People give him a lot of leeway in that respect. He's been wading in promising the earth for years, and I no longer believe for a second that he doesn't realise these things are impossible in the short to medium term. The impact of his publicity-seeking forays into fantasy-land are an increasing level of scepticism and fall in investment for real engineers trying to make real current technology do useful things in the real current decade.
I think you have the wrong person there. Having handled Teslas, sufficiently to have gone through the recharging stages, they really are the first "proper car" with electric technology, and feel and handle like a proper car. They do seem to be catching on around the world, the only present downside is they are notably expensive, but they really do what it says on the tin. Likewise his SpaceX rockets do seem to have promised beyond the earth - and actually managed it.
He's done quite well with the Tesla, although I'm waiting to see the proper reasonably-priced version for the rest of us - so far he's spent 10-15 years getting to an interesting luxury oddity and he's arrived there about the same time as everybody else. What annoys me is throwing stuff like hyperloop out there in a cheap attempt to disrupt proper high-speed rail, and the current fixation with tunnelling which rather seems to push the idea that the people who've been at it for a hundred years just aren't doing it right and we should wait for him to fix it and buy his new patented version.
I think you do not understand the concept of specific energy - it is the energy stored per unit mass and in SI units is measured in joules per kilogram. The energy may be stored in the form of mass as shown by Einstein's famous formula, or in the stress in chemical bonds in the case of fuels and explosives, in the form of electro-chemical potentials as in batteries or electrostatic fields as in capacitors or even magnetic energy in a magnetic field. Tables of specific energy for different materials may be found in scientific papers and textbooks.
To be fair, most of the Northern Fells route does not have headspans. However, the windier bits of the double track sections have had intermediate masts fitted to stop lateral displacement.
Wow - I did not know that - 1989 was the last time I traveled Preston- Carlisle and beyond.
There was a report by Chris Gibb on the problems being faced on the Euston to Rugby section of the WCML in the period up to 2012. From Period 1 to Period 7 in 2012-13 there were 23,511 OHLE/third rail defects; after he had identified these and other problems the number of defects had been reduced to 8558 over the same Periods in 2013-14.
To a large extent electric traction gives you this sort of benefit already.
Heck, even in Germany they're no longer the preferred solution as far as I'm aware. It's just that whereas the UK initially used portals (the original WCML electrification for example), switched to headspans for a while and now back again to portals, Germany had always used headspans until recently (apart from some experimental Swiss-lookalike portals in a station or two), so the installation base of already existing headspans is naturally much larger. But for new installations headspans are rather uncommon, although instead of portals normally this kind of multi-track cantilever is used (I think the two track variety is more common, but as that picture shows at least three tracks are possible as well).
The Swiss? To my mind, Swiss electrification is always associated with rigid portal masts, although maybe not quite as massive-looking as those typically used in the UK.
Sort of...
Part of me hopes his HGV will work. If it does, he has made a quantum leap in battery technology which could mean that battery EMUs for branch lines are back on the menu.
