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Comment Re:EV sales in *USA* plummet (Score 1) 297

most cars are more efficient at 55 to 60 MPH than at 40 MPH

I think the studies show 50 mph is the sweet spot for the same distance on highways. But you are right it varies by both vehicle and driving style. But the difference between 50 and the current 70-80 mph people drive on freeways is substantial for any vehicle.

Certainly true for highways, yes. There's also next to no good alternative to individual cars for highway driving, though. Amtrak is very, very limited, Greyhound is slow *and* very limited, airplanes are grossly fuel inefficient and are generally limited to relatively long distances, and that's about it.

The other part of the equation is how many miles someone drives. Lower speeds mean people drive fewer miles because the real cost of a trip is the time it takes. If you drive 8 hours at average 50 mph you only go 400 miles. You drive at average 60 miles per hour you go 480. If you use 5 gallons to go 100 miles then you use an extra gallon of gas.

Not sure why you think people would drive fewer miles. Most people in cars are trying to get to a specific place, not driving just to drive. Would people plan shorter trips? Maybe for some small percentage of leisure driving, but leisure driving is already a small percentage of driving, so that's a small reduction in fuel use for a small percentage of a small percentage of trips. That's hardly worth the negative impact on everything else.

Comment Re:Musk gets 50 billion dollars (Score 1) 149

It is basically impossible for Tesla to ever be a profitable company now. It is madness to be investing in it. But so many people have put so much money in it and they are so afraid of losing out that we all just have to pretend.

That's not how stock grants work. That trillion dollars doesn't come from Tesla. It comes from the stock market through share dilution. The company can absolutely still be profitable no matter how much equity it chooses to give out.

Comment Re:Is Matter open ? (Score 1) 44

One that can't be made obsolete when the manufacturers get bored with it.

Then think long and hard about IKEA. For many product lines, they seem to discontinue stuff frequently. If you bought one piece of furniture or light fixture, figure "Gee. That looks nice" and go back for matching pieces: Sorry. No longer available.

I think they work a lot like Costco. Make a deal for a few container loads of something, slap a wierd name on it and put it in stores. Once their stock is finished, no more. I have had some luck in finding the original manufacturer and ordering through Aliexpress. But that will remain difficult until after Trump's third term

Comment Re:what happens (Score 1) 125

For example the city I'm in, if you make your house two stories (the maximum, by the way) the required setbacks triple in size so your house won't be any bigger.

Yeah, your definition of "mega-mansion" definitely is a starter house. My parents' home was two stories plus a basement. I can think of plenty of three-story houses that aren't even remotely mansions (e.g. row houses in San Francisco).

Penalizing people for using space efficiently by building up just leads to more suburban sprawl and lower housing density. It's the opposite of what any sane urban planner would recommend.

Comment Re:what happens (Score 0) 125

When someone builds a mega-mansion on your street, it makes the street less appealing as a whole and it makes your house look less attractive by comparison.

I would argue that having newer houses in your neighborhood is a sign that your neighbors probably aren't crackheads, so it should make your house look more attractive by comparison. The only time that might not be true is when the nicer house is also for sale at the same time yours is.

Also, those "mega-mansions" (which, based on having known a bunch of people who use phrases like that, are probably what we used to call a starter home back where I grew up) mean higher property taxes, which means better schools, which also increase the value of your property.

Comment Re:EV sales in *USA* plummet (Score 1) 297

Where I grew up, a town of about 10,000 people, the total extent of "public transit" was a van service that served the elderly and disabled.

That's called public transit assuming anyone can use it, which is the way it works most places. If you mean scheduled bus service, then yes that is more limited in both suburbs and rural areas where it exists at all.

Wow. I looked it up, and today I learned that it actually is available to non-seniors. I'm kind of surprised. Of course, the median wait time is measured in significant fractions of an hour, so even the elderly prefer to get rides from other people when they can. Either way, there's no advantage to a van that drives around and picks up one or two people at a time and takes them to their destination compared with a private car (and actually a huge disadvantage from a fuel economy perspective). It's just a glorified Über service, but with the most fuel-inefficient vehicles on the road.

I'm talking about small town USA.

One of the firm criteria of our choosing our house was that it be within walking distance of work and a grocery store. We didn't even look at houses that didn't meet that criteria. Did that mean we couldn't have five acre spread in the woods? Yes. Did it mean we couldn't live on a lake? Yes, we couldn't afford lake front property that met that criteria. What I am talking about is what is real, not your imaginary small town.

My actual small town that I lived in until I was 22 currently has almost no houses within a twenty minute walk of any of the grocery stores. Maybe a few of the houses closest to the front of one of the wealthiest neighborhoods are close enough to Walmart. E.W. James (oops, that apparently just became a Save-A-Lot) is on a highway with almost no houses for probably a mile. Ruler Foods is within a mile of maybe a half dozen houses.

The Big Star store that went under in the 1980s (IIRC) was within walking distance of maybe a dozen mostly low-income houses, plus some university married student apartments, and *barely* within walking distance of some of the other university housing, but that has been gone for decades. The old E.W.'s was within walking distance of maybe low-double-digit houses before it moved across town in the late 1990s to where Ruler is now, and then again to its current location. IGA was also kind of near some houses, but again, that closed in the 80s or 90s when all the businesses moved to the west side of town to be near Walmart after it moved.

But even if you distributed them as evenly as you could, with only three real grocery stores, you'd still only have maybe 10% to 15% of residents within a reasonable walking distance of a grocery store. At 850 people per square mile, you just can't sustain a lot of grocery stores. And that's before you factor in all the people out in the country. For that matter, my current city has trouble keeping more than about three grocery stores in business at anything approaching *bikeable* distances even with 7k people per square mile. The economies of scale just lend themselves to a smaller number of larger grocery stores, rather than a larger number of smaller stores.

trying to eliminate cars can't work in rural areas,

I agree and lowering the speed limit doesn't eliminate cars. It reduces their emissions immediately instead of waiting 20 or 30 or 40 years when the only cars on the road are electric.

Except that this isn't true. Yes, above a certain speed, you rapidly lose energy from wind resistance. But at lower speeds, you're not getting the maximum advantage of higher gears. That's why most cars are more efficient at 55 to 60 MPH than at 40 MPH. So lowering the maximum speed will NOT necessarily reduce emissions.

Here's a graph of a few vehicles' efficiency versus speed. Going significantly over 60 MPH usually results in a significant reduction in efficiency. Below that, though, you're just as likely to make emissions worse by slowing people down as you are to make it better. It depends entirely on what speeds just happen to be at the sweet spot in the torque curve of a particular engine with a particular gear ratio. You really can't fix the environment with that approach. All you'll do is make people late all the time.

Comment Re:The supply chain problems are real (Score 1, Interesting) 149

And that's before the uncertainty around rare Earth minerals which are absolutely critical to the battery in that EV.

Nit: To the best of my knowledge, there are no rare earth minerals in EV batteries. They are, however, used in a lot of EV *motors*. Lithium, cobalt, manganese, iron, etc. are anything but rare.

Folks have not really fully grasped just how much of a fuck up electing Donald Trump was and is. I think the scale of the fuck up is a little bit too large for most people to comprehend. Trump has done as much damage in 10 months as a Republican president usually does in 8 years. We also did not get the usual 8 years of Democrats fixing the previous Republicans disastrous policies.

The full extent of the damage will take years to fully appreciate. That's half the reason people like him get elected. By the time the full extent of the damage is know, you're two presidential cycles later or even three.

Given all the uncertainty and the loss of the 7500 tax credit yeah there is no way in hell anyone can sell EVS profitable unless they're using slave labor to build them like China does.

It's really not *that* bad. They just have to sell them for more money. The tax credit doesn't magically make them unprofitable unless they haven't paid off the R&D costs. Otherwise, it just reduces their sales volume or forces them to take a lower profit per unit to keep the volume up.

Meanwhile Tesla is about to give Elon Musk 1 trillion with a t dollars. It's not just more money than the company has ever made it's more money than the company ever can make. It took them 20 years and constant government subsidies to make 43 billion in profit. To pay Elon Musk will take 200 years.

It's stock. It's funny money.

For any other company the stock price would be cratering right now as people sell out as fast as they can but so many people bought in when Tesla was already overvalued that nobody wants to be the one that pulled the trigger and start the downward spiral. Everyone is hoping to get out and give it over to a greater fool. So it's a Mexican standoff.

Not at all true. The numbers are kind of nuts, but they are also tied to growth targets, so if Tesla doesn't grow, he doesn't get anything. It doesn't really devalue the shares, and this style of compensation scheme is pretty typical, though again, I won't argue that the numbers seem questionably high.

The whole electric car market is poised to collapse. China might keep it going thanks to the aforementioned slave labor but without that there's nothing to sustain it anymore.

It already did, at least in the U.S. As soon as the tax credit expired, buying cratered. The company most likely to weather this is Tesla. Tesla already lost their tax credits, and their sales didn't crater before, so they probably won't crater this time, either.

But the rest of the industry? Dealers at the major car companies want to *avoid* selling EVs, because they don't get all that lucrative service business — oil changes and brake jobs and oxygen sensor replacements and so on. They have no incentive to sell EVs, and without tax credits to push people to choose EVs, sales dry up.

In other words, Ford ditching their electric trucks is *entirely* plausible. (I could maybe even see Tesla ditching the Cybertruck, because its sales suck for... let's just say design and implementation reasons.)

Comment Meh. (Score 1) 32

The testimony paints a picture of a leader who could be manipulative and chameleon-like in the relentless pursuit of his own agenda

Welcome to the corporate world. The only thing worse than the aforementioned leadership is when middle management runs off in their own multiple directions and leadership can't or won't reign those morons in.

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