And therein lies the utter whimsicality of the U.S. transportation system. Every day we get up and get into our metal cube and travel 1, 5, 20, even 50 miles to work. Then at the end of the day we get back in and reverse the trip. Wasting billions of man-hours of mental effort every year simply trying to keep our metal cube from hitting someone else's metal cube getting from point A to point B. Yet every attempt to build a transit system that would off-load this responsibility to trained professionals performing it for hundreds of people at once meets almost insurmountable criticism and only the barest of funding offers.

The fact that every one of these metal cubes is burning fossilized dinosaur plants and polluting the atmosphere is just icing on the cake. Electric cars are admittedly only a coping mechanism to deal with this dystopia in the least destructive manner. I'm sure there are many people who simply don't consider or know about their public transit options, and drive as a result. But until we get serious about transit investments, there isn't much choice for a lot of people.

"Burning American coal" is probably the lamest reason to buy an electric car.

Only if you live in West Virginia and you know they don't have solar panels on their house. But you can rub it in the face of any Prius driver you want. I don't understand how they can be so smug when all they're doing is using a *little less* gas by driving an underpowered, overcomplicated contraption--if they REALLY wanted to help the environment they would be driving electric. That's why I went straight to a Leaf--even better for the environment, AND I get plenty of torque and perfectly smooth acceleration.

This has been studied extensively as well. While specific chemistries have their own pollution issues, most EV batteries are made in Japan, Korea and the U.S., with relatively strong pollution controls. There is general agreement that the manufacturing impact is relatively small compared to the operating costs of both electric and gasoline cars.

It's easy to be skeptical of electric vehicles until you realize just how bad even the best gasoline cars are. All those tailpipe emissions are making you and the people around you sick. All the money you spend on gas goes back to the oil companies, and you know how they treat the environment... Not mention all the motor oil, frequent maintenance and potential breakdowns, and subconscious stress induced by the constant engine noise in a gas car. Whereas EVs are perfectly silent, never smell like gas or exhaust, have no routine mechanical maintenance and far fewer parts to break. And powering it with grid electricity costs between 1/3 and 1/5 of what a 35mpg car costs in gas, coming from power plants which are under constant pressure to improve their emissions. Or just put solar panels on your house and be carbon neutral.

Actually, I should have added: Even though fuel economy has increased dramatically since 2000, so has manufacturing energy efficiency. Most new auto plants include vast solar arrays on site for the simple reason that it is cheaper than buying power from the grid, no matter what the emissions.

And the details have been largely worked out. Studies have found that even on the dirtiest grid in the US modern electric cars match the emissions of a 34mpg car. Since this worst case scenario so rarely happens (the US grid is much cleaner than just coal, and getting cleaner all the time, and many EV owners install solar panels on their homes), Mazda will essentially have to race against the electric grid in trying to clean up their vehicles.

This MYTH has been debunked:

And as everyone in this thread knows, energy == emissions for all practical purposes...

That's what happens when your company doesn't have a pipeline to train new employees, and only focuses on maximizing return on the ones they have. A healthy organization would have people with 20 years of experience to replace those with 30 when they retire, and people with 10 years of experience to replace the ones with 20, etc. Reduces your efficiency in the short term because you have to support some who aren't as experienced but preserves institutional memory much better.

FTFY. They use big-government regulation to favor of businesses that "play the game" and donate to their campaigns. The rest of them are upstarts that they couldn't care less about.

Well, he does work from home. Be a sucker and click on a link so he can have a cup of coffee.

The news here is that Elsevier has given up their unspoken tradition of non-enforcement when researchers share their own papers. It isn't clear here whether the papers in question were the pre- or post-editing versions; typically the former were considered fair game. Now that the contract is being interpreted more broadly than it had been (no matter what their actual rights were originally), it becomes even more onerous for would-be customers.

You would be far better served by installing a 40A breaker. Then you won't have to replace it again in 3 years, and you'll be code-compliant to boot. That's why you're supposed to size a breaker to be 25% more than your maximum continuous load.

The $30k EVs--at least the ones that actually sell--are far from "econoboxes". They come with all the bells and whistles of similarly priced cars, and serve the same purpose if you get one that matches your lifestyle. Buy a Chevy Volt for and you won't have range anxiety, but you'll be among drivers who go an average of 900 miles between gasoline fill-ups. Buy a Nissan Leaf (like my own), and you may have to borrow a gas car or ride with a friend once in a while, but never have to worry about oil changes.

He made an assertion that is dimensionally inconsistent by comparing a dollar amount (tax revenue) with a percentage (profit margin), so he can be safely ignored as someone who doesn't know what he's talking about or care enough to write it properly.

I'll admit that for my first five years or so, yes, I was intentionally drowning myself in work, and I loved it. I came into the organization with several skills they had been lacking, and jumped on every opportunity to apply them. Now they are training others to do those tasks as well, and I have spent the last few years learning to moderate my workload. What I got out of those hectic years, though, was the trust and respect of my colleagues and superiors.

I frequently play the role of the shielded guru, but I'm also not afraid to jump into the politics of a decision when it's necessary to get the job done. And when I say "job", I mean "project"--since I consider my job to be getting the project done regardless, not just my part of it.

I'm proactive about learning new tools and often have features ready before they're asked for (but I would never fly myself to a conference for the heck of it--they did pick some extreme examples for the paper).

Most importantly, I earned the reputation of someone who will get the job done no matter what, because I always have the right skill or contact to fill in the missing pieces.

You sound like an excellent engineer, but it takes a very adept manager to make sure all the bases are covered when everyone sticks to their job description precisely. Having members of the team who "lead from within" is a very valid way to share responsibility for a project without having to find a "star manager" who can direct everything himself. And taking the time to understand how your piece fits into the rest of the project should be part of your job no matter what your philosophy, even if your boss doesn't tell you to do it explicitly--perhaps this, in particular, is what the poster really needs to work on.

An interesting observation, though, is that this study was completed in 1999, which was some time ago. My organization has been around for much longer than that, so our corporate culture still has many of the "old ways" ingrained in it. It could be that their research is not as applicable to newer companies, but I would very surprised if there were not a significant degree of similarity.