Ok now I WANT one!
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But the future is disposable! Planned obsolescence drives the economy! Think of it, the entire auto industry would become unemployed, along with the effects on the financial industry if no one needed car loans, and all the repo men would have to find a real job.
No, we need cars that wear out within a year and are easier to replace than repair. And our economy is driven by consumers, so we need to make them consume more instead of less. Maybe we do make them electric (so people will think theyāll be cheaper than gas) but have some expensive electrical component that theyāll have to replace every weekā¦ Some black box that canāt be repaired because itās DRMād.
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Iām surprised that this āgreenā (more like just plain old amazing technology for generating electricity) has not been developed faster or further.
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Thats depressing, it actually talks about the same thing that the BoingBoing linked vox article on the death of streetcars discussed. Thank God Portland has good public transport. First public transit, pedestrian, and bike only bridge in the entire fucking country beatches!!!
[It is used by:] MAX Orange Line light rail passenger trainsā¦ city buses and the Portland Streetcar, as well as bicycles, pedestrians, and emergency vehicles. Private cars and trucks are not permitted on the bridge. It is the first major bridge in the U.S. that was designed to allow access to transit vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians but not cars.
Tilikum Crossing - Wikipedia
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At the moment, natural gas is the same as electric given that you need a private garage to charge/fill the thing.
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Doesnāt solve my issue, which is that I hate driving. Where are our train-centric cities?
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Electricity storage has always been the issue, and now itās all but solved. We just need everyone to go solar and get a Tesla Powerwall or something, and all this bullshit can be history.
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Thatād be niceā¦ so would adequate driver education that includes some concept of safe and efficient traffic flow. I guess self-driving cars will mean weāll never reach that stage.
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The thing that has been bugging me lately in regards to transportation is the inability to get across atlantic and pacific oceans by any means other than Airplane. The tickets are expensive, the planes burn tons of fuel, and itās not the most pleasant of experiences when you have the cheapest ticket on the plane.
So instead of using an expensive plane travel why canāt we just setup a hyperloop, say for example, between the east coast of the U.S. and the UK (Preferably the UK station would be connected to the High Speed 1 train line somehow, allowing easy access to the Chunnel). Run it on negative pressure or whatever they plan on setting up the end hyperloop product with and tada! Cheaper, faster, and definitely more environmental. Now where is Bill Gates when you need him? Paging @Billgates!
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Thermoelectric devices are useful, but are also woefully inefficient when operating within temperatures that consumers are comfortable with. The single biggest factor to how well they work is how drastic the difference in temperature is across the device. When weāre talking low-grade waste heat, itās usually just too close to environmental temperatures to be worth using to drive thermoelectric systems.
On the other hand, they work beautifully for spacecraft, since space is about 3K, while a hot lump of plutonium can be 500K plus, and also emits almost exclusively charged particles which are very easy to shield against.
Thereās RTGs still running lighthouses and unmanned radiobeacons from the Soviet era. Although theyāre probably mostly run down by today. If they have any that run on the longer lived isotopes like Sr90, they might still be near their normal operating temps. Iāve heard stories of hunters out in the wilderness surviving due to the constant heat of the installations during blizzards where itād be nigh impossible to get a fire started.
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I donāt know, based on the way my Macbook pro sets fire to any paper products I set underneath it I think it could work quite well with modern day computing technology.
ETA - This seems a appropriate point to reference back to this
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Itās a production vehicle. You can buy one if you got the scratch.
http://www.21stcenturymotoring.com/FAQs.html
Also, more bananacycle porn:
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hahah 90 thousand bucks!!! Iāll just watch the bananaporn.
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Iām sure they could build 'em cheaper if they had more sales volume. They are basically making them one at a time by hand in Switzerland like Santaās Elves. Like @Kimmo says, there is āno demandā for a vehicle that is sensible, efficient, safe, and also awesome. Because reasons?
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I know itās off topic and petty of me to go off on the video title, but I spent a few years working in a book store in MA where I repeatedly had to move books out of the Nevada travel section and back into California. No trace of the SIerra Nevada in that footage, itās I15 from LA to Vegas.
(Sorry, personal pet peeve that will not die.)
BANANAMOBILE CLASSIC from twenty years ago
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