330 MPG! Aptera Hybrid

Apparently you've never lived in a major city. A condominium in Bethesda MD, which is still eight or ten miles from downtown Washington, costs a million dollars. I rented a ratted out basement in DC for a year and it cost me $1000 a month. People are paying $500,000 for a bloody townhouse in Frederick County MD, which is fifty miles from Washington! The only people who can "live near where they work" in places like Los Angeles and Chicago either make more than $100K or live like losers in garrets. Sure you can still find a few smaller towns with short commutes, but they're all growing. Even a crap-hole like metropolitan Tucson has two-thirds of a million people.

Of course there are a few cities whose governments believe in the fairytale that the law of supply and demand does not apply to them, i.e. they have rent control laws. Santa Monica enacted rent control about 25 years ago and it has turned from one of the nicest suburbs of Los Angeles into a stinking slum. New York City is a lot like that although since it's an industrial center people are able to rent lofts in old factories for fair market value and the authorities don't notice *wink wink*.

In addition, overcrowded housing creates conditions that generally degrade the quality of life. Noise, odors, lack of privacy, inconvenience of living twenty stories above street level, small quarters, no outdoor space. It's a rotten place for people of average means to raise children. It's really hard to have a dog in a crowded city unless you're rich, and you're all familiar with my thesis that every child should have a dog because it's one of our earliest and best civilizing influences. Places where children have to grow up without dogs are striking examples of civilization backsliding into the Stone Age, from the cesspools of America's inner cities where there's no room for dogs to poop, to the cesspools of Islamic fundamentalism where dogs are considered "unclean."

Try buying your gas in Europe for a couple of bucks per quart. America is living in a fantasy world in which the Chinese and Indians will never start competing with us for the world's limited supply of petroleum.

People experimented with that configuration for sidecar motorcycle racing, since a loophole in the rules allowed it. I didn't really follow the sport, but as far as I know it didn't catch on. Having more weight on the inboard wheel certainly must help improve stability, but you can't fight the laws of physics. Three wheels are not as stable as four. Besides, it pretty much mandates front-wheel drive, and Americans are not adept enough drivers to handle FWD in emergency situations. You go into a turn too hard, back off on the throttle, and the rear wheels break loose. It will be even worse if there's only one wheel back there.

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