I thought the engineer's answer was, "More than three and probably less than twenty."

Oh, no, wait, that's the answer to "What's 2+2?"

Last time I checked, actually, it is. It's just not in the USA.

A staggering number of people commenting here appear not to understand English, let alone French or Italian.

Well colour me puzzled. Surely the expression "whatever the French call la dolce vita" demonstrates that, whatever the French do call it, they don't call it la dolce vita? So he knows it's not a French expression, he just doesn't know what the equivalent expression in French is.

Well done for supplying the French equivalent.

Yes and no. In the UK the price has roughly quadrupled in that time, but the real increase (ie increase over RPI) is only 33%[1]. Assuming that overall rate continues (very unlikely, but there you go) it takes over 70 years for the price to double.

[1]http://www.speedlimit.org.uk/petrolprices.html

Well, yes, but the vast majority of the difference is in tax, not in production costs; $3/gal supplied to the US Navy is probably something like £9 per litre in Crawley.

300,000 in five hours? God forbid!

Depends on where in the supply chain that $3/gal is. $3/gal supplied to the US Navy is probably more like $7 or $8 at the pump for putting in your car - not so viable.

Once electric cars become prevalent, the charging time doesn't really matter for the supply and HV distribution side of the grid - each car sucks either 10.2MW for 30s or 10.2kW for a bit over eight hours (30,000s). Once there are enough that the spikes in charging smooth out, the demand increase is the same whichever charging rate you use. The only problem really comes at the edge of the grid, with the connection to individual houses currently being sized about three orders of magnitude wrong for this use. At this point, it's probably not too unreasonable to ask homeowners to pay to have their grid connection upgraded to give them the privilege of a 30-second charge for their car.

Let's see, a 4,700mAh 5V battery has a capacity of 23.5 VAh or 84.6kJ. To charge that in 30s, you'll need a 2.82kW charger output. So whether it's feasible or not probably depends on what jurisdiction you're in - a British 240V 13A socket will give you 3.12kW, so as long as your losses are below 10% you'll just get it. An Australian 240V 10A socket will give you 2.4kW, so allowing for 90% efficiency of the charger you'll get about 40s to charge. A US 110V 15A socket will give you 1.65kW, requiring about 57s at 90% efficiency to deliver a full charge.

Of course, I'm sure now I'll be buried in crap telling me either a) how crap Wordpress is and how much better blogging-platform-XYZ is or b) how useless the advice is because Bennett will never follow it and how my metrics for assessing the advice I give out is all wrong.

Seriously, Bennett? You don't think maybe researchers who devote their lives to figuring out good advice on health, diet and exercise know just a teeny bit more about experimental design than you? Sorry, I forgot, teenagers know everything.

Uh huh. Can someone tell Bennett about Wordpress so he can go get a real blog, please?

In Soviet Russia, dash cams are compulsory!

Hmmm, that didn't quite work out like I wanted.

I dunno; put it in an acid bath and see what happens.

Seems to have missed out on recent election results, that man.