PayPal co-founder Musk persists in funding and floating loss-making EV startup

Can't fault a man for trying, is what some may say here. If you've got the cash and a big idea, why not? And EVs will be big one day. Only problems may be (a) that day if still a ways off and (b) starting with a sports car may grab headlines but not wider sales. OTOH Musk reckons it's a profitable business, if you discount the "high growth mode" expenses.

At some point a rethink of that growth may be in order.

Elon Musk On What's Next For Tesla - Forbes.com

The company is just over six years old and it's in high growth mode, which explains its heavy losses: $261 million in losses just since 2007. Musk has poured nearly all of the fortune he made when eBay ( EBAY - news - people ) bought PayPal (Musk was a PayPal cofounder) into his battery-operated cars. According to his divorce filing, Musk is officially broke as a result.

"I think an important point to consider is that if Tesla was just to sell sports cars and do power train work [for other] companies, we would be profitable," explains Musk. "The reason that we're unprofitable is that we're in very high-growth mode. We're eventually going to grow by 3,000% or 4,000%."

Here's a market opportunity - autosensing thermoreflective glass. As long as making it doesn't use more energy than it saves

The idea is good - as temperature rises the glass darkens. It's hardly new, there are similar but different methods to do this, but it may be a cheaper and more scalable way. As long as the processes involved in making it don't overwhelm the savings.

RavenWindow automatically changes transparency with temperature

The key element in the window is a layer of thermoreflective material between the internal and external layers of glass. When the temperature of that material exceeds the threshold, it becomes reflective, bouncing off at least 90% of the incoming solar energy.

Care to Google up a robotic car?

You may have noticed the recent DARPA-organised robotic car competition. If you didn't you can read about it here in a Forbes article. It's certainly impressive and looked like a lot of fun. Aside from enhancing research into practical robotics, competitions between robotic cars completing 'races' in urban environments is an interesting look into a Sci-fi future of immense wonder. There must be a business model here for someone.

Just imagine: robotic sports, anyone? Google-search your way to an urban pleasure robot for hire, perhaps? Replace human-driven taxis with robots and cut down on those inane cab-driver conversations? (Unless the robots get speech chips as well of course.) Or robotic buses that eliminate the end-of-shift grumpy-driver syndrome? Or more seriously, competent robotic day-surgery in remote locations without the need for expensive, highly-trained human surgeons "on-site". It's potentially a mix of good and bad, isn't it? More programmers and robotics experts, fewer jobs for real people.

Now I'm not a Luddite, but I do wonder about whether we think these things through. Like Einstein wondering whether his work opened to door to nuclear war.

And sure enough these harmless-looking robot games have a military goal as well, with lives saved if you can send more robots into battle instead of warm bodies. The downside to robotic wars, however, are grim. Without the appropriate programming robots will not show human mercy or simple judgment, and may indeed be programmed to be exactly that - inhumane killing machines. And war with 'thinking' machines instead of people at risk may lower the barriers to war itself. So we get more war with fewer consequences - well, if you are on the winning side, anyway.

Meanwhile Google's 'first privately-owned car on the moon' competition is a bit wacky - and certainly way-out - but hints at where we may be going next in our personal transport. Despite the fun of it all it's possible that our obsession with cars will end on Earth when we run out of accessible, cheap resources; equally it's hard to see how lunar exploration and exploitation will solve our immediate problems. But that's humanity - pressing on, pushing the boundaries and fixing up the broken stuff later.