Sounds like the script from the classic War Games movie from 1983.

Depends on your use case but this time I would agree that range will be an issue for many classic motorcycle uses and charging time too slow. It is where BE motorcycles lag behind BE cars.

For commuting BE motorcycles have been up to the job for decades. For off road riding they are fine too in most cases but the range could be an issue on longer tail rides. My 2024 OSET TXP-24 got me a couple of hours riding on forestry tracks to the top of the local hills using only about a third of the charge, so covers my current needs ok. The small and easy to change of battery on the TXP range would make all day riding possible if a battery was ready at suitable stops through the day. One nice thing about the OSET is it about half the weight of the ICE motorcycle it replaced but with similar performance. As I have got older dealing with a heavy bike on dirt tracks had been an issue, so the OSET has made a few more years riding possible for me.

Last time I checked the specs of the Zero, about 5 years ago, they would not be suitable for a day road trip of the type you mention. That is a use case I like, so I think any current model would fall short of the mark. There are other more common use cases where the currently offering would be ok, like a day trip to the nearest big city, so I would still buy a Zero today if they were sold here. I'm guessing we are still about 5 to 10 years away from seeing the first models that can do the kind of trip you mention.

Charging is a real issue, with all models I have seen so far having slow charging. Rapid charging simply takes up too much space and weight to work well on current motorcycles. There are some smart engineers out there so hopefully they will come up with an acceptable solution but I don't care to speculate when that might happen.

If you care about noise and smell then buy an ICEV, but if you care about performance it has to be a BEV. I was walking thru a mall the other day and they had couple of Lotuses on display. They look pretty sharp but when I looked that spec sheets they both had slower 0-100kph times and lower top speeds than my Tesla and I bet they cost a lot more.

The nice guys at Zero let me ride one of their bikes when I was visiting the USA, really liked it. I like how BE motorcycles can give you more power with less weight to have to deal with. With an ICE motorcycle more power means more weight where as the BE it is more range that adds more weight. They don't sell the Zero in my country yet, or else I would have brought one by now. They do sell the OSET off road BE motorcycles here and I have a couple of them, much easier to man handle off road as they weigh less than half that of a comparable ICE motorcycle.

Depends on the country, but in many countries and market segments BEVs are already cheaper to purchase than ICEVs, even without subsidies, and the saving after purchase are greater making them an easy choice. As for the practicality BEVs are fine for most people in most use cases and as the range of models improves the cases where they are unsuitable will continue to become more rare.

Yes, the density of a city has a big influence on how practical public transport is. Just got back from Tokyo where the subway system is great to use, but back home which is rural for me, there is zero public transport. On the other hand BEVs are great for rural living given the long distance to gas stations vs the ease of installing solar panels for charging BEVs.

Well the Chinese appear to have the capacity, and BMW does not, hence their bitching about the industry being killed.

Yea, it does sound like cayenne8 doesn't have kids or grandchildren. I'm old enough that the lag in the damage we have done and continue to do may not affect me too much in my remaining years but I do worry how bad it might get during my kids' lifetimes and my grand daughter's lifetime.

It is something I have wanted to address for a while but only in the last 5 years it has become viable to ditch all my gas power devices and vehicles in favor of battery electric alternatives and at the same time use only clean electricity sources, in fact becoming a net exporter of clean power. At least I can say I tried to improve things, rather than ignoring the issue by saying "relax and enjoy life a little.".

Yes, I like roundabouts because when used in the right locations they flow so much better, but when there is an unbalanced heavy traffic flow traffic lights are the better way to go. Likewise if you need more than one lane at lot of the easy convince is lost.

Yeah, nah. We are pretty tolerant of that kind of things, unless you are a Destiny Church member.

Actually snails have featured in New Zealand animal rights. There has been conflict around some endangered snail species and planned mining operations with mining being blocked or snails being relocated.

Is that flame bait or do not really know Australia and New Zealand are different countries? Granted they are similar in a lot of ways, but in wildlife they are very different countries. The main difference is Australia has lots of animals that want to kill you, and we apparently have left-spiral snails.

Fair enough, I like what his companies have achieved, but at a personal level there is a lot I don't like about him, so respect your view point.

I was wondering what that "one line of code" was, but Google didn't give an immediate answer. Anyone know that answer for someone too lazy to dig for it before breakfast?

I would assume they will be factoring in the cost replacing both vehicles after number of launches as part of the launch costs. In that sense just using the fuel cost would be misleading. From my non-perfect memory they assumed 10 launches for falcon9 in the early days, but have since increased the assumed operational life since they are routinely passing 20 flights already. I'm guessing they will do the same for starship, assuming a modest reuse number until it has proven itself.