If you hit and seriously injure someone, that $35 insurance will not cover the multi-million dollar medical and legal and recompense bills.
This can be a working strategy if you don't have a dollar to your name (whomever you hit won't be able to squeeze blood out of a stone), and never intend to have a dollar to your name, but is generally ill-advised for someone in the middle-class, who has money and assets to lose.
This is not true in a strict sense; Standard Japanese has a pitch accent that has a "culminative" pitch countour over a word. Culminativity means that there is a single point of prominence at maximum. In Japanese, this gets realised as a drop in the pitch. (In variants of Japanese, there are more elaborare systems.)
Tone systems are different in the sense that each syllable has it's own countour. (Of course, when realized, these get merged according to various phonological processes) Japanese differs from tone systems in that it has only one culminative pitch contour over multi-syllable words.
(Disclosure: I am an expert in Japanese phonology, especially in pitch accent.)
Not sure what to post, but here are four interesting tidbits about Japanese pitch accent:
1) "Culminativity" is actually considered the most helpful functionality of the pitch accent. It helps making sense of word boundaries, as there can be only one prominent syllable per word. In spoken word of any language, there are no "spaces" (there are no spaces in written Japanese either, though), so languages need to provide accommodations for aural parsing strategies.
2) The other functionality provided by the pitch accent is distinctiveness, which means that there are some homonyms (similar-sounding words), that are only differentiated by the pitch accent. However, that is only a secondary functionality. In Mandarin Chinese, tones play a lot more important role for making sense of the meaning of the word. In Japanese, they play a role, but not a significant one. (There are some hundreds of minimal pair words that differ only by the pitch accent pattern, but as many regional dialects also have slightly different accent patterns, clearly 100% nailing the pattern isn't required for communication, as long as the general principles (such as one drop per word) are followed.)
3) Japanese is said to be an "isochronic" language, which means it has (or at least, is perceived to have) a simple integer-based rythm. For example, Haiku, a famous genre of Japanese poetry is based on these rythms, unit of which is called haku (拍) in Japanese or mora in Latin/English. In context of poetry metrics, mora is often misrepresented as a "syllable", but actually, there are uni- and bimoraic (and rarely, trimoraic) syllables in Japanese. An example: 2-mora "ma-to" means a target (in archery etc). 3-mora "ma-t-to" means a "mat/carpet". 3-mora "ma-n-to" means a cloak. 3-mora "ma-to-o" meas "let's wait". 3-mora "ma-to-n" means "mutton meat". 4-mora "ma-t-to-o" means "proper/straight". But every one of these are two-syllable words!
4) The rythm of Japanese speech is not concerned with the pitch accent prominence, unlike stress in English, which tends to make stressed syllables longer and louder (and more defined in vowel quality). Indeed, it is often said that "syllables" are an irrelevant concept for Japanese. However, phonologically that isn't true at all. The rythm of Japanese is indeed dependent mostly on moras, but the pitch accent patterns, where the prominent drop of pitch tends to happen, is highly dependent on syllable structure. It never happens on "weak" morae, which are called the "coda" or tail of the syllable. It always happens on the start of a syllable.
In the same way that Swedish has two tones. Bitonal systems aren't quite as difficult as language like monosyllabic polytonal languages like Mandarin or Cantonese though. There are a handful of words in Japanese which are differentiated in pronunciation only by tone, but these are relatively rare. If you screw up the tone in Japanese it will sound like a bad foreign accent but you will likely still be understood. Just about every word in Mandarin on the other hand has one or more conjugate tone pairings, and if you screw up the tone you're speaking nonsense.
(Source: 10 years learning Japanese, followed by marrying someone from Taiwan.)
Power/Weight ratio matters for pretty much everything more than one initially thinks.
People usually think first of adding power as adding performance. But power affects only one parameter - acceleration. In contrast, reducing weight similarly improves acceleration, but also improves turning, and braking performance, and reduces the loads and wear on every other component (the opposite of adding power). And that is just in automotive performance.
As soon as you go to anything that flies, the same effects are just multiplied. Every gram of weight saved is either a 1:1 increase in available payload, or an increase in range and/or fuel that can extend range, and of course still improved performance across the entire envelope.
And the only reason that e-Vehicles get away with such absurd weights is that all that weight can be put low and centered in the suspension so the fundamentals of chassis dynamics is acceptable. They still massively abuse the tires, but with a higher weight distribution would be absolute pigs if no virtually un-driveable.
Of course, any vehicle choosing between a Wankel and this LP thing is not likely an overweight battery-heavy vehicle, so it'll count more. Obviously a 1% saving of 45 pounds on a 4500Lb EV is not going to do a lot, but ... yeah, it's still a key issue.
And this is especially an issue because LP is making it the central claim of their pitch, and it is so easily beaten by much older technology. Makes it seem more like a basis for fleecing investors than a serious entry to improve the state of the art.
