Car manufacturers are allowed to temporarily import non-conformant vehicles for R&D purposes.

A dependable 180 miles (maybe 200 EPA) would work for us as a primary vehicle. Existing 10 yo (ICE) car is driven maybe 50 miles/month, mostly for shopping and airport runs. We have a garage that can be used for charging. We have no reason to lug around a few hundred extra pounds of battery that will almost never be…

+1 A “city car” is exactly what we want, we work from home, the kid is now an adult, we don’t go on long road trips, our existing car is used once or twice per week for shopping, dinners in a neighboring city, and the odd airport run. If the 500e was $10K less, we’d likely already have one. Of course, what I really…

They don’t (yet) make high speed trains in Sacramento. They currently make conventional diesel-electric passenger locomotives and passenger cars, like the trains used by Brightline in Florida and Amtrak. The screwed up part is how many European and Japanese train companies build factories here due to “Buy American”…

Assuming he had flaps down during final approach (if he didn’t, that was the cause right there) he should have backed off a couple of notches to optimize lift vs drag, rather than retracting completely. I was a long time glider and small plane pilot, my best nearly missed landing story:

Having the engine at the rear facilitates a key plot point, as that plane had one critical thing that the vast majority of planes of that era did not. It was a spoiler for me when I saw what plane they picked, as I knew how that was going to play out in the end.

That confused me. I assumed that kamikaze pilots were effectively locked in the cockpit and unable to return from a mission. I looked it up after seeing the movie, and that was apparently untrue (and likely US wartime propaganda). They could return if there were mechanical issues or they were unable to find the…

In the mid 60s the CIA attempted to place two Pu 238 RTG powered remote sensing stations high in the Himalayas to monitor Chinese nuclear tests. One was lost in bad weather and never recovered, a replacement was successfully placed. Both are likely still melting their way through tons of snow and ice.