Electric Cars Continue to Make Inroads

I think the changable battery could be accommodated. It would be under the car in a standard footprint, possibly two sizes and two footprints for two car ranges. A jack is placed under and the battery released. Sllide the new battery in place, raise and lock in place. I don't see why that wouldn't work, maybe it could even be automated. But the mountain of batteries would be huge, the size of a gasoline tank at a gas station. This would be the big problem. Keeping enough spare batteries on hand to accommodate everyone and having fully charged batteries on hand. The capital investment would be on the order of thousands of dollars per battery rather than just the cost of the charger. I don't think this is financially sustainable.

Home Depot only rents their trucks to haul stuff bought at Home Depot. Sometimes I buy stuff at Lowes, even. ;-) It's $19 for 75 minutes,

My goal is to "buy" my way up the curve by paying for technology rather than having to trade off size and performance. The higher end electric cars have *great* performance, best in the world, and great comfort. I'm not interesting in giving up comfort at this point in my life.

Not sure what that means. They are both tiny cars, no?

You are either young, or not a very large person. A friend had a Mazda and I couldn't even swing my legs in comfortably. I hate small cars.

Sometimes fun is what you have (or do) in the back of the van. Pickup doesn't always mean acceleration. ;-)

Sure it does. Sometimes you spend a little more money, here, so that you have the freedom to do something else, there. I drive a pickup every day to work because it gives me the freedom to haul stuff on the weekend.

Nonsense. There is a lot more to life than seeing how hard you can squeeze a buffalos.

Mo has never cared for cars, until I bought her a Honda Fit. She loves it. It's a really good small car.

Another Trump fact

Except they most often use hot water instead of steam.

Did it come with a Fez?

It has a bigger power/weight ratio than my previous 2L VW Rabbit. It blasts up SF hills, and over the Sierra crest at 7200 feet, just fine.

Too bad they don't import the 4WD version into the US.

What about cold weather?

most cookers here only have two phase input terminals. so long as they don't wire every cooker in ther neighbourhood to te same two phases it balances out well enough for the powerco.

For process heat, not for mechanical power, unless used to run a sterling engine or other low temperature heat engine.

No one but NASA types use sterling engines. I was talking about low temp for heating things. Many processes require heating. Waste heat is often used to preheat something to save on the primary energy heating.

That's basically the way it is here, too, except that the power company balances the phases.

New cars depreciate in value so quickly, and their initial cost has outstripped the rate of wage increase and inflation by so much that any equity you get from buying outright is of questionable value. My 2015 Volt had a MSRP of $40,000. By the time it was totaled less than a year later the insurance adjuster put its value at $21k. A year after that and it would've been worth 14k, like the 2014 that's for sale on the lot of the dealer I leased my 2017 from. By 2020 it would've been worth asymptotically close to nothing. It's not like a home, its value will never increase.

In ideal circumstances one would never buy or lease a new car, one would buy a 3 year old car at a significant discount and drive it into the ground. The problem with that assumption is that a 3-4 year old car that you can buy for say 10k is a car that's had the f*ck driven out of it. The decay curve on value isn't linear; used cars that are creampuffs hold their value pretty well for the first couple years or so until their value drops off a cliff.

By the time you start getting into the territory of used cars that are a few years old that the average person can afford to pay say 10k cash for you're looking at cars that have 70k miles on the clock and are pushing the end of their main warranty. Not everyone is a shade-tree mechanic who can fix all the problems that might arise, even if they had the time for it, and even if "modern" vehicles were amenable to "DIY" repairs (they aren't.)

A plug-in hybrid that one leases is frankly a car that someone with McJob might do well to get. If you negotiate well the lease terms available for them are very attractive - say 36 months for $229 month plus under a grand down payment. But if you play it right your fuel costs immediately decrease from say $150 a month, if you drive 1k miles, to around $20 a month worst case. Insurance is cheap - nobody steals them and EV drivers are statistically known to be safe drivers. My rate is about $250 for each 6 months prepaid; and that's comprehensive

So for the equivalent of $150 a month if you factor in fuel savings, you're driving a safe, modern car.

PS: my mother worked for a social service agency for 20 years, and "boots on the ground" data indicates someone coming looking for a "cash grant" for a car repair on some beater that had given up the ghost and required a 2k replacement widget or something so they could make it to their McJob and not lose it was nearly a weekly occurrence, while someone coming looking for a cash grant so they could keep making tpayments on a leased vehicle after they had lost their McJob was so rare as to be essentially a non-event.

They can't. They distribute the customers over the phases but they can only hope that the customers on each phase take the same amount of power out of it. For large numbers of customers this of course happens by itself. When providing individual customers with 3-phase connections they have to rotate them to avoid cases where stoves are routinely connected to the same 2 phases by electricians all the time, and the 3rd phase would be loaded a lot less.

Home Depot's walking distance for me, they don't require any particular use to rent their truck, and it's really cheap to buy extra hours if you need to. You're right, it's 75 minutes, not two hours. But I've not needed extra time.

We rented it to haul some BIG oak logs off my place, no problemo.

Cheers, James Arthur

Sitting in one car's seat versus another car's seat makes no difference to me whatever. It might make a world of difference to a seasoned citizen with different physical needs, but not me.

No.

That's the beauty of living in a free country. You can find and buy a car that fits your needs, and I can too.

In less-free countries, know-it-alls in the central government would decide that everyone(*) has to drive econoboxes, and fine us all until it was true.

(*) Except politicians, who'd be exempt.

Cheers, James Arthur