If the number of seats is above 9 then you need a different driver's license in Germany. Everything above 9 already counts as a bus.

If they state that they're using their car for private needs and then go on to use it in a business setting - certainly.

Over here, you insure the car instead of the driver and you also have to tell the insurance company what you're using the car for. Lying to insurance companies was always a bad idea, y'know?

Riiight. You're forgetting one thing: The insurance companies.

As soon as you have been in an accident while driving for Uber, your insurance company WILL drop your contract AND sue you - because the standard insurance contract is not intended for transportation services.

It's a grey area and the companies you link already have had some problems. However, the companies themselves already link the limits on their sites themselves:

• No cars with more than 9 seats
• No profit making - the money you collect may not exceed the costs you incur for gas and car usage (deprecation)
• No regular routes
• No drivers who make this kind of driving their job.

The linked article lacks one important detail: The fine of up to 250,000€ is for each instance of breaking the injunction.

Sure, the first violation may only cost 2,000€. But that will go up for every violation. And you can bet your ass that the competitors will use the apps to check on Uber. And they will report any violation they find.

But, hey, a tank needs holidays, too!

Are 76 micrometers thin enough? http://www.nature.com/nmat/jou...

You're wrong there. The VW Up exists as both a pure electric and pure gasoline version. The difference in price? 10,000€

That's the price for the battery. In the case of the Up it almost doubles the price (from 12,000€ to 22,000€). And "all the other bits" being expensive? Seriously?

With the switch to pure electric you just god rid of the following: The alternator which provides the energy for all the gizmos in a normal gasoline car. And, more importantly, the transmission, one of the most complicated and intricate mechanical pieces in a car with a combustion engine.

Two complicated parts of the car, just poof! gone like that. The engine itself also just became way more easy - you don't need carefully timed pistons. You don't need the 3-way catalysator and the lambda probe. And so on and so forth. Hell, if you wanted to you could let each of the 4 wheels be driven by a separate motor! (which gets rid of the need for a differential!).

"Complex / insane" and "aerodynamic" usually don't mix very well. Not to mention that there's the usability factor - you may get an insanely low cv from a teardrop shape. Doesn't mean that it's usable.

Yes. But they're not cheap and the production process is quite involved. And he specifically drew a relation between material used and possible aerodynamics:

From:"Reinventing Fire: Three Energy Gamechangers for China and the World, Nov. 15th, 2013, pg. 2

He specifically mentioned "more aerodynamic" in addition to "lighter". I'm also not that convinced of "ultrastrong" materials being safer due to the fact that you want a crumple zone to soak up kinetic energy.

Not to mention that "severalfold less energy" is a lie: The BMW i3 already largely consists of carbon-fiber and is not that much lighter and, if you calculate the average energy consumption, doesn't consume that much less energy.

Lastly, carbon-fiber is not more "simpler to produce". Folding, bending and melting metals is easy compared to what you have to go through for carbon-fiber. Not to mention that it's not recycleable. Metal is easy to recycle.

Well, that's the problem with most renewable energy creators: They're dependent on an external factor. So, keeping some in "reserve" might not exactly yield the result you want. What use are additional windmills is there's no wind? What use are solar panels if it's nighttime or overcast?

Yes, there are others like biogas or waterpower, but most of those would fall under this heading of "energy storage" which this guy proposes to be superfluous. If they aren't storage technologies, they're usually not scalable enough, either due to provisioning problems (biogas) or geographical restrictions (water).

I did read some parts of it. For instance, he proposed that switching to carbon-fiber instead of metals that we would be able to create more aerodynamic shapes. Which is rubbish, of course, the shape of a car is not dependent on the material used.

He also proposed that switching to carbon-fiber would reduce costs. Far from it: Production of carbon-fiber is a very expensive process due to the way the shapes are formed. One of the reasons, by the way, why the BMW i3 is quite expensive.

There were a whole slew of conjectures, shoddy/dubious reasoning and exaggerations in there.

Yeah, I just read that rubbish. Numbers which appear from thin air, false causal relations and shoddy reasoning. I didn't enjoy that at all.

Great. Which results in your economy being dependant on the weather. I can see the historical articles now: "The big wind calm of 2030 lead to a nation-wide depression as the metalworking industry was unable to sustain minimum power needed to keep the metal from solidifying."

Well said. He also forgets that we already have problems with failover and unexpected losses of transmission lines which lead to blackouts.

I mean, one could probably design a system which works as he proposes - however, this would almost certainly mean a complete revamp of the existing electrical grid.

At which point investing in storage technology and facilities will be the cheaper and more reliable solution.