If you keep redefining terms like “sale” and “competitor” to suit your original thesis, I’m sure you’ll come across some definition which shows that you’ve been absolutely correct all along. If you get in trouble, I suggest redefining terms like “car” and “engine” to better suit your purposes.

“The official unemployment rate has dropped to 4.2 per cent in the United States—its lowest level in ten years—and the economy is expanding, but wages for most workers have scarcely budged.”

I bet there is some competition between the i3 and the prius too.

Wasn’t BMW going to start supplying engines to toyota? those are pretty high volume guys.

Thats a valid question.

Look, every manufacturer will tell you that steel is easier to work with than aluminum. It draws better, it joins better. There is a reason why trucks only now starting to go to aluminum. Tesla managed aluminum fine, I’m sure they will figure our how to work with steel if they haven’t already. All we know so far is…

Well because they already made tens of thousands of very advanced vehicles.

That would be a much stronger argument if it wasn’t wielded at a company that made close to 100,000 vehicles.

I think the difference between successful and failing auto manufacturers have less to do with the quality of new ideas than it does with their execution.

Spot welding is the easiest welding process to learn/understand/setup correctly, and steel is among the easiest metals to spot weld. Yes, lots of sparks and lack of smoke can be indicative of a problem, but if that’s the biggest problem in 3's production, I think they are going to have it resolves pretty quickly.

I don’t think the problem is lack of enthusiastic fresh engineers, but rather its a lack of capital.

I would hope that Ford understands relative advantage, and would absolutely sell engines to compete with one of their cars.

An extender equipped ev would only run the gas engine on less that 10% of its trips. So basically you can take its emissions and divide them by 10 or more.

It makes some sense. The lack of torque becomes irrelevant when your engine just drives a generator. It can run at an exact rpm, without regard for low end performance. Since rotaries run at higher rpm than piston engine, and generators are more efficient at high rpm, less gearing is needed between the two, thus lower…

The average household certainly owns two vehicles. The average person does not take by monthly 200+ trip miles. I’m pretty sure the average wife does not respond to “Hey honey, I’m going to go see uncle Henry this weekend, might be the last chance before the cancer gets him, do you mind if we trade cars?” with “Screw…

What about the financial liability? You take your 6 mo old 75k ev to a station, replace a battery, the car dies 45 miles later, and you needs $15k in repairs. You can call the station, but someone else already ran off with your original battery, and who knows where it is now, and also, they don’t want to take the new…

Not sure that I agree with that. The packaging advantages of custom shape/size battery is one of the main advantages of an electric car. Moving to a standardized, quickly swappable system would be surrendering those.

You’d want mechanical brakes for panic stops, both because there are limits to how much speed you could scrub with resistance in a short time, and because you want to have failsafe brakes in case of a drive train malfunction. But yes, you could increase regenirative braking from what it is now, as they are currently…

Yes, sort of. Electric motors have wider power bands than ICE, but they are not infinitely wide. If you design one gear to produce appropriate torque at low speed, it will run out of torque at high (starting to drop off at low triple digits with todays technology). So if you need really good performance at well over…

Electrical grids are not currently designed for worst case scenarios, they could not handle a situation where every used started using as much power as they possibly could, simultaneously. I can’t think of any infrastructure that could pass that test. Systems are designed for expected use with some sort of safety…