And there are tons of used 172's in excellent condition for a third that price.
Or, you could compare the Terrafugia to a two-seat LSA. That would be a fairer comparison, since the Transition is an LSA while the 172 is a real certified airplane. Pipistrel and Icon both sell LSAs for about half the price of a Transition.
The problem is that the limitation is physics, not engineering. There is little overlap between what characteristics make a good airplane and what make a good car. Additionally, many of the characteristics that make a good [airplane|car] directly work against your efforts to make a good [car|airplane].
Let me give you some concrete examples: You want an airplane to be light, have good impact protection from the front (because airplanes very rarely get run into by a mountain from behind), and not require long runways. A car, on the other hand, must have good impact protection from all sides, fit inside a lane on the road, and good acceleration so you can merge onto the freeway.
The second car requirement and last airplane requirement together necessitate folding wings, which are heavier than fixed wings (and also more complicated and more expensive). Short of a powered-lift design (which is going to be even more insanely expensive), there is no other way around the physics. It doesn't matter how good your engineers are. Physics puts limits on what you can do with a wing.
The side and rear impact protection on a car do nothing beneficial to the airplane, but add weight. Again, clever engineering can only do so much within the limits of physics with regard to material strength. I don't care if you use the most expensive quantum-dot-infused titanium-nanotubes: Real-world materials have strength limits.
As part of making an airplane light, you're probably going to want to put a small, air-cooled engine in it (the Rotax 912, used in the linked aircar, produces between about 90 and 110 HP, depending on the variant). Even a light car is going to have very poor acceleration with that engine. Again, this is a matter of physics: F=ma. Some sort of continuously-variable transmission will help a bit, but you still only have 110 HP to work with.
Smartphones have improved radically over the past 10 years because the problem was not physics, but rather engineering. Software engineers made better software (which is really what made the iPhone different from Blackberries when it was introduced) and hardware engineers made better CPUs to run the software at a decent speed.
What's wrong wrong with it is simple: The question "Is PCM transparent?" is not subject to taste. It either is or it isn't. If listeners can't tell the difference between a source that is being reproduced from PCM or one that is being reproduced from DSD, then we can objectively state that PCM does not degrade sound quality.
You and I can disagree about whether impressionism is a "good" style of painting. The art world spent a good deal of energy debating that point. That is something which is subject to taste. But if you say "yes" and I say "no" to the question of whether van Gogh created his impressionist painting on canvas, then only one of us can be right. In this case, my insistence that van Gogh didn't paint on canvas would put me squarely in the loony or wacko category.
France probably doesn't tie both its rail agency's hands behind its back with pointless environmental impact reports (the sole purpose of which seems to be to generate extra revenue for civil engineering contractors) and then let NIMBYs sue because this or that insignificant detail wasn't included.
France is an interessting case. If I remember well, the have a group of people (project managers, politians, you name it) preparing the case well before any actual construction work starts. Yet, as afar as I remember, there actually were some controversies when they started a TGV line somewhere in northern France. But it still works pretty well, one benefit of being highly centralized.
Another factor at play is that TGV lines are purpose built for high-speed traffic (curve radius, climb rate, ...) while for example in Germany they are mostly shared. That makes the single TGV track cheaper, but you still ahve to built another track for lets say freight. If want another track, that is.
But the cool thing ist that TGV don't stop at every single village that happens to be the hometown of some polititian.
I think one aspect is just that the decision is made definitively at some point, in advance. People have different opinions: impact on historic buildings, noise, environment, other things. This is all debated up front, and then the legislature either approves it, or it doesn't. But when it was approved, it was approved. You can't sue in court to stop the plan on environmental grounds or noise grounds or something else, once the legislature has decided to go ahead with it, because the authorizing legislation supersedes any contrary legislation.
But the U.S. delegates decision-making to agencies and courts in a way that this doesn't happen. California might take input for a long time before deciding on its plan, but its final plan is still not final. Anyone can sue it for many different reasons. Maybe it violates the federal Clean Air Act, maybe it violates property rights, maybe something else. The decision is never final until every challenge to an agency or court is decided, which massively adds to uncertainty and costs.
What John Dakota said, plus one more thing: I've noticed that papers written in the past ten years tend to be written by people who have poorer writing skills (to the point of sometimes writing nearly incomprehensible paragraphs) than papers published, say, 30 to 40 years ago. At least in my field and a few somewhat-related fields. It may be different in other fields.
It's possible that some of today's reviewers also have poorer reading skills than reviewers 40 years ago, and thus don't really understand what they are reading some of the time. Combined with a lack of time, they might simply skip parts they do not understand.
Why would you base your assumption on experience with laptops when you have access (through the magic of the Internet) to perfectly good data about the Tesla Roadster? They've been on the road for over four years now.
It says that the batteries have, on average, over 80 percent capacity remaining after 100,000 miles. 80% of the original 265 mile EPA range is still well over 210 miles of range.
Interesting... I've noticed your username above several rather anti-social comments in several different threads over the last day or so. I wonder why.
/Meta
To be honest, I don't think alxndr was being snarky. I see plenty of drivers plow through stop signs at 5-10 mph. I also see plenty of people on bikes plow through stop signs at 5-10 mph. Both are in the wrong, but the fact that the person on the bike was going the same speed before the stop-sign doesn't seem hugely relevant to me. What does seem relevant is that plowing through at 5-10 mph in a car is far more likely to injure or kill a pedestrian or cyclists than doing so in a car, for simple reasons of mass and vehicle width.
Frankly, your little rant sounds like the self-serving justification I usually hear from several of my friends and relatives for raging at cyclists. Those friends and relatives are among the least courteous and defensive (that is to say, the most dangerous towards other drivers and cyclists around them) drivers I've ridden with. I hope for your sake and mine that you are not like that.
Drivers opening their doors into the bike lane without looking doesn't help cyclists avoid weaving in and out of it. And before you say anything: In California (and I believe this is true in many other states), opening your door into traffic (and, yes, cyclists count as traffic) automatically puts you at fault in the even of an accident or incident.
I have seen such notes, but you have to take them with a grain of salt. When a department posts a note like that it's sort of the corporate equivalent of "Don't talk to our managers: submit your resume on this web form right here." So you should still talk to professors (but don't waste their time).
When a professor writes that on his/her personal/research website, it means "I already have grad students coming out of my ears, and I don't have enough grant money to support even half of them." This is useful information, because you (should) pick a grad school based on who you want to work with. You need to look elsewhere if all the professors you want to work with at a particular school are over-subscribed. Some professors also become jaded by the sheer number of unqualified candidates who can't hack it: None of the string theory groups in my school will talk to you until after you've been admitted, gotten good grades for a couple semesters and the passed department's second-year screening exam with a good score.
Let me part with this: I got into grad school (probably) mostly because I sent an email to the professor who ended up being my research advisor. I described what I did in the past (which was sorta-kinda tangentially in the same field), omitted any mention of my (not very good) grades, and asked a non-time-waste-y question about the research group. The thing about grad school (at least in the hard sciences) is that one of the criteria for admission is "doesn't anybody want this candidate in his/her research group??" When you have someone pulling for you on the inside, getting in is a whole lot easier.
> As I understand it TSA only do the finding of the guns and it's local law enforcement who does the rest. So TSA have no idea about who's allowed to carry the weapon or not.
I have no idea if this is true, but let's assume it is.
So what? How does that prevent TSA's Office of Public Relations from following up with law enforcement after the fact? Is there some law of which I'm unaware that prevents the TSA from asking the local PD for statistics about this sort of thing?
> Just because we find a prohibited item on an individual does not mean they had bad intentions, that's for the law enforcement officer to decide. In many cases, people simply forgot they had these items.
Or, you could compare the Terrafugia to a two-seat LSA. That would be a fairer comparison, since the Transition is an LSA while the 172 is a real certified airplane. Pipistrel and Icon both sell LSAs for about half the price of a Transition.
http://www.pipistrel-usa.com/ http://www.iconaircraft.com/