Probably much safer than a motorcycle though. I always found it interesting how we have such strict crash safety testing for cars, but still allow motorcycles despite them being incredibly dangerous. Maybe just because it is visually obvious that a motorcycle is dangerous? Or more likely because everyone would get mad if you tried to ban them.
* Motorcycles aren't very dangerous to bystanders.
* Approximately zero infants or toddlers are routinely transported via motorcycle.
* Motorcycles don't make up a large percentage of traffic in the U.S.
* Motorcycle deaths are more likely to leave donable organs intact, so it's a bit like the lottery, but for organs. Some people opt in to entertainment, and the rest of society benefits.
EuroNCAP ratings are harsher, so not really. It's mostly that the US system is based on SUVs and other behemoths. Look at the new small Toyota Yaris. That's what is required to get a good rating these days. Most newish SUVs doesn't even have the same amount of safety systems (like airbags between driver and front passenger seat).
I was speaking solely about regulatory requirements (i.e FMVSS) for selling a vehicle, not the NCAP programs. It is generally legal to sell vehicles with bad NCAP scores. For instance: the 2018 Fiat Panda met EU regulations to be sold but scored 0 stars on EuroNCAP.
I think it's not that the US is odd as much as each market is odd in a different way.
I remember one of the points of the failed trans-atlantic trade treaty was about handling where the stop lights should be on cars, because "safety" regulations differ.
Yes, the EU has high standards and differs from the US mainly on minor details.
Standards (or lack thereof) in much of Asia/Africa/S.America are on a whole different planet.
I guess my point is, not being approved for sale in the US doesn’t mean the car is shockingly different than many other cars in the rest of the world. You can find unsafe cars that would be illegal to sell in the US that say “Nissan” or “VW” on them just over the border in Mexico.
Every manufacturer builds cars to meet the specific requirements and needs for a market. In many countries, the requirements are low and the #1 priority is cheap.
I wonder what’s worse: being squashed inside this car or just become airborne when scooter hits something. At least you’re required to wear a helmet when on a scooter. But as someone said here, if we only had those cars on the road(and a 30 km/h speed limit), it’d be much safer.
Seatbelts saved a bunch of lives by preventing occupants from getting flung out the car, so I’d imagine that being in the car is safer.
Current road death trends in the US indicate that people inside cars are dying less, but people outside of them are dying more, notably cyclists and pedestrians.
If they would be used for city speeds only, the risks aren't much bigger compared to scooters, in contrary.
But I have 0 doubt that being priced so aggressively, US and Europe would slap such a huge tariff to protect local markets, they would be very uncompetitive.
A lot of hedge funds don’t really have the ability to find their own investing ideas so they just copy and pile on to existing trades.
Nuclear is their attempt at creating something, which I might mention is expressly opposite the vision of something that Tesla with its batteries represent.
Care to expand on this? It sounds like you're saying hedge fund managers are jealous of Elon Musk's creativity, so they decided to push for more nuclear reactors, so they could feel some ownership in the ideas. Am I misunderstanding you?
I'm still not connecting the dots. If nuclear succeeds, then it makes Elon look bad? Buying nuclear stocks doesn't help the nuclear companies unless they're making secondary offerings. If nuclear success makes Elon look bad, then maybe VC funding would be the way to go, but I'm not sure there's much overlap between people with influence in VC funds and hedge fund managers who were big Tesla shorts.
Something really doesn't make sense here, but there aren't enough details in your post to tell if fund managers are really being that irrational, or if the post itself just doesn't make sense.
That part I kind of understand. However, I'm having trouble seeing the strings by which the puppet masters manipulate the marionettes. These hedge fund managers who shorted Tesla... they're trying to bring about a nuclear future... buy buying already issued nuclear-related stocks? Have there been any big secondary stock offerings in the nuclear industry lately? Are the puppet masters buying up corporate debt instruments in large volumes? If they're calling in favors from journalists, why do journalists owe them favors?
I'm willing to believe the players on the stage are marionettes, but I need to be told where to look for the strings so I can see them for myself. Exactly how are these sour Tesla shorts pushing nuclear?
You’re purposely being obtuse so I’m going to stop responding to you now.
To everyone else, hedge funds don’t give a shit about what actually happens except that they can make money on it. And if you’re curious about how salty hedge funds can get when they lose on a trade, I recommend looking up the Herbalife saga. Tesla and GameStop are still currently ongoing examples as well.
I'm not being obtuse. I'm trying to help you present a testable hypothesis. You've done a good job at explaining the "who" and the "why", but you haven't given any examples of "what" these Tesla shorts are doing to promote nuclear power. I tried giving some possible examples of actions they might plausibly take to promote nuclear power.
Without any verifiable examples of things Tesla shorts are doing to promote nuclear power, your statement comes across as a conspiracy theory.
It’s a point to note that without Google Fiber bashing in traditional telecom, we’d still be at 10Mbps upload/download being deemed “blazing fast internet”.
Keep that in mind the next time you pay your monthly bill for AT&T/Time Warner/Comcast/Verizon. They could’ve given you gigabit speeds the entire time.
Batteries are also getting cheaper and improving in capacity at immense rates too no? It seems like a double whammy against nuclear, unless there’s something I’m missing?
Triple whammy if you include the larger and larger capacity factor of ever growing wind turbines (and offshore). Even if you're overprovisioning 2x and fill in with battery capacity for some of the shrinking holes inbetween, you'll end up cheaper than nuclear.
Which, on the other hand also still does not factor in the externalities of the still-not-solved issues of final deposition of nuclear waste (some quote 38 billion still outstanding for just getting rid of the current ones that haven't been factored into historic electricity prices), defending against proliferation and antitrust issues due to the massive capital investment and minimum size of nuclear power plants.
I used to be pro-nuclear at some point, but just looking at the current wholesale prices and trends, it's basically game over for nuclear.
Average lifetime of those batteries are about 7 years before a full replacement.
Everyone also seems to clearly ignore how detrimental they are to the environment. There's huge swathes of toxic wastelands created from mining the materials needed.
So cost, lifecycle and externalised environmental damage is what I would say is missing here.
Late edit: Batteries certainly have their place in smoothing out the grid inputs, I don't want to come across as saying they are not useful when they certainly are. In South Australia the newly installed grid scale batteries have paid themselves off within a few years.
The article linked makes clear the engineering tradeoffs involved, and as a society we should always base these decisions on the numbers over emotion. Think there is a bright future for small modular reactors in remote and rural areas if communities are willing to accept them.
> Average lifetime of those batteries are about 7 years before a full replacement.
Based on what?
> Everyone also seems to clearly ignore how detrimental they are to the environment. There's huge swathes of toxic wastelands created from mining the materials needed.
I happened to read an article a few weeks back regarding Aluminum-Air batteries, and a potential use in EVs, yet while they might not be ideal for EVs, a potential ability for use in the grid might be convenient.
Perhaps because that standard design didn't work out?
Even Switzerland is shutting down nuclear plants and they managed to build the longest railroad tunnel of the world without budget overruns and half a year before due date.
That's not so clear cut. Mühleberg near Berne has said that 2019 they didn't make profit, however the operator company BKW never published gains with that plant.
It's obvious that energy sources based on local meteo conditions don't have 24/7 reliability. The question is: how much of that reliability do we need? What would be possible if we did forgo some? Most of our industrial processes are optimized for pure efficiency (optimizing asymptotic behavior with no regard to constants), which is biased towards high-energy, constantly running chains and immense infrastructure. These need reliability. If we optimize for more smaller workloads, which can start/stop depending on local conditions (and power source), then we loose some efficiency in the process but gain a lot in the simplicity of the energy supply chain (which may in the end translate in lower/comparable overall energy consumption).
There are two guiding clues for that. One is to look at https://www.electricitymap.org/ranking and see how Germany is doing. One can derive the weather based on how brown the color is.
The second clue is energy prices swings more heavier as a country replaces nuclear with renewable. Heavy energy using industries can't double production when prices shrink by 50%, but they will stop production when costs exceed profits. This is already happening in Sweden when prices jumped by +70% this winter. It will be interesting to see what happens when the steel industry is becoming even more dependent on energy prices and will have to stop for weeks during the winter, and the effect that will have on employment contracts.
Electricity production in the U.S. is only about 2% of GDP, but basically every economic activity relies on electricity to function. Having very much of the electric supply be truly intermittent would create enormous costs elsewhere in the economy. If you're going to power the U.S. on renewables, you're going to need a lot of storage to get the needed reliability, so if you're comparing costs, you need to compare an equivalent end product.
There’s no prospect of batteries acting as base load supply anytime in the foreseeable future. Batteries aren’t even great for peak supply yet. Those big grid-scale battery farms installed by Tesla (et al) are used primarily for grid stabilisation and a limited amount of useful arbitrage.
That is if, not only can we keep making them, we produce them at massive scales without inciting coups around the world for Lithium [1]. Because let us be honest with ourselves, the CIA has staged coups around the world many-a-times [2], and iirc but can't locate that some of said instances were done to support private entities.
Lithium for energy storage is not the only option. Pumped water already has been a thing for decades. Additionally other avenues are being explored like [1] pumped air and [2] lifting concrete weights.
Interesting solutions, especially the latter, absolutely brilliant, despite the reduction in efficiency, it probably trumps batteries wrt to first materials used.
