The web site is cool, danke for the link. Electrical cars are making progress. Though I could be wrong, but the site doesn't address the general issues with electrical cars. Driving range, amenities and maintenance cost. Generally an electrical car can do well in one of these categories currently but are sub par in other, where conventional fuel cars dont.
Battery replacement (or capacitor) and driving range are two huge obstacles that are being tackled. It'll get there, because it has to. Its just kinda no where near competing with a conventional cars.
Hybrids though are a genius compromise.
I think some of the videos address them, but I'm not sure, got all my info from a lecture by one of the founders. Business plan is to give out the cars for free to drivers and make them pay for the batteries. The concept is that you can even charge for 'free' (i.e. at your electrical bill cost) at home at off-peak hours, but in the day time, you'll have to pay to recharge. It's only costly to people who drive daily all the time, but incredibly cheap to those who aren't heavy drivers.
Driving range is still a bit of a problem, which was why some people suggested that they can only be used in metropolitan areas. That's why they made Australia one of the locations to launch it - so that they could prove that it works well. The idea was to hook up many battery swapping stations along highways, and the world's governments have been more than happy to spend money on "greener fuel".
If I'm not mistaken, they handle all the problems with maintaining the electric cars themselves, though they might charge you for service. One of the major ideas behind the concept is that they don't want anything to discourage people from driving those cars, so they'll probably subsidize some of the service costs early on. Battery replacement has already been tackled. If you see the videos, they're swapping batteries at about the same pace as it takes to refuel a normal petrol car.
It's the black swan that I'll be betting on. An interesting thing is that they're fully focused on getting it to revolutionize the way people live, but they admit that they have no idea what non-technical effects it might have.
Why the hate for saying it is only a theory? Don't they call it that so people wont get all pissy when others say that it would be nice for it to be contradicted?
Really though it is only a theory because we cant know it is true. For all we know it is just his noodleness messing with us.
Eh, I find that the B12 kids have always been a little sensitive about anything related to theoretical science. It's like how jocks treat their sports. Go out and count how many discussions derail into theoretical science. You'll find people who have no idea how to code a basic TCP client arguing violently about how it's possible to make high speed communications with the moon. They take their theories far more seriously than reality. My pet peeve with this place
Anyway, math has been built on a bunch of theories. Nobody really knew how addition and multiplication worked, but they just kept using them to prove more and more advanced math. If the speed of light can be changed, it's not just a black swan, it's a swan that turns into a giant robot Godzilla. You might as well tell us that 1 + 1 = 3.
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Topic: Painting a Black Swan (Read 6211 times)