I'm trying to understand how this works. They make it sound like there's no vehicles of any kind. Pontevedra is 118,3 km, equivalent to a square 10,9 kilometers on a side. Do people walk 5km or so to get into town? Even the elderly and disabled and infirm? And if they buy something in town, walk back hauling that? Even things like furniture? Shops in town, stocked by... 5km hike with a handcart? Can someone explain to me how exactly this works?
ED: Aha, just read the article:
within a month had pedestrianised all 300,000 sq m of the medieval centre
Not the whole city of ~80k people, just 1/394th of the city. 0,3km^2. Just a big pedestrian mall, really.
It depends on what you're photographing. Outdoors in the daytime, I agree with you; it's largely not the phone that matters most, but the photographer. But in dim conditions and with motion, the small apertures of smartphones are a very serious limitation.
The only meaningful weakness of LCD is that the blacks aren't as black as AMOLED (but they're more than black enough unless you're specifically looking for that problem, and the LCD generally has brighter whites) The problem with AMOLED isn't that it doesn't get as bright. It's not even burn-in, which AMOLEDs have and LCDs don't. It's that after 1-2 years the colour balance on AMOLEDs gets out of whack because the individual LED colours degrade at different rates, and the compensation schemes that have been attempted to try to counter this are imperfect at best.
You can see some pictures here as an example comparing an AMOLED that's seen almost no usage with the exact same model that's seen 18 months of normal usage here. No, the problem has not gone away on modern AMOLEDs. If you change phones every year, maybe it's not a problem for you. But if you hang onto a phone for several years, most of that time is going to be on a phone with lousy colour balance.
Most of my coworkers have AMOLED phones. I've stuck with LCD. Every now and then a conversation would crop up that would lead to both parties using their phone at the same time, and I've - on multiple occasions - gotten comments from people asking about my phone because they assumed it was some new model because the display looked so nice - even though it was older than theirs. Their displays surely looked great when they bought their phones. But AMOLED displays slowly turn to junk - slow enough that you don't notice it until you compare to either A) a new AMOLED phone, or B) a LCD phone (either new or old).
No. You linked to a comparison between the XZ and the XZ2. Not the XZ2 Premium. But beyond that, that page doesn't even cover the key distinguishing feature as a category: the addition of an entire grayscale low-light camera whose data is correlated with the color camera.
It's not so much the "replacing hardware" that bothers me as it is the fact that you have to either go wireless - meaning "something else to charge" - or use a micro USB connection. And micro-USB isn't anywhere near as durable as a 3,5mm headphone jack. I loved the 3,5mm jack because it's such a thick, strong piece of metal it's almost impossible to mess up. You might mess up the wiring leading up to the jack or the cord that connects to the plug, but not the jack itself or the plug. Micro-USB ports are just so fragile.
I understand why they want to reclaim the volume taken up by the 3,5mm jack, I really do. Even tiny amounts of internal space make a big difference for them in terms of capabilities that they can offer. But I don't like the options for replacing it.
I guess a wireless charging pad and bluetooth headphones will have to do. I can see which way the wind's blowing.
The camera on the XZ2 Premium is its main selling point, and not available on any of the other earlier XZ models. But I guess if you don't do low-light / fast motion photography much it's not that big of a deal.
Processing depends on what your goals are "out of the box". You can apply a noise filter, up edge sharpness, increase the saturation to make things more vivid, etc.... but you can also do that in post. On the other hand, such filtering can throw out real details and is not always desirable. On the opposite end of the spectrum, unfiltered HDR images can look washed out and grainy, but you'll get the best results if you use them as a starting point for further processing.
A good comparison between heavy filtering and low filtering can be seen here in this comparison between the same plant shot in low light conditions between the Note 9 (heavy filtering) and the XZ2 Premium (low filtering). The leaves on the Note 9 look "prettier", all smooth from being filtered out. Yet you can hardly see any real details on them like the veins - indeed, on the XZ2, on the large upper leaves you can even see secondary veins in the leaves. The Note 9's filtering also at times smooths together different leaves (not seeing enough of a contrast between them to treat them as separate objects), but the differences are all distinct in the XZ2.
So the real question is... do you want filters, or real detail? And honestly there is no single "one choice is best for everyone" answer.
(Also beware of "smoothness due to dragging out the exposure" issues... note the difference in the fountains between these two shots)
* I've resigned myself to the fact that the headphone jack is going the way of the dodo, though I don't like that fact. Have to convert at some point.
* I'm not yet resigned to the concept that LCD screens are being killed off by AMOLED:P Seems to be happening, but I'll keep raging against they dying of the light.
* I'm rather indifferent to the notch. I know I'm supposed to have strong feelings one way or another but... nah.
* I'll keep resisting bezel-less designs. No, I don't like having my fingers covering the screen when I hold it. Yes, I do like having a buffer zone around my screen if it falls.
* Edge displays: see above, but times 100.
* I'll accept non-replaceable batteries in the name of good water and dust protection, though if they can pull off a good rating with a replaceable battery, that's obvious bonus points. But "better protection" beats "replaceable battery".
Hmm, did I miss any of the modern cell phone design religious war topics?;)
Love its camera setup. Like many modern phones, there's an extra camera on the back, but rather than being telephoto or wide angle or the like, it's greyscale, and designed solely for getting intensity values in low light. So they maximize the light data for a given amount of sensor area, and then correlate it to the color data from the primary camera.
While the benefit is nice in still pictures, it really shines in motion. Some great comparisons here.
Also like how the phone doesn't try to make still shots look better by running everything through sharpness filters and upping the saturation. It gives you something much closer to raw data so you can choose how to present it. Its 920 fps 1080p slow motion is really impressive, too.
Actually, I wish Lucid well. They seem to know what they're doing and have a reasonable strategy. They're way behind the curve and have a lot of slog ahead of them, but I think they could become a legitimate minor player on the high end. And that's rather high praise from me compared to my take on many EV startups.
Meanwhile, the Model 3 is the highest grossing passenger car in the US and keeps getting rave reviews. But don't worry your head about that - keep on shortin'!.;)
Huh, 20 cases and 689 docket entries? Let's see what happens when we substitute another random billionaire - say, Zuckerberg? Oh hey, what do you know, 54 cases and 6072 docket entries. I guess he's is going Megabankwupt...
I find his idea vacuous. But, so long as he helps fund the development of BFR / BFS, I don't care if his mission for buying the first flight was for the opportunity to juggle goslings in microgravity by bouncing them off the walls. A paying customer is a paying customer.
They hate their customers and actively work to screw them over. Why support them?
I probably won't after the Xperia XV2 series. With the XV3 they're moving to an AMOLED display; their use of LCD displays has been one of the main reasons I've stuck with them. I hate AMOLED; looks nice and pretty when you buy it, but after a year or two the color balance gets messed up and the whites end up off-white. Not an issue I guess if you swap phones every year, but as someone who doesn't, it's really annoying. Beyond that, they're generally good phones. XV2 Premium's camera setup for low light is especially nice; they have a separate greyscale camera specifically for capturing light in low-light conditions, and correlate the intensity data from it to the colour data from the primary camera. ISO 51200;) Also has 960fps 1080p slow motion and a good 3d capture stack.
Companies "doing evil" is really pretty close to the bottom of the list of my concerns when shopping for a smartphone.
I actually like both. I use the Sony Lifelogger app, although wish there was a better one out there (that one is too focused on fitness and they nerfed the timeline several years ago).
What I really want from Google is a way to set a percentage charge limit. There's no point to putting excess wear on my battery on days when I'm not going to need a 100% charge. The rate of reactions with the electrolyte (and deposition of deposits on the anode) is proportional to the voltage; the lower the voltage you store your battery at, the lower the rate of degradation. I've seen an app to let you impose charge limits but it requires root and doesn't work on all phones.
Even better than just a percentage charge limit would be scheduled charges, preferably with different schedules for different times of day. So e.g. for nighttime charges, to charge to 60% as soon as it's plugged in, then to wait until 20 minutes before my alarm to charge to a target percentage - but for daytime charges, to charge immediately to the target percentage.
Fuel consumption on a Falcon 9 (surely their launch vehicle of choice) is equivalent to ~70 typical diesel cars (8l/100km) driving a typical 20k km/year for 1 year.
E.g., not a tiny amount of emissions, but not some vast amount either.
I've frequently gotten emails sent to different people - often the same different people over and over again.
My favourite was when I decided to have a little fun with their mistake. Someone was redoing their house and I got their cost estimate from the contractor. I responded, thanking them for the cost estimate, but added that A) I'm going to be shutting off my net access soon, so you should probably contact me by other means in the future, and B) I have a request, and I know it's going to sound a little strange... but I have a collection of dinosaurs drawn on bills by random people that I've collected over several decades; would you mind drawing one for me on my final bill?
He responded that he'd get his nephew to draw one on it;)
Loop is not maglev; it's wheels or rails. Some technologies using the "Hyperloop" name are maglev, but the original Hyperloop proposal is air bearing-based.
because there are big spikes in traffic at certain times of the day... However, it doesn't need to be able to hold the entirety of all traffic
You mean like where I wrote "Increase that figure (significantly) for the fact that you can't expect it to always be at 100% usage *and* not generate lines. Decrease for the fact that nobody would expect that to be a city's only means of trasportation. On the balance I'd think that a city of 1 million would need at least 3000 terminals, preferably more like 5000 terminals, if you want to avoid lines."
I increased the number of terminals by a factor of more than five due to accounting for both of those factors combined (the former increasing the number of terminals needed, the latter decreasing it). But it turns out that that's not the constraint; the constraint is how far apart they are, since you don't want people to have to walk on average a third of a kilometer (more in less densely populated areas).
I wouldn't be surprised to find that over 80% of traffic is trying to go to less than 20% of the city
You mean like where I wrote "(obviously, in practice, spacing would be proportional to density, not even)"?
925 assumes both uniform loading patterns and that Loop is the only means of transit in the city. 3-5k is my estimate for accounting for both of these factors.
The plan is to have them be so numerous that there are rarely ever "lines" of more than one car - simultaneously also enabling much of a direct-to-the-destination mode of travel. Which again, is why it rises and falls on how well they can accomplish this loading step. If an elevator takes 1 minute per loading, which (between cars and passenger capsules) averages 3 passengers, then the maximum daily passengers from that terminal is 4320. So for it to be the only means of transportation for a city of 1 million people with an average of four trips per person per day you'd need 925 terminals. Increase that figure (significantly) for the fact that you can't expect it to always be at 100% usage *and* not generate lines. Decrease for the fact that nobody would expect that to be a city's only means of trasportation. On the balance I'd think that a city of 1 million would need at least 3000 terminals, preferably more like 5000 terminals, if you want to avoid lines.
Actually... that's not nearly as bad as I was expecting.
So let's see... 1 million people, that's the size of San Jose. Which has 177,5 square miles / 467,55 square kilometers. Which if they were spaced evenly on a grid would be 303 meters / 995 feet apart (obviously, in practice, spacing would be proportional to density, not even). So actually I'd think you'd want well more terminals than that just to reduce walking distance, if you want to service passengers without cars to/from everywhere in the city. Maybe 10x as many terminals (50000)? Then the average terminal would be running at a capacity factor of 1,85% if all traffic was done via the Loop system (and less in practice, since there would still exist other forms of transport)
So no, I don't think lines are any meaningful threat, assuming the terminal layout is properly done. At least based on these back-of-a-napkin calculations.
I mean, I assume you're equally diligent about reporting fires in gasoline cars, right? I totally remember your coverage of, say, the million BMWs that were recalled in 2017 due to over 40 parked cars - not cars involved in accidents, but parked cars - spontaneously bursting into flames, right? That's just up to 2017. And they keep getting more fires and keep issuing more recalls this year. The BMW fires have been particularly prolific in South Korea, where 11 burst into flames in July alone.
Want something more recent? Just seven days ago, Ford recalled two million trucks due to fire risks. GM's last major fire-related recall was a couple years, their *third attempt* to fix a problem that was causing cars - often ones that were parked - to burst into flames. Also seven days ago a million Priuses were recalled due to a fire risk in the wiring harness. Need I keep going? Remember here that we're not talking about fires in these cars from crashes - we're talking only the subset of fires that occur during normal use. Fires in gasoline cars during crashes are effectively a problem flagged "WONTFIX" by the NHTSA.
Teslas have been driven 9 billion miles. This should correspond to 450 fires and 106 deaths.
Where are they?
Concerning fires, here's a list of Tesla fires between 1 January 2013 and 11 March 2018, which is the vast majority of Tesla miles. The total count? 14. Vs. an expected 450.
Concerning fatalities, three months ago an anti-Tesla Twitter account added up the number of deaths in Teslas and arrived at 34. Note that many of these occurred in other countries like China that have a much higher road fatality rate than the US. It's still a third of the expected number for US-only driving of that many miles.
Let's look at the newest Teslas, shall we - the Model 3? So far there have been no fatalities and no reports of fires in customer cars (there was one Model 3 found up for scrap that had been gutted by fire, but it was "Location: Fremont" with 1 mile on the odometer, so clearly something that happened at the factory. Also, the fire damage was heaviest on the bumper, where it had melted the alumium - but hadn't managed to do so over the pack itself. So it's not clear that a battery fire was actually involved). But how many miles have been driven for this rate of "0/1 fires and 0 deaths"?
Lacking specific numbers, the best we can do is estimate. The average driver drives around 12k miles per year. Owners of new cars put significantly more miles on them during their first year, and particularly first few months because - obviously - it's a new car that they bought because they wanted to drive it. Bloomberg says there were around 25k made in the past month (0-1m ago), 19k in the previous month (1-2m ago), then 13,5k (2-3m ago), then 9k (3-4m ago), the 9k (4-5m ago), then 6,5k (5-6m ago), and 9k earlier than that. So around 19k*(30k/12)*0,5 + 13,5k*(30k/12)*1,5 + 9k*(26k/12)*2,5 + 9k*(23k/12)*3,5 + 6,5k*(21k/12)*4,5 + 9k*(18k/12)*6 = ~315M miles. Meaning if they were gasoline cars we should expect 16 fires and 3 1/2 deaths. Where are they?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm trying to understand how this works. They make it sound like there's no vehicles of any kind. Pontevedra is 118,3 km, equivalent to a square 10,9 kilometers on a side. Do people walk 5km or so to get into town? Even the elderly and disabled and infirm? And if they buy something in town, walk back hauling that? Even things like furniture? Shops in town, stocked by... 5km hike with a handcart? Can someone explain to me how exactly this works?
ED: Aha, just read the article:
Not the whole city of ~80k people, just 1/394th of the city. 0,3km^2. Just a big pedestrian mall, really.
Why is this news?
Interesting, had to look that up:
2 chiefly British : a line of people (such as schoolchildren) usually walking in pairs
It depends on what you're photographing. Outdoors in the daytime, I agree with you; it's largely not the phone that matters most, but the photographer. But in dim conditions and with motion, the small apertures of smartphones are a very serious limitation.
The only meaningful weakness of LCD is that the blacks aren't as black as AMOLED (but they're more than black enough unless you're specifically looking for that problem, and the LCD generally has brighter whites) The problem with AMOLED isn't that it doesn't get as bright. It's not even burn-in, which AMOLEDs have and LCDs don't. It's that after 1-2 years the colour balance on AMOLEDs gets out of whack because the individual LED colours degrade at different rates, and the compensation schemes that have been attempted to try to counter this are imperfect at best.
You can see some pictures here as an example comparing an AMOLED that's seen almost no usage with the exact same model that's seen 18 months of normal usage here. No, the problem has not gone away on modern AMOLEDs. If you change phones every year, maybe it's not a problem for you. But if you hang onto a phone for several years, most of that time is going to be on a phone with lousy colour balance.
Most of my coworkers have AMOLED phones. I've stuck with LCD. Every now and then a conversation would crop up that would lead to both parties using their phone at the same time, and I've - on multiple occasions - gotten comments from people asking about my phone because they assumed it was some new model because the display looked so nice - even though it was older than theirs. Their displays surely looked great when they bought their phones. But AMOLED displays slowly turn to junk - slow enough that you don't notice it until you compare to either A) a new AMOLED phone, or B) a LCD phone (either new or old).
No. You linked to a comparison between the XZ and the XZ2. Not the XZ2 Premium. But beyond that, that page doesn't even cover the key distinguishing feature as a category: the addition of an entire grayscale low-light camera whose data is correlated with the color camera.
It's not so much the "replacing hardware" that bothers me as it is the fact that you have to either go wireless - meaning "something else to charge" - or use a micro USB connection. And micro-USB isn't anywhere near as durable as a 3,5mm headphone jack. I loved the 3,5mm jack because it's such a thick, strong piece of metal it's almost impossible to mess up. You might mess up the wiring leading up to the jack or the cord that connects to the plug, but not the jack itself or the plug. Micro-USB ports are just so fragile.
I understand why they want to reclaim the volume taken up by the 3,5mm jack, I really do. Even tiny amounts of internal space make a big difference for them in terms of capabilities that they can offer. But I don't like the options for replacing it.
I guess a wireless charging pad and bluetooth headphones will have to do. I can see which way the wind's blowing.
The camera on the XZ2 Premium is its main selling point, and not available on any of the other earlier XZ models. But I guess if you don't do low-light / fast motion photography much it's not that big of a deal.
Processing depends on what your goals are "out of the box". You can apply a noise filter, up edge sharpness, increase the saturation to make things more vivid, etc.... but you can also do that in post. On the other hand, such filtering can throw out real details and is not always desirable. On the opposite end of the spectrum, unfiltered HDR images can look washed out and grainy, but you'll get the best results if you use them as a starting point for further processing.
A good comparison between heavy filtering and low filtering can be seen here in this comparison between the same plant shot in low light conditions between the Note 9 (heavy filtering) and the XZ2 Premium (low filtering). The leaves on the Note 9 look "prettier", all smooth from being filtered out. Yet you can hardly see any real details on them like the veins - indeed, on the XZ2, on the large upper leaves you can even see secondary veins in the leaves. The Note 9's filtering also at times smooths together different leaves (not seeing enough of a contrast between them to treat them as separate objects), but the differences are all distinct in the XZ2.
So the real question is... do you want filters, or real detail? And honestly there is no single "one choice is best for everyone" answer.
(Also beware of "smoothness due to dragging out the exposure" issues... note the difference in the fountains between these two shots)
* I've resigned myself to the fact that the headphone jack is going the way of the dodo, though I don't like that fact. Have to convert at some point. :P Seems to be happening, but I'll keep raging against they dying of the light.
* I'm not yet resigned to the concept that LCD screens are being killed off by AMOLED
* I'm rather indifferent to the notch. I know I'm supposed to have strong feelings one way or another but... nah.
* I'll keep resisting bezel-less designs. No, I don't like having my fingers covering the screen when I hold it. Yes, I do like having a buffer zone around my screen if it falls.
* Edge displays: see above, but times 100.
* I'll accept non-replaceable batteries in the name of good water and dust protection, though if they can pull off a good rating with a replaceable battery, that's obvious bonus points. But "better protection" beats "replaceable battery".
Hmm, did I miss any of the modern cell phone design religious war topics? ;)
Love its camera setup. Like many modern phones, there's an extra camera on the back, but rather than being telephoto or wide angle or the like, it's greyscale, and designed solely for getting intensity values in low light. So they maximize the light data for a given amount of sensor area, and then correlate it to the color data from the primary camera.
While the benefit is nice in still pictures, it really shines in motion. Some great comparisons here.
Also like how the phone doesn't try to make still shots look better by running everything through sharpness filters and upping the saturation. It gives you something much closer to raw data so you can choose how to present it. Its 920 fps 1080p slow motion is really impressive, too.
Actually, I wish Lucid well. They seem to know what they're doing and have a reasonable strategy. They're way behind the curve and have a lot of slog ahead of them, but I think they could become a legitimate minor player on the high end. And that's rather high praise from me compared to my take on many EV startups.
Meanwhile, the Model 3 is the highest grossing passenger car in the US and keeps getting rave reviews. But don't worry your head about that - keep on shortin'!. ;)
Huh, 20 cases and 689 docket entries? Let's see what happens when we substitute another random billionaire - say, Zuckerberg? Oh hey, what do you know, 54 cases and 6072 docket entries. I guess he's is going Megabankwupt...
I find his idea vacuous. But, so long as he helps fund the development of BFR / BFS, I don't care if his mission for buying the first flight was for the opportunity to juggle goslings in microgravity by bouncing them off the walls. A paying customer is a paying customer.
I probably won't after the Xperia XV2 series. With the XV3 they're moving to an AMOLED display; their use of LCD displays has been one of the main reasons I've stuck with them. I hate AMOLED; looks nice and pretty when you buy it, but after a year or two the color balance gets messed up and the whites end up off-white. Not an issue I guess if you swap phones every year, but as someone who doesn't, it's really annoying. Beyond that, they're generally good phones. XV2 Premium's camera setup for low light is especially nice; they have a separate greyscale camera specifically for capturing light in low-light conditions, and correlate the intensity data from it to the colour data from the primary camera. ISO 51200 ;) Also has 960fps 1080p slow motion and a good 3d capture stack.
Companies "doing evil" is really pretty close to the bottom of the list of my concerns when shopping for a smartphone.
I actually like both. I use the Sony Lifelogger app, although wish there was a better one out there (that one is too focused on fitness and they nerfed the timeline several years ago).
What I really want from Google is a way to set a percentage charge limit. There's no point to putting excess wear on my battery on days when I'm not going to need a 100% charge. The rate of reactions with the electrolyte (and deposition of deposits on the anode) is proportional to the voltage; the lower the voltage you store your battery at, the lower the rate of degradation. I've seen an app to let you impose charge limits but it requires root and doesn't work on all phones.
Even better than just a percentage charge limit would be scheduled charges, preferably with different schedules for different times of day. So e.g. for nighttime charges, to charge to 60% as soon as it's plugged in, then to wait until 20 minutes before my alarm to charge to a target percentage - but for daytime charges, to charge immediately to the target percentage.
Fuel consumption on a Falcon 9 (surely their launch vehicle of choice) is equivalent to ~70 typical diesel cars (8l/100km) driving a typical 20k km/year for 1 year.
E.g., not a tiny amount of emissions, but not some vast amount either.
I've frequently gotten emails sent to different people - often the same different people over and over again.
My favourite was when I decided to have a little fun with their mistake. Someone was redoing their house and I got their cost estimate from the contractor. I responded, thanking them for the cost estimate, but added that A) I'm going to be shutting off my net access soon, so you should probably contact me by other means in the future, and B) I have a request, and I know it's going to sound a little strange... but I have a collection of dinosaurs drawn on bills by random people that I've collected over several decades; would you mind drawing one for me on my final bill?
He responded that he'd get his nephew to draw one on it ;)
Loop is not maglev; it's wheels or rails. Some technologies using the "Hyperloop" name are maglev, but the original Hyperloop proposal is air bearing-based.
You mean like where I wrote "Increase that figure (significantly) for the fact that you can't expect it to always be at 100% usage *and* not generate lines. Decrease for the fact that nobody would expect that to be a city's only means of trasportation. On the balance I'd think that a city of 1 million would need at least 3000 terminals, preferably more like 5000 terminals, if you want to avoid lines."
I increased the number of terminals by a factor of more than five due to accounting for both of those factors combined (the former increasing the number of terminals needed, the latter decreasing it). But it turns out that that's not the constraint; the constraint is how far apart they are, since you don't want people to have to walk on average a third of a kilometer (more in less densely populated areas).
You mean like where I wrote "(obviously, in practice, spacing would be proportional to density, not even)"?
925 assumes both uniform loading patterns and that Loop is the only means of transit in the city. 3-5k is my estimate for accounting for both of these factors.
The plan is to have them be so numerous that there are rarely ever "lines" of more than one car - simultaneously also enabling much of a direct-to-the-destination mode of travel. Which again, is why it rises and falls on how well they can accomplish this loading step. If an elevator takes 1 minute per loading, which (between cars and passenger capsules) averages 3 passengers, then the maximum daily passengers from that terminal is 4320. So for it to be the only means of transportation for a city of 1 million people with an average of four trips per person per day you'd need 925 terminals. Increase that figure (significantly) for the fact that you can't expect it to always be at 100% usage *and* not generate lines. Decrease for the fact that nobody would expect that to be a city's only means of trasportation. On the balance I'd think that a city of 1 million would need at least 3000 terminals, preferably more like 5000 terminals, if you want to avoid lines.
Actually... that's not nearly as bad as I was expecting.
So let's see... 1 million people, that's the size of San Jose. Which has 177,5 square miles / 467,55 square kilometers. Which if they were spaced evenly on a grid would be 303 meters / 995 feet apart (obviously, in practice, spacing would be proportional to density, not even). So actually I'd think you'd want well more terminals than that just to reduce walking distance, if you want to service passengers without cars to/from everywhere in the city. Maybe 10x as many terminals (50000)? Then the average terminal would be running at a capacity factor of 1,85% if all traffic was done via the Loop system (and less in practice, since there would still exist other forms of transport)
So no, I don't think lines are any meaningful threat, assuming the terminal layout is properly done. At least based on these back-of-a-napkin calculations.
What, they haven't landed an air force contract in the past week? Heavens to betsy!
I mean, I assume you're equally diligent about reporting fires in gasoline cars, right? I totally remember your coverage of, say, the million BMWs that were recalled in 2017 due to over 40 parked cars - not cars involved in accidents, but parked cars - spontaneously bursting into flames, right? That's just up to 2017. And they keep getting more fires and keep issuing more recalls this year. The BMW fires have been particularly prolific in South Korea, where 11 burst into flames in July alone.
Want something more recent? Just seven days ago, Ford recalled two million trucks due to fire risks. GM's last major fire-related recall was a couple years, their *third attempt* to fix a problem that was causing cars - often ones that were parked - to burst into flames. Also seven days ago a million Priuses were recalled due to a fire risk in the wiring harness. Need I keep going? Remember here that we're not talking about fires in these cars from crashes - we're talking only the subset of fires that occur during normal use. Fires in gasoline cars during crashes are effectively a problem flagged "WONTFIX" by the NHTSA.
OMG, a car caught fire - quick, get breathless overcoverage of it! Wait, you already did? Good!
There's one car fire in the US for every 20 million miles driven and one fatality per 85 million miles.
Teslas have been driven 9 billion miles. This should correspond to 450 fires and 106 deaths.
Where are they?
Concerning fires, here's a list of Tesla fires between 1 January 2013 and 11 March 2018, which is the vast majority of Tesla miles. The total count? 14. Vs. an expected 450.
Concerning fatalities, three months ago an anti-Tesla Twitter account added up the number of deaths in Teslas and arrived at 34. Note that many of these occurred in other countries like China that have a much higher road fatality rate than the US. It's still a third of the expected number for US-only driving of that many miles.
Let's look at the newest Teslas, shall we - the Model 3? So far there have been no fatalities and no reports of fires in customer cars (there was one Model 3 found up for scrap that had been gutted by fire, but it was "Location: Fremont" with 1 mile on the odometer, so clearly something that happened at the factory. Also, the fire damage was heaviest on the bumper, where it had melted the alumium - but hadn't managed to do so over the pack itself. So it's not clear that a battery fire was actually involved). But how many miles have been driven for this rate of "0/1 fires and 0 deaths"?
Lacking specific numbers, the best we can do is estimate. The average driver drives around 12k miles per year. Owners of new cars put significantly more miles on them during their first year, and particularly first few months because - obviously - it's a new car that they bought because they wanted to drive it. Bloomberg says there were around 25k made in the past month (0-1m ago), 19k in the previous month (1-2m ago), then 13,5k (2-3m ago), then 9k (3-4m ago), the 9k (4-5m ago), then 6,5k (5-6m ago), and 9k earlier than that. So around 19k*(30k/12)*0,5 + 13,5k*(30k/12)*1,5 + 9k*(26k/12)*2,5 + 9k*(23k/12)*3,5 + 6,5k*(21k/12)*4,5 + 9k*(18k/12)*6 = ~315M miles. Meaning if they were gasoline cars we should expect 16 fires and 3 1/2 deaths. Where are they?