You act as if to have a choice in power lol. Yes you can move, buy a super expensive solar or wind installation. Outside of that you are stuck with electrics polluting badly. Were I live in the USA electrics get around 35mpg equivelant. I'd rather buy an efficient diesel, pay less than half what a cheap electric costs, and not blow as much money on alternat power sources as my house.
Very true. Also internal combustion efficiency is rated as if you had access to a 0deg K heat reservoir. If you assume efficiency in dumping to the same temperature you took the air in at efficiency goes up a lot.
Replacing coal plants takes decades. Unless you buy a 50k solar or 100k wind installation or move you ARE tied to fossil fuels for the life of the vehicle. Lol.
Oh, they didn't miss the point. The problem with the current EV's are multitudious just like the previous "solutions". (I'm off to gore some sacred cows now...)
The battery manufacture, recycling and/or disposal is a more toxic form of pollution than the previous "solutions".
The source of power, at least until we ditch the idiot notions about Thorium fueled nuclear power, is one of being more polluting (even the unreliable (yes) "green" power "solutions" pollute worse than Coal does...just not where you are. As such, any EV is as removed from "green" as Coal and the "green" wind and solar are. Coal's big reason for existence is that it's cleaner than the current alternatives (yes) and is reliable as opposed to the so-called "green" solutions in play right now.
Ultimately, they're not an improvement- it's a sloppily done shifting of the problem around. Could they be an improvement? Yes. With something like the recent ultracapacitor tech improvements, if it succeeds in being commercializeable, would remove the batteries from the equation. If you move to Thorium for most of your electric power with hydroelectric being the remainder, you end up with something relatively green as a power source for everything.
At that moment, and not before, do you have an improvement over the modern IC engines which actually emit less than the coal fired plants, the manufacture of the "green" solutions for electric power require to accomplish a move to all EV for personal transport.
Should we do better than we're doing? Yes. Is an EV in the current state of affairs "better"? Nope. Not even close.
Yes electrics pollute CO2 per mile the same as efficient gas and diesel for about 80% of the worlds populations. But lithium batteries are relatively non-toxic compared to lead acids, nickel metal hydrides and nickel cadniums. Ultra-capacitors have good power density, more than lithium in some cases, but energy density is 1.2-2 orders of magnitude lower making them useless as a power source. Pseudo capacitors may have some potential, but look like they will fall short of newer battery tech by a large gap even over the next decade. Electrics have good torque at low speeds, are extremely easy to control precisely, are very efficient, and turn and off in extremely short amounts of time with nearly no efficiency overhead costs. They are superior in many ways. It's just electric fanboys neglect power comes from coal, the increased environmental costs of producing current electrics, and the fact that because they cost so much it would reduce global emissions more to promote efficient diesels instead for the next 10-20 years at least. But they compartmentalize facts and don't listen to reason trying to believe we live in a shiny new future instead of actually reducing emissions in the most econonomical and feasible way now.
Yes, but there are a relative few number of fossil-fuel-burning power plants compared to fossil-fuel-burning automobiles, and once the electric car is built, it can be charged from electricity produced from any power plant, not simply a fossil-fuel plant. That means that the fossil-fuel plants can be replaced over time as they reach end-of-life or when they no longer meet emissions standards.
New power plants take decades to plan, build and come online. Minimum 10 years in the USA. Very small solar and wind can go faster but make little impact since they are little. I live in a region where electrics get 35mpg and there are no plans on upgrades of any significance. If you buy a car now in a region like that, and don't move, you just paid double to pollute the same over the entire life of the vehicle.
jogging/running is approximately the same CO2 output as driving a hybrid
I don't think you're factoring in the reduced medical care that people who exercise require. This results in a decreased demand for healthcare goods and services, lower resource consumption and specifically consumption of the fossil fuels used to create the plastics most medical devices are made from nowadays due to their throwaway nature, and the energy consumed by the medical staff going to/from work, home visits, etc. Also, as far as consuming calories for exercising, the way most people obtain them is through eating carbs, not meat. Take a look at the horses you are referring to - they eat grain.
Holy cow lol! I mentioned jogging/running. Have you seen the injury rate? You ruin your knees and lower extremities so badly it's only two notches down from American football, boxing, or rugby players. Yes for a few years medical costs 'may' be lower. In the long run those people will ruin their bodies actually requiring more care. I myself messed up my knees and can't run or jog as eh short distances myself. I can still use elliptical trainers or bicycles, but it has pushed me to stop exercising nearly as much. Ur. Isn't ruins your body long term unless you are genetically and traditionally very lucky.
True but if you eat meat, especially beef, it's much worse. Further i did say lots of exercise - when I was active id easily eat 400-6000 calories a day. When I'm lazy, like for the last 5 years, i only eat 2500 or so. Those results are pretty common. Most people dont think and don't want to realize that traditional forms of transportation, like walking, are almost as bad (in come cases worse) than driving.
It's not exactly good for the enviornment to strip mine coal, burn it and change it to electricity, then charge up an electric vehicle either. Because of that it is actually cleaner in terms of CO2 to run efficient fossil fuel cars in many areas.
Full electrics pollute more than efficient gas in 17%-25% of America while efficient diesel pollute less then electrics in 50% of America due to the electricity being produced by fossil fuels. China is much worse and India is far worse. Yes in the future electrics will be a cleaner solution but today saying electrics are the panacea of all problems with driving and CO2 is disingenuous.
Cars were seen as a non-polluting alternative to horses and an answer to grid lock; as well as safer since getting run over by a horse was a not uncommon occurrence.
This. People dont realize how much pollution/problems/rangers exist with horses because 99.999% of people never use them. It's just like people and diseases vaccinations have nearly wiped out. Further with all the care horses require, modern feed, medical care, large open spaces, they actually do have a carbon cost. Due to the insane footprint of creating, transporting, and preparing food the human CO2 footprint is pretty large - so big that jogging/running is approximately the same CO2 output as driving a hybrid. The meat you almost need to eat if you excercise a lot is the most to blame.
Aluminum air batteries have far lower power density (power at high discharge rates) than the type of lithium batteries being used currently. Additionally aluminum air batteries are primary (non rechargeable) and too many problems exist with simply dumping out the spent aluminum.
The small subgroup of middle age, mid life crises men, who bought the model S as some form of maintaining their sexual prowess only to be overcome with 'range anxiety'.
Are autonomous vehicles limited by visual spectrum? I was under the impression they used a combination of visual spectrum, active radar, infrared, sonar, and lasers (amongst other, I would guess).
Yes the major players use multiple types of sensors. The data is "fused" from them to create a virtual world representation (essentially) of the real world. You additionally merge error through mathematical techniques like Kalman filtering. However this is not straight forward. When sensors give conflicting results, or sensors become dirty, or faulty it becomes a very very hard problem. The hardest problems are extracting and fusing the data in reliable ways taking sensor problems into account and creating algorithms that can reliably act 'intelligently' using the extracted information. Vision tends to be the most difficult but can use relatively cheap sensors while outputting very rich data. Each type has pluses and minuses. It's likely we will need many more smart algorithms for sensor processing and simeltaneous localization and mapping along with more smart algorithms to get them all working together before its a reality. The google car is great, but just look at all the things it has to deal with in their videos.
I would agree with the prospect of "fully" autonomous driving being too far out to even hope for. However, I think we will have limited-access highway-only autonomy by 2020.
I would be happy if that happened. However we would already need to have been starting legislation in place years ago, and be installing extra sensors, signs, and lane markers now for things to get done in only 5 years. This is the government lol. I too think limited freeway driving will be first but I'm not hopeful 10 years is enough.
Yes I have watched them. I also worked in a robotics lab for almost 8 years where tons of computer vision, lidar, radar, sonar, etc were used in various projects. I don't consider myself an expert in autonomous cars but ill wager i know a lot more than most fans of them. we can wait and see but I'm only slightly hopeful of autonomous driving being accepted in the US before my license is revoked when I'm too senile to pilot a car manually.
I have no objections to any of those concerns. What i object to is the FAA not getting off their ass and actually working them out. The FAA has a long history of ignoring new tech, and stubbornly ignoring any discourse, rather than working through the issues and making the world a better place.
If you are talking about the google car video 2:30 into the video - yes cars can just barely - and unsafely - navigate through construction at like 5mph. Google is NOT claiming they can reliably handle construction. Please point me to a statement otherwise. Furthermore in that same video the car is meandering like a texting schoolgirl in its lane - dosen't inspire confidence in me at all. Get that laser rangefinder on top of the car dirty, such as dust from rain and road spray, then tell me how it works. (Answer is the vehicle wont work in rain).
There sure is. I have no doubt that sometime in the future, barring some kind of planetary catastrophe, it will be solved. The article is just a stunt and nothing more, id be much more impressed by a well cited DARPA urban challenge paper or any serious work than the article. 30-50 years out for true autonomous freeway driving in the USA is my guess - for both the legal and technical challenges.
Keep in mind that cars can and will make use of a variety of sensors besides vision that are much easier and reliable to process. I'm betting the first generation of automated highway driving uses no vision systems at all... just radar, lidar, and sonar, plus GPS for nativation. More to the point, they can use ALL of them at once. Those are more than enough to handle highway driving. Cars today are already using some of these systems for their intelligent cruise control, auto-parking, and collision avoidance systems.
Make no mistake... computers are going to be FAR better drivers than humans. No getting drowsy or falling asleep. No distractions by the passengers in the seat next to you or the rugrats in the back. No rear-ending cars while looking at your cellphone or putting on makeup or one of the ten thousand stupid things humans do every day behind the wheel. Fully autonomous cars can't come fast enough, and they'll likely be coming a hell of a lot faster than you think.
Funny because sensor fusion isn't so simple. It's a big step from auto following a car to actual autonomous driving on freeways in a more reliable way than even the worst human drivers. Comparing the state of the art today to sunny day freely moving traffic human drivers - we are no where near humans. Add heavy rain, dirty sensors, snow, road construction, etc and we will have need for humans to sit and nanny autonomous vehicles from the inside for a long time. Furthermore all this "solved problem in 10 years" smacks of the leading computer scientists in the 60s claiming they could beat the best human in 10 years. Then it was another 10. Granted it was only 4 times of saying 10 years so yes eventually. Further still there is the legal ramifications of when the first human fatality due to autonomous driving occurs - common sense and logic will take a back seat to "think of the children" in the USA and we both know it. We are more likely 30 years out than 5-10. However what chaps my hide is people saying this stunt of using a combination of cruise control, lane following, and car distance following is autonomous driving is like saying Siri is strong AI.
Slashdot Mirror
You act as if to have a choice in power lol. Yes you can move, buy a super expensive solar or wind installation. Outside of that you are stuck with electrics polluting badly. Were I live in the USA electrics get around 35mpg equivelant. I'd rather buy an efficient diesel, pay less than half what a cheap electric costs, and not blow as much money on alternat power sources as my house.
Very true. Also internal combustion efficiency is rated as if you had access to a 0deg K heat reservoir. If you assume efficiency in dumping to the same temperature you took the air in at efficiency goes up a lot.
It's far more unusual to get 350 actual miles from an electric than 700 miles from a fossil fuel car.
Replacing coal plants takes decades. Unless you buy a 50k solar or 100k wind installation or move you ARE tied to fossil fuels for the life of the vehicle. Lol.
Oh, they didn't miss the point. The problem with the current EV's are multitudious just like the previous "solutions". (I'm off to gore some sacred cows now...)
The battery manufacture, recycling and/or disposal is a more toxic form of pollution than the previous "solutions".
The source of power, at least until we ditch the idiot notions about Thorium fueled nuclear power, is one of being more polluting (even the unreliable (yes) "green" power "solutions" pollute worse than Coal does...just not where you are. As such, any EV is as removed from "green" as Coal and the "green" wind and solar are. Coal's big reason for existence is that it's cleaner than the current alternatives (yes) and is reliable as opposed to the so-called "green" solutions in play right now.
Ultimately, they're not an improvement- it's a sloppily done shifting of the problem around. Could they be an improvement? Yes. With something like the recent ultracapacitor tech improvements, if it succeeds in being commercializeable, would remove the batteries from the equation. If you move to Thorium for most of your electric power with hydroelectric being the remainder, you end up with something relatively green as a power source for everything.
At that moment, and not before, do you have an improvement over the modern IC engines which actually emit less than the coal fired plants, the manufacture of the "green" solutions for electric power require to accomplish a move to all EV for personal transport.
Should we do better than we're doing? Yes. Is an EV in the current state of affairs "better"? Nope. Not even close.
Yes electrics pollute CO2 per mile the same as efficient gas and diesel for about 80% of the worlds populations. But lithium batteries are relatively non-toxic compared to lead acids, nickel metal hydrides and nickel cadniums. Ultra-capacitors have good power density, more than lithium in some cases, but energy density is 1.2-2 orders of magnitude lower making them useless as a power source. Pseudo capacitors may have some potential, but look like they will fall short of newer battery tech by a large gap even over the next decade.
Electrics have good torque at low speeds, are extremely easy to control precisely, are very efficient, and turn and off in extremely short amounts of time with nearly no efficiency overhead costs. They are superior in many ways. It's just electric fanboys neglect power comes from coal, the increased environmental costs of producing current electrics, and the fact that because they cost so much it would reduce global emissions more to promote efficient diesels instead for the next 10-20 years at least. But they compartmentalize facts and don't listen to reason trying to believe we live in a shiny new future instead of actually reducing emissions in the most econonomical and feasible way now.
Yes, but there are a relative few number of fossil-fuel-burning power plants compared to fossil-fuel-burning automobiles, and once the electric car is built, it can be charged from electricity produced from any power plant, not simply a fossil-fuel plant. That means that the fossil-fuel plants can be replaced over time as they reach end-of-life or when they no longer meet emissions standards.
New power plants take decades to plan, build and come online. Minimum 10 years in the USA. Very small solar and wind can go faster but make little impact since they are little. I live in a region where electrics get 35mpg and there are no plans on upgrades of any significance. If you buy a car now in a region like that, and don't move, you just paid double to pollute the same over the entire life of the vehicle.
jogging/running is approximately the same CO2 output as driving a hybrid
I don't think you're factoring in the reduced medical care that people who exercise require. This results in a decreased demand for healthcare goods and services, lower resource consumption and specifically consumption of the fossil fuels used to create the plastics most medical devices are made from nowadays due to their throwaway nature, and the energy consumed by the medical staff going to/from work, home visits, etc. Also, as far as consuming calories for exercising, the way most people obtain them is through eating carbs, not meat. Take a look at the horses you are referring to - they eat grain.
Holy cow lol! I mentioned jogging/running. Have you seen the injury rate? You ruin your knees and lower extremities so badly it's only two notches down from American football, boxing, or rugby players. Yes for a few years medical costs 'may' be lower. In the long run those people will ruin their bodies actually requiring more care. I myself messed up my knees and can't run or jog as eh short distances myself. I can still use elliptical trainers or bicycles, but it has pushed me to stop exercising nearly as much. Ur. Isn't ruins your body long term unless you are genetically and traditionally very lucky.
True but if you eat meat, especially beef, it's much worse. Further i did say lots of exercise - when I was active id easily eat 400-6000 calories a day. When I'm lazy, like for the last 5 years, i only eat 2500 or so. Those results are pretty common. Most people dont think and don't want to realize that traditional forms of transportation, like walking, are almost as bad (in come cases worse) than driving.
It's not exactly good for the enviornment to strip mine coal, burn it and change it to electricity, then charge up an electric vehicle either. Because of that it is actually cleaner in terms of CO2 to run efficient fossil fuel cars in many areas.
Full electrics pollute more than efficient gas in 17%-25% of America while efficient diesel pollute less then electrics in 50% of America due to the electricity being produced by fossil fuels. China is much worse and India is far worse. Yes in the future electrics will be a cleaner solution but today saying electrics are the panacea of all problems with driving and CO2 is disingenuous.
Cars were seen as a non-polluting alternative to horses and an answer to grid lock; as well as safer since getting run over by a horse was a not uncommon occurrence.
This. People dont realize how much pollution/problems/rangers exist with horses because 99.999% of people never use them. It's just like people and diseases vaccinations have nearly wiped out.
Further with all the care horses require, modern feed, medical care, large open spaces, they actually do have a carbon cost. Due to the insane footprint of creating, transporting, and preparing food the human CO2 footprint is pretty large - so big that jogging/running is approximately the same CO2 output as driving a hybrid. The meat you almost need to eat if you excercise a lot is the most to blame.
Aluminum air batteries have far lower power density (power at high discharge rates) than the type of lithium batteries being used currently. Additionally aluminum air batteries are primary (non rechargeable) and too many problems exist with simply dumping out the spent aluminum.
you can always eat your ride if it breaks down
And I thought they smelled bad on the outside...
This
The small subgroup of middle age, mid life crises men, who bought the model S as some form of maintaining their sexual prowess only to be overcome with 'range anxiety'.
It has noting to do with 'my model' at all. It's ubiquitous in peer reviewed literature.
Are autonomous vehicles limited by visual spectrum? I was under the impression they used a combination of visual spectrum, active radar, infrared, sonar, and lasers (amongst other, I would guess).
Yes the major players use multiple types of sensors. The data is "fused" from them to create a virtual world representation (essentially) of the real world. You additionally merge error through mathematical techniques like Kalman filtering. However this is not straight forward. When sensors give conflicting results, or sensors become dirty, or faulty it becomes a very very hard problem. The hardest problems are extracting and fusing the data in reliable ways taking sensor problems into account and creating algorithms that can reliably act 'intelligently' using the extracted information. Vision tends to be the most difficult but can use relatively cheap sensors while outputting very rich data. Each type has pluses and minuses. It's likely we will need many more smart algorithms for sensor processing and simeltaneous localization and mapping along with more smart algorithms to get them all working together before its a reality. The google car is great, but just look at all the things it has to deal with in their videos.
I would agree with the prospect of "fully" autonomous driving being too far out to even hope for. However, I think we will have limited-access highway-only autonomy by 2020.
I would be happy if that happened. However we would already need to have been starting legislation in place years ago, and be installing extra sensors, signs, and lane markers now for things to get done in only 5 years. This is the government lol. I too think limited freeway driving will be first but I'm not hopeful 10 years is enough.
Yes I have watched them. I also worked in a robotics lab for almost 8 years where tons of computer vision, lidar, radar, sonar, etc were used in various projects. I don't consider myself an expert in autonomous cars but ill wager i know a lot more than most fans of them.
we can wait and see but I'm only slightly hopeful of autonomous driving being accepted in the US before my license is revoked when I'm too senile to pilot a car manually.
Mod parent up because the tech beng touted as new and groundbreaking is simply 20 years old. Saying its autonomous is like saying Siri is strong AI
Delphi team.
I might not know much about the programming, but I know that every source file ends with a full stop.
end.
While that is true runtime errors are a bigger pain in the ass.
I have no objections to any of those concerns. What i object to is the FAA not getting off their ass and actually working them out. The FAA has a long history of ignoring new tech, and stubbornly ignoring any discourse, rather than working through the issues and making the world a better place.
If you are talking about the google car video 2:30 into the video - yes cars can just barely - and unsafely - navigate through construction at like 5mph. Google is NOT claiming they can reliably handle construction. Please point me to a statement otherwise. Furthermore in that same video the car is meandering like a texting schoolgirl in its lane - dosen't inspire confidence in me at all. Get that laser rangefinder on top of the car dirty, such as dust from rain and road spray, then tell me how it works. (Answer is the vehicle wont work in rain).
There sure is. I have no doubt that sometime in the future, barring some kind of planetary catastrophe, it will be solved. The article is just a stunt and nothing more, id be much more impressed by a well cited DARPA urban challenge paper or any serious work than the article. 30-50 years out for true autonomous freeway driving in the USA is my guess - for both the legal and technical challenges.
Cars with autonomous freeway driving will be out in just a couple of years, according to automotive manufacturers. Nearly all the major players are predicting fully autonomous cars will be a solved problem sometime between 2020 and 2025.
Keep in mind that cars can and will make use of a variety of sensors besides vision that are much easier and reliable to process. I'm betting the first generation of automated highway driving uses no vision systems at all... just radar, lidar, and sonar, plus GPS for nativation. More to the point, they can use ALL of them at once. Those are more than enough to handle highway driving. Cars today are already using some of these systems for their intelligent cruise control, auto-parking, and collision avoidance systems.
Make no mistake... computers are going to be FAR better drivers than humans. No getting drowsy or falling asleep. No distractions by the passengers in the seat next to you or the rugrats in the back. No rear-ending cars while looking at your cellphone or putting on makeup or one of the ten thousand stupid things humans do every day behind the wheel. Fully autonomous cars can't come fast enough, and they'll likely be coming a hell of a lot faster than you think.
Funny because sensor fusion isn't so simple. It's a big step from auto following a car to actual autonomous driving on freeways in a more reliable way than even the worst human drivers. Comparing the state of the art today to sunny day freely moving traffic human drivers - we are no where near humans. Add heavy rain, dirty sensors, snow, road construction, etc and we will have need for humans to sit and nanny autonomous vehicles from the inside for a long time.
Furthermore all this "solved problem in 10 years" smacks of the leading computer scientists in the 60s claiming they could beat the best human in 10 years. Then it was another 10. Granted it was only 4 times of saying 10 years so yes eventually. Further still there is the legal ramifications of when the first human fatality due to autonomous driving occurs - common sense and logic will take a back seat to "think of the children" in the USA and we both know it. We are more likely 30 years out than 5-10. However what chaps my hide is people saying this stunt of using a combination of cruise control, lane following, and car distance following is autonomous driving is like saying Siri is strong AI.