Welcome to The Morning Dump, bite-sized stories corralled into a single article for your morning perusal. If your morning coffee’s working a little too well, pull up a throne and have a gander at the best of the rest of yesterday.
Florida Real Estate Agents Don’t Play
I’ve moved about a dozen times since college and, therefore, have interacted with a lot of real estate agents. They’ve all had their different quirks and personalities, but the one consistent feature is drive. You’ve gotta hustle if you’re in real estate. It’s therefore no surprise that if anyone was going to find a bunch of stolen cars after getting their own car stolen, it would be a person in the biz. This story comes courtesy of the Bradenton Herald, a local newspaper serving Florida’s Gulf Coast, whose headline sums it up nicely: “A Florida real estate agent found a stolen car ring in search of her missing Mercedes.” The car in question appears to be a white W212 Mercedes E-Class sedan, the official car of “I want something nice but I still work for a living.” The agent in question is Rachel Speight, of Sarasota, who bought the car more than a decade ago. Unfortunately, per the story, Ms. Speight lent her car to her daughter and the daughter left the keys in the car overnight only to discover the car gone. “I went … huffing and puffing because that was my baby when I started my real estate career. That was the car I purchased, so I’m panicking,” Speight told the Herald. From there Speight did what all good real estate agents do: Advertise and increase word-of-mouth. She started handing out flyers to anyone and everyone within a few miles of the theft. Lo and behold tips started coming in and she found it! From the Herald: I love this woman. In the end, she found four stolen cars, all of which were likely being cooled until they could be transported discreetly. I’m sharing this story both because it’s awesome and because I filmed with the NYPD Auto Crime Division and what happened here is what they say is happening more often: Thieves are just looking for cars with the keys in them. For some reason, when it’s a key that looks like a key no one will leave it in their car. When it’s a key that’s a cool little fob thing people have no trouble shoving it in the center console. Don’t do it!
VW South Africa Needs New Markets For Gas-Powered Cars
With the quick pace of electrification in Europe, Volkswagen of South Africa is having to look for a new place to send its gas-powered cars. While there’s certainly a domestic market in the country, about 75% of the country’s cars are sent abroad and most of those end up in Europe. Where are those cars going to go now? According to this Reuters article, VW is looking to Asia and Latin America. Not all countries are capable of supporting an EV infrastructure (we don’t even have a fully developed one in the United States yet) so it makes sense that someone has to keep making these cars. Instead, it would partner with the company’s Indian and Brazilian manufacturing hubs to produce petrol and diesel vehicles for countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa that will likely lag behind advanced economies in the shift to EVs.
Hyundai Is Still Into Hydrogen
With the exception of the Hyundai N Vision 74 I’m still not super hot on hydrogen for regular passenger vehicles, but that isn’t stopping automakers for doubling down on the future of the technology. Hyundai Motor Group Exec Chairman Euisun Chung gave a big speech yesterday in Bali, Indonesia for a G20 Summit on the topic of “Energy Poverty and Accelerating a Just and Orderly Sustainable Energy Use.” There were the usual platitudes in the Chairman’s speech about “leadership” and “bold decisions” and an acknowledgment that climate change is real. But then there was this, in the press release from Hyundai: The emphasis is mine. This still feels to me like the industry is trying to make fetch happen, but if you get enough people rowing in the same direction eventually you’ll start going on that direction. Regarding hydrogen as a future clean energy solution, he explained: “With renewables come different challenges—including limits on supply and storage. Hydrogen can solve many of these issues. And now, there is a global consensus on the importance of hydrogen as a future, limitless, energy solution.”
Paris Is Serious About Flying Taxis For The 2024 Olympics
We’re less than two years away from the Paris Summer Olympics and Aeroports de Paris, the people whose name you curse when you’re stuck trying to figure out how to return your car at CDG amidst a random strike, are building a “vertiport” at Pontoise Cormeilles to help ferry passengers around the city. Per a Bloomberg article on the topic: Maybe this will be a thing! Again, enough people seem to want it. We’ve had civil aviation for like 100 years and the French still haven’t figured out how to run an airport so we’ll see! Flying taxis are emerging as a new transport market, with developers raising hundreds of millions of US dollars.
The Flush
Would you take a flying taxi? What comes first: mass-produced hydrogen cars or regular flying taxi use?
Photos: Rachel Speight-Hudson, Hyundai, Volkswagen, Volocopter
The taximeter part? Sure, no problem. That’s just how you calculate and charge for the fare.
The CABRIOLET part, though? Have you seen those blades?!
Of course the retarded makers of these gadgets don’t know this.They’re calling them flying taxis because somehow that phrase became cool.
TLDR They lucked onto being half right about the name.Everything else about it is a shit milkshake
They’re also not generally designed as typical helicopters in terms of being designed around being quiet and, once presumes safer.
They’d have to exist first, of course.
It doesn’t matter how many people are rowing if you’re trying to climb a waterfall. Everybody rowing just gets wet.
And I would rather trust making my way through the worst Paris traffic instead of taking an “eTaxi,” which looks like a vastly scaled-up drone. Nope.
Good for the real-estate agent. Intelligently handled, too. Even a nice E-Class is not worth getting shot at by some desperate clown who was planning to sell the car to a chop shop in exchange for his next fix.
I hear some spots in the Caribbean happily take all the cars they can get from the U.S. With or without clean titles. Or any title at all.
Maybe the people working with algae to produce hydrogen will come through, but, until then, I don’t see it as a realistic cost-beneficial solution. Honestly, even then I’ll be wary ‘cause the good ol’ boys ‘round these parts will try to find a way to roll coal with hydrogen trucks. shudders
My prediction is it will start with aerospace (which already uses LH2 as a fuel in rockets), then it will spread to marine uses, and finally ground transportation. So not really near-term, but not waaayyyy out there either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uun1ex1TUCA
No it won’t.
“The only hurdles to widespread adoption are engineering problems (ie tankage and on-site production) ”
And the general lack of infrastructure that costs 10X more to build out than BEV infrastructure
” rather than problems of fundamental physics ”
That’s false. There is a fundamental problem of it being far less efficient than BEVs on an end to end basis.
The lack of efficiency and high infrastructure cost means hydrogen will never have the future you think it might have.
Hydrogen powered heavy equipment or trucks, possibly, but even there carbon-neutral synthetic fuels seem like a better idea. Much denser, much easier to use existing infrastructure, and much easier to retrofit to older vehicles.
As for flying taxis, it’s hard to picture a worse cost/benefit tradeoff than a bunch of poorly trained pilots littering the skies in exchange for saving a few minutes in traffic.
Powered by electricity. Buildings and other obstacles simply make for a more enjoyable ride. Are safely(ish) operated by untrained teens earning minimum wage. The perfect mass-transit solution. Prove me wrong!!!
– Disney’s Rock and Roller Coaster starring Aerosmith
Being serious, drone stabilization systems are incredible, even on cheap hobby quadcopters. But the best stabilization can’t compensate for a mechanical failure, AFAIK. On a quadcopter motor failure means instant crash. I’m not hopping into one of these gizmos unless it has an emergency chute and some crazy effective airbags to slow down the sudden stop when it meets the ground after a malfunction.
But, yeah, the threat of mechanical failure is very real. A plane can glide, a helicopter can perform an autorotation landing, but what do these do? And are they going to find a safe zone for an emergency landing? Too many questions that aren’t really being thoroughly addressed.
All the costs and expenses that make personally owned passenger hydrogen a dumb idea are ten times worse in vehicles whose operating costs are carefully evaluated before purchase and tightly tracked afterwards.
The only thing that will make commercial vehicles hydrogen powered is a huge thumb on the scale in the form of government subsidies and tax breaks. I think most governments are wising up to the economic unfeasibility of hydrogen as a motor vehicle fuel.
Re: Flying taxis We’ll have a few flying taxis in all of the wealthiest major cities before long. Those who are merely rich already want the benefits of the ultra-rich, who currently own private helicopters. I know I won’t live long enough for that to become available to ordinary people.
In the case of EVs, the thumb on the scale is just making it happen a little faster.
