the donor car for the karma platform is the maserati quatroporte. in V8 italian form it weighs 4200 pounds dry.

If they were on the a-pillar you wouldn't be able to see them...

I don't really find the nissan versa all that hateful. what interesting though is how much better the handling dynamics of the nissan leaf which is ostensibly the same platform except with a much lower CG and lot heavier are. I rather enjoy driving the leaf.

That liebherr crane is almost more impressive than the turbine.

I've got an 07 civic hybrid, and it's fine. If there was something wrong with it I might consider replacing it. But there isn't. that's basically the problem with most civic owner's. They're stuck with a decent (if boring) car with no issues.

You can get it an any of about 4000 colors if you order it.

It's loud, the thing is made of glass and concrete. 75dB is an order of magnitude louder than 65dB. Yes you can find places with more ambient noise, that doesn't mean it's particularly confortable.

the house in question was purchased by jobs in 1983... part of it was designed by julia morgan, but several rather ugly additions were not and the thing was something of a visual attrocity appart from being 17,000 square feet. it took him 25 years to get the city council to let him knock it down.

I tried to find video of it actually negotiating a corner with a human onboard and was unable.

"It's similar to the original, but worse."

In the plugin model which the heavier of the three battery packs it weighs like 125 pounds.

Yeah because epicyclic gearsets to mesh the input of multiple powerplants are dumb. That's why they're also used in heavy truck and SUV hybrid applcations as well as a number of toyotas.

a decade ago it took about 6 hours to fully juice up 1300 pounds of lead acid batteries with 16.5kwh. At this point it takes 30 minutes to charge 800 pounds of lithium ion batteries with 4x the energy density to 80% of capacity. There's very little to indicate that continued incremental improvement is infeasible, or…

Why do you care what form your electrons are stored in?

The battery isn't made out of nickel anymore. But since you're argument is completely fallacious from the outset I'm pretty sure that doesn't make a difference.

I drove an auris hybrid (the prius c in europe) all over beligium for a week and it is a fine little car. In response to your question probably someone that wants to improve their fuel economy by about a 1/3.

brush gets used on the wheels maybe and that's it. a decent pressure wash will do way less damage to your clear coat and paint than any carwash robot on the planet.

The obsession with inflation doesn't really capture the detail. e.g. you get a fabulously better car today then you did 30 years ago. the 2012 camry owner is in addition to paying less nominally, is materially better off. likewise the 1965 porsche is a hell of a lot more likely to kill you than the 2012 one. The…

Superficially maybe, the AC panel in modern circa 1990s or later detached single family residential construction can definitely support that much current. but cars that are being rapid-charged (the dc charger would require a decent sized trasformer/SCR) are probably not sitting in front of your house for that.…

mimeograph... I was still getting those in gradeschool.