Ha! That's an old one. After you find the golden rivet you can hop in your F-35 for a little snipe hunting.

Does cherry picking old war stories usually work out well for you?

From their site, they intend to make all the essential parts for crash safety out of printed plastic.

Everything on the car that could be integrated into a single material piece has been printed. This includes the chassis/frame, exterior body, and some interior features. The mechanical components of the vehicle, like battery, motors, wiring, and suspension, are sourced from Renaultâ(TM)s Twizy, an electric powered city car.

Also on their site has the specs.

Motor - 5 bhp or 17 bhp, 42 lb-ft torque*

Top Speed - approx. 50mph*

The "*" indicating there should be a footnote explaining it, is missing.

Actually, their donor car (Renault Twizy) isn't even classified as a car. It's a quadcycle, and is not currently legal for road operation in the United States. From what I found elsewhere, Renault isn't even planning to make it available in the US, since it doesn't meet the road requirements here.

Well it's been many, many years since I've used it, which was back in the late 80s and early 90s. My impression from this time is that C++ is unquestionably a work of genius, but that I didn't particularly like it. Part of that is that we didn't really know how to use it effectively. In that era most object oriented programmers used concrete inheritance way too much. Part of that is due to aspects of what we thought an OO language should have that turned out to add complexity while being only marginally useful in practice (e.g. multiple concrete inheritance and operator overloading).

But in terms of meeting its design goals C++ is a tour de force of ingenuity -- even if some of those goals are questionable by today's standards. The very fact that we know some of those features aren't necessarily ideal is because they were taken out of the realm of academic noodling and put into a practical and highly successful language that could tackle the problems of the day on the hardware of the day. It's hard to overstate the practical impact of C++ on the advancement of both theory and practice of software development.

Any prize for contributions to OO programming pretty that didn't include Stroustrup in its first recipients would be dubious.

I have an even better idea: let's find a way to fix human beings so that they're perfectly consistent in their behavior.

While certainly taking demonstrably bad drivers off the road is a no-brainer, even good drivers have lapses. My teenaged son is learning to drive, and whenever someone does something like cut us off I make a point of saying we can't assume the driver did it on purpose, or did it because he was an inconsiderate or bad person. Even conscientious and courteous drivers make mistakes or have lapses of attention.

It's the law of large numbers. If you spend a few hours on the road, you'll encounter thousands of drivers. A few of them will be really horrible drivers who shouldn't be on the road. But a few will be conscientious drivers having a bad day, or even a bad 1500 milliseconds.

You can build a full VW Beetle from 3rd party parts. Quite literally, you could have absolutely no parts sourced from Volkswagen or their OEM manufacturers at all. It's an expensive hobby, but people do it.

Try this: Crash safety testing.

Well, assuming the article saying that the consumer can "design" it really means design, and not just select from a few options to make it custom.

That's farther down the list. "Don't implicate yourself, even to your friends" :)

I'm the wrong one to implicate. Your diversion will be a bit too transparent. You may as well hang a neon sign in your front window saying "IT'S ME!"

At best, someone will show up to my door with doughnuts, and we'll have a good laugh over it.

Er... maybe it's the companies (and now the state) you work for.

Don't worry. They'll find a way to disappoint you.

I'll give you a hint. It begins with the letter "p" and rhymes with "mycology".

As a cyclist, I can attest a Prius is not a totally silent vehicle. Nor, I am sure, is a Tesla although I've never encountered one on the road. The reason is tire noise.

For a modern car traveling at 20+ MPH and not accelerating, tire noise is the dominant sound. You can easily hear a car traveling at speed from a hundred yards or more away, almost entirely from the tire noise. The engine of a well-maintained car traveling at a constant 30 MPH might as well be totally silent.

At low speeds such as would be encountered in a parking lot or congested city street the engine noise is dominant, particularly because the car is doing a lot of accelerating and decelerating. At those speeds I think a modest synthesized engine sound is a very good idea, especially when you consider blind people and even more especially service dogs, who would have to be re-trained for some other kind of noise. There would be no need for the artificial sound once the car is at cruising speed.

If you play a synthesized noise back through the car's sound system the energy wasted is negligible. And arguably, anything that serves a purpose isn't wasted, so long as it is done with minimum energy needed.

I actually kind of like the idea of synthesized sounds. Think of it as being like haptic feedback. Anyone who's ever driven a car with an exhaust leak knows the powerful illusion it creates that the car's engine has lost power. So why not use sound to convey feedback about what the car is doing -- in this case using lots more gasoline.

In fact I'd take it further. If the oil is low or past due for changing, why not pipe valve tapping sounds into the passenger compartment? Or if the pressure of a tire drops maybe impart a thrum to the steering wheel.

Mental note: When establishing a questionably legal site for definitely illegal transactions to be made through, don't keep any logs about it, nor your conversations regarding it.