OK. Well it's possible to build you house out of gold bricks and diamond-encrusted windows, but there's a reason people don't do that, either.

In Soviet Poland, picture Photoshops YOU!

Really, no need to get emotional, insulting, or to make much in the way of value judgments. People often borrow money, and sometimes for a variety of reasons, turns out they can't pay it back.

And when that happens, we've got this thousand year old anglo-saxon legal tradition that lets us sort these things out in court if need be -- as opposed to bludgeoning each other with axes to settle it.

No big deal.

Yeah but it's all duct-taped up like a 3-year old Ford!

David Wright: "I venture to suggest that half the population of the USA (which is where so many EV-skeptics reside) will be driving electric vehicles themselves in ten years."

There is no possibility whatsoever of that happening, not even close. Factors you've got to consider are installed base, rate of new car manufacture and purchase, rate of old car scrapping, and the very long development and lead times of mass producing new vehicles.

There are now some 220 - 230 million ICE cars in the U.S., a number increasing several million per year as new car sales are larger than numbers scrapped.

Current sales of EVs in 2008 = close enough to round down to zero. How do you expect EVs to have placed 120 or 130 million vehicles in the fleet by 2018? No chance. It'll take that decade for manufacturing to ramp up, and US sales of EVs to even pass -- what, 1 million? 2 million? -- per year, pretty much the best possible scenario.

Far more likely than your expectation, is that in 2018 new ICE cars will still be outselling new EV cars by 10:1 -- that's all assuming things actually progress sufficiently with EV battery tech, which remains to be seem.

"78% of us drive less than 40 miles each day.
85% less than 50 miles"

So what, why even quote stuff like this, do you think the rest of us don't know that we don't drive 500 miles every day? I drive less than 40 miles MOST days too. But sometimes I need to travel 200 miles and sometimes I need to travel 500 miles, and every once in awhile I need to travel 1200 miles. Those occasional long-distance needs make an electric car totally and completely useless.

Because that's why I own a car. So that I can independently travel further than walking distance when I need to. Sometimes that means a 450 mile trip.

It's one thing to claim to be "interested" in an EV1, and quite another to be interested enough to slap down $30,000 to buy an EV1, which obviously very few people wanted to do.

You mean that I can save money by not buying a $20,000 car if I can tolerate limiting myself to bus routes?

You mean if I seldom drive I might not want to spend an additional $10,000 on a too-fancy car?

Wow, thank God there are hardworking journalists unlocking these inscrutable mysteries for us rubes. Slow news day I guess

"Unless you have a compelling need to hear Howard Stern unfiltered, most of the rest doesn't sound much different than what you can hear on terrestrial radio."

C'mon, I COULD heap abuse on you for such a dumb statement -- you're one of those people who don't get out of the big city much, aren't you? Try driving through southeast Oklahoma and see what you can find on the radio. Between the talk, sports & music, satellite radio is vastly different and has tons of stuff unavailable in the AM/FM band in any city in the country. And BTW I never listen to Howard Stern -- personally I spend more time listening to the CNBC audio track than anything else, which you can't get on terrestrial radio.

Since you couldn't be bothered to look it up I'll mention that sat radio has by now well over 16 million paying subscribers who appear to disagree with you. Standalone tuners have never been the primary focus of their sales effort, and if those are falling now it might be because 8 or 10 million new cars are now sold each year with integrated tuners (nearly all GM vehicles, for example).

What a boon to parents, who'll now be able to say:
"Quit whining Junior. Starving children in Mongolia have to use BLACK AND WHITE computer screens to look at porn."

*** If the driver miscalculates and ends up driving beyond the remaining "eletric" range, the car goes into "charge sustaining" mode. The gas engine does not recharge the battery completely, so no "gasoline generated energy" would end up going to the grid. ***

You are wrong, Chris. As you acknowledge, a driver who has miscalculated (and who's going to guarantee that no one will ever miscalculate or have a change in evening plans?) will now burn some gasoline on the way home. So instead of a pure-electric commute, gasoline is thus being consumed that otherwise would not have been, as a direct result of the driver having sold electricity from his battery earlier in the day.

It does not matter that the car is in "charge sustaining mode" or that the battery is not fully recharged. Those details are distractors. The car is burning gasoline because and only because it had traded away battery power to the grid.

Yes this means gasoline is being burned in order to supply the grid with electricity: grid electricity is generated by gasoline. This is quite clear.

This is not a difficult concept. I don't understand why people have trouble grasping it.