"Did the Hybridist kill the Electric Car?"
Why am I asking this? Well, remember the eighties? I do. In the eighties, in fact as early as the late seventies, electric vehicles (or at least research into such) started to arrive in driving magazines, like a promise of the future. We got all the tech specs about battery types, illustrated cutaways, etc. Drag coefficients were prominent, as I remember, suggesting that 'the way a car cuts through the air' might be more important than how many people can sit across a communal front seat.
But THE ELECTRIC CAR got murdered, it did. There are no two ways about it. Whether it was a funding issue, or an assassination issue or a simple bad publicity issue (battery recharge times, or weight, or toxicity, or any number of other innovation-negating factors) petrol-powered cars ruled and NO ONE WAS GOING TO GET IN THE WAY. So what's this?
The VW XL1 will be powered by a tiny 800cc diesel engine and a separate electric motor (SWNS)
Well, of course, it's yet another MASSIVE CORPORATION coming out with yet another variation on the die-stamp'd theme Hybrid Car i.e. one that still has a petrol engine drive an electric solution, this time with DeLorian-like Gull Wing doors. Woo hoo! How fashion changes but always recycles to the same core principles of 'look' over content.
So, the Oil Industry helped eradicate (or certainly didn't hinder the demise of) the old Electric Car inventors one by one (we must not forget that the entire board of Tesla Motors (like Poland's elected leaders) were taken out in a single plane crash) and we just go on paying for less and less innovative technology while THE OLD GUARD continue to reap their rewards, accrue their PROFIT.
Probably the most paranoid aspect of all this is the belief that there's a Grand Chess Game dictating which global moves are made, by whom and when. If some ardent i.e. hapless or blithely non-mortal researcher starts poking his nose into Affairs of the Corporate State, isn't it shocking that he seems to just DIE? It's happened time and time again, in politcs as well as business. As if he's been OFFed? As if someone TOOK HIM OUT. The inherent and taunting Devil's Advocate in me always has a counter punch, "Look, Mike, people on the cusp of great breakthroughs die all the time," it doesn't (always) mean they were killed.
Yeah, you're right, "Give us more Mobile Phone tracking devices, snooker-ball sock more of our skulls; show us who's the daddy," that's what I feel about your 'logical argument', Philbin.
