They wonâ(TM)t. Efficiency usually means HIGHER reliability and better consistent power (due to thermal constraints).

The trade off is they can get by without this chip. But itâ(TM)s a worse trade-off in every other way. And 5% increased fuel usage isnâ(TM)t insignificant when scaled up to millions of vehicles. It means thousands of dollars more fuel costs over the life of the vehicle (if it has 20mpg and 250,000 mile lifetime and $3-$3.50/gallon average fuel costs, thatâ(TM)s $2000 greater total cost of ownership). Also, that extra oil is marginally coming from foreign sources.

Tesla sell sold over 90,000 cars in one quarter of this year. So you're off by a factor of 4. Additionally, that's basically just with one factory in California fully up to speed. There are 3 *additional* factories being built at this moment, and Tesla sells higher end vehicles on average than Toyota plus is more vertically integrated (capturing more of the value chain). Tesla is growing in capacity at a very fast rate compared to any of their competitors. And Toyota and Honda are both still deeply invested in hydrogen fuel cell tech, which is a massive dead-end. They're not that concerning for Tesla.

Which isn't to say Tesla is valued properly. They're about 4 times as much as makes sense to me. But I suppose that's what growth in an otherwise-stagnating market will get you: people don't have anywhere better to put their money, I guess.

Of course long-haul trucks can be electric. It makes more economic sense than commuter, cars, actually. Trains can be electric (battery electric makes it easier even than trucking). Domestic flights can be electrified, and long-haul flights can eventually be as well (liquid hydrogen being the easiest way to do it in the near-term, though). Shipping can be electrified, too, and that'd usually be cheaper than using synthesized fuels. Synthesized fuel is a nice drop-in solution for anything that doesn't conveniently electrify (like rockets), but the round-trip efficiency is terrible and there are still lots of negatives from burning stuff.

Nuclear power is great, and so are renewables (including solar, which has become insanely cheap at the utility scale). Onshore wind, as you say, has been cheap for years, now, and with very large wind turbines, off-shore is also becoming really cheap. All these things should be done.

The idea that the more fragile object on the road should yield is a fantastic argument for outlawing large SUVs and trucks unless the driver can prove a need, pays an extra fee, and gets a class B license. Otherwise itâ(TM)s just an arms race.

It is just for aborts, so very rare. It's like being protected by an airbag.

It's true that suborbital is an order of magnitude away from orbital velocity, and two orders of magnitude away in terms of energy, but I will say the method that Blue Origin is using to achieve suborbital flight above the Karman line is more extensible to orbital spaceflight than either Virgin Galactic (using hybrid rockets and feather reentry) or XCOR (although XCOR, may they RIP, did have a hydrogen variant concept that would've been extensible).

The New Shepard booster is using pump-fed hydrolox engines, and vertical takeoff/landing is very scalable to large sizes. Their orbital rocket has a new factory in Florida that is basically finished (currently being furnished inside) with a launch pad undergoing construction, and the engines for it are currently undergoing extensive testing. So you should take their orbital aspirations seriously, although there is a long ways to go. The upper stage of New Glenn uses couple vacuum-optimized engines based on this sea-level-optimized one used for New Shepard, so there is some direct heritage.

New Shepard is to New Glenn (the orbital rocket) as Falcon 1 is to Falcon 9 or maybe Falcon Heavy.

Nothing. A well-made solar panel will last 40 years (there are some 40 year old solar panels still operating fine) and will probably last over 70 years: https://us.sunpower.com/sites/...

"he real challenge is how to build a very long vacuum tube that would be safe and cost-efficient to operate"

That's what the Boring Company is trying to do. Starting with just long tubes and adding the vacuum parts later.

Naysayers who think they have all the answers but really are just ignorant are poison to the Internet. And society in general. Nothing is going to progress because of misguided cynicism on the Internet. Get out and do something.

Wait, did you even read the article? Or even the headline??? We used the technology to make cars BOTH more efficient AND with greater horsepower.

I remember downloading web pages for display for later on my Windows CE Palm-sized PC Cassiopeia e-105 in 1999.

Everything old is new again.

India has nuclear power, too. And electric cars (especially with large batteries) are good at smoothing over variable renewables since drivers can charge when power is cheapest (just like people fill up their cars where gas is cheapest).

And even coal (if burned far from the city and with good scrubbers) beats an asthma-inducing and smog-filled city. A coal power plant also can be run very efficiently. If you include the energy cost needed to refine gasoline, then a good, supercritical steam, multi-stage coal power plant charging an electric car may even have fewer CO2 emissions than a conventional gasoline powered vehicle.

But India is also close to the equator, which means more sunshine and less seasonal variation in sunlight (northern Germany and the UK are actually terrible for solar for this reason).

Except like a Prius (but unlike, say, a Leaf), a large battery EV like a Tesla (or a GM Bolt) doesn't need to hit the ends of its capacity. In fact, a Tesla experiences very few cycles (relatively speaking) since the battery is so large. You seem to think that a small battery electric car will last longer than a large battery electric car, but the reality is the opposite (although both the Volt and Prius are special cases as they are plug-in hybrids).

Electric car batteries are designed to last for the entire life of the vehicle, like over 200,000 miles. At some point, I suppose you'd need to replace a car engine, too. Same deal. Car engine is recycled. Electric car battery is recycled.

India will get it done because the materials in car batteries are worth recycling. It's the same reason we don't put car engines in a landfill but instead we scrap them.

"Greeter" is just a euphemism for "person who watches the door to make sure people don't shoplift stuff."

He doesn't claim to already have new tunneling tech. He's just done some back of the envelope, first-principles calculations to show it should be possible in theory to go much faster. Typical Musk.

So does he have a faster TBM right now? Definitely not. It'll be interesting to see if he develops one, though. I suspect just reducing the man-power and increasing the up-time would give a significant boost to performance-to-cost, though. Europeans usually require a lot fewer workers for a similar TBM project than Americans do. Don't know why that is. (Or you can also think of it the other way around: for a given number of workers, you can get a lot more tunneling done, thus making tunneling cheaper and more appealing, thus increasing the number of tunneling projects you can afford to do.)

Much more money in building a mega telecommunications satellite constellation in low Earth orbit, which SpaceX has been working on for years now. You have 7 billion potential customers. The market for platinum group metals (even if you were able to get as much as you wanted) is globally much smaller and lower value than telecommunications.