Aptera completes low-speed drive in its first production-intent solar electric vehicle
Aptera completes low-speed drive in its first production-intent solar electric vehicle
Spoiler Alert: The low-speed function test is short and sweet but a milestone nonetheless. Solar EV startup Aptera Motors has...
![Aptera completes low-speed drive in its first production-intent solar electric vehicle [Video]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/2b90b865-fcd6-4c43-ab94-4ae44fca7bd9.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=256)
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Please just do trains. They can even be solar powered - a lot easier than this.
Trains are easy and they're easily electrified already. So putting solar on the trains won't have any advantage.
Rails are the difficult part of railways. They never seem to put them between my house and my work. They've put something called a road in between instead.
I presume they meant to put in railway infrastructure.
Railways cost so much less than one highway, we could have a system basically from home to work.
(eg smol trams to a midway se station to high-speed trains)Is that true in California? Caltrain is costing $5.15 billion per mile.
I note with interest that you are repeatedly posting the same cherry-picked factoid.
Average cost per mile for new track in the USA can be anywhere from $100mil/mile to over $1billion/mile for complicated projects like tunneling. This is roughly 50% higher than Europe - most likely for the simple fact that they have a larger industry for it. These are both quite high on an international scale- China builds new track for 24-48mil USD per mile.
Caltrian is not California High Speed Rail
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.
No it's not, railway infrastructure comes at a fraction of a cost of highways, the maintenance alone, all the tires, fuel, insurance, etc of cars, even the environment impact (in like the area they cover/destroy) is minute.
All that costs, somebody has to pay.
Really? So we can install thousands of miles of rail for under a billion dollars? Let’s do it!
For raw resources sure, its properties acquisition that gets expensive. You still have to pay even with imminent domain and thats not getting into legal battles and the like. But at least in my neck of the woods I wish they could acquire the old industrial rails and use them for transport for workers.
You mean the huge underground train station & several miles of tunnels around if, with all the work preformed underneath an undisturbed city?
Yes, that is still waaay cheaper than constructing an underground highway of that magnitude/that area (+ an underground station you conveniently included in the estimate) .
Or did you have something else in mind?
Why would you build the highway underground?
Same reasons as railway I suppose - its expensive to destroy a city centre to get the land needed for it.
But you started the comparison with the underground thing.
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.
New electric car companies only intensity the always insufficient highways & daily rush hours adding time to peoples commutes.
Also cars cost money, we tend to forget that when talking about rail.
With less than 1bn you can build railroads between cities.
Some random sniplet (californiapolicycenter.org:
According to the HERS analysis, adding a new lane to an interstate on flat terrain in a rural area costs $2.7 million per lane mile. To do the same thing in a major urbanized area costs $62.4 million per lane mile, more than twenty times as much. Even minor projects display wide ranges in cost. Resurfacing an existing lane of a principal arterial in a flat, rural area costs $279,000 per lane mile. To do the same in a major urbanized area costs $825,000 per lane mile, three times as much.
(That is without car related costs with fall on individuals, or environmental costs that arent counted at all.)
California at the same time is building high-speed rail between LA & SF at 66 million per mile - that is including the railway stations & the city tunnels mentioned previously at billions per mile.
And that's also a stupidly mismanaged project with 200+ million dollars in literally just planning mistakes and human errors (or sabotage).
With low maintenance & basically unlimited capacity I can only see that as a cost efficient project that should have been done 50 years ago.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.
Kind of a different scale. $5.15 billion per mile of track for Caltrain. Aptera hasn’t even broken a billion in funding.
I note with interest that you are repeatedly posting the same cherry-picked factoid.
Average cost per mile for new track in the USA can be anywhere from $100mil/mile to over $1billion/mile for complicated projects like tunneling. This is roughly 50% higher than Europe - most likely for the simple fact that they have a larger industry for it. These are both quite high on an international scale- China builds new track for 24-48mil USD per mile.
$24-48m per mile is still quite a lot. It’s just not the same scale in expense.
Trains are already electrified.
Yes. That is the point.
As much as people on Lemmy love trains, they're not replacing cars no matter how good the infrastructure is.
I think the goal is they can replace cars a ton of the time for a ton of people. Take the train to work and then rent a car for the occasional road trip.
It's a noble goal don't get me wrong, but cars are just way too convenient to get rid of for most that don't live in the central zones of cities. Just things like taking your kid to their swimming lessons, evening activities, going to the tip and garden centre and dropping off at your parents en route, visiting friends that are several villages away, kids birthday party and then going to the supermarket after to pick up some food etc.
Something I've noticed is that people on Lemmy never seem to advocate for busses, it's always trains.