My wife really likes that you can control the temperature without having to interact with anyone.

However humans may also be getting better via self driving tools such as radar cruise control. So you’d need to compare to a human with access to these tools.

The very original post I responded to says:

Please just do trains.

Which implies don’t do cars.

What government money? Aptera is privately funded. They’ve won some government grants but most of their funding is from investors. They’re not taking money away from rail projects.

And even if we went all in on rail, what are we supposed to do in the years it takes to make the transition? Keep using ICE vehicles?

Because you have to approach the two problems differently. If you want to support the expansion of railways, you’ll need political willpower.

But if you’re an individual who needs a vehicle, wouldn’t the best choice be the most efficient one available?

Why would a new company increase traffic? Like people just have extra disposable income and love going out to drive when everyone else does?

If your argument is, someone who would have bought the car would instead switch to using rail. Then there is no place in the US that has heavy traffic that can also have a new railway built for under $1b.

But the city already has highways. If we started fresh sure let’s do more rail.

My point is just, what infrastructure can you do with say <$1b? It’s a lot of money but not building a whole new railroad kind of money. You can get a few station upgrade projects, a couple of electric trains, etc.

There’s room for private funding of a new electric car company. Save the tax dollars for big infrastructure projects.

Why would you build the highway underground?

Really? So we can install thousands of miles of rail for under a billion dollars? Let’s do it!

Ok? The point is that rail development is expensive and like an order of magnitude the cost of Aptera. Ideally we could do both but they shouldn’t be put into the same bucket.

$24-48m per mile is still quite a lot. It’s just not the same scale in expense.

Is that true in California? Caltrain is costing $5.15 billion per mile.

Kind of a different scale. $5.15 billion per mile of track for Caltrain. Aptera hasn’t even broken a billion in funding.

Maybe it’s a trap?

Scott Manley is good on factual space stuff.

Well a SWE at Google just won a Nobel in chemistry?

I’m thinking Splinter Cell had this kind of feature.

Oh dear. I was responding to a completely wrong comment thread…

For context I thought this thread was about Elysium the movie and the 1/3 budget was talking about District 9…

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