My thinking is, hopefully electric cars will be improved so it won't be 'electric' or 'good performance'. Rather you'd get both... Now i'm dreaming.

Hahahaha! Hum a melody? I know of Mexican rides that'll do that... not with the engine, though. That's not the sort of tune I want to hear from my vehicle, toshiro! By Lightning, do you mean that Ford truck? 'Cause I'd prefer a P-38, haha.

Also.... when are electric engines going to be viable for airplanes? It would be sad if we decided to be altruistic and save the earth by equipping our Air Force with electric planes, only to be overrun by more "primitive" air forces still burning delicious hydrocarbons. The Earth would still not be saved.

Oh yeah.... until America can get over its nukular phobia, electric cars still burn hydrocarbons. Where do you think the electricity comes from in the first place, to charge the batteries?

I'm with Lecter. No one's taking my Jeep. They can try chasing me in their electric patrol cars.

[EDIT] They'd probably catch me. I don't get great gas mileage. I'd have to take it offroad and hide in the mountains. Come to think of it... that doesn't sound half bad.

Never happen, Tosh, and this for the same reason that places like Massachusets don't ban all guns: people with money have certain tastes. Vintage cars and pheasant guns happen to be two of them.

If it was not perfectly obvious, I was joking in that first paragraph of my previous post.

No, Chaos, neither that Lightning, nor this Lightning. This Lightning.

Now that is a cool car. Pity there's no way i can afford it. Like most other cool cars.

Yeah, same here. And the range is still execrable, in my opinion.

Let's wait a decade or two, and things'll have changed.

Guess that'll have to be that, yea.

I was pretty clearly talking about the banning of ICE cars, Tosh, rather than the literal destruction of them by targeted explosives.

I guess that proves just because it runs on "alternative energy" it doesn't have to be ugly. That really is a nice-looking car. It reminds me of an Aston Martin. Which makes me think.... I'd rather have an Aston Martin. Cool look similar to the Lightning, and the great sound and feel of an internal combustion engine.

The great thing is that as it stands now, my owning a Jeep or saving up for an Aston Martin doesn't stop you from buying a Lightning, and vice versa. Capitalism is great, isn't it? We will never run out of oil, because before we do it will become very economical to use nukular power to charge batteries in electric cars, or hydrogen, or something else. It's just not economical yet.... but fortunately there are rich people who can afford cars like the Lightning, investing in that technology by buying expensive toys like that, which gets production going so that eventually the rest of us can afford it, too.

And if you start targeting my ICE car with explosives, I might just target back. Now that would be an interesting reason to start a civil war....

I confess that, despite the months of man-hours I've put into the car, I'd probably crush my XJS into a cube for the right V12 Aston Martin. Very tightly put together, particularly for a British car.

Too bad they're at least a quarter million dollars for one in desirable condition.

Haha, what I wouldn't do for an Aston Martin like in the older James Bond films....

Nuclear power will never, ever be economical. As in, Never. With a capital N. To emphasize its neverness, like. And I'm not joking.

Also, Morgan Motors is making a hydrogen-powered car (called the Life Car, for some reason...), just to prove that it's possible. And it is!

One more thing: I know that making noise with your car is interesting to many people, but I somehow cannot take them seriously, for various reasons. Anyway, have fun with your cars. I know you will.

Making your engine's performance audible at higher speeds is one thing; making your car's intake/exhaust system so noisy as to disrupt the normal soundscape of a neighborhood as you pass though at 25mph is something else entirely.

Lecter beat me to it again. I hate those "coffee can" mufflers people put on their stupid Civics. They sound louder, but not better.

Why will nukular power never be economical? It's one of the rare things I wish America would emulate about European countries, is their reliance on nukular.

Of course hydrogen cars are possible, they're just not economical yet. I encourage all the research going into these alternatives, I just wish people would stop vilifying petroleum. I also wish the government would step aside and let natural market forces bring us the next thing instead of trying to force it before its time.

Speaking of alternative fuel vehicles and noise, I regularly experience an issue that many people have yet to think of: electric vehicles are sometimes TOO quiet. I live and work in Berkeley, CA, where we're hairy-armpit deep in electric cars. They're so quiet you can hear the granola crunching within. I've been surprised more than once by a silent car while biking or crossing the street. We need to bell these things. WVO is popular here too, but those things aren't quiet.

Nuclear power plants are absolutely economical and run beautifully in Western Europe. Fuel rods are recycled instead of being buried (as they are in the US) and the plants are financially viable despite the anti-nuke rhetoric to the opposite. The truth is found easily once you leave the cloud of opinion and look at the facts. I would gladly trade a nuclear power plant for the oil refinery that resides in a nearby city, and I'd take both over a coal-burning plant.

Whistler, that reminds me of a thing I once read:

When the first cars hit the market there was a suggestion for a law that stated that all cars should have bells on them to warn people that a car was approaching. Was meant to alleviate that horses got scared and such. Come to think of it, I think it was regarding steam powered and electric cars, can't see how you would miss something as noisy as the old school ICE cars:)

If you want to talk about Nuclear power and rentability you have to look to France, Finland and Japan for three different models that work. France doesn't have breeder reactor and exports the leftover material to Germany (gullible fools...) but their systems run very smoothly. Actually around 70% of all power in France=Nuclear. Finland does roughly the same and was the first to build new powerplant in Europe after the cold war.
Japan is afaik the only country to use breeder reactors for power production and are as such the ones with the least amount of waste. Remember though that they were forced to rely on Nuclear energy due to their limited access to raw materials among those coal and oil, and so had to make it very efficiently. Thus, much as it irks me (I rarely agree with any of your views Chaos...) I have to agree with one of Chaos' points: If we have to, we can make it work. What lacks is incentive. We could try removing all the subsidies from power production, put a CO2 tradeable tax on it instead and see what happens.....

Anyway, that Mitsubishi is ugly as hell! I like the Lightning though, all three of them!!!

Whistler, I do believe I acquaint myself with facts supporting both sides, thank you very much. The storage of radioactive waste is not solved as such (you still get radioactive waste you cannot recycle), the waste from western European nuclear power plants still has to be stored somewhere, and nobody wants that in their own backyard. I know that because Switzerland is relying heavily on nuclear energy (about 40%), and the debate about where to store the final waste resulting from the process is still on-going, going .

The plants are not financially viable once you take all costs into effect (and you have to), which include building it, maintaining it and tearing it down again, as well as storage of leftover nuclear waste.

There's no way nuclear energy is a viable source of energy to provide for the entire world's energy need alone. I don't think you meant to say that, but other countries have a right to have nuclear power plants, too, like China and India. As it stands, about 15% of the world-wide energy requirement can be satisfied by nuclear power for a few decades (four to five). After that, the uranium reserves are likely to become exceedingly scarce. Prices will soar, and the nuclear power plants will be more expensive than they are even now.

I think you are within the cloud of opinion, as well, so you should be wary to point fingers.

I am not opposed to nuclear power plants as such, as they present one way of acquiring relatively clean electrical energy. But they are by no means the only source, nor should they be. Solar power generation (solar-thermic as well as photovoltaic) are both viable ways, wind to a lesser extent. Plants making use of the tide are interesting as well, but, as with wind, we do not know what happens to the climate when they are built on a large scale, worldwide.

Booster rockets, enough thrust to leave earth orbit, towards the sun, make sure the thrust is -not- enough to have a stable orbit around the sun.

Voila. No more problems with nuclear waste, instead it's sent into that massive fusion reactor in the sky.

break19

Haha, exactly what I was going to say, break. I bet why they don't is they're afraid of an accident spreading that stuff over a large area. The real reason we have a hard time storing radioactive waste is irrational fear of the stuff. I blame Captain Planet (I'm half serious, actually). Nobody wants it in their backyard, even if that backyard is dozens or hundreds of miles from any population center, and completely safe. They don't even want it transported through their state or country. It's a manufactured crisis. Also, as I understand it the reason we don't do breeder reactors here is that they produce "weapons grade" radioactive products, and we signed a treaty with a nation that doesn't exist anymore that we wouldn't make the stuff. Stupid.

There's a similar problem with every other alternative fuel. No one wants it near them, or at least enough people don't. Solar takes too much space, disrupts migration patterns of turtles or whatever. Wind power kills birds, and some people (not me) think it's ugly. (The real problem is cost effectiveness, but that's improving.) Hydro-electric kills the salmon. Etc., etc. The only reason we get to use oil is that the infrastructure is already there and it's the only viable option we have at present to run our country. The world economy is literally fueled by oil.

And toshiro, I think Whytee has the evidence on his side. There are two things I wish we had that France has: more nukular plants, and a president who thinks America is a land of opportunity.

And France is shipping its nuclear waste to Germany. Case in point. Also, the reason as to why storing radioactive waste is so difficult is pretty much immaterial if you cannot act on it (and you can't really make people less afraid of nuclear energy, because they do not understand it...).

Solar power doesn't take that much space, and especially in areas where nobody's around (deserts...), people could care less. The real problem is transferring the energy to the area where it's needed.