[ldjessee00]

Redpoint5,

I suppose Japan and Europe in general are irrelevant as well?

I have an electric car that does great as a commuter, and is actually a better than another small car I bought in the past to fill the same role. Batteries are terrible at what metric compared to what?

Current batteries do not store the same energy as fossil fuels, but with electric drive trains being so much more efficient, we actually do not need them to be. And, the amount of money spent just to get fuel out of the ground and refine it into a usable form can be eliminated, as well as all the pollution (oil spills alone, without even talking about the burn off or other pollution caused by fossil fuels).

Sales of ICE cars are dropping and EVs sales are increasing. I have not found anything that says EVs were 1% of car sales in the US for 2019. Where did you get this information? I have not even found a solid number for the number of cars sold in the US for 2019, let alone the percentage of those sales that were EV.

Hahaha, the comment about technology stagnating, now I am not sure if you are just trolling me or not...

If you think the only difference between one model of phone and the next is measured by the outside dimensions and that headphone jack was removed, either you are willfully ignorant or here to troll. Which is it?

In case you are ignorant, if you look at the battery life, computing power, and expansive amount of tasks that you can do with a phone compared to 10 years or 20 years ago, you might understand better. The fact that an iPhone would qualify as a super computer in the early 90s and has more graphics processing than special effects computers used for major motion pictures in the late 90s... and does all of that at a microscopic fraction of the power used by computers in the 90s... If that does not impress you, or atleast have you reconsider your stagnant technology, nothing will.

And just because a company does not implement technology, does not mean it is not out there and is not implemented by someone else. There is a whole other conversation about patents, time limits, and monopolies that could be had as to why it seems some market segments takes longer to innovate than others...

The US train system fell to the way side due to a combination of several things. The US being flooded by surplus trucks, mechanics, and drivers after WW2. Also, greedy train companies not wanting to spend the money on improving their infrastructure. Europe in rebuilding from WW2 got to put in new, more consolidated tracks, and when the technology came about for high speed trains, they invested (companies, countries, people) in getting those implemented.

Is inefficiency stupid? I usually think so. I understand how it came to be in the US. Cheap gas, lots of trucks and drivers, then throw in the national highway system... you have an infrastructure that is newer than trains, can get things there faster, and because the government is keeping up the roads, the trucking companies do not have to maintain the infrastructure, so with all of those costs deferred, it became cheaper to ship things fast with trucks...

Technologies not implemented in the US for trains? You want a list or do you actually not know that almost no country continues to use wooden ties for the tracks? That even older rails systems can be operated with faster trains by improving the suspension on those trains. I road in such a 'transitional' train in Sweden. It was not considered a high speed train there, as it never got up to a 100 mph, but for most of my trip from Malmo to Stockholm it was going 72 mph on unimproved tracks.

To allow for true high speed trains, the rail system has to be upgraded. Like no road/track crossings, because 100s of tons going over 100 mph and it hits a car or truck stuck on the tracks will be very bad. Curves have to be more open.. These kind of improvements to the infrastructure as well as train traffic control and trains in general.

Japan and China are building maglev trains. Magnetic Levitation. But we do not even have high speed trains here, not even long distance electric trains. The US is behind. We could implement these things, but we have not. And yes, it would cost, but would it cost as much as maintaining the national highway system? Would it cost as much as the F-22 or F-35 programs? I bring them up, as they are trillion dollar projects that we, as a nation, paid for. If the US wanted to start a program to upgrade its rail infrastructure to even just highspeed rail standards, we could do so. It might actually help the economy... but we would still be behind and not the leaders.. which right now seem to be Japan and China's maglev trains.

I do not claim to have the perfect solution, but I can look around the world, being lucky enough to have been outside the US, and see how others are doing some things better than the US. I want my native country to be better at things. When I was in Korea, the train system was better than it was where I came from... at the time atleast. It is only since then did I come to find out that Indiana actually had several commuter train systems that brought people 30 to 50 miles from the surrounding areas to Indianapolis everyday... But that was before WW2.

I used to think plugin hybrid would be good enough, but once it was pointed out that vehicles are lugging around two different systems to do the same thing, hampering both, I realized they were just not good enough. Pure EVs is the way to go. I personally think a combination of super capacitors and batteries would solve many issues and maybe allow EVs to fill even more niches currently thought of as only being able to be served by ICE engines.

Tesla, and others, have proven they can make EVs with decent range (over 200 miles).
I have an EV that during the summer is lucky to have 100 miles of real world range, and yet it works great for what we wanted it for, which is what 80% of people in the US need (a car that lets them commute to and from work, under 50 miles a day).

The tax incentive helped convince me to buy my first EV, but now that I have one I do not care anymore, I want to replace my other car with an EV, with or without tax incentive. Owning an EV is such a better experience than a gas car.

But, I also understand my prospective is not everyone else's...