[rdl]

I disagree.

Based on time in a Roadster, and what I've seen of the model s, I would be totally happy with the S in the bay area, and either rent or keep a second car for trips out of the bay. With a constant level of tech, sure, the city car makes more sense, but assuming you can afford the high tech batteries, the tesla seems like a great car for how Americans use cars.

If I weren't getting a model s, I'd probably get an Audi S5 or S7, so you are taking a 25mpg or less car off the road for an incremental cost of $30k. For me, the carpool benefits make it worthwhile alone (I wasted 1.5h driving to SF today, which would have been 30min in the carpool lane, but I only had one rather than 2 companions).

Making big trucks, SUVs, etc fuel efficient IS the low hanging fruit, followed by cars like taxis and police cars which drive lots of miles and idle a lot. Taking a 50mpg city car to 100mpg, driven 5 miles a day, isn't much savings by comparison.

[salem]

Regarding the taxis, just about every taxi in Australia runs on LNG these days. It's widely available, and aside from the benefits on somewhat cleaner emissions, you can easily make the money back on the conversion for the number miles they rack up. I'm surprised this is not subsidized in the USA, especially now that the reserves of gas have been revised up so much.

[tjmc]

You're off by a carbon atom. The taxis here run on LPG not LNG. In other words - propane rather than methane. Australia still produces more LNG than pretty much anywhere, but it's all shipped off to China, Korea and Japan.

[riffraff]

FWIW, taxis in italy have massively migrated to hybrid cars (noticeably, prius)

[Tossrock]

Carpool lanes are two people in the Bay Area. Did you mean you had zero rather than one companions, or were you unaware of the law?

[d2vid]

If you have an electric car and get a permit you can drive in the carpool lane alone: http://www.arb.ca.gov/msprog/carpool/carpool.htm

[Domenic_S]

Huge swaths of 80 and 880 are three-person HOV lanes. Take a look at the interactive map here: http://rideshare.511.org/

[Tossrock]

Well, I'd quibble about 'huge swaths', but I was in the wrong, so my mistake. I guess this is what I get for going to Oakland once per year.

[rdl]

Yeah, it's specifically the Bay Bridge; since they did work last weekend, it seems to have become a parking lot all morning. Not sure why. It's HOV-3.