Juggling Dynamite

A dramatic car accident last weekend reminded of one of the most compelling selling features for electric cars:  not having ‘ICE’ (internal combustion engines) under the hood. This allows massive crumple zones to absorb impact and protect occupants. If going electric to help our health, environment and air quality isn’t enough to convince some, perhaps avoiding death and injury might be compelling?  See Tesla driver walks out unscathed after 500′ plunge over a cliff:

“…large crumple zones in Tesla’s vehicles (due to the lack of an engine) can be very useful in high-velocity impacts – sometimes even lifesaving. The driver said: “It felt rock solid to me and I feel lucky to be alive because of my Tesla.”

The roof also played a crucial role since the vehicle rolled and ended up upside down. The sunroof detached itself midway down the cliff, but it didn’t affect the strength of the Model S’ roof, which broke NHTSA’s roof-crushing test equipment when they performed their crash tests. It could register a result past 4Gs – meaning that 4 Model S’s could pile up on another without the cabin caving in.”

Generally, we humans tend to intellectual laziness. As Daniel Kahneman showed through decades of research, our ‘system 1’ intuitive, emotional and frequently erroneous thinking is easiest to access, where as our ‘system 2’ functions of methodical analysis, reason and assumption-checking take a lot more work, time and energy.

A unique challenge to our system 2 today, well beyond anything seen in history before, is the constant supply of easy, short, shallow info bites flowing around the internet day and night.  Fast food for the brain, they can fill and distract us without fueling the growth of mind muscle and strength.  Centuries of experience have shown that humans need rigorous systems, discipline and challenge in order to test and evolve our thinking and understanding of the world.

Another feature that has ‘dumbed’ the past 15 years has been the unprecedented proliferation of  ‘easy money’ and speculation courtesy of the finance sector and complicit politicians.  This has had the unfortunate effect of allowing weak hands to wield money and influence for years at a time, before intermittent, catastrophic wipe-outs reveal truth once more.

This video on the scientific method, reminds of the importance of critical, fact-based thinking.  In a world, where we are constantly urged to abandon the discipline of math and measurements and go with the flow, thinking people must keep lifting heavier weights.

OFFERING: A four-minute video on “Science in America” — https://t.co/2wEsrlJssj

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) April 19, 2017

Racing after Tesla, every week now another car company rolls out the timeline for its own fleet of electric vehicles. Neanderthal naysayers notwithstanding, the world is moving to EV and most people are recognizing that the business opportunity here is massive. Last month, John Goodenough, coinventor of the lithium-ion battery, announced a battery breakthrough, that is likely to accelerate EV tech and adoption faster than most imagined. Exciting stuff. This is what innovation does. See: Will a New Glass battery accelerate the end of oil?

Electric car purchases have been on the rise lately, posting an estimated 60 percent growth rate last year. They’re poised for rapid adoption by 2022, when EVs are projected to cost the same as internal combustion cars. However, these estimates all presume the incumbent lithium-ion battery remains the go-to EV power source. So, when researchers this week at the University of Texas at Austin unveiled a new, promising lithium- or sodium-glass battery technology, it threatened to accelerate even rosy projections for battery-powered cars.

“I think we have the possibility of doing what we’ve been trying to do for the last 20 years,” says John Goodenough, coinventor of the now ubiquitous lithium-ion battery and emeritus professor at the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin. “That is, to get an electric car that will be competitive in cost and convenience with the internal combustion engine.” Goodenough added that this new battery technology could also store intermittent solar and wind power on the electric grid.