If you're gonna go through all this trouble, why not put motors directly into the wheels? Then you can bypass the drivetrain all together and directly power the wheels.
Magiccupcake
The newer technology at that time was cars and roads, and many European countries did try the American system of roads and suburbs.
Its just that most of them realized it wad a bad idea around 20 years ago and started rethinking their cities.
Many city centers were even turned into parking lots like American ones.
Again cities arent supposed to be static, and normally they grow denser, rather than sprawling.
The problem with American cities is partly zoning, and partly nimbyism, where people don't want their places to change.
And sprawl sucks for pretty much everyone. Less arable land for farming, poorer anmeties, longer travel times, and finally huge transportation costs. Cars are by far the most costly method of travel, both personally and for governments.
The stupid thing is that fixing it isn't even that hard.
Step one Get rid stupid zoning laws like single family housing and reduce parking minimums.
Step 2 Modify existing roads piece by piece to include alternative transit methods. Add bike lanes, if you can't slow down roads and people will bike.
Actually run decent buses where peoole want to go, not oversized 50 person buses on 3 routes that nobody uses becasue it doesn't go anywhere, and has an hour between the next bus.
That's it, the market will build more housing in areas that need it if its profitable, then use that new tax money to drive transit infrastructure.
There's a lot of fine details, but we're bankrupting cities with cars right now.
It's a good point that cities aren't built anymore, and that's part of the problem. Our population has grown drastically, but we don't build hardly any new infrastructure for them outside of roads. So traffic is terrible despite enormous amounts of money from both government and people.
Cities aren't supposed to be static, they're supposed to grow and adapt to the needs of those that live there. There is a large need for non-car transport that is either ignored or sidelined for cars.
I'm not talking about 90% empty land, that's not where people are.
When the car was invented, governments had little issue buildozing entire neighborhoods for highways, but now that some places are realizing that's a bad decision, its really hard to undo.
There are places that would be wonderfully served by trains, but just aren't.
Cars are best in rural areas, but by far the majority of peoole live in cities where cars are the worst, yet we still build them for cars.
I think it could've used a few more years, because its still not that fun.
Exploation is meaningless, which completely takes the fun out of it. There's nothing interesting to discover.
We have reactor designs that use already spent fuel, we just aren't building them. We have enough spent fuel for centuries, and afterwards the reprocessed fuel is much less radioactive, and only for a few decades.
Anybody got a non paywalled version?
But it's text, an entire persons message history can be stored very cheaply.
A million words is only 2MB.
Most people are expexted to text less than 10 millions words in a lifetime.
An entire persons lifetime message history is only 20MB, that's trivial to store.
If they want to charge to save media, thats fine, but text backups should be free
If you're barely scraping by, having less money can significantly affect quality of life, or at least percieved quality of life.
Prey and outer wilds are games especially enjoyed blind with no prior knowledge.
Do really need need 4?
If you cant get by on 2, you might have less power, but you can get better efficiency. With better efficiency you can have a smaller battery for the same range and reduce some of your increased cost that way.