Companies like Tesla can already do automated battery swaps. I can see them offering this on long trips. You pull in to swap your li-ion battery with an aluminum battery then swap back when you return.

I followed the recommendation of my 1991 Ford Probe which recommended an oil change every 7500 miles. I never had any issues with the engine though I also used synthetic oil.

My father went 80,000 miles without changing the oil in his 1966 Pontiac Sprint-Tempest LeMans which he had converted to run on propane during the gasoline crisis in the 1970s. He ran Mobile 1 and when he drained it the oil was clear and the engine was still at the tight end of the factory spec. He still has the car with over 225,000 miles on the original engine.

Modern engines have much tighter tolerances and many can easily handle 7500 miles between changed since fewer contaminantes make it into the oil. The reason my father was able to go 80K miles without changing it is that propane does not create the contaminates that you get from gasoline or diesel.

Even the Optima batteries, while better than many other batteries, still do not like to be overcharged.

The battery in one of my older cars lasted 10 years, I think because every couple of months I would run a desulfate operation on it with a smart battery charger. I wish they would build that technology in to car charging systems since it only cost pennies and can greatly extend the life.

After I got my Tesla I put the 12v battery in my Prius (an Optima replacement for the OEM when the OEM died) on a battery minder which does this and has proper temperature compensation. I only drove my Prius a couple times a year.

I might add that Tesla has several patents dealing with metal oxide batteries and using them in combination with lithium ion batteries. They already have the automated battery swap technology as well.

Most modern batteries have a catalyst to convert the hydrogen and oxygen back into water.

According to their site they have tested their tiles to be able to handle loads of 250,000lbs. I doubt a 5,500 lbs car would do much to them.

If you read their site one of the things they plan to do is do away with snow plows by having the ability to heat the tiles.

There are many forms of glass. Some types of glass are a lot tougher than other types. They describe the testing that they have done and how it holds up to wear and tear and how they're designed to handle loads as high as 250,000 pounds.

They describe this. A lot of the grime won't stick. Skid marks just brush off. They're also talking about adding a coating of titanium dioxide which would cause a lot of the grime to break up when exposed to sunlight. They also discuss the loses due to dirt and grime and say it's about a 9% loss of power when coated in grime.

Um, you know they talk about heating the tiles to prevent ice buildup so no frozen water.

The article is not all that accurate. Actually Tesla itself isn't making much from government subsidies any longer. The article is full of a lot of what-ifs. Currently there are no cars on the horizon that directly compete with Tesla. The GM Cadillac? It's a huge flop. BMW? It lacks the range (the range extender is a joke, you can't add more gas and continue driving and there's no rapid charging support). The reason Tesla is currently not making a profit is because they are in a rapid expansion phase, which is exactly what they should be doing. They are building out their supercharger network and building out their factory in order to meet the demand for their upcoming Model X. As for tax credits, they don't make much from the CARB credits since that article was written and they don't expect to make much on the CARB credits. Also, the GAAP accounting rules don't make a lot of sense with their lease program and the large investors know this. The lease program depends on the cars holding their value, which they are doing quite well I might add.

Having followed Tesla for quite a while they have done extremely well executing according to plan. They also still have quite a long waiting list of people waiting for cars.

Then again I also invested early at around $35 and am holding long.

Their NRE costs are also dropping. Much of the model X design is based on the model S.

Nissan appears to have done it. They're even making a profit off of their Leafs. I think it just points to Fiat's incompetence and being late to the game. Then again, Nissan designed the Leaf from the ground up as an electric car, just like how Tesla designed their Model S.

In the 1970's my father converted his 1966 Pontiac Tempest LeMans to run on propane. The engine was originally designed to run on the "white gas" that was leaded 110 octane with 11:1 compression. During the gasoline crisis he did the conversion, also in part because the car ran like crap once the high octane gasoline was no longer available. The conversion involved putting in bronze valve guides, the tank, a converter that uses the engine coolant to heat the propane and the propane carbeurator which sits inline with the gasoline carberuator. The engine runs great on propane though there's about 20% less milage and a bit less power running propane compared to gasoline due to the 20% lower energy density of the fuel. As a test, running Mobile One oil he went 80,000 miles without changing the oil (only the filter) and the oil was clear when he drained it and the engine was still at the tight end of the factory spec. Propane is a lot easier on the engine than gasoline.

He also switched the car to use an electric fuel pump when it was switched to gasoline (which was extremely rare).

One nice thing was that while camping we could fill the propane tanks for the stove from the car which has a 26 gallon tank. I think propane is also safer than natural gas since it does not require a very high pressure.

He did not have to compromise running on propane other than the fact that there was a bit less power due to the fact that propane burns at a lower temperature than gasoline. The car drove better at high altitude since the propane carberuator automatically compensated for the lower air density.

For many years propane was much cheaper than gasoline as well, so the conversion paid for itself many times over. He still has the car though he rarely drives it any more.

I still use my HP Laserjet 4M/Plus I bought years ago. The thing was built like a tank. Once in a while I need to do a rebuild which is cheap but the thing just works. New HP stuff is crap. I remember being unable to print PDFs with the newer HP printers because they would crash so I had to print them at home on my ancient printer.

Find me an American who's qualified for the job and they'll be hired on the spot. My employer has had a very hard time finding qualified people. The key word here is qualified. I don't care what race, sex, sexual orientation or anything else, as long as you wear pants and can code I'm happy. The problem is that there are far too few Americans graduating with Computer Engineering degrees. I need someone who is good at writing software and understands hardware. When I code I have several documents open at the same time, usually datasheets and schematics.

A standard CS degree doesn't have the hardware background and I'm sorry to say that a lot of code I've seen from EEs is utter crap. Finding someone good at both seems to be damned near impossible.

It often takes months to find someone qualified for a position. Too often the person I interview doesn't even have decent C programming skills, let alone understand things like CPU cache, virtual memory, multi-core programming (up to 48 * 2 right now) or how to interact with complex hardware devices.

I don't want someone who just adds a quick fix or hack. I want someone who does it right, even going so far as to reengineer code if it will make it better (i.e. easier to maintain, more portable, etc.) The code I get from vendors who design boards for us almost always is crap. The first thing I do is throw it out and start over. I try and maintain strict separation between board specific code, our code and the standard U-Boot bootloader code. I've ripped out almost all board-specific code from the common code and put it where it belongs along with minimizing the amount of board-specific code that is required.

I can confirm this. I have interviewed a lot of people for trying to fill positions and finding a good qualified person is damned near impossible, regardless of race. The best candidate I interviewed was a trans-gendered Russian who we made an offer to (I guess she decided to stay where she was or had a better offer). I've interviewed some white people who clearly are not qualified as well as some Indians who are very well qualified.

If you know how to work on U-Boot or embedded programming (multi-core RISC experience a major plus) I'm desparately looking for someone to help out since I'm totally overwhelmed. I'm working with 48-core NUMA chips, 10G/40G networking, PHYs, Linux kernel stuff, I2C devices and a lot more. I work on everything from XHCI to AHCI, NAND, EMMC/SD, SPI and just about everything else imaginable. Want to play with running an application or Linux on 96 cores? Generally not much assembly language, though I consider MIPS assembly to be quite elegant compared to the horrendous mess that X86 has turned into. I'm always getting new boards to support, new PHYs, new I2C devices, SATA port multipliers and just about anything imaginable. Virtual memory and low-level CPU experience a plus (we run U-Boot in virtual memory to simplify things). We're also working on ARM64.