There is a lot of capacity left for off peak charging over night. If people don't charge during peak hours there shouldn't be any problem. It's the people who want megawatt quick charges during the day that worry me. An infrastructure where people are charging away from home during the day is going to lead to more power problems.

Hopefully it will be a lot cheaper to charge at home over night. People who must charge during the day and contribute to the peak load should pay a big premium.

Some of your figures for the Volt are wrong. The Chevy Volt can recharge in 6 or 8 hours from a standard 120 volt receptacle. The 240 volt option is 16 amps and recharges the Volt in three hours. You are correct that the Volt battery is suppose to take a 8 kWhr charge. I agree that the 500 mile battery would probably need a 100 kWhr charge. So worst case for a fully discharged battery is 12.5 times longer than a Volt at the same rates. Probably take 4 days to recharge from a standard 120V outlet.

Just the other day I saw a figure of 1.4 traffic fatalities per 100 million miles driven. At that rate a 3000 mile trip would generate 0.000042 deaths, or 1 in 24,000 odds. Supposedly the odds of dying in an airliner are just under 1 in a million per flight hour. It comes out to 1 in 140,000 for an eight hour cross country flight by my calculations. So according to those figures a cross country flight is almost 6 times safer than a cross country car trip.

Yes you can rightly argue that interstate driving is safer per mile than the rush hour commuting that the traffic fatalities is undoubtedly biased toward. But I doubt it's enough safer to make up the difference. But I'd love to hear the figures if anyone has them.

My original point was to compare plane flights to long car trips, not average short car trips that probably have million to one odds of a fatality. Even on interstates, the further you drive the more likely something is going to happen. Haven't we learned anything from Clark Griswold in "Vacation"?

That feeling of control over the odds is probably why we put up with relatively high possibility of injury or fatality with cars. Airline travel seems to bother people much more because they're not in control of the situation. If we had much longer lifespans we might think twice about cars killing off 1% of us every century.

The length of a shuttle mission probably doesn't affect the odds of disaster much, because the main risk is during launch and re-enrty. Planes have increased risk during takeoff and landing, but the length of the flight must affect the risk also. As long as your flight is near average length the per mile statistics should work just fine. Car trip accident odds are likely strongly related to distance driven. So when you compare a plane flight to a car trip be sure to compare it with a long car trip. The odds of an accident are obviously much larger on a cross country car trip than a five mile local trip.

It does cost the state time and manpower to prosecute all those charges. The folks in the DA's office don't work for free, you know. I'm often amazed with how few charges actually go to trial. Probably because they don't have the resources to prosecute everything they'd like. Plea bargaining is an integral part of the process and often results in the charges just being dropped. My perspective comes second hand from my wife who's a Public Defender. Of course she works a low court with lots of minor charges where resources are likely stretched thinnest.

Since the state has limited resources, it must already think twice about prosecuting someone who can afford the best lawyers. Can you imagine what would happen if they had to pay the legal fees for a billionaires lawyers if the state lost? It would have to be a slam dunk case before anyone rich ever got prosecuted.

You're right, one pound more might double the cost because it would require a second launch. More likely it would mean lots of man hours reviewing the entire system to see where you could save a pound somewhere else.

One can definitely go to far in asserting their lawful rights. You've certainly come up with some outrageous examples of that behavior. I don't want to be the guy with the tombstone that reads "I was in the right!"

It sounds like you've judged all cycling on roads with cars to be too dangerous for you. That's your call to make, but be aware that many feel that cycling on sidewalks is even more dangerous due to drivers pulling in and out of entrances without ever checking the sidewalks. The more a cyclist behaves like a car the more likely they won't get overlooked and accidentally run over.

When I cycle I do avoid roads that are heavily trafficed, but I don't avoid all roads simply because dangerous cars use them too. Yes, I probably inconvenience a few motorists because they have to slow down momentarily to wait till it's clear to pass me, but no one is stuck for minutes behind me.

Don't forget that driving a car is probably the most dangerous thing people do regularly. You're not immune to crazy drivers in heavy metal boxes just because you're in your own metal box. One could argue we're borderline insane to accept that risk too.

I also don't want a tombstone that reads "He played it safe and stayed home experiencing life through the Internet". Cycling is currently one of the few things that gets me out into the real world.

"Because regardless of what you think the law is, or how the world should work, **YOU** are responsible for **YOUR** own behavior."

What you're really saying is that I'm responsible for predicting the bad behavior of others. The roads can easily be shared by reasonable cyclists and motorists. The trouble arises when either becomes reckless, impatient, or inattentive. If I do that then I am indeed at fault. But if you're saying that I'm responsible because bad drivers put me at risk, then you have an odd idea of where the blame truly lies.

"Hi, Dr. Nick!"

I'd never let him treat me, but what a sunny disposition and great bedside manner.

Another lovable fictional quack is Dr. Leo Spaceman (speh-chemâ-en) from "30 Rock".

You're looking at this the wrong way around. It's women that do the real work of continuing the human race. It would only take a relatively small fraction of males with a flesh fetish to successfully impregnate the women of the world.

We'll disappear once they invent a handi-bot capable of mowing the lawn, changing a tire, fixing things around the house. Once women don't need men around any longer the human race is done for.

Did you note that 2010 projection was made in 2003? Have we heard anything on Hy-wire in the past five years? The Volt is well beyond concept car stage and is slated for production late next year. It sounds like there will be actual electric cars in major dealer showrooms in just a year or two.

As you point out, an electric car won't be very useful to someone who parks on the street. But I don't see hydrogen available anywhere yet either. I just can't believe the hydrogen car is going to be workable.

More like a lucky few can lease one now. From the wikipedia article: "Honda planned to produce 200 vehicles within 3 years" and "Honda believes it could start mass producing vehicles based on the FCX concept by the year 2018". In other words they don't have a clue how to make an affordable hydrogen fuel cell yet.

GM plans to start mass producing the plug in Volt by the end of next year, assuming they don't go under before then. All the infrastucture a Volt requires is a 120V power outlet in your garage. I've already got my electric infrastructure right now, how many can say the same about hydrogen?

I do not think ultracaps like that exist. At least not yet. Which brings up a problem with battery swapping - technological change. Battery (and ultracap) technology is changing quite rapidly right now. Everyone keeps talking about amazing new formulations being experimented with in the labs. We've gotten to the point where lithium batteries are good enough to put into electric cars and we should start seeing a lot of these popping up in the next few years. It's becoming economically feasible to produce a reasonable electric car with current battery technology. But I don't expect they will be using the exact same battery chemistry five or ten years from now.

How is battery swapping going to cope with the quick changes in battery technology we're likely to see once elecric cars become a multi billion dollar industry? The race to develop a better cheaper battery is going to be intense.