Presumably these things are available because there are customers for them. I’d guess there might be places in the world where a facility like this would be worth the expense. That would be a different way of life, to be sure.

The story of an illegal garden in Brooklyn.

Today I went for a drive in a brand new Nissan Leaf. The Leaf, as you may know, is an electric car.There aren’t that many true electric cars on the market (the Chevy Volt doesn’t count because it has both electric and gasoline power plants; the Leaf is all battery, all the time).

The Leaf is surely one of the butt-ugliest cars I’ve ever seen in my life, but otherwise it’s a pleasant ride. I took it out for a drive of about 25 kilometers, and was, of course, worried that the battery would run out. However, the car was fully-charged when I picked it up, and is capable of covering up to 140 kilometers on a charge, depending on driving conditions.

If I hadn’t known it was electric, I would not have been able to tell from the driving experience, except to say that the car was unusually quiet. The Leaf is comfortable, well-appointed, nicely detailed, and quite straightforward once you get past the fact that there’s no ignition key (you start it like a computer, by pushing a power button on the dashboard). The dashboard is reassuringly informative about the available charge, the distance remaining, and even an estimate of the time you’ll need to charge it back up. When you plug it in at the end of your day, there’s a flashing blue “charging”  light on the dashboard, easily visible from a distance, so that you might look at the car in the driveway, say, and you’ll know if it’s still charging. For today’s 25K trip, I racked up an estimated charging time of 2.5 hours. Kudos to Nissan for a brave innovation.

the Rachel Maddow Show, 2011 Nov 21

How a Common Sandbox Is Battling Arizona’s Wallow Fire | Techland | TIME.com

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT_UmBHMYzg

Americans at their best. The filmmakers have created a “day in the life” snapshot of the global human world and of the Internet. I’m actually just sitting down to watch it, and can only bear witness to the first few minutes; but it’s immediately riveting and beautiful.

Here’s some news from MIT, about emerging technologies to make batteries lighter and quicker to charge.

These improvements may presumably make batteries better everywhere they are used, but in particular (if the innovations pay off and can be deployed at the scale of the auto industry), they bring the performance of electric cars (slow to charge, limited in range) closer to that of cars powered by gasoline.

I don’t know but I’d have to guess, a lot of money is flowing toward research into better batteries, especially for cars. From stories like the ones above, it sounds like this is starting to pay off.

I’d imagine that car manufacturers in particular can see, they need to make batteries work in a big way. Of course, auto manufacturers probably also live from the intention that the world to come will have even more cars than exist on the planet today.

Now here’s the thing: so far, the electric cars treated as a serious alternative in the market closely resemble the cars we’re used to, in their size, speed and comfort.

There is one great error or blindspot, I find, in much of the discourse about autobiles and what they must become. Cars like the Chevy Volt proclaim: business as usual! On one level, the Volt is plainly expensive transitional technology; but it sets an expectation. As/when batteries get better, your next next car (the affordable and range-anxiety-free EV that is surely in the pipeline as we speak) will let you kick the gasoline habit and this will be mostly painless. Happy motoring!

It’s important to ask, what are the unchallenged economic assumptions of a future where the global market for cars is growing? What has to persist, so that this can transpire? Here’s a problem that stays with us: what to do with the cars we don’t want any more?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz1ECsWR8h8

Oh, to be young. Of course, when I was a boy, of an age to have a toy like that: we used to go roaming about, all over the countryside. Kids don’t I think get to do that as much, any more.