People never seem to take the production (and destruction) process into account.

It really helps to have objectively the best car by some metric, then your pricing and production control demand The Prius is phenomenal, still the only 50mpg car you can buy and yet it's a practical reliable mid-size car. The Prius C is expensive but again the only 50mpg compact car. The Highlander Hybrid is…

Ahh, OK. The 918 Spyder's engine cranks out 580 horsepower (430 kW), so if you could route all that power to its 6.8 kW·h battery you could recharge it in under a minute. In reality its main 125 kW motor also acts as the generator and there will be losses in the power management electronics and battery recharging, but…

Look at Karma. Now look at Volt. End of story. In the flesh the Karma is a gargantuan voluptuous beast that makes a BMW 6 series look like a Hyundai, it's a Hot Wheels vision of the future that some rich people will buy for the looks alone. That they will be able to drive around a lot of the time gas-free in their…

Besides the cheapness Dreadcthulhu mentions (every penny helps to pay for that $63,000 Liquid Metal paint job!) , it's also less polluting to plug in, and it's convenient and fun to skip the gas station for your regular 15 mile commute. Those benefits also apply to much cheaper cars than this flagship.

You're dreaming if you think standards produce the best engineering solution. CHAdeMO requires a separate plug for DC fast charging. The SAE "design by committee" solution sticks two extra fat pins on the bottom of the AC standard to make a Frankenplug. And neither is "first", they're preceded by the Magnecharge…

@alex lloyd

I offer three: the The 80 mpg diesel-hybrid General Motors Precept, the 72 mpg diesel-hybrid Ford Prodigy, and the 72 mpg diesel-hybrid Chrysler ESX-3. All from the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles. America could have lead the world in fuel-efficient cars, instead "On track to achieving its objectives, the…

Because they're all different shapes, sizes, electrical characteristics, and chemistries, and require different complexities of cooling.

Please cite a source for "dramatically more fuel to manufacture and gather parts for the batteries" (Jezza on Top Gear doesn't count). Heavier cars take more resources to produce, and batteries are heavy. But I repeat, the extra weight is minor compared with the TONS of fuel saved, here's the irrefutable math. That's…

Eliminating belt-driven accessories means better mpg, less servicing, and in general a more reliable car. Win.

Rant wrong. Electric cars are being mass-produced, whether or not they are relevant to you. Existing electric cars work fine for lots of drivers, especially since the majority of households have more than one car. It doesn't matter how long the battery takes to recharge if every morning you get in a car with a full…

Jalopnik featured a video tour of the Pagani factory and the quality of their carbon fiber weave and layup was staggering. No man's suit in the world has cloth cut to that level of care. Where's the equivalent video for the Veyron's carbon finish?

Sitting in a car is a great opportunity to listen to music, if you love recorded music then why not make it sound as good as possible? I know someone with ~$10,000 of audio in his 5-series who gets more time to listen there than at home with the kids and TV.

Audi focusing on the shiny-shiny to distract from the fact that their EV program is a disaster. They hoped to copy Tesla and start with a high-end halo sports GT car, which must have seemed like a good plan when the only competition was Tesla's cramped spartan Roadster and even better when Tesla ended its production.…

Cue the uninformed ranting about government. Congress passed the $25bn Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program under George W. Bush. Go re-read those words again. It's a loan program for the manufacture of advanced vehicle technology in the USA. It seems to have worked because Ford ($5.9bn) is…

Highest and purest style: GTA: Vice City

You're wrong, and/or confused about units. The Nissan Leaf has an 80 kW (110 hp) motor powered exclusively by its battery, and that certainly doesn't cost $120,000! Perhaps you mean kilowatt·hours, a unit of energy. The Tesla Model S costs 49,900 - $59,900 - $69,900 for 40 - 60 - 85 kW·h battery, so Tesla is able to…

The phonautogram was evidence of a musical performance, Scott couldn't play it back. It's poetic that 150 years later we figured out how to scan lines in soot and the artifact transmuted into a recording.

Carl Haber at IRENE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been doing this for several years. His team has made 3-D scans of wax cylinders and shattered shellac disks and "played" the scans.