FastForward Radio

By | July 20, 2008
3 Comments

Phil Bowermaster, Stephen Gordon, and Michael Darling covered a lot of ground with this show.

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They talked about The Dark Knight film, the hybrid bridge to electric vehicles, how a Blue Ray player makes regular DVD’s look better, and they took a shot at figuring out how an electron can be two places at once.

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  • dantealiegri

    My answers for a few questions:

    * Why weren’t the big companies do the electric cars?

    Same reason big companies don’t do all kinds of thing: too much risk. Lots of literature talks about how large companies traditionally become very risk averse.

    * For the whole 100 mile electric car thing.

    People value time a LOT. It’s why many people still drive 70+ with gas at the cost it is; their time is worth more.

    I couldn’t have done my mini-vacation to a 250 mile away vacation spot this weekend if I had to spend 5 hours waiting for a battery.

  • MDarling

    Dantealiegri-

    I agree that risk aversion is an important reason big corpAmerica hasn’t innovated more on ev’s and other things.

    As for the value of time- I agree that people appear to value it a lot. But I would predict that if the added expense of cruising at 80mph (the norm here in Colorado) instead of 60 were visible and large enough- people would slow down.

    And while your 250 mile mini-vacation was only doable because refueling/range were not large impositions, I’d argue that if the fuel expense differential was large enough- it would overcome the range/recharge discomfort.
    Example- say the ev range was just enough for half- 125 miles.
    A driver could preposition a second battery pack at the halfway point- if the swap could be done briefly (Midas has a new biz) – pack 1 gets charged and is ready on the way home.

    Or that kind of trip might become a thing of the past.
    But I think 250 mile ev range is just around the corner- though your point would stand for “commonly taken now but longer than ev range car trip”. I think it can be addressed by an EV…if it’s cheap enough.

  • dantealiegri

    Oh, also what I wanted to mention about that location was that it’s a vacation spot that is used in a manner that a lot like the way I described in this area.

    People have vacation homes there are use the area for small vacations to just get away for a long weekend.

    So if travel increases by say 5 hours ( to this destination that takes about 5 total right now ), the entire area would suffer a lot, as almost the entire area revolves around this.

    I’m also sure a lot of other eastern coastal cities have things like this.