I love the bathtubs in the Kalil house; one of the things I guess you can do w/ a slab foundation (that I've never seen in a more modern slab house) is to sink the bathtub so that the rim of the tub is even with the floor. I guess it made the last owner of the house (Dr. Kalil's brother) able to live in it until he was 101.
It'd be in litigation forever; which is why nobody with the means would try to build something like that today. Even if they could afford the construction, they can't afford the time in court.
Larry Ellison owns a replica Japanese daimyo mansion in Woodside, two mansions on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, and 98% of the island of Lanai...but none of those structures there are (AFAIK) atop a permanent watercourse.
That hous is still extremely small for what most people in the US would put in a full sized suburban lot: Nowadays a median build is 2300 square feet (213 square meters). It makes that 1600 square feet look very small. The hallways, the large space dedicated to a great room and just 2 bedrooms won't help.
You will find new houses that small, but typically when it's extremely high value land, so typically infill. And then chances are it's a multi story house that fits the lot to the limit.
1600 square for two bed/two bath will feel large if well designed; many modern houses are not well designed for their size - usually one version of a given plan is the "optimal/designed" version, and you can keep adding things that make it frankly ridiculous, weird winding hallways, small rooms, etc.
That said, the kit pictured will, if constructed, will have amenities & physical qualities that the similarly sized original Jacobs house has had to have retrofitted at great cost.
At operating temperatures, a modern ICE w/ a 3-way catalytic converter driving at highway speeds through the right environment (L.A. on a bad smog day) could easily have NOx and VOC levels at the tailpipe that are lower than what's going into the intake manifold.
It's the correct argument. Bob Lutz deals with it in one of his books.
The EV1 was a evaluation exercise/hedge against regulation; the impetus was a lunatic assertion in 1990 by the CA gov't: they wanted 10% of cars sold in the state by 2000 to be electric. Nobody outside of Sacramento thought this would be doable, but it was an excuse to do some useful R&D, as well as to demonstrate to lawmakers the difficulties involved.
As for the Prius-the Gen I Toyota Hybrid Synergy Drive cost $380 million in 1990s dollars for R&D. Anybody at GM trying to spend that kind of money on an experimental(!) powertrain for a low-volume(!!) economy(!!!) car would've been fired. At Toyota, Shoichiro Toyoda was supportive of such an idea, despite the limited opportunity for near-term profit; and if you have that last name at that company, nobody's gonna fire you.
How much do you think an electric S-10 cleared in terms of net profit, vs. a gas S10? Even before factoring in the development costs for the electric powertrain.
If you had to defend it to a roomful of the guys who would be writing checks for the program (and who, incidentally, decide what your annual bonus will be...) what would that sound like?
I don't believe they actually sold many of those, they had the same lease-only issue as the ev1, with the exception of a few private (ie government) owners...
The easiest way to make EVs more attractive is to have a battery w/ the power density of a 14-gallon stamped-steel tank filled with gasoline, at no more than 10% of the total BOM cost of the vehicle.
reply