No, the freeway issue doesn't need to be solved. Tesla Superchargers *are* along freeways. They're just a mile or two away so that they are in areas where there are things to do, rather than right at the offramp, where you'll find nothing but gas stations.
In short, you NEVER test N+1 systems which are in production use.
Unless you're a fairly small operation, you need N+1 redundancy per data center, and you need multiple extra data centers to handle fluctuations in your capacity needs. If, during your low-usage periods (typically the wee hours of the morning in the country where your service is most popular), you can't lose one entire data center and still keep running, you're already screwed, because it's just a matter of time before your entire operation comes crashing down.
In fact, this is really true even if you're small enough that your redundancy plan involves only hot failover to a backup data center. And if you don't even have that, then you don't really have N+1 redundancy, no matter how your main data center is set up.
A 43kW or 50kW charger is just not that big whether AC, DC or both, and is pretty fast.
A 50 kW charger will charge a Tesla in 2.5 hours or so. That's not "pretty fast". That's less than half the speed of a Supercharger. Also, it isn't the charger that takes up space. It's the dedicated building transformer required to provide 480V or 600V service at the requisite amperage and, in many cases, the Powerwall hardware required to smooth out the power delivery as a workaround for the power company's inability to reliably provide said high-amperage service at that location.
There are tons of these chargers all over the UK. Being blocked by another EV charging is rarely an issue -- the bigger issue is being blocked by an ICE car parking where it shouldn't.
Here in the U.S., that's usually not a problem. It is rare to see a supercharger space stay empty long enough to get ICEd.:-)
Building out a standard charging network at existing gas stations is not that difficult...
You know not of what you speak. Building up a slow AC charge setup would not be that difficult, except for the little problem of having to leave your car at a gas station for 18 hours to charge it.
Building up a DC fast charging network at existing gas stations is technically infeasible because of the space involved. A typical DC fast charging setup requires enough space to park about 14 cars, to serve only 10. It is best suited for companies with large parking lots, like Target or Wal-Mart, not gas stations, which never (+/- some small margin of error) have enough space for even two or three DC fast chargers, much less enough to be practical without large amounts of Internet-based coordination of which cars go to which gas stations.
The fact they are amazingly ubiquitous, especially when compared to Tesla charging stations.
To reuse a New York Times quote originally about the Macintosh, Tesla fans "... on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form."
But in all seriousness, gas stations and Tesla superchargers are fundamentally different in ways that make them inherently incompatible:
Gas stations are designed for high turnover, on the order of five minutes per customer. Tesla superchargers have to handle one car parked in the same spot for anywhere from 30 to 80 minutes.
Gas stations have fuel. Tesla superchargers have large transformers and, in many cases, power walls that represent a significant risk of fire or small explosion when they fail. If installed close enough to a gasoline tank, this poses a significantly elevated risk of amplifying the original problem.
Gas stations are almost always designed with minimal parking, because they want to cram as many pumps and as big a store as they can to maximize their ability to serve their existing customers. This means they don't have any space in which they could realistically park cars for an extended period of time.
Gas stations are mostly built near the freeway, which is largely undesirable for other types of business. Thus, most gas stations have nothing to do for miles around. This isn't a good fit if you're going to be there for an hour or more.
Basically, it is like trying to cram a drive-in movie theater into a porno theater, and for almost precisely the same reason. The ideal locations for charging are stores that people shop at for an extended period of time and/or large parking lots adjacent to restaurants where people spend an hour or more eating. Putting a Tesla Supercharger next to an Olive Garden is a good fit. Putting a Tesla Supercharger next to a Target is a good fit. Putting a Tesla Supercharger next to a gas station beside a freeway offramp is not.
BUT.. Keeping it N+1 as maintenance and improvements get done is *really* hard.
Not really. You just periodically do disaster tests. Shut down one of the 'N' periodically, and if infra that isn't supposed to go down does, turn it back on quickly, then do a post-mortem to figure out what screw-up needs to be fixed, and fix it.
All to save 10 ships out of 12,000, for maybe a reduced insurance premium.
Except it isn't really 10 ships out of 12,000. It is ten per year out of 12,000. This means the half-life of a ship is only 600 years. That seems way too short to me.
But the more alarming statistic is that only about two dozen large ships go down in a typical year. Thus, this one cause alone is responsible for about 42% of the major ship losses, which is to say nearly as much as all other causes combined. That's staggering, as it means that the cost of insuring that cargo would drop nearly in half if they could figure out why this happens and find a cheap, effective way to prevent it.
I don't even want a bezel-less laptop screen because when I'm opening it then it means I'm going to get some fingerprints onto the visible area instead of the bezel.
Just make the panel light enough that the hinge doesn't have to be stiff. Then, you can open it by the edge (the metal part that you can't possibly avoid) and maybe a millimeter or two. Either way, the bezels could easily be a quarter their current size without that being a problem.
You're kidding, right? My year-old 15" MacBook Pro has a roughly 1 cm bezel on the left and right, and a roughly 2 cm bezel on the top and bottom. To be fair, having a screen that goes out into the rounded corners wouldn't be of much utility, nor would going down to the bottom (because part of it would be hidden behind the bottom part), but it could still become almost a 16" flat panel without changing the size of the laptop.
It drives me absolutely nuts that Apple is reportedly implementing bezel-less displays on every device BUT the one they should have done it on FIRST.
I don't want a bezel-less cell phone, because that makes it hard to hold without covering part of the screen and accidentally triggering things.
I don't want a bezel-less tablet, because that makes it hard to hold without covering part of the screen and accidentally triggering things.
I DO want a bezel-less tablet, because I hold it by the keyboard part, so a bezel-less design could improve the screen size without reducing usability even slightly.
Now, what's CALLED two-phase in the US really isn't. It's half of a four-phase system, with two wires 90 degrees out of phase.
If you mean our 240V power, it's actually one sixth of a three-phase system, with two wires 180 degrees out of phase, and is thus fairly similar to a single phase in Europe (except, obviously, that it is at 60 Hz instead of 50Hz).
I'm guessing it was one of those awful Sunnyvale intersections like Kifer eastbound or Central/Enochs eastbound, where you're lucky to be moving 1 MPH during certain times of day.:-)
lane tracking software is still hard. Not all roads are well marked
On unfamiliar roads, I often have that problem also. (I'm a human, by the way.) CA roads are still recovering from the Great Recession, so I often have to guess around faded lines.
If there are cars in front of me, I simply follow them, hoping they know from prior experience on the same road. If not, I keep an eye on the cars around me for cues. If there are no cars around me, then guessing wrong has minimal risk anyhow.
As much as I rely on that algorithm myself, the thought of a bot having a similar algorithm bothers me. But faded is faded.
I'm somehow reminded of a joke.
A teenage driver was driving for the first time in the winter. His dad told him, "If you ever get caught in a snowstorm, just wait for a snowplow to come by, and follow it until it gets onto a major road."
Well, sure enough, the kid got stuck in a storm, so he started following a snowplow. After about half an hour, the snowplow driver stopped and got out of his truck.
"Why are you following me?" the man asked the young driver.
"My dad said that if I ever got stuck in a snowstorm, I should wait for a snowplow and follow it back to main road," the kid replied, "so I did."
The snowplow driver shook his head. "Well, I'm done with the Wal-Mart parking lot. I guess you can follow me over to the mall."
I'd imagine it's the latter. The more languages you have to consider, the more words are going to appear to match more than one language. I'd expect Spanish and Italian to be challenging even *without* adding a third language.
It can automatically decide whether to interpret input in either the selected main language or a selected secondary language. So two languages = bilingual. What did you think it meant?
Most cars sit unused most of the time. Capturing a fraction of that idle capacity should decrease cost per unit of travel. Fleets can do that.
Only if idle time actually lowers the life of the vehicle meaningfully. Otherwise, you just have n times as many vehicles operating for n times as many years, and it's a net break-even.
These days, most cars are replaced because of reliability issues (which are mostly miles-based, not age-based), rather than because they have rusted out. So I remain unconvinced that fleets operated with a profit margin can realistically be cheaper than private car ownership unless the market for new cars is artificially manipulated to make it so (e.g. by car companies offering deep discounts to the companies purchasing those fleets, or by car companies building their own fleets and then raising the price of sales to make their own fleet operations seem cheaper).
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Cotton is a kind of fiber....
No, the freeway issue doesn't need to be solved. Tesla Superchargers *are* along freeways. They're just a mile or two away so that they are in areas where there are things to do, rather than right at the offramp, where you'll find nothing but gas stations.
Unless you're a fairly small operation, you need N+1 redundancy per data center, and you need multiple extra data centers to handle fluctuations in your capacity needs. If, during your low-usage periods (typically the wee hours of the morning in the country where your service is most popular), you can't lose one entire data center and still keep running, you're already screwed, because it's just a matter of time before your entire operation comes crashing down.
In fact, this is really true even if you're small enough that your redundancy plan involves only hot failover to a backup data center. And if you don't even have that, then you don't really have N+1 redundancy, no matter how your main data center is set up.
A 50 kW charger will charge a Tesla in 2.5 hours or so. That's not "pretty fast". That's less than half the speed of a Supercharger. Also, it isn't the charger that takes up space. It's the dedicated building transformer required to provide 480V or 600V service at the requisite amperage and, in many cases, the Powerwall hardware required to smooth out the power delivery as a workaround for the power company's inability to reliably provide said high-amperage service at that location.
Here in the U.S., that's usually not a problem. It is rare to see a supercharger space stay empty long enough to get ICEd. :-)
You know not of what you speak. Building up a slow AC charge setup would not be that difficult, except for the little problem of having to leave your car at a gas station for 18 hours to charge it.
Building up a DC fast charging network at existing gas stations is technically infeasible because of the space involved. A typical DC fast charging setup requires enough space to park about 14 cars, to serve only 10. It is best suited for companies with large parking lots, like Target or Wal-Mart, not gas stations, which never (+/- some small margin of error) have enough space for even two or three DC fast chargers, much less enough to be practical without large amounts of Internet-based coordination of which cars go to which gas stations.
To reuse a New York Times quote originally about the Macintosh, Tesla fans "... on the other hand, may note that cockroaches are far more numerous than humans, and that numbers alone do not denote a higher life form."
But in all seriousness, gas stations and Tesla superchargers are fundamentally different in ways that make them inherently incompatible:
Basically, it is like trying to cram a drive-in movie theater into a porno theater, and for almost precisely the same reason. The ideal locations for charging are stores that people shop at for an extended period of time and/or large parking lots adjacent to restaurants where people spend an hour or more eating. Putting a Tesla Supercharger next to an Olive Garden is a good fit. Putting a Tesla Supercharger next to a Target is a good fit. Putting a Tesla Supercharger next to a gas station beside a freeway offramp is not.
If you look at total profit from drilling to the pump, I think you'll find that the money is in gasoline. The automakers just aren't involved in it.
Yeah, but the antennas are so tiny that it doesn't really matter.
Not really. You just periodically do disaster tests. Shut down one of the 'N' periodically, and if infra that isn't supposed to go down does, turn it back on quickly, then do a post-mortem to figure out what screw-up needs to be fixed, and fix it.
Except it isn't really 10 ships out of 12,000. It is ten per year out of 12,000. This means the half-life of a ship is only 600 years. That seems way too short to me.
But the more alarming statistic is that only about two dozen large ships go down in a typical year. Thus, this one cause alone is responsible for about 42% of the major ship losses, which is to say nearly as much as all other causes combined. That's staggering, as it means that the cost of insuring that cargo would drop nearly in half if they could figure out why this happens and find a cheap, effective way to prevent it.
Just make the panel light enough that the hinge doesn't have to be stiff. Then, you can open it by the edge (the metal part that you can't possibly avoid) and maybe a millimeter or two. Either way, the bezels could easily be a quarter their current size without that being a problem.
I remember a time when laptop screens didn't have glass on the front. Why can't we go back to that? It's not like they are touchscreens....
You're kidding, right? My year-old 15" MacBook Pro has a roughly 1 cm bezel on the left and right, and a roughly 2 cm bezel on the top and bottom. To be fair, having a screen that goes out into the rounded corners wouldn't be of much utility, nor would going down to the bottom (because part of it would be hidden behind the bottom part), but it could still become almost a 16" flat panel without changing the size of the laptop.
D'oh. Typo. I meant laptop.
It drives me absolutely nuts that Apple is reportedly implementing bezel-less displays on every device BUT the one they should have done it on FIRST.
If you mean our 240V power, it's actually one sixth of a three-phase system, with two wires 180 degrees out of phase, and is thus fairly similar to a single phase in Europe (except, obviously, that it is at 60 Hz instead of 50Hz).
I'm guessing it was one of those awful Sunnyvale intersections like Kifer eastbound or Central/Enochs eastbound, where you're lucky to be moving 1 MPH during certain times of day. :-)
On unfamiliar roads, I often have that problem also. (I'm a human, by the way.) CA roads are still recovering from the Great Recession, so I often have to guess around faded lines.
If there are cars in front of me, I simply follow them, hoping they know from prior experience on the same road. If not, I keep an eye on the cars around me for cues. If there are no cars around me, then guessing wrong has minimal risk anyhow.
As much as I rely on that algorithm myself, the thought of a bot having a similar algorithm bothers me. But faded is faded.
I'm somehow reminded of a joke.
A teenage driver was driving for the first time in the winter. His dad told him, "If you ever get caught in a snowstorm, just wait for a snowplow to come by, and follow it until it gets onto a major road."
Well, sure enough, the kid got stuck in a storm, so he started following a snowplow. After about half an hour, the snowplow driver stopped and got out of his truck.
"Why are you following me?" the man asked the young driver.
"My dad said that if I ever got stuck in a snowstorm, I should wait for a snowplow and follow it back to main road," the kid replied, "so I did."
The snowplow driver shook his head. "Well, I'm done with the Wal-Mart parking lot. I guess you can follow me over to the mall."
Oui.
And in the movie Mr. Bean's Holiday, Rowan Atkinson's character speaks Spanish to French people through the whole movie. :-D
Two at a time.
I'd imagine it's the latter. The more languages you have to consider, the more words are going to appear to match more than one language. I'd expect Spanish and Italian to be challenging even *without* adding a third language.
It can automatically decide whether to interpret input in either the selected main language or a selected secondary language. So two languages = bilingual. What did you think it meant?
I'm suddenly seeing a picture of a cat reading a newspaper, thinking "I should buy a bowling alley."
Only if idle time actually lowers the life of the vehicle meaningfully. Otherwise, you just have n times as many vehicles operating for n times as many years, and it's a net break-even.
These days, most cars are replaced because of reliability issues (which are mostly miles-based, not age-based), rather than because they have rusted out. So I remain unconvinced that fleets operated with a profit margin can realistically be cheaper than private car ownership unless the market for new cars is artificially manipulated to make it so (e.g. by car companies offering deep discounts to the companies purchasing those fleets, or by car companies building their own fleets and then raising the price of sales to make their own fleet operations seem cheaper).