Nissan Leaf would go from 25K to 18K
Or, much more likely it would be available for $18k with the current range or $25k with double the range. In fact Nissan is seriously talking to existing owners about how much they would be willing to pay for a model with double the range as they see Tesla coming down range at them.

My wife's friend who works for Rigid gets a company truck and a fuel card that covers his gas for work, he's supposed to report personal use but I believe if he doesn't they just use a standard IRS formula and take it out of his annual bonus.

VS what, a car from the 1970's? Everything from the mid 80's on is a complete fender replacement in the case of an accident. It's the price we pay for fuel economy. Heck, many fairly minor accidents result in the vehicle being totaled due to crumple zones, that's the price we pay for safety. In both cases it's a minor percentage of the total cost of the vehicle fleet.

I doubt it, my wife's last van is 11 years old and while it has some rust her sister is still driving it just fine, my 11 year old Vibe has hardly any rust and I live in the middle of road salt hell (NE Ohio), it's not the 70's anymore, cars don't rust out in 8 years.

Ah, that's just because today's ultra-high-density platters require high-coercivity materials in order to adequately maintain the magnetization patterns that store the data. Low coercivity magnetic media just don't work at those densities.

Right now there are plenty of stations listed on gasbuddy in LA proper, and the greater LA area at $3.47-$3.49, of course there are quite a few listed at $4.99!

According to their terriff sheet summer consumption at 200% of baseline is $0.19564 for delivery and and $0.12396 for generation which actually comes out to $0.3196 per KWhr so I assume the $.35 includes some kind of taxes.

You *do* know IOS has a search, right? Makes it kind of difficult to fail to find an app you're actually looking for.

As for the rest, different strokes, etc. I have no objection if you choose not to use such a feature (for that matter, perhaps the OS could contain a switch to turn it off for those who are unable to manage more than a single level of folders.

As for not being useful, you're not qualified to say what's useful to me.

Would you care to explain how, or point the way to a howto?

Thanks.

Missed this, sorry:

Perhaps they have never even thought about the topic at all (no thoughts == no knowledge). Nor do they form their identity through comparison with others.

These are not the issue, though. If they hold a belief in a god or gods, they are theist. If they don't, they are atheist. You can change from one to the other, in fact many times, but at any point in time, you *are* one or the other.

That's all the theism / atheism issue addresses. Belief in a god or gods -- or not. Has nothing to do with why, how, which or one's idea of identity. It's a state of being, like being alive, or not, or being able to hear, or not.

Well, there are some original model Prius out there with over 1M kilometers on their less overengineered batteries so I think any speculation about throwing away a Tesla because of a worn battery pack are just a bit pessimistic.

The tax credit is there to jump start the industry, and there are per manufacturer and total vehicles sold caps on the credit, compared to all the perpetual credits for the oil and gas industry that's actually extremely progressive.Oh, and you can buy a Nissan Leaf and take full advantage of the credit without being anything approaching "Rich".

Thing is, in California electricity costs almost the same as gas

The top tier with southern california edison is $0.32/KWhr so filling the top capacity model S costs $27.20 and gives you a 300 mile range for a cost per mile of $.09. The average price of gas in southern California is currently ~$3.50 so to match the Tesla you'd have to achieve ~38MPG, which is quite a bit better than the 740i achieves, probably the most comparable vehicle to the Model S. Heck, the most fuel efficient large BMW in the US, the 535d, only achieves 30MPG combined. This also neglects the fact that if you have the money for a Model S you can afford to put up solar panels to avoid falling into that top tier of consumption so your real cost per mile could be significantly lower.

What they should do is use the ocean version of "pumped storage": build a giant vertical cylinder in the ocean, and when you have surplus electricity you pump water OUT of the chamber. Then when usage peaks and you need more electricity, you let water run back in and turn turbines to generate it.

It's probably a hell of a lot cheaper than batteries. Pumped storage has been an up-and-coming technology for 20 years now. I worked on one project in which they hollowed out an entire stone mountain, creating huge chambers to store water for a pumped-storage system.

When I was a child, we had a nice wood boat. A ChrisCraft. The finish was getting pretty weather-worn so my father took it to a guy who refinished boats to get it done. He specified brass screws, just like the original. The refinisher said, "Everybody uses stainless steel these days. They're just as good." My father reluctantly let him use the stainless steel screws.

The boat was moored by strong chains to a dock in the ocean. (You had to leave lots of play in the chains so the boat could ride up and down with the tide.) A few weeks later, by family got a call from the SeaBees. They had found the boat, dangling underwater by the chains holding it to the dock pilings.

The seawater had eaten the stainless steel screws right up. It only took a few weeks.