Fun fact: having a child on Earth also means inflicting an uncertain existence upon them including certain death. That fact doesn't appear to have stopped significant numbers of earthers from breeding either, even in conditions most of us wouldn't want to spend a day in let alone a lifetime.
Talk about the cure being worse than the disease.
It's also not going to work flying in and out of New York, where handguns are prohibited for non-residents, and attempting to check it per the FAA's regulations will get you arrested for violating NYS law.
By your theory, my Model S wins. The initial purchase price of a Model S is pretty middle of the pack to comparable cars in the full size luxury sedan class.
Similarly sized and spec'd ICE vehicles to the Model S get 20 - 25 MPG. At $3.50/gallon gas, that's 14c/mile.
The Model S gets about 3 miles / kWh. At 11.5c/kWh, that's 3.8c/mile.
Even if we assume a kWh from gasoline and a kWh from the wall have similar environmental impacts, and transmission costs/losses for both are properly reflected in the price at the meter, the Model S is three and a half times more efficient at turning the delivered energy into motion.
You're the one who started with the statement you could power a gasoline engine with a renewable clean energy source, namely Hydrogen.
You can't. Hydrogen isn't an energy source, because you can't refine hydrogen into a viable fuel using just hydrogen feedstock in an energy positive process. Hydrogen/Oxygen is at best another energy storage media, with cycle losses and storage requirements that are distinctly different but not theromdynamically unlike existing battery chemistries. There's nothing "clean" or "renewable" about burning hydrogen in an ICE engine in and of itself.
The point is, hydrogen isn't any more of a fuel than lithium in a battery is. They're both just energy storage media.
Gasoline is a fuel, because I can take a barrel of oil out of the ground, consume some of it to repay the energy used to pump it out, consume some of it to refine the remainder into gasoline, and end up getting more energy out of burning the rest than I had at the beginning of the process.
There's no above-unity mechanism to get free hydrogen into a motor vehicle, certainly not one that works on any commercial scale.
You missed two more:
Third, the people who make their living off of pumping liquified dinosaur out of the ground, turning it into gasoline and selling it to consumers.
Fourth, traditional car dealers who are (a) terrified of a direct to consumer sales channel, and (b) terrified of the fact that without 4,500 moving components in the engine and transmission alone, electric cars don't need anywhere near the maintenance required of a gasoline car, and thus more opportunities to upsell even more "services" 4 times a year. Even things like brakes don't get used up much if you're using aggressive regen most of the time to slow down.
The Model S competes in price to other cars in the $80k - $100k price range to start with, if you were going to spend that much on a car anyway it's not any more expensive. And over a 3 - 5 year period, it's cheaper once you factor in the difference in fuel costs.
As for batteries, they currently have an 8 year warranty. We're learning fairly fast that what kills smaller batteries fast is heat and high states of charge, which are far less of a concern in cars where you've got thermal management systems and capacity to keep the charge around 80% most of the time.
Gasoline cars can end up with pretty expensive repair costs once you pass the 8 year / 100,000 mile mark too as engine components start to wear out. Even changing $2 gaskets gets pretty pricey when it takes 10 hours of shop time to get to it and bolt everything back together again.
hydrogen is renewable.
Only by expending more energy to crack it off of whatever it was previously attached to than you'll get back by burning it again, at which point you may as well just shove those electrons into the battery on a Tesla anyway and save yourself the trouble of trying to transport diatomic hydrogen around.
Right now they're Tesla only. However, Tesla also has a side business selling power trains to more traditional car companies, and they're probably likely to license access to the network to those cars as well once they've built it out some.
That's not exactly a scenario I or most other people do often enough to make it influence which car I buy. For the once a decade I need to get from NYC to LA in a day and a half, I can rent or take a plane.
Of course, the irony here is once the Supercharger network finishes building out along I-40, I may very well drive from coast to coast a few times, since the Superchargers are cheaper than airfare.
The Model S is comparable in purchase price to an otherwise equivalent gas-powered car. It's a large, high performance luxury sedan, and other cars of that size, horsepower, and trim level run $75 - $100k as well.
It's fine if you want franchise laws to protect existing dealers from their manufacturers. There's nothing wrong with a guarantee that after Bob's Dodge dealership spends a decade investing in the local market that Chrysler doesn't just move in next door and undercut him.
Tesla however doesn't have any existing dealers to screw over, and making them sell through other brand's established dealers is a horrible conflict of interest. The legacy brands made their bed and need to lie in it, but they shouldn't be able to force the upstart to deal with the mess their competitors made.
He stated a year ago he was looking specifically for Apollo 11 and started with estimates of where that particular flight profile would have ended up.
It's possible this stage is from another launch with a similar ground track and they can't confirm it until they find an intact serial number, but it's likely these are Apollo 11.
Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.
