That's a good point, it could help plug-in hybrids, or even regular hybrids.

But given that it's not very energy dense and other chemistries, what would you rather have? A battery that starts out with 25-50% more energy density and degrades 20-30% over the life of the car, or a battery that starts out with less but only loses a couple percent? I'd personally have the battery that starts out with more energy density even if at the end of life the density is similar.

Exactly. The energy density of these cells are very average at best.

It's nice that they last a long time as that makes them very useful for certain applications, but for EVs that's not the major issue preventing EVs from being more appealing. The major issue is energy density and cost.

Extreme durability might help with the cost aspect as batteries would hold more value for re-use after a car is otherwise useless, but it would be for other applications such as perhaps grid-storage where having batteries that basically last forever would be very useful.

But Lithium is not expensive or scarce relative to current costs of lithium battery manufacture. Other metals and manufacturing costs dominate the current cost of lithium cells.

PR like this claiming the next breakthrough in batteries has been coming out for years, but what actually makes it to production are basically minor tweaks to existing chemistry.

Inevitably what happens is something keeps the technology from being mass produced, or is too expensive, or simply does not function as advertised.

I hope I'm wrong, but I'm not holding my breath.

Uh, you were the one who was comparing the i3 to the Model S.

Regardless of the cars being in different classes, you still see people comparing all types electrified vehicles against each other.

I know a LOT of Nissan LEAF owners who sold their LEAFs for a Model S, for example. The LEAF is a class down for the i3 (so even further away from the Model S), yet there you go.

I have a LEAF and have considered the same thing, but just can't justify the luxury car price tag and just don't need the extra range all that often.

You should just use the EPA numbers which measure energy from the wall. Many people suspect that the major difference in efficiency between the 60 and 85 kWh Model S were the tires/wheels used for testing - the 60 kWh Model S is lighter, but no-one except Tesla seems to know by how much.

Model S 85 kWh: 38 kWh / 100 mi or 2.60 mi / kWh
Model S 60 kWh: 35 kWh / 100 mi or 2.85 mi / kWh
BMW i3: 27 kWh / 100 mi or 3.7 mi / kWh
Nissan LEAF: 30 kWh / 100 mi or 3.3 mi / kWh
Spark EV: 28 kWh / 100 mi or 3.57 mi / kWh

The i3 is about 30% more efficient than the Model S - very impressive! On the city cycle, it's 50% more efficient! I imagine if the i3 were a lower and longer car (and thus more aerodynamic) it'd do even better on the highway cycle.

You forgot to mention SONGs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

2 GW of nuclear power mothballed right after they finished spending $671M upgrading them. And who do you think the utilities want to pay for the lost revenue? I'll give you a hint - they sure don't wan it coming out of their guaranteed profit margin...

Not just slashdot, it happens everywhere.

"Electric cars suck, I can't drive it more than miles / charge!"

Yeah, this. For way less than the price of what Dyn charges for DNS service, you can get your own domain name AND dynamic DNS service.

All with a company that doesn't try to screw you over every year, too.

I am not aware, yet. Have only see one owner be vocal in the past about trying to get it, but haven't . A few relevant threads. Lots of noise and general ignorance about Copyright in there, so prepare yourself.

Anyone want to get the source code for the Linux (etc.) in your car?
Running on Linux
Copyright (and Libel) Discussion

Actually, what's more likely is that they saw his post on the Tesla Motors Club forum detailing what he'd done and then connect the dots between the forum post and ownership data:

Successful connection on the Model S internal Ethernet network

Tesla has been known to connect forum users to actual owners and proactively contact the owners via phone when they report problems with their car there.

Even with built-in battery or UPS, while that reduces the risk of unexpected power loss, in my experience it still happens.

As far as comparing reliability of SSDs to HDDs, an actual study found that SSDs were much more likely to lose lots of data, sometimes bricking the entire drive.

http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/...

Enterprise HDDs were the most reliable, even the best SSD they tested was not as good (though similar to consumer grade HDD).

Unfortunately, the study does not reveal which drives were tested.

But the main reason for the Intel 730 is to get power loss protection so your data doesn't get scrambled if your computer suddenly loses power.

The popular Samsung 840 series don't include that.

Where are you getting your failure rates from?

No, you could use the Facebook Messenger app as a replacement for the crappy stock Android SMS app and it would use your phone to send/receive SMS messages just like the newer Google Hangouts does.

You could also use it to just send regular Facebook messages, just like you can use Hangouts to send messages to other Google users using a regular internet/data connection.