You have landed among a bunch of hard nosed real people who actually do something
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Yep - for members, we're mostly not the spectators, but the actual doers who are pretty darn actualized. John being one of the better of us. We're not watching and eating the popcorn, we're putting on the show here. Or trying to. We like doing things that make others -
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Because we can - and so could many of them if they got off their butts.
One purpose of this board is to allow the establishment of what a patent lawyer would call "prior art" or in other words, prove who did something first. The other purpose is to troll for any real talent out there, and form this nice virtual network of pros to help one another - a lot of that is going on here via private messaging for example. It' makes each of us more effective and more valuable to employers and society at large.
And of course, there's this alt energy thing. And fun stuff with charged particles, and instrumentation, and theory and trade secrets and and and....
John, unless the NZ dollar tanks badly, the Volt (Or ampera if that's what they send) won't be that high - they are going down in price here. Mine, fully loaded and "no deals cut" was $42k, before a 7.5k tax rebate, so was really about half the price you're guessing. I don't own a prius, but have driven one, and I can really understand why you wouldn't be that enthused. Noisy, not very good looking, doesn't handle great, anemic power - it's a pure "how economical can we make a car" kind of car. The Volt instead was a "we're going bankrupt and need some really good new product, bet the company" car. It really shows in the result. This was confirmed by letting a prius owner drive it - now he's getting one for himself and trying to find someone to buy his prius.
There's a lot of interesting confluence in parts selection - a great big part of the car - the suspension and steering gear - are shared with BMW's and Audis...interesting - and that's kind of what the car drives like, midband German goodies. With the almost 50:50 weight distribution and the insanely low CG, this is a real sports car (well, if it had 50 more hp anyway). However, with the power it's got - I was able to easily and repeatedly just dust off one of those ricer racers (you know, the guys who take the muffler off a mitsubishi and put a wing on the back and think they're in Fast and Furious Tokyo drift movies). Ok, I've been driving this moderately treacherous twisty mountain road for probably longer than that guy has been alive, and we know what counts in those things - ability - but the car really did not let me down one bit. I just kept letting him catch back up so I could do it again, though with a lot less noise and tire squealing than he appeared to require...and it didn't even hurt my pure-electric range too much over what I get when "hypermiling". Basically only about 15% over the course of a 13.5 mile hot ride.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.