Europe is a humid place and is not accustomed to the large swings in temperature that low humidity causes. And Europeans think 4C/40F is cold because they live in such a mild, maritime climate.

How do you see out of that thing, and how do you see anything, like little children, in front of it?

Biden didn’t just try passing legislation. The legislation actually passed and has been the most significant effort in moving this country away from business as usual to a paradigm shift. Those shifts are always painful and take time. We should have done this thirty years ago, but Reagan took the solar panels off the…

Its doesn’t look futuristic at all. It just looks clunky. The blobby cars, on the other hand, are futuristic. However, what will damage the Tesla truck is its terrible ergonomics. Nikola Tesla himself would never have designed this.

The average age of cars on the road keeps going up. It’s now over 12 years. That is an indication that automobiles are too expensive to create turnover. Back in the 60s, new cars were traded in every 3 years. Of course, that is because they started falling apart at that point. The present I.C. fleet must be replaced,…

A car is a transportation tool, not couture. Wear fancy clothes. You don’t need a fancy car, just a comfortable, reliable one that hopefully doesn’t spew huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Go practical, not show-off. I recently bought a clean 14 year-old Prius for $3250. It’s been averaging 47 mpg. overall. My…

There’s no mention of the load carrying capacity of these trucks. Battery packs are heavy and take away load capacity. In the long term, a better solution for long distance heavy truck travel would be overhead powerlines, like for trains. Germany is already experimenting with these.

Top autonomous vehicle safety researcher Dr. Missy Cummings is highly doubtful of lower accident claims by the industry. She’s finding higher accident rates by robocars than human drivers. Missy Cummings, a Top Robotics Expert, Is Elon Musk’s Worst Nightmare (businessinsider.com)

There’s been no discussion of cost of purchase and maintenance, which will be far higher than cars on the road now. All those sensors are expensive and will need to be maintained at aircraft grade levels. They have to function at 100% or they’re not functional. Some $600 billion has been spent on autonomous vehicle…

The most significant innovation of the 1980s was the minivan, the best idea Detroit ever had. They are hugely useful and rugged. I used them on my farm instead of pickup trucks, finding minivans better all round. My favorite car of all time was a 1993 Dodge Caravan with 2.5 liter engine and 5-speed manual…

North Dakota blizzard. Complete white out. The only way I knew where I was was by the interference pattern in the wind caused by upwind farmsteads and the snow drifts created on the road. Another time, in northern Minnesota, the snow was so heavy but with little wind that I couldn’t see the road. I drove in the middle…

I used to drive for Fedex Ground in Minnesota on the rural routes and would do 250 to 300 miles per day. Yes, we did pee out the door of the truck because there wasn’t time to go to a bathroom, and I would throw a frozen burrito on the heater vent for lunch. However, I’m glad the Rivian is front wheel drive. Those…

Citroen showed a different way with its OLI concept car that only weighs around 2,400 pounds. With it’s 40 kwh battery pack, it’s able to go as far as other vehicles with much larger battery packs because of its low weight. Plus the OLI was designed to be totally recyclable.

The high cost, high profit market is already saturated. There’s profit and then there’s cash flow, and you can’t cash flow if all you’re doing is making high cost vehicles.

I live in far northern Minnesota, where everything is far away, so I have to drive a lot. I recently found a 2009 Prius with 236k miles for $3,200 and immediately bought it. Now, I’m averaging 45 to 48 mpg. BEVs are not ready yet for our cold and long distances, but give them time.

If EuroAmerican manufacturers don’t build low cost BEVs, China will and take over the market. The price of used cars is so high that low cost new Chinese vehicles will become very desirable. What happens then? High cost, high profit vehicles soon reach market saturation, and China grabs the rest of the market.

So the standard U.S. outlet is 110 volt 15 amp, roughly 1.6 kw and the Europeans have 220 volt 10 amp, for 2.2 kw. That’s not twice as much. In my house, I have 220 volt 30 amp service for dryer, stove, water heater. That’s 6.6 kw. I’ve got a 200 amp entry in the house and also one in the shop. Putting in a 220 volt…

These all run into the problem of fluid dynamics. You can go very fast planing on the surface with lots of horsepower and fuel use. You can go partially submerged with more stealth but at a slower speed. Fully submerged can go faster, but gets more complex. There’s no free lunch. The late Phil Bolger designed a very…

If Tesla were truly interested in pushing the boundaries, they would look at optimizing the morphology of vehicles for battery electric propulsion. Vehicles designed for internal combustion are being used as the basis for electrification. That’s like the early days of both trains and automobiles, where old…

The level of regulation, maintenance, and control of air travel is several orders of magnitude greater than for private vehicles. The two can’t be directly compared. However, vehicular deaths per million miles traveled have steadily declined over the decades. The U.S. rate of 5 deaths per million miles is higher than…