And when I buy a DRM-laden eBook, the first thing I do is crack the DRM so I have an unencumbered ePub.
It's sometimes painful for me, but I currently have a policy of not getting stuff with excessive DRM(at least not without significant discount) at all, so they're actually losing sales.
The painful part is that, at this point of my life, I'm not downloading them illegally either.
What I'll pay $6 for DRM free, you might be able to sell to me for $4 with signficant DRM. Less if the DRM functionally reduces it's usability.
B&N, Amazon, I suggest you pay attention. I've spent nearly a grand over at Baen due to their policies and pricing. With you guys? I've spent less than $100. There's reasons for this.
Consider my point - propane tank exchange programs don't experience a high enough rate of fraud to render their business model unprofitable. Sure, I'll fill my tank up the old fashioned way over doing the exchange thing. But even propane tanks have a limited lifespan - they have to be professionally inspected every so often, and part of what the exchange programs have done is made getting a tank inspected more difficult.
So when the propane filler refuses a tank, often the easiest solution is getting an exchange. Going back to electric cars, even batteries that are no longer servicable are generally so valuable from a recycling point of view that any exchange program isn't going to worry about it too much, as long as the battery is still intact, they aren't losing(much) money. One would have to be a fanatical 'fill at home/work' type to not hit up the exchange place enough to pay for the eventual replacement battery.
Sure, I could. It's called a 'series hybrid' or 'diesel-electric' when it comes to locomotives.
The problem is that you still need that lousy gasoline engine to hook up to the generator to produce the electricity for the electric drivetrain. The efficiency gain is limited, and the increase in cost and complexity is high.
You'd be better off burning the gasoline in a fixed facility for ~30-40% efficiency, with proper pollution controls and such. Of course, at that point you don't burn expensive fuel like gasoline, you burn coal, or bunker oil. Even better - hydroelectric, nuclear, wind, or solar. Natural gas even.
Do you happen to have a source for this? By my understanding aldulterated gasoline tends to be caught pretty quickly, and pretty easily. A number of people have car trouble, they track it down to the station(many/most people fill up at the same station every time), somebody does an independent test of their fuel, and they get busted.
Now, short-selling gasoline is caught less often, but 'most' states have a fairly active testing program ensuring that a gallon = a gallon. My last state tested every gasoline station twice a year on average, and the fines for short selling were extreme. In addition, they also get busted when somebody who tracks their gas obsessively(and there's more of them today with gas prices), exceeds the known capacity of their tank and complains.
In any case, the fraud is generally single digit percentage points - not $2k a pop 6 times a day.
Oh, I understand the reasons completely. I was just venting that I get pissed that they consider ebooks 'cheaper' when they're a buck or so less than MSRP(~10% today), but you sign up for a B&N card you get 10% off just about everything(matching ebook prices), 40% off things like new hardcovers, and they regularly ship you coupons worth another 25-50% off. None of which are valid on the ebooks.
I consider a valid ebook price for a book available as a $10 paperback to be $5, not $9.
Take David Weber's just released 'How Firm a Foundation' - $13 ebook, $16.80 for the hardcover w/membership discount. Okay, a fair deal. But what about 'A Mighty Fortress', the previous book in the series? The paperback and ebook are both priced at $9. But with a discount I can get the pb for $8, assuming I'm not picking it up at a store that offers 'all' paperbacks at 25% off, dropping the price to $6.75.
I never bought many hardcovers, both due to price and space. But the price, combined with DRM, has driven me to Baen's webscriptions. Isn't it odd that it's the rightwing/libertarian publisher that offers the 'best' ebook pricing today? DRM free ebooks(available in rtf & html even!) that you can read on a computer with no additional software but your web browser? Very good!
Example: "Voyage across the Stars" by David Drake - $6. It's effectively $3 if I buy it as part of the 'webscription' of 7 $6 ebooks for $18. Buy 3, get 4 free!. Paperback price is $10.29. A 40% discount, even off of paperback price, not penalty for DRM, has me sold.
I'd disagree. What happens when some logging allows the fraud to be found almost automatically, and the service station gets hit with a $1M fine?
What sort of 'cracking the lifetime meter' are you thinking of? A smart automated charge system would [i]realize[/i] that the battery's charge level, the amount of power needed to reach full charge, and reported charge don't add up and throw a fault on the battery.
Then investigation would have the customer(s) complaining about the crooked service station, which would spark an investigation and most likely criminal charges.
There's plenty of ways to commit fraud out there, this isn't really any different.
As mhajicek mentions, it'd most likely be done by automated machinery.
The battery pack for a tesla roadster weighs ~450kg/~1k pounds. Even if you split it into 4 seperate standardized 'packs', that's 250 pounds apiece, or 5 times the limit of what you can ask a worker to routinely lift. Even if he could, do you really want to have him make 4 trips for every exchange?
A pallet changer sort of robot is indeed the best answer. Could be completely automated, and you'd improve stability by mounting the batteries low on the undercarriage.
The idea is that you end up with a standardized battery pack, perhaps a couple of them. With a little custom wiring, you can even make the same battery put out a couple different voltages.
Or, to handle a range of sizes, you have the 'standard' EV1 battery. The future electric Civic takes 2, the Escape takes 3, my light truck 4, etc...
That leaves the legacy Tesla Roadster types out in the cold, but it's still not that bad.
Even if they end up with a dozen types, outages should be fairly rare, given that they get the old battery as trade in and it shouldn't take them more than a couple hours to charge it back up(using industrial sized chargers).
Then figure that, sure, it might only take you five minutes once a week to fill up at the gas pump, but with an EV it only takes you five seconds to hook up the charger at home for the night.
I remember reading about a company working on them back in the '90s. Carbon fiber, vacuum housing, the works.
Failing 'gracefully' was relative - it was more that the carbon fiber used for the wheel would basically disintigrate at the velocities it'd spin at, such that it wouldn't penetrate the heavy housing used to maintain the near-vacuum. Might pop it so it's no longer air tight though.
Last I'd heard they'd backed completely off the car angle(which they hit discover magazine for), and were making specialty industrial UPS systems.
If the services of publishers becomes otherwise unnecessary, the editors might not have the choice.
Publishers and editors have long done an important service to written works by doing an appreciable job of seperating out the crud and cruft in selecting which books to publish. Sure, I'm certain that potential masterpieces were sent back, and plenty of crap still got published, but they cleaned out the worst 90% pretty well.
Still, in the digital communication age, we may need to find other means. There are other models out there where good editors can still make a good steady wage, without working for a publisher.
Ebook pricing is one of the reasons my ebook catalog hasn't passed my physical books in number of titles I've obtained.
With ebooks, I get maybe a 10% discount off of the physical MSRP. Thing is, if I get less than a 25% discount off of MSRP at the store for a physical book, I'm not trying. 33-50% off is pretty standard, and that's for a new book, that I can(if I get my pack-rat tendencies under control) sell to a used book store, donate, whatever.
The reasons I want ebooks includes that I DO have so many physical books that I need the space, that I have a tendency to end up working away from home for months at a time and a nook/kindle/computer can carry a LOT of books for the space it takes.
Any reasonable and honest author will tell you that the editing (and fact checking for books where they are appropriate) services provided by publishers are useful and valuable
As you mention, these services are NOT exclusive to a publisher.
Indeed, as you mention, it's a valuable service(thus you can realize profit doing it), but it's not 'really necessary', as the article put it. Depending on how good the author is at proofing themselves, of course.
Some authors have half their work redone, some practically breeze through.
I would enjoy this as well, but I fear that we're never going to see SSDs that contain more storage for less cost.
While platters are often pretty pricy glass, it's still not up there with high purity silicon wafers. In addition, you only have to deposit an even layer of magnetic material - with flash you need not just the semiconductor gates, but the paths to them.
As such, I think that hybrid drives, such as released by Seagate, will eventually dominate. For desktops, hard drives are plenty fast enough for 90% of tasks, but it'd be nice to have the other 10% addressed faster.
I wouldn't be surprised to see DRAM replaced by flash first.
Why not? A turbocharged 2 stroke diesel can be some of the cleanest emitters out there. The trick is that you use the turbo to flush out all the exhaust air, then the exhaust valve is closed(or the piston moves over the exhaust port), followed finally by fuel injection during compression.
Then you get into the reduced weight helping to reduce the need for fuel - saving some emissions there.
The problems are indeed different than for a 4 stroke gasoline, but solvable all the same.
You design a whole new car and manufacturing process around it. You're retooling the factory from the concrete up, so it's no more or less skin to do it for one or another type of engine design.
That you're building a whole new factory to build the engine, that you might need to redesign cars a bit to fit it, etc...
They'll get to building the improved part/engine, but they'll likely do it as part of a major upgrade cycle, NOT as a 'hotfix'.
It's an engine type that, relatively speaking, scales up well. Sort of like how almost all large engines are diesel and almost all small ones are gasoline.
Bulldozer engine? Diesel. Weed-eater? Gasoline. The meeting point is approximately at 'pickup truck' with a good deal of overlap.
Because it's mechanically more complex, it tends to be more expensive, and smaller parts tend to be more fragile. With newer technology it's time might of come - we can more easily and cheaply produce tiny complex parts today of advanced alloys, whereas back in the '50s machining costs rapidly increased as you decreased the size of parts.
You saw them in planes and submarines because reducing the weight by 80%(with '50s tech) and 'half the size', was worth the additional expense. After all, cut the a couple thousand pounds off the weight of the engine, and that's a couple thousand pounds of extra cargo you can haul. Sure, it required a bit more maintenance - but it was worth the tradeoff.
Today, with us looking at 10k+ mile oil changes and 100k+ servicing periods, we potentially have much of the maintenance problems solved.
Assuming they can make this engine 'tiny' - the Napier Deltic weighed 10,500 pounds to produce 2500 hp, 4.2lbs/hp. My tacoma has a curb weight of 3250 pounds, the 1GR-FE V6 weighs 375 pounds to produce 236 HP. 1.6 lbs/hp. We've come a LONG way since the '50s.
I've had a bicycle accident where my helmet use saved me, at the least, a trip to the emergency room. I had a bit of road rash, but nothing requring medical attention.
Of course, I landed on my helmeted head, putting a big dent in it, while sliding enough to wear a hole in the hard plastic shell, into the styrofoam padding. By the time the rest of my body hit, most of the energy had been absorbed...
As you say, twisted statistics. Dead isn't going to go into the 'injured' category unless you survive long enough to make it to the emergency room.
We're seeing it with the military - we've actually given soldiers so much armor, and it's effective enough, that we're seeing lots of injuries, many of them severe, where previously the soldier would have died. More survivors with lost limbs - the armor keeps them alive, but their arms/legs still end up shredded.
I suspect the number slashdot is quoting here is bullshit.
Could also be part of a multi-year lease, out to the end of the material's copyright. That would make a movie that's worth $30M total only cost a fraction of that a year.
I'm not sure where he got his information from - Given the wiki for the 787 specifies that the -9 is to have a heavier takeoff weight, more fuel capacity, etc...
It might indeed be more efficient, using the same wings and engines, but it's still going to burn a smidge more fuel due to the extra weight.
Going by minimum seatings, the 787 carries less than half. Going by max cattle car arrangements, the A380 carries nearly 3 times the passangers.
Comparing new features is a good thing, but there are different structural issues between a single floor 787 and a two floor A380. That doesn't change that they're both targeting what are, in the end, very different markets. Not necessarily a bad thing. Airbus offers maximum seating for the highest density routes, Boeing offers a very affordable plane to handle the multitude of lower traffic routes.
While I'm sure the A380 is a very nice plane, my impression is that it's also a more conservative one than the 787,
I would suggest that smaller and lighter vehicles are a more sensible path to pursue. Smaller cars means cheaper batteries, which means that current technologies are affordable after all.
While there's still quite a bit of room for improvement in weight savings, consider that developing a battery that has higher energy density will allow you to put fewer pounds of battery into an EV, of whatever design.
Car makers would love to make their vehicles lighter for no additional cost. Right now steel is cheaper than carbon fiber. You need a car of at least a certain weight to meet the safety requirements. As long as batteries remain weighty, you have to add even more weight in structural support to carry them. 200 miles worth of batteries weighs more than 2x100 miles worth of batteries - you have to burn more power pushing the extra weight.
Another consideration entirely would be that while EVs are indeed the popular topic when it comes to batteries, I'd love to have a battery for my smart phone that will a day of heavy usage. And a lifespan of a year or two of charging is sufficient for most cell phones.
Slashdot Mirror
And when I buy a DRM-laden eBook, the first thing I do is crack the DRM so I have an unencumbered ePub.
It's sometimes painful for me, but I currently have a policy of not getting stuff with excessive DRM(at least not without significant discount) at all, so they're actually losing sales.
The painful part is that, at this point of my life, I'm not downloading them illegally either.
What I'll pay $6 for DRM free, you might be able to sell to me for $4 with signficant DRM. Less if the DRM functionally reduces it's usability.
B&N, Amazon, I suggest you pay attention. I've spent nearly a grand over at Baen due to their policies and pricing. With you guys? I've spent less than $100. There's reasons for this.
Consider my point - propane tank exchange programs don't experience a high enough rate of fraud to render their business model unprofitable. Sure, I'll fill my tank up the old fashioned way over doing the exchange thing. But even propane tanks have a limited lifespan - they have to be professionally inspected every so often, and part of what the exchange programs have done is made getting a tank inspected more difficult.
So when the propane filler refuses a tank, often the easiest solution is getting an exchange. Going back to electric cars, even batteries that are no longer servicable are generally so valuable from a recycling point of view that any exchange program isn't going to worry about it too much, as long as the battery is still intact, they aren't losing(much) money. One would have to be a fanatical 'fill at home/work' type to not hit up the exchange place enough to pay for the eventual replacement battery.
Sure, I could. It's called a 'series hybrid' or 'diesel-electric' when it comes to locomotives.
The problem is that you still need that lousy gasoline engine to hook up to the generator to produce the electricity for the electric drivetrain. The efficiency gain is limited, and the increase in cost and complexity is high.
You'd be better off burning the gasoline in a fixed facility for ~30-40% efficiency, with proper pollution controls and such. Of course, at that point you don't burn expensive fuel like gasoline, you burn coal, or bunker oil. Even better - hydroelectric, nuclear, wind, or solar. Natural gas even.
Do you happen to have a source for this? By my understanding aldulterated gasoline tends to be caught pretty quickly, and pretty easily. A number of people have car trouble, they track it down to the station(many/most people fill up at the same station every time), somebody does an independent test of their fuel, and they get busted.
Now, short-selling gasoline is caught less often, but 'most' states have a fairly active testing program ensuring that a gallon = a gallon. My last state tested every gasoline station twice a year on average, and the fines for short selling were extreme. In addition, they also get busted when somebody who tracks their gas obsessively(and there's more of them today with gas prices), exceeds the known capacity of their tank and complains.
In any case, the fraud is generally single digit percentage points - not $2k a pop 6 times a day.
Oh, I understand the reasons completely. I was just venting that I get pissed that they consider ebooks 'cheaper' when they're a buck or so less than MSRP(~10% today), but you sign up for a B&N card you get 10% off just about everything(matching ebook prices), 40% off things like new hardcovers, and they regularly ship you coupons worth another 25-50% off. None of which are valid on the ebooks.
I consider a valid ebook price for a book available as a $10 paperback to be $5, not $9.
Take David Weber's just released 'How Firm a Foundation' - $13 ebook, $16.80 for the hardcover w/membership discount. Okay, a fair deal. But what about 'A Mighty Fortress', the previous book in the series? The paperback and ebook are both priced at $9. But with a discount I can get the pb for $8, assuming I'm not picking it up at a store that offers 'all' paperbacks at 25% off, dropping the price to $6.75.
I never bought many hardcovers, both due to price and space. But the price, combined with DRM, has driven me to Baen's webscriptions. Isn't it odd that it's the rightwing/libertarian publisher that offers the 'best' ebook pricing today? DRM free ebooks(available in rtf & html even!) that you can read on a computer with no additional software but your web browser? Very good!
Example: "Voyage across the Stars" by David Drake - $6. It's effectively $3 if I buy it as part of the 'webscription' of 7 $6 ebooks for $18. Buy 3, get 4 free!. Paperback price is $10.29. A 40% discount, even off of paperback price, not penalty for DRM, has me sold.
I'd disagree. What happens when some logging allows the fraud to be found almost automatically, and the service station gets hit with a $1M fine?
What sort of 'cracking the lifetime meter' are you thinking of? A smart automated charge system would [i]realize[/i] that the battery's charge level, the amount of power needed to reach full charge, and reported charge don't add up and throw a fault on the battery.
Then investigation would have the customer(s) complaining about the crooked service station, which would spark an investigation and most likely criminal charges.
There's plenty of ways to commit fraud out there, this isn't really any different.
Just look at propane exchange programs. They're popular to the point that propane filling stations are getting rarer.
Heck, is the ratio of the value of an 20# propane tank to the propane in it that much less than the value of a battery to the electricity it stores?
As mhajicek mentions, it'd most likely be done by automated machinery.
The battery pack for a tesla roadster weighs ~450kg/~1k pounds. Even if you split it into 4 seperate standardized 'packs', that's 250 pounds apiece, or 5 times the limit of what you can ask a worker to routinely lift. Even if he could, do you really want to have him make 4 trips for every exchange?
A pallet changer sort of robot is indeed the best answer. Could be completely automated, and you'd improve stability by mounting the batteries low on the undercarriage.
The idea is that you end up with a standardized battery pack, perhaps a couple of them. With a little custom wiring, you can even make the same battery put out a couple different voltages.
Or, to handle a range of sizes, you have the 'standard' EV1 battery. The future electric Civic takes 2, the Escape takes 3, my light truck 4, etc...
That leaves the legacy Tesla Roadster types out in the cold, but it's still not that bad.
Even if they end up with a dozen types, outages should be fairly rare, given that they get the old battery as trade in and it shouldn't take them more than a couple hours to charge it back up(using industrial sized chargers).
Then figure that, sure, it might only take you five minutes once a week to fill up at the gas pump, but with an EV it only takes you five seconds to hook up the charger at home for the night.
I remember reading about a company working on them back in the '90s. Carbon fiber, vacuum housing, the works.
Failing 'gracefully' was relative - it was more that the carbon fiber used for the wheel would basically disintigrate at the velocities it'd spin at, such that it wouldn't penetrate the heavy housing used to maintain the near-vacuum. Might pop it so it's no longer air tight though.
Last I'd heard they'd backed completely off the car angle(which they hit discover magazine for), and were making specialty industrial UPS systems.
But then people realised they sucked and switched to gasoline instead.
Gasoline: Lousy Engine, incredibly great energy storage
Electric: Great Engine, incredibly lousy energy storage
There's nothing wrong with electric cars that a battery that costs half as much for twice the life(range and longevity) wouldn't fix.
If the services of publishers becomes otherwise unnecessary, the editors might not have the choice.
Publishers and editors have long done an important service to written works by doing an appreciable job of seperating out the crud and cruft in selecting which books to publish. Sure, I'm certain that potential masterpieces were sent back, and plenty of crap still got published, but they cleaned out the worst 90% pretty well.
Still, in the digital communication age, we may need to find other means. There are other models out there where good editors can still make a good steady wage, without working for a publisher.
Ebook pricing is one of the reasons my ebook catalog hasn't passed my physical books in number of titles I've obtained.
With ebooks, I get maybe a 10% discount off of the physical MSRP. Thing is, if I get less than a 25% discount off of MSRP at the store for a physical book, I'm not trying. 33-50% off is pretty standard, and that's for a new book, that I can(if I get my pack-rat tendencies under control) sell to a used book store, donate, whatever.
The reasons I want ebooks includes that I DO have so many physical books that I need the space, that I have a tendency to end up working away from home for months at a time and a nook/kindle/computer can carry a LOT of books for the space it takes.
Any reasonable and honest author will tell you that the editing (and fact checking for books where they are appropriate) services provided by publishers are useful and valuable
As you mention, these services are NOT exclusive to a publisher.
Indeed, as you mention, it's a valuable service(thus you can realize profit doing it), but it's not 'really necessary', as the article put it. Depending on how good the author is at proofing themselves, of course.
Some authors have half their work redone, some practically breeze through.
I would enjoy this as well, but I fear that we're never going to see SSDs that contain more storage for less cost.
While platters are often pretty pricy glass, it's still not up there with high purity silicon wafers. In addition, you only have to deposit an even layer of magnetic material - with flash you need not just the semiconductor gates, but the paths to them.
As such, I think that hybrid drives, such as released by Seagate, will eventually dominate. For desktops, hard drives are plenty fast enough for 90% of tasks, but it'd be nice to have the other 10% addressed faster.
I wouldn't be surprised to see DRAM replaced by flash first.
Why not? A turbocharged 2 stroke diesel can be some of the cleanest emitters out there. The trick is that you use the turbo to flush out all the exhaust air, then the exhaust valve is closed(or the piston moves over the exhaust port), followed finally by fuel injection during compression.
Then you get into the reduced weight helping to reduce the need for fuel - saving some emissions there.
The problems are indeed different than for a 4 stroke gasoline, but solvable all the same.
You design a whole new car and manufacturing process around it. You're retooling the factory from the concrete up, so it's no more or less skin to do it for one or another type of engine design.
That you're building a whole new factory to build the engine, that you might need to redesign cars a bit to fit it, etc...
They'll get to building the improved part/engine, but they'll likely do it as part of a major upgrade cycle, NOT as a 'hotfix'.
It's an engine type that, relatively speaking, scales up well. Sort of like how almost all large engines are diesel and almost all small ones are gasoline.
Bulldozer engine? Diesel. Weed-eater? Gasoline. The meeting point is approximately at 'pickup truck' with a good deal of overlap.
Because it's mechanically more complex, it tends to be more expensive, and smaller parts tend to be more fragile. With newer technology it's time might of come - we can more easily and cheaply produce tiny complex parts today of advanced alloys, whereas back in the '50s machining costs rapidly increased as you decreased the size of parts.
You saw them in planes and submarines because reducing the weight by 80%(with '50s tech) and 'half the size', was worth the additional expense. After all, cut the a couple thousand pounds off the weight of the engine, and that's a couple thousand pounds of extra cargo you can haul. Sure, it required a bit more maintenance - but it was worth the tradeoff.
Today, with us looking at 10k+ mile oil changes and 100k+ servicing periods, we potentially have much of the maintenance problems solved.
Assuming they can make this engine 'tiny' - the Napier Deltic weighed 10,500 pounds to produce 2500 hp, 4.2lbs/hp. My tacoma has a curb weight of 3250 pounds, the 1GR-FE V6 weighs 375 pounds to produce 236 HP. 1.6 lbs/hp. We've come a LONG way since the '50s.
I've had a bicycle accident where my helmet use saved me, at the least, a trip to the emergency room. I had a bit of road rash, but nothing requring medical attention.
Of course, I landed on my helmeted head, putting a big dent in it, while sliding enough to wear a hole in the hard plastic shell, into the styrofoam padding. By the time the rest of my body hit, most of the energy had been absorbed...
As you say, twisted statistics. Dead isn't going to go into the 'injured' category unless you survive long enough to make it to the emergency room.
We're seeing it with the military - we've actually given soldiers so much armor, and it's effective enough, that we're seeing lots of injuries, many of them severe, where previously the soldier would have died. More survivors with lost limbs - the armor keeps them alive, but their arms/legs still end up shredded.
I suspect the number slashdot is quoting here is bullshit.
Could also be part of a multi-year lease, out to the end of the material's copyright. That would make a movie that's worth $30M total only cost a fraction of that a year.
I'm not sure where he got his information from - Given the wiki for the 787 specifies that the -9 is to have a heavier takeoff weight, more fuel capacity, etc...
It might indeed be more efficient, using the same wings and engines, but it's still going to burn a smidge more fuel due to the extra weight.
found the company they hired
Yeah, they had a LOT of problems with subcontractors on this one. One of the big things Boeing discovered is that they can't farm out everything.
Looking at the two wiki pages, I'd say there's nothing 'nearly' about it -
787-8: 210-250(242 typical airline)
787-9: 250-290(280)
A380: 525-853(525)
Going by minimum seatings, the 787 carries less than half. Going by max cattle car arrangements, the A380 carries nearly 3 times the passangers.
Comparing new features is a good thing, but there are different structural issues between a single floor 787 and a two floor A380. That doesn't change that they're both targeting what are, in the end, very different markets. Not necessarily a bad thing. Airbus offers maximum seating for the highest density routes, Boeing offers a very affordable plane to handle the multitude of lower traffic routes.
While I'm sure the A380 is a very nice plane, my impression is that it's also a more conservative one than the 787,
I would suggest that smaller and lighter vehicles are a more sensible path to pursue. Smaller cars means cheaper batteries, which means that current technologies are affordable after all.
While there's still quite a bit of room for improvement in weight savings, consider that developing a battery that has higher energy density will allow you to put fewer pounds of battery into an EV, of whatever design.
Car makers would love to make their vehicles lighter for no additional cost. Right now steel is cheaper than carbon fiber. You need a car of at least a certain weight to meet the safety requirements. As long as batteries remain weighty, you have to add even more weight in structural support to carry them. 200 miles worth of batteries weighs more than 2x100 miles worth of batteries - you have to burn more power pushing the extra weight.
Another consideration entirely would be that while EVs are indeed the popular topic when it comes to batteries, I'd love to have a battery for my smart phone that will a day of heavy usage. And a lifespan of a year or two of charging is sufficient for most cell phones.
Even a magnetic connect charge cable would help.