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.

Not at a $Trillion a program. It crowds our spending for stuff that actually works. I think the first-wave stuff should be top-of-the-line stuff that we dump R&D into to keep it 20+ years ahead of everybody else and I think the first-wave stuff should be capable of making it safe for everything else to fly pretty much unchallenged. After that, give me cheap stuff that works. We can have multiple types of aircraft in each role, but they need to be cheap to design, cheap to build, and cheap to fly.

The F-16D's unit cost is $27.4 Million. A fleet of 1000 of those costs you $2.74 Billion (which over 5 years is pocket change).
The F-35's unit cost (averaged between the three models, which range from $148 Million to $337 Million) is $245 Million each (no R&D costs included, just building one). A fleet of 1000 then costs $245 Billion. Over 5 years, that will consume 9% of the entire DOD budget. For one plane. One shitty plane that can't dogfight and whose cockpit is too tight to allow pilots to look behind them.

The F-35 doesn't even have a well-defined role. The F-22 rules the skies; bar none. The B-2 owns all ground targets regardless of ground defenses. What's left that we need a plane that costs up to $337 Million before we put gas, weapons, or a trained pilot in it?

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.

What's the age got to do with anything? We have working airframes; working designs that are proven to be exceptional at their respective jobs. We could spend a whole bunch of time, money, and lives (test pilots mostly, and some regular ones too during initial roll-out) on new designs, but we'll get maybe slightly better (or possibly slightly worse) performance out of them and in the end we'll net out behind.

Fire up the plants and start rolling new A-10s and F-16s off the assembly line (alone with F-22s). Streamline the manufacturing so they're produced as inexpensively as possible. If we find how to do their jobs better in 20 years, we'll have wasted only some minor resources in manufacturing, so the risk is minimal. They're a fantastic investment. Own the skies with the F-22, the ground defenses with the B-2, and everything else with cheap, effective aircraft.

I know our government doesn't like that because it isn't porked up all to shit, but it's the right way to move forward militarily.

Perhaps you don't know very many people in the UK? David Cameron's coalition partners in the last government were considerably more socialist than David Cameron's own right wing party, yet they were the ones putting the brakes on this kind of State overreach and they were the ones try to protect the privacy of the people. You've clearly got some misplaced biases against socialism and considerable ignorance about the UK.

Also, stop and think about the suggestion of assigning a caseworker to every child... does that sound like something the UK could afford, and if they did do it, just what kind things would they be able to achieve given the current budget conditions? Sounds like a nonsense to me.

I live in the UK BTW.

So for $1 Trillion, we can maybe step up part of the now-more-limited capability (loss of A-10 capability, smaller number of aircraft requiring longer maintenance intervals between sorties) air campaign? Maybe? And we're doing this because our elected officials have constructed a system of perverse incentives that discourages efficiency and competence and encourages ludicrous waste?

(None of this being news to me, just confirming we're on the same page; in which case we're talking about two different things. I'm speaking of what ought to happen in a sane, sensible world and you're speaking of what will actually happen because unrestricted representative democracy has yielded idiocy, incompetence, and impotence at the top.)

The F-22 is (in fact it has better stealth than the JSF) and so is the B-2 (also has better stealth than the JSF, but you called it out in your other reply so we'll let that one slide).

The others don't need stealth to fulfill their respective roles.

Correct. The F-22 is extremely stealthy and will clear our whatever aircraft the enemy puts in the skies. It also has limited ground strike capability, but that's a real waste. The B-2 (also extremely stealthy, possibly more than the F-22) is then clear to come in and start really pounding ground defenses. You take out all the stationary radar, SAM sites, AAA, C&C, etc with that while the F-22 provides protection. You don't risk lucky shots against your B-2s by sending them after less heavily defended targets; you just use them to clear a path for your remaining forces so they don't face anti-air defenses.

Once all appreciable anti-air has been destroyed and the enemy can't put a plane in the sky without F-22s dropping it, you're free to send in your non-stealth aircraft. F-16s bomb the Hell out of stationary targets and can provide some target-of-opportunity strike capability. A-10s take out mobile infantry, supply convoys, etc. AC-130s and A-10s provide your close-in air support for whatever ground missions you need to complete your objectives. Each has its own distinct role to play; one thing it's great at doing. Used together, you get the best of all worlds.

Depends on what you mean by "doesn't look good on a budget request". As a taxpayer, they sure as Hell look good to me. They're much cheaper than JSFs and each is much more capable at the specific job it's intended to do. Those "old designs" have all the bugs worked out of them and are reliable as can be. And when one does break down, it costs peanuts to repair or replace it. If the folks in charge of the budget don't think that looks good, we need to fire them immediately.

We could buy so many of those things for $1 Trillion that we wouldn't have pilots to fly them all. So we'd buy a few less than that and train enough pilots to fly them. The result would be a force so large that we could run dozens of simultaneous sorties 24/7/365 and overwhelm anyone anywhere with omnipresent force.

Actually, getting through stealth isn't that bad when using low-frequency ground based radar. Getting through it in the air is a challenge. That's why the advanced stealth of the F-22 and the B-2 are a much better fit for early combat: they'll have vastly better survivability than the JSF. For later in the campaign - when the enemy no longer has effective anti-air defenses - there's no reason to fly significant amounts of costly aircraft sorties. At that point, you want to fly legions of cheap, effective aircraft in and pin down the enemy so they can't so much as glance out from under the rocks they're hiding under without JDAMs raining down on them from all directions.

Sorry, what debacle with the F-22? Near as anyone can tell, it's the best air superiority fighter ever built and will be for the next 15 - 20+ years. Do they cost a lot? Yes. But don't compare the cost of opposing military aircraft to the cost of the F-22. Compare the cost of opposing military aircraft to the cost of the AIM-120 AMRAAM fitted to the F-22 because the first indication the opposing pilots are going to have that F-22s are in the area is a missile warning.

The Iranians experienced this already when they decided to send up planes to harass some US drone aircraft. The US sent an F-22 up and after the F-22 pilot got bored waiting for the Iranians to notice he was there, he radioed them to get out of his airspace.

"He flew under their aircraft to check out their weapons load without them knowing that he was there, and then pulled up on their left wing and then called them and said ‘you really ought to go home.'" http://www.military.com/daily-...

"I can't see the [expletive deleted] thing," said RAAF Squadron Leader Stephen Chappell, exchange F-15 pilot in the 65th Aggressor Squadron. "It won't let me put a weapons system on it, even when I can see it visually through the canopy. [Flying against the F-22] annoys the hell out of me." http://www.acc.af.mil/news/sto...

The F-22 isn't supposed to be dogfighting. The F-22 is supposed to blow the enemy out of the sky from BVR long before the enemy knows F-22s are in the air. That's why it was always so stupid to compare the fly-away cost of a new F-22 to the fly-away cost of other nations' aircraft. The real comparison is the fly-away cost of other nations' aircraft against the cost of the AIM-120 AMRAAM fitted to the F-22 that's going to blow their aircraft away.

If you have F-22s dogfighting with anyone, something has gone horribly wrong.

And the JSF is a flying pile of horse shit. We'd have been much better off building new F-16s, A-10s, and AC-130s. Let the F-22s own the skies, let the B-2s take out the nastiest air defenses, and then let all the cheap stuff fly in and mop up whatever's left on the ground. I don't know what the Hell problem the JSF is supposed to solve. If the problem were just that the US military has way too much money laying around, we'd simply build more F-22s, B-2s, and carriers. Obviously that's not the problem, so what the Hell is the JSF?