
No it would not. When fuel cells come to market if they do which i don't see for the forseeable future (IE a decade) they have to come out and work perfect and be there for everyone. If 1 company comes out before everyone else with them and their cars have proplems or are simply not something people want the whole market is shot. It would be like GM's half ass attempts at bring Diesel cars out in the 70's the cars sucked so bad the market in the US was destroyed from there after. When hybrids started coming everyone new they had to suceed. Thats why their developement took so long. The prius is said to be way over built cause they couldn't chance it breaking. Ford is spending years upon years tuning the Hybrid escape to ensure no problems. Imaging if the Honda insight made it to market first, the image of hybrids would have been ruined. People would think a small impractical ugly car every time someone said hybrid and wouldn't like the idea of hybrids. Worse yet imagine if the insight had problems and needed repair all the time, the market would be destroyed. Thats why automakers when it comes to a big switch make such switches on cars people want, and make sure as heck it aint going to fail. You don't ever see to much new tech introduced on econbox/cheap cars do you. If they did people wouldn't want it becuase it would be seen as crap.
The fuel cell industry can't handle someone trying to just get fuel celled cars to market and hoping to work the bugs out later. If someone does that they will probably fail. As is the fuel cell car industry is seeing their odds for happening twindle, hybrids using IC engines, and or Hyrdrogen powered IC engine cars are looking better and better as the realities of the fuel cell cars come more aparent
"Relatively straight and flat interstate, cruise control set at 70, I slowly start to overtake a vehicle going 69 or 68mph"
You're the type of driver that pisses off the mass population. What you just described is one of the reasons cruise control needs to be banned. It takes you forever to make that pass. In the mean time all the traffic behind you is getting jammed up because both lanes are blocked. You are suppose to get around cars quickly even on the highway. Otherwise congestion occurs. A curtious driver would accel enough to get around the other car quickly then go to their normal speed. In PA it's now ilegal to take to long to pass a car, if you don't do it quick enough your considered to be blocking the passing lane or just hogging it and you will get ticketed, you must over take a car rapidly. If there is only a 1 mph diff between you, and often it's less when you get dueling cruise controls, it will take you a long time to pass. Fortently there is now cops that can point out this problem to you personaly.
"And if *you* would RTFwebsite, you'd find that two of the vehicles (previously fuel cell vehicles-- donator of cells got out of the business) are hydrogen IC engines, not "smaller oil burners". At least one vehicle used urea injection systems to cut emissions. At least one vehicle used titanium brake pads. Several vehicles used biodiesel."
Thank you for responding to the poster. to clear a few things.
3 teams had urea injection systems working. My school PSU was one. Also we used Titanium Brake rotors, not pads. All the diesel teams were required to run B35. In the past we ran LSD but to reduce the effort in setting things up the officials standardized on B35 only.
Ford has put a ton of money into this competition. We were using one of their main test facilities for 2 weeks, thats not cheap to do. I can't thank them enough for how much they helped.
"f you're buying an SUV you've already shown you don't care about the environment. Ford would be more likely to use this on cars than on SUVs."
You very much need to be beat over the head with a baseball bat. Many Many people people who care about the environment buy SUV's. Guess what, SUV's help the environment to. 1 SUV can carry what it would take many econo boxes to carry. I can fit7 people comfortably in a explorer, I can barly fit myself in a civic. And at best 4 people. An explorer like many SUV's meets LEV. The same as the econo box. LEV is not percentage, it's an amount. 1 explorer can be driving down the road producing the emissions of 1 econobox, but to move the same amount of people or stuff it takes 2-3 or more econoboxes. So now the explorer is putting out 2-3x less emissions then the small car solution.
Also SUV's arn't that bad mileage wish. Sure if you compair a suburban to a insight it's bad. But take your normal SUV like and explorer or smaller and compair it to a normal midsize car. the differance it a few MPG.
then there is also the practicality issues that make an SUV a good choice.
People who make statements like you do don't know shit.
Also ford is planning to use this technology on SUV's. The have the hybrid escape coming out for fleet use at the end of the year.
"Why then did Ford and other automakers suddenly announce fuel-cell cars, and hybrids? Because someone actually started selling hybrids to the American public - cars that weren't styled too strangely or overpriced (due to low production volume.) Can you say fear of the Japanese again? Kudos to Toyota and Honda for actually putting THEIR money where the market is. Boo on Ford for announcing a hybrid Escape well over a year ago, and (evidently) pushing the release date back by another year... AGAIN.
SUVs retail for 20k to 40k. Your typical hybrid retails for around 20k to 40k. A hybrid Ford Escape that gets 40mpg for between 20k and 40k is definitely doable... and there's definitely a market for them. Standardizing hybrid-electric drives would go a long way to lowering the cost per unit. People want these kinds of cars. But they can't buy what isn't on the market, and no American auto maker is willing to upset a good deal and cannabalize their existing sales of pure gas autos. It's much cheaper for them to spend money on PR and lawyers than it is for them to implement a conversion and face competition in a new market"
There was no suddeness at all about plans for hybrids. All companies have been working on them for a long time. Just because one company gets one to market first doesn't mean when the others say their going to be selling hybrids too it's because of the first company. Companies like ford have been at this for longer then anyone.
I want to escape to come out soon to, but I also want it to be a sucess and work great. so more time spent in developement is a great thing. Having been around it I can say it will be great.
Stop with your Japan is great American car makers are evil crazyness. They are all working at it. They all have been working at it for some time.
"Because they already built an 80MPG Taurus sedan: tied for first place in the 1999 competition and won first place hands down in the 2000 competition."
West Virgina and Maryland won in 2000, not wisconsin
UC davis in 2001
Wisconsin won in 2002, and not hands down. They one overall with a good margin, but that was do to their report and oral presentation. In actualy competition points they did not to much differant then the rest of the top 6, the might have not even one if not for those points, I would have to check.