Your definition of “low earth orbit” is significantly less than mine.

Neutral: Where Are We At On Electric Vehicles?

Blazing fast charging is totally not necessary. We replaced my wife’s Insight, which got about 400miles to a tank, with a Leaf, which gets about 85miles to a charge. We’ve had to fast charge it once in the 6 months we’ve owned it.

Please be sure to put the ProPilot system through its paces. When I drove the 2018 prototype a few weeks ago, it was very much still a beta system, to put it charitably. It had a weird tendency to pull to the left.

I’ve driven the 2018 prototype. It still uses the tire repair kit.

There are like 5 EVs that actually get 150+ mile range.

No, I’ve driven the 2018 prototype at a Nissan event already, and it looks just like a typical hatchback.

Have you driven an EV? A Spark EV, while a terrible car in basically all other respects, has 400lb-ft of torque in a tiny FWD hatch. It’s got (flawed) character for days.

Neutral:

Everything about a Cheetah is built for speed:

I think it will just evolve to suit the times. Look at Mercedes: their Sprinter is incredibly popular with the modern hippie Instagram-famous #vanlife #wanderlust crowd.

RVs are also big and clunky and churn through a lot of gas and probably represent the opposite direction we want to go in as far as transportation goes.

Don’t give the gov. any ideas...

Weird. I’ve lived in Oregon my entire life and can’t recall that ever happening. I always log my fill ups, so I know how much gas should be in there, and if it stops early, I just ask the attendant to restart it. That’s only happened a couple of times in the 15 years I’ve been driving though.

How about highlighting the fact that electric cars are hardly the only users of cobalt? Cobalt alloys are heavily used in the aircraft engine industry. Cobalt is found in carbide tooling and diamond cutting heads. A man-made cobalt isotope is used in cancer treatment, and it’s also used in permanent magnets.

Cobalt isn’t just used in batteries, it’s used in tons of high-strength alloys and tools like carbide end mills and diamond cutting heads. EVs and ICE cars each their environmental impacts.

Not to mention the fact that cobalt is used in all sort of industries, not just battery manufacture. Microchips contain it, lots of aircraft alloys and corrosion-resistant alloys contain it, etc.

Yeah, my dad’s E39 5-series has peeling headliner as well, particularly in the C-pillar area as he drives with the windows down a lot.

Just watch the presentation! The megacharger stations are 100% powered by Tesla solar panels and Powerpack battery banks. The stations are operational 24/7.

Well, a functional prototype absolutely exists. They gave rides in it last night.