As I have already pointed out, even in the US, the average daily mileage is only 30; and most people don't suddenly jump into their car and drive for days on any regular basis.

And there's very little problem with a 2 hour jam. It's a 7+ hour jam that does for your range.

I'm not saying that batteries don't degrade, only it takes more than a 'few years'. The batteries are expected to last 10 years/100,000-150,000 miles or more without significant degradation, and there's no evidence that this won't be achieved.

The other thing I haven't mentioned- cost. Yes, electric cars are fairly expensive right now, but they batteries are getting exponentially cheaper every year. Fossil cars, are NOT getting cheaper. We're right about at the crossing point now; electric cars are going to be cheaper- and second hand cars are becoming more and more available and more and more cost-effective, and they're cheaper to run. Pretty soon everyone will preferentially run an electric car, because it's cheaper.

I mean, sure, electric cars are better for only 99% of most people's journeys.

I'm in the UK; it has a half decent; but not fully decent infrastructure, some parts of the country don't have very much public charging infrastructure.

Obviously, if you don't have much public infrastructure around you, you shouldn't get the Leaf.

Nissan Leafs don't seem to lose much range; it's still a relatively new car, but so far it seems that there's very little degradation of the batteries; the idea that range plummets after a 'few years' is clearly bullshit.

Indeed, the second hand value seems to have gone up recently for vehicles of the same age.

The rule of thumb that Leaf drivers use is 70 mile range at 70 mph; note that the A/C or heating makes very little difference; unless you're stuck for hours in a traffic jam; which is pretty damn rare, but even then you have the choice of how much to use the A/C; it's not like you're going to be unexpectedly stranded, the car keeps you informed of the situation.

I never said it was the quietest car in the world, only that it's pretty quiet.

Bigger, heavier, gas guzzling, expensive cars may well be somewhat be quieter in some cases.

But the Nissan Leaf is still very quiet, and relaxing.

He started the journey only half full, in a region with hardly any charging infrastructure. Like, why?

If he hadn't done that, if he had been fully charged, he would have had far fewer problems.

It's because if he hadn't had done that, the review of the range extender would have been pointless. i.e. the charging infrastructure would have got him the whole way with less problems without using the extender.

And note, the reason the chargers weren't working was because he hadn't set the cards up, and when he did set the cards up, he got going again.

And note the hardware that did fail was the extender. Failures of pure electric cars are fairly rare. What do you expect from a much more complicated drive train?

So, no, it's a bullshit review; and the idea that he 'wouldn't have made it' is bullshit as well.

No, not double, even with a Nissan leaf, on very long journeys with fast charging, it's about 50% longer, not double (like 11 hours versus 7) and travel comfort is better if anything (cabin preheat). On journeys only slightly beyond maximum range there's far less difference, and there's hardly any difference with a Tesla at all, ever.

Obviously if you need to do a lot of long journeys, frequently, a Nissan Leaf is probably not the right car, but it can do it if you need to do that occasionally with no problem, provided there's fast chargers on your route anyway.

Nah. The average time it takes the owner to recharge is about 15 seconds, you plug it in, walk away. When you come back- it's fully charged.

Slightly less cynically, most users average 30 miles per day. On a ~3kW 240 volt charger (which is available in most places) that will only take about 3 hours to top up; but you don't really care, because almost certainly you won't be waiting for it, and you may well not need to recharge every day; it's like a cell phone. And most home chargers can do it faster than that.

Recharge stations depend where you are. But pretty much any wall socket that is anywhere near a road is a recharge station at a pinch.

That's not an electric car, it's a hybrid.

Actually the reason the Leaf looks a bit odd, is the headlights.

They're not a statement.

The headlights look like that for a good reason- it makes the car a lot quieter for the user; it deflects the air away from the side mirrors.

Because it's an electric car, it can actually be quiet, and then you actually notice these things.

Even if you're just changing focus rather than the direction your eyes are pointing, you're looking away. There's very little information while driving which is so essential you can't flick your gaze away for a fraction of a second (you'd better be doing that anyway to check your mirrors). If traffic is that tight, you don't need to be looking at your speed, just stay with the flow. Your fuel gauge isn't going to suddenly leap from half-full to empty (if it does, you have other problems).

That said, a blinky light on the side mirror as a blind spot warning can't hurt, and maybe an unobtrusive but visible "master caution and warning" light could light up at the bottom of the windshield if some other instrument needs attention.

That said, for a fighter (or other high-performance aircraft) pilot who has to track multiple things simultaneously (where's the enemy? which weapons are armed, do they have a lock? what's my attitude after all this dogfighting?), a HUD is invaluable -- and said pilots are carefully selected and undergo a hell of lot of flight training and then a hell of a lot of training in using the HUD (and there's also an auditory component to that).

I used to think that a hands-free phone should be fine when driving, since I was used to a fair bit of radio chatter while flying a plane.

But there are significant differences: radio chatter while flying is about the flying -- you're giving or getting info about your flight from ATC, if you're in formation you're discussing with the other aircraft where everyone is relative to each other and what your about to do, etc. You're not having a discussion about Junior's day in school or what John and Mary are up to or the latest server crash at work. One keeps your attention focussed on flying, the other distracts you from proper driving: where's your head at?

The other thing is that driving in typical traffic you should be paying as close attention to what the other vehicles are doing as if you're flying in close formation with a bunch of other planes. The latter is unlikely except for a very few pilots under special circumstances, most of the time in a plane you're at least many seconds (or minutes) away from other aircraft or obstacles (except landing or takeoff -- and you're generally not talking to anyone outside the cockpit at that point unless they're feeding you info about it.)

The latter is why we've had autopilots on aircraft for decades but nothing much better than cruise control (about equivalent to a wing leveller in terms of percentage control) on cars -- most of the time planes are in a much simpler environment.

If you're driving a car under IFR rules there's something seriously wrong with you.

Sure, every pilot with some instrument training knows to trust the instruments when he can't see anything out the windows -- he also knows he's got ATC tracking him, helping him navigate and warning of other traffic or potential trouble (like t-storms).

If you're driving a car when you can't see out the windows you're a fucking loony, and a danger to everyone else out there. If you're relying on looking at the instruments (and hey, a GPS will work just fine in thick fog) instead of out the window, well, I just hope you run off the road quickly (oops, map was out of date) before you hit somebody else.

Original poster wasn't talking about IFR -- obviously there's no point looking out the window in that case (if you're in cloud, you couldn't even see the wingtip).

But you're not going to get a new pilot flying IFR, because it takes a while to get the training and experience needed for that rating. Thing is, because a new pilot doesn't have the experience to know what attitudes look like (where's the horizon on the window? which way is it tilted? what sound is the engine making? etc), he's tempted to keep checking the instruments ... except that he hasn't figured out (at an intuitive level) all the interrelationships yet. He's looking at the attitude indicator to figure out if he's going up or down -- when he should be paying attention to the airspeed. He's focusing on "stepping on the ball" to coordinate his turns instead of looking out the window for that traffic he might be turning into and what the horizon is doing relative to the bug smear on the windshield.

Sure, you should be checking the panel periodically -- just like you should be checking the instrument panel periodically while driving -- but if you're VFR (and all driving is VFR, although with different minimums) you should be focussed on what the vehicle (and the others around it) is doing now (and about to do), not what the instruments are telling you it did a little while ago.

Things have to get worse before they can get truly better, and who better to do that than the GOP?

Jimmy Carter is still alive, and eligible to run again.

How is a third party vote "wasted"?

If you voted for the person who won, you wasted your vote -- they would have won without it, and you didn't send them any messages.

If you voted for the major party candidate who lost, you wasted your vote because he lost, and again you didn't send any message.

Voting third party is the only way not to waste your vote.

In the UK, there's the Advertising Standards Agency, which bizarrely enough is a trade body, and not a government body, and they actual force advertisements to be, not misleading, and not dishonest.

It works surprisingly well.