I agree Nissan and Renault are both fighting a losing battle to hold back the tide of change. After market batteries for cellphones are often better than the genuine product, and the same will very quickly be true for electric car batteries. Small independant shops will pop up with clever young people happy to sell you a new battery pack and pehaps a firmware hack.

This leaves dealerships in a bad spot. The are currently enshrined in law in the USA, and watching many or most go the way of the dodo will be traumatic for lobbiests.

As for stealerships, I agree. The Mazda dealership I worked at had almost all the work done by under-trained apprentices with insufficient supervision. I once watched a new car with steering alinment issues come back four times because the tyre-fitter was crap and the stealership got paid again every time. Much of the profits of the shop came from getting nearly an hour of unpaid overtime from every apprentice every day. For a dozen apprentices, this adds up fast.

The sooner I can order my car on line and have it arrive in the post, the happier I will be. Electric cars are wonderfully low maintainence, with a converted Prius being my favourite. I have seen the future, and it runs on batteries.

Recently I looked at buying a Nissan Leaf, which is a pretty sweet ride for an electric car. I discovered a few things.

1) The Leaf just about never needs service. Change the battery pack every two or four years, and that is it. Regular inspections of tyres and suspension components as usual, but these are very relable and can be done by any mechanic.

2) Nissan has some nagware shit that makes you take your leaf back to Nissan to be reassured. For this the dealership must buy an expensive piece of specalized kit from Nissan and will then charge you, the car owner, for the workship equivilent of clicking the "Okay" button.

Reading between the lines: Dealerships don't actually make any money by selling cars (the Mazda dealership I worked at for six months sure didn't). Just about all their profitability comes from warentee work (charged back to the manufacturer, thus getting a bigger slice of the sales profits), or regular scheduled services (which are mostly oil changes done by apprentices). Electric cars have far fewer parts which are far more reliable. Switching to electric cars will neatly drive a stake through the heart of the business model of auto dealerships. I assume this Renault bullshit is for exactly the same reasons as the Nissian Leaf bullshit.

You might enjoy this radio program broadcast on Australian Radio National in 2009 when the GFC was more topical.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2009/2526727.htm

The program examines the change in cluture from management as an apprenticeship to the advent of the MBA.

Why would tracking be slow? Parallax being what it is? As long as the mirror is tracking targets within the same quadrant of the sky, it should be able to switch fast enough.

As for modulation, I think you are making unstated assumptions about reflectivity and switching speeds. How are you imagining the focus to be shifted and reflectivity varied? Mylar held by variable stays, held taught by photion pressure, for example? Easy, point a big dish at a little dish for a two reflector system, and your traverse speeds (governed by mass) and modulation speed (also, to some extent governed by mass, depending on the method) are dramatically reduced, as now you only must move the smaller reflector.

I know very well about solar concentration with mirrors. A reflector array in the L1 would have the potential to extend the day cycle of a solar collection site.

http://www.sbp.de/en/html/solar/dish-stirling.html

It all depends on the size of the reflector, or better, array of reflectors.

It is probably more effective (given rotation times etc of a very large sail) to aim the array at an orbit and impart sunlight to objects as they approach in that vector. It may well be practical to rapidly turn on and off the reflectivity of the sail with shutters or LCD cells or the like, avoiding striking unintended targets.

The ability to de-orbit any satellites equipped with a solar sail alone might make this worthwhile. Also, point it at a terrestrial solar farm for double the energy production!

Outside the reams of the achievable right now, to be sure, but what are we without our dreams?

I wonder at the effectiveness of putting a very large focusable solar reflector in a high orbit, perhaps at LaGrange point 1. Such a solar sail could be used to give thrust to satellites equipped with a sail, or even large bits of space junk. Obviously it wouldn't give much Delta V to junk, but it might give some, and it would be essentially free. Junk in high orbits takes hundreds or thousands of years to de-orbit, and any means of reducing the velocity of said junk would drastically reduce that time. Additionally, with a variable focus the mirror might be pointed at solar cells of existing satellites, which could improve the thrust gained from Ion Drives, assuming enough reaction mass remains to take advantage of the extra watts.

Idle musings. Feel free to shoot me down.

Which suits me, as I'm monocular! I don't even have to take off my dashing eye patch!