The Toyota contract is dying a quiet death; Toyota never wanted an electric car but their fuel cell vehicles weren't ready in time to satisfy California's ZEV requirements.

They use 18560s.
LMGTFY

I think one thing that you might not have been considering when thinking about volume required at "electric filling stations" is that unlike hydrocarbon vehicles, most of the time EVs are fueled at home. There are not very many days that I drive more than I'd replace by charging a Model S overnight even on 110V 15A (~3MPH).

I may be misinterpreting your statement, but Tesla uses AC induction motors with no permanent magnets and no rare earths.

That argument is as fallacious as claiming that you need to own the biggest SUV there is because once every couple of years you want to tow a boat. It can be extended to any extreme: "Oh, your new pack is 500 miles of range? Well, I want to do a 1500 mile trip without charging, so EVs are impratical!"

Ooh! I also have an anecdote! One of my LTO tapes' leader broke off in the drive, ruining not just the tape but the drive itself. $5k oops.

It was great for offsite backups, but my data needs have eclipsed LTO's capacity. I don't have the budget to keep upgrading my drives to chase my ever increasing storage needs. On the other hand, I scrounged up a server and a disk array to make a 28TB backup server for no extra cost.

The "mover" (same function as a rotor, but is linear instead of rotational) is pushed past the stator by the explosions. This also compresses a gas spring which returns the cylinder to the starting point when it rebounds.

The laws are wrong and outdated. I do not ever want to go to a car dealer again. I am the consumer and I am demanding direct sales. I fully support Tesla's full on attack.

Hardly any other manufacturer takes EVs seriously. The most prominent one is the Leaf, but there are reports that dealers can be reluctant to sell them. Toyota makes the RAV4 EV, with a Tesla drivetrain. They only sell it in California and go out of their way to make it a pain to own. Chevy has the Spark EV, a city car. Fiat will have the 500e. None of these even come close to the practicality of Tesla's model with large batteries and very fast DC charging. The quick research I did just now suggests that using a Chademo DC charger on a Leaf puts in about half of the range per unit time as a Tesla Supercharger (remember that the Superchargers are free, too)

The statement "Meanwhile everyone else makes electric cars without all the drama queen nonsense!" is extremely misleading and dismissive.

If I want an EV, why does the first step have to be convincing a third party to offer to sell it to me? That's insane.

No it's not. I bought my Fitbit from Fitbit. I was thinking of buying a Nest from Nest. Nexus 5 from Google Play. Kilt from Utilikilts. Kettle from Adagio. Apple computers. Kindle from Amazon. Many more examples.
Most of those things are pretty mainstream.

I don't want to have to wait for a middleman to decide that there's enough volume potential for them to start stocking the stuff I want.

And this is all ignoring how _awful_ car dealers are. There's a whole industry dedicated to circumventing them as much as possible!

The whole point of Tesla is, in fact, to make all-electric cars for the masses. The funding for that project and to keep the company afloat until battery tech advances sufficiently to realize that goal is to sell first the Roadster and now the Model S and X.

Tesla's tests are showing 3000 full charge-discharge cycles, but it's not clear to me how that scales when you don't fully charge and discharge the battery, nor do I know the failure criteria.

Titanium itself is pretty low cost, material-wise. The cost comes in working it. I just found a retail price of $450/m^2 for 1mm sheet. I'm not sure how thick the plate here is, but it's only about 4x the cost of stainless sheet from the same place. If we assume that the plate is a solid rectangle measuring 60x30cm, then the retail value of the material is $80. I don't think it'd be worth much on the scrap market.

Anyway, to steal it, you'd have to crawl under the car (12cm clearance), detach the plastic aeroshield, then get the plate off.

They're not underpowered. They are huge discs (all four are about the same size, even, since the very low center of gravity limits diving) with Brembo-made calipers. That said, the discs stay wetter longer than in ICE cars because the regen takes care of the small reductions in speed. In this case it was too cold for regen, so no difference.

I think it'd be a good idea to disable the accelerator while the brake is pressed, and simple to add to every car via a software update.

These loans that they have paid back early? Do you not consider bailing out the Big 3 to be a form of subsidy?

You joke, but keep in mind that eye contact is a threatening gesture to most animals, cats especially. They show you that they trust you when they blink and look away. "I trust you enough that I feel comfortable not watching you". This is probably the source of the truism that the allergic person gets all of the attention: The cat lover stares and yells, "KITTY" while the allergic person avoids eye contact and is perceived to be the lowest threat.

You can squeeze your eyes shut a couple of times and watch cats do the same. It's fun!