So you don't like your food to taste good? Smoking and pickling can add substantial flavor to food. Jams and jellies and other products that are canned are fantastic. Canning does not require preservatives as it was developed as a way of storing foods aseptically. If you enjoy BBQ then you are enjoying the benefits of smoking. Preservation methods often have awesome side benefits in making food taste good. Cured meats, pickled vegetables, canned fruits, salting, etc all result in some pretty awesome food products. People developed those techniques out of necessity and elevated them to an art form.
Oh, and starvation is worse than any side effect of any preservation method.
I think they are possibly right but didn't generalize it enough. Refrigeration is fundamentally the same technology as air conditioning. Both just move heat from one room to another. (a small room in the case of refrigeration) And air conditioning is almost entirely responsible for the migration of huge numbers of people south and huge demographic changes. Same technology with different application and similarly huge results.
So the answer is correct if you include air conditioning as a subset of refrigeration (or vice-versa).
This is true, for now... but consider what happens over time: every time a computer does something sufficiently poorly (i.e. badly enough to cause an accident), there will be a full black-box recording and log of the conditions and operations that led up to the accident. The car company's programmers will go over the situation with a fine-toothed comb to understand what happened, and update the software to handle that situation better in the future.
They've been doing that for decades in aviation and yet we still require humans in the cockpit. We've been able to automate most flights for some time now but there is a demonstrable benefit to having a human pilot involved in many cases. You are quite correct that over time it will get better but I think the time where a computer only system outperforms a computer/human system will be a long way off.
(Meanwhile, human beings will continue to drive at more or less their present skill level, since they don't learn much from each others' mistakes)
That does not have to be the case. The reason people don't become better drivers is because there is no requirement for them to be better. Getting a driver's license is ludicrously easy when in reality it should be much harder to get and maintain like a pilot's license. People get better when you train them to be better. But we just give a few classes to a teenager, a perfunctory test and then proclaim them ready to drive safely until the time they die. And because of that many of them die much sooner than they might otherwise. There are a lot of people on the road who have NO business driving a motor vehicle. I've got a few in my family.
We also aren't very harsh on punishing drivers who do things that are known to be dangerous. If I'm flying a plane and I'm observed doing something stupid the FAA will come down on me (rightly) like a ton of bricks. We're generally much softer on drivers and I think to our detriment.
Flying is in some respects much simpler than driving; and, auto-pilots can now take off, cruise, and land.
Yes it can but there remain circumstances where a human pilot can outperform the autopilot. Particularly in weird corner cases where something truly unpredictable has happened. There is no computer we have that currently can match the problem solving prowess of a well trained human in many circumstances. I would expect the corner cases to get rarer over time but I doubt they'll go away entirely any time soon.
The notion that humans will actually react better than an automated system in an emergency seems backwards to me.
I think you'll be able to find cases where humans react better and cases where computers work better. I also expect that the cases where humans work better will be heavily correlated with driver skill. I think a well designed system with computers and people working together will probably work better than either independently.
I think the biggest improvement computers will provide is for impaired drivers (read drunk/distracted). A huge percentage of accidents are due to impaired drivers.
If you had a 40K Octane on your desk, then you had a very low-end Octane. You were probably a code monkey, right??
Nope. Used it for discrete event simulation and 3D modeling. Some VR work as well. All automotive engineering related. We also had an SGI Onyx as well as an Origin 2000 in my department as well. By the time I left that job you could get a desktop PC workstation for $6K that was faster for most tasks. I liked SGI hardware but it was ludicrously overpriced.
And let's be honest, a $40k processor isn't really going to drive up the price of the project very much.
Hell, 15 years ago that was the price of a Silicon Graphics Octane workstation which I had on my desk. You are quite correct that while $40K is a lot of money, it isn't really that much compared to the budgets of the projects such chips get used for. The New Horizons mission cost about $700 million if memory serves. For a project that you have to get right the first time, $40K for a proven processor is kind of a steal actually.
NASA spent something like 1.2 billion dollars on a pen that can write in space when the Russians just used pencils.
No, NASA did not spend billions on a pen and neither the Russians nor NASA use pencils in space. Broken pencil leads (actually graphite) would be a hazard and not permitted on spaceflights. NASA never spent a penny on developing a pen that would work in space.
This is the advantage of a centrally-managed economy. This type of economic system is more efficient, resistant to fraud, and is much more agile than having a huge, lumbering military-industrial complex.
HAHAHAHAHAHAH.... Efficient and resistant to fraud? Best laugh I've had all day.
This is why China will eat the US's lunch in a just a few years.
Yeah, having 5X the population and low labor costs has nothing to do with China's success... [/sarcasm]
Why not just use an off-the-shelf processor and put the PCBs in shielded, shock mounted enclosures?
Several reasons. 1) Weight matters. Adding shielding and enclosures adds weight and thus cost. Sometimes the cost of the component is dwarfed by the cost to launch said component. 2) Off the shelf hardware doesn't always work for applications like these for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's fine but not always. 3) A lot of this stuff was developed a LONG time ago and has to work with a lot of legacy systems. Off the shelf solutions don't always work for some of the problems they face. 4) Once they have a proven design, it is a non-trivial task to get a new piece of hardware qualified.
If you're away at a hotel, then they'll have chargers.
Someday hopefully but that day is years in the future. Until then we'll have to do things similar to how we do them now. I think the infrastructure build out can be relatively gradual fortunately.
It you're away staying at someone's home then it'll charge overnight from a domestic power socket.
If they are ok with that. Doesn't work if they live in an apartment or someplace like Manhattan.
(OK not all hotels have chargers yet. But they will soon enough, just as they all have wifi, because they'll lose trade without it.)
Not really the same. Wifi can be added to a hotel pretty easily by comparison. Charging stations are FAR more expensive and require ripping up pavement in a lot of cases. I think in the long term you are right but we're probably talking 10-15 years from now minimum for widespread uptake.
If you had all those problems with that brand, an expensive and extensive problem spanning multiple vehicles, then why did you keep buying that brand?
I didn't. The vehicles were mostly hand me down vehicles (or family deals) from family members who were VW enthusiasts. (my father particularly) I didn't have enough money at the time to be especially choosy. And to be fair they were generally pretty good vehicles aside from spending more time in the shop than I prefer. I have particularly fond memories of my 85 Scirocco which was a pretty fun car to drive. Of course once I had enough money to buy my own vehicles I haven't touched a VW since. My recent purchases were Honda, Nissan, Mercedes, Saturn, Ford. The only VWs that piqued my interest at all were (ironically) the diesels and that was mostly for the engine rather than the rest of the car.
I do own a sort-of-rare VW. I have what is known as a Quantum 5 wagon and it's fun but I don't take it out as much as I should
That's just another badge for an early version of the second gen Passat. Was badged the Quantum in North America but it was a Passat or a Santana in other markets. I kept my Scirocco far longer than I should have for similar reasons. Eventually the brakes froze like they will with any vehicles that sits too long and I sold it.
Virtually no one drives a car anything approaching 700 miles in a day.
Has nothing to do with driving 700 miles in a day. It has to do with time required to refuel. The longer it takes to refuel the longer the range on electric vehicles will have to be to make them practical for long distance travel. Don't get too wrapped up in the exact numbers - those are just guesses anyway. If it takes 2 hours to recharge your car, you're not going to want to do that daily if you are away from home. It's too inconvenient. If it is just 15 minutes your range can be less because the drive time to refuel time ratio is smaller. So you'll want enough range that you don't have to worry about it. Maybe that number is 500, maybe it is 800. Doesn't really matter. We're already seeing early prototypes of commercial EVs with over 400 mile ranges and Tesla has been talking about ranges long and more than that in the not distant future.
the issue with hydrogen is compressing and cooling a tank to keep hydrogen liquid is very heavy, that is why storing hydrogen in Magnesium hydride is attractive,
Magnisium hydride is just 8% hydrogen by mass. You have to tote around a huge amount of heavy magnesium so you lose whatever advantage in specific energy you had with hydrogen. No, that will most certainly NOT be the solution because it isn't any better than existing batteries.
To dialogue more cooperatively: I do believe in the possibility of a system that would somehow incentivize creators without pretending it's possible to own a thought, everywhere in the universe simultaneously forever.
So what is your system? You believe it is possible so either give up the details or concede that you are basically arguing in favor of patents. Just "believing in the possibility" is meaningless. This is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. Nobody has actual ideas that improve things. You either get modest improvements to the status quo patent system or you get people wanting to abolish all patents with no care as to the consequences of doing that. Unless you have a better way to deal with the free rider problem you aren't improving things and abolishing patents (even with all their problems) will demonstrably not improve people's economic lives overall.
You must not have been looking at the same quality surveys then.. 6 out of the top 10 car models in this satisfaction survey from last year are VW or one of its brands (Skoda):
You right I wasn't. I was looking at ones that measure RELIABILITY like this which have VW firmly in the bottom half. Same deal with Consumer Reports and plenty of others. The survey you cited measures customer satisfaction, not reliability. Very different. (Plus how do you get 6 of the top 10 and still not manage to be the top brand?)
Really? We're going straight for the absurdly unlikely sci-fi answer? That's like the people who claim UFOs must be of alien origin conveniently forgetting what the U in UFO stands for.
There's a saying that when you hear the sound of hoofs you should be thinking horses, not zebras. You can include it on the list of possibilities but it should be somewhere near the bottom.
To be fair, European-market Volkswagens tend to be built a lot better than their North-American market counterparts.
I've owned plenty of VWs that were built in Europe and I stand by my statement that their reliability isn't good. I don't think the boat ride reduces reliability so I'm unconvinced that VWs quality problems are anything but engineering and occasionally build defects in most cases. I've seen no evidence that VWs built on this side of the pond are less reliable than those build in Germany. Honda and Toyota and BMW and others manage to build very reliable cars here in North America so VW doesn't have any excuse.
They are generally considerd to be among the most reliable and durable brands and they depreciate very slowly because of this reputation.
I have never seen a single quality survey in the last 20 years where VW was not near the bottom of the heap. Durable I would agree with from personal experience. Reliable? No way. The data simply doesn't support that assertion.
Americans are prepared to pay less for a new car and have very different preferences.
VW overcharges for their vehicles. Why would I pay more for a vehicle from a company with a deservedly bad reputation for reliability? The Jetta is a decent enough car but it's not better than a half a dozen of its competitors. If VW cannot be bothered to listen to local preferences and cannot fix the reliability issues then it should surprise no one that their sales aren't going to be amazing.
VW has had trouble adjusting models to North-American tastes and requirements without losing too much of the original appeal of the car, but also with local production quality and continuity.
True but that's just arrogance on their part. I've owned a lot of VWs over the years and some of their design decisions are baffling. Other manufacturers manage the trick so what's VW's excuse?
You seem to be quite sure of this... I would question as to why?
Several reasons. 1) PHEVs require minimal to no infrastructure investment to be viable. No other alternative can make that claim. 2) Fuel economy standards. PHEVs are a proven solution to the problem and the solution with the least compromise of performance. 3) Prices of batteries continues to fall and performance continues to rise. As that happens the the price of hybrid vehicles will continue to improve. 4) Performance and luxury cars already are beginning the conversion to hybrid. (See McClaren, Ferrari, BMW, Porsche, Lamborghini, etc) 5) Internal combustion engines aren't going to get much better than they already are. We are well into diminishing returns on their performance. 6) There are basically no other market-ready alternatives to improve performance. Not hydrogen, not natural gas, not pure-electric. Not yet.
Well, they DO get a lot of press... but sales? Plug in EVs of all types were less than 1% of the total light car and truck sales in the US in 2014 (it was 0.7% to be exact).
Find me another alternative fuel vehicle type that has even close to the market uptake that hybrids have. Hybrids are still relatively pricey so it's not surprising that they will take some time to gather market share but they ARE gaining market share. And they are selling. In Japan the Toyota Prius is currently the #2 selling vehicle and has been near the top for years. They're not going to take over the market tomorrow but they will become very commonplace over the next 10-15 years.
That is a rounding error, not the "coming replacement of ICE cars".
That's like saying in 1978 that personal computers are a rounding error in computer sales. It's true but it misses the point of what will happen next. Hybrids are still new and fairly expensive. But car companies will HAVE to start pushing hybrids or they will have to greatly lower the power of the vehicles they sell to meet fuel economy standards. I think the former is far more likely than the later. There is no other market ready alternative available to them. You're particularly going to see hybrids becoming standard equipment on luxury cars first and then working down the food chain into mass market cars as costs fall. It will take some years but I don't see any credible scenario where hybrids don't grab big market share.
It has more energy per unit of mass (Specific Energy) but FAR less per unit of volume (Energy Density). So unless you plan on turning it into liquid hydrogen (impractical and dangerous) or can find some alternative storage medium, it's not practical as a fuel. The chemical storage mediums we've found so far are either lab experiments or impractical for various reasons.
The future is storing hydrogen in magnesium hydride and using algae to produce hydrogen.
And your evidence for this is what exactly? You are talking about a couple of laboratory projects. Nothing that is in any danger of becoming a commercial product any time soon. Your biological solution hasn't solved the key efficiency problem plus a host of other non-trivial issues. Your storage medium is not used in an commercial product that I am aware of.
I have no principled objection to hydrogen powered vehicles but I think your optimism regarding their prospects as commercial products is unwarranted given the available evidence. If we do see commercial hydrogen powered vehicles it will not be at any kind of scale for many many years.
Disagree. There are some important differences but the basic principles of operation are little different. Suck, squish, bang, blow. They mostly differ in what sort of operation they are optimal within. Little different than an Atkinson cycle engine versus an Otto cycle engine.
Enough to make a 20-40% difference in overall car efficiency.
40%? Show me one real world example of a car with a diesel getting 40% better fuel economy than a gasoline engine of similar horsepower in the same chassis. In the real world the fuel economy advantage tends to be 10-20% for any given power output. Diesel does have some advantages but let's not overstate it.
First of all, diesel engine is much more efficient at partial or near-idle load. Idle consumption of the same car is about 1.1l/h gasoline or 0.4l/h diesel.
Diesel is generally better at any steady state than most gasoline engines, not just idle. But much driving is not in steady state so the real world advantage is often less clear for many use cases.
Diesel has better torque distribution. Adding the mass of the battery to a diesel car generally has more effect than optimizing the engine load.
And electrics have still better torque distribution than diesel. Basically full torque immediately from a dead stop. Plus the electric motor provides additional power to deal with the battery weight.
Let me put it to you this way. There is a reason the newest supercars are coming as hybrids. It allows them to optimize performance in ways that are not possible with gasoline or electric alone. It is very reasonable to suppose that there will be use cases where a diesel hybrid will make sense for exactly the same reasons.
Their length unit is based on a physical cylinder of metal.
Not it is not and has not been since the 1960s. The metre is currently defined as the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second.
The Phaeton was sold in the US when it was introduced. However, the sales of the $70K VW were not good so they decided to withdraw it from the US Market.
That's because they sold it under the wrong brand. It should have been an Audi vehicle here in the US. NOBODY thinks of VW as a luxury brand. The Phaeton was a darn good car but VW flunked marketing 101 in selling it. The badge on the front matters when it comes to luxury vehicles. That's the same reason Toyota, Honda and Nissan sell their luxury stuff under Lexus, Acura and Infiniti brands here in the US.
Really? Every locomotive in use today is a diesel electric hybrid. Frankly I think a diesel hybrid would make a lot of sense for many applications, particularly large trucks. Electric motors are great for around town stop/start traffic where diesels aren't so hot and diesels are great for steady state long distance driving (like highways) where electric motors aren't so hot. Their strengths are very complimentary.
I know they exist, but still the whole hybrid jazz is about overcoming problems of petrol engine the diesel just does not have.
Diesel engines are not *that* much different from gasoline engines.
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So you don't like your food to taste good? Smoking and pickling can add substantial flavor to food. Jams and jellies and other products that are canned are fantastic. Canning does not require preservatives as it was developed as a way of storing foods aseptically. If you enjoy BBQ then you are enjoying the benefits of smoking. Preservation methods often have awesome side benefits in making food taste good. Cured meats, pickled vegetables, canned fruits, salting, etc all result in some pretty awesome food products. People developed those techniques out of necessity and elevated them to an art form.
Oh, and starvation is worse than any side effect of any preservation method.
I think they are possibly right but didn't generalize it enough. Refrigeration is fundamentally the same technology as air conditioning. Both just move heat from one room to another. (a small room in the case of refrigeration) And air conditioning is almost entirely responsible for the migration of huge numbers of people south and huge demographic changes. Same technology with different application and similarly huge results.
So the answer is correct if you include air conditioning as a subset of refrigeration (or vice-versa).
This is true, for now... but consider what happens over time: every time a computer does something sufficiently poorly (i.e. badly enough to cause an accident), there will be a full black-box recording and log of the conditions and operations that led up to the accident. The car company's programmers will go over the situation with a fine-toothed comb to understand what happened, and update the software to handle that situation better in the future.
They've been doing that for decades in aviation and yet we still require humans in the cockpit. We've been able to automate most flights for some time now but there is a demonstrable benefit to having a human pilot involved in many cases. You are quite correct that over time it will get better but I think the time where a computer only system outperforms a computer/human system will be a long way off.
(Meanwhile, human beings will continue to drive at more or less their present skill level, since they don't learn much from each others' mistakes)
That does not have to be the case. The reason people don't become better drivers is because there is no requirement for them to be better. Getting a driver's license is ludicrously easy when in reality it should be much harder to get and maintain like a pilot's license. People get better when you train them to be better. But we just give a few classes to a teenager, a perfunctory test and then proclaim them ready to drive safely until the time they die. And because of that many of them die much sooner than they might otherwise. There are a lot of people on the road who have NO business driving a motor vehicle. I've got a few in my family.
We also aren't very harsh on punishing drivers who do things that are known to be dangerous. If I'm flying a plane and I'm observed doing something stupid the FAA will come down on me (rightly) like a ton of bricks. We're generally much softer on drivers and I think to our detriment.
Flying is in some respects much simpler than driving; and, auto-pilots can now take off, cruise, and land.
Yes it can but there remain circumstances where a human pilot can outperform the autopilot. Particularly in weird corner cases where something truly unpredictable has happened. There is no computer we have that currently can match the problem solving prowess of a well trained human in many circumstances. I would expect the corner cases to get rarer over time but I doubt they'll go away entirely any time soon.
The notion that humans will actually react better than an automated system in an emergency seems backwards to me.
I think you'll be able to find cases where humans react better and cases where computers work better. I also expect that the cases where humans work better will be heavily correlated with driver skill. I think a well designed system with computers and people working together will probably work better than either independently.
I think the biggest improvement computers will provide is for impaired drivers (read drunk/distracted). A huge percentage of accidents are due to impaired drivers.
If you had a 40K Octane on your desk, then you had a very low-end Octane. You were probably a code monkey, right??
Nope. Used it for discrete event simulation and 3D modeling. Some VR work as well. All automotive engineering related. We also had an SGI Onyx as well as an Origin 2000 in my department as well. By the time I left that job you could get a desktop PC workstation for $6K that was faster for most tasks. I liked SGI hardware but it was ludicrously overpriced.
And let's be honest, a $40k processor isn't really going to drive up the price of the project very much.
Hell, 15 years ago that was the price of a Silicon Graphics Octane workstation which I had on my desk. You are quite correct that while $40K is a lot of money, it isn't really that much compared to the budgets of the projects such chips get used for. The New Horizons mission cost about $700 million if memory serves. For a project that you have to get right the first time, $40K for a proven processor is kind of a steal actually.
NASA spent something like 1.2 billion dollars on a pen that can write in space when the Russians just used pencils.
No, NASA did not spend billions on a pen and neither the Russians nor NASA use pencils in space. Broken pencil leads (actually graphite) would be a hazard and not permitted on spaceflights. NASA never spent a penny on developing a pen that would work in space.
This is the advantage of a centrally-managed economy. This type of economic system is more efficient, resistant to fraud, and is much more agile than having a huge, lumbering military-industrial complex.
HAHAHAHAHAHAH.... Efficient and resistant to fraud? Best laugh I've had all day.
This is why China will eat the US's lunch in a just a few years.
Yeah, having 5X the population and low labor costs has nothing to do with China's success... [/sarcasm]
Back in the 1970s there was a big push toward metric in the US.
I know because I lived through it.
Many road signs were replaced with ones that had both US customary and metric units.
Which was the big mistake. They should have just gone ahead and gone metric. But we gave ourselves an out and couldn't be bothered to see it through.
Why not just use an off-the-shelf processor and put the PCBs in shielded, shock mounted enclosures?
Several reasons. 1) Weight matters. Adding shielding and enclosures adds weight and thus cost. Sometimes the cost of the component is dwarfed by the cost to launch said component. 2) Off the shelf hardware doesn't always work for applications like these for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's fine but not always. 3) A lot of this stuff was developed a LONG time ago and has to work with a lot of legacy systems. Off the shelf solutions don't always work for some of the problems they face. 4) Once they have a proven design, it is a non-trivial task to get a new piece of hardware qualified.
If you're away at a hotel, then they'll have chargers.
Someday hopefully but that day is years in the future. Until then we'll have to do things similar to how we do them now. I think the infrastructure build out can be relatively gradual fortunately.
It you're away staying at someone's home then it'll charge overnight from a domestic power socket.
If they are ok with that. Doesn't work if they live in an apartment or someplace like Manhattan.
(OK not all hotels have chargers yet. But they will soon enough, just as they all have wifi, because they'll lose trade without it.)
Not really the same. Wifi can be added to a hotel pretty easily by comparison. Charging stations are FAR more expensive and require ripping up pavement in a lot of cases. I think in the long term you are right but we're probably talking 10-15 years from now minimum for widespread uptake.
If you had all those problems with that brand, an expensive and extensive problem spanning multiple vehicles, then why did you keep buying that brand?
I didn't. The vehicles were mostly hand me down vehicles (or family deals) from family members who were VW enthusiasts. (my father particularly) I didn't have enough money at the time to be especially choosy. And to be fair they were generally pretty good vehicles aside from spending more time in the shop than I prefer. I have particularly fond memories of my 85 Scirocco which was a pretty fun car to drive. Of course once I had enough money to buy my own vehicles I haven't touched a VW since. My recent purchases were Honda, Nissan, Mercedes, Saturn, Ford. The only VWs that piqued my interest at all were (ironically) the diesels and that was mostly for the engine rather than the rest of the car.
I do own a sort-of-rare VW. I have what is known as a Quantum 5 wagon and it's fun but I don't take it out as much as I should
That's just another badge for an early version of the second gen Passat. Was badged the Quantum in North America but it was a Passat or a Santana in other markets. I kept my Scirocco far longer than I should have for similar reasons. Eventually the brakes froze like they will with any vehicles that sits too long and I sold it.
Virtually no one drives a car anything approaching 700 miles in a day.
Has nothing to do with driving 700 miles in a day. It has to do with time required to refuel. The longer it takes to refuel the longer the range on electric vehicles will have to be to make them practical for long distance travel. Don't get too wrapped up in the exact numbers - those are just guesses anyway. If it takes 2 hours to recharge your car, you're not going to want to do that daily if you are away from home. It's too inconvenient. If it is just 15 minutes your range can be less because the drive time to refuel time ratio is smaller. So you'll want enough range that you don't have to worry about it. Maybe that number is 500, maybe it is 800. Doesn't really matter. We're already seeing early prototypes of commercial EVs with over 400 mile ranges and Tesla has been talking about ranges long and more than that in the not distant future.
the issue with hydrogen is compressing and cooling a tank to keep hydrogen liquid is very heavy, that is why storing hydrogen in Magnesium hydride is attractive,
Magnisium hydride is just 8% hydrogen by mass. You have to tote around a huge amount of heavy magnesium so you lose whatever advantage in specific energy you had with hydrogen. No, that will most certainly NOT be the solution because it isn't any better than existing batteries.
To dialogue more cooperatively: I do believe in the possibility of a system that would somehow incentivize creators without pretending it's possible to own a thought, everywhere in the universe simultaneously forever.
So what is your system? You believe it is possible so either give up the details or concede that you are basically arguing in favor of patents. Just "believing in the possibility" is meaningless. This is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. Nobody has actual ideas that improve things. You either get modest improvements to the status quo patent system or you get people wanting to abolish all patents with no care as to the consequences of doing that. Unless you have a better way to deal with the free rider problem you aren't improving things and abolishing patents (even with all their problems) will demonstrably not improve people's economic lives overall.
You must not have been looking at the same quality surveys then.. 6 out of the top 10 car models in this satisfaction survey from last year are VW or one of its brands (Skoda):
You right I wasn't. I was looking at ones that measure RELIABILITY like this which have VW firmly in the bottom half. Same deal with Consumer Reports and plenty of others. The survey you cited measures customer satisfaction, not reliability. Very different. (Plus how do you get 6 of the top 10 and still not manage to be the top brand?)
Really? We're going straight for the absurdly unlikely sci-fi answer? That's like the people who claim UFOs must be of alien origin conveniently forgetting what the U in UFO stands for.
There's a saying that when you hear the sound of hoofs you should be thinking horses, not zebras. You can include it on the list of possibilities but it should be somewhere near the bottom.
To be fair, European-market Volkswagens tend to be built a lot better than their North-American market counterparts.
I've owned plenty of VWs that were built in Europe and I stand by my statement that their reliability isn't good. I don't think the boat ride reduces reliability so I'm unconvinced that VWs quality problems are anything but engineering and occasionally build defects in most cases. I've seen no evidence that VWs built on this side of the pond are less reliable than those build in Germany. Honda and Toyota and BMW and others manage to build very reliable cars here in North America so VW doesn't have any excuse.
They are generally considerd to be among the most reliable and durable brands and they depreciate very slowly because of this reputation.
I have never seen a single quality survey in the last 20 years where VW was not near the bottom of the heap. Durable I would agree with from personal experience. Reliable? No way. The data simply doesn't support that assertion.
Americans are prepared to pay less for a new car and have very different preferences.
VW overcharges for their vehicles. Why would I pay more for a vehicle from a company with a deservedly bad reputation for reliability? The Jetta is a decent enough car but it's not better than a half a dozen of its competitors. If VW cannot be bothered to listen to local preferences and cannot fix the reliability issues then it should surprise no one that their sales aren't going to be amazing.
VW has had trouble adjusting models to North-American tastes and requirements without losing too much of the original appeal of the car, but also with local production quality and continuity.
True but that's just arrogance on their part. I've owned a lot of VWs over the years and some of their design decisions are baffling. Other manufacturers manage the trick so what's VW's excuse?
You seem to be quite sure of this... I would question as to why?
Several reasons.
1) PHEVs require minimal to no infrastructure investment to be viable. No other alternative can make that claim.
2) Fuel economy standards. PHEVs are a proven solution to the problem and the solution with the least compromise of performance.
3) Prices of batteries continues to fall and performance continues to rise. As that happens the the price of hybrid vehicles will continue to improve.
4) Performance and luxury cars already are beginning the conversion to hybrid. (See McClaren, Ferrari, BMW, Porsche, Lamborghini, etc)
5) Internal combustion engines aren't going to get much better than they already are. We are well into diminishing returns on their performance.
6) There are basically no other market-ready alternatives to improve performance. Not hydrogen, not natural gas, not pure-electric. Not yet.
Well, they DO get a lot of press... but sales? Plug in EVs of all types were less than 1% of the total light car and truck sales in the US in 2014 (it was 0.7% to be exact).
Find me another alternative fuel vehicle type that has even close to the market uptake that hybrids have. Hybrids are still relatively pricey so it's not surprising that they will take some time to gather market share but they ARE gaining market share. And they are selling. In Japan the Toyota Prius is currently the #2 selling vehicle and has been near the top for years. They're not going to take over the market tomorrow but they will become very commonplace over the next 10-15 years.
That is a rounding error, not the "coming replacement of ICE cars".
That's like saying in 1978 that personal computers are a rounding error in computer sales. It's true but it misses the point of what will happen next. Hybrids are still new and fairly expensive. But car companies will HAVE to start pushing hybrids or they will have to greatly lower the power of the vehicles they sell to meet fuel economy standards. I think the former is far more likely than the later. There is no other market ready alternative available to them. You're particularly going to see hybrids becoming standard equipment on luxury cars first and then working down the food chain into mass market cars as costs fall. It will take some years but I don't see any credible scenario where hybrids don't grab big market share.
Hydrogen has more energy per mass than gasoline.
It has more energy per unit of mass (Specific Energy) but FAR less per unit of volume (Energy Density). So unless you plan on turning it into liquid hydrogen (impractical and dangerous) or can find some alternative storage medium, it's not practical as a fuel. The chemical storage mediums we've found so far are either lab experiments or impractical for various reasons.
The future is storing hydrogen in magnesium hydride and using algae to produce hydrogen.
And your evidence for this is what exactly? You are talking about a couple of laboratory projects. Nothing that is in any danger of becoming a commercial product any time soon. Your biological solution hasn't solved the key efficiency problem plus a host of other non-trivial issues. Your storage medium is not used in an commercial product that I am aware of.
I have no principled objection to hydrogen powered vehicles but I think your optimism regarding their prospects as commercial products is unwarranted given the available evidence. If we do see commercial hydrogen powered vehicles it will not be at any kind of scale for many many years.
As for petrol/diesel, they differ a lot.
Disagree. There are some important differences but the basic principles of operation are little different. Suck, squish, bang, blow. They mostly differ in what sort of operation they are optimal within. Little different than an Atkinson cycle engine versus an Otto cycle engine.
Enough to make a 20-40% difference in overall car efficiency.
40%? Show me one real world example of a car with a diesel getting 40% better fuel economy than a gasoline engine of similar horsepower in the same chassis. In the real world the fuel economy advantage tends to be 10-20% for any given power output. Diesel does have some advantages but let's not overstate it.
First of all, diesel engine is much more efficient at partial or near-idle load. Idle consumption of the same car is about 1.1l/h gasoline or 0.4l/h diesel.
Diesel is generally better at any steady state than most gasoline engines, not just idle. But much driving is not in steady state so the real world advantage is often less clear for many use cases.
Diesel has better torque distribution. Adding the mass of the battery to a diesel car generally has more effect than optimizing the engine load.
And electrics have still better torque distribution than diesel. Basically full torque immediately from a dead stop. Plus the electric motor provides additional power to deal with the battery weight.
Let me put it to you this way. There is a reason the newest supercars are coming as hybrids. It allows them to optimize performance in ways that are not possible with gasoline or electric alone. It is very reasonable to suppose that there will be use cases where a diesel hybrid will make sense for exactly the same reasons.
Their length unit is based on a physical cylinder of metal.
Not it is not and has not been since the 1960s. The metre is currently defined as the length of the path traveled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second.
Does this mean the US can now join the rest of the metric world, or are we still in the quagmire?
No, apparently we prefer to remain the backwards rednecks of the world because... 'Murica.
The Phaeton was sold in the US when it was introduced. However, the sales of the $70K VW were not good so they decided to withdraw it from the US Market.
That's because they sold it under the wrong brand. It should have been an Audi vehicle here in the US. NOBODY thinks of VW as a luxury brand. The Phaeton was a darn good car but VW flunked marketing 101 in selling it. The badge on the front matters when it comes to luxury vehicles. That's the same reason Toyota, Honda and Nissan sell their luxury stuff under Lexus, Acura and Infiniti brands here in the US.
Diesel hybrid is a nonsense.
Really? Every locomotive in use today is a diesel electric hybrid. Frankly I think a diesel hybrid would make a lot of sense for many applications, particularly large trucks. Electric motors are great for around town stop/start traffic where diesels aren't so hot and diesels are great for steady state long distance driving (like highways) where electric motors aren't so hot. Their strengths are very complimentary.
I know they exist, but still the whole hybrid jazz is about overcoming problems of petrol engine the diesel just does not have.
Diesel engines are not *that* much different from gasoline engines.