I put 550 miles on a rental car on an island that was 32 miles wide, so I would expect that rentals used for leisure/vacation driving would see a lot more miles than rentals used for business (ie, airport to hotel to worksite to hotel to airport), but if the hotel one stays at on a vacation has the ability to charge rental cars then this shouldn't be too much of a problem.
With as much as some urban hotels charge just park the car, they should allow one to charge the car for free. Probably won't, but they should.
Many states have laws requiring that service be possible (ie, documented) for the end-buyer and for independent shops. I expect that part of Tesla's current behavior is due to the newness of the technology, and that in-essence, the current car is a beta product. Once the technology is firmed up it will be a lot simpler for others to repair well-documented platforms, if those right-to-repair laws continue to exist, as manufacturers will be forced to document those procedures and systems.
I was part of my high school's electric car club. We had a Porsche 914 that was converted; long after the club ended the car ended up in private hands and last I saw was still in-use in California as a commuter car. That car was very basic, with 24 six-volt deep cycle lead-acid batteries, with an electric motor that was some kind of starter motor for an aircraft engine, with the large motor controller and electrical bus for the few accessories that the car had (lights, mainly) but even if computers are heavily integrated into electric cars the systems are still fairly straightforward. There's power storage, capacitors for immediate power delivery, a motor controller, power distribution for systems, and a charging circuit, possibly with regenerative braking. Each part could be somewhat discrete and modular, allowing the diagnosis to look at each major component.
Compared to dealing with an internal combustion engine an all-electric setup is easy. I built a 408 stroker from a Chrysler LA small-block 360, deciding on the clearances (.0015" piston-to-cylinder wall) that the machine shop had to bore and hone the block to, then assembling the whole thing in my garage over several days. Maintenance is also a massive headache in many circumstances, and the fluids are extremely messy and make it much worse. By contrast that Porsche was a pain when it came to the batteries (we didn't charge in-car and had to pull the caps, so I ruined many shirts with acid) but just about everything else was clean. There was grease in the transaxle for the gears and differential, grease in the wheel bearings, grease in the ball joints and steering linkages, and there was brake fluid (both for the brakes and for the clutch), but there was no steering fluid (manual steering on this car, but electric cars could use electric-assist rather than hydraulic assist), no engine oil, no coolant. No gasoline or diesel. No heat-worn linkages like the carburetor choke mechanism to repair, no fuel lines. A lot less things to have as a mess.
An electric car would work perfectly for most households with more than one driver. One traditional liquid-fuelled vehicle that can be refuelled by pouring in more fuel and thus would be useful out-of-town, and electric cars for all of the other regular commuter vehicles in the household that don't need to commute out-of-town and don't need to drive more than a couple-hundred miles a day.
Just some perspective, most people drive 10,000-20,000 miles a year. There are about 270 weekdays in a year. If one's job has one driving close to the range of an electric car every workday (I'll call that 200 miles a day, for the math to be easy, the new vehicles appear to have more range than that) then that'd be 54,000 miles a year just on work/commuting alone. Even at 100 miles a day that's still 27,000 miles a year in just commuting. For the sake of argument, let's assume that a car gets driven about half of the mileage on the weekend that it gets driven on the weekday, so the weekend days effectively are another one day's driving. 270*1.2 is 324, divide 15,000 miles per year (on average) by 324, and you get a little under 50 miles a day.
We can conclude that most drivers, assuming 15,000 miles per year, drive less than 50 miles a day. Thus, most drivers could use an electric car for their work, and if the range is more than 250 miles they could even probably go several days or an entire work week without running out of range. They wouldn't even have to recharge every night, which might extend the life of the batteries. Might not want to drive past 200 miles if one's range is less than 300, in case the last day one has unexpected errands to run, but should still be practical.
My round-trip commute is 20 miles. My wife's is 40 miles. Even if errands were to triple the mileage we'd still have enough range daily. Not having electric cars seems just silly in this context.
Unfortunately a lot of the import dealerships have realized this and switched their employees to company polos. Still equally slimy, just less material to hold it in.
The electric car doesn't need nearly as much grease as there are no reciprocating engine parts to keep lubricated. There certainly are axle and wheel bearings, and possibly some other random bearings, so it should be a lot easier without salesmen-slime. We can reserve that long-lasting grease for the door hinges.
I had to drive through a hedge row to leave a dealership once. I was eighteen and shopping for my first car, driving my folks' old '86 Isuzu Trooper. I had driven in to look at a car up on the pedestal that I wanted to know the price of, and they blocked the driveway and wouldn't move. I shifted into four-wheel-high, jumped the curb into the landscaping, drove through a shallow, landscaped water retention basin, through a short hedge of oleanders, out on to the flat landscaping next to the street, shifted into two-wheel, and pulled out onto the street. I only saw the facial expression of one of the salesmen that blocked me, but it was absolutely priceless...
I do not have a problem with the end of the dealer franchise system. It's one thing if they were honest about the price and all of the associated costs so that one could actually negotiate with them, but it's fighting tooth-and-nail to get them to that point. When we tried to buy a truck in September 2008 and the prices just didn't align with what we expected, and finally after more than an hour they brought out the complete price breakdown, under duress that we were going to walk out if they didn't. Still couldn't reach a price, still walked out.
If franchise dealers would negotiate on an out-the-door price (especially when one is going to pay cash or bringing in one's own financing, effectively a cash transaction from the dealer's point of view) then I wouldn't be calling for their end, but with all of the crap they pull I see nothing redeeming about them, no value added.
Can't find a source for it right now, but if I remember what I learned in history class correctly, it was stated that Japan had a lot of decentralized manufacturing for the war effort in their cities; almost cottage-industry if you will. That would mean that a residential neighborhood would be the source for at least some war materiel, even if something as simple as uniform parts or boots or satchels, and production facilities of those items could well still be considered legitimate targets, especially for boots or for satchels and pouches that carry other war materiel.
Also with Japan's attempts to indiscriminately attack the United States with incendiary balloons they helped set the rules of engagement. That the balloons didn't have specific military targets in their attack lends weight to the US position that it did not need to attack only specific military targets in Japan either.
Arguably attacking the United States before the US was directly involved in the war in Europe was Japan's biggest mistake. Even with the damage and loss of life in Hawaii and the later attacks on The Philippines, Japan was not in a position to significantly hurt the United States and by attacking the US they turned their war into a two-front one, when previously it had been mostly fought against the Chinese, and fairly successfully fought that way too. Worse for them, they didn't impact industrial output in any way, and that industrial output had already been growing in anticipation of war, so it was simply a matter of ramping up the production that had already been planned. Had they stuck with European holdings in the Pacific only then they probably could have pressed for their economic sphere of influence without causing the United States to directly enter the war against them or against Germany, at least for awhile longer.
Maybe they left it in there in case anyone had gotten to market a VR headset with proper eye tracking built by the time the game was released, so that depth of field would follow what the eye was looking at rather than where the center of the screen is pointed. But, that could be me being rather more charitable than they deserve.
I wouldn't put anything past any government in this world.
Based on the content of lots of Japanese pop culture, I don't think that the Japanese feel a lot different about their government either.
As long as there are belligerent nations in close proximity to each other there will be interest in powerful weapons, even if the persons that would be responsible for such developments might find them in distaste. Do recall that Nobel thought that Dynamite would make war so horrible that no one would want to fight it anymore, he was wrong.
Sometimes I wonder if Japan surrendered so unconditionally because they thought that we had a lot more of them ready to drop. Had they known that we pretty much exhausted our supply of weapons with those two then perhaps they would have kept on fighting. I'm also curious when exactly it became general knowledge that we were essentially bluffing.
I doubt it. For monuments to war to be successful there has to be a clear villain for the population to unite against. Like the War on Drugs, the War on Terror doesn't really have a clearly defined set of opponents, especially as the War seems to turn inward to affect us even more than it turns outward.
It's still running Blackberry's OS, up to version 10, derived from QNX. The Q10 has the same processor in it that's in my Galaxy SII, which I assume makes it easier to run programs written for another OS if they don't have to emulate the very processor itself, just all of the hooks in the form of a wrapper. My guess is that many Android apps that require a lot of ties to Android-specific APIs won't work that well though, so we'll see how useful this truly ends up being.
I used to try to contribute, but for this very reason I don't anymore. I already have to deal with self-important busybodies in things that I'm required to do, I'm not going to deal with them in things that are supposed to be enjoyable pastimes.
If Geely bought Volvo to take Volvo's corporate culture, safety, and quality and apply it to Geely then good for them.
If Geely bought Volvo and took Geely's corporate culture, safety, and quality and applied to to Volvo, then that sucks.
Unfortunately while I'm sure that Geely would love to claim that it did the former, I expect that in the long term, they did the latter.
This is common, even when companies rename themselves post-acquisition. Current Sears is the Kmart corporation that bought Sears and renamed itself, and they're now in the endgame when Kmart crappiness is being applied to what historically had been strong Sears brands like Kenmore and Craftsman. Allied Signal bought Honeywell and renamed itself to Honeywell, and the Allied Signal perspective on "synergy" (translated into layoffs to be 'lean' that have meant that things get missed or dropped because the experienced employees were cut so the projects come in late and over-budget) persists to this day.
The only way that this kind of sale or merger works is if the working parts are left as-is or expanded at the expense of those of the purchasing entity. And most companies that end up big enough to do the buying are too proud to leave them intact.
My antenna is in my attic, under the roof and still picks up every station broadcast in my area, even when connected to a three-output passive distribution block with three TVs attached.
I guess I'm even less attached to TV than GP. I don't have a DVR anymore. I did have a gbpvr box until analog TV went clear away, but it hasn't been used in years, and the PCs that I have hooked to two of the TVs are in hardware hibernate mode (RAM suspend to disk) most of the time.
I interpret GP's point being that one can stop using cable and thus stop using so much electricity that's required by cable.
Cable companies seem to live in the universe of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, where among its quirks, technology only improves to the point that it achieves bare minimum functionality, never any real development without "need". This excessive power consumption for something that should be drawing close to nothing most of the time is proof enough of that- given the cable company's excessive control over the device in the home it's actually pretty stupid to even locally record the shows in the home. It makes much more sense for the DVRs to be front-ends to company-side storage, so the same shows only have to be stored once and can then be played back with a very thin, very light client.
If the DVRs and other cable "boxes" weren't owned and managed by the cable company then perhaps I'd feel differently about this kind of lack of personal control, but the way it is now, if you're in for a penny you may as well be in for a pound.
Could it be something silly like, food? Or maybe gas for their current gas guzzler so they can get to work?
My "gas guzzler" of a 1995 Impala that I bought with 6000 miles on the odometer three years ago costs me less in loan+fuel than a new car with three times the fuel economy would in loan+fuel.
I am certainly in favor of increasing the fuel economy of new vehicles. On the other hand, I believe that it makes sense to use equipment until it's reached the end of its lifespan. If that six year old Escalade is paid-off, then operating it will probably still cost less than buying a new vehicle, even at three times the fuel economy.
The number of new-car buyers is relatively inelastic. What you're seeing is the number of buyers that are willing to pay a premium for a hybrid over a vehicle with a conventional transmission.
Some buyers of hybrids actually want 100% electric cars. The hybrid was settling. Now that there are some 100% electrics, those buyers won't buy another hybrid.
Some buyers can only afford the cheapest car or only want to afford the cheapest car with the most fuel economy, and often that's a subcompact with a small four-cylinder engine and highway differential gearing, and in many instances that car gets as good fuel economy as a hybrid of of the next size-class up.
Lastly, hybrids often are equipped with more options or luxury options, which pushes up the price.
If you want hybrids to sell more, make them cheaper to buy, and sell them based on their fuel economy as the feature, not simply that they're a hybrid. That'll help attract buyers that want to avoid the dreaded "H word", and could get subcompact economy buyers to consider hybrids.
I'd personally like an all-electric, but I don't want a goofy looking car in the process. I want something like a modern Dart or 200 with a full-electric drivertrain, like the setup used in the Fiat 500e. But since Marchionnie doesn't even want to sell the 500e and is only doing so because California's laws require it, I doubt we'll see a Dart-electric or 200e anytime soon.
Actually I'd chock one up to Andrew Jackson, who marched tens of thousands of indigenous people from their tribal areas in the southern US to what's now Oklahoma, directly against court-order, in what's now known as the Trail of Tears.
Fact of the matter is, unless two branches gang-up on the third, it's not really, truly going to be illegal. Right now there aren't enough people in the legislative branch and the judicial branch to truly oppose the executive branch, especially in the post-2001 era when the executive branch was given latitude by both others.
Between the price of the coffee and the price and complexity of the machines I thought that modern coffee shops were an example of the technological developments of the space program working their way back into terrestrial use...
What they revealed was an asteroid at least 1,200 feet long and shaped like a Teletubby, with a small lobe on top and a larger lobe on the bottom.
I wasn't aware that a Teletubby was a standard unit of comparison. Maybe Le Système international d'unités can define degrees of similarity... "That asteroid is.7 Teletubbies in shape!"
I wonder what the SI unit for Teletubbies would be...
Slashdot Mirror
I put 550 miles on a rental car on an island that was 32 miles wide, so I would expect that rentals used for leisure/vacation driving would see a lot more miles than rentals used for business (ie, airport to hotel to worksite to hotel to airport), but if the hotel one stays at on a vacation has the ability to charge rental cars then this shouldn't be too much of a problem.
With as much as some urban hotels charge just park the car, they should allow one to charge the car for free. Probably won't, but they should.
Many states have laws requiring that service be possible (ie, documented) for the end-buyer and for independent shops. I expect that part of Tesla's current behavior is due to the newness of the technology, and that in-essence, the current car is a beta product. Once the technology is firmed up it will be a lot simpler for others to repair well-documented platforms, if those right-to-repair laws continue to exist, as manufacturers will be forced to document those procedures and systems.
I was part of my high school's electric car club. We had a Porsche 914 that was converted; long after the club ended the car ended up in private hands and last I saw was still in-use in California as a commuter car. That car was very basic, with 24 six-volt deep cycle lead-acid batteries, with an electric motor that was some kind of starter motor for an aircraft engine, with the large motor controller and electrical bus for the few accessories that the car had (lights, mainly) but even if computers are heavily integrated into electric cars the systems are still fairly straightforward. There's power storage, capacitors for immediate power delivery, a motor controller, power distribution for systems, and a charging circuit, possibly with regenerative braking. Each part could be somewhat discrete and modular, allowing the diagnosis to look at each major component.
Compared to dealing with an internal combustion engine an all-electric setup is easy. I built a 408 stroker from a Chrysler LA small-block 360, deciding on the clearances (.0015" piston-to-cylinder wall) that the machine shop had to bore and hone the block to, then assembling the whole thing in my garage over several days. Maintenance is also a massive headache in many circumstances, and the fluids are extremely messy and make it much worse. By contrast that Porsche was a pain when it came to the batteries (we didn't charge in-car and had to pull the caps, so I ruined many shirts with acid) but just about everything else was clean. There was grease in the transaxle for the gears and differential, grease in the wheel bearings, grease in the ball joints and steering linkages, and there was brake fluid (both for the brakes and for the clutch), but there was no steering fluid (manual steering on this car, but electric cars could use electric-assist rather than hydraulic assist), no engine oil, no coolant. No gasoline or diesel. No heat-worn linkages like the carburetor choke mechanism to repair, no fuel lines. A lot less things to have as a mess.
An electric car would work perfectly for most households with more than one driver. One traditional liquid-fuelled vehicle that can be refuelled by pouring in more fuel and thus would be useful out-of-town, and electric cars for all of the other regular commuter vehicles in the household that don't need to commute out-of-town and don't need to drive more than a couple-hundred miles a day.
Just some perspective, most people drive 10,000-20,000 miles a year. There are about 270 weekdays in a year. If one's job has one driving close to the range of an electric car every workday (I'll call that 200 miles a day, for the math to be easy, the new vehicles appear to have more range than that) then that'd be 54,000 miles a year just on work/commuting alone. Even at 100 miles a day that's still 27,000 miles a year in just commuting. For the sake of argument, let's assume that a car gets driven about half of the mileage on the weekend that it gets driven on the weekday, so the weekend days effectively are another one day's driving. 270*1.2 is 324, divide 15,000 miles per year (on average) by 324, and you get a little under 50 miles a day.
We can conclude that most drivers, assuming 15,000 miles per year, drive less than 50 miles a day. Thus, most drivers could use an electric car for their work, and if the range is more than 250 miles they could even probably go several days or an entire work week without running out of range. They wouldn't even have to recharge every night, which might extend the life of the batteries. Might not want to drive past 200 miles if one's range is less than 300, in case the last day one has unexpected errands to run, but should still be practical.
My round-trip commute is 20 miles. My wife's is 40 miles. Even if errands were to triple the mileage we'd still have enough range daily. Not having electric cars seems just silly in this context.
Unfortunately a lot of the import dealerships have realized this and switched their employees to company polos. Still equally slimy, just less material to hold it in.
Cool, I guess I'll go buy ... a ...
Nevermind...
The electric car doesn't need nearly as much grease as there are no reciprocating engine parts to keep lubricated. There certainly are axle and wheel bearings, and possibly some other random bearings, so it should be a lot easier without salesmen-slime. We can reserve that long-lasting grease for the door hinges.
I had to drive through a hedge row to leave a dealership once. I was eighteen and shopping for my first car, driving my folks' old '86 Isuzu Trooper. I had driven in to look at a car up on the pedestal that I wanted to know the price of, and they blocked the driveway and wouldn't move. I shifted into four-wheel-high, jumped the curb into the landscaping, drove through a shallow, landscaped water retention basin, through a short hedge of oleanders, out on to the flat landscaping next to the street, shifted into two-wheel, and pulled out onto the street. I only saw the facial expression of one of the salesmen that blocked me, but it was absolutely priceless...
I do not have a problem with the end of the dealer franchise system. It's one thing if they were honest about the price and all of the associated costs so that one could actually negotiate with them, but it's fighting tooth-and-nail to get them to that point. When we tried to buy a truck in September 2008 and the prices just didn't align with what we expected, and finally after more than an hour they brought out the complete price breakdown, under duress that we were going to walk out if they didn't. Still couldn't reach a price, still walked out.
If franchise dealers would negotiate on an out-the-door price (especially when one is going to pay cash or bringing in one's own financing, effectively a cash transaction from the dealer's point of view) then I wouldn't be calling for their end, but with all of the crap they pull I see nothing redeeming about them, no value added.
Can't find a source for it right now, but if I remember what I learned in history class correctly, it was stated that Japan had a lot of decentralized manufacturing for the war effort in their cities; almost cottage-industry if you will. That would mean that a residential neighborhood would be the source for at least some war materiel, even if something as simple as uniform parts or boots or satchels, and production facilities of those items could well still be considered legitimate targets, especially for boots or for satchels and pouches that carry other war materiel.
Also with Japan's attempts to indiscriminately attack the United States with incendiary balloons they helped set the rules of engagement. That the balloons didn't have specific military targets in their attack lends weight to the US position that it did not need to attack only specific military targets in Japan either.
Arguably attacking the United States before the US was directly involved in the war in Europe was Japan's biggest mistake. Even with the damage and loss of life in Hawaii and the later attacks on The Philippines, Japan was not in a position to significantly hurt the United States and by attacking the US they turned their war into a two-front one, when previously it had been mostly fought against the Chinese, and fairly successfully fought that way too. Worse for them, they didn't impact industrial output in any way, and that industrial output had already been growing in anticipation of war, so it was simply a matter of ramping up the production that had already been planned. Had they stuck with European holdings in the Pacific only then they probably could have pressed for their economic sphere of influence without causing the United States to directly enter the war against them or against Germany, at least for awhile longer.
Maybe they left it in there in case anyone had gotten to market a VR headset with proper eye tracking built by the time the game was released, so that depth of field would follow what the eye was looking at rather than where the center of the screen is pointed. But, that could be me being rather more charitable than they deserve.
Tell that to J. J. Abrams. I tried cleaning my glasses when I went to see Star Trek but it didn't make it any better.
Of course, I don't think that removing the lens flare would have helped much in that case regardless...
I wouldn't put anything past any government in this world.
Based on the content of lots of Japanese pop culture, I don't think that the Japanese feel a lot different about their government either.
As long as there are belligerent nations in close proximity to each other there will be interest in powerful weapons, even if the persons that would be responsible for such developments might find them in distaste. Do recall that Nobel thought that Dynamite would make war so horrible that no one would want to fight it anymore, he was wrong.
Sometimes I wonder if Japan surrendered so unconditionally because they thought that we had a lot more of them ready to drop. Had they known that we pretty much exhausted our supply of weapons with those two then perhaps they would have kept on fighting. I'm also curious when exactly it became general knowledge that we were essentially bluffing.
I doubt it. For monuments to war to be successful there has to be a clear villain for the population to unite against. Like the War on Drugs, the War on Terror doesn't really have a clearly defined set of opponents, especially as the War seems to turn inward to affect us even more than it turns outward.
Hmmm... Last time I checked, "trendy" and "spelling" didn't go together, especially with "youth"...
Lik ths? I cn typ wt lss ltrs nd b undrstndbl 2.
It's still running Blackberry's OS, up to version 10, derived from QNX. The Q10 has the same processor in it that's in my Galaxy SII, which I assume makes it easier to run programs written for another OS if they don't have to emulate the very processor itself, just all of the hooks in the form of a wrapper. My guess is that many Android apps that require a lot of ties to Android-specific APIs won't work that well though, so we'll see how useful this truly ends up being.
I used to try to contribute, but for this very reason I don't anymore. I already have to deal with self-important busybodies in things that I'm required to do, I'm not going to deal with them in things that are supposed to be enjoyable pastimes.
If Geely bought Volvo to take Volvo's corporate culture, safety, and quality and apply it to Geely then good for them.
If Geely bought Volvo and took Geely's corporate culture, safety, and quality and applied to to Volvo, then that sucks.
Unfortunately while I'm sure that Geely would love to claim that it did the former, I expect that in the long term, they did the latter.
This is common, even when companies rename themselves post-acquisition. Current Sears is the Kmart corporation that bought Sears and renamed itself, and they're now in the endgame when Kmart crappiness is being applied to what historically had been strong Sears brands like Kenmore and Craftsman. Allied Signal bought Honeywell and renamed itself to Honeywell, and the Allied Signal perspective on "synergy" (translated into layoffs to be 'lean' that have meant that things get missed or dropped because the experienced employees were cut so the projects come in late and over-budget) persists to this day.
The only way that this kind of sale or merger works is if the working parts are left as-is or expanded at the expense of those of the purchasing entity. And most companies that end up big enough to do the buying are too proud to leave them intact.
Why would most people need a preamp?
My antenna is in my attic, under the roof and still picks up every station broadcast in my area, even when connected to a three-output passive distribution block with three TVs attached.
I guess I'm even less attached to TV than GP. I don't have a DVR anymore. I did have a gbpvr box until analog TV went clear away, but it hasn't been used in years, and the PCs that I have hooked to two of the TVs are in hardware hibernate mode (RAM suspend to disk) most of the time.
I interpret GP's point being that one can stop using cable and thus stop using so much electricity that's required by cable.
Cable companies seem to live in the universe of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, where among its quirks, technology only improves to the point that it achieves bare minimum functionality, never any real development without "need". This excessive power consumption for something that should be drawing close to nothing most of the time is proof enough of that- given the cable company's excessive control over the device in the home it's actually pretty stupid to even locally record the shows in the home. It makes much more sense for the DVRs to be front-ends to company-side storage, so the same shows only have to be stored once and can then be played back with a very thin, very light client.
If the DVRs and other cable "boxes" weren't owned and managed by the cable company then perhaps I'd feel differently about this kind of lack of personal control, but the way it is now, if you're in for a penny you may as well be in for a pound.
Okay, how about a Tahoe or an Armada or a Sequoia?
My "gas guzzler" of a 1995 Impala that I bought with 6000 miles on the odometer three years ago costs me less in loan+fuel than a new car with three times the fuel economy would in loan+fuel.
I am certainly in favor of increasing the fuel economy of new vehicles. On the other hand, I believe that it makes sense to use equipment until it's reached the end of its lifespan. If that six year old Escalade is paid-off, then operating it will probably still cost less than buying a new vehicle, even at three times the fuel economy.
The number of new-car buyers is relatively inelastic. What you're seeing is the number of buyers that are willing to pay a premium for a hybrid over a vehicle with a conventional transmission.
Some buyers of hybrids actually want 100% electric cars. The hybrid was settling. Now that there are some 100% electrics, those buyers won't buy another hybrid.
Some buyers can only afford the cheapest car or only want to afford the cheapest car with the most fuel economy, and often that's a subcompact with a small four-cylinder engine and highway differential gearing, and in many instances that car gets as good fuel economy as a hybrid of of the next size-class up.
Lastly, hybrids often are equipped with more options or luxury options, which pushes up the price.
If you want hybrids to sell more, make them cheaper to buy, and sell them based on their fuel economy as the feature, not simply that they're a hybrid. That'll help attract buyers that want to avoid the dreaded "H word", and could get subcompact economy buyers to consider hybrids.
I'd personally like an all-electric, but I don't want a goofy looking car in the process. I want something like a modern Dart or 200 with a full-electric drivertrain, like the setup used in the Fiat 500e. But since Marchionnie doesn't even want to sell the 500e and is only doing so because California's laws require it, I doubt we'll see a Dart-electric or 200e anytime soon.
Actually I'd chock one up to Andrew Jackson, who marched tens of thousands of indigenous people from their tribal areas in the southern US to what's now Oklahoma, directly against court-order, in what's now known as the Trail of Tears.
Fact of the matter is, unless two branches gang-up on the third, it's not really, truly going to be illegal. Right now there aren't enough people in the legislative branch and the judicial branch to truly oppose the executive branch, especially in the post-2001 era when the executive branch was given latitude by both others.
Well, things do become somewhat less expensive when their tech developments no longer involve actually going to space...
Between the price of the coffee and the price and complexity of the machines I thought that modern coffee shops were an example of the technological developments of the space program working their way back into terrestrial use...
I wasn't aware that a Teletubby was a standard unit of comparison. Maybe Le Système international d'unités can define degrees of similarity... "That asteroid is .7 Teletubbies in shape!"
I wonder what the SI unit for Teletubbies would be...