Your arguments about EVs seems to be based partly on misperceptions about their capabilities (the Volt's gas tank is only 9 Gallons, but it exists, which means you can drive it thousands of miles without charging if you want, you just have to stop at the gas station every 9 gallons instead of every 13), and partly based on people's misperception of what they need in a car (250 mile trips are not common).

Which sounds a lot like the small-car market in the late 70s, right before foreign cars started to dominate. The old guard in Detroit were convinced car buyers wanted symbolic, hard-to-measure shit like beautiful design and fun driving, and that a tiny Japanese car designed to not have this shit would move zero units. Then their customers got used to the idea that Honda made real cars, and anyone who wanted a sensible car went Japanese.

EVs are the sensible cars of the next 20 years, and if battery tech keeps getting 10-20% better year-on-year it's not gonna be a decade before everything else switches over.

I believe you forgot a decimal point. 1000 times $27.4 Million is $27.4 Billion. Not that it changes the argument any.

What F-35 adds is partly modern features like Stealth that make it more survivable then F-16, but also strategically locks in our neighbors to the US weapons ecosystem. Unless you want to sell the Canadians a bunch of F-22s.

Which is wasteful in dollar terms, but hey. If we'd wanted any given department of the government to be efficient we'd have waited on the independence thing until the Brits had developed Responsible Government.

Maybe in 10 years the poorest will be avoid the gas tax man the way the richest can, but then in 10 years it'll be time to replace the battery in most of these things.

Dude, 40% is roughly the share of the market enjoyed by light trucks. EVs share could not possibly be higher then 35%, because that's roughly the percent buying cars cars, as opposed to trucks/SUVs/crossovers/etc.

The question they're trying to figure out is why that 35% or so that belongs to the kinds of vehicles EVs can replace is not going EV. Which means you're basically answering the question "Why aren't Android smartphones dominating iOS?" with a long-ass explanation about how great Windows XP is for spreadsheets. Just as it doesn't take a genius to figure out that smartphones are not going to replace desktops for office work, it does not take a genius to figure out why the 40% of the market buying pickups do not want a Prius. The debate is why people will not switch from a Taurus or Accord to a Volt or Prius.

As for long trips, two points:

1) Everybody thinks they make a lot of long trips. Almost nobody actually does. My family's vacation spots were Piqua OH, and Southhampton, ON. Before I checked I would have thought both broke the 250-mile limit from Detroit. Neither does. Piqua isn't close (180ish according to google), and Southhampton is only 240. But they took forever, and severely taxed everyone's sanity because we were in an Accord and there were four of us.

Thus I sincerely question the sanity of anyone who claims that he spends more then 250 miles in the same car as his four-year-old, on multiple trips a year. Note the "car," explicitly referencing a four-door sedan or smaller. The kind of vehicle that does not have a TV screen on the back console because nobody can see the back console. As I mentioned above nobody has ever wondered why a family that needs a Minivan does not switch over to a Leaf.

2) Hybrids have gas tanks. The 250-mile range you see on something like a Volt means that after 250 miles you stop at a gas station and fill up, not that after 250 miles you stop at a hotel and plug it in overnight.

I know all about insurance. When I lived in Detroit the penalty for buying car insurance with a Detroit Zip code was in the $1,500 a year range. This site shows it's still happening. Click on a dot. If it's Detroit, the minimum will be in the $2,500-$3,100 range. The 'burbs are all below $2k, and mostly at $1,500.

As for EVs, the technology keeps improving, the costs keep going down, and used ones keep entering the marketplace. For example let's say you've got one car, but somebody needs to get to work every day and it's only a 40-mile commute. A used Leaf (available for $12k in my new suburban Cleveland home) would be perfect. If you need a car that can do gas-engine shit, then a hybrid Chevy Volt will set you back $16k used, and since you're saving about $1k a year in gas, if you use it for 10 years you basically purchased a 4-year-old-car for $6k.

Part of the problem is this areas is moving at much greater speeds then most automotive technology, so something that was true when they were first introduced four years ago is no longer true, particularly if you buy used and get half-off the original sticker price.

It's a huge subset.

I have never met a family where Mom did not have her own car, and I work in retail. My coworkers are not wealthy people. The secondary car is frequently a POS that's barely running, but it exists. As long as the commute is less then 100 miles (and almost all of them are) an EV would be fine. Probably superior to the POS, because said POS's problems are almost all directly related to the complexity of the machinery required to get a gasoline engine to start, and it's tendency to wear out after 100k miles.

Even in one-car families (which are almost universally also single-parent families) saving $1,000 a year on gas pays for a lot of car rentals to see grandma 400 miles away.

Damnit, I put one too many decimal places in the gas cost, and then tried Ars Technica-style quotes on Slashdot.

An edit button would be so nice.

Depends on what you mean by cost.

If you're in the market for a new or newish car, an EV does not cost more then a similar gasoline-powered vehicle; and has much lower total costs of ownership because it's really easy to spend $1,000 a year on gasoline. But the vast majority of people in the EV price range (ie: willing to spend $20k-$25k on a sedan), don't even consider it. Most people who want a $50k sporty-type fun car don't consider Teslas. And they probably should, because the competition would cost thousands more a year in gasoline.

I strongly suspect that with gas prices consistently above $2.50, the total cost of ownership of an EV and cares that cost tens of thousands less is actually quite comparable.

Which sucks but it's true. The worst bit is that the long-term cost of ownership of an EV is probably lower then a much cheaper gasoline vehicle, because the $1,500 gasoline car you buy is probably hellishly expensive to keep roadworthy, with shitty gas mileage (and subsequent $10-15k a year fuel costs), and forces you to burn your personal days at work quite regularly when said roadworthiness issues crop up. My $5k '99 Taurus was great from roughly '05 until '11, but at that point it refused to start and took hundreds from the ghetto mechanic and pull-apart to get back working, and then three months later it refuse to start again. So I switched to the bus. My social life sucks, but my bank account has a comma in it.

It reminds me of a Terry Pratchett quote:[quote]“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”[/quote]

You must live in New York City and take the train everywhere.

$20 a week works out to $1,040 a year, and 10 years of that makes up the $10k price difference. Assuming gas is $2.50 a gallon, that's 8 gallons a week. At 25 MPG that's 200 miles a week. A 20-minute drive to and from work eats up all of that budget.

So most people who could actually use a 4-door car would save money in the long-run if they had $20k in cash to pay for an electric vehicle. The only time a gas model is cheaper in the long term is if a) your commute is long enough that the battery range on a low-end electric is insufficient, or b) you actually need a pickup/mini-van.etc.

Why would you assume that they're succumbing to US Pressure?

This is fucking France, which spent most of the Cold War technically out of NATO, and didn't come back until it was safe in '09. They actively supported Rwanda's genocidal government because they thought the English-speaking rebels were lying about the genocide, to the point of sending troops to try to protect the fleeing government troops. Their response to PRISM was to condemn it as 'espionage' the very fucking day their biggest paper announced they'd been doing the same damn thing to their citizens for years.

They support Assange and Snowden in public, solely because idiots like you will mistakenly assume this means they actually support Assange and Snowden. In private they will do their best to get those guys fucked over, because if those guys are fucked over they can't do interesting things like tell Le Monde about the DGSE. Which is why, despite their PR as privacy advocates, neither guy has actually asked for Asylum. It's not a surprise they were one of the countries that got Morales' plane stopped, and that of the four involved they were the only one that had clout with the other three (Portugal, Spain and Italy were all in the midst of EU-recovery programs at the time, and guess whose the most important economy in the Euro not named Germany?).

So they have a long history of fucking privacy activists over, and then letting the US take the blame.

I doubt they'd kill him. They don't play that rough.

But if he pisses them off then it will be very difficult for any EU state to accept him. And their public statements on him are always bound to be much more pro-Assange then their actual actions.

The French state is more secretive, and more info-hungry, then the US; because it's a good deal more Machiavellian then any comparable advanced Democracy, including the US. It supports guys like him because they piss off the US, which allows France to keep playing it's historic anti-Anglo-dominence role.

Except of course it would be mighty hard to get export orders for aircraft that old, and half the military point of the program is to lock countries like Canada into a long-term alliance with the US Military. When you're the Hegemon everything you do has to suit both short-term tactical needs as well as long-term Strategic and Grand Strategic needs.

Moreover, historically one of the strengths of the US Air Force was that (at least prior to the 70s) it would have multiple types in each role, which encouraged competition and somewhat turkey-proofed the force. So adding an A-13 modernized Warthog, and F-36 new Lightweight Interceptor would be very useful.

The Chinese are always interesting. Always looking for a shortcut that just happens to put the rest of the world into a "fuck you China" mood.

In this case they probably could have developed a fighter 80% as good as the F-35 on their own, and then built twice as many of them, but no. They just built a worse F-35, which will be harder to export (the Chinese knock-off is only a prestige purchase if nobody knows you bought the Chinese knock-off), and will hit that 80% number if they're lucky.

In real world combat situations the F-16 dies before it detects the F-35. That's what stealth technology is. Now if you're a western-style democracy, with a good education system, and en extremely expensive air defense network, your ground stations can probably tell the F-16 where the F-35 is. But they can't give it a missile lock, so all that means is that they're pointed towards the enemy when the missiles start heading their way. Which is why the Air Force would use a combination of B-2s and F-22s to take out your air defense RADARs and missile batteries (ground RADAR can give those a missile lock) before sending the F-35s in.

And it doesn't matter how many Predators you have. F-35 flies at 60k feet, they can only go up to 25k. 2,000 F-35s at 50k feet are just fine, and immune to drone attacks, but they can drop 8,000 bombs on your drone base per sorty. Which means the question isn't whether the two types ever meet in combat, it's whether the air-defenses of a base capable of supporting 2,000 F-35s can hold out against 400k slow, low service ceiling, etc. drones better then the base for 400k drones can hold out against 2,000 F-35s. And the 2,000 F-35 base has a major logistical advantage, and can also actually use older low-tech weapons such as machine guns and WW-2-era RADAR effectively.

Almost none of aerial warfare since the Battle of Britain has turned on which side had better planes. It's all been about protecting your ground-based facilities.