Lots of people thought the early 30s were as bad as it could get, until they saw 38-45

Oh, I thought you meant age. I turn 37 this year. Scared me for a minute.

Michael, you have it actually backwards. Electric cars gain energy by braking without friction. The rotating wheels of the car act as a generator, converting the car's kinetic energy into electricity with about 70% efficiency. That's why the friction brakes on my Tesla still squeak; because the regenerative deceleration is enough 98% of the time, and I rarely need to use the friction brakes.

Another nice feature of the Tesla is that the regen is triggered merely by lifting off the accelerator, so you can practically drive with one foot. It's also arguably safer, because deceleration starts immediately with no lag from moving your foot to the brake pedal.

It's "braking," people. Braking. Though in the case of electric cars, that usually means decelerating/regenerating. The friction brakes on my Tesla still squeak after 12,000 miles of driving.

The best part will be when the AIs start arguing amongst themselves about how they can know whether humans are truly sentient! :)

They're Made out of Meat!

Ok, one thing that always bothers me about these electric cars is the seeming ignorance surrounding the simple notion of how to provide climate comfort within the cabin.

HVAC takes a fairly small amount of energy relative to the car's overall usage. The electric drivetrain does produce a nontrivial amount of waste heat, which in theory could be used for cabin heating. Tesla chose not to do this, because it wasn't worth the added complexity. The Tesla at max acceleration uses 200kW, at highway cruising speed around 15kW, and the HVAC only about 2kW. And as for air conditioning, an ICE car doesn't have any obvious advantage over electric, that I can see. Most of the energy in the gasoline is lost as waste heat before it can be used to drive the AC compressor.

Common sense plays into this too. If you live in Minnesota in winter, don't drive in short sleeves. And if you live in Arizona, don't buy a black car.

Better to use more of it than to sacrifice in another area.

But then there's the Hollywood studios that spend years and hundreds of millions of $$$ and multi-teraflop render farms to produce mega-blockbusters that only engage 4,096 of your brain cells. YMMV.

Most accidents happen within, I think it was five or ten miles of a person's home.

That's why, when I drive from home, I try to get outside that five or ten mile radius as quickly as possible!

Top Gear is full of it. I own a Tesla Roadster and regularly get 180-200 mile range with ordinary driving, and the car recharges empty to full in 3.5 hours on the fast charger.

should have been a 25K car cost cap.

In the electric car industry, that's simply too big a jump to make all at once. If your ultimate goal is to produce 200,000 $25k cars a year, and the current state of the art is 2,000 $100k cars a year (the Tesla Roadster), then it's only reasonable to expect to produce 20,000 $50k cars (the Tesla Model S) as a stepping-stone. The market is there, and those early adopters will facilitate the eventual availability of the $25k mass-market car you're talking about. If you do the math, the "rich" purchasers of the Model S will be kicking in about one billion dollars a year towards this goal, double the government loan amount. So think before you knock 'em.

When thinking about dinosaurs' long necks, it's helpful to consider the possibility that the atmosphere was much thicker back then. So fluids could be drawn much higher without introducing vacuum problems, and it also explains how such huge insects and proto-birds (e.g. pterodactyls) could have flown there. Interesting stuff.

Hu's on first?

The astounding thing to me is just how expensive this is... 6 billion for 1100MW is almost $6/nameplate watt.

From a related article:

The Sanmen Nuclear Power Plant will be built in three phases, with an investment of more than 40 billion yuan (5.88 billion U.S. dollars) injected in the first phase.
The first phase project will include two units each with a generating capacity of 1.25 million kw.

So it appears that the real cost is closer to 5.88 / (2 * 1.25) = $2.35 per watt. Still expensive, but not outlandish. I'm in the process of installing a 4kw grid of solar panels on my own roof for a cost (after subsidies/rebates) of $17k, so $4.25 / watt. For greener energy, I think the premium is worth it.