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Originally Posted by AMERICA 123
Btw, concerning the USA and Australia ....... how would you compare and contrast the implied intellectual capabilities of the 'lead' lemming off the cliff - and one following ?
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Australian Government has effectively NO foreign debt and only issues Gov Bonds to satisfy a market requirement for a standardised base for interest rate spreads. Did the US 'lead' Australia into no debt?
Australian Government has a $20 Billion dollar annual surplus, which it does on a regular basis. Given the US has 15x our population that's equivalent to a US annual budget surplus of $300 Billion. Did the US 'lead' Australia to have a surplus every year?
Australian Government has $60 - $70 Billion in our national sovereign wealth fund called 'The Future Fund' (equivalent to the US having a national savings fund of $1 Trillion). Again?
Australia has virtually free Healthcare, very cheap Higher Education, and a wide array of social services, all well funded. Not 'lead' there by the US I don’t think.
We have a booming economy where interest rates are in a historically healthy normal range of 5%-8% (lots of foreigners invest here in bonds as they can't get such returns elsewhere) and this gives our Federal Reserve Bank plenty of room to lower rates if we get into economic difficulty by contagion from a bad US economy. We obviously didn't take the super low interest rate cheap money 'lead' of the US, which helped cause your problems.
I'm sorry but I just don't see how the intellectuals that run Australia are 'following' the US. And we are certainly NOT following the US's 'lead' off the cliff, but we will stand on the edge and wave goodbye to you as you go....
You know, when I was a kid we used to get a lot of US TV shows that made America look so much different than today. Family shows like My Three Sons where the dad was an aeronautical engineer, played by Fred MacMurray. Or Family Affair starring Brian Keith who was an engineer who built things like bridges. Or The Brady Bunch where the dad was an architect. And like Disney's weekly TV show where every second or third week they had documentaries for kids (instead of gratuitous cartoons or dramas) on things like nuclear power, or submarines and space programs.
It was US shows like that and others that made me want to be a scientist or engineer and fell in love with science. And they made America appear to be a place where things got made and built and did in fact 'lead' the world, but in good things.
Is it true that now US University courses in science and engineering are filled, not with American students, but foreigners who now are no longer staying in the US but going back home in droves after graduation to their booming Asian economies?
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Originally Posted by AMERICA 123
This makes more inexplicable ..... I think ? - the continuing miscalculations.....
Where is your brake regen energy - recharge amount ???
Lots of it - even in the USA highway number.
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Because firstly regenerative braking gets well under 50% efficiency and plays less of a role than people imagine in a vehicle of this weight compared with heavy vehicles like SUV's. And GM are not clear about on what cycle the Volt goes 40 miles, only that it will at least go 40 miles, implying that in normal use one would expect it to go further.
If that is true, which I believe it is, then that 8kWh of energy is spread over even more miles in normal driving, which would mean a normal car would have to get even better gas mileage. So while the unknown regen component may alter the net energy equivalent one way, the unknown overrun of 40 miles would alter it the other way, and as they cannot be specified but would likely be a wash, I left them out.
The simple fact is that GM fans here are cheering for the Volt to succeed, so am I. But unlike some of you cheer squad I am trying to be realistic about the Volt's expectations. It is not going to outperform the Prius in its on road performance but I believe it will be a better product. It will have lower levels of performance than many Americans expect, and I don't believe in raising expectations which could genuinely harm Volt sales and GM's future.
Just as high expectations for a movie before release can ruin it if it falls short of those expectations, it is best if Volt's performance expectations are closest to or even under what it can deliver. Then you avoid disappointment and buyers remorse. Because if you get a few thousand Volt buyers rush and buy the Volt sight unseen just to be first and then bitch to their friends that they thought it was going to have the get up and go of a Tesla, that would be very bad in the market place.
So go ahead, damage the Volt's marketability with your overly patriotic fervour and sell it up for a fall; as the best thing since sliced bread.
Me, I'm a realist who hopes to be pleasantly surprised. You people may be optimists, but you risk disappointment.....
