I wholly agree.

If so, it probably needs a custom allocator, that's all.

Probably they had some developer mobility betwen Star Division and SAP :/ /me ducks and runs

I just used the 60% figure as given by the parent. Even with a 40% efficient power plant, 5% electrical transmission losses (U.S. ballpark), and a 70% efficient car, we get 27% overall efficiency - worse than an ICE, but then there must be some oil-rig-to-tank inefficiencies in refining and transit that the mere ICE efficiency doesn't take into account.

It really looks like at the moment electric cars are about as efficient as ICE cars, when it comes to the overall amount of waste heat generated in the entire process - from extracting the raw energy source (coal, crude) to pushing the car along the road. The EVs are probably much better when it comes to non-CO2 pollution, though, and can only get better as more efficient power plants get deployed. There's not much you can do to an ICE at the moment.

Um, where, pray tell, did he?

The location of the gearshift is different, and the clutches are hydraulic. Otherwise it drives just like a manual. The mechanical linkage of a manual transmission gear shifter is, as far as I'm concerned, an obsolete artifact belonging in a museum, together with the dry clutch that's used with it.

How does the fact that standard cars don't have it stand contrary to the fact that you can have a regenerative braking system in essentially any vehicle?

Well, let me elaborate a bit. I have modified my Volvo S80 for steering wheel gear shifting. The firmware has access to the serial bus between the shifter handle and the transmission, as well as the CAN bus to which the steering wheel is talking, and the bus on which you get all the common parameters like road speed, engine RPM, etc. During one of the updates when I pulled my contraption from the car, I've added an 8 DOF inertial reference sensor, consisting of a 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis rate gyro, and a 2 axis inclinometer. In the time since I've tweaked the firmware to use that information to estimate the engine power needed to maintain the current acceleration. Shifting is done so as to shift the operating RPMs of the engine up and down as needed so that the car will not change the acceleration (the acceleration may be zero, positive or negative, doesn't matter). The means that if I keep my accelerator depressed just enough to maintain constant speed (a=0), the car will downshift on an incline to get the RPMs up and increase the output power at current throttle command. It also turns out that it downshifts on a decline in order to engine-brake, so as not to let the acceleration rise past zero, but that behavior is optional and I enable it only in the mountains.

The firmware also executes an upshift-hold for 10s whenver the inclination changes sufficiently, so that in the mountains there's no constant gear changing every time the road levels out. I pay for it by having to work more on the accelerator, but it makes it easy on the brakes. The radiator doesn't wear any more simply by dissipating more heat :)

There's this thing called an inclinometer. No GPS needed.

So, you've contradicted yourself, right there. There's no "imaginary loss" at all. There's a current flowing around as the energy is transferred between the inductance and the capacitance, and that current dissipates energy through the resistance of the infrastructure. It heats the wires all right.

Your sources are hilarious. Here's a representative sentence:

Reads like something from the 1950s.

You're way off on that. Where did you get the 50% figure from? Your source seems to indicate that 90% is an appropriate figure for lead-acid chemistry.

That's still better than 30% for a typical ICE, but worse when you combine the 35% efficiency of a coal-fired powerplant with transmission line losses and 60% efficiency of the car itself. That said, we've got way more coal than oil.

So, we agree, then. Intelligence is about a bit more than reading newspapers and listening to the news - the game of chinese whispers you allude to.

Again - for the most part, you don't need to be physically present anywhere to get this stuff. Sure freely available sources, including the demeanor of the public, must be taken into account, but this is but a part of what intelligence work is about. Never mind that you don't really want the foreign governments to have a list of your assets, and sending them abroad as diplomats is like putting a big searchlight on their back. Their whereabouts will be duly noticed wherever they happen to go.