They have a lot of prototypes and demo cars, and have been giving test drives to people who are already on the waiting list, showing them off to magazine writers, etc. But the only person who's actually taken delivery of his own car thus far is Elon Musk.
Tesla's flagship store -- in L.A. on Santa Monica Blvd. -- will have its debut on May 3. It won't actually be opening for business that day, but will be having an "open house" for customers and their guests, so they are calling it a preview.
The cars are being assembled, albeit at a very slow pace, and some of them I believe should already on the boat from England. Tesla's approach seems to be: assemble four or five cars and then put them on a ship in one lot. Then it takes a few weeks to cross The Pond.
Car number one has already been delivered a while back to Elon Musk. But I think car number two is the important one, since that's the start of "series production", and that's when they start handing the keys over to people outside the company. (Granted that Martin Eberhard isn't outside the company by his own choice.)
3. BluRay will eventually start releasing movies with an Image Constraint Token flag. HD-DVD won't. . . not after their format is "dead". Sure there'll be no new movies released. . . But all the movies in circulation will have no ICT flag to worry about.
4. After HD-DVD is dead and buried, there will be no revoking of HD-DVD AACS keys either.
The brilliant thing about BluRay (and HD-DVD) is that it can capture pretty nearly everything the back catalog of movies has to offer. Yes in the future we may have 3D Smell-O-Vision or some other such new technological wonder, but it won't make My Fair Lady look or sound any better. Those hypothetical future formats will require new content to show off their capabilities. BluRay doesn't.
It's sort of like the situation with CDs. CDs are probably the final physical format for music because they do a good job of capturing the audio experience of a studio master tape. It's not perfect reproduction, but when you go to SuperCD or DVD-A then the improvement is so subtle that it's not meaningful to most people. The new formats can offer surround, but most albums for the last 50+ years weren't mixed for surround anyhow. Then add the inconvenience of not being able to rip it and load onto your MP3 player. . . That's why there's such a massive apathy in the marketplace toward SuperCD and DVD-A.
Contrary to what some people say, DVD isn't "good enough" to show a movie the way it was meant to be seen. BluRay is. So in that regard, BluRay is the video equivalent of an audio CD. And whatever comes after will be the equivalent of SuperCD, which hardly anybody will care about.
LaserDisc was a pretty successful format. True it didn't set the world on fire the way CD and DVD did, but it was viable in the marketplace for about 20 years. At this point HD-DVD and BluRay can only dream of becoming Laserdisc 2.0.
I loved my laserdiscs, and if there was a HD version of that format I'd jump back to it in a heartbeat. No more DRM. No possibility of my player being "revoked" by a movie studio. No image constraint token. No region coding. No "FBI Warning" that I can't skip past. No trailers that I can't skip past, or commands that I'm "not authorized" to enter at certain times. Huge cover art!
Because, let's face it. . . HD-DVD and BluRay were never competing for the hearts and minds of consumers like you and me. They were competing for the hearts and minds of the movie studio executives. And the format that puts us the furthest under their collective thumb is, predictably, the one that's winning.
Not sure what you mean by compulsory DRM. I was aware that Blu-ray has region codes and HD-DVD does not, but otherwise I thought their DRM schemes were basically the same. Are you saying it's not possible to create a non-DRM Blu-ray disc even if you wanted to? And that it's possible to do with HD-DVD?
From my own reading on the subject, "the major roadblock to widespread geothermal use" is lack of motivation.
Despite all the talk and hand-wringing over global warming, power companies are still not paying any carbon tax. They aren't required to phase out coal-fired plants, and they aren't having any difficulty getting permits to build new ones. They have a business model that is working and making money for them, and no pressing reason to change their ways.
A study came out of MIT a while back showing that the USA has vast geothermal resources which could be exploited fairly easily. It would require a small R&D investment to prove the concept, but they believe enhanced geothermal energy could be accessed across large regions of the country.
Is anybody going for it? No. . . No power companies want to pony up that "small R&D investment". Why should they? They can continue using coal and natural gas without any R&D cost at all. As for the federal government, their energy research has been cut to nearly nothing. So nothing happens.
Actually, I believe there is a federal law which requires car makers to support a model for ten years after production ceases. There is nothing buyers could have signed that would have changed it, only the US Congress can do that.
The thing that chapped my hide the most was when GM reclaimed the cars and charged the lessees penalties for every nick or ding on the car, however minor, then hauled the cars off to the crusher. That's mean and vindictive. It's like. . . something Microsoft would do. Hearing about that made me feel a lot less inclined to do any soft of business with GM in the future.
I've read "The Car That Could" and it's very educational about the EV1 and GM's attitudes. They really wanted to make electric cars -- but they wanted to get the jump on their competitors. If Ford and Chrysler and Toyota and Honda were all *forced* to make directly competing products, then it was no longer an attractive proposition. Fighting against the ZEV mandate was their top priority, and they would do anything they could do to show regulators that it was impractical.
Whenever the ZEV mandate was brought into effect, or strengthened, that's when GM pulled back and fought against electric cars. When there was no ZEV mandate, or whenever it was rolled back or greatly weakened, then GM supported electric cars (Impact, EV1, Chevy Volt).
Also. . . When the ZEV mandate was greatly weakened (or "gutted" as some would say), Tesla Motors filed for incorporation within a few days. That was no coincidence. Anybody would be crazy to start a car company knowing that GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota and Honda were forced -- by law, like it or not -- to compete against you.
There's no way you'd get anywhere near 30 miles per day of driving out of solar panels on your car. Maybe you could get 5 miles if you're lucky. The surface area just isn't big enough, and it's not aimed (angled) face-on toward the sun.
For those who have a house, garage or carport with some roof space, they can put enough solar panels up there to charge a car.
If electric cars catch on, curbside charging stations should follow.
The new generation of EVs and PHEVs are going with Li-ion cells. They are considered non-toxic by the EPA. You can dump them into a landfill, although it makes more sense to recycle them and recover the lithium metal.
You cannot (legally) dump used motor oil into a landfill, it's toxic waste.
Has any electric car ever burst into flames? I mean literally, has this ever been observed to happen? Gasoline cars have been known to catch fire.
Nuclear fission is A-OK with me, but it's *not* the only option for our future. Solar has potential (don't overlook solar-thermal systems, by the way), geothermal energy has huge untapped potential -- and with a bit of luck Dr. Bussard's fusion reactor just might work and make everything else obsolete. But here's the point. . . There are lots of ways to make electricity, lots of clean ways even, but none of them will get you down the highway without an ELECTRIC CAR.
All of your numbers are wrong! I don't mean a little bit off, I mean blatantly dead wrong.
For example: "Electric engine has THEORETICAL top efficiency of around 45%."
Most electric motors are about 90% efficient.
"The theoretical efficiency of gasoline engine (which I don't remember at the moment) is 2-3 times that."
So that would make gas engines up to 135% efficient? Heh. . . AS best I can recall, the maximum for gas engines is roughly 33%. Most typical ones run about 20% efficient.
Many studies have been done on this subject, and they all concluded that electric cars are very significantly more energy-efficient than gas cars. IN FACT, that's the primary motivation behind electric cars. If they weren't more efficient, nobody would be interested in them. All it takes is about five minutes with Google or Wikipedia to dig up this info, it's no secret.
The only practical difference I can see between HD-DVD and BluRay is that HD-DVD players are cheaper and they don't use region coding. Both of these are significant advantages to me. I understand BluRay has more data capacity. . . but as long as both formats have enough capacity for a HD movie, then what difference does it make?
I give a damn, and I'm not satisfied with DVD quality. "The whole HD thing" is not a scam, it's very easy to see the difference between DVD and HD. HD is actually pretty addictive once you've seen what it can do.
DVDs are fuzzy and blurry compared with movie film, what you see in a theater. It doesn't properly reproduce the source material. HD does, for the most part. HD isn't identical to movie film, but it's probably about 98-99% in terms of what the viewer perceives. DVD is more like 75% there.
This is why I get so hot under the collar. This is why I get so disgusted. From where I sit, HD discs are a product we really need. It could be, and should be, a wonderful, fantastic product. And instead it seems like both Sony and Toshiba are hell-bent on ruining it with their format war and their DRM crap.
The only way I can see either side "winning" this war is if they. . .
1. Get rid of HDCP.
2. Get rid of control lock-outs.
3. Get rid of region codes. (Score one for HD-DVD, it doesn't have region codes.)
It's blatantly obvious that neither side in this battle is playing to win -- and by that I mean, win over consumers. These machines aren't designed for consumers, they aren't designed for movie lovers, movie collectors. . . they aren't designed for your or me. They're designed for the MPAA.
I've wanted a HD videodisc player badly for years. This was the key thing that's been missing from the HDTV transition. We had HDTV sets and monitors, we had receivers, we had cable boxes and satellite receivers. We even got DVRs. The one big crucial thing that was missing, that I wanted most of all as a HDTV fan, was a pre-recorded HD format -- HD discs. With HD discs I'd be able to start a movie collection of actually theater-quality movies, not fuzzy (relatively speaking) DVDs. That's the dream.
And I still haven't bought one. And I'm not sure if I'm going to, because I'm so disgusted by HD-DVD and BluRay. I'm disgusted by the stupid, pointless "format war". I'm disgusted by HDMI, which my expensive, high-quality HDTV set doesn't have. I'm disgusted by HDCP "downsampling", even though nobody has actually used it on their discs yet. Just knowing they could and probably will use it makes me sick. I'm disgusted by the thought of my hardware being "revoked" and killed by the MPAA whenever it tickles their fancy to do so. I disgusted that they still aren't getting rid of control lockout and region codes, which have been nothing but a nuisance for DVD (and which LD didn't have).
It's like they're trying every way in the world to drive me away from their products. But the truth is worse. . . The truth is that they don't really care what I think, what any of us ordinary people think. They aren't trying to please us, they are trying to please the MPAA. The MPAA is their customer. As far as I'm concerned the MPAA can buy their machines, and I'll go back to collecting books.
It drives me nuts when people say things like this: "The jump between VHS quality and DVD quality was HUGE!!"
That's like saying the jump between cassette tapes and CDs was huge. Of course it was. But anyone who really cared about audio quality had LP records instead of cassettes. Same way, anybody who actually *cared* about video quality had LaserDisc. Apparently not many people cared, since LD never really took off in a big way. (And S-VHS fared even worse.)
The jump in quality between LD and DVD was none. Zip. Nada. Yet for some reason DVD quickly obliterated LD. Go figure.
It just shows how little "quality" matters in making or breaking an audio or video format.
You lost me with that last sentence. "If X were possible, we'd already have it." Any technology that isn't already on the market today is "magic" and therefore can be scoffed at. Nope, sorry, I don't buy that.
Companies today are pouring billions into battery research. They obviously see some potential for improvement, or else they wouldn't be throwing that kind of money at the problem. Look at it this way. . . For about 100 years we were stuck with lead-acid batteries. Ever since the time of Tesla and Edison there were predictions that a battery breakthrough was right around the corner, but after 100 years of disappointments a lot of people had become very cynical and were ready to give up. Then NiMH came along. Then in another ten years Li-ion came along.
Li-ion chemistry is still advancing. . . but even if it didn't advance any further, Li-ion has crossed a line into the realm of adequacy. More energy density is always a fine thing, and I'm confident that more can be squeezed out of Li-ion -- but even without that, today's Li-ion cells are powerful enough to make an adequate, acceptable, reasonably practical electric car. Energy density is no longer the show stopper. (Getting the cost down has become a bigger obstacle, but it's one that doesn't require any technological breakthroughs.)
So. . . You say if batteries could match the energy density of gasoline, going electric would be a no-brainer. It would be radically superior. But that's a moot observation, isn't it? That's not going to happen, doesn't need to happen, we can't afford to wait for it to happen. We have some urgent problems that need to be solved today and can be solved with today's battery technology.
The movie makes the EV1 look like the ultimate dream car. Reality wasn't quite that simple. . .
The first EV1 with crummy Delco lead-acid batteries could only manage about 60 miles per charge. That really wasn't enough. GM were very fearful that legislation would force them to sell it in cold-weather states where range would often be even less.
Later they switched to Panasonic lead-acid batteries that could achieve about 85 miles (in warm weather), and then the second-generation EV1 had NiMH batteries that could manage about 130 miles. It was starting to get into a useful area, but only 457 of the NiMH-based cars were ever made, and it was too little too late to turn things around.
No, I don't think the oil companies are going to take this lying down. I think they are going to kick and scream and lobby and bribe and sue and fight every way they can. And eventually they're going to lay down and die -- just like the RIAA. This is the fate of a powerful business cartel when its business model no longer works.
Actually, there will be some demand for oil for a long time to come. I don't see any easy way to replace petroleum in aircraft fuel, or plastics, solvents, adhesives, pesticides, asphalt and all the myriad other petrochemicals. But if you take cars off the table -- light passenger vehicles -- then you're striking out about 80% of demand, and the oil business becomes a shadow of its former self.
Tell your European car makers to get with the program! Tesla shouldn't be the only company in the world making cars like this. If electric cars can become popular, there's no reason why Volkswagen (for example) couldn't make them. If enough people ask, they'll do.
I liked the VW EcoRacer concept car, by the way. It could have been the biofuel counterpart to the Tesla Roadster -- if VW had actually put it into production. That's an opportunity lost.
The Roadster is assembled by Lotus in their plant at Hethel England. The plant isn't designed for high-volume automated production, it's really only meant to produce a few thousand cars a year -- and Lotus's own cars have to come first, one must assume!
My understanding is that Tesla could produce as many as 2,000 Roadsters per year there, after they get production ramped up. That would probably require adding shifts, and I think 1,000 per year is a more likely limit.
Have to correct you on this point. . . Even if your electric car was powered from 100% coal-generated electricity, the carbon emissions would still be slightly less than the emissions from a gasoline-powered car. It uses energy that much more efficiently. Furthermore, I don't know any country that is running on 100% coal. Here in the USA we are only about 50% coal, and everything else we use is cleaner than coal.
It should be understood that we have to clean up our electrical grid and move away from fossil fuels. You have to assume that's going to happen, and when it does happen the electric cars will be ready to take advantage of it. They won't have to change.
Systems like airbags are mostly made by independent suppliers who will happily sell their components to anybody: Ford, GM, Toyota, Honda, Tesla, Fisker, Aptera, Bubba's Electric Car Company. . . It doesn't matter who the customer is, as long as they've got the money to spend.
As for range. . . . A plug-in hybrid would allow you to run on gasoline for those long trips, so that wouldn't be a problem. Or you could keep your old gas car for those long trips. Or rent one. Or you could charge your electric car at RV hookups, there are RV parks all over the country with nice fat 50-amp sockets. There are lots of options.
Still, that isn't really the point, is it?
The real point is that right now gasoline cars can do some things that electric cars can't do.
Five years from now the situation may be reversed. You may find that an electric car still works when all the gas stations in your area have run dry. You may find you can make a long cross-country trip in your electric car, charging at RV parks and motels, when you would never be able to get enough gasoline ration tickets to make that same trip in your gas car.
Slashdot Mirror
They have a lot of prototypes and demo cars, and have been giving test drives to people who are already on the waiting list, showing them off to magazine writers, etc. But the only person who's actually taken delivery of his own car thus far is Elon Musk.
Tesla's flagship store -- in L.A. on Santa Monica Blvd. -- will have its debut on May 3. It won't actually be opening for business that day, but will be having an "open house" for customers and their guests, so they are calling it a preview.
The cars are being assembled, albeit at a very slow pace, and some of them I believe should already on the boat from England. Tesla's approach seems to be: assemble four or five cars and then put them on a ship in one lot. Then it takes a few weeks to cross The Pond.
Car number one has already been delivered a while back to Elon Musk. But I think car number two is the important one, since that's the start of "series production", and that's when they start handing the keys over to people outside the company. (Granted that Martin Eberhard isn't outside the company by his own choice.)
1. It's cheap.
2. No region coding.
3. BluRay will eventually start releasing movies with an Image Constraint Token flag. HD-DVD won't. . . not after their format is "dead". Sure there'll be no new movies released. . . But all the movies in circulation will have no ICT flag to worry about.
4. After HD-DVD is dead and buried, there will be no revoking of HD-DVD AACS keys either.
The brilliant thing about BluRay (and HD-DVD) is that it can capture pretty nearly everything the back catalog of movies has to offer. Yes in the future we may have 3D Smell-O-Vision or some other such new technological wonder, but it won't make My Fair Lady look or sound any better. Those hypothetical future formats will require new content to show off their capabilities. BluRay doesn't.
It's sort of like the situation with CDs. CDs are probably the final physical format for music because they do a good job of capturing the audio experience of a studio master tape. It's not perfect reproduction, but when you go to SuperCD or DVD-A then the improvement is so subtle that it's not meaningful to most people. The new formats can offer surround, but most albums for the last 50+ years weren't mixed for surround anyhow. Then add the inconvenience of not being able to rip it and load onto your MP3 player. . . That's why there's such a massive apathy in the marketplace toward SuperCD and DVD-A.
Contrary to what some people say, DVD isn't "good enough" to show a movie the way it was meant to be seen. BluRay is. So in that regard, BluRay is the video equivalent of an audio CD. And whatever comes after will be the equivalent of SuperCD, which hardly anybody will care about.
LaserDisc was a pretty successful format. True it didn't set the world on fire the way CD and DVD did, but it was viable in the marketplace for about 20 years. At this point HD-DVD and BluRay can only dream of becoming Laserdisc 2.0.
I loved my laserdiscs, and if there was a HD version of that format I'd jump back to it in a heartbeat. No more DRM. No possibility of my player being "revoked" by a movie studio. No image constraint token. No region coding. No "FBI Warning" that I can't skip past. No trailers that I can't skip past, or commands that I'm "not authorized" to enter at certain times. Huge cover art!
Because, let's face it. . . HD-DVD and BluRay were never competing for the hearts and minds of consumers like you and me. They were competing for the hearts and minds of the movie studio executives. And the format that puts us the furthest under their collective thumb is, predictably, the one that's winning.
Not sure what you mean by compulsory DRM. I was aware that Blu-ray has region codes and HD-DVD does not, but otherwise I thought their DRM schemes were basically the same. Are you saying it's not possible to create a non-DRM Blu-ray disc even if you wanted to? And that it's possible to do with HD-DVD?
From my own reading on the subject, "the major roadblock to widespread geothermal use" is lack of motivation.
Despite all the talk and hand-wringing over global warming, power companies are still not paying any carbon tax. They aren't required to phase out coal-fired plants, and they aren't having any difficulty getting permits to build new ones. They have a business model that is working and making money for them, and no pressing reason to change their ways.
A study came out of MIT a while back showing that the USA has vast geothermal resources which could be exploited fairly easily. It would require a small R&D investment to prove the concept, but they believe enhanced geothermal energy could be accessed across large regions of the country.
Is anybody going for it? No. . . No power companies want to pony up that "small R&D investment". Why should they? They can continue using coal and natural gas without any R&D cost at all. As for the federal government, their energy research has been cut to nearly nothing. So nothing happens.
Actually, I believe there is a federal law which requires car makers to support a model for ten years after production ceases. There is nothing buyers could have signed that would have changed it, only the US Congress can do that.
The thing that chapped my hide the most was when GM reclaimed the cars and charged the lessees penalties for every nick or ding on the car, however minor, then hauled the cars off to the crusher. That's mean and vindictive. It's like. . . something Microsoft would do. Hearing about that made me feel a lot less inclined to do any soft of business with GM in the future.
I've read "The Car That Could" and it's very educational about the EV1 and GM's attitudes. They really wanted to make electric cars -- but they wanted to get the jump on their competitors. If Ford and Chrysler and Toyota and Honda were all *forced* to make directly competing products, then it was no longer an attractive proposition. Fighting against the ZEV mandate was their top priority, and they would do anything they could do to show regulators that it was impractical.
Whenever the ZEV mandate was brought into effect, or strengthened, that's when GM pulled back and fought against electric cars. When there was no ZEV mandate, or whenever it was rolled back or greatly weakened, then GM supported electric cars (Impact, EV1, Chevy Volt).
Also. . . When the ZEV mandate was greatly weakened (or "gutted" as some would say), Tesla Motors filed for incorporation within a few days. That was no coincidence. Anybody would be crazy to start a car company knowing that GM, Ford, Chrysler, Toyota and Honda were forced -- by law, like it or not -- to compete against you.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe!
Now all we need is to run a pipeline from Jupiter. . .
There's no way you'd get anywhere near 30 miles per day of driving out of solar panels on your car. Maybe you could get 5 miles if you're lucky. The surface area just isn't big enough, and it's not aimed (angled) face-on toward the sun.
For those who have a house, garage or carport with some roof space, they can put enough solar panels up there to charge a car.
If electric cars catch on, curbside charging stations should follow.
The new generation of EVs and PHEVs are going with Li-ion cells. They are considered non-toxic by the EPA. You can dump them into a landfill, although it makes more sense to recycle them and recover the lithium metal.
You cannot (legally) dump used motor oil into a landfill, it's toxic waste.
Has any electric car ever burst into flames? I mean literally, has this ever been observed to happen? Gasoline cars have been known to catch fire.
Nuclear fission is A-OK with me, but it's *not* the only option for our future. Solar has potential (don't overlook solar-thermal systems, by the way), geothermal energy has huge untapped potential -- and with a bit of luck Dr. Bussard's fusion reactor just might work and make everything else obsolete. But here's the point. . . There are lots of ways to make electricity, lots of clean ways even, but none of them will get you down the highway without an ELECTRIC CAR.
All of your numbers are wrong! I don't mean a little bit off, I mean blatantly dead wrong.
For example: "Electric engine has THEORETICAL top efficiency of around 45%."
Most electric motors are about 90% efficient.
"The theoretical efficiency of gasoline engine (which I don't remember at the moment) is 2-3 times that."
So that would make gas engines up to 135% efficient? Heh. . . AS best I can recall, the maximum for gas engines is roughly 33%. Most typical ones run about 20% efficient.
Many studies have been done on this subject, and they all concluded that electric cars are very significantly more energy-efficient than gas cars. IN FACT, that's the primary motivation behind electric cars. If they weren't more efficient, nobody would be interested in them. All it takes is about five minutes with Google or Wikipedia to dig up this info, it's no secret.
What technical merits?
The only practical difference I can see between HD-DVD and BluRay is that HD-DVD players are cheaper and they don't use region coding. Both of these are significant advantages to me. I understand BluRay has more data capacity. . . but as long as both formats have enough capacity for a HD movie, then what difference does it make?
I give a damn, and I'm not satisfied with DVD quality. "The whole HD thing" is not a scam, it's very easy to see the difference between DVD and HD. HD is actually pretty addictive once you've seen what it can do.
DVDs are fuzzy and blurry compared with movie film, what you see in a theater. It doesn't properly reproduce the source material. HD does, for the most part. HD isn't identical to movie film, but it's probably about 98-99% in terms of what the viewer perceives. DVD is more like 75% there.
This is why I get so hot under the collar. This is why I get so disgusted. From where I sit, HD discs are a product we really need. It could be, and should be, a wonderful, fantastic product. And instead it seems like both Sony and Toshiba are hell-bent on ruining it with their format war and their DRM crap.
The only way I can see either side "winning" this war is if they. . .
1. Get rid of HDCP.
2. Get rid of control lock-outs.
3. Get rid of region codes. (Score one for HD-DVD, it doesn't have region codes.)
It's blatantly obvious that neither side in this battle is playing to win -- and by that I mean, win over consumers. These machines aren't designed for consumers, they aren't designed for movie lovers, movie collectors. . . they aren't designed for your or me. They're designed for the MPAA.
I've wanted a HD videodisc player badly for years. This was the key thing that's been missing from the HDTV transition. We had HDTV sets and monitors, we had receivers, we had cable boxes and satellite receivers. We even got DVRs. The one big crucial thing that was missing, that I wanted most of all as a HDTV fan, was a pre-recorded HD format -- HD discs. With HD discs I'd be able to start a movie collection of actually theater-quality movies, not fuzzy (relatively speaking) DVDs. That's the dream.
And I still haven't bought one. And I'm not sure if I'm going to, because I'm so disgusted by HD-DVD and BluRay. I'm disgusted by the stupid, pointless "format war". I'm disgusted by HDMI, which my expensive, high-quality HDTV set doesn't have. I'm disgusted by HDCP "downsampling", even though nobody has actually used it on their discs yet. Just knowing they could and probably will use it makes me sick. I'm disgusted by the thought of my hardware being "revoked" and killed by the MPAA whenever it tickles their fancy to do so. I disgusted that they still aren't getting rid of control lockout and region codes, which have been nothing but a nuisance for DVD (and which LD didn't have).
It's like they're trying every way in the world to drive me away from their products. But the truth is worse. . . The truth is that they don't really care what I think, what any of us ordinary people think. They aren't trying to please us, they are trying to please the MPAA. The MPAA is their customer. As far as I'm concerned the MPAA can buy their machines, and I'll go back to collecting books.
I'm leaning toward HD-DVD.
1. It's cheaper.
2. No region codes.
However. . . Then I get reminded of crap like HDCP and I lose interest in the whole idea. Maybe I'll collect books instead of movies.
It drives me nuts when people say things like this: "The jump between VHS quality and DVD quality was HUGE!!"
That's like saying the jump between cassette tapes and CDs was huge. Of course it was. But anyone who really cared about audio quality had LP records instead of cassettes. Same way, anybody who actually *cared* about video quality had LaserDisc. Apparently not many people cared, since LD never really took off in a big way. (And S-VHS fared even worse.)
The jump in quality between LD and DVD was none. Zip. Nada. Yet for some reason DVD quickly obliterated LD. Go figure.
It just shows how little "quality" matters in making or breaking an audio or video format.
You lost me with that last sentence. "If X were possible, we'd already have it." Any technology that isn't already on the market today is "magic" and therefore can be scoffed at. Nope, sorry, I don't buy that.
Companies today are pouring billions into battery research. They obviously see some potential for improvement, or else they wouldn't be throwing that kind of money at the problem. Look at it this way. . . For about 100 years we were stuck with lead-acid batteries. Ever since the time of Tesla and Edison there were predictions that a battery breakthrough was right around the corner, but after 100 years of disappointments a lot of people had become very cynical and were ready to give up. Then NiMH came along. Then in another ten years Li-ion came along.
Li-ion chemistry is still advancing. . . but even if it didn't advance any further, Li-ion has crossed a line into the realm of adequacy. More energy density is always a fine thing, and I'm confident that more can be squeezed out of Li-ion -- but even without that, today's Li-ion cells are powerful enough to make an adequate, acceptable, reasonably practical electric car. Energy density is no longer the show stopper. (Getting the cost down has become a bigger obstacle, but it's one that doesn't require any technological breakthroughs.)
So. . . You say if batteries could match the energy density of gasoline, going electric would be a no-brainer. It would be radically superior. But that's a moot observation, isn't it? That's not going to happen, doesn't need to happen, we can't afford to wait for it to happen. We have some urgent problems that need to be solved today and can be solved with today's battery technology.
The movie makes the EV1 look like the ultimate dream car. Reality wasn't quite that simple. . .
The first EV1 with crummy Delco lead-acid batteries could only manage about 60 miles per charge. That really wasn't enough. GM were very fearful that legislation would force them to sell it in cold-weather states where range would often be even less.
Later they switched to Panasonic lead-acid batteries that could achieve about 85 miles (in warm weather), and then the second-generation EV1 had NiMH batteries that could manage about 130 miles. It was starting to get into a useful area, but only 457 of the NiMH-based cars were ever made, and it was too little too late to turn things around.
You forgot the last line. . . "This message brought to you by the gasoline producers of America."
No, I don't think the oil companies are going to take this lying down. I think they are going to kick and scream and lobby and bribe and sue and fight every way they can. And eventually they're going to lay down and die -- just like the RIAA. This is the fate of a powerful business cartel when its business model no longer works.
Actually, there will be some demand for oil for a long time to come. I don't see any easy way to replace petroleum in aircraft fuel, or plastics, solvents, adhesives, pesticides, asphalt and all the myriad other petrochemicals. But if you take cars off the table -- light passenger vehicles -- then you're striking out about 80% of demand, and the oil business becomes a shadow of its former self.
Tell your European car makers to get with the program! Tesla shouldn't be the only company in the world making cars like this. If electric cars can become popular, there's no reason why Volkswagen (for example) couldn't make them. If enough people ask, they'll do.
I liked the VW EcoRacer concept car, by the way. It could have been the biofuel counterpart to the Tesla Roadster -- if VW had actually put it into production. That's an opportunity lost.
The Roadster is assembled by Lotus in their plant at Hethel England. The plant isn't designed for high-volume automated production, it's really only meant to produce a few thousand cars a year -- and Lotus's own cars have to come first, one must assume!
My understanding is that Tesla could produce as many as 2,000 Roadsters per year there, after they get production ramped up. That would probably require adding shifts, and I think 1,000 per year is a more likely limit.
Have to correct you on this point. . . Even if your electric car was powered from 100% coal-generated electricity, the carbon emissions would still be slightly less than the emissions from a gasoline-powered car. It uses energy that much more efficiently. Furthermore, I don't know any country that is running on 100% coal. Here in the USA we are only about 50% coal, and everything else we use is cleaner than coal.
It should be understood that we have to clean up our electrical grid and move away from fossil fuels. You have to assume that's going to happen, and when it does happen the electric cars will be ready to take advantage of it. They won't have to change.
Systems like airbags are mostly made by independent suppliers who will happily sell their components to anybody: Ford, GM, Toyota, Honda, Tesla, Fisker, Aptera, Bubba's Electric Car Company. . . It doesn't matter who the customer is, as long as they've got the money to spend.
As for range. . . . A plug-in hybrid would allow you to run on gasoline for those long trips, so that wouldn't be a problem. Or you could keep your old gas car for those long trips. Or rent one. Or you could charge your electric car at RV hookups, there are RV parks all over the country with nice fat 50-amp sockets. There are lots of options.
Still, that isn't really the point, is it?
The real point is that right now gasoline cars can do some things that electric cars can't do.
Five years from now the situation may be reversed. You may find that an electric car still works when all the gas stations in your area have run dry. You may find you can make a long cross-country trip in your electric car, charging at RV parks and motels, when you would never be able to get enough gasoline ration tickets to make that same trip in your gas car.