Looks terrible, creates a safety hazard (grates WILL be pulled up and people electrocuted), creates a metal theft problem, doesn't adequately protect the cable from freeze/thaw problems, doesn't protect from rodents & wildlife adequately, still vulnerable to weather, etc. Problems with doing this are legion. The biggest is safety. You do NOT want the general public to have convenient access to power lines because someone will inevitably do something stupid.

It's actually cheaper and safer to bury it. A grate like you propose would be kind of the worst of both worlds in practice.

Absolutely. Otherwise you get what what the guys at the phone company term a "manhole in the sky". (Put down the dirty joke and step away. Just step away.) When I visited Shanghai you'll see a rats nest of wires almost everywhere because wires that should be in the ground aren't. It's a huge mess. Most people have no idea just how much buried cable they have around them in a big city.

It also makes sense for areas where there are existing easements, or private property. I have a buried wire from the drop near my house to my home and the cost wasn't outrageous. A little trenching and some conduit and we were good to go. It's a pretty short run though and there are no special property issues to deal with or engineering or roads involved. Of course that still didn't prevent our power from going out when a squirrel fried itself and tripped the fuse on our transformer. It's when you have to get into engineering and easements and the like that the cost skyrockets. The actual physical work is normally nothing too outrageous but it's the legal issues that take time and cost cubic dollars.

Quote correct. Thing is someone has to pay for the upfront cost of burying the cables and it is much more expensive. Where I live stringing wires on poles costs in rough numbers something like $1 per linear foot. Burying the cable costs about $8 per linear foot. (this is semi-reliable info from family who worked in the business and would know) Getting the funds to do any sort of meaningful program of burying wires would likely involve a rate increase which tends to be as popular as a lead filled life preserver.

That isn't so clear in a lot of places. Repairs on above ground wires are more common but cheaper when they occur. Roll a truck, look up and get busy. Repairs on buried cable is just the opposite. Even finding the problem is harder and many repairs involve a lot of digging. There are places near where I live (semi-rural 20 miles from a major metro area) where it might make economic sense to bury the cable but also quite a few where it most likely doesn't. You can do a LOT of repairs before you even break even on the buried cable despite its general higher reliability. Plus you are replacing infrastructure that already exists and lots of it so any sort of economically rational replacement program would take decades. Every place that truly needs reliable power has a backup generator anyway so it's not like you are gaining much in practical terms by burying the cables for quite a few customers.

Don't get me wrong, I think a lot more cables should be buried than currently are but it's not as simple an equation as buried = more reliable = cheaper.

Yes though you are asking a bigger question than you may realize.

Whose profit are you trying to account for? The manufacturer of the part? The OEM who built the car? The dealer? For OEM parts the OEM (think Ford or GM) will purchase the parts from a supply chain during the production run and they will usually contract for several years worth of replacement parts in addition to the production run - usually something like 3-7 years worth. Once the original production run ends it usually moves into aftermarket manufacturers, sometimes custom replacements or sometimes the original manufacturer will continue to produce the part for some time if there is a market for it. It's not unheard of for the OEM to keep the supply chain for replacement parts running for 15-20 years though that isn't the norm.

Actually dealers do see a lot of older vehicles for service so they have pretty decent information. Aftermarket parts dealers also have a pretty good idea what parts fail commonly on which vehicles. Furthermore the parts that are failing in year 5 are mostly going to be the same as the parts failing in year 20 with a few additions.

Actually it isn't usually the manufacturer charging the outrageous markup, it is the dealer who is independent. (And you are right, it is outrageous) The OEM usually charges the dealer a 10-40% markup. Anything you buy from a dealer typically has a minimum of an 8X or more markup over the actual manufacturing cost. To give you an example, my company makes a jumper harness for a GM vehicle. Costs us about $3.00 to make it and we sell it for roughly $4.00. We are a Tier 3 so by the time it gets to GM it probably costs somewhere around $6-8 once you factor in the markups along the way and they probably double the price they sell to a dealer. If you were to march into a dealer and try to buy our part by itself from a dealer it would cost you somewhere between $30-50 if they would even sell it to you as a standalone product which they probably would not. I've seen assemblies that cost $3 to actually make selling for $200+ and the majority of that markup comes from the dealer.

No, I said a larger part count for the OEM generally leads to less profit. Increasing part counts has no benefit to the OEM. Ford has competition and they cannot simply pass on any markups to the car buyer. In essence they have a cap on how much the can sell the car for. If they make a more complicated part that will cost more to make, it will break more often and sooner and Ford will make less profit. There is a limit to what they can charge for aftermarket parts too though the price elasticity is less sensitive. If a car constantly breaks people tend to get rid of the car in the long run. Furthermore the reputation benefits foregone in lost sales alone far outweigh any minor additional profit from more expensive replacement parts.

They do get some profit from part sales but only after the warranty runs out and not nearly as much as you probably think. The expense of recalls from failures can easily swamp any profit from a vehicle line. Even the most profitable vehicle manufacturer has a net profit margin no higher than 8-10% and most are somewhere around 5%. Do you have any idea how easy it is for 5% net profit to vanish? Car manufacturers make most of their money from selling and financing cars. Parts might help but most of that profit accrues to the (independent) dealer network rather than the manufacturer.

If you think the technology in hybrids is mature you are very mistaken. It's evolving quite rapidly and the technology is still highly non-standard. I defy you to find an engineering consensus that there is a "best way to do it" and certainly nothing as simple as just swapping out the torque converter. That might be your opinion but it isn't a widely shared one. Hybrids are expensive because there is a lot of engineering and tooling costs that have to be recouped and the sales volumes aren't big enough yet to fully amortize the fixed costs away.

I'm a cost accountant and I do this sort of stuff for a living. You have the cost accounting completely wrong. The different in part numbers provides Tesla no cost advantage at this time because the parts they have to buy are significantly more expensive. Electric vehicles have such low sales volumes currently that any cost advantage they might have from reduced part counts is hugely swamped by the high R&D costs and fixed costs of production. They simply don't have enough volume to reach minimum efficient scale.

There is minimal risk of automobiles becoming meaningfully more commoditized than they already are. Switching to an electric platform will not change that. A commodity product is one that one unit is indistinguishable from another. That does not describe the car industry unless you abstract more than is appropriate. The established players you are talking about already have the capability to develop and sell an electric vehicle. Several of them have already done so. Nothing Tesla is doing is outside of the big automaker's capabilities. They are staying out of the market because the market simply isn't big enough given the state of the art in electric vehicle technology right now to make it worth their while. There is enough room for a few niche products but that's it for the time being. It's not worth their time right now because they cannot make a profit doing it yet. Even Tesla hasn't made any sort of meaningful operating profit on car sales yet.

Any time you have a compressed flammable substance near your house there is some risk involved. I don't think it is substantially more than the risk from a propane tank but it's non-zero. Nothing to get paranoid about but there are safety considerations.

It could affect the underwriting premiums potentially.

Because their job is genuinely dangerous unlike yours. Nobody calls the police to give them hugs and cookies. They get called when bad things are happening. Often it's no big deal but at other times their lives are genuinely in danger. People draw guns on police on a regular basis. Cops wear bullet proof vests for very good reasons. It is impossible to tell in advance whether the dispatch call they are on will be the one that results in them needing to draw their gun. You'd be a little tribal too if you weren't sure who you could trust.

Understanding why they behave the way they do is not the same thing as condoning their behavior.

Their job is to enforce the laws. Not to prevent crime. That said it's easily demonstrable that police presence reduces incidence of crimes. There is plenty of data out there if you had bothered to look.

Because every day they have to go into situations where their lives are potentially in danger. Nobody calls the police to give them cookies or hugs. Their job is dangerous and that tends to make them a bit tribal. Every single time a police officer stops a suspect there is a chance they could be injured or worse. Most people are good decent people but it's impossible to tell in advance the few that are not because they don't look any different. If some small percent of the people you dealt with on a daily basis represented a non-trivial chance of you being injured you would be a little cautious about who you trusted too.

Exactly my point. I said it is understandable. I did not say it was the right thing to do. You can understand why someone does something without supporting what they are doing. I understand why cops behave the way they do. Doesn't mean I condone their behavior when it becomes a problem.

Oh, and except for maybe doctors in dangerous areas none of those groups you mention face even close the amount of danger that cops do. IT support is not likely to get shot even though a few of the worse ones might actually deserve it. (yes that's a joke) I'm not especially worried about anyone drawing a gun on me in my day job.

Yes niche. There is precisely 1 supercharger station in my state and it is on the other side of the state from where I live. Having a route by which you can go coast to coast means very little by itself unless that happens to be the specific route you need to follow. Believe it or not, not everyone lives in NYC or LA or even particularly close to the interstates that directly connect them. Good luck getting across North Dakota in your Tesla.

That's not even remotely true. They have 132 stations in the US. Yes they are building out quite a few of them but that isn't remotely the same thing as having them "cover the US". When they get the number of stations into the tens of thousands then I'll concede the point. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited to see them building this sort of infrastructure but I'm also not going to pretend it is a bigger deal than it actually is.

Yes there is infrastructure accessible (like electric) but there aren't very many fueling stations for CNG vehicles readily available to most people. I honestly could not begin to tell you where there is a CNG refueling station near where I live though I know there are a handful. I can however tell you where there are some electric and plenty of gasoline/diesel refueling stations. CNG is an easier problem to solve than pure hydrogen but it has similar problems to electric as far as infrastructure goes. It also has the chicken/egg problem of building out the refueling infrastructure much like electric, though with admittedly fewer technical issues.

The key word there is "fleet". CNG cars currently are only really practical as fleet vehicles presently. That could be changed but I doubt it will be.

Which gets you a nice car that you can (mostly) only refuel at home. I know such a vehicle would be less practical for me than even a pure electric vehicle.

There is of course the fact that CNG is still fundamentally a fossil fuel even if it isn't quite as dirty as oil derived fuels. Maybe you care about that or maybe not but it doesn't really get us away from fossil fuels which is kind of a big deal.

I'm in the auto industry and I'm a cost accountant. The part count on cars generally has only a modest (though significant) effect on profit margin and increasing part counts usually implies negative effects on profit margin. If anything they would welcome the reduced part counts because it would likely reduce costs, particularly warranty, production and maybe engineering. It's a competitive market so unnecessarily inflating part counts translates into reduced profit margin, not increased like you are implying.

They sell hybrids because that is the state of the technology. We don't have the battery technology or charging infrastructure to go fully electric yet outside of some niche markts. We may in due time but not today. Hybrids are expensive because the technology is new, complex and doesn't enjoy full economies of scale yet.

Which is irrelevant because hydrogen powered vehicles lack even rudimentary refueling infrastructure and thus will not be a meaningful part of the discussion for at least another 10-20 years a minimum.

You have to have something to do with the hydrogen. We have no infrastructure that could absorb such production even if it made economic sense to store energy that way. It's a solvable problem if the economics make sense but doing so would take considerable time. Not a bad idea in principle but I don't know enough about the technical feasibility and economics to evaluate it fully.

And what exactly do you think is going to replace cars within our lifetime? For better or worse they aren't going anywhere.

Wow! A whole 1000 cars. Drop meet ocean. [/sarcasm] Those sorts of production volumes make even electric cars look like hot sellers.

With the downside that there is no refueling infrastructure in place. At all. Kinda hard to refuel your car in 5 minutes if there is nowhere to refuel it. And without a substantial number of hydrogen powered cars on the road there is no economic incentive to build hydrogen refueling stations. If you ever needed an example of a strawman argument, here you have it. Electric cars might be slow to recharge but there is no lack of places to actually charge them as long as you have a long enough extension cord and enough time.

Yes hydrogen fuel cells are beautiful in principle but until they solve the infrastructure problem such cars are useless to 99.99999% of the car buying public.

Hate is probably the wrong word for most cops but it would be fair to say cops don't trust anyone who isn't a cop. Cops tend to (understandably) have an us versus them world view and see everyone's actions as those of a potential suspect. Apply a bit of low grade racism and you have a real problem with police distrusting a minority population and the minority population growing to distrust the police.

Wow! Training eliminates racism? Training gets rid of stupid racists laws? Training solves economic and social inequality? How did we never think of this before...[/sarcasm]