Because it has less of the stuff that helps stop your phone from getting broken (bezel) and a higher percentage of the stuff that's easy to break (the glass), of course!
Probably a wise business decision, mind you - style trumps functionality on the market every time. As for me, I'm just hoping I don't need to switch phones before a Tango device comes out...
Right. A blog from a self-admitted contributor to the "Tesla Death Watch"? Great reference there.
Just so you know, the game that he's playing is with the dates. His "references" all date to before the NHTSA closed the case on the Tesla suspensions.
Try again. The figures I cited are for sustained power on the Model S. The peak power ratings are even higher. For example, the fastest model has a 375kW motor in the front and a 193kW motor in the back, but a maximum sustained power of 397kW, because that's all the battery pack supports. And the battery packs are 60-85kWh, so no, that's not going to just drain in an instant.
Using the Cessna as an example and your figure of 60% and doubled power requirements for the increased weight, we get a power requirement of 144kW for cruising (only 36% of maximum power), which on the 85kW pack is over 35 minutes. Now, of course, you'd be running at full power during takeoff and climb, reduced power on descent, but regardless, your claim of the battery being rapidly drained does not stand up unless by "minutes" you mean "over half an hour". At Cessna-typical speeds that would be a range of about 125km.
Licensing. App and web usage, and thus ad revenue. The usual.
A rather... um... interesting thought just occured to me. They talk about the potential use of this being paired with cameras, to fill in the detail that the camera couldn't capture. And I totally agree. But think of where that'll go. At first it'd just be implemented in software. But if it really works out well, they'll want to implement it in hardware. Meaning... hardware neural nets in all of our phones.
Not in a particularly useful manner, as it makes up the details in the gaps... but that said, it really gets some amazing results. I wish they had more examples. Blows away all of the non-neural-net-based deblurring and texture expansion techniques I've ever seen.
1) The battery pack is water-sealed, just like with hybrids. 2) The individual cells are isolated from each other (they actually do failure propagation testing)
It actually has enough power to, versus its weight, if one were to retrofit the drivetrain to turn a prop and affix some reasonably efficient wings and flight surfaces. A typical Cessna weighs a bit over a tonne and has an engine in the ballpark of 120kW or so. Even the cheapest Model S is about 2 tonnes and puts out about 250kW. The high performance versions are about 200kg heavier and pump out vastly more power.
Heck, you could probably fly one with just a big parasail for lift - the L/D ratio of 4-5 is probably good enough, at least for the mid-range versions and possibly the low-end as well. You just need to find a good way to get that motor power going to one or more props.
What are you talking about? If you're talking about the suspension issue, the NHTSA investigated and found no problem with Tesla suspensions (and furthermore that 93% of the complaints were fraudulent).
The police interrogated Gembe for three hours. "Most of the questions they asked me were about the Sasser-Worm," he says, referring to a particularly vicious malware that affects computers running vulnerable versions of Windows XP and Windows 2000, created by an eighteen-year-old German computer science student Sven Jaschan from Rotenburg, Lower Saxony.
"For some reason they thought there was a connection between me and Sasser, which I denied. Sasser was big news back then and its author, Sven Jaschan, was raided the same day as me in a coordinated operation, because they thought I could warn him."
Gembe's bot exploited the same vulnerability as Jaschan's. "Of course I denied this and told them that I never write such shoddy code," he says.
When the police realised there was no link between Gembe and the Sasser-Worm, they began to ask him about Valve.
Sounds like they were most interested in an unrelated crime, but that the Valve case gave them the opportunity to arrest and interrogate him.
First off, airplanes putting electric motors in their landing gear is becoming a mainstream thing, it's a major fuel saving mechanism being employed by major manufacturers.
Secondly as has been pointed out in many comments above, there are numerous reasons for the approach, as it lets you increase air velocity across the wing (giving better wing performance) and use props more performance-optimized to their current flight environment.
Third, unlike ICE engines (the reason that this was impractical before), electric motors are very small and lightweight versus how much power output their produce.
In fact, there already are Chinese manufacturers of electric planes, like Yuneec.
As for Musk, he doesn't just want to make an electric airplane, he wants to make the first electric airplane to break the sound barrier. Ho-hum, I wish that guy would decide to try something ambitious for once;)
Indeed, research is a bit part of what NASA does - and IMHO, it should be bigger. I agree with Buzz Aldrin that NASA should revert to the earlier NACA model.
Of course, in reality, small electric aircraft tend to perform better than their ICE counterparts. Power density comes much cheaper (in terms of mass, volume, and money) with electric drive than it does with internal combustion. It's energy density that electrics perform worse in.
Some small electric aircraft have pretty crazy performance specs for surprisingly little money. Of course, if you've seen high performance drones designed for pulling tricks, you wouldn't find this surprising; you could never get that sort of performance out of an internal combustion aircraft.
Energy density is always the achilles heel, and it limits electric aircraft currently to several hundred kilometers range. But, it improves at about 7% a year. People like to joke about all of the announced tech breakthroughs in batteries, as if they never materialize, when the reality is, they simply don't notice when they do, because the market moves by progressive scaleup, not leaps and bounds. Those silicon anodes, for example, that people were talking about here years ago? They started being used in commercial cells a couple years ago. Lithium-sulphur? They'll probably start hitting the market later this year or early next. Etc. You probably won't even notice when li-air start hitting the market - except that your cell phones will gobble even more power and despite that you'll get even longer lifespans with an even smaller battery.
(Note that the cell phone timeline image above was made in 2009, you could put even thinner modern phones at the end of that... and throughout their history, the battery has been one of the biggest portions of the size of the phone)
And meanwhile, in the real world, electric planes are a real thing, actually rather popular in the light aircraft world, and a market that's growing by leaps and bounds every year. And actually have excellent performance vs. price figures compared to their ICE equivalents. Ranges are usually similar to those of electric cars, 150-400km.
Can we ditch with the old battery-energy-density-versus-fuel-energy-density canard, as if a gallon of petrol is an entire vehicle? Even the long-range versions of the Model S, the batteries are only a third of the vehicle weight. There are other parts to a vehicle. An electric motor the size of a roomba has the power output of an entire typical gasoline engine in a typical passenger car. And you can ditch the transmission and a lot of other hardware as well. And it's only logical that this size difference would be the case. Electric motors have vastly less heat to dissipate - heat dissipation means mass. Electric motors have vastly fewer parts; complexity equals mass. Electric motors create force directly applied as torque on a driveshaft linkage (or even directly on the wheel), while ICEs produce it as pressurized gas, change that to linear momentum, then change that to rotational. Obviously the latter is going to cost you signfiicantly in terms of mass.
This headline makes it sound like electric airplanes are new. They're not. They're not even in the one-off-prototype stage, there are a number of serial producers out there. The market is expected to be over 22 billion a year three years from now. I'm not sure I believe it's going to scale up that fast, but it most definitely is growing. It's not even just small manufacturers, even Airbus is currently tooling up to market their E-Fan.
I know that this isn't what they're referring to... but I immediately had a mental image of a bus controlled by a constantly learning neural net, with each of the passengers being able to reward or punish the network based on its behavior via a smartphone app (which also lets the AI keep track of who is on the bus, and maybe even where they are when they're not on the bus, for "predictive pickup"), and trigger some "destination" input neurons (which everyone would see on their app)
Now, when I say "control", I mean "give directions to a driving program" (Google, etc) on where to turn, where to stop, etc, but not the low-level details. You could have the neutral net itself actually drive, but there's that whole "high likelihood of death to occupants and innocent bystanders" thing. Then again, if it was kept slow, well padded, and constrained from entering an area where it could run into traffic, drive off a cliff, or anything of the sort, such as walkways on a college campus.... but I think the more interesting one would be a version where the bus can go wherever it wants, with a "don't kill people " drive program on board.
I can just imagine the bus starting stalking someone who tends to reward it a lot;)
Large amounts of power, tiny measurements at the edge of the capabilities of their measuring systems, and very inconsistent results between designs, testing procedures, and testing teams.
If one's talking about an actual colony, I.e. something whose goal involves maintaining itself and expanding using locally-produced materials, it's electricians needed more than electrical engineers. People with fabrication skills really are the most critical part. You want people who know their way around a TIG welder, people who can do a composite layup right the first time, people who can run and maintain a wide variety of metal shaping and plastic forming tools, people adept with an excavator, etc. The sort of jobs that a lot of nerds look down on - "builders";) You also need one or more "homesteader" type positions to handle cooking, cleaning, food processing from raw staples, soapmaking, paper making, sewing, and other "primitive" skills - not to mention harvesting crops (I know it's a sci-fi nerd staple that robots will do everything for people off-world, but in the real world, developing reliable robotic systems for complex tasks in alien environments is extremely expensive, and generally involves major tradeoffs between 1) throughput, 2) task adaptability, and 3) reliability - and accidents could potentially prove fatal)
There are a couple scientific fields that will require on-hand experience, mind you. Medicine and botany come to mind - the former because the time delay is too great for effective telemedicine in acute cases (including for livestock, when that occurs), and the latter because optimizing harvests is going to take a lot of hands-on experimentation and inspection. And of course you need geologists and the like for whatever scientific exploration you're tasked with. A chemist would also be important, both for assisting the local scientific work as well as doing small-scale batch production of chemicals for both industrial and domestic uses.
So there are a variety of jobs needed. But I really don't see how an electrical engineer fits in on-world (now, *off-world*, people like you would be critical).
Then again... how good are you at sewing? Can you pick tomatoes quickly in a cumbersome suit? How accurately can you cut a piece of aluminum with a torch?;)
This is how the martian habitats are constructed and covered in dirt. No humans with shovels. That's absurd.
Of course, that's absurd. But high throughput nuclear powered Martian bobcats, hey, those are a dime a dozen.
Everything you wrote is like this, as if TRL is some sort of irrelevant factor, rather than being the most critical, expensive, and slow aspect of space mission development.
The rank and file did not simply "not approve that", they explicitly voted against it. Assange and his representative controlled two seats of the council. His proposal got three votes for it (aka, only one other person), five opposed, and three obstained - it failed (this was the only of the 13 party meetings that Assange had actually bothered calling into). Yet somehow, not long after the vote, they ended up discovering that they were actually set up to preference with Australia First despite the vote. Assange blamed it on an "administrative error", and implied that it was the party's council's fault. The council fought and eventually got Assange to concede to allow an investigation into the issue of what happened. Only, they then subsequently discovered that he was only going to allow the investigation after the election and that he himself would personally run it. Eventually it emerged that Assange himself had ordered it. Four of the 11 council members resigned immediately. Four more council members joined in with a strong condemnation. There were mass waves of resignation from the party at lower levels. There was actually a statement posted on the Wikileaks party website apologizing for the subversion of democracy, encouraging people not to vote for them in NSW and to vote for Scott Ludlam instead.
This sort of stuff is really par for the course with the guy.
Yeah... I have lots of seriously concerns about Clinton... but I'd pick her over Trump because I'm a one-issue voter, and that issue is not opening the seventh seal and ushering in the apocalypse.
Are you surprised? This is, after all, a guy who overrode the democratic vote of the Wikileaks party in Australia to preference with the fascist Australia First party over the Greens, describes himself as a "big admirer" of Rand Paul, opposes abortion, and supports both Putin and Assad. Who do you think he'd support in this election in the US?
2,000 Horsepower is nearly 1.5 MEGAWATTS. 250,000 watts per motor. Even if they were 90% efficient, that's still 25kW of heat to dissipate. So, I imagine the 2000 horsepower is only available for a very short time, if it's even real.
I guess if you write it in caps, it just can't be true!;)
A truck burning diesel getting 6mpg is burning about 23MJ per mile. At 65mph (just cruising) that's 41kW. Most of which must be dissipated as heat.
Cruising, not peak.
Radiating 25kW of heat in a freight truck is a nothing task. And 90% is pessimistic. And 250kW for electric motors is nothing these days. Tesla Model S Ludicrous does 568kW in a single motor that's sized for a car. Modern electric motors are amazingly compact. Here's a EMRAX 268 sitting next to the equivalent power gasoline engine that it replaces. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Dramatically less heat to dissipate means dramatically less size/mass. Much simpler design means dramatically less size/mass. And direct application of force rather than indirect through expanding gases creating linear and then rotational momentum means, again, dramatically less size/mass. Then factor in the near constant power output over a wide RPM range....
They're not the first company to do this (Smith has been doing it for ages), but the tech keeps converging. And pairing it with a range extender is a good idea, it's not as much of a cost or mass penalty (proportional to total hauled mass) in a freight truck as it is in a car, so you might as well retire any range anxiety. That said, 100-200 miles range is no slouch in and of itself. It depends on what sort of charge setup they provide, but it might fit well into a role shuttling goods around town where there's some delay on each end for charging - ports, factories, warehouses, etc.
And lest anyone think that you can't provide power that fast with detachable connectors... so long as you have a good enough feed, you can provide power fast enough to fry the batteries on that thing in seconds. AMP provides power to docked ships at up to 6600V and up to the ballpark of 8MW. Enough to fill one of those trucks' packs every 2 1/2 minutes, if they could actually take it. Technically you don't even need that big of a feed from the power plant, if you get a battery buffer.
Seeking candidates for hazardous journey. No pay, dangerous radiation, real possibility of death by rapid decompression. Safe return depends on several hundred thousand parts working as designed. Honour and recognition in the event of success. Tons of Youtube hits in event of failure.
What he's calling ridiculous is indeed the concept of any profitable space-based manufacture any time soon. Any colonists are going to be spending most of their time doing their best to, quite simply, not die. Nextmost they'll be spending their time collecting scientific data, which is by far the most "valuable" thing they could produce, given that interplanetary missions to collect such data run from the upper tens of millions to the lower billions. Lastly, from a risk-reward benefit you present an absurdity. The possible reward of (immensely dubious) space-based manufacturing for the negative consequences of life in prison for engaging in slave trafficking? I mean, really?
Anyway, Musk's statement has been heard before. And it's the right call. Here's the apocryphal ad for one of Shackleton's Antarctic missions:
Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.
While it's been questioned whether the ad ever actually was real, it's been lauded as one of the most brilliant pieces of advertising of all time - both attracting risk-takers while weeding out those who would be unlikely to manage the journey.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it has less of the stuff that helps stop your phone from getting broken (bezel) and a higher percentage of the stuff that's easy to break (the glass), of course!
Probably a wise business decision, mind you - style trumps functionality on the market every time. As for me, I'm just hoping I don't need to switch phones before a Tango device comes out...
Right. A blog from a self-admitted contributor to the "Tesla Death Watch"? Great reference there.
Just so you know, the game that he's playing is with the dates. His "references" all date to before the NHTSA closed the case on the Tesla suspensions.
Try again. The figures I cited are for sustained power on the Model S. The peak power ratings are even higher. For example, the fastest model has a 375kW motor in the front and a 193kW motor in the back, but a maximum sustained power of 397kW, because that's all the battery pack supports. And the battery packs are 60-85kWh, so no, that's not going to just drain in an instant.
Using the Cessna as an example and your figure of 60% and doubled power requirements for the increased weight, we get a power requirement of 144kW for cruising (only 36% of maximum power), which on the 85kW pack is over 35 minutes. Now, of course, you'd be running at full power during takeoff and climb, reduced power on descent, but regardless, your claim of the battery being rapidly drained does not stand up unless by "minutes" you mean "over half an hour". At Cessna-typical speeds that would be a range of about 125km.
Licensing. App and web usage, and thus ad revenue. The usual.
A rather... um... interesting thought just occured to me. They talk about the potential use of this being paired with cameras, to fill in the detail that the camera couldn't capture. And I totally agree. But think of where that'll go. At first it'd just be implemented in software. But if it really works out well, they'll want to implement it in hardware. Meaning... hardware neural nets in all of our phones.
Not in a particularly useful manner, as it makes up the details in the gaps... but that said, it really gets some amazing results. I wish they had more examples. Blows away all of the non-neural-net-based deblurring and texture expansion techniques I've ever seen.
1) The battery pack is water-sealed, just like with hybrids.
2) The individual cells are isolated from each other (they actually do failure propagation testing)
It actually has enough power to, versus its weight, if one were to retrofit the drivetrain to turn a prop and affix some reasonably efficient wings and flight surfaces. A typical Cessna weighs a bit over a tonne and has an engine in the ballpark of 120kW or so. Even the cheapest Model S is about 2 tonnes and puts out about 250kW. The high performance versions are about 200kg heavier and pump out vastly more power.
Heck, you could probably fly one with just a big parasail for lift - the L/D ratio of 4-5 is probably good enough, at least for the mid-range versions and possibly the low-end as well. You just need to find a good way to get that motor power going to one or more props.
What are you talking about? If you're talking about the suspension issue, the NHTSA investigated and found no problem with Tesla suspensions (and furthermore that 93% of the complaints were fraudulent).
From the article:
Sounds like they were most interested in an unrelated crime, but that the Valve case gave them the opportunity to arrest and interrogate him.
First off, airplanes putting electric motors in their landing gear is becoming a mainstream thing, it's a major fuel saving mechanism being employed by major manufacturers.
Secondly as has been pointed out in many comments above, there are numerous reasons for the approach, as it lets you increase air velocity across the wing (giving better wing performance) and use props more performance-optimized to their current flight environment.
Third, unlike ICE engines (the reason that this was impractical before), electric motors are very small and lightweight versus how much power output their produce.
In fact, there already are Chinese manufacturers of electric planes, like Yuneec.
As for Musk, he doesn't just want to make an electric airplane, he wants to make the first electric airplane to break the sound barrier. Ho-hum, I wish that guy would decide to try something ambitious for once ;)
Indeed, research is a bit part of what NASA does - and IMHO, it should be bigger. I agree with Buzz Aldrin that NASA should revert to the earlier NACA model.
Of course, in reality, small electric aircraft tend to perform better than their ICE counterparts. Power density comes much cheaper (in terms of mass, volume, and money) with electric drive than it does with internal combustion. It's energy density that electrics perform worse in.
Some small electric aircraft have pretty crazy performance specs for surprisingly little money. Of course, if you've seen high performance drones designed for pulling tricks, you wouldn't find this surprising; you could never get that sort of performance out of an internal combustion aircraft.
Energy density is always the achilles heel, and it limits electric aircraft currently to several hundred kilometers range. But, it improves at about 7% a year. People like to joke about all of the announced tech breakthroughs in batteries, as if they never materialize, when the reality is, they simply don't notice when they do, because the market moves by progressive scaleup, not leaps and bounds. Those silicon anodes, for example, that people were talking about here years ago? They started being used in commercial cells a couple years ago. Lithium-sulphur? They'll probably start hitting the market later this year or early next. Etc. You probably won't even notice when li-air start hitting the market - except that your cell phones will gobble even more power and despite that you'll get even longer lifespans with an even smaller battery.
(Note that the cell phone timeline image above was made in 2009, you could put even thinner modern phones at the end of that... and throughout their history, the battery has been one of the biggest portions of the size of the phone)
And meanwhile, in the real world, electric planes are a real thing, actually rather popular in the light aircraft world, and a market that's growing by leaps and bounds every year. And actually have excellent performance vs. price figures compared to their ICE equivalents. Ranges are usually similar to those of electric cars, 150-400km.
Can we ditch with the old battery-energy-density-versus-fuel-energy-density canard, as if a gallon of petrol is an entire vehicle? Even the long-range versions of the Model S, the batteries are only a third of the vehicle weight. There are other parts to a vehicle. An electric motor the size of a roomba has the power output of an entire typical gasoline engine in a typical passenger car. And you can ditch the transmission and a lot of other hardware as well. And it's only logical that this size difference would be the case. Electric motors have vastly less heat to dissipate - heat dissipation means mass. Electric motors have vastly fewer parts; complexity equals mass. Electric motors create force directly applied as torque on a driveshaft linkage (or even directly on the wheel), while ICEs produce it as pressurized gas, change that to linear momentum, then change that to rotational. Obviously the latter is going to cost you signfiicantly in terms of mass.
This headline makes it sound like electric airplanes are new. They're not. They're not even in the one-off-prototype stage, there are a number of serial producers out there. The market is expected to be over 22 billion a year three years from now. I'm not sure I believe it's going to scale up that fast, but it most definitely is growing. It's not even just small manufacturers, even Airbus is currently tooling up to market their E-Fan.
I know that this isn't what they're referring to... but I immediately had a mental image of a bus controlled by a constantly learning neural net, with each of the passengers being able to reward or punish the network based on its behavior via a smartphone app (which also lets the AI keep track of who is on the bus, and maybe even where they are when they're not on the bus, for "predictive pickup"), and trigger some "destination" input neurons (which everyone would see on their app)
Now, when I say "control", I mean "give directions to a driving program" (Google, etc) on where to turn, where to stop, etc, but not the low-level details. You could have the neutral net itself actually drive, but there's that whole "high likelihood of death to occupants and innocent bystanders" thing. Then again, if it was kept slow, well padded, and constrained from entering an area where it could run into traffic, drive off a cliff, or anything of the sort, such as walkways on a college campus.... but I think the more interesting one would be a version where the bus can go wherever it wants, with a "don't kill people " drive program on board.
I can just imagine the bus starting stalking someone who tends to reward it a lot ;)
No, this is the relevant one ;)
Large amounts of power, tiny measurements at the edge of the capabilities of their measuring systems, and very inconsistent results between designs, testing procedures, and testing teams.
It's cold fusion all over again.
If one's talking about an actual colony, I.e. something whose goal involves maintaining itself and expanding using locally-produced materials, it's electricians needed more than electrical engineers. People with fabrication skills really are the most critical part. You want people who know their way around a TIG welder, people who can do a composite layup right the first time, people who can run and maintain a wide variety of metal shaping and plastic forming tools, people adept with an excavator, etc. The sort of jobs that a lot of nerds look down on - "builders" ;) You also need one or more "homesteader" type positions to handle cooking, cleaning, food processing from raw staples, soapmaking, paper making, sewing, and other "primitive" skills - not to mention harvesting crops (I know it's a sci-fi nerd staple that robots will do everything for people off-world, but in the real world, developing reliable robotic systems for complex tasks in alien environments is extremely expensive, and generally involves major tradeoffs between 1) throughput, 2) task adaptability, and 3) reliability - and accidents could potentially prove fatal)
There are a couple scientific fields that will require on-hand experience, mind you. Medicine and botany come to mind - the former because the time delay is too great for effective telemedicine in acute cases (including for livestock, when that occurs), and the latter because optimizing harvests is going to take a lot of hands-on experimentation and inspection. And of course you need geologists and the like for whatever scientific exploration you're tasked with. A chemist would also be important, both for assisting the local scientific work as well as doing small-scale batch production of chemicals for both industrial and domestic uses.
So there are a variety of jobs needed. But I really don't see how an electrical engineer fits in on-world (now, *off-world*, people like you would be critical).
Then again... how good are you at sewing? Can you pick tomatoes quickly in a cumbersome suit? How accurately can you cut a piece of aluminum with a torch? ;)
Of course, that's absurd. But high throughput nuclear powered Martian bobcats, hey, those are a dime a dozen.
Everything you wrote is like this, as if TRL is some sort of irrelevant factor, rather than being the most critical, expensive, and slow aspect of space mission development.
The rank and file did not simply "not approve that", they explicitly voted against it. Assange and his representative controlled two seats of the council. His proposal got three votes for it (aka, only one other person), five opposed, and three obstained - it failed (this was the only of the 13 party meetings that Assange had actually bothered calling into). Yet somehow, not long after the vote, they ended up discovering that they were actually set up to preference with Australia First despite the vote. Assange blamed it on an "administrative error", and implied that it was the party's council's fault. The council fought and eventually got Assange to concede to allow an investigation into the issue of what happened. Only, they then subsequently discovered that he was only going to allow the investigation after the election and that he himself would personally run it. Eventually it emerged that Assange himself had ordered it. Four of the 11 council members resigned immediately. Four more council members joined in with a strong condemnation. There were mass waves of resignation from the party at lower levels. There was actually a statement posted on the Wikileaks party website apologizing for the subversion of democracy, encouraging people not to vote for them in NSW and to vote for Scott Ludlam instead.
This sort of stuff is really par for the course with the guy.
Yeah... I have lots of seriously concerns about Clinton... but I'd pick her over Trump because I'm a one-issue voter, and that issue is not opening the seventh seal and ushering in the apocalypse.
Are you surprised? This is, after all, a guy who overrode the democratic vote of the Wikileaks party in Australia to preference with the fascist Australia First party over the Greens, describes himself as a "big admirer" of Rand Paul, opposes abortion, and supports both Putin and Assad. Who do you think he'd support in this election in the US?
I guess if you write it in caps, it just can't be true! ;)
A truck burning diesel getting 6mpg is burning about 23MJ per mile. At 65mph (just cruising) that's 41kW. Most of which must be dissipated as heat.
Cruising, not peak.
Radiating 25kW of heat in a freight truck is a nothing task. And 90% is pessimistic. And 250kW for electric motors is nothing these days. Tesla Model S Ludicrous does 568kW in a single motor that's sized for a car. Modern electric motors are amazingly compact. Here's a EMRAX 268 sitting next to the equivalent power gasoline engine that it replaces. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Dramatically less heat to dissipate means dramatically less size/mass. Much simpler design means dramatically less size/mass. And direct application of force rather than indirect through expanding gases creating linear and then rotational momentum means, again, dramatically less size/mass. Then factor in the near constant power output over a wide RPM range....
They're not the first company to do this (Smith has been doing it for ages), but the tech keeps converging. And pairing it with a range extender is a good idea, it's not as much of a cost or mass penalty (proportional to total hauled mass) in a freight truck as it is in a car, so you might as well retire any range anxiety. That said, 100-200 miles range is no slouch in and of itself. It depends on what sort of charge setup they provide, but it might fit well into a role shuttling goods around town where there's some delay on each end for charging - ports, factories, warehouses, etc.
And lest anyone think that you can't provide power that fast with detachable connectors... so long as you have a good enough feed, you can provide power fast enough to fry the batteries on that thing in seconds. AMP provides power to docked ships at up to 6600V and up to the ballpark of 8MW. Enough to fill one of those trucks' packs every 2 1/2 minutes, if they could actually take it. Technically you don't even need that big of a feed from the power plant, if you get a battery buffer.
I guess the one for Mars for today would read:
What he's calling ridiculous is indeed the concept of any profitable space-based manufacture any time soon. Any colonists are going to be spending most of their time doing their best to, quite simply, not die. Nextmost they'll be spending their time collecting scientific data, which is by far the most "valuable" thing they could produce, given that interplanetary missions to collect such data run from the upper tens of millions to the lower billions. Lastly, from a risk-reward benefit you present an absurdity. The possible reward of (immensely dubious) space-based manufacturing for the negative consequences of life in prison for engaging in slave trafficking? I mean, really?
Anyway, Musk's statement has been heard before. And it's the right call. Here's the apocryphal ad for one of Shackleton's Antarctic missions:
While it's been questioned whether the ad ever actually was real, it's been lauded as one of the most brilliant pieces of advertising of all time - both attracting risk-takers while weeding out those who would be unlikely to manage the journey.