Well yeah. There's a reason I mentioned fuel stabilizer. I have a 5 gallon can that I always add some to when I get gas. Makes firing up all the small engines so much easier. When winter rolls around I add even more, as I have a big economy sized container of it (1L?) for a reason.

I've never really had a problem, and if I do, more fuel stabilizer, then letting it sit for half an hour before priming it again, works like a charm.

If you empty it out, you refill with fresh gasoline. I haven't ever really had a problem. Sure, it might take an extra 5 minutes in the spring to fire the mower up, but that's still less time than trying to get it started in the winter. *Shudder*. I have an engine block heater for my truck for a reason, I don't want to be pull starting anything at -30.

I had no such problems on a week long drive from North Dakota to Alaska. My truck alone is likely longer than an EV + tiny trailer, and remember one of the trailers had active steering. Worst case, if you can't back up that well, you wait until the truck in front is done and then pull out.

Again: I learned in one day, with a much bigger, nastier trailer. Oh, and 'brake too hard'? Being able to take more than full power braking is part of the design. Heck, some trailers have their own brakes. This little midget wouldn't though.

Really, you're posting a lot of 'what ifs' that are already answered. It reminds me of a couple different topics.

Never pictured people actually buying them, remember? I pictured them renting them from U-haul. If you have enough use to actually buy one you're better off with an actual hybrid.

Not quite a year, but in my case: motorcycle, lawnmower, standby generator, edger, chainsaw, etc... are all not used 6-9 months out of the year. For the ones with batteries, you hook it up to a trickle charger occasionally, and for all of them you either empty out the gas or dump fuel stabilizer in there. As for the rest of it, not really necessary in my experience.

For select people, they do make things easier. There are reasons why I don't own one yet. And yes, today's EVs need a lot of improvement. Hopefully they get that improvement, like having superchargers(or better yet their more open successors) scattered around like gas stations. Well, not like gas stations, I'm picturing some around every restaurant and other business that somebody might want to stop by for an hour on a long trip.

I don't know, what do you do if the road is washed out in a storm? If the lightning instead hits the only gas station within 100 miles(I've traveled through areas like this) and fries their pumping system? Not enough charger stations is purely an infrastructure build-up problem. It's nothing insurmountable. Heck, if the situation is bad enough just stop for the day and plug into a lower power charger.

Depends on how you define 'fortune' and how the mold actually works. I'm not picturing one of the really high pressure ones. As for 'exact copy' have somebody dressing them up after they come out, plus have a dozen different molds.

Like I said earlier, for longevity purposes Tesla actually has their system report it's full and stop charging at about 80% of the maximum charge it's battery pack could actually take. That avoids the 'last 5%' slow charge problem pretty much completely, as a LiIon battery pack will still be charging at a good rate until it's over 90%. Figures are approximate due to variability in chemistry, battery size, what's considered a 'fast charge', etc...

Wiki and other sources are quoting 'about an hour' for a full charge, with 50% being 20-30 minutes, but then Tesla's website mentions that they're upgrading(have upgraded?) their supercharger stations to make charging even faster, so the 30 minute references might be for the older stations. All figures are for the longer range 85kwh battery.

They can't? I mean, google has all sorts of hits...

Actually, they can. My light truck, for example, has a class II receiver(3.5k pounds), which is 2". On the open market I can only get class 1(2k pounds) or 2 ball mounts that fit my receiver. If I had had the tow package, I could have put a class III on(5k pounds). With a regular EV, you'd get one with a 1 1/4" opening, which you can only fit the smaller ball on, thus only the smaller trailers with that type of hitch.

If somebody goes through the effort to custom make a 1 1/4" bar with the larger ball in order to hook up a large boat to their EV, the damage is going to be warranty voiding obvious. Most of those things are designed to hook into a special hitch installed into the bed of a pickup or on an actual semi.

Meanwhile, there's all sorts of instructions in my truck on how much I can tow. There's stickers on trailers as well, all I have to do is play 'equal to or less than'. Places like U-Haul are well used to educating users, and have a selection of light tow trailers that even smaller cars can haul. I figure they'd be the ones renting out the generator trailers anyways.

I learned in the course of a day. I wouldn't rate myself as expert, but some of these models are designed to help prevent jackknifing when backing, and you shouldn't be doing much of that given that you're only going to be using it(theoretically) on the highways. I learned with a 3k pound loaded trailer without fancy steering.

The price I found was $320 for a SUV from Enterprise, like I said. Your dates might have been bad, or the area expensive, etc... *shrug*, rental prices vary a lot. As for snow chains, well, I own a set, they aren't cheap, but well, I live in Alaska, paranoia is professional for winter up here.

$20k would get you a pretty good older used SUV as long as you're careful. But transaction, registration, inspection, and insurance costs would eat up any savings from buying if your use is irregular enough. I'll note that you didn't buy an SUV instead of renting, you delayed your trip.

Same can be said for many things; I'm warped, both parents are accountants. I do those sorts of figuring as a routine matter of course.

If you're not attached to your vehicle, rent one. If you're attached(or going one way) rent a trailer. If you're going camping, figure the ability of the trailer(and car) to provide electricity in remote locations. If you get a light enough trailer you can move it by hand if necessary. Heck, I can do that with MY trailer when it's empty, and it's a covered trailer big enough to put my motorcycle into.

Like I implied, odds are the government would quickly decide that those artifacts aren't really all that valuable to avoid just that issue. Like anything it's a balancing game.

There's a dude storing up horn in case it ever becomes legal to sell it from Rhinos he 'ranches' himself as is. He manages to keep them protected; remember that he, at least in his own mind, has a very good incentive to have an effective protection program up, not to mention that since all the Rhinos are missing their horns(on average), they're not as good of a target for poachers.

I'm not saying that it's as cheap as farming cattle, where raising a steer worth not even $200 is still economical, but when a horn you can harvest something like 10 times over the animal's life is worth $20k, you can go through a lot more effort and still have it be economical. Heck, even if you depress the price to a 'mere' $2k, and raise the price of raising them an OOM over a steer, they're still easily worth it.

The people buying it, on average, don't care. The trick is to ensure that the government/customs agents can verify it's legally harvested stuff, but once the legal horn harvest herds are big enough, the trickle of illegal horns won't actually be that big of a deal since the price will be so depressed, it won't normally be worth a poacher's effort/risk. What's worth it right now at $200k per horn might not be worth it at $2k.

There's already a lot of fake rhino horn sold, one of my ideas was to have the government flood the market even more with convincing fakes. Using a 3D printer to make them would probably be a wash; I'm picturing something more like a mold and using bull horns as the base.

Ah, so you're a statist, got it. ;)

And that's something that you don't really have enough information to assess from the contents of one one line post. You don't know if he's really irrational, just mad about the topic of the moment, etc...

I should know, I practically specialize in government paranoia, both for and against. The trick is to realize that 'the government' isn't a person, or if it is, it's a multiple personality schizophrenic. The left hand literally doesn't know what the right is doing. Thus, you have to assess each program, each policy, somewhat on it's own.

Programs are one thing, but when it comes to law - watch out. NEVER trust them if they say 'Oh, sure, it could theoretically be used to prosecute case X, but we'd never use it for that!'. Normally it takes about a year from hitting the books before they're using it to prosecute case X. See anti-terrorist laws for a recent example of that, what with 'domestic terrorist' labels being applied willy-nilly.

No, that's a 16% drop going through a small scale rectifier, wave chopper, multiple transformers, capacitors, and finally voltage regulators to produce multiple voltages in relatively very clean and tightly controlled levels: +/-12, +/-5, and 3.3.

Power systems get more efficient the larger they are. A neighborhood level transformer is going to be better than 98% efficient.

You're NOT going to lose 7% from your curb drop to your circuit breaker panel.
Calculations: 240V service, 1/0 awg(100Amp service, I'm being nice), 200 feet of wire(I'm being generous here), fully utilized at 100A, you get 2.1% drop. I had a 60A service once, couldn't blow it even running the oven, stove, and water heater all at once. That's a mere 1.3% drop.

Why not? We already do it for dams. Matter of fact, losses can be kept down to 3.5% per 1k km. That's for the ENTIRE RUN, including conversion costs.

At 14 cents per kwh(of which average transmission loss is already factored in), that would be half a cent per kwh.

First, When posting off-topic, it's best to post anonymous to preserve your reputation. Thus why the AC posted that way.

Back on your topic. It's true that 'distribution' doesn't start at the plant and end at the wheels, though I'd say that for an EV it does tend to 'end at the wheels'. It's just that it gets very, very hairy once you start looking past the plant. Sure, you can analyze a specific source/plant/generation facility, but if you analyze a different one the numbers can be completely different. Even averages are hard to come by.

Are you looking at a solar plant or wind turbine? How much energy went into creating the system, how much do you expect to get out of it, what's that individual KwH's share?
What about Natural Gas? How much energy went into drilling for the NG, collecting and purifying it, and shipping it to the plant? 60% efficiency for the plant itself.
Coal? Most coal plants are located close to their mines for logistical reasons - it's more efficient to ship the electricity than to ship the coal. Still, mining and shipping of the coal needs to be accounted for. You're looking at 40-50% efficient for coal plants.
Nuclear? Mining and enrichment(if necessary) of the Uranium needs to be added in. 30-40% efficient.

Still, you contend that hydrocarbons are 'cheap to ship'. Well, coal isn't that cheap to ship due to the shear amount of it necessary. Natural gas either needs to be piped(and NG pipelines are expensive to run long distances), or it needs to be compressed to a liquid. This costs $1.50-$2 per mcf. This is significant, considering the wellhead price of $3 per mcf. Shipping runs $.30 per mcf.

Liquid fuels such as diesel and gasoline, of course, need to be extracted from a well, shipped as crude to a refinery, refined(~70% efficient), then shipped to the final destination. I think that you'd find that it's quite hilariously expensive from that perspective, in line with power plant costs.

The vast majority of real studies have figured that even if you use a relatively dirty coal plant for power that EVs still come out ahead energy wise due to the shear efficiency.

The grid is better than 90% efficient, on average, the charger is better than 90%, as is the battery and motor. You go beyond that if you still want to compare it to IC vehicles you have to look at energy losses in pumping out of the well, transporting to the refinery, then to the distribution point, etc...

It would take a lot of efficiency within the hydrocarbon supply chain, and a lot of inefficiency in the electric one, to make up for the difference between a ~73% efficient plant-wheel EV w/regenerative brakes vs the 20% efficient engine and 80% efficient transmission, with no regeneration of a gasoline engine.

Looking up the site's claims, it's '50% in 20 minutes', I'm taking that as +50%, not TO 50%. IE if you start at 20%, you'll be 70% when you're done. If you're really close to 0% you might get a touch more, if you're close to 50% you might get a bit less. Given that Tesla sets their battery's '100%' to more like 80% of true capacity for longevity purposes, you shouldn't run into the problem where the last 5% takes as long as the first 50%.

Well, it's a good thing that the range is 265 for a model S. You might be able to Ironman driving, but I like to sit down and have a good meal every so often. That's without getting into a number of different possibilities:
1. The proposed on-road charging, which should enable you to finish a drive with most of the charge you left with, even if it doesn't enable charging the battery at all.
2. Even more increased battery capacity - we saw an article about lithium-sulfur batteries not long ago. Even if it only 'doubles' the range - that's 530 miles of range, or 8 hours of driving at 65 mph. You want lunch, right? If you utilize a high speed charger for an hour during that, you should be able to hit 14-16 hours of driving easy.
3. Generator trailer: I LOVE this concept. When people are on long trips is generally when they want to haul the most stuff. Make a small trailer incorporating a 5 gallon tank and a 15-20 kw generator in addition to some extra storage. The Tesla model S should use ~21kw@65, but if you're supplying 75% of the energy, you should be able to travel 1k miles before exhausting the battery, and just let it keep running for a bit if you're camping to charge the batteries back up. A 20kw version shouldn't cost more than $13k. See #4 for the idea of simply renting the trailer when you need it. If it runs the full size price, you're still looking at 65 weeks of renting it to make it cheaper to buy.
4. Week long rental costing 10% of the cost of a car? What kind of cheap-ass cars are you looking at? I see $45-65/day, $315-455, $3-4.5k doesn't generally get you a car I'd trust on a highway. Heck, Enterprise, checking a non-airport location, gives me a rental price for a full size at $200 for a week. You can get a 'intermediate SUV' for $320.

Still a lot of lab work to be done, of course, but going from the article I remember:
1. It probably won't work all that well at -50, but that's what heaters are for. I don't remember Fargo getting that cold, but given that I'm in Fairbanks now...
1a. There's nothing interfering but purism to say that you can't install a hydrocarbon based heater into your electric car, especially in extremely cold climates. They make 90%+ efficient ones, though even a 70-80% efficient one will produce gobs of heat for not much fuel.
2. 120F in LA - Probably work fine
3. 3k discharge cycles- that's what they're working on.
4. Safe in rupture - the battery has been reported to be solid(as opposed to modern liquid types), and sulfur is pretty low on the list of toxic substances. Lithium isn't bad either.
5. Hasn't been mentioned. Why are you leaving a car in long term parking for 3 months? Just take a cab! Otherwise, well, they can always retrofit the parking with plug systems like what Fairbanks International has in it's parking lots. Oh, and I know a fair number of gasoline cars that wouldn't start without assistance if left for 3 months.
5a. Heck, they sell solar powered battery chargers for a reason. Scale it up a touch and you're not likely to come back to a fully charged battery if you left it at half charge, but if it can keep it at half charge...

And you missed the rest of his point. Heck, for all we know the poachers often shoot the rhino in the dark before they knew it's had it's horn removed.

The theory behind reducing profit levels still holds true - would you do X for $10k? What if it's a 50% chance of being 0? Still worth it?

Personally, I'd allow the responsible ranching of Rhinos combined with sustainable horn harvest; drop the price by an OOM and poaching would be nowhere near as profitable while ranched Rhinos would help pull the species back from endangerment.

The moment you do this though I think that you'd find that the government doesn't think all those 'priceless archeological historical items' aren't priceless after all...

Still, it'd be a net positive. You wouldn't have people quietly disposing of said artifacts, sort of like how there are constant rumors about developers equally quietly disposing of any endangered species that might be found in the development area that would bring said development to a screeching halt.