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Toyota and Tesla May Work Together Again
cartechboy writes: Tesla and Toyota have already worked together a few times. The factory in which Tesla builds the electric Model S? It bought that from Toyota. The Toyota RAV4 EV? The battery and software tuning was done by Tesla. Now it sounds like Tesla and Toyota might have another significant project in the pipeline in the next two or three years. Tesla CEO Musk said such a project could be "on a much higher volume level" than the firm's last project with Toyota, the RAV4 EV. Toyota currently has a 2.4 percent stake in Tesla Motors and has sold 2,130 RAV4 EVs through August. For its part, Toyota has no comment regarding Musk's statements about the future project. Given Toyota's stance on electric cars, Musk's comment is a bit confusing. So what exactly will this joint project be?
Because pure electric cars are new technology that are cool and interesting to read about. Because, for the moment, it still reads like an underdog story(not that I actually buy into that being true). Because are we really that interested in what, say, Microsoft is up to now?
Even though this is really a non-story, it's still much more interesting than Bitcoin.
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The current Priuses and other Toyota offerings are parallel hybrids. That is, they have transmissions that directly drive the wheels using the ICE (Internal Combustion Engine).
In a series hybrid, each wheel has it's own motor, and the ICE engine runs at a steady speed that is very efficient to generate electricity that is then used to recharge the batteries that are fed to the electric motors.
A second part of my guess is that Toyota is licensing the recharging technology from Tesla, so that they can use the supercharger network as well. This way they can have a vehicle that can run 100% off of electricity only, but have a ICE engine that is available at any time to back that up (faster refueling, can go anywhere there is a gas station, etc.)
www.toyota.com/prius-plug-in/
Maybe Tesla can help them to bump that number up by a factor of 10 - otherwise, it almost a joke.
(I drive a 2005 Prius and my wife drives a LEAF)
And yet, nobody started buying them in any significant volume until the last couple years.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Given Toyota's stance on electric cars, Musk's comment is a bit confusing.
So I followed the relevant link in TFS and the only substance there is the following: Toyota's Global R&D Chief Mitsuhisa Kato [...] said: "The cruising distance is so short for [electric cars], and the charging time is so long ... At the current level of technology, somebody needs to invent a Nobel Prize-winning type battery." Somebody needs to for what? Certainly not for Toyota to sell an EV, because they've done that already. But I'm not really clear on what Toyota's stance on EVs is, except that the battery technology is not where they'd like to see it. That's everyone's stance on EVs.
Here's my prediction: Either Tesla is going to provide the powertrain for another Toyota EV, possibly a RAV4, or Toyota is going to provide the car (perhaps sans plastics and fenders) for Tesla's upcoming cheaper car. I'd like to see such a car made of Aluminum, but Tesla has hinted that the next car or two won't be made of so much of it, and Toyota is generally allergic to it for all but top-end models.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Then they went away, but only have only recently made a comeback. And they're far, FAR better than ever before due mostly to advancements in battery technology.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Hey, sometimes you just want to make a crash a little more literal.
Or a race condition.
This is a bit like going "why talk about computers like they're new" in the 50s, because the babbage introduced the difference engine in 1822.
Parallel = electric motor and gas motor are both connected to the drive train.
Series = only the electric motor is connected to the drive train.
Prius is a "power split" or a "series parallel" hybrid, which is a bullshit term that means "we are special and not just a parallel hybrid"
In the modern colloquial terminology, slang usage seems to to be
"Series" = "range extended electric vehicle" or "generater in the trunk"
"Parallel" = "doesn't work without gasoline"
In general, people don't care HOW a series/parallel/power split/monkeyass hybrid works... they just care about the "doesn't work without gasoline" part, which is the tough pill to swallow with modern "totally not parallel" hybrids.
Pretty sure those runaways were caused by morons who put their floormats over the accelerator, not software.
Pretty sure they weren't (at least, not all of them).
Having spent more than 18 months going in and out of the secure room to study Toyota's code, Michael Barr, CTO of the Barr Group, put together an 800-page report analyzing the 2005 Camry L4's software. On the witness stand, he walked a jury step by step through what the experts discovered in their source-code review.
...
Barr testified that the source-code review indicated "both that task could die by the memory corruption, and that also that one of side effects of that would be that this -- for example, that task died, that many of fail safes would be disabled." But is it possible to prove that the experts' discoveries in that cloak-and-dagger source-code room would manifest themselves in a moving vehicle? How do we know how a car might react to malfunctions or an outright failure in Task X?
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However, we have confirmed in other vehicle testing that I'll talk about later, that if the incident begins with the peddle, [sic] brake peddle [sic] pressed at all, even lightly then the unintended acceleration will continue, potentially, forever unless the driver tries the risky thing of letting go of the brake while the car is driving away with him.