The first weekend.

Or the first year.

GM TOTAL sold fewer than 5,000 hybrid vehicles in all of ‘07.

The EV-1 was their paradigm-buster. It sold less than 700 units.

For 35 years smart Americans have bought fewer and fewer Chevvies because they DON’T WORK.

You want the paradigm-buster: Prius. 180,000 sold annually in the U.S.

Rotsa Ruck, Chevy.

As of 6/7/07, Toyota sold over ONE MILLION hybrids – 3/4 were Prius.

And we all know what kind of market share Apple has. FAIL.

Probably more like Windows Vista. Running along at highway speed, and BSOD forces a reboot. (I’ve never seen a BSOD in vista, much less XP, ME was the last time).

Actually, since you asked, let’s look more closely at what happened with the Lisa/Mac. It could very well mimic what happens with the eflex products.

The original 1MB Lisa was released in the beginning of 1983 for $10k.
The first hardware revision (the Lisa 2) came out one year later for 3.5-$5.5k and could be had with 2MB and a hard drive.

So, in that one year, the memory doubled and the price dropped in half. That was too fast a price jump even for Moore’s law. That was Apple getting comfortable with the manufacturing and market positioning.

I expect something similar for the Volt, as they are getting comfortable with the batteries and warranty costs. Maybe not quite as fast as for computers, of course.

The mac 128k came out about a month after the Lisa 2. It had 128kB of memory and cost $2k initially, but was quickly raised to $2.5k. There was a memory upgrade to 512kB in Oct 2005, but it wasn’t a huge mover because:
The 1MB mac plus came out in January of 2006 for $2.6k.
(all data from Wikipedia, by the way)

So, let’s apply to the Volt. Time scales will be different.

Lisa volt: 40 mile range, $40k
Lisa 2 volt 80 mile range, $20k
Mac volt 4 mile range, $10k
Mac plus volt 40 mile range, $10k

Granted that is unlikely. I suspect if you cut the price drops by half that factor it might be more appropriate:
Lisa volt 40mi/$40k
Lisa2 volt 80mi/$30k
Mac volt 4mi/$20k
Mac plus volt 40mi/$20k.

What took 3 years for the computers is probably more like 15 for the carmakers, too.

I’m not going to go very far on a limb and predict that is what will happen. It’s just kind of a fun thought experiment. Still, there might turn out to be some grain of truth in it. We shall see!!

Generally, PG&E just puts one meter per premise. They’re under no obligation by the California Public Utilities Commission to provide submeters… so they don’t. You have to run your household on one schedule.
Here’s the relevant rules:
http://www.pge.com/tariffs/tm2/pdf/ELEC_RULES_18.pdf

And PG&E can be a pain to deal with. I had to do a couple thousand bucks worth of extra work to completely replace my meter (FSE- Field Service Equipment) to integrate the solar system into my house loads (my system can power the entire house when PG&E is down).
Of course, my troubles were really minor compared to these troubles:
http://www.solarwarrior.com/pgebattle.html

Given the amount of work that I’ve put into this house I’m stuck here! That’s unless I find a buyer for a solar system with a house attached!

The cells are Sun Power, but they don’t fill the available area of the tile. Open Energy recently swapped away from Sun Power to a cell that fills the available area (for less money) and only dropped from 35W to 34W per tile. Exposed area of the tile is 3 sq ft almost exactly.

For the nearly flat roof I probably lose 15 to 20% by being flat on the roof. If I mounted them at an angle I would have to install about 20% less panels otherwise the front ones would cast shadows on those behind. I didn’t want to do this because of wind concerns. The mounts might be strong, but I’m near the ocean, and 120 mph wind gust could rip my roof off if the panels acted like sails. So flat on the roof was the best solution. Also it looks better.

The solar tour looks to be USA only. shame it doesn’t go north of the border.
I’m a little south of you in NY (south shore of Long Island), 41 degrees north.

I have very little roof space left, but will likely install at least one if not two 8×4 solar thermal collectors. For this I may mount one like a sail to point a little more south, but on a rack that can be lowered and locked if need be.

I would be interested to know how selling your house goes with the solar.

As for solar trackers, I think there are bunch of guidance methods passive, active with photo cells, maybe active with inverter feedback is possible, but if correctly aligned all that’s needed is an accurate clock to know where the sun is given your latitude I would have thought that an active system with an accurate clock would be best (it could point to the sun even behind a cloud), and not suffer from a slow reset like a passive system. Plenty for you to research before spring. I have until spring to research my solar thermal.