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Oil dictatorship will just move to renewables dictatorship. I was listening to the Bloomberg radio and some oil guy all on hype explaining how they are moving into the market and that 20% of their biz is now renewables and how they are the biggest solar electricity plant operator, etc. So, no, dictatorship as you say is kind of here to stay.

Also Tesla. BMW announced usable fully electric Mini and other manufactureres such as MB and Volvo are full on. I am sorry to say but Tesla will go down very soon....it's cool and everything but 'normal' businesses would already be down in similar position. You can't also really compare it to Amazon who actually formed the market. Tesla is competing with 100 years old manufacturers who nailed production down to the millionth of a cent.

discuss

codefined|8 years ago

Renewables can be used in almost any location over the entire world. It is incredibly hard to monopolise renewables in the same way you can monopolise oil.

kamaal|8 years ago

Same could be said about feudalism and agriculture. And they did exist.

There will always be these monopolistic business practices and there is nothing much we could do about it.

thinkling|8 years ago

BMW already have a fully electric car out, the i3. It costs ~$50k and has a range of, what, 120mi?

We'll have to wait and see if the fully electric Mini is going to be any better.

But we can look at the hybrid Mini Countryman S E, cleverly getting AWD from putting the electric motor on one set of wheels and ICE on the other set. Great idea. Except... it gets 27mpg. Terrible. The only excuse I can see is that it's a "performance hybrid", i.e. they weren't trying to be particularly fuel efficient.

Volvo currently sells only big cars that get bad gas mileage even in the hybrid versions.

I'm not holding my breath for any of these companies to save the planet.

princeb|8 years ago

putting 250mi range on a european car just feels like premature optimization.

my thinking is that bmw is going to sell electric cars with a diff spec in the US, same way bmw doesn't sell 1.5L 3 series there.

that said, given China's penchant for American sized cars, I feel like they're missing out on the two biggest economies in the world focusing on europe/asia exC.