Lol, it's you! I was wondering what sort of idiot must be out there (but which I had never encountered before) who automakers were catering to when putting fake grilles on cars that didn't need them.
In Tesla's ideal world, they'll soon be offering fully autonomous driving, and people will want that full screen for watching movies and the like while the car drives itself.
Honestly, I think they're too optimistic on fully autonomous driving, but hey, I've got no complaints about getting a large screen:)
Ah yes, I remember when they started shipping the $17k Ford Fusion standard with 7 cameras, radar and 12 ultrasound sensors to implement automatic crash avoidance, with an optional upgrade to self driving. I remember it like yesterday: I had just told the car to preheat using an app on my phone, put my bags into the frunk, and after staring through the panoramic glass roof, I peeled out with a 5,6 second 0-60 with instantaneous torque using energy that I could refill cleanly at miniscule cost using a battery pack warrantied for 8 years, while the info ticked by on its 15" touchscreen....
For what it's worth, all of the driving reviews thusfar have been in agreement that it's very easy to get used to the speedometer on the center screen.
The real value is what they plan to start launching once they get their cadence up. They're looking to launch a constellation of around 4000 LEO satellites to provide cheap, global, low-latency, high-bandwidth internet. I've seen some analyses of their plan, and done some of my own, and their numbers on all aspects are in general "tough, but it should be doable". The goal is to take over 50% of the backhaul traffic on the internet, while rapidly growing it by providing high speed access to previously isolated parts of the globe. The amount of money being talked about if they succeed is mind-boggling.
They're not the only one with this goal. Samsung announced a similar proposal, and Blue Origin is also striving for it. Everybody sees the dollar signs; the question is who will actually achieve it first?
A floppy disk has only marginal IR protection, and blurs the image heavily.
Soot works if you deposit it at the right thickness, but it's easy to get the thickness wrong, and the slightest smudge can eliminate your protection; the coating is very fragile.
A common third trick is looking through CDs. Which can work, if you pick the right one, but their transparency varies dramatically, so there's no guarantee that an arbitrary one will offer sufficient protection. If you're willing to risk your eyes with an improvised filter, a CD should be good if you can barely see an incandescent bulb through it.
Photography filters and photographic film should never be used for looking at the sun. They don't block nearly enough IR.
More info about various homemade and professional filters tested here.
I do the same thing; it's designed to protect against the exact same thing (light emitted by a hot plasma, containing blinding amounts of UV and excessive visible and IR). The main downside is it makes you look like a weirdo when you're standing around in public looking at the sun with a welding helmet on;)
I guess if you want to go hardcore, you could have the welder with you and act like you're trying to weld the sun. Then people will stop seeing you as a weirdo and just think that you're high instead.;)
Supercharger V2, of which there are thousands deployed and thousands more in construction (with a minimum of two chargers per site), are 145kW. Without any problem to the grid. Supercharger V3 is going to be over 350kW (exact power has not been announced yet). In order to move to the higher capacity, V3 chargers will have a battery buffer, and thus stress the grid less than V2. That is to say, they'll trickle charge from the grid (and their solar awnings, which Tesla is looking to make standard), then surge charge EVs.
Battery swap is a total non-starter for about fifty reasons that aren't worth reiterating yet again here. Every major corporate proponent has either given up on them or gone bankrupt. Including, by the way, Tesla, who was demonstrating their automated swapping system a couple years ago, but has since cancelled it. It's technologically possible, but grossly economically impractical (due to stockpiling requirements, made worse by the unavoidable necessity for widely varying battery profiles and performance characteristics, as well as the ever-changing technological baseline) and gets poor consumer acceptance in practice (as there's widespread opposition to giving up your good new battery pack for someone else's old degraded battery pack). There's also concerns about durability when you're replacing such a large structural element in the vehicle with HV connectors, although this issue comes in a distant third.
How long is your commute that today's EVs couldn't handle it? Tesla range calculator (scroll down 3/4ths of the way). Model 3 range should be only slightly less than the S 75.
Biggest problem is having like 2 chargers for every 1,000 or 10,000 cars.
What are you talking about? Tesla's supercharger map alone has 909 supercharger stations with 6118 superchargers, over half of which are operational. That's one supercharger per 60 cars sold, not "2 chargers for every 1000 or 10000 cars". And given that EVs spend the vast majority of their time charging at home, that's actually a huge ratio of chargers to cars.
As for costs: supercharger stations cost roughly the same to build as gas stations. They cycle vehicles much more slowly through, but their profit margins are much higher, as their operating costs are much smaller. They buy power at industrial rates (say, 6 cents per kWh) and sell it for $0.20/kWh or so and require no overhead for arranging deliveries or the like.
Your comment about 400V three-phase power makes little sense. If you're talking AC then you're talking onboard chargers, which don't use three-phase, are not 400V, and are limited in capacity. Are you meaning to talk about AC charging or DC?
Are you even talking about fast charging or slow? Adding slow chargers is an easy "loss leader" for businesses, in that the power costs so little, you earn goodwill, and if anyone actually wants to draw a meaningful amount of power then they're going to be spending long periods of time at your store. Charging can be as simple as an outdoor 120V (US) / 220V (Europe) outlet, although you'd usually prefer something like a J1772 connector.
EVs spontaneously bursting into flames is not exactly a common occurrence. EV fires have occurred during charging, but it's been very rare, and is a sign of manufacturing defects, generally in the charger (not the battery pack). Most EV fires have been in severe car accidents; however, the rate per mile seems to be significantly lower than gasoline car fires.
As for the amount of power needed, that depends on whether you're talking unbuffered chargers or battery-buffered chargers, and what rate charging you're discussing. Unbuffered chargers require lines with a high peak capacity, but rarely make use of that full capacity. They're cheaper to buy, but mean you pay for higher rates for having the connection. Buffered chargers are more expensive to buy, but can be installed on any line so long as the average draw can be provided for by the line. E.g. if you put a buffered supercharger out in the middle of Canyonlands and it was visited by only one EV per week (needing say 50kWh of power), you could power it for decades on end with nothing more than 7 square meters of solar panels costing $2k and making a couple hundred watts of power. Now, even an unbuffered supercharger will cost you in the upper 5 figures, so it's probably not worth it to stick a supercharger out in the middle of Canyonlands, but just saying...;) For infrequently visited sites, having a solar awning over the charger can provide most to all of the power.
(The lower the peak power, the cheaper a charger is - and AC chargers are cheaper than DC, but limited to whatever the EV's onboard charger can handle. Little AC chargers directly wired into the wall and delivering 5-20kW generally cost only $500 or so, plus installation costs)
Even Tesla's super-charger takes at least an hour to fully charge the small capacity batteries.
1) Tesla's batteries are "small capacity"? 4-5 hours highway driving time per charge is "small capacity"?
2) Actually, it takes 125 minutes to fully charge a Tesla pack. But it takes only 30 minutes to charge one to 80%. There's a taper over the course of a charge, so the higher you want the percentage, the slower it gets.**
3) Supercharger V2 is 120kW per vehicle / 145kW shared, but the upcoming V3 is going to be "over 350kW". That could potentially up the speed in the first ~50% or so of a charge, although more dramatic improvements will also require battery pack improvements.
** - Basically, early in the charge, almost all of the energy you pump in becomes stored as fast as you can get, with only a tiny fraction converted to heat. As cells begin to fill up (unevenly), however, the incoming power is increasingly turned into heat. The charge rate must consequently be reduced to avoid excessive cell heat during charging, which is one of the biggest contributors to reducing cell lifespans.
That's so skewed. The next quarter they made almost nothing from ZEV credits. Tesla's gross profit per vehicle is about 25% on the Model S, and expected to be similar on the Model 3, which are excellent numbers. Damning them for also selling ZEV credits is just stupid.
No, energy density is the key issue for electric vehicles
Saying that doesn't make it true. What about the 100D's 335mi range do you think is too small to be mass-market? Is the 100D too heavy to be practical? Of course not; the Model S handling has been acclaimed. So why doesn't everyone buy one? Because they don't have six figures lying around for a car purchase.
Getting the price down is the barrier. Tesla's sales are going up by an order of magnitude going from a ~$65k minimum price vehicle (Model S 75, formerly their cheapest model) to a ~$35k minimum price vehicle (Model 3). And a huge chunk of that is both battery price reductions combined with minimizing the amount of battery needed to go a given distance (drag coefficient reduction, reduced frontal area, etc); the battery pack will be something like 50kWh, half that of a 100D.
Energy density improvements are "nice", but they're not the essential aspect. Tesla could double the range of their vehicles if they wanted to simply by stacking the battery pack higher. They don't because almost nobody would be able to afford it, and of those who could, almost none would see the price-to-benefit ratio to be worthwhile.
One is that it's Toshiba who have a track record of delivering new battery tech such as SCiB
On one hand you claim to be all about energy density, and then you come here and promote SCiB? It's a bloody titanate battery. Crazy expensive (always have been, always will be; the chemistry does not lend itself to cheap mass production) and their most advanced model is only 100Wh/kg. And you seem to be promoting it because of power density (charge / discharge rate), which is an entirely different thing from energy density, which you claimed to be all about. Power density is more important than energy density to BEVs, but not as important as price. Right now, BEV makers have huge numbers of customers who want EVs, who have no problem with Tesla Supercharger speeds (e.g. 30 minutes to 80% charged), but can't afford an EV. Only when that barrier is met do they need to get charge times down in order to continue to grow sales among people for whom 30 minute stops every 5-6 hours of road-trip driving is too much.
I'm speculating here but it's possible the new Toshiba batteries will provide a fast-charge capability since they are supposedly solid-electrolyte
Yes, you are speculating. There is nothing about a solid electrolyte that means that you can have faster charge rates. Often it's just the opposite.
1) The conversation was about electric cars, not hybrids. When someone says "I bought an electric car", they don't mean a hybrid. Toyota has no BEVs, and the longest range PHEV that they have has a whopping 11 miles range, which ranks fifth globally in PHEV/BEV sales, including the Model S which starts at literally over double its price.
2) Your choice of comparing cumulative numbers to annual sales numbers is ridiculous. Toyota has been selling hybrids since long before Tesla even existed, and Tesla's growth has been exponential, meaning that for most of its history its sales were a fraction of what they were today, which is in turn a fraction of what they'll be next year.
3) "Battery units" is even more absurd. Toyota has been sitting around on decades-old technology and hardly advancing at all. They got a hit nearly two decades ago and have been milking it ever since. They only even moved to li-ion a couple years ago, only on a minority of their fleet, and their li-ion technology is pathetic. Their drivetrain on all models is obsolete, with a terrible performance to mass ratio vs. what you find in BEVs. There's literally nothing in the EV world of interest coming out of Toyota these days. Seriously, "battery units"? Might as well define lead-acids as "battery units". Or alkaline AAs, for that matter.
That tells you that there's something seriously wrong with the scalability of their production.
It's a brand new model. What, do you want a 500k car-a-year factory to just magic itself into existence at full production? What sort of logic train led you to make a statement like that?
500k cars a year, haven't even had the official full reveal yet (that's on Friday), none in dealerships, no test drives, not even the full options and options pricing announced yet - and they're booked solid until late 2018 at the best, probably early 2019. Meanwhile, Toyota piddles along on hybrids without pushing the tech envelope.
If you want to know what the problem is, Tesla relies on selling ZEV credits to other automakers to keep from going bankrupt.
If you want to know what the problem is, it's you going off about things that you don't know about. First off, ZEV credits sell for pennies on the dollar. The revenue from them is so small that Tesla doesn't even break it out on their budget sheet anymore. Secondly, Tesla's total sales revenue is in turn small compared to the investment that has gone into going from a luxury car maker to a mass-market midrange car maker. Again, you seem to have this notion that 500k car-a-year factories magic themselves into existence. They don't.
Tesla has to be careful not to produce too many ZEVs lest they cause the price of ZEV credits to plummet due to oversupply.
The reality is precisely the opposite. Tesla is undergoing an exponential scaleup, and has been throughout its entire existence.
Tesla sells actual electric cars that people get in a waiting list years in advance to buy. GM sells actual electric cars that people generally yawn at. Toyota: Our lab-scale battery is gonna be a big hit in 2020!
Solid state batteries are no real magic. It just means that you're using a solid electrolyte rather than a liquid one plus a membrane. They offer some nice benefits (such as resistance to dendrite punctures), but they hardly change the world on their own. They're a popular choice for working towards lithium-air batteries, which would be revolutionary, but there's no way anyone (including Toyota) is going to be mass-producing mature lithium-air batteries in 2020.
But anyway... if you're not going to make EVs, I guess you can still make press releases about hypothetical EVs. Seems to be a popular alternative these days.
And for the record... energy density really isn't the issue; Tesla has shown that you can get quite good range even with today's batteries without having your vehicles be excessively heavy (Model S, a bit over 2 tonnes; Model 3, a bit under). Cost per kilowatt hour is the issue. Tesla is reportedly at $190/kWh now and thinks they'll be at $100/kWh in a few years. But ideally you want even lower than that.
I mentioned that primates are very good at problem solving; please read better. However, primates are distinctly not good at passing down information; they perform much worse in tasks that require communication and cooperation than human children. They seem to have rather limited "theory of mind", and have difficulty discerning intents and thoughts of others.
Humans children are good at learning from others almost to a fault; if you have an instructor teach young children to accomplish a task, but insert a bunch of pointless steps in the middle that clearly contribute nothing to the task, the children will use and continue to use the pointless steps. A chimpanzee, by contrast, will generally proceed straight to the actual solution. It's picking up from the instructor that the task is possible, but ignoring what the instructor teaches as the procedure - great on contrived tasks with pointless tasks inserted, but not great in real world communication tasks involving complexity. We reached the state we are as a species by standing on the shoulders of those who came before us. If we had to solve everything on our own from looking at the world around us, if the only way we learned to do things was by looking at what others around us were accomplishing and reasoning out on our own how to do it, we would still be foraging in the wilderness like them.
You seem to think that I'm not familiar with Pepperberg's work. What parrot owner isn't?
Alex was also able to coin terms to describe his experience - apple became the “ban-erry” because to him it apparently tasted like the combination of a banana and a cherry.
Parrots love performing vocal "mashups". My aunt taught her Amazon the songs "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" and "Bali Ha'i", and the bird would sometimes sing "I left my heart, in Bali.... Bali.... heart!" and the like. That's normal parrot behavior. The key aspect is what happens next. If a parrot says "banerry" and you respond by giving it an apple every time, "ban-erry" is now the word for apple. Parrots are quite good at operant conditioning.
A standard trick for teaching parrots new words is to leave the room, have someone say the word, and then enter the room. Repeat. While parrots can pick up any random sounds, they're particularly prone to picking up "calls" to summon flockmates. Once it's saying the word as a call, you then repurpose it with conditioning to its proper meaning.
Further, the damn bird seemed to me to be capable of sarcasm. (The way he would deliberately report incorrect results when he was fed up with an experiment is well-documented, and reminds me of the deadpan style of a couple people I know)
And my amazon has the annoying habit of repeatedly insisting, "I want scratch" while he's standing on his cage until I come, and then when I come, only letting me scratch him for a few seconds before backing off and not letting me scratch him further. They can be real jerks sometimes;)
As mentioned, they're not stupid animals. They learn what behavior, with their limited vocabulary, will achieve their desired results. Alex learned early on that the experiments stopped when he stopped participating properly.
Alex did many things that were impressive (which Pepperberg's later birds BTW failed to reproduce to the extent of Alex). But it's important to understand parrot limitations. If you have a parrot, try the following. Teach them "I want cracker" when you give them a cracker and "I want nut" when you give them a nut, but say "want" in different accent. You'll find that the parrot always matches the accent with the food. It doesn't understand that it's a sentence; it sees it as a single word, a single sound that it's repeating.
It's easy for humans to mistake this for stupidity, but it's not; parrots are excellent problem solvers. They can even be little manipulative bastards sometimes;) But problem solving does not equal communicative ability.
Actually it's dogs that more commonly eat their dead owners.
A common theory as to why is that the dog starts freaking out - first trying to get the owner to respond by licking and nudging, which eventually devolves to biting, and then there's blood in the equation... etc etc. But it's never been directly witnessed, so it's hard to say. The way that dead owners are consumed generally starts at the face, which is different from how dogs normally scavenge food (going after soft areas like the abdomen first). And it often happens very soon after death, when there's still food around.
The one field where humans vastly outperform all other species is communication. Chimps can solve problems as well as children, and even parrots and corvids with their tiny brains can work out surprisingly complex problems. Various animals show all sorts of ability to conceptualize, plan, etc. But in terms of conveying complex thoughts about novel situations to other members, no species comes close to humans.
When my parrot says "I want up", he doesn't have any clue what "I", "Want", and "Up" means. He just knows that if he says that sound, I'll offer him a finger to stand on. And he only started saying it because I kept repeating it, and he likes making sounds; learning the benefit of making that sound came second. To him, "I want cracker" and "I want peanut" are two entirely different sounds; every phrase is learned as a whole. The total "vocabulary" he can maintain is quite limited. It's not out of some lack of problem solving / reasoning ability; he solves all sorts of complicated puzzle toys that I give him. He just doesn't grok complex communication. Some sort of "translator" isn't going to change his limitations. I already know what his basic sounds mean - I've been around him plenty to read his vocalizations and body language**. But real *communication* requires something more.
Facebook has been working on a rather interesting technology focused on using semi-ballistic photons imaging to yield something like a compact, real-time, super high-res MRI. Elon Musk's Neuralink has even broader ambitions. Things like these may actually some day yield better insights into what our pets are thinking than what they're capable of vocalizing. Our pets are reasoning, thinking, feeling beings. But they simply cannot, on their own, communicate to us about with the same level of depth as their internal processes encompass.
** Here's your "Amazon Parrot Translator":
Repeated triple cluck: Baby amazon wants food (goes away with age).
Idle trilling with varying pitch: Content, often associated with preening behavior.
Deep, almost clicky trilling: Playtime. Watch your fingers.
Loud or crackly repetitive sounds, repetitive beeps, or saying learned sounds randomly without clarity or intensity: Nearing bedtime, common in the evenings.
Saying learned sounds with clarity and intensity: Wants you to take a learned action associated with it, or otherwise trying to "take part" socially.
Crackly whine: uncomfortable, doesn't like this situation. Often associated with moving away from the thing that's making him uncomfortable
Sharp isolated trill: Alarmed
Continuous sound like a cross between a goose honking and a chicken clucking, with spasmic motions: hormonal / mating dance
No noise or highly pitch modulated sounds, while fanning the tail feathers and pulsating the size of the pupils: Crazy mode. DO NOT TOUCH. Common around cages with the "hot" amazon breeds.
Yeah, and they were trying out never-before used titanium grid fins, too. But that was their highest energy trajectory yet (as noted, they keep pushing the bounds on trying to land more and more difficult trajectories). I imagine they'll cut back on that a lot once the Heavy is in full service and they can just offload heavier payloads to the Heavy.
Beta testing: Musk has openly and often stated that autopilot is "continuously improving" and "evolving" and constant software updates are being made to existing installations.
You mean like almost every piece of software we use today? Do you call whatever programs and operating systems you're now "beta" because there's regular updates for them? Most people consider the ability to patch software a good thing. Traditionally, cars are stuck with whatever they're shipped with, and retain any deficiencies for their entire lifespan.
Shitty : fails to detect enormous object right in front of the car, when one of the stated purposes of the system is to detect objects in front of the car.
Yes, one failure from a guy who was ignoring warnings and watching Harry Potter, in over a billion vehicle miles under autopilot. My god, how unthinkable.
Half-assed : the vendor of the hardware disassociates itself from Tesla stating the tech is not being correctly implemented
Yes, that was their accusation as for why they were cutting off their relationship with Tesla. Contrarily, Tesla's accusation is that the Mobileye cutoff occurred when Mobileye learned that Tesla was doing its own in-house image recognition development, aka was going to be cutting Mobileye out of the loop in the future, and demanded as a condition to continue that Tesla kill its in-house development. Mobileye responded claiming that they knew about the team, but didn't feel threatened by it... yadda yadda yadda. Lovely when contract negotiations play out in public.
To elaborate on the above AC's point, here's a list of SpaceX launches (starting with the first oceanic "landing" attempt) and their success/failure rate.
29-sep-2013: Ocean failure 03-dec-2013: No attempt 06-jan-2014: No attempt 18-apr-2014: Ocean success 14-jul-2014: Ocean success 05-aug-2014: No attempt 07-sep-2014: No attempt 21-sep-2014: Ocean success 10-jan-2015: Drone ship failure 11-feb-2015: Ocean success 02-mar-2015: No attempt 14-apr-2015: Drone ship failure 27-apr-2015: No attempt **********28-jun-2015: In-flight failure 22-dec-2015: Ground pad success 17-jan-2016: Drone ship failure 04-mar-2016: Drone ship failure 08-apr-2016: Drone ship success 06-may-2016: Drone ship success 27-may-2016: Drone ship success 15-jun-2016: Drone ship failure 18-jul-2016: Ground pad success 14-aug-2016: Drone ship success **********01-sep-2016: Pre-launch testing failure 14-jan-2017: Drone ship success 19-feb-2017: Ground pad success 16-mar-2017: No attempt 30-mar-2017: Drone ship success 01-may-2017: Ground pad success 15-may-2017: No attempt 03-jun-2017: Ground pad success 23-jun-2017: Drone ship success 25-jun-2017: Drone ship success 05-jul-2017: No attempt
These don't even tell the whole story because not only has their success rate gone way up, but they've also been attempting to land from increasingly difficult flight envelopes that previously they wouldn't have even attempted from (and simply flown legless / finless rockets)
The issue with testing rocket landing is, you can't just do it in some research lab; you can only do it by actually landing rockets, and changing whatever doesn't work. That's the only way you can learn of your failure modes. Sure, you can use scaled-down testbeds, and SpaceX did that with the Grasshopper series - but there's the difference between a testbed and something that actually goes to orbit. There's a reason that SpaceX used to call them "experimental landings". I don't think they use that term any more; nowadays a landing failure would be seen as a pretty significant setback.
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Lol, it's you! I was wondering what sort of idiot must be out there (but which I had never encountered before) who automakers were catering to when putting fake grilles on cars that didn't need them.
Indeed. A quarter of Norway's new vehicle sales are EVs.
In Tesla's ideal world, they'll soon be offering fully autonomous driving, and people will want that full screen for watching movies and the like while the car drives itself.
Honestly, I think they're too optimistic on fully autonomous driving, but hey, I've got no complaints about getting a large screen :)
Ah yes, I remember when they started shipping the $17k Ford Fusion standard with 7 cameras, radar and 12 ultrasound sensors to implement automatic crash avoidance, with an optional upgrade to self driving. I remember it like yesterday: I had just told the car to preheat using an app on my phone, put my bags into the frunk, and after staring through the panoramic glass roof, I peeled out with a 5,6 second 0-60 with instantaneous torque using energy that I could refill cleanly at miniscule cost using a battery pack warrantied for 8 years, while the info ticked by on its 15" touchscreen....
Ford Fusions sure have changed.
For what it's worth, all of the driving reviews thusfar have been in agreement that it's very easy to get used to the speedometer on the center screen.
Some people are amazingly resistant to change.
The real value is what they plan to start launching once they get their cadence up. They're looking to launch a constellation of around 4000 LEO satellites to provide cheap, global, low-latency, high-bandwidth internet. I've seen some analyses of their plan, and done some of my own, and their numbers on all aspects are in general "tough, but it should be doable". The goal is to take over 50% of the backhaul traffic on the internet, while rapidly growing it by providing high speed access to previously isolated parts of the globe. The amount of money being talked about if they succeed is mind-boggling.
They're not the only one with this goal. Samsung announced a similar proposal, and Blue Origin is also striving for it. Everybody sees the dollar signs; the question is who will actually achieve it first?
He's not very good at punning. He tried making ten different puns yesterday, hoping at least one of them would elicit a laugh, but no pun in ten did.
Do not do either of these.
A floppy disk has only marginal IR protection, and blurs the image heavily.
Soot works if you deposit it at the right thickness, but it's easy to get the thickness wrong, and the slightest smudge can eliminate your protection; the coating is very fragile.
A common third trick is looking through CDs. Which can work, if you pick the right one, but their transparency varies dramatically, so there's no guarantee that an arbitrary one will offer sufficient protection. If you're willing to risk your eyes with an improvised filter, a CD should be good if you can barely see an incandescent bulb through it.
Photography filters and photographic film should never be used for looking at the sun. They don't block nearly enough IR.
More info about various homemade and professional filters tested here.
I do the same thing; it's designed to protect against the exact same thing (light emitted by a hot plasma, containing blinding amounts of UV and excessive visible and IR). The main downside is it makes you look like a weirdo when you're standing around in public looking at the sun with a welding helmet on ;)
I guess if you want to go hardcore, you could have the welder with you and act like you're trying to weld the sun. Then people will stop seeing you as a weirdo and just think that you're high instead. ;)
Supercharger V2, of which there are thousands deployed and thousands more in construction (with a minimum of two chargers per site), are 145kW. Without any problem to the grid. Supercharger V3 is going to be over 350kW (exact power has not been announced yet). In order to move to the higher capacity, V3 chargers will have a battery buffer, and thus stress the grid less than V2. That is to say, they'll trickle charge from the grid (and their solar awnings, which Tesla is looking to make standard), then surge charge EVs.
Battery swap is a total non-starter for about fifty reasons that aren't worth reiterating yet again here. Every major corporate proponent has either given up on them or gone bankrupt. Including, by the way, Tesla, who was demonstrating their automated swapping system a couple years ago, but has since cancelled it. It's technologically possible, but grossly economically impractical (due to stockpiling requirements, made worse by the unavoidable necessity for widely varying battery profiles and performance characteristics, as well as the ever-changing technological baseline) and gets poor consumer acceptance in practice (as there's widespread opposition to giving up your good new battery pack for someone else's old degraded battery pack). There's also concerns about durability when you're replacing such a large structural element in the vehicle with HV connectors, although this issue comes in a distant third.
Indeed. For example, Tesla's warranty on both the pack and drive unit is 8 years / unlimited mileage.
How long is your commute that today's EVs couldn't handle it? Tesla range calculator (scroll down 3/4ths of the way). Model 3 range should be only slightly less than the S 75.
What are you talking about? Tesla's supercharger map alone has 909 supercharger stations with 6118 superchargers, over half of which are operational. That's one supercharger per 60 cars sold, not "2 chargers for every 1000 or 10000 cars". And given that EVs spend the vast majority of their time charging at home, that's actually a huge ratio of chargers to cars.
As for costs: supercharger stations cost roughly the same to build as gas stations. They cycle vehicles much more slowly through, but their profit margins are much higher, as their operating costs are much smaller. They buy power at industrial rates (say, 6 cents per kWh) and sell it for $0.20/kWh or so and require no overhead for arranging deliveries or the like.
Your comment about 400V three-phase power makes little sense. If you're talking AC then you're talking onboard chargers, which don't use three-phase, are not 400V, and are limited in capacity. Are you meaning to talk about AC charging or DC?
Are you even talking about fast charging or slow? Adding slow chargers is an easy "loss leader" for businesses, in that the power costs so little, you earn goodwill, and if anyone actually wants to draw a meaningful amount of power then they're going to be spending long periods of time at your store. Charging can be as simple as an outdoor 120V (US) / 220V (Europe) outlet, although you'd usually prefer something like a J1772 connector.
EVs spontaneously bursting into flames is not exactly a common occurrence. EV fires have occurred during charging, but it's been very rare, and is a sign of manufacturing defects, generally in the charger (not the battery pack). Most EV fires have been in severe car accidents; however, the rate per mile seems to be significantly lower than gasoline car fires.
As for the amount of power needed, that depends on whether you're talking unbuffered chargers or battery-buffered chargers, and what rate charging you're discussing. Unbuffered chargers require lines with a high peak capacity, but rarely make use of that full capacity. They're cheaper to buy, but mean you pay for higher rates for having the connection. Buffered chargers are more expensive to buy, but can be installed on any line so long as the average draw can be provided for by the line. E.g. if you put a buffered supercharger out in the middle of Canyonlands and it was visited by only one EV per week (needing say 50kWh of power), you could power it for decades on end with nothing more than 7 square meters of solar panels costing $2k and making a couple hundred watts of power. Now, even an unbuffered supercharger will cost you in the upper 5 figures, so it's probably not worth it to stick a supercharger out in the middle of Canyonlands, but just saying... ;) For infrequently visited sites, having a solar awning over the charger can provide most to all of the power.
(The lower the peak power, the cheaper a charger is - and AC chargers are cheaper than DC, but limited to whatever the EV's onboard charger can handle. Little AC chargers directly wired into the wall and delivering 5-20kW generally cost only $500 or so, plus installation costs)
1) Tesla's batteries are "small capacity"? 4-5 hours highway driving time per charge is "small capacity"?
2) Actually, it takes 125 minutes to fully charge a Tesla pack. But it takes only 30 minutes to charge one to 80%. There's a taper over the course of a charge, so the higher you want the percentage, the slower it gets.**
3) Supercharger V2 is 120kW per vehicle / 145kW shared, but the upcoming V3 is going to be "over 350kW". That could potentially up the speed in the first ~50% or so of a charge, although more dramatic improvements will also require battery pack improvements.
** - Basically, early in the charge, almost all of the energy you pump in becomes stored as fast as you can get, with only a tiny fraction converted to heat. As cells begin to fill up (unevenly), however, the incoming power is increasingly turned into heat. The charge rate must consequently be reduced to avoid excessive cell heat during charging, which is one of the biggest contributors to reducing cell lifespans.
That's so skewed. The next quarter they made almost nothing from ZEV credits. Tesla's gross profit per vehicle is about 25% on the Model S, and expected to be similar on the Model 3, which are excellent numbers. Damning them for also selling ZEV credits is just stupid.
Saying that doesn't make it true. What about the 100D's 335mi range do you think is too small to be mass-market? Is the 100D too heavy to be practical? Of course not; the Model S handling has been acclaimed. So why doesn't everyone buy one? Because they don't have six figures lying around for a car purchase.
Getting the price down is the barrier. Tesla's sales are going up by an order of magnitude going from a ~$65k minimum price vehicle (Model S 75, formerly their cheapest model) to a ~$35k minimum price vehicle (Model 3). And a huge chunk of that is both battery price reductions combined with minimizing the amount of battery needed to go a given distance (drag coefficient reduction, reduced frontal area, etc); the battery pack will be something like 50kWh, half that of a 100D.
Energy density improvements are "nice", but they're not the essential aspect. Tesla could double the range of their vehicles if they wanted to simply by stacking the battery pack higher. They don't because almost nobody would be able to afford it, and of those who could, almost none would see the price-to-benefit ratio to be worthwhile.
On one hand you claim to be all about energy density, and then you come here and promote SCiB? It's a bloody titanate battery. Crazy expensive (always have been, always will be; the chemistry does not lend itself to cheap mass production) and their most advanced model is only 100Wh/kg. And you seem to be promoting it because of power density (charge / discharge rate), which is an entirely different thing from energy density, which you claimed to be all about. Power density is more important than energy density to BEVs, but not as important as price. Right now, BEV makers have huge numbers of customers who want EVs, who have no problem with Tesla Supercharger speeds (e.g. 30 minutes to 80% charged), but can't afford an EV. Only when that barrier is met do they need to get charge times down in order to continue to grow sales among people for whom 30 minute stops every 5-6 hours of road-trip driving is too much.
Yes, you are speculating. There is nothing about a solid electrolyte that means that you can have faster charge rates. Often it's just the opposite.
Deflect much?
1) The conversation was about electric cars, not hybrids. When someone says "I bought an electric car", they don't mean a hybrid. Toyota has no BEVs, and the longest range PHEV that they have has a whopping 11 miles range, which ranks fifth globally in PHEV/BEV sales, including the Model S which starts at literally over double its price.
2) Your choice of comparing cumulative numbers to annual sales numbers is ridiculous. Toyota has been selling hybrids since long before Tesla even existed, and Tesla's growth has been exponential, meaning that for most of its history its sales were a fraction of what they were today, which is in turn a fraction of what they'll be next year.
3) "Battery units" is even more absurd. Toyota has been sitting around on decades-old technology and hardly advancing at all. They got a hit nearly two decades ago and have been milking it ever since. They only even moved to li-ion a couple years ago, only on a minority of their fleet, and their li-ion technology is pathetic. Their drivetrain on all models is obsolete, with a terrible performance to mass ratio vs. what you find in BEVs. There's literally nothing in the EV world of interest coming out of Toyota these days. Seriously, "battery units"? Might as well define lead-acids as "battery units". Or alkaline AAs, for that matter.
It's a brand new model. What, do you want a 500k car-a-year factory to just magic itself into existence at full production? What sort of logic train led you to make a statement like that?
500k cars a year, haven't even had the official full reveal yet (that's on Friday), none in dealerships, no test drives, not even the full options and options pricing announced yet - and they're booked solid until late 2018 at the best, probably early 2019. Meanwhile, Toyota piddles along on hybrids without pushing the tech envelope.
If you want to know what the problem is, it's you going off about things that you don't know about. First off, ZEV credits sell for pennies on the dollar. The revenue from them is so small that Tesla doesn't even break it out on their budget sheet anymore. Secondly, Tesla's total sales revenue is in turn small compared to the investment that has gone into going from a luxury car maker to a mass-market midrange car maker. Again, you seem to have this notion that 500k car-a-year factories magic themselves into existence. They don't.
The reality is precisely the opposite. Tesla is undergoing an exponential scaleup, and has been throughout its entire existence.
Tesla sells actual electric cars that people get in a waiting list years in advance to buy.
GM sells actual electric cars that people generally yawn at.
Toyota: Our lab-scale battery is gonna be a big hit in 2020!
Solid state batteries are no real magic. It just means that you're using a solid electrolyte rather than a liquid one plus a membrane. They offer some nice benefits (such as resistance to dendrite punctures), but they hardly change the world on their own. They're a popular choice for working towards lithium-air batteries, which would be revolutionary, but there's no way anyone (including Toyota) is going to be mass-producing mature lithium-air batteries in 2020.
But anyway... if you're not going to make EVs, I guess you can still make press releases about hypothetical EVs. Seems to be a popular alternative these days.
And for the record... energy density really isn't the issue; Tesla has shown that you can get quite good range even with today's batteries without having your vehicles be excessively heavy (Model S, a bit over 2 tonnes; Model 3, a bit under). Cost per kilowatt hour is the issue. Tesla is reportedly at $190/kWh now and thinks they'll be at $100/kWh in a few years. But ideally you want even lower than that.
I mentioned that primates are very good at problem solving; please read better. However, primates are distinctly not good at passing down information; they perform much worse in tasks that require communication and cooperation than human children. They seem to have rather limited "theory of mind", and have difficulty discerning intents and thoughts of others.
Humans children are good at learning from others almost to a fault; if you have an instructor teach young children to accomplish a task, but insert a bunch of pointless steps in the middle that clearly contribute nothing to the task, the children will use and continue to use the pointless steps. A chimpanzee, by contrast, will generally proceed straight to the actual solution. It's picking up from the instructor that the task is possible, but ignoring what the instructor teaches as the procedure - great on contrived tasks with pointless tasks inserted, but not great in real world communication tasks involving complexity. We reached the state we are as a species by standing on the shoulders of those who came before us. If we had to solve everything on our own from looking at the world around us, if the only way we learned to do things was by looking at what others around us were accomplishing and reasoning out on our own how to do it, we would still be foraging in the wilderness like them.
You seem to think that I'm not familiar with Pepperberg's work. What parrot owner isn't?
Parrots love performing vocal "mashups". My aunt taught her Amazon the songs "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" and "Bali Ha'i", and the bird would sometimes sing "I left my heart, in Bali.... Bali.... heart!" and the like. That's normal parrot behavior. The key aspect is what happens next. If a parrot says "banerry" and you respond by giving it an apple every time, "ban-erry" is now the word for apple. Parrots are quite good at operant conditioning.
A standard trick for teaching parrots new words is to leave the room, have someone say the word, and then enter the room. Repeat. While parrots can pick up any random sounds, they're particularly prone to picking up "calls" to summon flockmates. Once it's saying the word as a call, you then repurpose it with conditioning to its proper meaning.
And my amazon has the annoying habit of repeatedly insisting, "I want scratch" while he's standing on his cage until I come, and then when I come, only letting me scratch him for a few seconds before backing off and not letting me scratch him further. They can be real jerks sometimes ;)
As mentioned, they're not stupid animals. They learn what behavior, with their limited vocabulary, will achieve their desired results. Alex learned early on that the experiments stopped when he stopped participating properly.
Alex did many things that were impressive (which Pepperberg's later birds BTW failed to reproduce to the extent of Alex). But it's important to understand parrot limitations. If you have a parrot, try the following. Teach them "I want cracker" when you give them a cracker and "I want nut" when you give them a nut, but say "want" in different accent. You'll find that the parrot always matches the accent with the food. It doesn't understand that it's a sentence; it sees it as a single word, a single sound that it's repeating.
It's easy for humans to mistake this for stupidity, but it's not; parrots are excellent problem solvers. They can even be little manipulative bastards sometimes ;) But problem solving does not equal communicative ability.
Actually it's dogs that more commonly eat their dead owners.
A common theory as to why is that the dog starts freaking out - first trying to get the owner to respond by licking and nudging, which eventually devolves to biting, and then there's blood in the equation... etc etc. But it's never been directly witnessed, so it's hard to say. The way that dead owners are consumed generally starts at the face, which is different from how dogs normally scavenge food (going after soft areas like the abdomen first). And it often happens very soon after death, when there's still food around.
It's not incredibly common, but it does happen.
The one field where humans vastly outperform all other species is communication. Chimps can solve problems as well as children, and even parrots and corvids with their tiny brains can work out surprisingly complex problems. Various animals show all sorts of ability to conceptualize, plan, etc. But in terms of conveying complex thoughts about novel situations to other members, no species comes close to humans.
When my parrot says "I want up", he doesn't have any clue what "I", "Want", and "Up" means. He just knows that if he says that sound, I'll offer him a finger to stand on. And he only started saying it because I kept repeating it, and he likes making sounds; learning the benefit of making that sound came second. To him, "I want cracker" and "I want peanut" are two entirely different sounds; every phrase is learned as a whole. The total "vocabulary" he can maintain is quite limited. It's not out of some lack of problem solving / reasoning ability; he solves all sorts of complicated puzzle toys that I give him. He just doesn't grok complex communication. Some sort of "translator" isn't going to change his limitations. I already know what his basic sounds mean - I've been around him plenty to read his vocalizations and body language**. But real *communication* requires something more.
Facebook has been working on a rather interesting technology focused on using semi-ballistic photons imaging to yield something like a compact, real-time, super high-res MRI. Elon Musk's Neuralink has even broader ambitions. Things like these may actually some day yield better insights into what our pets are thinking than what they're capable of vocalizing. Our pets are reasoning, thinking, feeling beings. But they simply cannot, on their own, communicate to us about with the same level of depth as their internal processes encompass.
** Here's your "Amazon Parrot Translator":
Repeated triple cluck: Baby amazon wants food (goes away with age).
Idle trilling with varying pitch: Content, often associated with preening behavior.
Deep, almost clicky trilling: Playtime. Watch your fingers.
Loud or crackly repetitive sounds, repetitive beeps, or saying learned sounds randomly without clarity or intensity: Nearing bedtime, common in the evenings.
Saying learned sounds with clarity and intensity: Wants you to take a learned action associated with it, or otherwise trying to "take part" socially.
Crackly whine: uncomfortable, doesn't like this situation. Often associated with moving away from the thing that's making him uncomfortable
Sharp isolated trill: Alarmed
Continuous sound like a cross between a goose honking and a chicken clucking, with spasmic motions: hormonal / mating dance
No noise or highly pitch modulated sounds, while fanning the tail feathers and pulsating the size of the pupils: Crazy mode. DO NOT TOUCH. Common around cages with the "hot" amazon breeds.
No translator needed.
Yeah, and they were trying out never-before used titanium grid fins, too. But that was their highest energy trajectory yet (as noted, they keep pushing the bounds on trying to land more and more difficult trajectories). I imagine they'll cut back on that a lot once the Heavy is in full service and they can just offload heavier payloads to the Heavy.
You mean like almost every piece of software we use today? Do you call whatever programs and operating systems you're now "beta" because there's regular updates for them? Most people consider the ability to patch software a good thing. Traditionally, cars are stuck with whatever they're shipped with, and retain any deficiencies for their entire lifespan.
Yes, one failure from a guy who was ignoring warnings and watching Harry Potter, in over a billion vehicle miles under autopilot. My god, how unthinkable.
Yes, that was their accusation as for why they were cutting off their relationship with Tesla. Contrarily, Tesla's accusation is that the Mobileye cutoff occurred when Mobileye learned that Tesla was doing its own in-house image recognition development, aka was going to be cutting Mobileye out of the loop in the future, and demanded as a condition to continue that Tesla kill its in-house development. Mobileye responded claiming that they knew about the team, but didn't feel threatened by it... yadda yadda yadda. Lovely when contract negotiations play out in public.
To elaborate on the above AC's point, here's a list of SpaceX launches (starting with the first oceanic "landing" attempt) and their success/failure rate.
29-sep-2013: Ocean failure
03-dec-2013: No attempt
06-jan-2014: No attempt
18-apr-2014: Ocean success
14-jul-2014: Ocean success
05-aug-2014: No attempt
07-sep-2014: No attempt
21-sep-2014: Ocean success
10-jan-2015: Drone ship failure
11-feb-2015: Ocean success
02-mar-2015: No attempt
14-apr-2015: Drone ship failure
27-apr-2015: No attempt
**********28-jun-2015: In-flight failure
22-dec-2015: Ground pad success
17-jan-2016: Drone ship failure
04-mar-2016: Drone ship failure
08-apr-2016: Drone ship success
06-may-2016: Drone ship success
27-may-2016: Drone ship success
15-jun-2016: Drone ship failure
18-jul-2016: Ground pad success
14-aug-2016: Drone ship success
**********01-sep-2016: Pre-launch testing failure
14-jan-2017: Drone ship success
19-feb-2017: Ground pad success
16-mar-2017: No attempt
30-mar-2017: Drone ship success
01-may-2017: Ground pad success
15-may-2017: No attempt
03-jun-2017: Ground pad success
23-jun-2017: Drone ship success
25-jun-2017: Drone ship success
05-jul-2017: No attempt
These don't even tell the whole story because not only has their success rate gone way up, but they've also been attempting to land from increasingly difficult flight envelopes that previously they wouldn't have even attempted from (and simply flown legless / finless rockets)
The issue with testing rocket landing is, you can't just do it in some research lab; you can only do it by actually landing rockets, and changing whatever doesn't work. That's the only way you can learn of your failure modes. Sure, you can use scaled-down testbeds, and SpaceX did that with the Grasshopper series - but there's the difference between a testbed and something that actually goes to orbit. There's a reason that SpaceX used to call them "experimental landings". I don't think they use that term any more; nowadays a landing failure would be seen as a pretty significant setback.