Tesla already does this with their showrooms. The showrooms are independent of selling cars. The people working there do not get a commission. Their job is to show the car. If you put down a deposit you go to the front of the line for test drives. Tesla also has their service centers which are independent from the showrooms as well. The goal of the service center is to not make a profit. If a service center is too far away, they'll come to you (for a $100 fee).
This is a totally different model than the dealerships. The showrooms basically contain the top end car but show all of the available options available. In terms of looks there really is very little difference between a P85+ and a standard 60. They look about the same, inside and out. The only difference is all the various choices the buyer chooses when they order the car and that some options are only available on the higher end cars. The showrooms do carry the different models, though right now there aren't very many that show the Model X since the car won't be in standard production until the end of the year.
Similarly having service handled separately means that in service they won't try and push you to get a new car or push services you don't need. The service centers often are not at their showrooms. They do allow upgrading to the latest and greatest since the loaner car you get is usually top of the line or nearly top of the line and you can upgrade to the loaner car if you want, but there's no person trying to pressure you. It's basically they hand you the fob and off you go. The only problem is that they have trouble keeping loaner cars. When I got my 12K service last week they had sold them all.
1. Model 60, 85, P85 or P85+ 2. Paint color (9 choices) 3. Roof type, standard or panomeric 4. Wheels (19 or 21", color and style) 5. Interior cloth or leather (and color), standard or performance seats, finish (wood and type, carbon fiber or piano black), carpet or matching wood floor storage area 6. Carbon fiber spoiler or not (for P85 and P85+) 7. Standard or red brake calipers 8. Standard (10KW, 40A) or high (20KW, 80A) 240V charging 9. Supercharger support or not (for 60) 10. Tech package or not 11. Standard or active air suspension 12. Parking sensors or not 13. Fog lamps or not 14. Standard or upgraded sound system 15. Standard or extended Nappa leather trim 16. Standard or Alcantara headliner 17. Rear facing child seats or not 18. Premium interior lighting or not 19. Subzero weather package or not 20. Parcel shelf for trunk 21. 19" Michelin Primacy tire upgrade (if 19" wheels are chosen) 22. Paint armor or not
When I bought my Prius I had my choice between 7 different packages. In this case each individual feature can be selected by the buyer and the car is made to order at the factory. There are over a million combinations. You get exactly what you order, not what's available on a lot.
The Tesla galleries do not sell cars. They do not make a profit. The only things they sell are some accessories and things like shirts, hats, etc. They do not sell cars but show them. There is no pressure to buy when you visit a showroom since the people who work there do not earn a commission.
As the owner of a Tesla one thing I have to point out is that Elon Musk has publically stated that their goal for service is to not make a profit. When I broke a part on my Model S the replacement cost of that part, plus installation was a fraction of what it would cost for most other cars. My experience with dealerships is they try and gouge you any way they can, pushing unneeded services on their customers, especially on those they feel are the least knowledgeable.
Tesla does not sell generic ready-made cars. It does not fit that model.
When I ordered my Tesla Model S I chose exactly what car I wanted. The paint color, the wheel color, interior trim, various options, etc. There are many choices to make when buying a model S. It's not just package 1, 2, 3 or 4. It's more like Do you want parking sensors? Do you want fog lights? Cold temperature options? Paint color? Wheel options? 60 or 85KWh battery? etc. Each car is custom built to order from the factory for the customer.
They don't cut down cost. There are companies that transport cars. If you need to deliver 10 cars to an area it's not hard to get a car transport to deliver directly to the customer. That's how Tesla does it. While it cost a bit more than delivering them all to a single location it's still cheaper than a dealership where they may be sitting for months on a lot.
In the early days dealerships made sense. It made it so that manufacturers didn't have to hold onto inventory and deal with all the individual financing or service.
In the case of Tesla dealerships would be a big problem.
To give you an example, back in 2006 I decided to get a Prius. I researched and decided what options I wanted, what color, etc. The problem was that for many months the only cars I could get were white or sometimes black. I didn't want white or black and I wanted a certain set of options. I ended up waiting six months and ended up with my third color choice. I also had to deal with them trying to sell me things I didn't want, especially when it came to service.
Now move ahead to 2012 when I decided to get a Tesla. Through their website I was able to chose exactly what I wanted down to the color of the wheels. Today there are even more choices on exactly what features you get with the car. Again I had to wait six months but I got exactly what I wanted. When it comes to service, they do not try and push unneeded services on me since Elon Musk has stated that their goal is to not make a profit on service. When I broke something on my car the cost to fix it was a fraction of what it would be with a similar luxury car.
The Tesla show rooms are also quite different. The people working there do not make a commission so they're not trying to push options or features but to basically answer questions. The one I went to was inside a mall. A lot of regular people walked in to look at the car and ask questions, most of whom probably had little interest in buying one. They answered their questions the same as they did for me when it was fairly obvious I was looking to buy one. It was a totally different experience than what one expects at a typical dealership.
The Toyota dealership keeps sending me all kinds of crap in the mail even after I sold my Prius. Another non-Toyota dealership who did some body work on my car after someone hit it also sends me a bunch of crap periodically. Tesla sends me almost nothing. There are no coupons for radiator flushes or other crap constantly flooding my mailbox. It helps in that service is only suggested every 12,000 miles other than tire rotation.
Since Tesla builds to order they don't maintain an inventory of cars. It allows them to streamline their business and reduce costs.
Also, dealerships in some ways are a monopoly. Dealerships are franchises and they are guaranteed that there will not be another dealership for the same car within a certain distance. This means that I have to really go out of my way to avoid the local Toyota dealership for parts or service which I have had to do on some occasions due to the crap I had to put up with from the dealership.
Also, dealerships are often big conglomerates of dealerships such as dgdg.com. They have a huge percentage of dealerships in the Bay Area covering many different brands from Dodge, GM, Fiat, Hundai, Kia, Mazda and more. These are not your small mom and pop dealerships.
During a Q&A with Elon Musk he said that the biggest push against Tesla was not from the mom and pop dealerships but from these huge mega-dealership groups. They have a monopoly and see Tesla as a threat to them.
Dealerships are nothing but leaches. They offer little if any value and only are there to suck money from consumers and give car salesmen a bad name. Their service is often overpriced and they push crap you don't need.
I hate to break it to you but the Model S IS a hatchback with a lot of space. A month ago I hauled a new dishwasher in the back of mine with plenty of room to spare. I'm sure Tesla did a lot of market research before coming out with the model X. Right now they're focusing on the luxury segment due to the current high cost of the large battery packs. Once they get their giga factory built they expect to come out with a 30-35K car though that probably won't be until at least 2018.
There is already a lot of demand and preorders for the Model X.
At least here in the US there is a strong demand for SUVs, especially by all those soccer moms.
Tesla is also addressing their battery availability issues and is building their giga factory (which will be powered by solar).
The nice thing with my Tesla is every morning I wake up to a full tank. It takes me 5 seconds to plug in at night and 5 seconds to unplug in the morning. If I have to charge at home I can charge at around 55 miles per hour of charging. The only time I need to spend any time charging is during long trips, and in the next three months if I drive down to Los Angeles it will take me only 90 seconds due to battery swapping. It's faster than filling up a gas car. Also, for those long trips the charging is free and always will be. Charging at home at night is also a lot more convenient than having to go out of my way to fill up at a gas station, standing out in the weather. It's also a lot cheaper.
As for drawing huge amounts of power, Tesla is adding batteries to their charging stations so they can maintain a steady load and/or charge the batteries at night to provide the energy during the day. They are also installing solar to offset the energy used and to charge the batteries during the day. The solar won't meet peak demand but that's not necessary. Most of the time the superchargers are not used. They are primarily used on weekends. Most owners just charge at home since it is more convenient. The superchargers tend to be along major routes but not in the middle of big cities. They tend to be at malls or near restaraunts and other things.
There are also a lot more places I can charge than there are gas stations. Electricity is virtually everywhere. I can charge via 110v in the worst case or at any RV hookup or 240v outlet. The supercharger network is also filling out very quickly. By the end of this year most of the country will be covered. Right now I can drive from Vancouver to San Diego, from Southern California to New York and along most of the East coast.
Hydrogen is actually a terrible solution for cars for a number of reasons.
1. Creating hydrogen from water is very inefficient and prohibitively expensive for transportation. 2. Creating hydrogen from natural gas is at best around 70% efficient due to the laws of physics, then there's all that CO2 left over. 3. Compressing hydrogen consumes at least 20% of the energy contained in the hydrogen. Cryogenically cooling it is far more energy intensive. 4. Fuel cells such as the type used in cars are at best around 40% efficient. Fuel cells also must maintain a certain temperature range, even when not in use. They must never freeze or they will be destroyed. They also must maintain a certain internal humidity level. 5. Transportation of hydrogen is expensive. For pressurized hydrogen the tanks are quite heavy. A truck carrying enough hydrogen for around 200 cars will weigh around 13 tons due to the tanks. 6. Existing pipelines cannot be used. Hydrogen embrittles metal so the pipes must be specially lined. 7. Safety is a concern for refueling. The Alameda County hydrogen filling station for the fuel cell busses already had one fire due to a failed valve and this refueling station is not open to the public. 8. Hydrogen is extremely flammable and burns with an almost invisible flame. A hydrogen leak in an indoor area could be catestrophic. Hydrogen also will leak through virtually any joint. Hydrogen is also explosive over a very wide range of mixtures with air, more so than even natural gas. 9. A diesel powered car is more efficient than a hydrogen fuel cell and will produce less CO2 since virtually all hydrogen comes from cracking methane.
I curse Office 365 almost daily. We switched over to it for our email. Their email services are extremely slow and frequently I cannot access it via IMAP since Microsoft's IMAP implementation is broken. I frequently get authentication errors. Last week I couldn't even send email for a day for the same reason, authentication errors. This has been going on for many months and people have been reporting this problem for almost a year.
It seems that Microsoft tries to limit the number of IMAP connections, which fundamentally breaks the protocol. The problem is made worse if you have more than one computer connected via IMAP. In my case I have my home computer, work computer and my phone connecting.
Their mail service is also extremely slow and for some reason forces my mail client (Thunderbird) to have to redownload all of the email to reindex it which often takes a week or so since it is so slow.
Their filtering support is also weak with no way to filter on mailing list ID. I had to give up subscribing to the Linux Kernel Mailing List because that totally broke things. It could not keep up at all.
The web interface absolutely sucks as well.
Few people on my floor use the Outlook client since most of us run Linux on our desktops.
Our sales and marketing had to drop Sharepoint and switched over to Google Drive because it was so bad.
Some of our engineers (myself included) have resorted to just setting up Microsoft's services to just forward all of our emails elsewhere (i.e. Google) in order to reliably access our email.
The problems of Greece and Spain have more to do with overspending and the European central bank rather than being socialist. The high unemployment is due to the harsh measures that were handed down which just made things worse. It is not due to socialism but from bad management of government funds. Another big problem in Europe is that governments lack a lot of control over their currency since it is all handled by the central bank. Great Britain kept their currency for just that reason and do not have the huge problems that some other European countries are experiencing.
Other socialists countries are also doing fairly well. The Chinese economy has been doing fairly well though now many Chinese are upset about the things the government has ignored (like the environment, human rights and corruption).
I think it can work as has been shown in the Scandinavian countries. For example, Norway has the second highest GDP per capita after Luxembourg and is the second wealthiest country in monetary value. Large industries are also controlled by the government. Higher education is free.
I have found the nVidia drivers to be extremely easy to install. I have been running nVidia for years on several computers and generally their drivers just work. I have run into frequent problems with the Intel drivers such that on my netbook if power management kicks in on the screen it will never recover. Years ago I had a nightmare with the AMD drivers and Intel drivers. We had a computer where it was impossible to get the Intel drivers to work at all. We ended up buying a cheap nVidia card because their closed source drivers just work. I have had far fewer problems over the years with the nVidia drivers than I have had with Intel and AMD drivers.
It has been estimated that there is no shortage of lithium for the batteries. Lithium ion batteries are only 2-3% lithium anyway. Also, older batteries are recycled to recover all of the lithium and other metals. The batteries in my Tesla are Lithium cobalt aluminum oxide, nothing in them being particularly rare. The lithium sulfur batteries have no shortage of sulfur either since it is a big waste product from oil refining.
In terms of mines, there's a big one in California starting back up that is out in the middle of a desert with nobody living nearby and it is estimated that there is easily 100 years worth of lithium currently known.
Batteries are actually quite efficient at storage, especially lithium ion ones. The older NiMH batteries and lead-acid are not all that efficient. The NiMH batteries in my Prius were still in a good state of charge after 6 months of sitting in my driveway. The leakage of lithium ion batteries is quite small. The problems Tesla was having had to do with systems drawing power all the time, not the batteries. Now that problem is mostly solved via software updates.
My car has a 416HP induction motor with 445 ft-lbs of torque the size of a large watermelon. High powered motors can be quite small. People are always shocked when I open the hood of my car to put in groceries and ask where the engine is. It's hidden under the trunk.
With the battery swapping program you always end up getting your battery back. Your battery does not go to anyone else. If you decide to keep the battery you ended up with you have to pay the difference in value based on how much use the replacement battery has had.
While I can fit an awful lot in my Tesla, certainly more than my Prius, I still rent a truck for the few times I need to haul stuff. It's only $20-$25 + gas usually to rent for a short time. For the few times I need to go where charging is not an option, like on some of my camping trips, renting a car is not all that expensive. It's also possible now to drive a Tesla across the country and it won't be too long until the entire country is covered.
That's what the battery swapping will be for. Supercharging is fine if you want to go grab a meal and charge while you eat. Battery swapping will take around 90 seconds, less time than filling up at a gas station.
Slashdot Mirror
Tesla already does this with their showrooms. The showrooms are independent of selling cars. The people working there do not get a commission. Their job is to show the car. If you put down a deposit you go to the front of the line for test drives. Tesla also has their service centers which are independent from the showrooms as well. The goal of the service center is to not make a profit. If a service center is too far away, they'll come to you (for a $100 fee).
This is a totally different model than the dealerships. The showrooms basically contain the top end car but show all of the available options available. In terms of looks there really is very little difference between a P85+ and a standard 60. They look about the same, inside and out. The only difference is all the various choices the buyer chooses when they order the car and that some options are only available on the higher end cars. The showrooms do carry the different models, though right now there aren't very many that show the Model X since the car won't be in standard production until the end of the year.
Similarly having service handled separately means that in service they won't try and push you to get a new car or push services you don't need. The service centers often are not at their showrooms. They do allow upgrading to the latest and greatest since the loaner car you get is usually top of the line or nearly top of the line and you can upgrade to the loaner car if you want, but there's no person trying to pressure you. It's basically they hand you the fob and off you go. The only problem is that they have trouble keeping loaner cars. When I got my 12K service last week they had sold them all.
Actually they have a lot more.
1. Model 60, 85, P85 or P85+
2. Paint color (9 choices)
3. Roof type, standard or panomeric
4. Wheels (19 or 21", color and style)
5. Interior cloth or leather (and color), standard or performance seats, finish (wood and type, carbon fiber or piano black), carpet or matching wood floor storage area
6. Carbon fiber spoiler or not (for P85 and P85+)
7. Standard or red brake calipers
8. Standard (10KW, 40A) or high (20KW, 80A) 240V charging
9. Supercharger support or not (for 60)
10. Tech package or not
11. Standard or active air suspension
12. Parking sensors or not
13. Fog lamps or not
14. Standard or upgraded sound system
15. Standard or extended Nappa leather trim
16. Standard or Alcantara headliner
17. Rear facing child seats or not
18. Premium interior lighting or not
19. Subzero weather package or not
20. Parcel shelf for trunk
21. 19" Michelin Primacy tire upgrade (if 19" wheels are chosen)
22. Paint armor or not
When I bought my Prius I had my choice between 7 different packages. In this case each individual feature can be selected by the buyer and the car is made to order at the factory. There are over a million combinations. You get exactly what you order, not what's available on a lot.
The Tesla galleries do not sell cars. They do not make a profit. The only things they sell are some accessories and things like shirts, hats, etc. They do not sell cars but show them. There is no pressure to buy when you visit a showroom since the people who work there do not earn a commission.
As the owner of a Tesla one thing I have to point out is that Elon Musk has publically stated that their goal for service is to not make a profit. When I broke a part on my Model S the replacement cost of that part, plus installation was a fraction of what it would cost for most other cars. My experience with dealerships is they try and gouge you any way they can, pushing unneeded services on their customers, especially on those they feel are the least knowledgeable.
Tesla does not sell generic ready-made cars. It does not fit that model.
When I ordered my Tesla Model S I chose exactly what car I wanted. The paint color, the wheel color, interior trim, various options, etc. There are many choices to make when buying a model S. It's not just package 1, 2, 3 or 4. It's more like Do you want parking sensors? Do you want fog lights? Cold temperature options? Paint color? Wheel options? 60 or 85KWh battery? etc. Each car is custom built to order from the factory for the customer.
They don't cut down cost. There are companies that transport cars. If you need to deliver 10 cars to an area it's not hard to get a car transport to deliver directly to the customer. That's how Tesla does it. While it cost a bit more than delivering them all to a single location it's still cheaper than a dealership where they may be sitting for months on a lot.
In the early days dealerships made sense. It made it so that manufacturers didn't have to hold onto inventory and deal with all the individual financing or service.
In the case of Tesla dealerships would be a big problem.
To give you an example, back in 2006 I decided to get a Prius. I researched and decided what options I wanted, what color, etc. The problem was that for many months the only cars I could get were white or sometimes black. I didn't want white or black and I wanted a certain set of options. I ended up waiting six months and ended up with my third color choice. I also had to deal with them trying to sell me things I didn't want, especially when it came to service.
Now move ahead to 2012 when I decided to get a Tesla. Through their website I was able to chose exactly what I wanted down to the color of the wheels. Today there are even more choices on exactly what features you get with the car. Again I had to wait six months but I got exactly what I wanted. When it comes to service, they do not try and push unneeded services on me since Elon Musk has stated that their goal is to not make a profit on service. When I broke something on my car the cost to fix it was a fraction of what it would be with a similar luxury car.
The Tesla show rooms are also quite different. The people working there do not make a commission so they're not trying to push options or features but to basically answer questions. The one I went to was inside a mall. A lot of regular people walked in to look at the car and ask questions, most of whom probably had little interest in buying one. They answered their questions the same as they did for me when it was fairly obvious I was looking to buy one. It was a totally different experience than what one expects at a typical dealership.
The Toyota dealership keeps sending me all kinds of crap in the mail even after I sold my Prius. Another non-Toyota dealership who did some body work on my car after someone hit it also sends me a bunch of crap periodically. Tesla sends me almost nothing. There are no coupons for radiator flushes or other crap constantly flooding my mailbox. It helps in that service is only suggested every 12,000 miles other than tire rotation.
Since Tesla builds to order they don't maintain an inventory of cars. It allows them to streamline their business and reduce costs.
Also, dealerships in some ways are a monopoly. Dealerships are franchises and they are guaranteed that there will not be another dealership for the same car within a certain distance. This means that I have to really go out of my way to avoid the local Toyota dealership for parts or service which I have had to do on some occasions due to the crap I had to put up with from the dealership.
Also, dealerships are often big conglomerates of dealerships such as dgdg.com. They have a huge percentage of dealerships in the Bay Area covering many different brands from Dodge, GM, Fiat, Hundai, Kia, Mazda and more. These are not your small mom and pop dealerships.
During a Q&A with Elon Musk he said that the biggest push against Tesla was not from the mom and pop dealerships but from these huge mega-dealership groups. They have a monopoly and see Tesla as a threat to them.
Dealerships are nothing but leaches. They offer little if any value and only are there to suck money from consumers and give car salesmen a bad name. Their service is often overpriced and they push crap you don't need.
According to your link:
"Model X comes standard with Dual Motor All-Wheel Drive."
"Model X will be offered with a 60 kWh or an 85 kWh battery and will be dual motor all-wheel drive."
I hate to break it to you but the Model S IS a hatchback with a lot of space. A month ago I hauled a new dishwasher in the back of mine with plenty of room to spare. I'm sure Tesla did a lot of market research before coming out with the model X. Right now they're focusing on the luxury segment due to the current high cost of the large battery packs. Once they get their giga factory built they expect to come out with a 30-35K car though that probably won't be until at least 2018.
There is already a lot of demand and preorders for the Model X.
At least here in the US there is a strong demand for SUVs, especially by all those soccer moms.
On top of that, cryogenically cooling hydrogen is extremely energy intensive.
You can't ship hydrogen through methane gas pipes since hydrogen embrittles metal.
Tesla is also addressing their battery availability issues and is building their giga factory (which will be powered by solar).
The nice thing with my Tesla is every morning I wake up to a full tank. It takes me 5 seconds to plug in at night and 5 seconds to unplug in the morning. If I have to charge at home I can charge at around 55 miles per hour of charging. The only time I need to spend any time charging is during long trips, and in the next three months if I drive down to Los Angeles it will take me only 90 seconds due to battery swapping. It's faster than filling up a gas car. Also, for those long trips the charging is free and always will be. Charging at home at night is also a lot more convenient than having to go out of my way to fill up at a gas station, standing out in the weather. It's also a lot cheaper.
As for drawing huge amounts of power, Tesla is adding batteries to their charging stations so they can maintain a steady load and/or charge the batteries at night to provide the energy during the day. They are also installing solar to offset the energy used and to charge the batteries during the day. The solar won't meet peak demand but that's not necessary. Most of the time the superchargers are not used. They are primarily used on weekends. Most owners just charge at home since it is more convenient. The superchargers tend to be along major routes but not in the middle of big cities. They tend to be at malls or near restaraunts and other things.
There are also a lot more places I can charge than there are gas stations. Electricity is virtually everywhere. I can charge via 110v in the worst case or at any RV hookup or 240v outlet. The supercharger network is also filling out very quickly. By the end of this year most of the country will be covered. Right now I can drive from Vancouver to San Diego, from Southern California to New York and along most of the East coast.
http://www.teslamotors.com/sup...
http://www.teslamotors.com/bat...
Hydrogen is actually a terrible solution for cars for a number of reasons.
1. Creating hydrogen from water is very inefficient and prohibitively expensive for transportation.
2. Creating hydrogen from natural gas is at best around 70% efficient due to the laws of physics, then there's all that CO2 left over.
3. Compressing hydrogen consumes at least 20% of the energy contained in the hydrogen. Cryogenically cooling it is far more energy intensive.
4. Fuel cells such as the type used in cars are at best around 40% efficient. Fuel cells also must maintain a certain temperature range, even when not in use. They must never freeze or they will be destroyed. They also must maintain a certain internal humidity level.
5. Transportation of hydrogen is expensive. For pressurized hydrogen the tanks are quite heavy. A truck carrying enough hydrogen for around 200 cars will weigh around 13 tons due to the tanks.
6. Existing pipelines cannot be used. Hydrogen embrittles metal so the pipes must be specially lined.
7. Safety is a concern for refueling. The Alameda County hydrogen filling station for the fuel cell busses already had one fire due to a failed valve and this refueling station is not open to the public.
8. Hydrogen is extremely flammable and burns with an almost invisible flame. A hydrogen leak in an indoor area could be catestrophic. Hydrogen also will leak through virtually any joint. Hydrogen is also explosive over a very wide range of mixtures with air, more so than even natural gas.
9. A diesel powered car is more efficient than a hydrogen fuel cell and will produce less CO2 since virtually all hydrogen comes from cracking methane.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/...
I curse Office 365 almost daily. We switched over to it for our email. Their email services are extremely slow and frequently I cannot access it via IMAP since Microsoft's IMAP implementation is broken. I frequently get authentication errors. Last week I couldn't even send email for a day for the same reason, authentication errors. This has been going on for many months and people have been reporting this problem for almost a year.
It seems that Microsoft tries to limit the number of IMAP connections, which fundamentally breaks the protocol. The problem is made worse if you have more than one computer connected via IMAP. In my case I have my home computer, work computer and my phone connecting.
Their mail service is also extremely slow and for some reason forces my mail client (Thunderbird) to have to redownload all of the email to reindex it which often takes a week or so since it is so slow.
Their filtering support is also weak with no way to filter on mailing list ID. I had to give up subscribing to the Linux Kernel Mailing List because that totally broke things. It could not keep up at all.
The web interface absolutely sucks as well.
Few people on my floor use the Outlook client since most of us run Linux on our desktops.
Our sales and marketing had to drop Sharepoint and switched over to Google Drive because it was so bad.
Some of our engineers (myself included) have resorted to just setting up Microsoft's services to just forward all of our emails elsewhere (i.e. Google) in order to reliably access our email.
-Aaron
The problems of Greece and Spain have more to do with overspending and the European central bank rather than being socialist. The high unemployment is due to the harsh measures that were handed down which just made things worse. It is not due to socialism but from bad management of government funds. Another big problem in Europe is that governments lack a lot of control over their currency since it is all handled by the central bank. Great Britain kept their currency for just that reason and do not have the huge problems that some other European countries are experiencing.
Other socialists countries are also doing fairly well. The Chinese economy has been doing fairly well though now many Chinese are upset about the things the government has ignored (like the environment, human rights and corruption).
I think it can work as has been shown in the Scandinavian countries. For example, Norway has the second highest GDP per capita after Luxembourg and is the second wealthiest country in monetary value. Large industries are also controlled by the government. Higher education is free.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
I have found the nVidia drivers to be extremely easy to install. I have been running nVidia for years on several computers and generally their drivers just work. I have run into frequent problems with the Intel drivers such that on my netbook if power management kicks in on the screen it will never recover. Years ago I had a nightmare with the AMD drivers and Intel drivers. We had a computer where it was impossible to get the Intel drivers to work at all. We ended up buying a cheap nVidia card because their closed source drivers just work. I have had far fewer problems over the years with the nVidia drivers than I have had with Intel and AMD drivers.
Oh, you mean like this? Though instead of 5 minutes it's more like 90 seconds.
It has been estimated that there is no shortage of lithium for the batteries. Lithium ion batteries are only 2-3% lithium anyway. Also, older batteries are recycled to recover all of the lithium and other metals. The batteries in my Tesla are Lithium cobalt aluminum oxide, nothing in them being particularly rare. The lithium sulfur batteries have no shortage of sulfur either since it is a big waste product from oil refining.
In terms of mines, there's a big one in California starting back up that is out in the middle of a desert with nobody living nearby and it is estimated that there is easily 100 years worth of lithium currently known.
Batteries are actually quite efficient at storage, especially lithium ion ones. The older NiMH batteries and lead-acid are not all that efficient. The NiMH batteries in my Prius were still in a good state of charge after 6 months of sitting in my driveway. The leakage of lithium ion batteries is quite small. The problems Tesla was having had to do with systems drawing power all the time, not the batteries. Now that problem is mostly solved via software updates.
My car has a 416HP induction motor with 445 ft-lbs of torque the size of a large watermelon. High powered motors can be quite small. People are always shocked when I open the hood of my car to put in groceries and ask where the engine is. It's hidden under the trunk.
With the battery swapping program you always end up getting your battery back. Your battery does not go to anyone else. If you decide to keep the battery you ended up with you have to pay the difference in value based on how much use the replacement battery has had.
It has already been demonstrated with battery swapping, which takes less time than filling a gas tank. In a few years this should be commonplace.
While I can fit an awful lot in my Tesla, certainly more than my Prius, I still rent a truck for the few times I need to haul stuff. It's only $20-$25 + gas usually to rent for a short time. For the few times I need to go where charging is not an option, like on some of my camping trips, renting a car is not all that expensive. It's also possible now to drive a Tesla across the country and it won't be too long until the entire country is covered.
That's what the battery swapping will be for. Supercharging is fine if you want to go grab a meal and charge while you eat. Battery swapping will take around 90 seconds, less time than filling up at a gas station.
http://www.teslamotors.com/bat...