Where is balance Academic priorities 289

ISTR that Wilbur Shaw, a three time winner of the Indianapolis 500 auto race, was once involved in the construction of a battery powered car around 75 years ago which had rather phenomenal performance. What many people don't know is that electric motors typically have a far more favorable power curve than internal combustion engines with respect to driving a motor vehicle, because they can apply mbuttive amounts of torque to accelerate from a standing stop. I have seen an electric car which was essentially a huge pile of laptop Limh computer batteries which could accelerate from 0-60mph in about 5 seconds.

The design of the currently ubiquitous diesel-electric rail locomotive engine predates the "hybrid car" by a half century and works on nearly identical principles.

There's a sort of romantic attraction for me to the engine in my 13yo Mazda Miata (the original 1.6 litre which was tuned so the torque peak isn't reached until 4,500 RPM and the power peak is limited only by the 7,300 RPM governor in the ignition and the size of the throttle body in the fuel injection system.) The performance of that little car is phenomenal, and it gets quite exceptional fuel economy even when driven relatively fast. I once made the daily commute from my job at the time at the NIH to Charlottesville, VA in 1.75 hours, a distance of 120 miles over a largely two lane highway going through a mountain range with several well known revenue collection regions where there was a 55MPH speed limit on the highway with limits as low as 25MPH in some of the intervening towns. This should probably give the statisticians an idea of how fast I was driving outside the towns...

That's another interesting characteristic of this vehicle. It seems to be nearly invisible to radar. I have on several occasions driven directly past police traffic radar operations doing in excess of 95mph without notice. The reflections from other vehicles and objects far outweigh the profile of the Miata, particularly since the government mandated front license plate is deliberately angled to scatter active radar into space.