Hybrid Car Quotes

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.

Oh, great. She could be a hybrid. Just like her sociology teacher's car.

Mort drove one of those little hybrid cars that, when not running on gasoline, was fueled by idealism. It was made out of crepe paper and duct tape and boasted a computer system that looked like it could have run the NYSE and NORAD, with enough attention left over to play tic-tac-toe. Or possibly Global Thermonuclear War.

Driving a hybrid car could save about one ton of carbon-dioxide emissions per year but adopting a plant-based diet would save nearly one and a half tons over a comparable period." "If every American reduced chicken consumption by one meal per week, the carbon-dioxide savings would be equivalent to removing 500,000 cars form the road." In a given year, "the number of animals killed to satisfy American palates is 8.6 billion, or 29 animals per average American meat eater. The total number of animals killed on land and sea was approximately 80 billion, or 270 per American meat and fish eater - making the average number of animals consumed in one American lifetime 21,000.

Mort drove one of those little hybrid cars that, when not running on gasoline, was fueled by idealism. It was made out of crepe paper and duct tape and boasted a computer system that looked like it could have run the NYSE and NORAD, with enough attention left over to play tic-tac-toe. Or possibly Global Thermonuclear War.

The best scenario of all when it comes to air pollution has nothing to do with tailpipe filters or hybrid, electric, or zero emissions car technology. The way to reduce pollution is to reduce driving, plain and simple.

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in 'sadness,' 'joy,' or 'regret' . . . It oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, 'the happiness that attends disaster.' Or: 'the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy.

Hey, I think I'm losing my mind now Having trouble finding a way out Shined so bright, this star's gonna burn out I take and don't know how to give You know I never mean well I can't help but help myself Been placed right under the spell The mirror shows somebody else Fat stacks and hybrid cars They don't take ya very far Branded with dollar-sign shaped scars We're in a special kind of hell

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.

Emotion, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." ...most of my emotions are hybrids. But not all. Some are pure and unadulterated. Jealousy, for instance.

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.

I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever. I can’t just sit back and watch from a distance anymore.

The Frieds have these two enormous dogs, Pasta Batman and Marco Baseball. They’re both some kind of Great Dane/Saint Bernard/werewolf hybrid. I remember the first time I came over, we pulled up in Mrs. Fried’s truck, and my first thought upon seeing them was 'We might not be able to kill those things with the car.' I envisioned them bouncing off the fender, getting up, cracking their knuckles, and then diving through the windshield to eat our necks.

As he placed the needle back on its tray, I realized that he'd complicated me; he'd imposed divisions on the matter I shared with Pearl, all that we'd both collaborated on in our floating little world. The needle made me a mischling, but the word took on a meaning different than the term the Nazis imposed upon us, all those cold and gruesome equations of blood and worship and heritage. No, I was a hybrid of a different sort, a powerful hyrbid forged by my suffering. I was now composed of two parts. One part was loss and despair. Such darkness should make life impossible, I know. But my other part? It was wild hope. And no one could extract or cut or drain it from me. No one could burn it from my flesh or puncture it with a needle. This hopeful part, it twisted me, gave me a new form. The girl who'd licked an onion in the cattle car was dead, and the mischling I'd become was an oddity, a thwarted person, a creature - but a creature capable of tricking her enemies and rescuing her loved ones.

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. I can't just sit back and watch from a distance anymore. From here on in, everything I'll tell you is colored by the subjective experience of being part of events. Here's where my story splits, divides, undergoes meiosis. Already the world feels heavier, now I'm a part of it. I'm talking about bandages and sopped cotton, the smell of mildew in movie theaters, and of all the lousy cats and their stinking litter boxes, of rain on city streets when the dust comes up and the old Italian men take their folding chairs inside. Up until now it hasn't been my word. Not my America. But here we are, at last.

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. I can't just sit back and watch from a distance anymore. From here on in, everything I'll tell you is colored by the subjective experience of being part of events. Here's where my story splits, divides, undergoes meiosis. Already the world feels heavier, now I'm a part of it. I'm talking about bandages and sopped cotton, the smell of mildew in movie theaters, and of all the lousy cats and their stinking litter boxes, of rain on city streets when the dust comes up and the old Italian men take their folding chairs inside. Up until now it hasn't been my world. Not my America. But here we are, at last.

Take a step back to recall the story that this book tells, and consider how it might come to a very unhappy ending. Imagine the history our disappointed descendants might write. For centuries, the moral teachings of a civilization held self—interest and self-trust to be the sins of frail and deluded humanity. These traditional teachings denied that societies could discern distinct and viable principles of order and design their own institutions accordingly. The denounced such efforts as doomed hubris. Then, in an unprecedented experiment, some people rejected the old wisdom. They took the heart’s desire and the body’s appetite as compass points and rededicated human ingenuity to serving them. They created new forms of order to house these inverted values. For a time, the experiment succeeded, changing life so dramatically that the utopian visions of one century became the pedestrian common sense of the next. Then, suddenly and drastically, the experiment failed. Self-interest and self-trust proved to be formulas for devastating the world. Democratic polities, the other moral center of the great experiment, could not stop runaway self-destruction and turned out to abet it instead. Faced with overwhelming evidence that they were on an unsustainable course, the freedom-loving peoples of the twenty-first century wrung their hands, congratulated themselves on their hybrid cars and locally grown food, and changed little, because it never made sense for anyone or any country to do so.

Explaining the rise of MSNBC, the Republican strategist Stuart Stevens said: “I think there are a lot of people out there who are dramatically troubled by the direction of the country, and they would like to be reminded that: (A) they’re not alone, and (B) there’s an alternative”. But loneliness isn’t the problem; the direction of the country is. And being alone together is not an alternative direction, just as a cancer support group does not shrink a tumour. It’s probably true that viewers of MSNBC are sometimes inspired to give money to progressive candidates, and perhaps there’s someone out there whose politics were changed, rather that their loneliness assuaged, by Rachel Maddow. It’s certainly true that a hybrid car gets better mileage than a traditional gas car. But primarily, these things make us feel better. And it can be dangerous to feel better when things are not getting better. […] Too often, the feeling of making a difference doesn’t correspond to the difference being made – worse, an inflated sense of accomplishment can relieve the burden of doing what actually needs to be done. Do the children getting vaccines paid for by Bill Gates really care if he feels annoyed when he gives 46 percent of his vast wealth to charity? Do the children dying of preventable diseases really care if Jeff Bezos feels altruistic when he donates only 1.2 percent of his even vaster wealth? If you found yourself in the back of an ambulance, would you rather have a driver who loathes his job put performs it expertly or one who is passionate about his job but takes twice as long to get you to the hospital?

He struck a dramatic pose, hands on hips.  “Et tu, Judas?” Unfazed by the theatrics, Ayden said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Blake pointed an accusing finger. “I know you melted the wires in my engine. Think you’re so smart. But you’re not the only one with mechanical ability.” “You called Logan, didn’t you.” “Of course I called Logan. He’s my mechanical ability. But that’s not the point. The point is I got it fixed and I’m here in time to pick her up. So despite your backstabbing sabotage, I’m ready to take her to school. Aurora, please get out of the,” he eyed Ayden’s car, “super exotic sports car and into my…practical hybrid.” His face fell into misery. “Come on, dude, A & E Kirk (2012-01-07). Demons at Deadnight (Divinicus Nex Chronicles series Book 1) (pp. 209-210). A&E Kirk. Kindle Edition.

The larger point is whatever worthless degree somebody inevitably chooses, ultimately it is nothing more than an admission of laziness. Declaring a worthless major is simply shouting out to the world, “I’m a parasite and have no intentions of working for a living. I want to do what I want to do and I want the rest of you to pay for it. I ultimately want to produce nothing society wants, but in return I demand other people slave away to make me MP3 players, computers, video games, as well as engineer hybrid cars and whatever else I want. I also want society to create some make-work job for me so my ego isn’t bruised and I can make-believe I’m a real-word-live adult too. And if you dare point out what I'm doing in the real world is nothing more than parasiting off of others, I'll cowardly hide myself behind some altruistic crusade and accuse you of being a racist, a misogynist, or a hater of children.

his peers have expressed considerably more skepticism. “There is nothing Tesla [can] do that we cannot also do,” Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne said in June 2016. Two years earlier, he had asked customers not to buy the Fiat 500e electric car, because the company lost $14,000 on the sale of each one. Fiat would sell the minimum number of electric cars needed to meet government mandates and “not one more,” he said. In April 2016, Marchionne continued that theme in an interview on the sidelines of his company’s annual meeting, this time responding to the price of the Model 3. If Musk could show him that the car would be profitable at the $35,000 price tag, Marchionne said, “I will copy the formula, add the Italian design flair, and get it to the market within twelve months.” The German automakers have been even more dismissive. In November 2015, Edzard Reuter, the former CEO of Daimler, called Tesla a “joke” and Musk a “pretender,” suggesting in an interview with a German newspaper that Tesla didn’t stand up to serious comparison with “the great car companies of Germany.” Daimler, BMW, and Volkswagen were slow to accept that Tesla could one day challenge their market dominance. “German carmakers have been in denial that electric vehicles can create an emotional appeal to customers,” Arndt Ellinghorst, an automotive analyst at Evercore ISI, told the Los Angeles Times in April 2016. “Many still believe that Tesla is a sideshow catering to a niche product to some tree-hugging Californians and eccentric US hedge fund managers.” GM wasn’t quite so blasé. In 2013, then CEO Dan Akerson established a team within the company to study Tesla, based on the belief that it could be a big disrupter. GM’s Chevrolet Volt, a hybrid sedan that could drive about forty miles in full electric mode, had won Motor Trend’s 2011 Car of the Year, but GM was looking further into the future. At the 2015 Detroit auto show, it unveiled a concept of the Chevy Bolt, a two-hundred-mile electric car that would retail for $30,000 (after a $7,500 rebate from the US government). It was seen as a direct response to Tesla and new CEO Mary Barra’s biggest risk since she took over in 2014. Wired magazine celebrated the Bolt’s impending arrival with a February 2016 cover story about how GM had beaten Tesla “in the race to build a true electric car for the masses

Could the electric car follow the same path? Count Elon Musk among the believers. ‘‘At the beginning of last year [2015], we had fifty thousand cars in total on the roads worldwide, and then last year we produced another fifty thousand cars,” he said in January 2016. “So the total fleet of Tesla vehicles doubled last year. It will approximately double again this year.” We shouldn’t take Musk’s word for it, of course—Tesla’s 2016 production fell about twenty-five thousand cars short of doubling the previous year’s tally—but consider that many of the effects that spur demand for electric vehicles are only just starting to take hold. The decline of battery prices, which will make electric cars more affordable, is probably the biggest factor influencing demand, but there are others. For a start, many hundreds of millions of people still don’t know a thing about electric vehicles that aren’t golf carts or hybrids like the Toyota Prius.

As an actor, I pretend for a living. I play fictitious characters, often solving fictitious problems… I believe that mankind has looked at climate change in that same way — as if it were a fiction, as if pretending that climate change wasn't real would somehow make it go away… To be clear, this is not about just telling people to change their light bulbs or to buy a hybrid car; this disaster has grown beyond the choices that individuals make… None of this is rhetoric, none of it is hysteria — it is a fact... This is now about our industries and our governments around the world taking decisive and large-scale action.

In August 2016, Ford announced plans to bring a Level 4 selfdriving car—without pedals or a steering wheel—to market by 2021. Other automakers have been working on similarly aggressive plans. Fiat Chrysler has partnered with Google’s Waymo to develop a fleet of self-driving hybrid minivans. GM, through its partnership with Lyft, has plans to bring Chevy Bolt robotaxis to the road as quickly as possible.

So we take infinitesimal little actions like preventing oil exploration, or recycling our beer cans, or driving hybrid cars that cost twenty-five times what a Third World worker makes in a year, or shaming other people for their desire to live well and prosper . . .

Predictably, Katherine’s car was a leased Toyota Prius, what they call a hybrid, and, though I consider myself as sensitive to the assassination of our environment as anybody, Sean Drummond was not the least bit happy with this choice. The car didn’t even require a key to get started, just this stupid button you push, then you can’t even hear the engine, so after the fifth time I punched the button, Katherine said, “Stop that, Sean. The damned car is already started.

This is human nature: to find a morality that is comfortable and convenient and let it suffice for holiness. But it is not. So you ride your bike to work, or drive a hybrid car—but

just-concluded Paris Motor Show stood out for its dazzling concept and production cars, many of which are pointing to the future, low emission, electric or hybrid cars that are environmentally-friendly as well as fuel-savers that give more mileage than ever before. It also showcased exciting levels of French design and innovation. There was the Peugeot 208 Hybrid Air concept which Peugeot-Citroen has based on a standard 208 with an engine that uses compressed air instead of conventional battery power in a hybrid set-up. It works in the opposite way to electric hybrids by being best utilised with frequent use and regeneration. As regenerating the system takes just 10 seconds, it's also ideal for city

You’ve got to be shitting me. A Prius.” “Just shut up and get in.” The hybrid car gave a whine as Bishop pressed the ignition button. “Yeah, great, we’ll really be able to outrun them in this,” Ice grumbled to himself as he leapt into the backseat.

The hybrid car I was aiming for suddenly crumples under the weight of something crashing down on it. The thunder of the crash almost makes me jump out of my boots. Luckily, it covers Mom’s scream. I catch a flash of tawny limbs and snowy wings. An angel. I have to blink to make sure it’s real.

The dying mall has attracted some odd tenants, such as a satellite branch of the public library and an office of the State Attorney General's Child Predator Unit. As malls die across the country, we'll see many kinds of creative repurposing. Already, there are churches and casinos inside half-dead malls, so why not massage parlors, detox centers, transient hotels, haunted houses, prisons, petting zoos or putt-putt golf courses (covering the entire mall)? Leaving Santee, Chuck and I wandered into the food court, where only three of twelve restaurant slots were still occupied. On the back wall of this forlorn and silent space was a mural put up by Boscov, the mall's main tenant. Titled "B part of your community", it reads: KINDNESS COUNTS / PLANT A TREE / MAKE A DONATION / HELP A NEIGHBOR / VISIT THE ELDERLY / HOPE / ADOPT A PET / DRIVE A HYBRID / PICK UP THE TRASH / VOLUNTEER / CONSERVE ENERGY / RECYCLE / JOIN SOMETHING / PAINT A MURAL / HUG SOMEONE / SMILE / DRINK FILTERED WATER / GIVE YOUR TIME / USE SOLAR ENERGY / FEED THE HUNGRY / ORGANIZE A FUNDRAISER / CREATE AWARENESS / FIX A PLAYGROUND/ START A CLUB / BABYSIT These empty recommendations are about as effective as "Just Say No", I'm afraid. As the CIA pushed drugs, the first lady chirped, "Just say no!". And since everything in the culture, car, iPad, iPhone, television, internet, Facebook, Twitter and shopping mall, etc., is designed to remove you from your immediate surroundings, it will take more than cutesy suggestions on walls to rebuild communities. Also, the worse the neighborhoods or contexts, the more hopeful and positive the slogans. Starved of solutions, we shall eat slogans.

In Europe, with its astronomical fuel prices, Volkswagen could market diesel on fuel economy. In the United States, where gasoline was cheaper than diesel and much less expensive than in Europe, Volkswagen needed another pitch. Positioning Volkswagen as a car for environmentally conscious drivers seemed like a clever strategy from many angles. It provided a way to attack archrival Toyota, whose hybrid Prius had become a hit and shown that people would buy a car that lent its owners a green halo. Volkswagen was not in a position to offer competing hybrids, because it had been slow to develop any. But Volkswagen was already a leader in diesel.

Computer chips are an outlier. They get better because we figure out how to cram more transistors on each one, but there’s no equivalent breakthrough to make cars use a million times less gas. Consider that the first Model T that rolled off Henry Ford’s production line in 1908 got no better than 21 miles to the gallon. As I write this, the top hybrid on the market gets 58 miles to the gallon. In more than a century, fuel economy has improved by less than a factor of three. Nor have solar panels become a million times better. When crystalline silicon solar cells were introduced in the 1970s, they converted about 15 percent of the sunlight that hit them into electricity. Today they convert around 25 percent. That’s good progress, but it’s hardly in line with Moore’s Law.

Finally, barely a soul among the fixed copped to driving a hybrid or electric car, while about 10 percent of fluid drivers said they drove these most-fuel-efficient of models. Like their choice of schools, then, the Redds’ and Bleus’ means of transportation divide them, rather than giving them something in common.

scientist Krishna Bharat, frustrated by how difficult it was to find news stories online, created Google News in his 20 percent time. The site now receives millions of visitors every day. Former Google engineer Paul Bucheit created Gmail, now one of the world’s most popular e-mail programs, as his 20 percent project. Many other Google products share similar creation stories—among them Orkut (Google’s social networking software), Google Talk (its instant message application), Google Sky (which allows astronomically inclined users to browse pictures of the universe), and Google Translate (its translation software for mobile devices). As Google engineer Alec Proudfoot, whose own 20 percent project aimed at boosting the efficiency of hybrid cars, put it in a television interview: “Just about all the good ideas here at Google have bubbled up from 20 percent time.”9

the roughly $800 billion in available stimulus, we directed more than $90 billion toward clean energy initiatives across the country. Within a year, an Iowa Maytag plant I’d visited during the campaign that had been shuttered because of the recession was humming again, with workers producing state-of-the-art wind turbines. We funded construction of one of the world’s largest wind farms. We underwrote the development of new battery storage systems and primed the market for electric and hybrid trucks, buses, and cars. We financed programs to make buildings and businesses more energy efficient, and collaborated with Treasury to temporarily convert the existing federal clean energy tax credit into a direct-payments program. Within the Department of Energy, we used Recovery Act money to launch the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), a high-risk, high-reward research program modeled after DARPA, the famous Defense Department effort launched after Sputnik that helped develop not only advanced weapons systems like stealth technology but also an early iteration of the internet, automated voice activation, and GPS.

Perhaps it’s obvious that to create an in-depth study of how urban life affects people, Terkel had to step outside of his inner circle. But all of us do. The challenges of modern life require more than our loved ones can give. Whether it’s cutting through a maze of information about a particular disease, figuring out how to best invest the funds in our 401(k), or deciding whether a hybrid car makes sense, we need what consequential strangers offer: a fresh perspective, different ideas, and connections and know-how that extend beyond our familiar.

Generations of frontal lobes, working in close collaboration, have created culture, which got us from dug-out canoes, horse-drawn carriages, and letters to jet planes, hybrid cars, and email. They also gave us Noam's lifesaving trampoline.

Generations of frontal lobes, working in close collaboration, have created culture, which got us from dug-out canoes, horse-drawn carriages, and letters to jet planes, hybrid cars, and e-mail. They also gave us Noam's lifesaving trampoline.

As you can see, with long runs at niko niko pace, you teach your body to use fat as fuel. That means that in marathons, even if you do run out of glycogen, your body will smoothly switch to fat-fueling like a hybrid car.

The elites who go abroad and eat organic food and drive hybrid cars and write papers about poor people back home.

little hybrid cars that, when not running on gasoline, was fueled by idealism. It was made out of crepe paper and duct tape and boasted a computer system that looked like it could have run the NYSE and NORAD, with enough attention left over to play tic-tac-toe. Or possibly Global Thermonuclear War.

To call spirits, again, sometimes a symbolic offering speeds things up. As for raising the dead, yeah, that kind of takes a big payment.” She scrat ched her nose. “But that depends on the necromancer. A strong one can get by with very little blood. He won’t need as much of a power boost, but the offering should be there. The amount of blood also depends on the quality.”   I felt relieved that I wouldn’t have to start slaughtering bunnies to get things done, but the last thing she said worried me. “The quality?”   “It’s not just how powerful the necromancer is, but also how powerful the blood is. You’d get more, you know, oomph out of a goat than a chicken. It’s simply a bigger payment. That being said, a more powerful necromancer could do more with a smaller sacrifice than a less powerful one could. They run more efficiently,” she said. “Here, think of it this way: Douglas is a hybrid car, and you’re a clunky old truck.”   “Thank you for that.”   Ashley glared at me until I pantomimed shutting my mouth and throwing away the key.   “You both need gas to run, but the hybrid wouldn’t need as much because it can draw from its internal power source, the electric battery. It uses a small amount of fuel more efficiently. The truck lacks that internal power source. It can get to the same place the hybrid car can, but it takes tons more gas to do so.”   “I should trade you in,” Brid said.   “Don’t make me sic Ling Tsu on you,” I told her.

Jamie got back to her apartment in nineteen minutes and forty-nine seconds.  It wasn’t a personal best for a five-kilometre run, but it was still fast.  She showered and dressed, pulled on her boots, and was out the door in seventeen minutes flat. Which probably was close to a personal best.  She was wearing jeans she picked up from a supermarket. She liked them because they had a three percent lycra content woven into the denim, which stretched a little and meant that she could more easily crouch, walk, and kick someone in the side of the head if the situation called for it. It hadn’t yet, but she had a long career ahead of herself, she hoped.  She jumped into her car — a small and economical hybrid hatchback which squeezed around the city easily — and headed north towards the Lea.  It took nearly forty minutes to get there in rush hour traffic, and by the time she pulled up, Roper was leaning against the bonnet of his ten-year-old Volvo saloon, smoking a cigarette. He was tall with thinning, short hair, and a face that looked like he was always squinting into a stiff wind.  His long black coat was pinned to his right leg in the breeze and his shirt looked like it’d been pulled out of the laundry hamper rather than a clean drawer. He was perpetually single, and it showed. There was no one to hold him accountable when he decided it was okay to skip a morning shower for an extra ten minutes sleeping off his hangover. What she hated most about him, beyond the cigarette stink and the pissed-at-life attitude, was that she always had to look twice to make sure he wasn’t her father.  Her mother had dragged her away from him in Sweden, and now, she’d been thrown together with a guy who seemingly had inherited all his bad habits. Her mum said it was because all detectives were like it if they did the job long enough. They saw too much and didn’t talk about it enough. Which led inevitably to drink, and drugs, and other women. She’d spoken from experience of course. And Jamie knew she hadn’t exaggerated.  Though moving them both to Britain seemed like a bit of a dramatic reaction. But then again, her father had given her mother gonorrhoea and couldn’t say which woman he’d gotten it from. So Jamie figured it was reasonable.  He would have turned sixty-one this year. Roper pushed off the Volvo and ground out his cigarette under the heel of his battered Chelsea boot. Jamie looked at it, stopping short of his odour-radius. ‘You gonna just leave that there?’ He looked between his feet, rolling onto the outsides of them as he inspected the flattened butt. ‘It’ll wash away in the rain.’ ‘Into the ocean, yeah, where some poor fish is going to eat it,’ Jamie growled, coming to a stop in front of him.

You don’t buy Hyundai’s new hybrid car the Ioniq—you subscribe to it, for $275 a month. It’s a lot like picking a cell phone plan: pick your model online, choose between a twenty-four- or thirty-six-month plan, select your upgrades, then walk into a dealership to pick up your vehicle. No price haggling, no loans, no back-office pitches. “Our goal is to make car ownership as easy as it is to own a mobile device,” says Mike O’Brien, vice president of product planning for Hyundai.

Mort drove one of those little hybrid cars that, when not running on gasoline, was fueled by idealism.

You’ll sometimes hear Moore’s Law invoked as a reason to think we can make the same kind of exponential progress on energy. If computer chips can improve so much so quickly, can’t cars and solar panels? Unfortunately, no. Computer chips are an outlier. They get better because we figure out how to cram more transistors on each one, but there’s no equivalent breakthrough to make cars use a million times less gas. Consider that the first Model T that rolled off Henry Ford’s production line in 1908 got no better than 21 miles to the gallon. As I write this, the top hybrid on the market gets 58 miles to the gallon. In more than a century, fuel economy has improved by less than a factor of three. Nor have solar panels become a million times better. When crystalline silicon solar cells were introduced in the 1970s, they converted about 15 percent of the sunlight that hit them into electricity. Today they convert around 25 percent. That’s good progress, but it’s hardly in line with Moore’s Law.