Letter to Barak Obama

Dear Professor Obama

I am very glad you are not going to observe common custom of American presidents and desist from commenting on the present presidency. You are a voice of calm, reason and right thinking which is much needed today.

Your legacy is being dismantled step by step and this is a tragedy. I was going to say that you have no one to blame but yourself but that is manifestly untrue. Also to blame are Hillary and Debbie in cahoots with each other and Elizabeth Warren.

Not only are you a constitutional lawyer but you swore to uphold the constitution of the United States. The core of that constitution is the part saying that the government is ‘by and for’ the people. The rest is window dressing. Just keep that part and you would still have the best founding document that the world has ever known.

Therefore, if you were going to endorse someone as the Dem candidate it should have been the peoples choice. It was abundantly clear who that was. To support anyone else was unconstitutional.

What really gets me is the stupidity of the decision. Why on earth would you, the DNC and Warren support a candidate with at best, a 50:50 chance of beating Trump instead of the candidate that would have left Trump as a minor foot note in American history. Professor Warren is particularly disappointing.  She was by a long shot my all time hero and her fall from grace, pandering to her own ambitions to be on the team is shocking.  And it is not as if she didn't know who Hillary is.
  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12mJ-U76nfg

You certainly have your work cut out for you trying to influence the course of the next 4 or 8 years but in my opinion, your first job is to reform the badly misnamed Democratic party. There is nothing democratic about it.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWvH84YvEF8

Go back to the choosing of Truman as FDR's running mate and work your way forward in time to this recent CF resulting in Trump being elected and you will see what I mean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_vice_presidential_nomination_of_1944

If Bernie had been elected, he would have taken your legacy, preserved and enhanced it.

What I am going to say now will sound bombastic but work your way through the implications of the situation we find ourselves in and you may come to the same conclusion.

Your support of Hillary combined with the support of the DNC and  Warren may just possibly have doomed our civilization. It certainly will have led to a huge amount of chaos and suffering in the world. Arguably we are just on the brink of tipping points that will send our climate to a new state. We have  adapted our civilization to the climate state we have had since the end of the most recent glacial period and any new state will result in much suffering. The more closely you have adapted to a situation, the greater the disruption under a new situation.

Looking at the strange weather now (2016-17) it could be that even Bernie would have been too late but at least he would have taken the necessary measures and we might just possibly have a chance.  Under Trump, especially if he is in for 8 years, we are deep in the brown stuff.

With respect to the economy,  under your administration, FDR-type reforms to the economy were not put in place. The next crash is inevitable.

Note that the economy boomed and crashed pre FDR on about a 14 year cycle.  After FDR put in much needed reforms, we had half a century of economic stability. Clinton and others deregulated and we had 2008.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal

You managed to pull us out of that one without the complete disaster that could have occurred.  However you failed to re-instate much needed reforms and the next crash is inevitable. 

So we are facing both economic chaos and Environmental chaos.

I hope that in the book you are working on, you will tell us ‘what happened’. In fact that might be a good title for the book. What Happened.  It could be an instruction manual for the next president, (after Trump)  telling him how difficult it is to get things done, and the pressures he is under to betray his beliefs. It could give future presidents a heads up on how to work the system.

A big advantage that Bernie would have had is that he has been a mayor, a representative and a senator. He had the experience. You, like Kennedy, didn’t have the depth of experience to know how to work the system. Johnson, the much maligned, got more of Kennedy’s measures through than Kennedy ever did. He knew how it all works

On that note, look what Trump is doing. He is doing what he promised and however you (and I) disdain what he is doing, he is proving himself to be an effective president and a man of his word. That is what the American people want and he is very likely to win a second term.  Looking at other things he has promised I can only say God Help Us.  The people he has surrounded himself with have an agenda which is past abuses of the American people on steroids

I believe that if you had moved on things such as Guantanamo during your first two years with a majority, you would not have lost at the mid terms.

It is not certain that Bernie could have pulled us out of our rush to destruction.  We may have actually gone too far already and the coming results are already in the pipeline.  But at least, he would have taken the much needed measures and given us a chance.  After 8 years of Trump, if he does what he has said he will do: and so far he has shown us that he is a man of his word: then it will almost certainly be too late.

Open letter to Senator McCain

Dear Senator McCain
I read your statement that “there is no national security interest more vital to America than the ability to hold free and fair elections without foreign interference”.

I’m not trying to “get at you” or at the United States but looking at America from outside, one gets the impression that this battle has long since being lost. Let me give you some examples. It is often easier to be more objective when looking  at examples that don't hit close to home so I will use examples from the Democratic Party and from some time ago.  I'm sure you can come up with more examples from the GOP  than I can.

Take the abysmal way that Truman was chosen instead of Wallace as FDR’s running mate in FDR’s last term. I’m sure you are familiar with the story so I won’t insult your knowledge by recounting it. Arguably, MAD might have been avoided if Wallace had become president. Wallace was clearly the people’s choice in America and was hugely admired all over the world He was an experienced politician with a proven track record but wouldn’t cow tow to the powers behind the spot lights.

Come forward in time to the recent Dem primary and the abysmal, undemocratic, unconstitutional activity under Debbie in cahoots with Hillary. Clearly Bernie was the people’s choice. If he had being running against Trump, the result is not hard to predict. I would suggest that he might well have brought in a Dem majority in both the House and the Senate on his coat tails.

Add to this the denial of registration in many states, the hassling of people trying to vote and the antiquated voting machines that are quite frankly a joke in a first world country. For a recounting of the abuses in one state, put in a google search box Youtube Arazona Hearings Democratic Primary. It’s a shocker.

If any more was needed, look at your delegate system. Even though a majority of the American people vote for a given candidate, your system can put the other candidate into office.What a joke.  What democracy??

Then you have  the reduction of polling stations such that it is a real treck for many of the voters to get to a polling station.  Older people and couples with young children either don't come to vote or get fed up by waiting in line for hours.  No prises for guessing which areas have lost their polling stations.

  Oh, I forgot.  Your totally undemocratic super delegate system, specifically designed to frustrate the will of the people if it doesn't agree with the wishes of the party bosses.

Just two more comments. First it is a bit rich for America to complain about another country interfering in America’s elections. America has a long history of deposing democratically elected leaders and replacing them with dictators.  America then supplies the dictator and his army with arms and money so that they can suppress their own people. Start with Mosedeq in Iran and work your way through Africa (Congo for instance)  and then central and South America. Include Italy. Look up the mtkass blog “Thoughts on the Roof” and type in the search box, “Timeline America” to see a catalog of specific cases.

Secondly, while it is important who hacked the e-mails, the really important question is what they revealed. They revealed a very corrupt DNC, which is part of the so called “free and fair” election system of the United States of America. The corrupt, bought and paid for American press is continuing its misdirection of the American people by focusing their attention on who the hackers were instead of what they revealed about the American election system.

Whoever hacked the Dem e-mails did the American people a favor.

Senator, there is nothing democratic about the American system.. You have by far the best constitution of any country in the world but you simply trample it into the mud.

Chinese air pollution

I don't get it.  In-so-far as Chinese air pollution is caused by coal fired power stations, smelters and  other factory that spew out particulates and oxides of sulfur into the atmosphere, they could clean up the problem in a historical instant (say 2 years).  America did it and the technology is old hat.  In America the situation was dire.  Once the decision was made, it took them very little time  to stop all this nastiness going into the air.  The technology was patented in1907.

I can't help wondering what the motivation is of the Chinese government.  Is it ignorance.  Is it a lack of concern for their citizens.  Do they want their citizens to die young so they don't have to look after them in their old age.  What on earth is the problem.  They seem to be happy that a lot of their people are smoking so perhaps the last possibility is the correct one.  Anyway, technically, how would they do it.

For the particulates they install electrostatic precipitators.  Let me digress here and try to explain how they work.

Have you ever run a comb through dry hair and then used the comb to pick up little pieces of paper from the table.  What is happening here?  When you rub almost any two different materials together, some electrons are rubbed off one on to the other.  If the rubbed materials are insulators, the electrons or lack of electrons stay on the surface of the two objects giving one a positive charge and one a negative charge.  Opposite charges attract and even a neutral object will be attracted to a charged one as some of the opposite charge on the neutral object is pulled toward the charged object.

Or have you ever shuffled your feet across a carpet and then walked over to a friend and brought a finger close to his ear.  A little spark jumps and so does your friend. You haven't sent much current to his ear but you were at a surprisingly high voltage which caused the spark to jump

Or have you ever got out of a car and as you went to close the door, you got a shock.  Once again a charged object sending a spark to an uncharged one.

In each case a charge has built up on the object and when you bring the charged object near to an uncharged object, electrons jump from the negative one to the positive one and neutralize the charge.  At a microscopic level, if you were a little charge particle, you would be pulled toward any nearby object which was neutral or had the opposite charge.

A lot of this is now done by electronic wizardry but I will describe it old school which is easier to understand.  You may have noticed that in older cars there is a coil.  Ask your granddad about them.  This is a transformer that has a few coils of wire coming from the battery and a lot of coils around it going to the spark plugs.  When a pulse of electricity is sent by the distributor from the battery through the primary (the few coils) it makes a magnetic field which cuts across the wires of the secondary.  This induces a voltage in the secondary.  How high the voltage is depends on the number of coils.  If there are ten times as many coils in the secondary as in the primary, the 12 volts of the primary (from the battery) will be stepped up 10 times to 120 volts. In a car the ratio of primary coils to secondary is much larger in order to get enough voltage to jump the gap in the spark plug.  Actually the strongest spark is created when you stop the current in the primary and the magnetic field it has created collapses.

In an electrostatic precipitator you have something similar except the voltage is stepped up to thousands of volts and you pass AC (alternating current) through the primary.  So far so good but useless.  You have also induced an alternating current in the secondary going positive and negative.  You need high voltage direct current.  No problem.  You rectify this alternating current with a wheatstone bridge.  Note that in the diagrams in the link they talk about resistors.  Replace then with diodes that only allow current to flow in one direction and you will understand rectification.  I'll leave you to puzzle this one out. It is rather neat.

You now have very high voltage Direct current.  You conduct this current to a bunch of spikes, plates or bars in the flu of the polluting chimney and electrons stream off  and attach themselves to the particles.  Once charged, they will be attracted to any neutral or positively charged material.  You then have only to pass this flu gas past, for instance, a wet, grounded surface and the particulates will glue themselves on to the water to be washed away.  Some precipitators are designed to collect the dry particles and shake them off.  Whichever system is used, problem solved.  Particulates removed.

The fine details are somewhat more complicated (aren't they always) but this technology can be bought off the shelf and with her command economy, I'm sure China can reverse engineer it and build a factory to turn these out in the thousands.

As for sulfur, have a look at this link.  Oxides of sulfur can also be removed and the technology is old.  One reason for doing this is  to recover the sulfur which is a valuable industrial feed material.  On the ecological side, oxides of sulfur in the atmosphere attract water and make aerosols of sulphuric acid which are both  toxic and corrosive.  With the recovered sulfur, the cost of a sulfur scrubber is negative (you make a profit on the process).

Incidentally, in a smelter, (factory where metal is recovered from an ore) an electrostatic precipitator also often recovers valuable materials so you often also make a profit on doing the right thing.

 What is wrong with the Chinese bosses.

There is a little wrinkle in this story, though.  Many scientists believe that the particulates in the atmosphere are shading the earth and keeping it cooler than it would otherwise be.  A fairly common estimate is about 2 degrees.  I don't know what proportion of aerosols (air born particulates) are due to Chinese factory pollution but for the sake of the argument, let's say a quarter.  If the Chinese did clean up their pollution, and if the estimates are correct, we could expect a sudden jump of half a degree (centigrade) in our atmospheric temperature.

We should see the results of this experiment fairly soon.  The Chinese population is getting fed up with being slowly poisoned by their leaders who are sitting on their hands.

Duterte

Rodrigo Duterte is the president of the Philippines.  He was trained as a lawyer and was a prosecutor in the town of Davao before becoming mayor of that city.  He is much in the news because he cleaned up drug trafficking in Davao by the  rather brutal expedient of shooting drug dealers without benefit of any judicial procedure.  At present he is doing the same for all of the Philippines.  Just recently (December 2016) he announced that he killed drug dealers in Davao with his own hand.  This has shocked the world and politicians all over the world are decrying his actions and his hands-on involvement.

It is interesting to compare and contrast the actions of Duterte in killing drug dealers and those of Presidents Obama and Bush in ordering drone strikes against people they define as terrorists. Incidentally, Obama has ordered many more hits that Bush did.   First the similarities.

Similarities
In both cases, these are extra-judicial killings.  No trial was carried out, no time was provided to examine the facts and determine if the person was guilty of the crime in question (as defined by the executioner) and no judge and/or jury was involved.  No defense was mounted.   No reference was made to international standards of justice.

In both cases, the killing was carried out in the name of protecting the population from a threat.  In the case of the Philippines, against the clear and present horror of drugs.  In the case of America against the threat of future terrorism.

Now the differences.
Duterte actually carried out at least some of these killings himself.  By admitting he is carrying out this policy and  admitting he has done some of the killing himself.  He has put himself in personal danger by personally confronting drug dealers. 
The American presidents have set others to do the killing who in turn pass the job on to their subordinates who then pass the job on to their underlings.  Even the drone operators are in no danger.  They operate the drones from the comfort of their bases somewhere in the USA.

Duterte, familiar with his local scene, is likely to be hitting the drug dealers he is targeting.  Of course, once you start extra-judicial killings; basically vigilantism; there will be killings of non drug dealers to settle old scores, for pecuniary motivations (protection rackets) and so forth.  Extra-judicial killings are reprehensible on many levels. 
Judging from recent failures of American intelligence, it is likely that the drone attacks are often targeting people with no connection with what America defines as terrorism.  In addition, recent revelations show that America is very casual about hitting innocent by standers.  Bradley Manning is in a military prison, Edward Snowdon is in self imposed exile in Russia and Julian Asange is holed up in an Ecuadorian embassy because of their revelations of these facts.

Duterte, as far as can be determined, has had no part in the drug trade he is hitting.  He is not and has never been a drug trafficker.
America has created the freedom fighter/terrorists she is hitting.    The most recent war in Iraq was based on lie after lie.  Afghanistan create another bunch of so called terrs.  Following the Iraq war, America refuse to let anyone who was a Baathist take part in the administration of their own country.  Since you had to be a Baathist to get a job as dog catcher, this involved pretty well anyone of ability and experience.  What did this cadre of experienced administrators and military men do.  They formed Isis.  So now, America can expend lots of ammunition, make lots of profits for her arms industries, keep her military occupied, justify asking for more of the money from America tax payers and so forth as she kills her own creation.  In the mean time she is into her next war in Yemen, this time by proxy.  She supplies arms and intelligence to the Saudis who are actually carrying out the war.  More terrs being created to keep America ticking over into the future.  The plight of the people of Yemen is heart wrenching.

Extra-judicial killing are reprehensible on many levels.  Much modern thought says any killings, even ones sanctioned by the judicial system are reprehensible.  Here we are comparing the bad with the even worse.  You judge which is the greater crime.

The car I want to drive

Most major car manufacturers are getting serious about electric cars and most of them are designing cars with all the bells and whistles. I hate to think what they will cost. I believe there is a massive market for a simple, basic, Volkswagen / model T ford / 2cv/Mini - type electric. It wouldn't be for everyone but I believe the market would be huge.

Not only would it be huge in third world countries but also in first world countries. So many of us are fed up with having such a big foot print on the world, fed up with being dependent on someone else to fix our gadgets and fed up with having to tie up a huge proportion of our wealth in a vehicle simply to get from A to B. For other people for whom their very concept of self worth is intimately entwined with driving a fancy car - carry on. Enjoy. The rest of us have a different self image.

Many of us are also a tad suspicious about having every gadget we use being connected to the World Wide Web.  Who wants to be spied on by his toaster (I'm kidding!!!). I suspect we are being spied on by our television sets. (I  am not kidding).  If I want an upgrade to my car, I will take the flash drive that goes into a socket in the dash board, take it to my computer and request the upgrade.  I'll take it back to my car and plug it in.  Note that many upgrades to ordinary computers smell like idle fiddling by some egg head and often create problems.

Perhaps I am completely content with the way my car already operates or perhaps I want to wait until some other poor suckers have tested the upgrade before I jump in.  Besides just imagine some bored hacker in his mom's basement hacking some part of the system and bringing a major city to a standstill with gridlock.  Just imagine some foreign power doing the same to your  whole country.  Worse than a nuclear war and leaves the infrastructure intact as they take over.

 

You don't think a Tesla, for instance, can be hacked.  Look at the institutions that have been hacked over the past few years.

Of course this also gives Big Brother the ability  not only to follow your every move but to decide to drive your car into a tree or over a cliff at high speed.  You think I am being paranoid.  You have, I assume, being following the revelations of Snowdon and Manning.

I agree most enthusiastically with practically everything Elon Musk is doing and advocating but genius is no guarantee of being right.  Remember a previous genius, Alvin Edison.  He advocated DC (Direct Current) for electrical grids.  Luckily we went with Tesla and used AC.  It is so much more versatile.   Yes, there is a place for DC such as when you transmit power in a cable under water but for the most part, AC is the way to go.

So what would this car be like. It would be both very simple and very sophisticated. Simple in that it would have very few frills, a low selling price and it would be easy for a home mechanic of modest ability to maintain and repair. It would be sophisticated in that it would have the very best engineering and best materials providing reliability, longevity, safety, easy driving, fast charging, recyclability, easy repair and maximum range.

It would be upgradable as new technology became available.  For instance if the new graphene batteries prove to be better than Lithium batteries, when the old batteries finally gave out one could change the batteries to the new sort.  The old batteries would find a new life in private houses to store excess energy generated by your solar panels to avoid sending the power to the grid at knock down prices.  The critical factor is that the new batteries would fit the space where the old batteries lived.

What sort of car would it be

Styling
The styling would be distinctive.  It would be as recognizable as the  Volks Wagon Combi, Betle, Deux Cheveaux, Model T Ford or Mini.   None of these cars were objects of beauty but they were distinctive.   Clearly it would have to be as aerodynamic as possible and this tends to converge the styling of all cars but there must be no doubt what vehicle you are looking at when you see one of these cars. Easy identification is a big help in making a car iconic. No changes would be made to the styling from year to year. None what so ever. The Beetle didn't need it, neither does our Peoples-Electric.   Not needing to retool for design changes contributes to a lower price.

Driving damage
Bumpers and mud guards should be bolt off and bolt on so that repairing a ding is a simple job of trading in your old part for repair or recycling and bolting on the new part. These easily damaged parts should be compatible for decades. A bumper from the first production model must fit the latest model and vice-versa. Some thought should be given to a hydraulic or pneumatic bumper which could sustain bumps of, say 5 or 10km/h without damage*.

*Nov 2011.  I just read of a jell bumper that a new electric car is using.  Good on you guys.


The Vehicle Manual
The vehicle manual would be straight out of America in their best tradition; the sort of manual that comes out of Time-Life or Readers Digest. They have the most incredible how-to-do manuals where everything is beautifully, clearly laid out and the illustrations are works of art. Once the car had been designed, the wives, secretaries and accountants of the company would be let loose on the car, with the manual, to see if they could change the electric motor, CV joints and anything else that might need to be replaced. If they could not do this, either the manual or the car or both would be redesigned. (No fair changing the secretary or accountant)  A copy of this manual would be standard equipment and would fit in a specially designed compartment in the car.


Tools
There would be a standard 'A' tool set and an optional 'B' tool set. The 'A' set would allow one to change a tire and tighten up a screw. The B tool kit would allow most procedures necessary to be done on the car. Very rare tools could be rented from the dealer.  If at all possible the car would be designed to use only conventional tools and to ensure that  a minimum of tools are necessary. The tool kit would fit in a specially built-in compartment in the car.

The Body
Have a think about a carbon fiber reinforced thermoplastic body.  It may not be practical yet but look up the item on YouTube by Amory Lovins in which he shows his audience a half dome of the material and gives them a sledge hammer to see if they can break it.  The car body could go together like pop beads with a smear of epoxy, eliminating all that welding.  The  material is naturally rigid and sound absorbing and able to survive severe crashes while protecting the driver.

The Chassis
Initially there would be only one medium size chassis but eventually there would be three sizes: small, medium and large. On to each of these chassis would bolt the body of a pick up truck (Ute, Bakkie, Tender), a family car, a people mover (van, Combi) or a sports car..... Well maybe not a sports car on the largest chassis but certainly on the medium and small chassis.  Perhaps with modern materials and technology, we might have mono-cock cars with no chassis.

Parts
Wrecked or scrapped cars could be taken apart for parts and the parts would fit on any other car no matter what the vintage. Also, in so far as possible, fittings from one size of car would fit on the other sizes. All, for instance, would use the same head light bulb, door handle, radio mounting and so forth.

Yearly Model Changes
 None.

This ridiculous system of planned obsolescence must be made obsolete .

Steering gear
Lets go for simple rack and pinion.  Check out all the cars that used this system and adopt the best one.  Power steering uses power and in a reasonably light car power steering is completely unnecessary.  Besides, Rack and Pinion is cheaper and easy to repair (if it ever needs repairing).  Our Peoples Electric will tend to be a light car with all the frills removed and eventually, as the technology allows, thermoplastic carbon fiber bodies. Rack and Pinion steering will be perfectly adequate.


Windows
Nothing wrong with wind up windows but make them of quality material so that they wind up smoothly when you buy the car and just a smoothly in 20 years.  Remember, no planned obsolescence.  Electric windows use power and are more expensive to build and repair than mechanical windows.  I have a horror of driving into a body of water and having the electric windows all shorted out and the doors lock electrically.  At least make the window of the driver a simple wind up window.  You can make the others electric if you insist.


Car Magazine
A quarterly car magazine would give interesting hints on how to maintain your car, maps of places to exchange or charge your batteries and quirky stories of how someone had crossed the Sahara with the car fitted with solar panels and how someone else had fitted a chuck wagon stern to his vehicle and gone on roundup.  It would be interesting, informative amusing and iconic. It could be delivered to your reading device or in a paper form if you prefer.  Some of us Luddites like paper.


Solar cells
Solar cells must eventually be fitted on every possible surface.  The technology is probably not there yet but is advancing rapidly.  Very interesting work is being done on allowing all panels to contribute their full generation capacity despite a lack of co-linearity and despite some panels being partially shaded. When we have power point tracking for individual solar cells, these technologies will greatly increase the effectiveness of the solar cells which clad the car. At one time solar panels were stiff and flat.  Now one can buy flexible panels.  It should soon be possible to clad any shape and get the full power from each cell.  In addition there is work on producing power from windows.

 Note that the solar panel retrofit on the Prius on the roof between the front and rear window is reputed to give about 10 km extra for a day in the sun. A nice little bonus. With advances in the technology and panels on the whole car, one might get, say, 25 extra km per sun-day*. We're not talking here about a completely solar car.  Just a nice little bonus for a day in the sun and the possibility of getting home if you forgot to charge and ran out of gas (sorry - electricity)

*Note that since the writing of this article there has been an item in the news (The NZ Press, feb 2010) that IBM has developed a solar panel using only "easy to find" minerals. If this development becomes commercial, the cost of solar panels should plummet even further. They already are on a toboggan ride.  Standard panels coming out of China are already (2012) down to a dollar per nominal watt.


Mechanical Design
The designers would endeavor to use the most commonly available parts much like the Skunk Works does. The Skunk Works only innovates parts that are necessary for the special functioning of the aircraft in question. The rest is off the shelf. If a certain tire rim with a certain spacing of stud is the most common in other cars of the world, this size should be adopted. If a certain head-light bulb socket is most common all over the world, this one would be used and so forth. This would ensure that if you were stuck, you would have a good chance of finding parts that would get you by. Conversely, scrapped cars of this type would be a rich source of parts, even for other makes. Even better for the company, people with other types of vehicles would always try to buy from the company because of the high quality and competitive pricing of their parts.  Having your parts fit other cars would ensure a large market.

Warranty
None, Nada, Zilch. This may sound revolutionary..... and at first, not having a warranty would be a negative selling point. At the very least, make it an optional extra.  As confidence builds up in the reliability of the car, people will relax about the lack of warranty. In fact, a lack of warranty will quickly become a major selling advantage. 

Warranties cost the company money and this is built into the price of their vehicles. The savings from the lack of warranty must be passed on to the customer. An added effect would be that people would not thrash their car during the warranty period. They would look after their cars from the start.

Besides, as mentioned above, the cars would be so easy to repair that any joker with a basic set of tools and the manual could repair any part of the car. By their nature, electric cars will be far simpler than petrol cars.  Moreover computer boards are simply unplugged and reprogrammed or a new one plugged in.  Computer chips are as cheap as,,,,, well chips, and software when spread over many users is also cheap.

Dealers
Dealers would locate in the low rental industrial areas of cities or towns. Only one dealer would be allowed per city or town. In their warehouses they would sell the cars and have a full stock of spares. They would never ever ever ever run out of spares. Their computer system would flag when they had to order parts to keep their inventory up to date. A dealer who couldn't do this would loose his dealership. All dealers and their staff would be sent to the factory to practice doing everything on the car that could be done but they would not be required to do repairs at their dealership. They would be there to provide advice and parts.

Note that Tesla has gone one step further and has no dealers.  You order your car on the WWW and it is delivered. Genius.

Computers
Undoubtedly, there will be  computer chips in the car. How about using one of those computer memory sticks (flash drives) that people use to transfer information from computer to computer. Have it plug in to the dash board. Taking it out and plugging it into your PC would run a diagnostic and you could reprogram the chip for maximum efficiency or maximum performance or for whatever other options were available right from your PC.  Hardware is expensive.  Software, when spread over many units is cheap.

The Battery
This is out of the hands of the company but every effort should be made to standardize batteries between different makes and models of cars. For instance, the battery of a Tesla should fit a Volt and vice versa. It would be well worth while looking at the Project Better Place option.  At the very least, a new company developing an electric car could adopt the battery design of other cars right from the outset and build the car around that design.

Note that as of 2020, it looks as if improvements in Battery design including fast charging has eliminated the need to change batteries.  It was a nice idea in a previous age (10 years ago).

Apparently the lithium ion battery is now obsolete and the Lithium titanate, lithium iron phosphate and lithium polymer batteries are far longer lasting.  The polymer battery, is apparently much lighter.

Graphene batteries are on the horizon with the discovery that with an addition of water, the layers of grapene do not fuse.   Batteries can be upgraded as technology allows but can still have the same outer aspect so that they can be used in older vehicles. The batteries might be based on a standard cell of 2x3x5 cm that could be combined in series and parallel to achieve whatever voltage the particular car uses and combined in different physical configurations to fit virtually any available space.  Incidentally, such batteries would find uses in a wide variety of other applications including power storage for the home.  There would be a huge market for both new batteries and batteries which no longer had the capacity to be used in a vehicle.

Recycling
All components of the car must be designed to be completely recyclable. All parts will have a core charge just as is done with glass bottles and given back when the part is returned. This would ensure that worn out cars would not litter the environment. People who are too rich or too lazy to recycle their vehicles would find any number of people who would take the vehicles off their hands to recycle parts or to get the return fee.


Lubrication
A great beauty of electric cars is not only that you save on fuel but also on lubricants. An electric car can be built today that needs no lubricant except perhaps a little 3 in 1 oil for the door hinges. Remember all the grease points we used to have to attend to at each service. These don't exist on modern cars.  Electric cars do not have an oil sump.  More saving of our too-valuable-to-burn fossil fuels.

Reliability
Electric motors are so reliable that one could have a car quite soon that would last almost a lifetime. You would probably change the upholstery 4 or 5 times before the car wore out. Israel is about to convert to electric cars provided by Renault-Nissan with reticulation and battery exchange provided by Project Better Place. If successful, this will cause a paradigm shift in the car market. A very attractive option is to for a new car builder to build a car with a battery that can be changed by Project Better Place stations*.

 *It appears that the Project Better Place company has been bought and shelved.  This smacks of interference by the oil or conventional car companies.  They are fighting a rear guard action and will loose in the end.

The world is ready for a simple affordable car. Renault is now building the Logan which already goes some way towards a "peoples car" and demand has outstripped anything the company expected. Of course it is a petrol car but they have tapped a market that they didn't know existed. Renault has been absolutely amazed by the response of the public in France. Tata in India has done the same. Obviously a simple car is not for everyone but all over the world there is a longing for simplicity, for having a smaller footprint on the world and for being able to look after yourself rather than having to depend on a specialist for all your needs. If Renault "keeps the faith" and isn't tempted to slowly turn the Logan into a conventional car, it will sweep the world. By the time other manufacturers wake up and smell the flowers, the Logan should have captured the imagination of the world and a huge chunk of its markets. How much more would a simple electric car capture our imagination.

Self Driving
No no no!  I don't want a car that drives itself.  I like driving.  I certainly don't want my car connected to the world wide web.  Have you any idea the vulnerabilities we are exposing ourselves to by putting all our activities into the hands of 'big brother'.  How exposed we are to being hacked, not only by some 14 year old kid in his mom's basement but by government agencies.  Give me a simple but well engineered car and if possible one that I can maintain myself.  Make it highly recyclable.  If as many scientists predict, we are heading for a collapse of our civilizations which will put us back at least into the dark ages, any idea how valuable an electric car will be, after the crash, that you charge at your own solar panels on your roof and that doesn't depend on a www that has collapsed.


And finally
If a car manufacturer does this, eventually it will have to down-size. Such a car will saturate even the world market and The Company will then be providing top up cars and parts. And ultimately, isn't this what we want: a much smaller car manufacturing sector, using less raw materials and energy and producing usable, long lasting cars for the public. We are just on the brink of an ecological melt down and must reduce our foot print on the world. We don't all want to be living the way the kids were in the winner of this year's (2009)Oscars*.

*Slum Dog Millionaire

What is certain is that the car manufacturer that twigs on to this philosophy first will capture a huge share of the market.  If this car comes from America, the world is their market.  If it comes from some other country, America and the rest of the world is their market.