(09-09-2022, 09:54 AM)David Horn Wrote:(07-03-2022, 07:03 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Hyundai is apparently making small electric sedans.
With the 2030 mandate from California (and similar mandates from China), electirc is where the R&D money is focusing and what the future is expecting. I'm hoping to live long enough to see electric be so common place that gas-guzzlers will be seen as the oddities.
Just as gas buggies supplanted horse-and-buggy travel due to cost (Henry Ford made his Model T Ford so that farmers could use it and even modify it into a tractor), so will electric vehicles supplant gas buggies of 120 years later. As significant will be "self-driven" cars (or nearly so. Someone will have to take responsibility for being awake and sober while driving in case of a computer glitch). The combination will revolutionize travel about as much as gas buggies supplanting horses.
It is worth remembering that the halcyon days for American farmers were in the mid-1910's, when much of the agricultural activity was the production of oats to fuel equine-based transportation. As motor fuels supplanted oats and cars supplanted horses, agricultural prices collapsed worldwide and contributed to the economic instability that culminated in the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929, with its own effects including the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. Between World War I and the retirement of horses from transportation and drafting of farm implements, the time around 1920 was a nightmare for horses.
Unexpected consequences happen. Just think of what happens to the petroleum industry and political entities and investors and workers who depend upon it.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.