Lawrence, you really seem to be pining for a Stella Lux. I've lost count of how many times you've brought it up. Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you.
It's clearly a technical tour de force, and I'd love to see it go into to production. However, I doubt very much that you or I will ever be able to buy one, or anything similar. Vehicle buyers' habits have been carefully sculpted over the last century, especially the last 40 years, and those habits are the exact antithsis of a funky-looking car with racing seat belts and a solar skin. It would take a gargantuan advertising and PR blitz to develop any significant demand. Then the vehicle itself, being so different from the mainstream, would need years or maybe decades of subsidies from governments and the vehicle maker itself before it could amortize its design costs and achieve economy of scale. That's not going to happen in our libertarian capitalist system. Governments are too intent on cutting rich folks' taxes to spend that way, and a vehicle maker who carried a money-loser for that long would face a stockholder revolt. Someone with a Bezos- or Gates-size fortune might be able to do it, but Elon Musk notwithstanding, people like that don't usually have enough interest in EVs to put a big part of their fortune into one. I just don't see a business case for a vehicle like the Stella Lux. I wish I did. But the landscape is already littered with hundreds of brilliant EV ideas that should have made production and couldn't get there, from the Aptera to the Solectria Sunrise. I think that if you want a Stella Lux or something similar, you're going to have to build it yourself from scratch. Or maybe you could hire a couple members of the Stella team to build you one, if you have something close to Elon Musk's fortune. :-\ Or just do the sensible thing, and put the bloody PV on your house's roof. That way it gets more sun more of the time, and you don't have to haul it around on the car when it's not producing any significant energy. David Roden, EVDL moderator & general lackey To reach me, don't reply to this message; I won't get it. Use my offlist address here : http://evdl.org/help/index.html#supt = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and [how] hard it is to undo that work again! -- Mark Twain = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub ARCHIVE: http://www.evdl.org/archive/index.html INFO: http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
