Electric Vehicles Quotes

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At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potential in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper. At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high-precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random mutations; upside-down images are formed against two screens made up of millions of light-sensitive cells, which translate light into electrical pulses that go up the optic nerves, cross the chiasm, down the optic tracts, and into the visual cortex, where the pulses are reassembled into letters, punctuation marks, words, sentences, vehicles, tenors, thoughts. The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional.
Ken Liu (The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories)
In a era of autonomously driven electric cars and vehicles capable of taking us to Mars, our education system is the equivalent of a horse and carriage.
Jim Kwik (Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life)
A vehicle's power is measured in horses. But why is that? Why not ducks? The engines of today's electric cars are closer to the output of ducks than horses.
Jarod Kintz (Ducks are the stars of the karaoke bird world (A BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm Production))
Tesla already has its sights set on producing a large-volume electric vehicle in three years or so.
Anonymous
We are caught up Mr. Perry on a great wave whether we will or no, a great wave of expansion and progress. A great deal is going to happen in the next few years. All these mechanical inventions—telephones, electricity, steel bridges, horseless vehicles—they are all leading somewhere. It’s up to us to be on the inside, in the fore-front of progress. . . .
John Dos Passos (Manhattan Transfer: A Novel)
James climbed into the transport vehicle, and the moment Felicity’s eyes met his was practically charged with electricity, the attraction was so strong. Her smile was just the balm he needed. “Here I am, Captain, alive and well, never better. I think I even lost a few pounds in my enforced confinement!” “Felicity, good to see you. You look great as always. But I have to ask, do you usually resort to such extreme measures when you want to stand up a partner for a dinner date?” He saw the tease in her eyes as she smiled at him. “Only in exceptional circumstances—or when someone leaves me no option.
Patrick G. Cox (First into the Fray (Harry Heron #1.5))
On December 17, 1903, on a windy North Carolina beach for just shy of one hundred seconds, the Wright brothers demonstrated that a heavier-than-air, self-propelled vehicle could fly. The moment was electric and its importance widely understood. Almost immediately, there was an explosion of interest in this newfound technology of manned flight, and a gaggle of innovators began to build upon it.
Lawrence Lessig (Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity)
4. Effective innovations start small. They are not grandiose. They try to do one specific thing. It may be to enable a moving vehicle to draw electric power while it runs along rails – the innovation that made possible the electric streetcar. Or it may be as elementary as putting the same number of matches into a matchbox (it used to be fifty), which made possible the automatic filling of matchboxes and gave the Swedish originators of the idea a world monopoly on matches for almost half a century. Grandiose ideas, plans that aim at ‘revolutionizing an industry’, are unlikely to work.
Peter F. Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Routledge Classics))
The “triad”—the convergence of electric vehicles, ride hailing, and self-driving cars—is far from sure. It will take electrics a long time to catch up with gasoline-powered cars as a share of the fleet. People may continue to want to own cars and drive themselves. Autonomous vehicles at scale are far from proved.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
Thank you," he said. "Welcome. Welcome especially to Mr. Coyle Mathis and the other men and women of Forster Hollow who are going to be employed at this rather strikingly energy-inefficient plant. It's a long way from Forster Hollow, isn't it?" "So, yes, welcome," he said. "Welcome to the middle class! That's what I want to say. Although, quickly, before I go any further, I also want to say to Mr. Mathis here in the front row: I know you don't like me. And I don't like you. But, you know, back when you were refusing to have anything to do with us, I respected that. I didn't like it, but I had respect for your position. For your independence. You see, because I actually came from a place a little bit like Forster Hollow myself, before I joined the middle class. And, now you're middle-class, too, and I want to welcome you all, because it's a wonderful thing, our American middle class. It's the mainstay of economies all around the globe!" "And now that you've got these jobs at this body-armor plant," he continued, "You're going to be able to participate in those economies. You, too, can help denude every last scrap of native habitat in Asia, Africa, and South America! You, too, can buy six-foot-wide plasma TV screens that consume unbelievable amounts of energy, even when they're not turned on! But that's OK, because that's why we threw you out of your homes in the first places, so we could strip-mine your ancestral hills and feed the coal-fired generators that are the number-one cause of global warming and other excellent things like acid rain. It's a perfect world, isn't it? It's a perfect system, because as long as you've got your six-foot-wide plasma TV, and the electricity to run it, you don't have to think about any of the ugly consequences. You can watch Survivor: Indonesia till there's no more Indonesia!" "Just quickly, here," he continued, "because I want to keep my remarks brief. Just a few more remarks about this perfect world. I want to mention those big new eight-miles-per-gallon vehicles you're going to be able to buy and drive as much as you want, now that you've joined me as a member of the middle class. The reason this country needs so much body armor is that certain people in certain parts of the world don't want us stealing all their oil to run your vehicles. And so the more you drive your vehicles, the more secure your jobs at this body-armor plant are going to be! Isn't that perfect?" "Just a couple more things!" Walter cried, wresting the mike from its holder and dancing away with it. "I want to welcome you all to working for one of the most corrupt and savage corporations in the world! Do you hear me? LBI doesn't give a shit about your sons and daughters bleeding in Iraq, as long as they get their thousand-percent profit! I know this for a fact! I have the facts to prove it! That's part of the perfect middle-class world you're joining! Now that you're working for LBI, you can finally make enough money to keep your kids from joining the Army and dying in LBI's broken-down trucks and shoddy body armor!" The mike had gone dead, and Walter skittered backwards, away from the mob that was forming. "And MEANWHILE," he shouted, "WE ARE ADDING THIRTEEN MILLION HUMAN BEINGS TO THE POPULATION EVERY MONTH! THIRTEEN MILLION MORE PEOPLE TO KILL EACH OTHER IN COMPETITION OVER FINITE RESOURCES! AND WIPE OUT EVERY OTHER LIVING THING ALONG THE WAY! IT IS A PERFECT FUCKING WORLD AS LONG AS YOU DON'T COUNT EVERY OTHER SPECIES IN IT! WE ARE A CANCER ON THE PLANT! A CANCER ON THE PLANET!
Jonathan Franzen (Freedom)
The age of centralized, command-and-control, extraction-resource-based energy sources (oil, gas, coal and nuclear) will not end because we run out of petroleum, natural gas, coal, or uranium. It will end because these energy sources, the business models they employ, and the products that sustain them will be disrupted by superior technologies, product architectures, and business models. Compelling new technologies such as solar, wind, electric vehicles, and autonomous (self-driving) cars will disrupt and sweep away the energy industry as we know it.
Tony Seba (Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation: How Silicon Valley Will Make Oil, Nuclear, Natural Gas, Coal, Electric Utilities and Conventional Cars Obsolete by 2030)
The new transportation system is multi-modal, autonomous and electric. People utilize a variety of vehicles including cars, bicycles, passenger drones, hoverboards, airplanes, boats, rockets and more. And with ease, efficiency and comfort. At Mayflower-Plymouth, we’re making that real.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
His humor has many levels. The lowest is his puerile affection for poop emojis, fart sounds programmed into the Tesla, and other discharges of bathroom humor. Say the voice command “Open Butthole” to the console in a Tesla, and it opens the electric charging port at the rear of the vehicle.
Walter Isaacson (Elon Musk)
A hobo walks by in a suit made of today's newspaper. A guy chases him, shouting. "Wait! I haven't read the business section yet!" Oh, the economic news. The most honest, trustworthy, freshest goods you can get—apart from ripe fish. With its gorgeous headlines it shakes out the mirror’s lost reflections: The fountains are lobbying for more water in this pyromaniac city. Buses with electric chairs are running through the streets. Passengers ask for tickets to Heaven, then take their seats. Eyeballs jump out of their smoking skulls. "No littering in the vehicle!" growls the driver, adjusting the hat on his horns.
Zoltan Komor (Flamingos in the Ashtray: 25 Bizarro Short Stories)
A typical 100-kilowatt-hour Tesla lithium-ion battery is built in China on a largely coal-powered grid. Such an energy- and carbonintensive manufacturing process releases 13,500 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly equivalent to the carbon pollution released by a conventional gasoline-powered car traveling 33,000 miles. That 33,000-miles figure assumes the Tesla is only recharged by 100 percent greentech-generated electricity. More realistically? The American grid is powered by 40 percent natural gas and 19 percent coal. This more traditional electricity-generation profile extends the “carbon break-even” point of the Tesla out to 55,000 miles. If anything, this overstates how green-friendly an electric vehicle might be.
Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
One late winter afternoon in Oxford Street, amid the noise of vehicles and voices that filled that dusky thoroughfare, as I was borne onward with the crowd past the great electric-lighted shops, a holy Indifference filled my thoughts. Illusion had faded from me; I was not touched by any desire for the goods displayed in those golden windows, nor had I the smallest share in the appetites and fears of all those moving and anxious faces. And as I listened with Asiatic detachment to the London traffic, its sound changed into something ancient and dissonant and sad—into the turbid flow of that stream of Craving which sweeps men onward through the meaningless cycles of Existence, blind and enslaved forever. But I had reached the farther shore, the Harbour of Deliverance, the Holy City; the Great Peace beyond all this turmoil and fret compassed me around. Om Mani padme hum—I murmured the sacred syllables, smiling with the pitying smile of the Enlightened One on his heavenly lotus. Then, in a shop-window, I saw a neatly fitted suit-case. I liked that suit-case; I desired to possess it. Immediately I was enveloped by the mists of Illusion, chained once more to the Wheel of Existence, whirled onward along Oxford Street in that turbid stream of wrong-belief, and lust, and sorrow, and anger.
Logan Pearsall Smith (All trivia: Trivia, More trivia, Afterthoughts, Last words)
When we talk about reducing transportation emissions, the conversation tends to solely be about cars and fuel. Efforts to invent and promote electric and hybrid cars have enjoyed some success, and have proven the latent market demand for lower-emissions personal transportation. These vehicles pollute less, but they still require roads and parking spaces, are susceptible to crashes, and contribute to a dispersed and unhealthy landscape. And they are far from energy-neutral.
Elly Blue (Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save The Economy (Bicycle))
For electric vehicles, the power plant generators alimenting the electrical grind will then produce the GHGs, not the car engine itself. Concerns for GHG emissions would then shift to the source of electric power generation and away from car manufacturers. Currently, there is a wide difference in GHGs emissions in various electrical grids, depending on the source of energy fueling the generators. The low emissions from Swedish and French grids are explained by a combination of nuclear and hydroelectric generation, while the high emissions of the Polish and US grids stem from the use of coal as a fuel in some generators. However, the emissions from the Californian grid are nearly half those of the IS average! The regional differences in emissions in the US grid are also explained by the differences in fuels used for electricity generation: California has a high proportion of hydroelectricity and nuclear plants, while in Michigan generation plants the dominant production fuels are coal and crude oil. Anybody concerned with GHG emissions should certainly switch to electric cars in Sweden, France, and California, but should use gasoline when driving in Michigan or Poland!
Alain Bertaud (Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities (Mit Press))
When I was reporting on Steve Jobs, his partner Steve Wozniak said that the big question to ask was Did he have to be so mean? So rough and cruel? So drama-addicted? When I turned the question back to Woz at the end of my reporting, he said that if he had run Apple, he would have been kinder. He would have treated everyone there like family and not summarily fired people. Then he paused and added, “But if I had run Apple, we may never have made the Macintosh.” And thus the question about Elon Musk: Could he have been more chill and still be the one launching us toward Mars and an electric-vehicle future?
Walter Isaacson (Elon Musk)
Lucid Motors was started under the name Atieva (which stood for “advanced technologies in electric vehicle applications” and was pronounced “ah-tee-va”) in Mountain View in 2008 (or December 31, 2007, to be precise) by Bernard Tse, who was a vice president at Tesla before it launched the Roadster. Hong Kong–born Tse had studied engineering at the University of Illinois, where he met his wife, Grace. In the early 1980s, the couple had started a computer manufacturing company called Wyse, which at its peak in the early 1990s registered sales of more than $480 million a year. Tse joined Tesla’s board of directors in 2003 at the request of his close friend Martin Eberhard, the company’s original CEO, who sought Tse’s expertise in engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain. Tse would eventually step off the board to lead a division called the Tesla Energy Group. The group planned to make electric power trains for other manufacturers, who needed them for their electric car programs. Tse, who didn’t respond to my requests to be interviewed, left Tesla around the time of Eberhard’s departure and decided to start Atieva, his own electric car company. Atieva’s plan was to start by focusing on the power train, with the aim of eventually producing a car. The company pitched itself to investors as a power train supplier and won deals to power some city buses in China, through which it could further develop and improve its technology. Within a few years, the company had raised about $40 million, much of it from the Silicon Valley–based venture capital firm Venrock, and employed thirty people, mostly power train engineers, in the United States, as well as the same number of factory workers in Asia. By 2014, it was ready to start work on a sedan, which it planned to sell in the United States and China. That year, it raised about $200 million from Chinese investors, according to sources close to the company.
Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, then getting from single-celled organisms to multi cellar ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead let’s imagine’s Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59pm. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 pm. Agriculture and large human communities and the building of monolithic structures all occur within the last minute of this calendar year. The Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the invention of basketball, recorded music, the electric dishwasher, and vehicles that travel faster than horses all happen in the last couple of seconds. Put another way: It took Earth about three billion years to go from single-celled life to multicellular life. It took less than seventy million years to go from Tyrannosaurus rex to humans who can read and write and dig up fossils and approximate the timeline of life and worry about its ending. Unless we somehow manage to eliminate all multicellular life from the planet, Earth won’t have to start all over and it will be okay--- at least until the oceans evaporate and the planet gets consumed by the sun. I know the world will survive us – and in some ways it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us is gone. I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back to the moon.
John Green (The Anthropocene Reviewed)
blast could see the lethal, glowing plume from miles away. It was certainly seen on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, just ten miles away, and as the killer winds began to blow, death and destruction soon followed. It was only a matter of time. There would be no escape, and no place to hide. Surely first responders would emerge from surrounding states and communities, eager to help in any way they possibly could. But how would they get into the hot zones? How would they communicate? Where would they take the dead? Where would they take the dying? The power grid went down instantly. All communications went dark. The electromagnetic pulse set off by the warhead’s detonation had fried all electronic circuitry for miles. The electrical systems of most motor vehicles in Seattle—from fire trucks and ambulances to police cars and military Humvees, not to mention most helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft—were immobilized completely or, at the very least, severely damaged. Most cell phones, pagers, PDAs, TVs, and radios were rendered useless as well, as were even the backup power systems in hospitals and other emergency facilities throughout the blast radius. The same was true in Washington, D.C., and New
Joel C. Rosenberg (Dead Heat: A Jon Bennett Series Political and Military Action Thriller (Book 5) (The Last Jihad series))
RENEWABLE ENERGY REVOLUTION: SOLAR + WIND + BATTERIES In addition to AI, we are on the cusp of another important technological revolution—renewable energy. Together, solar photovoltaic, wind power, and lithium-ion battery storage technologies will create the capability of replacing most if not all of our energy infrastructure with renewable clean energy. By 2041, much of the developed world and some developing countries will be primarily powered by solar and wind. The cost of solar energy dropped 82 percent from 2010 to 2020, while the cost of wind energy dropped 46 percent. Solar and onshore wind are now the cheapest sources of electricity. In addition, lithium-ion battery storage cost has dropped 87 percent from 2010 to 2020. It will drop further thanks to the massive production of batteries for electrical vehicles. This rapid drop in the price of battery storage will make it possible to store the solar/wind energy from sunny and windy days for future use. Think tank RethinkX estimates that with a $2 trillion investment through 2030, the cost of energy in the United States will drop to 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, less than one-quarter of today’s cost. By 2041, it should be even lower, as the prices of these three components continue to descend. What happens on days when a given area’s battery energy storage is full—will any generated energy left unused be wasted? RethinkX predicts that these circumstances will create a new class of energy called “super power” at essentially zero cost, usually during the sunniest or most windy days. With intelligent scheduling, this “super power” can be used for non-time-sensitive applications such as charging batteries of idle cars, water desalination and treatment, waste recycling, metal refining, carbon removal, blockchain consensus algorithms, AI drug discovery, and manufacturing activities whose costs are energy-driven. Such a system would not only dramatically decrease energy cost, but also power new applications and inventions that were previously too expensive to pursue. As the cost of energy plummets, the cost of water, materials, manufacturing, computation, and anything that has a major energy component will drop, too. The solar + wind + batteries approach to new energy will also be 100-percent clean energy. Switching to this form of energy can eliminate more than 50 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is by far the largest culprit of climate change.
Kai-Fu Lee (AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future)
The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, then getting from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead let’s imagine’s Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59pm. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 pm. Agriculture and large human communities and the building of monolithic structures all occur within the last minute of this calendar year. The Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the invention of basketball, recorded music, the electric dishwasher, and vehicles that travel faster than horses all happen in the last couple of seconds. Put another way: It took Earth about three billion years to go from single-celled life to multicellular life. It took less than seventy million years to go from Tyrannosaurus rex to humans who can read and write and dig up fossils and approximate the timeline of life and worry about its ending. Unless we somehow manage to eliminate all multicellular life from the planet, Earth won’t have to start all over and it will be okay--- at least until the oceans evaporate and the planet gets consumed by the sun. But we`ll be gone by then, as will our collective and collected memory. I think part of what scares me about the end of humanity is the end of those memories. I believe that if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, it does make a sound. But if no one is around to play Billie Holiday records, those songs won’t make a sound anymore. We’ve caused a lot of suffering, but we’ve also caused much else. I know the world will survive us – and in some ways it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us is gone. I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back to the moon.
John Green (The Anthropocene Reviewed)
Every act of communication is a miracle of translation. At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potentials in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper. At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random mutations; upside-down images are formed against two screens made up of millions of light-sensitive cells, which translate light into electrical pulses that go up optic nerves, cross the chasm, down the optic tracts, and into the visual cortex, where the pulses are reassembled into letters, punctuation marks, words, sentences, vehicles, tenors, thoughts. The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional. Who can say if the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thoughts I had in my mind as I typed them? We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe. And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly.
Ken Liu (The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories)
Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare ‘automeals,’ heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be ‘ordered’ the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning. Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica. [M]en will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button. Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. “[H]ighways … in the more advanced sections of the world will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air a foot or two off the ground. [V]ehicles with ‘Robot-brains’ … can be set for particular destinations … that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver. [W]all screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible. [T]he world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000. All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapse long before that! There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect. Ordinary agriculture will keep up with great difficulty and there will be ‘farms’ turning to the more efficient micro-organisms. Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavors. The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction…. All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary “Fortran". [M]ankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. [T]he most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work! in our a society of enforced leisure.
Isaac Asimov
The hard part, evolutionarily, was getting from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic ones, then getting from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, a timescale I simply cannot get my head around. Instead let’s imagine’s Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1 and today being December 31 at 11:59pm. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 pm. Agriculture and large human communities and the building of monolithic structures all occur within the last minute of this calendar year. The Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the invention of basketball, recorded music, the electric dishwasher, and vehicles that travel faster than horses all happen in the last couple of seconds. Put another way: It took Earth about three billion years to go from single-celled life to multicellular life. It took less than seventy million years to go from Tyrannosaurus rex to humans who can read and write and dig up fossils and approximate the timeline of life and worry about its ending. Unless we somehow manage to eliminate all multicellular life from the planet, Earth won’t have to start all over and it will be okay--- at least until the oceans evaporate and the planet gets consumed by the sun. I know the world will survive us – and in some ways it will be more alive. More birdsong. More creatures roaming around. More plants cracking through our pavement, rewilding the planet we terraformed. I imagine coyotes sleeping in the ruins of the homes we built. I imagine our plastic still washing up on beaches hundreds of years after the last of us is gone. I imagine moths, having no artificial lights toward which to fly, turning back to the moon.
John Green (The Anthropocene Reviewed)
consider the fate of the space shuttle’s external tanks (ETs). Dwarfing the vehicle itself, the ET was the largest and most prominent feature of the space shuttle as it stood on the pad. It remained attached to the shuttle—or perhaps it makes as much sense to say that the shuttle remained attached to it—long after the two strap-on boosters had fallen away. The ET and the shuttle remained connected all the way out of the atmosphere and into space. Only after the system had attained orbital velocity was the tank jettisoned and allowed to fall into the atmosphere, where it was destroyed on reentry. At a modest marginal cost, the ETs could have been kept in orbit indefinitely. The mass of the ET at separation, including residual propellants, was about twice that of the largest possible shuttle payload. Not destroying them would have roughly tripled the total mass launched into orbit by the shuttle. ETs could have been connected to build units that would have humbled today’s International Space Station. The residual oxygen and hydrogen sloshing around in them could have been combined to generate electricity and produce tons of water, a commodity that is vastly expensive and desirable in space. But in spite of hard work and passionate advocacy by space experts who wished to see the tanks put to use, NASA—for reasons both technical and political—sent each of them to fiery destruction in the atmosphere.
Anonymous
Google unveiled its latest driverless car. It plans to build 100 prototypes from scratch, rather than modifying others’ vehicles as it has done in the past. The car has no steering wheel or pedals, only a “stop” and a “go” button. The two-seater electric vehicle can travel up to 25mph (40kph) and the firm hopes to pilot it on Californian roads within two years. However, there remain significant regulatory and legal barriers to its spread.
Anonymous
The good news is that advances in batteries, fuel cells, lightweight cars, and charging networks are making electric vehicles look more promising than ever before. To accelerate the economies of scale necessary for the widespread adoption of electric vehicles, the government currently subsidizes the production and consumption of such cars. But in the absence of major technological improvements, these policies have proved insufficient. If policymakers took the politically unpopular step of taxing people for the carbon their cars emit, electric vehicles would capture a larger market share.
Anonymous
Tesla, which has defied larger carmakers by making money out of its luxury electric vehicles, will allow competitors to use its patents in a gamble that it hopes will bring down industry costs and open up new business opportunities. “We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly evolving technology platform,” Mr Musk said. “Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.
Anonymous
HPM stands for High Power Microwaves. Eureka Aerospace in Pasadena, California developed a device to be used by police to stop a car during high-speed chases. Since the 1970s, every car is built with some sort of microprocessor-controlled system—like the ignition control and fuel pump, the microprocessor controls a lot of vital car systems. When a two second blast from a HPM device is shot at a vehicle, the electric current affects the wires and leads to a power surge which, in turn, burns out those microprocessors and burns up the wiring in the vehicle. Eureka Aerospace is partially funded by the US military. In effect, the same microwave radiation that reheats pizza in a microwave can be used to fry the electrical systems in cars, stopping them dead in their tracks. The document states that HPM was used to incapacitate our van, and can be used against “residents and parties involved.” I assumed “residents” was a misspelling and was supposed to be “residence.” In my research of how HPM works, however, I learned that the word “residents” in the document was not a misspelling; it can and is used against people as well.   U.S. to Use Microwave Weapons On
Lisa Romanek (From My Side of the Bed)
When I was a child, I enjoyed thinking about the future, and especially loved to imagine flying around in one of those cool bubble cars I’d seen on The Jetsons cartoons. Here we are, fifty years later, and we have the same gas- and oil-guzzling motor vehicles, the same basic planes, the same trains, the same utility companies to monitor and charge for our electricity, gas, and water usage. Jimmy Carter talked a lot about new sources of energy back in the 1970s. So did some of the hippies. And yet, decades later, there has been little progression on this front.
Donald Jeffries (Hidden History: An Exposé of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics)
After an electric car, other vehicles just seem like old-tech, gas-burning, pollution-making throwback machines. Which, frankly, they are.
Bill Nye (Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World)
I’m sure there are some readers who will choke on the word subsidy. The gasoline subsidy in the U.S. is not a visible thing that shows up in the budget documents, but it’s there. Keeping a standing Army and Navy at the ready to defend oil fields on the other side of the world is an extraordinary subsidy for gas-powered vehicles. Cheap leases on federal land for drilling and mining are subsidies. Tax breaks for the fossil-fuel industry are subsidies. If we enhanced the grid, subsidized electric vehicles, and let gasoline cost what people are really willing to pay (and what we really pay to get and protect it), we could bring a lot of our military home. And change the world.
Bill Nye (Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World)
There’s the potential that Tesla is setting itself up to capitalize on a situation like the one Apple found itself in when it first introduced the iPhone. Apple’s rivals spent the initial year after the iPhone’s release dismissing the product. Once it became clear Apple had a hit, the competitors had to catch up. Even with the device right in their hands, it took companies like HTC and Samsung years to produce anything comparable. Other once-great companies like Nokia and BlackBerry didn’t withstand the shock. If, and it’s a big if, Tesla’s Model 3 turned into a massive hit—the thing that everyone with enough money wanted because buying something else would just be paying for the past—then the rival automakers would be in a terrible bind. Most of the car companies dabbling in electric vehicles continue to buy bulky, off-the-shelf batteries rather than developing their own technology. No matter how much they wanted to respond to the Model 3, the automakers would need years to come up with a real challenger and even then they might not have a ready supply of batteries for their vehicles. “I think it is going to be a bit like that,” Musk said. “When will the first non-Tesla Gigafactory get built? Probably no sooner than six years from now. The big car companies are so derivative. They want to see it work somewhere else before they will approve the project and move forward. They’re probably more like seven years away. But I hope I’m wrong.” Musk
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
Electric vehicles won’t displace ICE vehicles because they save money (except in the commercial realm), or even because of their very real environmental benefits. They will win out in the end because they’re better. They’re more fun and more convenient to drive, they’re safer, they require less maintenance, they offer more interior space, and their technological superiority enables all kinds of high-tech features that will someday seem as necessary as the AC and the stereo do today.
Charles Morris (Tesla Motors: How Elon Musk and Company Made Electric Cars Cool, and Sparked the Next Tech Revolution)
I purchased one of those electronic things that plugs into the wall that is meant to scare cockroaches by sending a pulse through the apartment wiring, but while it has reduced the numbers, it seems some have evolved to feed off the electrical signal, increasing their size. I am using one as a coffee table in the lounge and two smaller ones as side tables in the bedroom. They would probably be susceptible to carbon monoxide poisoning, though, so I will try running a hose pipe from my car exhaust to the apartment, closing the windows and leaving the vehicle running overnight. It is apparently an odorless gas so should not prove an issue for my son’s Cub group sleepover. Also, I read somewhere once that cockroaches can survive a nuclear attack, so I have been collecting the dead ones and intend to glue several thousand to the walls thereby ensuring my survival should Cyberdyne Systems become self-aware between now and when the lease runs out.
David Thorne (The Internet is a Playground)
I can easily envision a future system in which all of our vehicles are autonomous, just like our electric grid and your refrigerator. You’d take out your smartphone and, Uber-style, summon an autonomous get-you-to-work vehicle. The autonomous vehicle company takes care of the car and sends you a bill for each ride. If those vehicles coordinated with each other the way our mobile phones and their communication cells do, and these robot cars were electric … oooh! We’d have far fewer car wrecks, less pollution, and more free time.
Bill Nye (Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World)
A billion people lack access to electricity; three billion do not have access to clean cooking fuels. Instead they burn wood or charcoal or crop waste or cow dung indoors, impairing their health. This leads to a different perspective. “We’re told we have to move on beyond natural gas, to the next thing,” said Timipre Sylva, Nigeria’s minister of petroleum. “The reality is that Africa is not there yet on renewables. We have to overcome the issue of energy poverty in Africa. Many, many things are not being taken into account with all the talk about renewables and electric vehicles.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
In 2018, there were 867 cars for every thousand people in the United States, 520 in the European Union. Compare that to the 339 in Russia, the 208 in Brazil, the 160 in China—and just 37 in India. In other words, the world’s auto population will grow substantially as incomes rise and the number of people increases from today’s 7.8 billion to 9.5 or 10 billion. In “Rivalry,” IHS Markit’s planning scenario, the world’s auto fleet grows from its current level of just over 1.4 billion to over 2 billion by 2050. Of that 2 billion, about 610 million are electric vehicles—almost a third of the total. The fleet simply does not turn over quickly. Annual new-car sales represent only about 6–7 percent of the total fleet. Most of the fleet is composed of vehicles that have been purchased over the preceding dozen years—in the United States, cars on average remain on the road for 11.8 years. But EVs catch up. By 2050, in this scenario, some 51 percent of total new car sales are EVs.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
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extravaganza of the twentieth century.”7 Proof in productivity: “Amish farming practices today are impressively productive and efficient, even carried on without electricity or motor vehicles. Wendell Berry has compared their operations favorably with industrial farming in several books.”8 Wendell Berry is an author, poet, activist, and farmer for natural traditional ways of farming verses Industrial Agricultural.
Bruce Cyr (AFTER THE WARNING TO 2038)
Storm Sondors has managed to break into the extremely competitive electric transportation industry via his two business: Sondors Electric Bikes and Electric Vehicles. He has a lot of faith in these businesses and so do their many customers. Storm Sondors is personally inspired by Bill Gates and he hopes that he can emulate his success in business.
Storm Sondors
all global automakers in China to make 10 percent of their vehicles electric models by 2022
Rebecca Fannin (Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector is challenging the world by innovating faster, working harder, and going global)
Alien Mind Parasites are attacking children! Alien Parasites attack children through violent video games, music videos with lyrics and images of adult sexuality, drug use, denigration of and violence toward women! Horribly, even children’s cartoons are now filled with the above images. Our children are being bombarded with electrical and chemical contamination in food, beverages, cell phones and microwave transmitters. The Alien Parasites are turning our children into materialistic, violent, Godless puppets. By the time a teenager graduates from high school, they have seen 8,000 real or simulated murders in movies, the Internet, video games and television. This negative imagery is the perfect insertion vehicle for Alien Parasites to enter the child's brain. If you care about your children - protect them from Alien Parasite attacks. Prevent your child from becoming addicted to media that is full of torture, murder, blood, bullets and violence. Beware of anything that generates negative emotions!
Laurence Galian (Alien Parasites: 40 Gnostic Truths to Defeat the Archon Invasion!)
China today is the world’s largest producer of steel (almost 50 percent), aluminum, and computers—as well as the rare earths necessary for electric vehicles and wind turbines. In one three-year period, 2011–13, China consumed more cement than the United States did in the entire twentieth century.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
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History does matter. If the option finally chosen seems superior to the others (for instance, the combustion engine that made the development of electric vehicles difficult or even impossible, or a technological standard that prevails owing to the network externalities created by the first adopters), it is because it has benefited from incomparably greater technical, scientific, economic, and political investments than have the alternatives. As the economists of innovation say, it is not because it is superior that a technology is chosen, but rather because it is chosen that it becomes superior. This
Andrew Feenberg (Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity (Inside Technology))
Somehow her hula hoop had cut into the driver’s side door like the vehicle was made of cheese.
Nathan Reese Maher (Lights Out: Book 2)
Electricity has just two disadvantages: it is difficult to store cheaply, and it can be transmitted easily only on high-voltage lines, above the ground and visible. Automotive lead-acid storage batteries are as cheap as mass production and the cost of materials will allow, yet their cost for storing an hour's worth of energy coming off the power line is over two thousand times as much as the utility company charges for that energy. Multiple recharges can't even come close to bringing that factor down below about three. There is a radically different type of battery, using liquid sodium and liquid sulfur as electrodes and solid sodium aluminate as an electrolyte (yes, I said that the right way round) that is now getting substantial research. Theoretically, it could store as much as seven times the energy per pound of a lead-acid battery. Sodium-sulfur batteries have to be heated above normal outside air temperatures - a disadvantage that will probably make them unusable in vehicles - but they could find use in central power stations to supply peak loads.
Gerard K. O'Neill (2081)
Some five hundred people lived there. Four thousand years ago I should have found their ancestors living in the same place, in the same kind of house. Along in those four millennia the electric engine was developed, radios and power looms and power vehicles and farm machinery and all the rest began to be used, and a Machine Age got going, gradually, without any industrial revolution, without any revolution at all.
Ursula K. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness)
her purse. Evan Nussbaum, Det. 114th Precinct, City of New York. It would be one quick phone call, one quick urgently whispered sentence—the truck driver and Desirio are sitting together in a diner—as if each of them carries an electric charge and their union produces instant ignition, and Nussbaum would be here immediately. But she has stolen 1.3 million dollars. Not spent a dime of it, no, but moved it, transferred it, and therefore stolen it . . . and therefore can hardly risk more contact with a detective of the New York Police Department. A moment later, the big truck driver and Desirio are up out of the booth and heading toward the door. And at the same time, clearly choreographed—obviously summoned by cell phone—a big silver sedan pulls up to the door of the diner and Desirio and the truck driver look both ways before ducking purposefully, wordlessly, into the back of it. Shit. As the sedan pulls away and stops in a moment at a red light, Elaine steps out of the shadows, raises her hand high above her head, waves it around irrationally, frantically. As if to halt the silver sedan purely on the strength of her authority, through the power of her righteousness, for the obviousness of the vehicle’s illicitness. But the frantically waving hand is, in fact, searching for a telltale flank
Jonathan Stone (The Teller)
Education hasn’t changed enough to prepare us for the world we live in today. In a era of autonomously driven electric cars and vehicles capable of taking us to Mars, our education system is the equivalent of a horse and carriage.
Jim Kwik (Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life)
Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible. At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales. Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day. We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.[431]
Charles Morris (Tesla: How Elon Musk and Company Made Electric Cars Cool, and Remade the Automotive and Energy Industries)
More than half of the world’s electricity passes through motors—in vehicles and appliances, in heating and cooling systems, in industrial machinery. Even when the motors themselves are efficient, poor controls can waste up to half the energy they consume. One novel improvement is a lighter type of motor—a “switched reluctance motor”—that allows for variable speeds and can run forward or backward.
John Doerr (Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now)
If the vehicle you took to work or school today was powered by electricity, great—though that electricity was probably generated using a fossil fuel.
Bill Gates (How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need)
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Marketeers have become so savvy at creating emotional associations with their products that they have us believing electric vehicles are "green," though in some ways they pollute differently than gas vehicles and in other ways the same. Electric vehicles are no more “eco-friendly” than low-tar cigarettes are “healthy,” but whether driving the one or smoking the other they both give us reason to puff our chests.
Anthony P. Mauro, Sr
The “triad”—the convergence of electric vehicles, ride hailing, and self-driving cars—is far from sure.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
It has strong environmental appeal, although in some places it is running on coal-generated electricity. This would make those EVs what some call “EEVs”—“emissions elsewhere vehicles.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
Today, more than a hundred Chinese-made EV models are on sale in China. The development of electric vehicles meets three major objectives for Beijing. The first is to reduce the often-choking air pollution (although the gains will be somewhat mitigated by the amount of electricity produced by coal). Secondly, electric cars promote energy security. “China’s oil demands are increasing day by day,” Wan warned. With overall auto ownership growing rapidly, Beijing counts on electric cars to dampen the continuing increase in oil imports.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
For electric vehicles to make an impact on climate change, they must be powered by renewable energy sources, otherwise, the powerplants producing the electricity to power the vehicles would end up dumping more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere than we are able to reduce by replacing regular vehicles with electric ones.
Abhijit Naskar (Mucize Insan: When The World is Family)
If we are to make significant strides in climate action through electric vehicles, then producing them as a class statement for the rich won't do, they must be made affordable enough to be owned by the vast population of working classes.
Abhijit Naskar (Mucize Insan: When The World is Family)
The 2011 Chinese National Patent Development Strategy highlighted seven industries to focus on in the coming decade: biotechnology, high-end equipment manufacturing, broadband infrastructure, high-end semiconductors, energy conservation, alternative energy, and clean-energy vehicles. In 2017, it added artificial intelligence to the list.
Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
Marketeers have become so savvy at creating emotional associations with their products that they have us believing electric vehicles are "green," though in some ways they pollute differently than gas vehicles and in other ways the same. Electric vehicles are no more “green” than low-tar cigarettes are “healthy,” but whether driving the one or smoking the other they both give us reason to puff our chests.
Anthony P. Mauro, Sr
Marketeers have become so savvy at creating emotional associations with their products that they have us believing electric vehicles are "green," though in some ways they pollute differently than gas vehicles and in other ways the same. Electric vehicles are no more “green” than low-tar cigarettes are “healthy,” but whether driving the one or smoking the other we've been given a reason to puff our chests.
Anthony P. Mauro, Sr
The Battle of Stalingrad during World War II was the largest battle in history. With it came equally staggering stories of how people dealt with risk. One came in late 1942, when a German tank unit sat in reserve on grasslands outside the city. When tanks were desperately needed on the front lines, something happened that surprised everyone: Almost none of them worked. Out of 104 tanks in the unit, fewer than 20 were operable. Engineers quickly found the issue. Historian William Craig writes: “During the weeks of inactivity behind the front lines, field mice had nested inside the vehicles and eaten away insulation covering the electrical systems.” The Germans had the most sophisticated equipment in the world. Yet there they were, defeated by mice. You can imagine their disbelief. This almost certainly never crossed their minds. What kind of tank designer thinks about mouse protection? Not a reasonable one. And not one who studied tank history.
Morgan Housel (The Psychology of Money)
And then you ended up in Chechnya, I understand" Sergei continued. "And what, exactly, did you do there?" Jack inquired. "Exactly? We would surround the villages, call out the village elders and give them our ultimatum: if you don't give up your arms, we'll raze your village to the ground. At night, all men, including boys, would go away in to the mountains on the request of the village elders. By the time we rolled in, there were no more weapons or rebels. Only the elderly, women and children. And nobody could leave." "Why not?" "Because we blocked off the main road, that's why," Fedor said as if he was losing patience with Jack. "On approaching any house, I'd fire inside. If anyone jumped out, woman or child, I mowed them down. The guys behind me would torch the bodies with the flamethrowers to get rid of the evidence. We moved through the village, house by house, firing, throwing grenades into the basements, burning. At one train station we hung ten high school kids, and then six more students that were hiding inside a school. On the outskirts we found about a hundred and thirty people, women, children, old men, anyone who didn't run away. We locked them in a grain elevator, chained the door and then torched it. What we left behind were not ruins, just flat ground." "Are you saying that the Russian soldiers killed everyone in some village and nobody has heard of it?" Jack asked him incredulously. It was inconceivable that such a barbaric event could take place in today's world without CNN and BBC dissecting it under a microscope. "Not everyone was killed. Some of the villagers, the ones who survived, were transported to a filtration camp." "What's a filtration camp?" "You really don't' know anything, do you? Or are you pretending?" "Try me," Jack said. "There is this filtration camp in Osinovka. Each room houses twenty to twenty five prisoners, who sleep on the concrete floor. The guards line them up against the wall and practice karate kicks in the head or in the groin. One of our guys liked to put electricity to the bodies, to see them fry. It takes a long time to get used to that smell. If a prisoner tried to untie their hands, the sergeant would cut them off at the wrists. If a prisoner tried to take off the black blindfold, the sergeant would put out his eyes with his thumbs. He was a piece of work from Archangelsk, our sergeant. During one helicopter ride, he dropped three prisoners because he was bored." "But how is it possible that the world news did not report any of this?" Jack persisted in knowing. Fedor raised his eyebrows in a manner that made Jack feel foolish for asking such a question. "Simple. For the next forty-eight hours we didn't allow anyone to enter Samashki, not even the Red Cross. That gave us plenty of time. Our armored vehicles flattened their bones so that the relatives could not identify them later. Exactly what news are you talking about? Are you from this world or not?" Fedor's wolf-like stare made Jack very nervous.
Alex Frishberg (The Steel Barons)
2011, I led the Department of Energy’s Quadrennial Technology Review to develop strategies for government support of emerging clean energy technologies. In one town hall meeting, I faced advocates for four different vehicle technologies—internal combustion engines powered by biofuels, compressed natural gas, hydrogen-powered fuel cells, and battery-powered plug-ins. Each of them believed that their technology was the optimal vision for the future, and that all the government had to do was support the development of the appropriate fueling infrastructure. When I reminded them that the country could probably deploy no more than two new fueling technologies at scale, a squabble ensued. There are several reasons I believe that electricity will fuel the passenger vehicles of the future, but one of them is that the existing electrical grid is a good start on the fueling infrastructure. If a widespread transition to plug-in electric cars does come about, systems thinking will be even more important as the electrical and transportation systems would have to work together to accommodate charging millions of vehicles.
Steven E. Koonin (Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters)
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Hurricane Ian damaged vehicles may have mechanical, electrical, fire, health and safety issues.
Steven Magee
Think about all the things that we can’t imagine not having that were invented or discovered in just the last 150 years. Before we had them, nobody could have imagined them—e.g., the telephone (1876), the electric light bulb (1879), the internal combustion powered vehicle (1885), the radio (1895), movies (1895), the airplane (1903), television (1926), antibiotics (1928), the computer (1939), nuclear weapons (1945), nuclear power plants (1951), GPS (1973), digital cameras (1975), online shopping (1979), the
Ray Dalio (Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail)
During the hurricane Ian disaster the Florida police were warning electric vehicle owners that had flooded vehicles to not turn on or drive them.
Steven Magee
Electric car fires are very difficult to extinguish.
Steven Magee
Thus, contrary to the folklore, entrepreneurs don't much like risk either. They use these six mindsets to mitigate it. Or manage it. Or off‐load it onto others. “Isn't your idea risky?” they will be asked. Of course, it's risky! There's market risk: Will customers buy (They bought from the outset at Budgetplaces.com; but not so fast at Nespresso.)? There's technology risk: Will the new‐fangled product actually work (Would Elon Musk figure out how to build electric vehicles with enough range?)? There's execution risk: Will the team be able to deliver what it sets out to deliver (Simon Cohen's 2 a.m. wake‐ups stole a day on his competitors.)? And more. Working counter‐conventionally, they all put one or more of the six mindsets into action.
John Mullins (Break the Rules!: The Six Counter-Conventional Mindsets of Entrepreneurs That Can Help Anyone Change the World)
Forecasts of completely autonomous road vehicles were made repeatedly during the 2010s: completely self-driving cars were to be everywhere by 2020, allowing the operator to read or sleep during a commute in a personal vehicle. All internal combustion engines currently on the road were to be replaced by electric vehicles by 2025: this forecast was made and again widely reported as a nearly accomplished fact in 2017. A reality check: in 2022 there were no fully self-driving cars; fewer than 2 percent of the world’s 1.4 billion motor vehicles on the road were electric, but they were not “green,” as the electricity required for their operation came mostly from burning fossil fuels: in 2022 about 60 percent of all electricity in general came from burning coal and natural gas.
Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
I’m an electric vehicle running on two AA batteries
Hannah Bonam-Young (Next to You (Next, #2))
SUV ownership began to rise in the US during the late 1980s, it eventually diffused globally, and by 2020 the average SUV emitted annually about 25 percent more CO2 than a standard car.[76] Multiply that by the 250 million SUVs on the road in 2020, and you will see how the worldwide embrace of these machines has wiped out, several times over, any decarbonization gains resulting from the slowly spreading ownership (just 10 million in 2020) of electric vehicles. During the 2010s, SUVs became the second-highest cause of rising CO2 emissions, behind electricity generation and ahead of heavy industry, trucking, and aviation. If their mass public embrace continues, they have the potential to offset any carbon savings from the more than 100 million electric vehicles that might be on the road by 2040!
Vaclav Smil (How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going)
Born in Brunei, Kevin is an impact-focussed entrepreneur who has successfully started, bought, built, fixed, scaled up, and sold businesses across a range of industries—including software, education, funds management, media, road infrastructure services, solar power, and electric vehicles.
Kevin Chin
In the dangerous kingdom of silence is our raft floating hundreds of corpses are visible on the shoreline burned in sunlight for long they are deformed those whose life had vibrated till now in happiness and grief electric current whose life once while vibrating from desire to desire those lives had flown In this dangerous kingdom of silence is our raft floating burning sun overhead on right is golden colour in the river green carpet on sandy strip peeps a naked man is seated on that strip all alone seeing the raft he jumps in water waves his hand while being washed away by tide as is wants to say something know one knows where he drowns in the heavy current with half ton biscuit and a few saris this small raft floats downstream Dark hall-room lavender fragrance touches nose many men are running this way trampling corpses of relatives jumps over for a fistful of food fights for it with each other dies hundreds of incorporeal species in electric light though goods for charity are not sufficient terrible dearth of vehicles and in order to reach the distressed area the administration never finds a way out in the absence of diggers between one to one & half thousand were buried in one pit Sir payment was Rupees two per day news further says that four persons in Bhootnath's house died when the house fell over them when they were sleeping though his state of affairs was more or less same happiness was not meagre in that tiny house today beneath open sky small time truck driver Bhoothnath stoops with his head between his knees the Sub Divisional Officer said. Twenty rupees more could not be given today from poverty alleviating fund because the person who has the keys to the cupboard has not come.
Basudeb Dasgupta (বাসুদেব দাশগুপ্ত রচনা সমগ্র)
that we currently use in ICEs, we have to use hydrogen. I find this very disappointing as hydrogen can actually be used to fuel ICEs directly (and only emits water and trace amounts of nitrogen oxide from the exhaust), and as a fuel in fuel cells to generate electricity that powers the vehicle.
Mark Boxall (Renewable Energy: An Essential Guide (Essential Guides))
Electric cars are not a cure-all. While they don’t create exhaust, their brakes and tires give off tiny, toxic particles as they wear. The energy needed to manufacture them, the raw materials used in their bodies and batteries, will be an unsustainable burden on our groaning Earth if car ownership keeps increasing. For now, that relentless rise frames everything. The number of vehicles in America has more than tripled since 1960;27 in England, there’s one car for every two people.28 And the biggest growth is now in developing nations like India and China. If they follow the path we’ve taken, the world could go from about a billion cars today29 to more than 3 billion by 2050.30 What’s really needed is not just a slowing of that growth, but fewer cars altogether, of any sort. It’s a goal that’s reachable if we reorganize the places we live to be denser, more pedestrian and bike friendly, with public transportation—and newer options like car sharing—that are convenient and affordable.
Beth Gardiner (Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution)
During Biden’s long period of flailing, I had feared that he had missed his chance to avert the worst consequence of climate change—and that another opportunity to protect the planet wouldn’t come around for years, after it was far too late. But then in the summer of 2022, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, a banally named bill that will transform American life. Its investments in alternative energy will ignite the growth of industries that will wean the economy from its dependence on fossil fuels. That achievement was of a piece with the new economics that his presidency had begun to enshrine. Where the past generation of Democratic presidents was deferential to markets, reluctant to challenge monopoly, indifferent to unions, and generally encouraging of globalization, Biden went in a different direction. Through a series of bills—not just his investments in alternative energy, but also the CHIPS Act and his infrastructure bill—he erected a state that will function as an investment bank, spending money to catalyze favored industries to realize his vision, where the United States controls the commanding heights of the economy of the future. The critique of gerontocracy is that once politicians become senior citizens, they will only focus on the short term, because they will only inhabit the short term. But Biden, the oldest president in history, pushed for spending money on projects that might not come to fruition in his lifetime. His theory of the case—that democracy will succeed only if it delivers for its citizens—compelled him to push for expenditures on unglamorous but essential items such as electric vehicle charging systems, crumbling ports, and semiconductor plants, which will decarbonize the economy, employ the next generation of workers, and prevent national decline.
Franklin Foer (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future)
failed to create an arm of the government that will be forever attached to his name, nothing like Obamacare or remotely resembling social security. But the thrust of the Inflation Reduction Act can still be described as transformational—and it will change American life. The theory of the legislation is that the world is poised for a momentous shift. For a generation, the economy has taken tentative steps away from its reliance on fossil fuels. New technologies emerged that lowered the costs of solar panels and wind turbines and batteries; the mass market showed genuine interest in electric vehicles and heat pumps. But the pace of adaptation was slow, painfully slow given the looming changes to the climate. On its own, the economy was never going to evolve in time to avert the worst consequences
Franklin Foer (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future)
Every major change in the technologies underlying our lifestyles, from gunpowder to steel to the internal combustion engine to the rise of electricity, has required a leap of faith and a major break from the past. Imagine the fear, traveling long distances aboard a rickety vehicle that burned an explosively flammable liquid and rode upon black rubber tubes filled with air. What could possibly go wrong?! Yet people quickly overcame their fear of cars and focused instead on how to improve safety and reliability.
Vivek Wadhwa (The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the Future)
One came in late 1942, when a German tank unit sat in reserve on grasslands outside the city. When tanks were desperately needed on the front lines, something happened that surprised everyone: Almost none of them worked. Out of 104 tanks in the unit, fewer than 20 were operable. Engineers quickly found the issue. Historian William Craig writes: “During the weeks of inactivity behind the front lines, field mice had nested inside the vehicles and eaten away insulation covering the electrical systems.” The Germans had the most sophisticated equipment in the world. Yet there they were, defeated by mice.
Morgan Housel (The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness)
There’s nothing quite so invigorating, so freeing, as piloting a gasoline-powered vehicle along an open road. Years from now, when all the vehicles are electric, when tens of millions of acres of Earth’s surface have been destroyed by open-pit mining for the enormous quantities of lithium and cobalt and nickel and copper required for EVs, when thousands of new landfills have been crammed full of batteries that can’t be recycled and are leaking horrifying toxins into the water table, when thousands of square miles of windmills have made extinct hundreds of species of birds with disastrous environmental effects, I will still—always, always—remember this special and exhilarating night, chauffeuring you two hither and yon in the dogged pursuit of justice, my destiny buddies.
Dean Koontz (The Bad Weather Friend)
There’s no better case study showing how connectivity and computing power will turn old products into digitized machines than Tesla, Elon Musk’s auto company. Tesla’s cult following and soaring stock price have attracted plenty of attention, but what’s less noticed is that Tesla is also a leading chip designer. The company hired star semiconductor designers like Jim Keller to build a chip specialized for its automated driving needs, which is fabricated using leading-edge technology. As early as 2014, some analysts were noting that Tesla cars “resemble a smartphone.” The company has been often compared to Apple, which also designs its own semiconductors. Like Apple’s products, Tesla’s finely tuned user experience and its seemingly effortless integration of advanced computing into a twentieth-century product—a car—are only possible because of custom-designed chips. Cars have incorporated simple chips since the 1970s. However, the spread of electric vehicles, which require specialized semiconductors to manage the power supply, coupled with increased demand for autonomous driving features foretells that the number and cost of chips in a typical car will increase substantially.
Chris Miller (Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology)
Electric vehicles will likely be scrapped if their very expensive battery fails out of warranty.
Steven Magee
Electric vehicles are typically scrapped when their battery fails out of warranty.
Steven Magee
Electric vehicles are typically scrapped by insurers when their damaged battery replacement cost exceeds the secondhand value of the vehicle.
Steven Magee
of climate change. What was needed was a massive nudge in the right direction. In the past, the stick of regulation and the rod of taxation were the methods that environmentalists believed could break the fossil fuel economy. But the Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t rely on such punitive tactics, because Manchin culled them from the bill. Instead, it imagined that the United States could become the global leader of a booming climate economy, if the government provided tax credits and subsidies, a lucrative set of incentives. There was a cost associated with the bill. By the Congressional Budget Office’s score, it offered $386 billion in tax credits to encourage the production of wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal plants, and battery storage. Tax credits would reduce the cost of electric vehicles so that they would become the car of choice for Middle America. But $386 billion was an estimate, not a price tag, since the legislation didn’t cap the amount of money available in tax credits. If utilities wanted to build more wind turbines or if demand for electric vehicles surged, the government would keep spending. When Credit Suisse studied the program, it estimated that so many businesses and consumers will avail themselves of the tax credits that the government could spend nearly $800 billion. If Credit Suisse is correct, then the tax credits will unleash $1.7 trillion in private sector spending on green technologies. Within six years, solar and wind energy produced by the US will be the cheapest in the world. Alternative energies will cross a threshold: it will become financially irresponsible not to use them. Even though Joe Biden played a negligible role in the final negotiations, the Inflation Reduction Act exudes his preferences. He romanticizes the idea of factories building stuff. It is a vision of the Goliath of American manufacturing, seemingly moribund, sprung back to life. At the same time that the legislation helps to stall climate change, it allows the United States to dominate the industries of the future. This was a bill that, in the end, climate activists and a broad swath of industry could love. Indeed, strikingly few business lobbies, other than finance and pharma, tried to stymie the bill in its final stages. It was a far cry from the death struggles over energy legislation in the Clinton and Obama administrations, when industry scuppered transformational legislation. The Inflation Reduction Act will allow the United States to prevent its own decline. And not just economic decline. Without such a meaningful program, the United States would have had no standing to prod other countries to respond more aggressively to climate change. It would have been a marginal player in shaping the response to the planet’s greatest challenge. The bill was an investment in moral authority.
Franklin Foer (The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future)
An even more ambitious EV30@30 Campaign was launched in 2017 with the goal of accelerating the deployment of electric vehicles, targeting a 30 percent market share for electric vehicles sales by 2030.
Siddharth Kara (Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives)
of glittering armor and the forest of battle pennants, the main part of the emperors’ army was concentrated on Highway 24, forcing its way toward the Caldecott Tunnel. Enemy catapults hurled projectiles toward the legion’s positions, but most disappeared in bursts of purple light as soon as they got close. I assumed that was the work of Terminus, doing his part to defend the camp’s borders. Meanwhile, at the base of the tunnel, flashes of lightning pinpointed the location of the legion’s standard. Tendrils of electricity zigzagged down the hillsides, arcing through enemy lines and frying them to dust. Camp Jupiter’s ballistae launched giant flaming spears at the invaders, raking through their lines and starting more forest fires. The emperors’ troops kept coming. The ones making the best progress were huddled behind large armored vehicles that crawled on eight legs and…Oh, gods. My guts felt like they’d gotten tangled in my bike chain. Those weren’t vehicles. “Myrmekes,” I said. “Meg, those are myr—” “I see them.” She didn’t even slow down. “It doesn’t change anything. Come on!” How could it not change anything? We’d faced a nest of those giant ants at Camp Half-Blood and barely survived. Meg had nearly been pulped into Gerber’s larvae purée. Now we were confronting myrmekes trained for war, snapping trees in half with their pincers and spraying acid to melt through the camp’s defensive pickets. This was a brand-new flavor of horrible. “We’ll never get through their lines!” I protested. “Lavinia’s secret tunnel.
Rick Riordan (The Tyrant's Tomb (The Trials of Apollo, #4))
Noether proved mathematically that equations will only exhibit this symmetry if they are associated with a quantity whose value does not change. In other words, for time translation symmetry to exist in the laws of mechanics, something must be conserved. That something is what we call energy. Noether’s theorem goes far beyond energy conservation. It shows that whenever equations contain a symmetry, some quantity must be conserved. For example, the laws of mechanics do not regard one location in space as being more special than any other. Billiard balls follow these laws irrespective of where in the universe they are. This means the laws of mechanics have a spatial symmetry as well as a temporal one. For this to happen, a quantity called momentum is conserved. This is linked to the idea of inertia—the familiar feeling of being thrown forward when the vehicle you’re in brakes suddenly. Put another way, this happens to ensure the laws of mechanics are the same everywhere in the universe. Other conserved quantities linked to symmetries include angular momentum and electrical charge.
Paul Sen (Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe)
Tangible evidence of that economic upsurge was the fivefold increase of electricity consumption in the territories and the elevenfold increase in private vehicle ownership.
Howard M. Sachar (A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time)
In 1900, electrics far outnumbered gasoline cars on the streets in New York City. No one was a more powerful advocate of the electric car than the great inventor Thomas Edison, who poured a lot of his own money, along with his reputation and effort, into trying to perfect an electric vehicle.
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
General Motors did try, spending a billion dollars to develop the two-seater electric EV1. Introduced in 1996, the vehicle was not exactly compelling—owing to its shape, it became known as the “Egg on Wheels”—and its range was limited. Aside from a handful of aficionados, the EV1 failed to gain traction and ended up in the junkyard. The battery just wasn’t good enough. Moreover, how many people really wanted a gasoline-free car when gasoline was at that time only $1.30 a gallon?
Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)