3. TIL that Majel Barrett, the voice of the Starfleet computer on Star Trek, record...

TIL that Majel Barrett, the voice of the Starfleet computer on Star Trek, recorded an entire library of phonetic sounds before she died which allowed her voice to be used as the computer for future generations.

You know what he meant. Glorified golf carts were not anywhere comparable to cars until recently.

And you also probably know what I meant when I said, "You're probably going to have to walk some of that back, sorry."

in the 70s, 80s and 90s, before the wide spread availability of Lithium rechargeable batteries, hobbyists and small companies were making and converting cars into electronic vehicles. And for short trips and commutes less than 60 miles, they worked fine. They could do 60 mph on the interstate too.

Most people didn't adopt them because they couldn't pile into their car and drive two states away to grandma's house on short notice. There was zero refueling infrastructure. Even the hobbyists typically had at least one normal vehicle for trips like that.

These cars ran on deep cycle lead-acid batteries, which were around much earlier than 30-40 years ago.

I was going to essentially reply this comment to that other guy after he did indeed "walk some of that back", but I didn't because I read the other comments he left elsewhere ITT. I wasn't interested in proving the existence of practical 20th century electronic vehicles to someone who was going to fight me tooth and nail every step of the way.

But they still took the cars back and destroyed them. That was lunacy.

I don't know. I think there are federal consumer laws that force companies to support vehicles they sold in the US market for X number or years or something. Memory is kinda fuzzy, but I recall when Renault pulled out of the US market -- years ago -- they still had to provide parts and service.

Let me be clear, I don't know the exact law. But if something like that existed, it probably made sense to only lease the experimental vehicles out in the first place and claw them back when the lease was up. They probably should have saved some for the Smithsonian or something of course.

Whatever it was, I'm sure it's not a story the jedi tree-huggers would tell you, especially since they were the ones mostly responsible for the bad PR nightmare.

And after a PR nightmare like that, how do you think GM felt about repeating the experiment again?

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