About the train speeds, the benefit of a train is that it will always run on time and to a timetable regardless of time of day. Putting more people on the train doesn't make it slower. In the corridors we are talking about, the interstate isn't running 80MPH constantly; during rush hour these stretches of interstate are crawling whereas the train will still be running at full speed on the same timetable. The peak throughputs of a highway is something like 17mph, but trains always run at peak throughput.

About the land near cities, you answered your own question. When approaching cities, trains can use existing highway ROW because they start slowing down miles outside the city anyway, and nearly all US cities (regrettably) already have interstates cutting right through them.

About stations, train stations are tiny compared to things like airports or even compared to highway interchanges. A single highway interchange is many times bigger than a big train station. No even to mention the size of airports. That's how Penn Station in Manhattan handles more daily passengers than any airport in the world, despite being smack in the middle of Manhattan. You don't need acres of land to build a train station; you can build it in the space of one moderately large parking lot, and almost no city in America is so dense that you can't find such a patch of land for a train station. And in cases where it makes sense, building a station on the edge of town is perfectly viable. That's what we do with airports already, and people manage to get themselves to airports. In fact you might be running the train straight to an existing airport for the obvious connectivity benefits.

So you use those same highway ROW for the trains. They have to slow down miles before they get to the city anyway. In cases where there's no urban freeways, which is really rare in the US, you can build a terminal on the city edge instead, exactly like they did with shin-osaka in Japan.

That's the same situation for interstates. There's no "at grade" road crossing on any interstate highway, by design. Every junction is grade separated, universally, by design. Yet we have a nationwide interstate system. Why is this seen as a barrier, when it's literally how we build anyway?

1) We already have public ROW all over the country for interstates and utility corridors. Not all of it is suitable for true HSR, but then again you don't need true HSR on every mile. Mere "HSR(tm)" is perfectly serviceable. Even most true HSR systems only hit peak speeds in short stretches. This is the approach you would use in built up areas.

2) the vast majority of the mountain West is actually public land anyway. You would build it exactly how we did it in the 1800s when we built the transcontinental RR...the government uses its own land and grants it to private railway companies or the public railway company.

Companies also realized Americans have no transportation alternative, and get to choose between absurdly high house prices and a crushing car commute, or slightly less absurd house prices and an even more crushing car commute. Either way, the car is mandatory, and housing prices effectively become capitalized into car prices.

There's no reason to sell cars for cheap in America. If you can keep competitors out, you can charge almost unlimited amounts for something people absolutely have to have.

Fair points. You're right that overproduction has costs. I agree, I'm just saying US economic thought is hyper sensitive to that particular cost of overproduction, as if low prices and excess capacity is the worst thing that can happen, and dismisses the costs of monopoly and unearned income generation, and other costs that society pays when production is held back for higher corporate profits.

This article clearly is written from a Wall Street perspective, but China is not Wall Street.

Wall Street fears a "crash" above all else, because a "crash" causes existing winners to lose, which is something that cannot be allowed to happen in the US. But China understands that a crash for one person is an opportunity for others, and what matters is overall progress, not just making sure nobody ever loses money. People losing money is part of capitalism and part of the industrial lifecycle, so a "crash" is not some kind of existential failure, but just a rumble in an evolving market.

China has a tendency to fund a huge amount of companies who invest extravagantly in building overflowing amounts of capital. Then a lot of those companies go out of business, the whole sector "crashes" (we could also say "matures"), all that huge amount of capital is snatched up and purposed to extremely efficient PRODUCTION which is the part that Wall Street doesn't care about.

The same thing is happening with solar; from a Wall Street perspective it's a failure because prices keep falling and solar companies aren't making profits. From a Chinese perspective it's a success, because they are blanketing their mountains with cheap solar panels and they are going to achieve energy independence which will help the whole economy. They understand you can't have cheap power and also have extremely profitable energy companies. You can't have low solar prices and also boost profits of solar companies. So what Western articles will describe as a "failure" and "collapse" is actually an evolution of the market to the next stage of hyper-efficient production (also known as low profitability) which the US never achieves because they step in to make sure incumbent interests don't lose money (even if the overall economy or consumer "loses money" in the long run).

In the central cities, Europe's answer to traffic congestion is to reduce the need for cars in general, and reduce the number of cars on the road. Self-driving cars aren't going to do either thing. Streets are already clogged with cars so self-driving ones aren't going to make any positive improvement unless they allow replacement of a personal car with a self-driving car, and that's only going to happen in the long run if self-driving cars are for some reason cheaper than Ubers. Even then, even Ubers/SDC's take up space on the road; there's only so much gain to be had.

It makes sense that SDC development is happening in America, because in America, only car transport is allowed. It has been decided that roadway infrastructure is going to be the only form of infrastructure to get public investment and the only one which will be accommodated by public policy, no matter what. The fact that SDC's aren't really going to move the needle here either, is a lost point because there's nowhere else for investment dollars to go.

Logically, mass transit moves so many more people than cars, that in terms of dollars per person moved, cars are nearly irrelevant by comparison by the raw numbers. A single subway line carries more people than the busiest highway in the world. And cities may have dozens of subway lines. Throwing money after cars, when the streets are already clogged with cars, is just a waste of money, self-driving or not. So European cities are more likely to invest in things like the Grand Paris express, a completely new subway system (which, notably, is electrified and self-driving). By comparison, self-driving cars are just a technology that's seen as a way to increase the number of cars on the road, increase congestion, increase wear and tear on the roads, all for the "benefit" of saving the salary of the drivers, which is an important source of low-wage employment, and it's just not compelling at all.

Having ridden Waymo a lot, and also driven through European cities, I actually think they could navigate through European cities just fine, and also safer than human drivers. It's not a technology limitation IMO. It's just...why. At best, you save the cost of a driver, but even then, you simply can't improve overall transport efficiency vs. taxis/Ubers, which they already have.

Not objectively worse; just different tradeoffs.

LFP can be routinely charged to 100%, unlike NMC which is recommended to charge to 80% most of the time. In fact, LFP thrives when trickle charged all the way to 100.% and battery manufacturers recommend charging to 100% to maintain battery health. LFP also have a very flat discharge voltage curve, so in cars where that matters, LFP can be discharged deeper than similar NMC batteries before the voltage drops too far. Between the 100% charge and equivalent or better discharge, actual capacity-per-weight of LFP in a car is very competitive with NMC, plus cost is lower and fire risk is lower. Which is why Tesla has been using LFP in Model 3 and Model Y for a long time now.

Furthermore, a similar pattern is in the process of happening with tariffs. The month before the first wave of tariffs hit had the largest amount of foreign imports in history, because everyone pulled in their orders. Then the month after tariffs hit, imports dropped like a rock, as expected, because everyone had high inventory and prices were higher. What we haven't seen yet is 1) what the long term tariffs will actually be, because unlike EVs, where everyone assumes the natural subsidy rate is zero, the natural tariff rate is also zero but everyone expects some amount of tariffs now that pandora's box has been opened and 2) What the final impact to consumer prices will be once companies burn through all that pre-tariff inventory they bought.

Carmakers especially Hyundai have already dropped prices after the credit expired, proving they were jacking prices somewhat to capture the tariff...perfectly predictably. When the 7500 credit went into effect, Ford increased the price of the lightning by exactly 7500...they didn't even use a slightly different number to conceal it; they used exactly 7500 price hike. The inverse is happening after the credit expired, at least among makers who are motivated to sell cars...several Hyundai models have dropped by $5000 already.

The best use-case I've found for 4k is playing Mario Kart in split screen mode. When playing with 4 players, each quadrant of the screen is full HD, so you can all sit close to a big panel and it's like you each have your own 4 HD panels. Doing the same thing on an HD panel results in each quadrant being SD or below resolution, which is definitely noticeable.

That may be so, but if you look at the data for the US, practically all the decrease in childbirth has come from the reduction in teenage pregnancy. You can basically say we won the war against teen pregnancy, but oops, it turns out society actually needs those babies, and they aren't being offset by any increase in childbearing at later ages.

Many automakers already dropped their prices after the credit. Hyundai especially, has dropped their prices across their product line, by up to $5000, proving they were keeping prices high to soak up the credit (I don't blame them; that's what subsidies do).

I hope I'm not the only one who remembers Ford increasing the price of the lightning by exactly $7500 after the tax credit went into effect. They didn't even try to hide it by using some other slightly different number.

EVs will be just fine without subsidies; what they need is not outright dis-incentives in the form of tariffs and arresting factory workers.

There are already dutch companies that make electric tractors, and yes, part of the reason is that famers already have solar systems and want to use their solar to run their equipment instead of buying diesel. Diesel is a huge cost for farmers, even here in the US.

The interesting thing is they went with 48V, so farmers can work on them without having to use any high-voltage techniques, and the batteries are swappable because you don't want to have a tractor sitting to charge. The batteries hang on the front and sides where they usually hang huge iron weights anyway, and they just lift them off with a forklift to change them out.

The Aztek was actually ahead of its time. Here 25 years later, the market is flooded with "compact SUVs" essentially the same as the Aztek, and just as ugly.

A possible difference is that the drift toward SUV dominance is a result of malignant regulation that unfairly penalized small cars, regular cars, big cars, and basically everything but SUVs. So I think people still hate compact SUVs just as much as they did when the Aztek was launched, it's just that now, there are no viable alternatives left like there were then.

I also think people don't like or care about thin phones, but they don't have a choice anymore. They also liked their headphone jacks, removable batteries, and removable media just fine, but they don't have a choice anymore.