I think you're making some assumptions about Google that aren't true. Yes, it does appear that the NSA tapped data center connections, but Google has responded by strongly encrypting all of those. And the "they can get anything by asking" notion isn't as true as it appears. Yes, they can, but only if they go through proper channels and issue a narrow and specific request. More importantly, the numbers Google publishes show that such requests are issued for data only about a very tiny percentage of the user base.
And if anyone can suggest a reliable email provider that is NOT Google, MS or Yahoo, I am all ears.
Whatever other provider you use is going to be subject to the same legal requirements to comply with warrants, subpoenas and National Security Letters -- and odds are that they won't do as good a job with securing your data as Google does.
Anyway, I'm not criticizing your decisions, just pointing out that a portion of your rationale may not be factually correct. Personally, I don't have any concerns about Google handling my personal information, but I'm a Google employee so I have a little better visibility into exactly what the risks are and are not. To be completely honest, I also don't worry about it much because I don't have anything to hide... not that I think people shouldn't have anything to hide. It's just that I personally don't. And, yes, I understand that things can change, but if things change so that something I do "needs" to be hidden, I'd rather stand up and fight than hide. But that's just me. YMMV.
What are you on about? I didn't say anything about principles; I just explained why it's often in the best -- pragmatic -- interest of shareholders to give a CEO they're firing a big payoff.
Even normal people can turn empathy off under certain circumstances or through conditioning.
Like modern military training. [/sad-fact]
Nonsense. Military training, modern and traditional, doesn't teach empathy disconnection except in one narrow way, which is that combat training teaches soldiers to view their targets as "targets", not as people. It's always been done that way, because it's necessary to get soldiers to overcome the natural antipathy most of them have for killing. What military training is mostly about, besides building strength and stamina and teaching particular skills, is building esprit de corps, a sense of solidarity with fellow soldiers as well, of course, as a habit of obedience to orders (though post WWII most militaries leaven that with classes on the distinction between lawful and unlawful orders).
Actually, the most modern trend for US military training, as in the last 5-10 years, is exactly the opposite; it's training to increase empathy. The Marine Corps in particular has established a very interesting program training Marines that they should be "Ethical Marine Warriors". The catchphrase of this program is "The Ethical Warrior is a protector of life. Whose life? Self and others. Which others? All others." It's taught with the aid of stories like this one.
In one particular country in Asia Minor, the unrest was beginning to have strategic implications during that delicate time of détente. The trouble centered on the presence of an American missile base there. The local people said that they wanted the base closed and the Americans to go home. Humphrey’s job was to find a solution to the conflict.
The basic problem was plain old culture shock. The Americans working in that poor ally country thought that the local people were ‘dumb, dirty, dishonest, lazy, unsanitary, immoral, violent, cruel, crazy, and downright subhuman,’ and what’s more, they let them know it. No matter what he did, Humphrey couldn’t stop the negative talk—partially because some of it seemed true!
One day, as a diversion, Humphrey decided to go hunting for wild boar with some people from the American embassy. They took a truck from the motor pool and headed out to the boondocks, stopping at a village to hire some local men to beat the brush and act as guides.
This village was very poor. The huts were made of mud and there was no electricity or running water. The streets were unpaved dirt and the whole village smelled. Flies abounded. The men looked surly and wore dirty clothes. The women covered their faces, and the children had runny noses and were dressed in rags.
It wasn’t long before one American in the truck said, ‘This place stinks.’ Another said, ‘These people live just like animals.’ Finally, a young air force man said, ‘Yeah, they got nothin’ to live for; they may as well be dead.’
What could you say? It seemed true enough.
But just then, an old sergeant in the truck spoke up. He was the quiet type who never said much. In fact, except for his uniform, he kind of reminded you of one of the tough men in the village. He looked at the young airman and said, ‘You think they got nothin’ to live for, do you? Well, if you are so sure, why don’t you just take my knife, jump down off the back of this truck, and go try to kill one of them?’
There was dead silence in the truck.
Humphrey was amazed. It was the first time that anyone had said anything that had actually silenced the negative talk about the local people. The sergeant went on to say, ‘I don’t know either why they value their lives so much. Maybe it’s those snotty nosed kids, or the women in the pantaloons. But whatever it is, they care about their lives and the lives of their loved ones, same as we Americans do. And if we don’t stop talking bad about
With the tax credits available, the break-even point against the next-best vehicle (the Honda Insight) as just a bit over two years
So, it's a good deal if other people pay for a good sized chunk of the costs of an EV? Makes sense. Getting other people to pay for your stuff always makes them cheaper....
It's a better deal, yes. But it's a good deal even without the tax credits. Break-even in that case was just under six years.
And, I never asked anyone to pay for my car. If there's a legal way for me to reduce my tax liability, however, I will take it.
Do you really think it was in shareholders' interest for the former CEO of Home Depot to get a $200M pay-off?
I don't know the details, so I can't say for sure, but I can say: very possibly, in fact very likely.
There's a reason that boards vote big golden parachutes for CEOs they're dumping, and it isn't (generally) cronyism, it's protection. Not so different from the sort of "protection" paid to a mob boss, actually. You have to consider how much damage an angry ex-CEO can do to a corporation. Lawsuits, airing dirty laundry, fighting a protracted battle for control of the company which leaves it leaderless and generates lots of uncertainty and bad press... and those are just the beginning. We're talking about a person who was in a position of extreme trust, and unlike and angry ex-sysadmin, you can't cut off a former CEO's power by just deleting some user accounts.
Generally, CEOs get those big payoffs in exchange for signing agreements to go away quietly and to do nothing to (further) damage the company. That is often a very good deal for the shareholders.
As for the case you mentioned, as I said I don't know the details and have no idea if it was good for shareholders or not, but it's likely it was.
I pay $230 per month, and put nothing down on the vehicle, though I did have to pay sales tax on the difference between sale price and residual value. That's with 12K miles per year mileage allowance (which does restrict my usage of the car a little). I actually pay almost nothing in electricity costs for it, since I mostly charge at work, so my total expense for commuting is basically that lease fee, plus insurance and taxes. If I did pay for the electricity I'd be spending about $30 per month for it.
My car is an SL (the high end trim) with GPS navigation, XM radio, backup camera, power everything, heated seats and steering wheel, allow wheels, etc. Sticker price was around $36K. Nissan got the $7500 federal tax credit, I got about $2K of the $5K Colorado tax credit (it's pro-rated based on the difference between sale price and residual value).
Oh, yeah, forgot about that part; the state of Colorado effectively paid the sales tax back to me through the tax credit, plus a little.
All in all, I'm very pleased with both the car and what it costs me to drive it.
Lack of standardization may be an issue there, true. But games of significant complexity in general are going to be platform-specific.
Yet somehow, SDL manages to abstract gamepad access across multiple PC platforms. True, the button order for non-Xbox 360 controllers varies considerably, but there are ways around that. I seem to remember XBMC maintaining a device description repository for game controllers.
Just how many places do you think people can drive 75 mph for one hour, given traffic? Highway speeds in populated areas average more like 10-40 mph. And since nobody can possibly drive only on the highway, what about city/town traffic? That is more like 5-20 mph. At speeds people actually drive, and counting regenerative braking, most driving consumes more like 2-6 kW than 20 kW. That means that 1 kW for heat, plus the much worse battery performance in the cold, add up to an enormous impact on range.
Yes and no. Yes the impact is greater, but it's also impacting a longer range. You get 50% more range out of the battery at 40 mph than you do at 75 mph. And stop-and-go traffic (if you know how to drive it to maximize regeneration) costs very little. On cold days when I'm a little worried about range I like heavy traffic because driving slower will help me a lot more than what the additional time costs me. Of course, I could always drive slower anyway, but that tends to really piss off other drivers who are anxious to get home:-)
It's actually even a little better than that -- not that 7.9 seconds is wrong, but the acceleration feels even zippier than the number expresses, partly because it's front-loaded as compared to ICE vehicles with similar 0-60 times and partly because it feels really cool to accelerate like that in near silence.
Oh, come on. You can't get away with shit like that on/. The measurement is 7.9. How it feels is just you sniffing your own farts.
Nonsense. Neither EVs nor ICEVs accelerate with perfect consistency. There are peaks and dips in the acceleration based in many different factors, but one difference that is fairly consistent is that EVs have maximum acceleration at zero mph, while ICEVs need to spool up a bit. The result is that the EV gives you a real kick in the pants, and does it instantaneously. An ICEV that meets the same 0-60 time has to have greater acceleration later in order to make up for the slower start, and in fact if an EV and an ICEV have the same 0-60 time the ICEV will almost certainly be faster 0-90.
There's a YouTube video of a Tesla racing a Dodge Viper that demonstrates this; the Tesla wins the quarter-mile drag race quite handily, but you see that the Viper is actually moving faster towards the end -- but it can't make up what it lost from the Tesla's phenomenal hole shot.
So, what I said is exactly true: The LEAF feels zippier than an ICEV that has the same 0-60 time, mostly because of that initial kick in the pants. After that begins to taper off, though, people are still very impressed because the car continues to accelerate at a very healthy pace, with no more sound than a quiet whine. The combination is... very cool, and much more interesting than an ICEV that does 0-60 in 7.9 s.
-- and I overestimated the amount of charging I'd have to do at home. In practice I do 90% of my charging at the office, letting my employer pay for the electricity.
And your employer is fine with this? I can see it if you are a key player in a professional office environment, but for common workers I don't see management saying "Sure, use our electricity, we don't mind. By the way, your request for a raise has been approved."
Yep. My employer installed the EV chargers specifically so employees can use them.
A cheap electric car that performs well will sell like crazy.
Define "cheap". I bought my Nissan LEAF because, compared to every other new hybrid or ICE-only vehicle I looked at, it was the cheapest option.
No more expensive than an a gasoline-powered car of similar ability.
Actually, yes, the gasoline-powered cars of similar features and similar ability (except range), were more expensive for my driving needs. It took about six years to hit the break-even point against the most competitive ICE vehicles... but only without the $13K in tax credits (federal and state). With those, break-even was two years.
Lack of standardization may be an issue there, true. But games of significant complexity in general are going to be platform-specific. Of course, the bar for games that can work as web apps keeps rising.
webcam
That problem is already pretty well-solved. Google video hangouts work well across a wide variety of systems, for example.
3D graphics
There's no real reason that should be hard. We've had solid 3D graphics standards for decades, and while fragmentation due to rapid progress has been an issue (plus some deliberate MS-induced fragmentation), at this point 3D is pretty commoditized. Which isn't to say that this is a solved problem, but just that it's not a technical problem.
audio/video codec (WebM vs. MP4 format war)
Meh. That's just a matter of getting people to stop fighting.
shipping label printer support
If you don't mind needing to be online when you print, that's not an issue either. Drivers in the cloud.
How long does the battery last before it must be replaced?
I don't think the batteries will ever have to be replaced, in general, though the vehicles' range will gradually decrease. I know Nissan warranties the battery to retain 70% of its capacity for 8 years. And the dropoff in capacity should get slower and slower as it ages... so if it's 70% after 8 years, it'll probably still be 60% after 15. We don't know for sure, of course.
How does the environmental footprint of the battery compare with the environmental footprint of an oil burner?
I don't really care; I bought my EV for financial reasons, not environmental reasons. Oh, if the footprint is smaller I do consider that to be a good thing, but it's a second or even third-order concern for me.
You have got to be joking - do you have ANY concept of how much it costs to add a WiFi router to an internet connection the business already has, vs. running a high-load electrical connection out to even just TWO parking spaces? Not to mention cost of the electricity, not to mention the high likelihood of outside connections being vandalized...
Except that companies like SemaCharge and ChargePoint will actually install and maintain the equipment for almost nothing. They make their money by charging for use (you get an account and they mail you a card which you have to tap to charge).
I'll readily admit that I haven't looked into the details, but I know these companies are trying to address exactly the issue you're talking about, and to profit from solving that problem.
I should also mention that when it comes to the "with tax credits" side of the evaluation, I had not only the $7500 federal tax credit, but also a $4800 state tax credit. I'm actually philosophically opposed to subsidies like that, but I'll take any route I can find to legally reduce my tax liability. The fact that I projected a break-even point within the lifetime of the battery warranty even without the credits was impressive, and convincing, to me, though.
BTW, in practice the car has turned out to be an even better deal than I projected. I hadn't considered the fact that my LEAF requires virtually no maintenance -- really just consumables like tires, wiper blades, etc. -- and I overestimated the amount of charging I'd have to do at home. In practice I do 90% of my charging at the office, letting my employer pay for the electricity. Also I had budgeted for a 240V charger installation at home, but ended up decided that the slow 110V charger that came with the car was adequate.
Note that web apps still underpowered in terms of graphical capability.
Or more generally, anything that needs number crunching performance...in realtime. Updating a big spreadsheet comes to mind, Google Docs spreadsheets suck once they get beyond a few screen fulls.
That's why NaCl is under development. Though, in general, I think the direction of the future for number crunching performance is to do that part in the cloud.
Yeah, although I actually did end up leasing my LEAF, mainly because the technology is changing rapidly right now and I think there's an advantage in being able to walk away and by the new hotness in three years, in general I'm a "buy it new and drive it for 15 years" kind of guy. My other vehicle is a 2004 and I expect to get at least another five years out of it.
Your $35K estimate for the EV is too high. However, at only 5K miles per year it's extremely unlikely that the math will work out to favor EVs for you, at least in the near term. Now, if you were driving 15K miles (like I do), it would be a different story.
Yea, people have trouble starting diesel cars when it's -25C outside, I wonder how far could you drivein an electric car - especially that heat is no longer "free" like in a gas/diesel car.
My experience is that in sub-zero (F) temperatures my LEAF spends about 1 KW on heat. That alone would drain the battery in about 20 hours. Given that driving at freeway speeds (75 mph) will drain it in about one hour, running the heater decreases the range, but it's on the order of a 5-10% decrease... maybe as high as 20% if you're driving longer distances at lower speeds.
But they need to be on or plugged in to work, don't they?
No. They run off of the stored electricity. If you leave it out in the cold for long enough to drain the battery (many weeks, if you start from a full charge), then it will no longer be able to power the heater and the battery will be damaged by the cold. This is why the EV manuals say that if you're going to leave the car parked for a weeks in cold weather, make sure it's plugged in.
Well, none of the gas cars I looked at were $14K. The cheapest was $18K (IIRC), mostly because I wanted an apples-to-apples comparison and the EVs are pretty loaded. And, I actually wanted all the gizmos. In addition, I drive quite a bit more than 10K miles per year, which increases the operational cost advantage of EVs.
which means I was looking at a higher price point than a lot of people,
Well that's why people aren't following you to all buy EVs.
No, that doesn't explain it, because there are plenty of other people who buy new cars. In fact, the article is all about new car purchases.
Incidentally, your post motivated me to check out the Leaf's 0-60 time, which appears to be 7.9 seconds, which is indeed fairly reasonable. So now we're just looking at price.
It's actually even a little better than that -- not that 7.9 seconds is wrong, but the acceleration feels even zippier than the number expresses, partly because it's front-loaded as compared to ICE vehicles with similar 0-60 times and partly because it feels really cool to accelerate like that in near silence.
Put it this way... my teenage kids' friends think my LEAF is more awesome than their dads' BMWs and Audis, even though those cars are actually more capable in virtually every respect (and more expensive!). All it takes is me putting the pedal all the way down once and they're sold. And it's not because they care a bit about "saving the planet".
So, what's the next insufficiency? At some point the web folks will say that web apps can replace desktop apps, and there won't be anything left that isn't covered. I think we're actually getting very close to that point.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're making some assumptions about Google that aren't true. Yes, it does appear that the NSA tapped data center connections, but Google has responded by strongly encrypting all of those. And the "they can get anything by asking" notion isn't as true as it appears. Yes, they can, but only if they go through proper channels and issue a narrow and specific request. More importantly, the numbers Google publishes show that such requests are issued for data only about a very tiny percentage of the user base.
And if anyone can suggest a reliable email provider that is NOT Google, MS or Yahoo, I am all ears.
Whatever other provider you use is going to be subject to the same legal requirements to comply with warrants, subpoenas and National Security Letters -- and odds are that they won't do as good a job with securing your data as Google does.
Anyway, I'm not criticizing your decisions, just pointing out that a portion of your rationale may not be factually correct. Personally, I don't have any concerns about Google handling my personal information, but I'm a Google employee so I have a little better visibility into exactly what the risks are and are not. To be completely honest, I also don't worry about it much because I don't have anything to hide... not that I think people shouldn't have anything to hide. It's just that I personally don't. And, yes, I understand that things can change, but if things change so that something I do "needs" to be hidden, I'd rather stand up and fight than hide. But that's just me. YMMV.
What are you on about? I didn't say anything about principles; I just explained why it's often in the best -- pragmatic -- interest of shareholders to give a CEO they're firing a big payoff.
Even normal people can turn empathy off under certain circumstances or through conditioning.
Like modern military training. [/sad-fact]
Nonsense. Military training, modern and traditional, doesn't teach empathy disconnection except in one narrow way, which is that combat training teaches soldiers to view their targets as "targets", not as people. It's always been done that way, because it's necessary to get soldiers to overcome the natural antipathy most of them have for killing. What military training is mostly about, besides building strength and stamina and teaching particular skills, is building esprit de corps, a sense of solidarity with fellow soldiers as well, of course, as a habit of obedience to orders (though post WWII most militaries leaven that with classes on the distinction between lawful and unlawful orders).
Actually, the most modern trend for US military training, as in the last 5-10 years, is exactly the opposite; it's training to increase empathy. The Marine Corps in particular has established a very interesting program training Marines that they should be "Ethical Marine Warriors". The catchphrase of this program is "The Ethical Warrior is a protector of life. Whose life? Self and others. Which others? All others." It's taught with the aid of stories like this one.
In one particular country in Asia Minor, the unrest was beginning to have strategic implications during that delicate time of détente. The trouble centered on the presence of an American missile base there. The local people said that they wanted the base closed and the Americans to go home. Humphrey’s job was to find a solution to the conflict.
The basic problem was plain old culture shock. The Americans working in that poor ally country thought that the local people were ‘dumb, dirty, dishonest, lazy, unsanitary, immoral, violent, cruel, crazy, and downright subhuman,’ and what’s more, they let them know it. No matter what he did, Humphrey couldn’t stop the negative talk—partially because some of it seemed true!
One day, as a diversion, Humphrey decided to go hunting for wild boar with some people from the American embassy. They took a truck from the motor pool and headed out to the boondocks, stopping at a village to hire some local men to beat the brush and act as guides.
This village was very poor. The huts were made of mud and there was no electricity or running water. The streets were unpaved dirt and the whole village smelled. Flies abounded. The men looked surly and wore dirty clothes. The women covered their faces, and the children had runny noses and were dressed in rags.
It wasn’t long before one American in the truck said, ‘This place stinks.’ Another said, ‘These people live just like animals.’ Finally, a young air force man said, ‘Yeah, they got nothin’ to live for; they may as well be dead.’
What could you say? It seemed true enough.
But just then, an old sergeant in the truck spoke up. He was the quiet type who never said much. In fact, except for his uniform, he kind of reminded you of one of the tough men in the village. He looked at the young airman and said, ‘You think they got nothin’ to live for, do you? Well, if you are so sure, why don’t you just take my knife, jump down off the back of this truck, and go try to kill one of them?’
There was dead silence in the truck.
Humphrey was amazed. It was the first time that anyone had said anything that had actually silenced the negative talk about the local people. The sergeant went on to say, ‘I don’t know either why they value their lives so much. Maybe it’s those snotty nosed kids, or the women in the pantaloons. But whatever it is, they care about their lives and the lives of their loved ones, same as we Americans do. And if we don’t stop talking bad about
So, it's a good deal if other people pay for a good sized chunk of the costs of an EV? Makes sense. Getting other people to pay for your stuff always makes them cheaper....
It's a better deal, yes. But it's a good deal even without the tax credits. Break-even in that case was just under six years.
And, I never asked anyone to pay for my car. If there's a legal way for me to reduce my tax liability, however, I will take it.
Mod parent up. GP's failure to properly account for this kind of corruption renders their entire argument hopelessly naive.
Sorry, the naivete is yours, here. See my explanation: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4478993&cid=45503283
Do you really think it was in shareholders' interest for the former CEO of Home Depot to get a $200M pay-off?
I don't know the details, so I can't say for sure, but I can say: very possibly, in fact very likely.
There's a reason that boards vote big golden parachutes for CEOs they're dumping, and it isn't (generally) cronyism, it's protection. Not so different from the sort of "protection" paid to a mob boss, actually. You have to consider how much damage an angry ex-CEO can do to a corporation. Lawsuits, airing dirty laundry, fighting a protracted battle for control of the company which leaves it leaderless and generates lots of uncertainty and bad press... and those are just the beginning. We're talking about a person who was in a position of extreme trust, and unlike and angry ex-sysadmin, you can't cut off a former CEO's power by just deleting some user accounts.
Generally, CEOs get those big payoffs in exchange for signing agreements to go away quietly and to do nothing to (further) damage the company. That is often a very good deal for the shareholders.
As for the case you mentioned, as I said I don't know the details and have no idea if it was good for shareholders or not, but it's likely it was.
I pay $230 per month, and put nothing down on the vehicle, though I did have to pay sales tax on the difference between sale price and residual value. That's with 12K miles per year mileage allowance (which does restrict my usage of the car a little). I actually pay almost nothing in electricity costs for it, since I mostly charge at work, so my total expense for commuting is basically that lease fee, plus insurance and taxes. If I did pay for the electricity I'd be spending about $30 per month for it.
My car is an SL (the high end trim) with GPS navigation, XM radio, backup camera, power everything, heated seats and steering wheel, allow wheels, etc. Sticker price was around $36K. Nissan got the $7500 federal tax credit, I got about $2K of the $5K Colorado tax credit (it's pro-rated based on the difference between sale price and residual value).
Oh, yeah, forgot about that part; the state of Colorado effectively paid the sales tax back to me through the tax credit, plus a little.
All in all, I'm very pleased with both the car and what it costs me to drive it.
gamepad
Lack of standardization may be an issue there, true. But games of significant complexity in general are going to be platform-specific.
Yet somehow, SDL manages to abstract gamepad access across multiple PC platforms. True, the button order for non-Xbox 360 controllers varies considerably, but there are ways around that. I seem to remember XBMC maintaining a device description repository for game controllers.
Ah, well, then it can be done. Cool!
locking you into Google
Umm, these are all open standards, how are you locked into Google?
Just how many places do you think people can drive 75 mph for one hour, given traffic? Highway speeds in populated areas average more like 10-40 mph. And since nobody can possibly drive only on the highway, what about city/town traffic? That is more like 5-20 mph. At speeds people actually drive, and counting regenerative braking, most driving consumes more like 2-6 kW than 20 kW. That means that 1 kW for heat, plus the much worse battery performance in the cold, add up to an enormous impact on range.
Yes and no. Yes the impact is greater, but it's also impacting a longer range. You get 50% more range out of the battery at 40 mph than you do at 75 mph. And stop-and-go traffic (if you know how to drive it to maximize regeneration) costs very little. On cold days when I'm a little worried about range I like heavy traffic because driving slower will help me a lot more than what the additional time costs me. Of course, I could always drive slower anyway, but that tends to really piss off other drivers who are anxious to get home :-)
It's actually even a little better than that -- not that 7.9 seconds is wrong, but the acceleration feels even zippier than the number expresses, partly because it's front-loaded as compared to ICE vehicles with similar 0-60 times and partly because it feels really cool to accelerate like that in near silence.
Oh, come on. You can't get away with shit like that on /. The measurement is 7.9. How it feels is just you sniffing your own farts.
Nonsense. Neither EVs nor ICEVs accelerate with perfect consistency. There are peaks and dips in the acceleration based in many different factors, but one difference that is fairly consistent is that EVs have maximum acceleration at zero mph, while ICEVs need to spool up a bit. The result is that the EV gives you a real kick in the pants, and does it instantaneously. An ICEV that meets the same 0-60 time has to have greater acceleration later in order to make up for the slower start, and in fact if an EV and an ICEV have the same 0-60 time the ICEV will almost certainly be faster 0-90.
There's a YouTube video of a Tesla racing a Dodge Viper that demonstrates this; the Tesla wins the quarter-mile drag race quite handily, but you see that the Viper is actually moving faster towards the end -- but it can't make up what it lost from the Tesla's phenomenal hole shot.
So, what I said is exactly true: The LEAF feels zippier than an ICEV that has the same 0-60 time, mostly because of that initial kick in the pants. After that begins to taper off, though, people are still very impressed because the car continues to accelerate at a very healthy pace, with no more sound than a quiet whine. The combination is... very cool, and much more interesting than an ICEV that does 0-60 in 7.9 s.
-- and I overestimated the amount of charging I'd have to do at home. In practice I do 90% of my charging at the office, letting my employer pay for the electricity.
And your employer is fine with this? I can see it if you are a key player in a professional office environment, but for common workers I don't see management saying "Sure, use our electricity, we don't mind. By the way, your request for a raise has been approved."
Yep. My employer installed the EV chargers specifically so employees can use them.
A cheap electric car that performs well will sell like crazy.
Define "cheap". I bought my Nissan LEAF because, compared to every other new hybrid or ICE-only vehicle I looked at, it was the cheapest option.
No more expensive than an a gasoline-powered car of similar ability.
Actually, yes, the gasoline-powered cars of similar features and similar ability (except range), were more expensive for my driving needs. It took about six years to hit the break-even point against the most competitive ICE vehicles... but only without the $13K in tax credits (federal and state). With those, break-even was two years.
Good luck getting robust gamepad
Lack of standardization may be an issue there, true. But games of significant complexity in general are going to be platform-specific. Of course, the bar for games that can work as web apps keeps rising.
webcam
That problem is already pretty well-solved. Google video hangouts work well across a wide variety of systems, for example.
3D graphics
There's no real reason that should be hard. We've had solid 3D graphics standards for decades, and while fragmentation due to rapid progress has been an issue (plus some deliberate MS-induced fragmentation), at this point 3D is pretty commoditized. Which isn't to say that this is a solved problem, but just that it's not a technical problem.
audio/video codec (WebM vs. MP4 format war)
Meh. That's just a matter of getting people to stop fighting.
shipping label printer support
If you don't mind needing to be online when you print, that's not an issue either. Drivers in the cloud.
How long does the battery last before it must be replaced?
I don't think the batteries will ever have to be replaced, in general, though the vehicles' range will gradually decrease. I know Nissan warranties the battery to retain 70% of its capacity for 8 years. And the dropoff in capacity should get slower and slower as it ages... so if it's 70% after 8 years, it'll probably still be 60% after 15. We don't know for sure, of course.
How does the environmental footprint of the battery compare with the environmental footprint of an oil burner?
I don't really care; I bought my EV for financial reasons, not environmental reasons. Oh, if the footprint is smaller I do consider that to be a good thing, but it's a second or even third-order concern for me.
You have got to be joking - do you have ANY concept of how much it costs to add a WiFi router to an internet connection the business already has, vs. running a high-load electrical connection out to even just TWO parking spaces? Not to mention cost of the electricity, not to mention the high likelihood of outside connections being vandalized...
Except that companies like SemaCharge and ChargePoint will actually install and maintain the equipment for almost nothing. They make their money by charging for use (you get an account and they mail you a card which you have to tap to charge).
I'll readily admit that I haven't looked into the details, but I know these companies are trying to address exactly the issue you're talking about, and to profit from solving that problem.
I should also mention that when it comes to the "with tax credits" side of the evaluation, I had not only the $7500 federal tax credit, but also a $4800 state tax credit. I'm actually philosophically opposed to subsidies like that, but I'll take any route I can find to legally reduce my tax liability. The fact that I projected a break-even point within the lifetime of the battery warranty even without the credits was impressive, and convincing, to me, though.
BTW, in practice the car has turned out to be an even better deal than I projected. I hadn't considered the fact that my LEAF requires virtually no maintenance -- really just consumables like tires, wiper blades, etc. -- and I overestimated the amount of charging I'd have to do at home. In practice I do 90% of my charging at the office, letting my employer pay for the electricity. Also I had budgeted for a 240V charger installation at home, but ended up decided that the slow 110V charger that came with the car was adequate.
So, what's the next insufficiency?
Note that web apps still underpowered in terms of graphical capability.
Or more generally, anything that needs number crunching performance...in realtime. Updating a big spreadsheet comes to mind, Google Docs spreadsheets suck once they get beyond a few screen fulls.
That's why NaCl is under development. Though, in general, I think the direction of the future for number crunching performance is to do that part in the cloud.
Yeah, although I actually did end up leasing my LEAF, mainly because the technology is changing rapidly right now and I think there's an advantage in being able to walk away and by the new hotness in three years, in general I'm a "buy it new and drive it for 15 years" kind of guy. My other vehicle is a 2004 and I expect to get at least another five years out of it.
Your $35K estimate for the EV is too high. However, at only 5K miles per year it's extremely unlikely that the math will work out to favor EVs for you, at least in the near term. Now, if you were driving 15K miles (like I do), it would be a different story.
Yea, people have trouble starting diesel cars when it's -25C outside, I wonder how far could you drivein an electric car - especially that heat is no longer "free" like in a gas/diesel car.
My experience is that in sub-zero (F) temperatures my LEAF spends about 1 KW on heat. That alone would drain the battery in about 20 hours. Given that driving at freeway speeds (75 mph) will drain it in about one hour, running the heater decreases the range, but it's on the order of a 5-10% decrease... maybe as high as 20% if you're driving longer distances at lower speeds.
But they need to be on or plugged in to work, don't they?
No. They run off of the stored electricity. If you leave it out in the cold for long enough to drain the battery (many weeks, if you start from a full charge), then it will no longer be able to power the heater and the battery will be damaged by the cold. This is why the EV manuals say that if you're going to leave the car parked for a weeks in cold weather, make sure it's plugged in.
Well, none of the gas cars I looked at were $14K. The cheapest was $18K (IIRC), mostly because I wanted an apples-to-apples comparison and the EVs are pretty loaded. And, I actually wanted all the gizmos. In addition, I drive quite a bit more than 10K miles per year, which increases the operational cost advantage of EVs.
which means I was looking at a higher price point than a lot of people,
Well that's why people aren't following you to all buy EVs.
No, that doesn't explain it, because there are plenty of other people who buy new cars. In fact, the article is all about new car purchases.
Incidentally, your post motivated me to check out the Leaf's 0-60 time, which appears to be 7.9 seconds, which is indeed fairly reasonable. So now we're just looking at price.
It's actually even a little better than that -- not that 7.9 seconds is wrong, but the acceleration feels even zippier than the number expresses, partly because it's front-loaded as compared to ICE vehicles with similar 0-60 times and partly because it feels really cool to accelerate like that in near silence.
Put it this way... my teenage kids' friends think my LEAF is more awesome than their dads' BMWs and Audis, even though those cars are actually more capable in virtually every respect (and more expensive!). All it takes is me putting the pedal all the way down once and they're sold. And it's not because they care a bit about "saving the planet".
So, what's the next insufficiency? At some point the web folks will say that web apps can replace desktop apps, and there won't be anything left that isn't covered. I think we're actually getting very close to that point.