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An idling gas engine may be annoyingly loud, but that’s the price you pay for having WAY less torque available at a standstill.
10 points
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It advanced at a glacier pace because there was no massive driving force. It only kicked off a bit with cell phones and then in any substantial way with laptops. (Yes, batteries existed before that for different things, but there was no massive driving force.) Now imagine what would have happened if we funded it starting in the 1970s.