Long hauls you get multiple options - vending machine grade is still one, but they also offer dining car services - and their food there is generally very good and you can go high end...

Or that completing one of those segments can be a joyful, highly rewarding experience. :)

(15 pts for the win!)

Have you ever gone any distance on Amtrak?

It may be a metal tube - but you have oodles of room around your seat compared to air, bus, or car. And you can get up and move around the train at will. The views are tremendous and you essentially have lounges and a restaurant that travel with you.

This can be a VERY relaxing…

That’s not likely to happen anytime soon.

Why? Because of demand cycles. What company is going to put up the capital to make that vision a reality during rush hour?

The PC version would be:

*Performance highly variable based on driver

(because complaints on PC stability are largely the result of poor system administration)

*falsely thought to be immune to hacking and viruses

There, I fixed it for you.

What will the Apple car be?

Twice as expensive as any other competing car on the market
Restricts you to buying gas from Apple gas stations
Crashes frequently but fans insist it never does
Will no longer receive support from Apple after 3 years - if anything goes wrong, they expect you to just buy another.

That’s entirely dependent on the system you’re trying to tie into, though - that’s my point. If you have microinverters, which are very popular, just forget it - the cost will hit double the battery cost because you’re going to need an inverter to switch the power AC/DC both directions. My system, however, has DC all…

Installation costs aren’t necessarily that bad. For most of us in the states, though, the cost is just prohibitive (and interestingly much higher than a Chevy Volt battery on a per kWh basis).

The installation cost is largely going to be a question of the system design you have and how easily it integrates a battery.…

Right - by retooling two factories, they actually cost themselves a lot of money. They can get savings in logistics if, for example, they produced small vehicle powertrains in Mexico and large truck ones in Michigan. These savings aren’t insignificant, but neither is the cost of swapping the plants. Remember the…

It makes the numbers worse if you assume more production shifting to the US than to Mexico. Think about it - for each vehicle in that example shifting from the US to Mexico you’re saving 20*($50-$5) = $900 on labor costs. For each vehicle shifting from Mexico to the US you’re losing 20*($5-$50) = $-900 per vehicle. So…

The cost of switching can be huge, but if you do it with a significant change in models, that can minimize it. For example, if you’re Ford and you have to gut your assembly plant to build an aluminum F-150 instead of steel, that’s an opportune time to move production at low marginal cost if you want (they didn’t). Or…

That might make sense - or if you anticipate growing demand for the vehicle moving to Mexico and shrinking demand for the one that will be built in the US. Then you can blame job cuts in the US on the weak market.

re: 4th:

These moves don’t make as much sense as people think
.
Why? Well, imagine you’re making the Dart in the US and the Ram 1500 in Mexico (I don’t know the exact alignment of production, this is for examples only). Say you have 200,000 Dart sales and 200,000 Ram sales. Both vehicles take 20 man hours to assemble,…

It isn’t so much headline fodder - the UAW VEBA, which you’re thinking of, was formed in 2007. Its sole purpose was to take retiree healthcare benefits off the books of the automakers - in exchange for removing that from their books, they funded the VEBA with a combination of cash and bonds. That fund didn’t even…

Deportation. Plain and simple.

Titanium is almost never used by itself - you always use a titanium alloy. Its properties depend on the specific alloy chosen, just like steel or aluminum. These properties vary wildly with alloy. The only major properties that don’t change that much are the density and the young’s modulus. Fracture toughness, yield,…

In Spain, yes. In the US? F U if you don’t have the cash.

Here’s why I disagree - we got sky-high prices and wild volatility with just a very small percent of world supply (or demand) under threat. Only a few hundred thousand to a million barrels of production can make a gigantic impact on prices. Here’s a list of world suppliers of just 1 million or more barrels per day…

For overall energy, yes, we are close to being independent on a BTU basis. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t heavily dependent on energy imports, though. We still rely on imports for a very large percentage of our oil consumption. And while Canada and Mexico are our largest suppliers there, that doesn’t mean we aren’t…