Cars was a better choice than trains on both environmental grounds and business grounds. First, environment. • Trains are somewhere from 1/2 to 1/4 the CO2 em

Cars was a better choice than trains on both environmental grounds and business grounds. First, environment. • Trains are somewhere from 1/2 to 1/4 the CO2 emissions per passenger over a given distance than are cars. • For freight are nearly an order of magnitude less per ton over a given distance than trucks. Second, business. • Nobody buys sports trains. Trains are expensive to build and expensive to buy. Almost nobody other than big companies and governments buys trains, and they buy them to do a job. Those buyers tend to be conservative buyers when it comes to technology. They want their new trains to be a lot like their old trains, with just incremental improvements. With cars you can build a sports car, and people will put up with all kinds of problems as long as you nail the performance (acceleration, top speed, handling). Sports cars are playthings, not work things. With a sports car you can try very different things and then take what works and use it to develop cars for the more widespread car market.