According to Mr. Hanson, the 15 existing trucks in the fleet, from supplier Smith Electric – which hopes to build a factory in the Bronx – have been "roughly on parity" with conventional diesels in terms of reliability.
Designed like a railgun and powered by electricity generated by a vehicle, its range is twice that of the roughly 8km reached by conventional mortars, says Harry Fair, founder of the group behind the project at the University of Texas, Austin.
The conventional version (roughly $17,000) hits the road later this year; its electric counterpart will be available in 2011.
It's a fancypants way of saying "conventional wisdom", roughly synonymous with the "Establishment" or Digby's "Village".
That's the one of the largest reserves in the country and is equivalent to roughly half of Saudi Arabia's conventional oil resources.
Last summer, for example, Salomon raised nearly $800 million to buy more than 6,200 mortgages from Ameriquest with an average interest rate of 9.56percentt, roughly 2 points higher than conventional mortgages.
And coming up to two years after September 11 , 2001- roughly the time it takes conventional fiction publishing to respond to cultural shifts - what did we find unstoppably atop the American fiction charts?
Indeed, for all the new competition in smartphones, Nokia remains the dominant player in conventional handsets, selling roughly 15 phones a second worldwide, according to the company, including the Nokia 1201, a basic model that is its best seller.
The living roof, for instance, costs roughly the same as a conventional roof but is expected to last twice as long because it will not expand during the day and shrink at night.
Every kilometer of this kind of road uses the equivalent of 1m plastic bags, saving around one tonne of asphalt and costing roughly 8% less than a conventional road.
