patrick.net

It's not about "need" or helping people, it's about MONEY and ROI! Fixing the inner cities of America will cost more, that means less profit. Buying up land for nothing with cheap labor costs could net a much bigger profit.

Money doesn't grow on trees. It's sitting in oil wells and ore concentrates around the world. We have already pumped out most of our oil and gotten rich off of it. Now, the Libya's are milking their cash cow. I don't mind US companies making money on projects in places with natural resources.

TPB, you can have an electric car if you want one, and you won't have to pay for big company marketing, corporate excess, and legacy expenses. You can take an older donor car, and pay about $5K for electric components & batteries. If you want to spend 12K or so, you can get the donor car and a kit with everything needed to drop in with no fuss. In LA, it is even easier. There is at least one shop that is producing cars or converting your car. I think it takes a week or two for them to do the conversion once you set up your appointment. Those types of kits would be good for short range (50miles or so).

A word about batteries. A taxi fleet in San Francisco put 300K miles on a fleet of ford escape hybrids with no battery issues at all over a period of about 3 years. Batteries do have a hard time with irregular use/disuse over long time periods. I think that a home brew electric with cheap batteries would make a killer daily driver over short distances.