On Aug 28, 2014, at 10:09 AM, Michael Ross via EV <ev@lists.evdl.org> wrote:
> There is a certain material inefficiency to make the car larger for > something it only has to do occasionally. At the other end of the process, there's another type of efficiency gain for reducing the number of designs. If a manufacturer is still going to have to make that 400-mile range vehicle for you to lease for trips, they're stuck either making a small number of very expensive such vehicles that'll cost an arm and a leg even to lease or coming up with a design that works reasonably well for both 40- and 400-mile ranges. TANSTAAFL. I think Tesla's approach is probably perfect. Those first adopters who didn't care at all about price subsidized the price of today's luxury sedan buyers for whom the car is plenty "good enough" and who can afford the premium. They, in turn, are subsidizing a much larger market of non-luxury premium sedans that will again subsidize mass-market sedans. And all along the way, each car has at least "good enough" range for the target audience. There're also some striking parallels with digital cameras at play. A digital camera costs much, much, much more than a film camera, but you buy with it an unlimited lifetime supply of film. In the earliest days when a digital camera couldn't store much more than the equivalent of a roll or three of film, that didn't mean all that much. Today, however, it's not at all uncommon to be able to store thousands of frames on a single card, and to have a few such cards in the camera bag that can be swapped out even faster and easier than a roll of film. There are and always will be aesthetic reasons why some will prefer film and create great art with it, but by any objective technical measure film has become as primitive and outdated a technology for image capture as charcoal on papyrus. Right now, today's EVs are mostly at that point where digital cameras were when the onboard memory could only hold a few dozen photos and you had to plug the camera into your tower's SCSI port to download the pictures. The first floppy-based cameras are just coming onto the market and giving a real hint of the potential advantages... ...but we've got a ways to go before, as with today's cameras, nobody minds the premium price for the camera body because you'll never again have to pay somebody at the photo lab before you can see your pictures. What's especially exciting is that there actually are a few people driving cars like that today, so we know it can be done. It's just a matter of time before it becomes affordable and commonplace...assuming our petroleum-powered economy can keep going another decade or three so we can bootstrap ourselves to a prosperous post-petroleum one.... Cheers, b& -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 801 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20140828/b4828018/attachment.pgp> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
