It looks cool, but that is a horrible handle. You want it to be wood or plastic so it dampens vibrations as much as it can, and smooth so one hand can slide down the handle from near the head to your other hand at the end as you swing. A couple minutes breaking up concrete with that and your hands would be numb, tingly, and probably bloody. Gloves would help, but using this will always suck.

They can’t reproduce, should be fine.

Airbags are not forbidden in aircraft. They just haven’t been considered to offer enough safety benfit for their weight and cost in most cases. That is starting to change though, and airbags integrated into aircraft seatbelts are becoming more common. They can be found in first class in a number of commercial aircraft, and are sold to be retrofitted into private planes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airplane_airbags

https://www.amsafe.com/product/airbag-restraint-systems/

There are many reasons I doubt this car will make it into commercial production, but the airbags will be OK.

There is a vaccine for chickens and turkeys for the bird flu. But poultry barns only use it when there are already outbreaks in their area, they don’t consider the cost worth it most of the time. And no one is giving it to wild birds.

Very true. Unfortunately, this process just pulls gold from dilute sources and gathers it into nuggets, from small ones to very very large. No gold is being made new though, that would be great.

Well, that is the amount gold that is mined or recycled every year that is used in electronics. The thing is though, a lot of the gold used in electronics is never recovered. So a considerable amount of the gold used in electronics is removed from from circulation in a way the gold in jewelry or bullion or coins isn’t. It isn’t the primary driver of gold’s price increase, but it is a significant factor.

Gold prices have risen steadily for a long time, partly because of its use in electronics. Over $2500/ounce now. But another quirk of gold is the ease with which we can make very thin coatings of it over other materials, sometimes only a few atoms thick. So it is commonly used, but in very very small amounts per device.

Metric measuring systems are superior in almost every use case, with the exception, I think, of how temperature feels to us. As arbitrary as Fahrenheit seems, it does seem like a more natural scale to talk about the weather or body temp. The smaller units are nice for these purposes too. 0 being very cold and 100 being very hot feels less arbitrary than -18 and 38, even if celcius is more logical and easier to use for many other things.

Growing crops to make ethanol is not particulatly green. In fact, in most existing production loops we would be better off environmentally to just burn pure gasoline than produce the ethanol to mix into it, unfortunately. Too much water, too many tractors and trucks, and way too much electricity into ethanol production to be worth what we get out of it. And the bit of carbon the crops sequester doesn’t overcome it. Electric vehicles are by far the greenest option right now.

It won’t have started getting closer again before the Milky Way collides with the Adromeda galaxy in 5 Billion years, so it and anything we send on a similar path isn’t coming back.

Last year their revenue from selling cars, powerwalls, and solar tiles was around $90 million. Makes the stock price seem crazy, yes. But then they sold $1.8 billion of carbon credits to other auto manufacturers, and that costs them basically nothing. Still doesn’t justify the stock price, but makes it less ridiculous. Selling carbon credits is Tesla’s main business at this point, the things they make just provide the justification for it.

Oh, it’s not the only reason, and the other may actually be worse. They sold $1.8 billion of carbon credits to other auto manufacturers last year. Which is pretty much free money to them. And hastens climate change, but, you know, free money.

I’d say anyone choosing to drive 74mph in a 25mph zone can be said to have disregarded safety. And if you haven’t realized you are going 74mph in a 25mph zone, you shouldn’t have a license, let alone be an officer.

I am not any kind of expert either, but I have been following this company for a couple of years. If it makes it to market and is at all price competitive i can’t see it not being a big deal. Granted, that is an if, not when, but they seem to be further along than most battery tech you read about.

No rare earth metals or even nickel or copper, has a very flat degradation curve even at charge rates up to 30C (testing stopped at 3k cycles in the coin cell tests), non flammable and non toxic. The only thing you would wish for is better capacity, but it is already better than any mass produced Li ion cell, and it has a theoretical maximum a couple times that of Li ions.

You’re right, battery news IS always breathlessly excited about the next crazy advancement, but they have a lot of things in their favor on this one. They broke ground on a manufacturing plant last year, which is not the case for most battery news stories. And the battery uses no rare earth metals, is non flammable, and performes better by nearly every metric than lithium ion. If they make it to market, I think they will absolutely be revolutionary.

A increasing percentage of new construction gets heat pumps. Some replacement HVAC units make the switch, but there is still a large portion of people who won’t because of misinformation and/or stubbornness.

But, unfortunately, most existing residential systems do not use heat pumps, under 20% in the US I believe.

They are too expensive. But only because auto manufacturers are only making midsized and larger suvs or luxury cars. The average price of an EV has dropped over 50% in China since 2015. That would have been tough for us to match, mostly because of batteries, but we could have made much more progress than we have.

The electric grid isn’t nearly as unprepared as people say. Sure, we need to build out more charging stations, but the grid as a whole far exceeds current needs. In fact, nationwide electrical usage is actually trending down in the US because of efficiency gains. Better building codes, heat pumps, LED lighting, if it uses electricity newer stuff is more efficient. If we had sold 8 times as many EVs in 2023 than we did, electricity usage would have stayed about flat.

https://cleantechnica.com/2024/02/02/the-us-added-1-2-million-evs-to-the-grid-last-year-electricity-use-went-down/

Well, as far as crash safety, I would think it would almost always safer to be facing backwards. That’s the way infant car seats are. Facing backward would mean your whole body would absorb the inertia change against the seat and your head would be supported. Better than seat belt bruises and a bobble head imitation, seems like.

That’s assuming the forward facing people in the back row are buckled of course. 60 mph headbutt would be…bad. Turn those seats around too maybe?

I believe they are kei cars. I looked up the safety ratings on them when I heard about them, and the D.O.T. equivalent board that rated them gave them 5 stars. But it could be that was a kei car specific rating. It did show diagrams with front and side air bags, and all the electronic crash avoidance systems. It’s bigger and seems like it would be safer than a smart car. I honestly think the hold up is that if we had options like that in the US fewer bigger, more expensive, cars would be sold. Maybe not a lot fewer, but enough fewer that it is overall more profitable not to offer them.

Nissan Sakura and Mitsubishi eK X EV are $14-16k, but are only for sale in Japan. Nissan closed orders for the Sakura because they already had more orders than capacity to make them. We need vehicles like that everywhere! That would drive EV adoption far, far more than another “affordable” $45k SUV.