Proper gearing will give you all the torque you need to get up any incline with even the tiniest motor. The question is how fast you'll be climbing.

A properly sized motor will provide all the hill climbing performance you could ever want and the limitation becomes range, as limited by battery capacity.

This thing is putting nearly a quarter megawatt (240kw) drain on the power grid during use.

I wonder if it has some sort of means of load smoothing and a limited duty cycle, or if it's going to need its own substation.

Parts&Vendors is a good program geared toward what you're wanting, but it's Windows only. You might see if the trial version will run under WINE.

To do a better job of understanding why their insights aren't always well received.

Does anyone here care to name a PC manufacturer with a spotless record of turning out nothing but quality, or who has always been 100% up front about dealing with legitimate manufacturing problems?

They've all turned out crap and they've all reliably concerned themselves with their own bottom lines first and foremost. It doesn't excuse Dell, but I can't really see why they need to be singled out either.

Many scientists need to realize that their goals, ideals, and ethical standards may not be universal.

Never worked with lead-free solder have you?

It's only very recently that it's become practical for widespread use and it's still not settled how well it will work in applications that require maximum reliability. The problems with higher melting points, reduced wetting, tin whiskers, appropriate fluxes, etc. took a long time to sort out.

I'm sure that when a lot of early supercomputers were being built the components used would have been destroyed by the temperatures required to solder without lead.

Would it really be so hard to read the article before posting?

How about the "if it was private they shouldn't have been screaming it in public to anyone who could hear" argument?

Where did you come up with all that?

I'm not self-employed, my wife is a stay at home mom, I make under $40k/year, and I pay out of pocket for health insurance. It's not even that expensive.

Thank goodness Obama has done so much to fix all that.

Lots of things can increase the tendency to knock.

Lean fuel-air mixture (which is common these days in efforts to improve emissions and mileage)
High load (due to towing, steep grade, heavy acceleration, high speed, etc)
High ambient air temperature
Too high heat range of spark plugs (which may happen when auto makers are trying to improve warm-up times for emissions purposes)
Too much boost in a forced induction system

I happen to live near a freeway (traffic commonly moving at 70+ MPH) that has a steep grade and summer temps over 100F (which means that air conditioning is adding to the engine load too). Knock can be a serious issue.

Not all newer vehicles benefit from higher octane gas, but it's more than the Car Talk guys would have you believe.