That's a serious point. They're not losing money "on every car sold", in that it implies that it's the cost of making the cars that's losing them money. It's the cost of scaling up by orders of magnitude that's losing them money. But that's obviously to be expected.
Companies investing in Tesla aren't investing on a valuation of them making a few tens of thousands of Model S's per year. They're investing on the prospect of Tesla churning out hundreds of thousands or even millions of electric vehicles, mostly lower end, per year.
First off, whenever anyone posts an article like this, everyone jumps all over it as some sort of evil abuse of government power. Here's people's reactions on Slashdot the last time. But when you actually look into the case, you find this out.
We see the same thing here again - everyone just automatically assuming that this is some sort of huge government overreach of power... because tech... and free speech... and... stuff. Should we even bother to look up the details of the case? First, here's what the article says:
Keonna Thomas, a 30-year-old from Philadelphia who went by @YoungLioness on Twitter, was charged in April with attempting to provide material support for the Islamic State. In an affidavit in support of probable cause, an FBI agent pointed to tweets that Thomas "re-posted on Twitter" supporting the militant group.
Oooh, evil FBI - going after a woman just because she hit the retweet button! Except... not exactly
A Philadelphia mom has been charged with planning to go overseas to join ISIS and martyr herself — going so far as to buy plane tickets.
"That would be amazing... A girl can only wish," Keonna Thomas allegedly told an ISIS fighter in Syria who asked over the Internet if she would be involved in a suicide mission.
"I can make that wish come true," the unnamed fighter allegedly replied.
The government says Thomas, 30, researched travel routes to Turkey and bought a plane tickets in late March.
Thomas, who also went by the nickname YoungLioness, allegedly posted support for ISIS on Twitter, writing, "If we truly knew the realities... we all would be rushing to join our brothers in the front lines pray ALLAH accept us as shuhada [martyrs]."
Court documents say that after applying for a passport, she told a friend that she would deactivate her Twitter account "till i leave for sham [greater Syria]... don't want to draw attention of the kuffar [non-believers]."
In one exchange of messages with the overseas ISIS fighter, he talked about how he would shoot or behead his wife if she turned out to be a spy and betrayed him.
"Cutting head is more personal," Thomas responded, according to the criminal complaint.
Ooooh, evil FBI, damning an innocent woman because she hit a retweet button, right?
Do people ever check into these things before they rush to damn the FBI for overreach of power?
The chips themselves (E3845, a very low power-consuming model) only consume 10W each, and it's 88 cores (not processors), each processor having 4 cores, so 22 processors consuming 220W. Assumedly these boards are designed for minimal power consumption and provide only a bare minimum of capabilities. The hard drives are SSD, so minimal power consumption there. There doesn't appear to be any sort of graphics, so no power consumption needed for that. RAM isn't usually a big power consumer. So I don't see any reason to think that the system is going to be consuming vast amounts of power. Maybe about the same total as a high-end gaming PC (but with a *lot* more computing power).
On the other hand, with epoxy-encased hardware, I am quite curious as to how they're handling cooling. I'm guessing that while the boards are embedded in epoxy that the surfaces of the processors aren't? And I'd wager that the processors are linked up to a common heat sink, as it'd make no sense to give each one its own fan. Hmm, if they're all connected to the same big chunk of aluminum or copper running all the way through, then it could double as a structural element. Neat.:)
Beyond all of this, the system is battery powered, so we're not looking at any "surge" at all. It's designed for 8 hours of usage at full power or a week of standby. The difference between the two says to me that they do a lot to power down hardware when it's not in use. Also, that battery alone probably weighs about 10-20kg** - although size-wise it's probably only 5-10 liters**, so it should fit fine.
You know, the more I look at these numbers, the more I think it all pans out. You're talking a big, heavy suitcase, but nonetheless, a suitcase.
** - assuming 8h@250-500W@200Wh/kg@400Wh/L or comparable.
We're not talking about playing Monday Morning Quarterback. There's a ton of revisionist history that happened after the war trying to pretend that everyone was in agreement about using nuclear weapons on cities and that it would have prevented millions of deaths from a ground war in the home islands with Japan. But that's just not the reality. The US's military leaders themselves were split over the use of the bomb. Some were adamantly opposed to using it on cities - among them, they were split further into groups who wanted to use it only on enemy troops, and groups that wanted to only use it as a pre-arranged "this is what you've coming if you don't surrender" demonstration to back up the Potsdam declaration. Likewise, official military casualty estimates were all over the board - yes, they ranged upwards of a million or more, but also down to the tens of thousands. There were many who were convinced that Japan was just getting ready to surrender. Even among those who wanted to bomb Japanese cities there was sometimes expressed a fear that Japan was about to surrender, insomuch as they wanted to be able to get a final show of force in to put the US in a better negotiation position vs. the Soviets after the war.
After the war, the US launched the Strategic Bombing Survey to determine how effective the various tactics used in both theatres were at achieving their objectives - everything from attacks against oil infrastructure to the atomic bombs. It made use of vast numbers of interviews and the huge troves of documents captured after the war to be able to get a comprehensive view. The report indicated that the atomic bombs had no impact on the voting of Japan's war council - the division of votes between the hawks and doves remained exactly the same before and after the attacks. All that did change was that it pushed up the urgency in the emperor's schedule. Japan's war council had already agreed to surrender on June 26th, albeit with terms (although half of the council was already willing to accept unconditional surrender). The emperor prepared a mission involving his son to go out with instructions from the council to negotiate a conditional surrender, but was secretly instructed to accept unconditional surrender if it was the only option available. The mission was pushed back due to the Potsdam conference, which ultimately issued the Potsdam declaration on July 26. The emperor twice broke his customary silence with the War Council during this period, once before and once after the bombings, speaking in favor of accepting the Potsdam terms; it was becoming increasingly hard for the War Council to say no. It's important to remember what Japan had already lived through - the main reason for example that an atomic bomb wasn't used on Tokyo was because Tokyo was already a steaming mass of rubble (the bombing report actually refers to the possibility of a bomb being dropped "on the remains of Tokyo"). The bombing survey concluded, "It is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
It's understandable that Americans would want to whitewash this history away, to feel that they had "no choice" but to willingly kill hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children by design. And the only way to argue that would be to argue that they saved far more people that they killed, and that everyone was in agreement that this brutality would be necessary. But this is unfortunately not reality. US leadership was highly, and often bitterly divided on the issue, and the US's own postwar study concluded that it was not necessary.
A curious sidenote raises a big question mark in the history books on how much Truman actually knew what he was signing onto. He repeatedly made statements to the effect of, and wrote in his diary, that while he felt the US should
2x the energy density of current li-ion top-of-the-line cells. A significantly smaller difference by the time the bugs get worked out of LiS.
Still, it's crazy contemplating what one could do with affordable 1500Wh/kg cells. At that point, fast charge becomes irrelevant, since you can drive all day on a single charge and then just charge while you sleep. 80A@220V should be enough for a sedan (the upper end of Level 2), no level 3 or 4 charging needed.
For those interested in the current state of cathodes in li-ion batteries and the research underway to improve them, there's a good paper here. The short of it is that they do keep making incremental improvements, and might continue that way for a long time, but they don't seem to be as subject to the "big leaps" that people are working towards on the anode side. There's been some interesting work since then, though - for example they don't mention anything about the recent work on vanadium/boron glasses (~300Mah/g initial capacity (twice that of LFP), without as much degradation as with forms of crystalline vanadium oxide)
Honestly, I don't expect any "big leaps" overall in battery tech. But based on everything I've seen that's already "in the pipeline", incremental improvements in li-ion battery capacity should be expected to continue to improve for at least 5 years, and probably much longer. There are a number of proposed techs for what will come after li-ion. I personally wouldn't be surprised if lithium-sulfur becomes the next usurper - it has huge capacity, generally common materials, there's been a lot of work towards overcoming its main downside (short lifespan), and there's already a low-volume manufacturer out there PolyPlus with limited use in special applications.
Link? Make sure you're not looking at alumina nanopowder (aka Al2O3), it's cheaper. But if it actually is aluminum, just lower quality, I'd expect the process to be fine with non-spherical particles or a greater variation in particle sizes.
No, that's just the issue - all hell doesn't break loose. Peoples' electronic devices just keep consuming more power and/or manufacturers keep shrinking the size of the battery pack. We keep reading about new battery capacity techs, and while most of them don't make it to market, some of them actually do. For example, on Slashdot 5-ish years ago we were at several points reading about silicon anodes for li-ion batteries. Guess what? Some manufacturers today now use them. But we just don't notice these things because there's no "hell breaks loose" moment.
Indeed, aluminum is the 3rd most common element in Earth's crust (more common than iron), oxygen is the most common, and titanium the 9th most common (more common than hydrogen). Now, of course, it's not elemental abundances that matter but raw feedstock prices. Their feedstocks are 50nm aluminum powder, sulfuric acid, and titanium oxysulfate. Concentrated sulfuric acid is one of the most widely used industrial chemicals on the market, cheap at about $700 a tonne. Even high purity sulfuric acid isn't particularly expensive. Titanium oxysulfate is about $5000 a tonne - still really trivial compared to the value of the anode material you're getting. However: 80nm aluminum nanopowder (in the same size ballpark) costs $1109 per kilogram, and that's the cheapest I've found online that has a price quote. And this here is a big problem, that's just way too expensive, your finished batteries will be selling for something in the ballpark of $100/kg. But, this is small scale. If anyone here has any idea how cheaply 50nm aluminum powder could be made if desired in quantities of hundreds of tonnes a year, I'd be quite curious.
Of course, as pointed out below, the sort of news we really want to see is about significant cathode improvements...
... there's many alternative, highly improved anode types. There's much more room for improvement on cathodes. There's diminishing returns focusing so much on the anodes. Don't get me wrong, this really does sound like a very good anode material - in particular, both the raw materials and the manufacturing process should be cheap and with good throughput. But we need cathode improvements more.
"In general" is key (and in general people will get *very* mad at you if you offroad on public lands or on private land without permission - me among them). However it's perfectly legal on private land if you have permission. On my land, for example, I sometimes *have* to offroad to haul things around (supplies for fences, trees to plant, manure for soil restoration, etc); I don't have roads that go everywhere, and nor do I want them.
There are three cases on public lands where people won't get mad at you offroading. One is if you're in a björgunarsveit (rescue squad) - they go wherever the heck they need to if there's a person there. The second is up on the glaciers, as those get wiped fresh every year. The third is, in specific locations, there's areas specifically designed for offroading (including difficult rock crawling).
It should also be mentioned that some of our highland roads are worse than what people in most countries would call "offroading";) Where they cross lava fields, for example, you'd be crazy to go over them at more than 15kph/10mph, and even that can be pretty jarring in places. But they don't involve any serious rock crawlimg, they're designed to be such that any high-clearance 4x4 can get through (don't even think about it with a regular passenger car, though!)
Indeed, but it's not the average speed that matters, it's the peak. When water funnels between rocks it can end up moving much faster than the average speed, and it also moves faster below the surface than on it. My personal preference would be more pressure than is necessary rather than too little; the concept of one's vehicle dying in the middle of an unpredictable glacial river is rather scary. Then again, I'm a big chicken when it comes to highland river crossings (had to do a bunch about a month ago**) so I probably have an overabundance of caution in this regard;)
** Word to the wise: When driving in a wilderness location with lots of fords, make sure that your vehicle hasn't accidentally slipped out of 4wd before your first crossing, not after half a dozen nail-biting crossings of slipping along riverbeds while steam rises from your engine compartment.;)
You're forgetting, rivers don't stand still. One can interpret the velocity of the water as relating to the volume of an imaginary water column above the surface, h=v/(2g). So a 10m/s (22mph) flow is equivalent to a 5 meter (197") water column. The force of fast flowing water is a more significant impact than the water depth, at least in a worst case.
I'm not sure what you mean by "at those volumes". Volume is relatively irrelevant in this context, and only really matters for the motor itself anyway (batteries, having no moving parts, can be water sealed on their own easily), and modern electric motors can be pretty tiny versus their power output. What matters is flow rate combined with pressure. The required flow rate in turn is related to the heat output of the motor. A "normal" motor for a vehicle like this a couple meters per second airflow in peak conditions, while a really high power low profile motor like one of the EMRAX ones at peak would need somewhere along the lines of 15m/s airflow at these sort of pressures (average airflow needs being much lower than the peak). Either way, at pressures of only several PSI, you're just looking at a rotary-vane air compressor, nothing like a piston-driven shop compressor or the like.
The other alternative is of course a submarine-style waterproof rotary joint. But it's an extra cost, will cost you some energy, and either way you still need to cool your motor and pack (unless you only ever operate in a very low power regime)
Yeah, try to drive one of those in the sort of lava fields we have here, it'd bottom out before it even gets started.;) Even on less extreme terrain, its clearance looks like a pretty big flaw - it can hardly drive on a flat slope without nearly bottoming out, let alone uneven terrain. They could raise the center, but then they'd also be raising the CG because not on the driver but the batteries are in that center bit, and on an offroader you really want a low CG.
Seems to me the solution is to put the batteries next to the hub motors. Something right next to the hub should never bottom out, and as they're low so the CG will stay low. It also allows you to reduce or eliminate your in-arm power wiring (esp. good given all of the bending that goes on in those swing arms), thus reducing wire mass, wire cost, and wire resistance. If you fully eliminate the in-arm power wiring you'd have to charge the packs individually, but even if you retain it you could reduce it to smaller wires that only need to be able to handle charging currents and inter-pack charge balancing, not peak discharge currents. Having the batteries next to the hub motors, you could upgrade them to pretty much whatever power level you wanted.
Another problem I see is with the use of hub motors. Everyone loves them until they start messing around with them and then the problems start to become clear. One, they're unsprung mass, which reduces your ride quality. Two, they're harder to cool, which limits performance. And three, you shake them to bits even on normal roads, let alone offroad. I'd prefer each wheel being hooked up to a small high power motor, connected to the wheels via a stubby CV joint (which should lose only a fraction of a percent of the energy transmitted). That way you keep your unsprung mass low, your motors are easy to cool, and they're not shaken to bits.
This thing is underpowered, but with some proper design choices there's really no limit to how high powered it could become.
The last issue I see is, if you're making an offroader, do you really want motors and wiring connections somewhere that they're going to get wet? Do you want to have your wheel drop into a deep puddle and suddenly short out? It seems to be that they really should have the motors (and as per above, battery packs) protected by a cowling. For transmitting the power to outside of the cowling I see two options. One is to use a waterproof rotary joint, like submarines use, although those are somewhat lossy. A better option might be to have the rotor simply penetrate the cowling (with only a small clearance around it) and use your pack / battery air-cooling system to maintain sufficient positive pressure inside to resist water influx - around 5-10 PSI should be enough for unbridged river crossings, while only 1-2PSI would be needed if you only want to be able to handle the occasional puddle. The air ingress to the cooling system would need to be located as high as possible, of course, whatever design one chooses.
(Yeah, this is something I've been thinking about for quite a while, I'd love to build my own go-anywhere electric vehicle some day;) )
Sometimes their "philanthropy" is self-serving. Paul Allen is currently in my country with his huge-arse luxury yacht with its two helicopters and two submarines, parked not at the harbour because his boat is too big, but just sitting out in the bay blocking the view. But because he explores shipwrecks and the like (something that he does for fun), it's called charity, and he gets welcome to park his floating palace at no cost.
Program crashing at startup? Okay, let's add debugging statements.
Can't get the debugging statements to execute? Okay, let's try removing code.
Doesn't fix the problem? Okay, let's keep removing more... and more...
A couple hours later, so much code was removed that the entire program had become nothing more than an empty main function that still crashed. This led to the following rule which I try to follow to this day: Make sure that you're actually compiling and executing the same copy of the code that you're modifying.;)
Indeed, Titan the easiest large world to explore by drone, so long as they tolerate the cryogenic conditions. A highly efficient version could potentially fly continuously just on RTG power (there have been proposals along these lines), although anything adapted to deal with the added weight / inefficiency of hardware to carefully land, collect samples, carry them, etc would probably have to use flight batteries.
I called you daft for not understanding the concept that someone who runs a swapping service station covers all costs related to their business activities and rolls them into what they charge for service, just like every other business does. I fail to see what is hard about this for you to understand. The answer to "who pays for X cost" is *always* "the service provider, with the costs indirectly passed on to their customers via the rate charged".
Really, you think that bad fuel can't damage an engine? It can and does. And it's the supplier who ultimately bears the cost. No, "bad electricity" is not a proper analogy (although your sarcasm in this regard is funny given how many devices are damaged by surges every year); a gas station fuels vehicles by insertung fuel into them, while a swapping station fuels vehicles by inserting pre-charged batteries into them. Batteries correspond to fuel in this context.
In what world do you live where car parts are regularly inspected by the manufacturer after being installed into the vehicle? Cars have hundreds if not thousands of parts more safety critical than a battery pack, and yes, manufacturers *are* liable if their failure modes due to damage pose an unreasonable risk of injury. Think of a famous failure case - say, for example, the Ford Pinto fires. Were the gas tanks defective? Nope. But the cars had an unacceptably bad failure mode in certain types of crashes, and it fell on the manufacturer to fix it - as it always does. A part must meet its use case, and if its use case is "deliver electricity from a swappable system and not burn the vehicle down if damaged", it has to contain the necessary safety systems to do that.
Lastly, you're still stuck in bizarro world where ICE vehicles full of combustible fuel are incombustible, whereas EVs with no combustable fuel and more often than not with batteries less flammable than a block of cheese (once again: *not all li-ions are the same*!) burst into flames left and right. Meanwhile, in the reality that the rest of us live in, the opposite is true. Heck, last summer I saw a flaming hulk of a passenger car with fire crews trying to put it out to extract the burned bodies of the two tourists who had been driving it. Meanwhile, Teslas and Leafs have been in many wrecks - go to Google Images and search for "crash tesla" or "crash leaf". Where are the fires from these oh-so-flammable vehicles? Yes, they have happened, but at a much lower per-vehicle rate than gasoline cars according to NTSB stats. Sorry, but your fire conceptions are just not based in reality.
On the Moon or Mars they wouldn't reach very far. But a RTG-powered version on Titan would have unlimited range (although may need to land periodically to recharge its flight batteries). And even a rocket or gas jet version would have quite significant range on an asteroid.
Such a design is obviously going to be very mission sensitive, hence the need for different propulsion systems. Some missions would benefit significantly as well from wings to allow for long distance flight on bodies with atmospheres (Venus, Titan, maybe Mars, etc). A couple worlds, such as Titan, might benefit from landing floats. And so forth. But that's where rapid prototyping tech (such as 3d printing) becomes useful - they engineer the base model and then can play around with variants with ease. Hopefully in the end they'll have a sample collector module with a workable version for almost any body in the solar system. And for the interests of science, we really need something like that, a universal adaptable drone module - to be paired with a universal adaptable ion tug module, one of a couple variants of a universal adaptable reentry / landing modules, and the same for adaptable ascent modules.
It's impressive what science can be pulled off on the surface of another world. But it's nothing compared to what we can do here on Earth with a sample return.
In one truck, yes. The frequency of dead batteries, however, will be the same as passenger vehicles; who will dispose of those?
Seriously, you can't be this daft. The operator, of course, with the price rolled into the service cost.
All of which are relatively involved.
No, they're not. Even your laptop battery estimates its capacity, and that's about as simple as li-ion battery packs get. Coulomb counting, voltage measurements at start and end compared to the charge temperature, charge voltage curve shapes, direct measurement of pack heating over the course of charge to measure internal resistance, and about half a dozen other methods are all usable and widely used to estimate capacity remaining in a pack. Pretty much every modern EV and hybrid in existence checks its battery pack's performance at least at the pack level, if not the individual cell level (Tesla does it at the "brick" level), to see how it's aging and when components or the pack as the whole need to be replaced.
Measuring remaining battery capacity is a concept older than the light bulb.
testing and inspecting a battery for damage and danger conditions so you don't install it into someone's vehicle and get a lawsuit for "vehicle exploded in a giant flaming blaze" (or drive all your customers away with "we don't test our batteries for anything but charge, and damaged batteries may set your truck on fire") is wholly different.
Just like gas stations check their gas for impurities that can cause damage to an engine? No, it's the manufacturer's issue to ensure that the product meets its stated usage specs - in this case, the specs including safe handling of damage and X number of swap cycles. Meeting damage control specs is why Tesla isolates each cell in a canister to prevent failure propagation. And why packs always come with fuses/breakers that blow when the pack gets wet or there's otherwise a short.
(Just ignoring that many types of li-ions don't burn even when abused. Tesla uses standard cobalt-based 18660s, which is why they have to have a failure isolation system, but vehicles like the Volt and Leaf use more stable spinel chemistries)
That may result in diesel being the cheaper fuel by far
Tesla's battery packs have an 8 year, unlimited-mile warranty. Even if we assume that they're only good for 1000 full charge cycles (which should be well on the low end), at 30 tonne-miles per kWh of charge, times 1000 cycles, and $150/kWh for the pack, that's 200 tonne-miles per dollar of pack capital cost. A diesel truck will get about 120 tonne-miles per gallon of diesel, and diesel costs somewhere in the ballpark of 6x more than electricity per unit range (depends on your location), meaning that the electric version saves about 3-4$ per dollars of energy cost per dollar of pack capital cost.
There are a lot more batteries on a truck.
Wait, so you're picturing them being done individually, one after the next? Seriously? *smacks forehead*
Fortunately, if you mount batteries under there without a bunch of armored doors and other shit to hold it all together, the cargo container catches fire when the batteries become damaged.
In the parallel world where EVs are always catching on fire, and petroleum-fueled vehicles aren't - quite unlike our actual world.
You know, that would be the best prank ever. Convincing Clarkson that he's getting a new TV show but having the actual point being to secretly film him when he's not acting for the fake "show", as they subject him to situations that would be increasingly uncomfortable for a speed-obsessed labour-hating hot-headed racist diva. Sort of "Top Gear" crossed with "An Idiot Abroad".;)
How old are the batteries? Do you own your battery? What is a battery worth? Do you load your truck with aging, unreliable batteries to swap-off with other aging, unreliable batteries?
When it comes to a truck which will have a sizeable number of large batteries, you're pretty much statistically guaranteed to never have more than a dud or two so long as the battery management process is sound.
As a service station manager, how do you test each of these batteries to ensure its safety and reliability (its level of aging)
By, for example, any of the dozen or so methods already used for this purpose?
As a service station manager, how do you offset the cost of rotating out old batteries traded in by truckers?
By rolling that into the swapping cost?
Could you please ask questions a little harder than "What does 1+1 equal?" I'm seriously not getting why you don't already know the answer to these questions you're asking.
Changing batteries in something like a truck is a labor-intensive process.
Wait a minute, you think that when people talk about battery swap they're talking about someone going up and swapping batteries by hand?
mounting may preclude a fast removal operation.
Many companies have already demonstrated battery swap for cars, which is a far harder target than trucks. With trucks, my preferred mounting is on the trailers themselves (with the cab having its own, non-swappable batteries). You already have, today, stuff mounted to the underside of trailers. It's right where the structural strength is already located and you have tons of open space underneath for easy access and standard form factors. It's an order of magnitude easier challenge than for cars, which you practically have to have disassemble their frames to get their batteries out.
The operation may take 40 minutes overall
Battery swap in the much harder case of cars can be done in less than a tenth that time.
Mounting the batteries affects balance, thus handling, thus safety
And you're envisioning that one would load all of the batteries only on one side or something...?
Think about it as if you were going to swap an entire, pre-filled gas tank
And think about having the tank you plan to switch out be a standardized external tank mounted in a standard form factor on a standard trailer.
Assuming an overall pack energy density of 200 Wh/kg, 1kWh would weigh 5kg. A typical truck may move around 1 tonne 120 miles per gallon of diesel. A gallon of diesel contains about 10kWh of energy. An electric motor will use it about 2,5 times more efficiently than a diesel ICE, so 120 miles per gallon of diesel equates to 300 miles per 10kWh of electricty, or 30 miles per kWh electric, or 30 miles per 5kg of battery pack. So every 30 miles of range you want takes up 0,5% of your cargo mass. If you want say 300 miles range then it would consume 5% of your payload.
On the other hand, the price difference in the cost of fuelling the truck (diesel vs. electricity) would be massive. For each tonne of cargo (assuming 300 miles vehicle range and an average haul distance per hour of say 60 miles), giving up 50kg of cargo to enable to you spend $0,30 on electricity ($0,10/kWh) instead of about $1,80 on diesel ($2,70/gal), or a savings of $1,5 for giving up 50kg of cargo. If we scale to say 50 tonnes of cargo then this equates to giving up 2,5 tonnes (5%) of your cargo to save $75 per hour.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a serious point. They're not losing money "on every car sold", in that it implies that it's the cost of making the cars that's losing them money. It's the cost of scaling up by orders of magnitude that's losing them money. But that's obviously to be expected.
Companies investing in Tesla aren't investing on a valuation of them making a few tens of thousands of Model S's per year. They're investing on the prospect of Tesla churning out hundreds of thousands or even millions of electric vehicles, mostly lower end, per year.
First off, whenever anyone posts an article like this, everyone jumps all over it as some sort of evil abuse of government power. Here's people's reactions on Slashdot the last time. But when you actually look into the case, you find this out.
We see the same thing here again - everyone just automatically assuming that this is some sort of huge government overreach of power... because tech... and free speech... and... stuff. Should we even bother to look up the details of the case? First, here's what the article says:
Oooh, evil FBI - going after a woman just because she hit the retweet button! Except... not exactly
Ooooh, evil FBI, damning an innocent woman because she hit a retweet button, right?
Do people ever check into these things before they rush to damn the FBI for overreach of power?
The chips themselves (E3845, a very low power-consuming model) only consume 10W each, and it's 88 cores (not processors), each processor having 4 cores, so 22 processors consuming 220W. Assumedly these boards are designed for minimal power consumption and provide only a bare minimum of capabilities. The hard drives are SSD, so minimal power consumption there. There doesn't appear to be any sort of graphics, so no power consumption needed for that. RAM isn't usually a big power consumer. So I don't see any reason to think that the system is going to be consuming vast amounts of power. Maybe about the same total as a high-end gaming PC (but with a *lot* more computing power).
On the other hand, with epoxy-encased hardware, I am quite curious as to how they're handling cooling. I'm guessing that while the boards are embedded in epoxy that the surfaces of the processors aren't? And I'd wager that the processors are linked up to a common heat sink, as it'd make no sense to give each one its own fan. Hmm, if they're all connected to the same big chunk of aluminum or copper running all the way through, then it could double as a structural element. Neat. :)
Beyond all of this, the system is battery powered, so we're not looking at any "surge" at all. It's designed for 8 hours of usage at full power or a week of standby. The difference between the two says to me that they do a lot to power down hardware when it's not in use. Also, that battery alone probably weighs about 10-20kg** - although size-wise it's probably only 5-10 liters**, so it should fit fine.
You know, the more I look at these numbers, the more I think it all pans out. You're talking a big, heavy suitcase, but nonetheless, a suitcase.
** - assuming 8h@250-500W@200Wh/kg@400Wh/L or comparable.
We're not talking about playing Monday Morning Quarterback. There's a ton of revisionist history that happened after the war trying to pretend that everyone was in agreement about using nuclear weapons on cities and that it would have prevented millions of deaths from a ground war in the home islands with Japan. But that's just not the reality. The US's military leaders themselves were split over the use of the bomb. Some were adamantly opposed to using it on cities - among them, they were split further into groups who wanted to use it only on enemy troops, and groups that wanted to only use it as a pre-arranged "this is what you've coming if you don't surrender" demonstration to back up the Potsdam declaration. Likewise, official military casualty estimates were all over the board - yes, they ranged upwards of a million or more, but also down to the tens of thousands. There were many who were convinced that Japan was just getting ready to surrender. Even among those who wanted to bomb Japanese cities there was sometimes expressed a fear that Japan was about to surrender, insomuch as they wanted to be able to get a final show of force in to put the US in a better negotiation position vs. the Soviets after the war.
After the war, the US launched the Strategic Bombing Survey to determine how effective the various tactics used in both theatres were at achieving their objectives - everything from attacks against oil infrastructure to the atomic bombs. It made use of vast numbers of interviews and the huge troves of documents captured after the war to be able to get a comprehensive view. The report indicated that the atomic bombs had no impact on the voting of Japan's war council - the division of votes between the hawks and doves remained exactly the same before and after the attacks. All that did change was that it pushed up the urgency in the emperor's schedule. Japan's war council had already agreed to surrender on June 26th, albeit with terms (although half of the council was already willing to accept unconditional surrender). The emperor prepared a mission involving his son to go out with instructions from the council to negotiate a conditional surrender, but was secretly instructed to accept unconditional surrender if it was the only option available. The mission was pushed back due to the Potsdam conference, which ultimately issued the Potsdam declaration on July 26. The emperor twice broke his customary silence with the War Council during this period, once before and once after the bombings, speaking in favor of accepting the Potsdam terms; it was becoming increasingly hard for the War Council to say no. It's important to remember what Japan had already lived through - the main reason for example that an atomic bomb wasn't used on Tokyo was because Tokyo was already a steaming mass of rubble (the bombing report actually refers to the possibility of a bomb being dropped "on the remains of Tokyo"). The bombing survey concluded, "It is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
It's understandable that Americans would want to whitewash this history away, to feel that they had "no choice" but to willingly kill hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children by design. And the only way to argue that would be to argue that they saved far more people that they killed, and that everyone was in agreement that this brutality would be necessary. But this is unfortunately not reality. US leadership was highly, and often bitterly divided on the issue, and the US's own postwar study concluded that it was not necessary.
A curious sidenote raises a big question mark in the history books on how much Truman actually knew what he was signing onto. He repeatedly made statements to the effect of, and wrote in his diary, that while he felt the US should
2x the energy density of current li-ion top-of-the-line cells. A significantly smaller difference by the time the bugs get worked out of LiS.
Still, it's crazy contemplating what one could do with affordable 1500Wh/kg cells. At that point, fast charge becomes irrelevant, since you can drive all day on a single charge and then just charge while you sleep. 80A@220V should be enough for a sedan (the upper end of Level 2), no level 3 or 4 charging needed.
For those interested in the current state of cathodes in li-ion batteries and the research underway to improve them, there's a good paper here. The short of it is that they do keep making incremental improvements, and might continue that way for a long time, but they don't seem to be as subject to the "big leaps" that people are working towards on the anode side. There's been some interesting work since then, though - for example they don't mention anything about the recent work on vanadium/boron glasses (~300Mah/g initial capacity (twice that of LFP), without as much degradation as with forms of crystalline vanadium oxide)
Honestly, I don't expect any "big leaps" overall in battery tech. But based on everything I've seen that's already "in the pipeline", incremental improvements in li-ion battery capacity should be expected to continue to improve for at least 5 years, and probably much longer. There are a number of proposed techs for what will come after li-ion. I personally wouldn't be surprised if lithium-sulfur becomes the next usurper - it has huge capacity, generally common materials, there's been a lot of work towards overcoming its main downside (short lifespan), and there's already a low-volume manufacturer out there PolyPlus with limited use in special applications.
Wait a minute.... it says mean size 30 *micron*, not 30 *nanometers*. Sorry - the particles are 600 times too large :(
Hmm, found it. If it indeed is possible to buy it that cheap, then I'd expect that to work, and the whole process to be quite economically viable. :)
Strange that the powder looks blue in the images.
Link? Make sure you're not looking at alumina nanopowder (aka Al2O3), it's cheaper. But if it actually is aluminum, just lower quality, I'd expect the process to be fine with non-spherical particles or a greater variation in particle sizes.
No, that's just the issue - all hell doesn't break loose. Peoples' electronic devices just keep consuming more power and/or manufacturers keep shrinking the size of the battery pack. We keep reading about new battery capacity techs, and while most of them don't make it to market, some of them actually do. For example, on Slashdot 5-ish years ago we were at several points reading about silicon anodes for li-ion batteries. Guess what? Some manufacturers today now use them. But we just don't notice these things because there's no "hell breaks loose" moment.
Indeed, aluminum is the 3rd most common element in Earth's crust (more common than iron), oxygen is the most common, and titanium the 9th most common (more common than hydrogen). Now, of course, it's not elemental abundances that matter but raw feedstock prices. Their feedstocks are 50nm aluminum powder, sulfuric acid, and titanium oxysulfate. Concentrated sulfuric acid is one of the most widely used industrial chemicals on the market, cheap at about $700 a tonne. Even high purity sulfuric acid isn't particularly expensive. Titanium oxysulfate is about $5000 a tonne - still really trivial compared to the value of the anode material you're getting. However: 80nm aluminum nanopowder (in the same size ballpark) costs $1109 per kilogram, and that's the cheapest I've found online that has a price quote. And this here is a big problem, that's just way too expensive, your finished batteries will be selling for something in the ballpark of $100/kg. But, this is small scale. If anyone here has any idea how cheaply 50nm aluminum powder could be made if desired in quantities of hundreds of tonnes a year, I'd be quite curious.
Of course, as pointed out below, the sort of news we really want to see is about significant cathode improvements...
... there's many alternative, highly improved anode types. There's much more room for improvement on cathodes. There's diminishing returns focusing so much on the anodes. Don't get me wrong, this really does sound like a very good anode material - in particular, both the raw materials and the manufacturing process should be cheap and with good throughput. But we need cathode improvements more.
"In general" is key (and in general people will get *very* mad at you if you offroad on public lands or on private land without permission - me among them). However it's perfectly legal on private land if you have permission. On my land, for example, I sometimes *have* to offroad to haul things around (supplies for fences, trees to plant, manure for soil restoration, etc); I don't have roads that go everywhere, and nor do I want them.
There are three cases on public lands where people won't get mad at you offroading. One is if you're in a björgunarsveit (rescue squad) - they go wherever the heck they need to if there's a person there. The second is up on the glaciers, as those get wiped fresh every year. The third is, in specific locations, there's areas specifically designed for offroading (including difficult rock crawling).
It should also be mentioned that some of our highland roads are worse than what people in most countries would call "offroading" ;) Where they cross lava fields, for example, you'd be crazy to go over them at more than 15kph/10mph, and even that can be pretty jarring in places. But they don't involve any serious rock crawlimg, they're designed to be such that any high-clearance 4x4 can get through (don't even think about it with a regular passenger car, though!)
Indeed, but it's not the average speed that matters, it's the peak. When water funnels between rocks it can end up moving much faster than the average speed, and it also moves faster below the surface than on it. My personal preference would be more pressure than is necessary rather than too little; the concept of one's vehicle dying in the middle of an unpredictable glacial river is rather scary. Then again, I'm a big chicken when it comes to highland river crossings (had to do a bunch about a month ago**) so I probably have an overabundance of caution in this regard ;)
** Word to the wise: When driving in a wilderness location with lots of fords, make sure that your vehicle hasn't accidentally slipped out of 4wd before your first crossing, not after half a dozen nail-biting crossings of slipping along riverbeds while steam rises from your engine compartment. ;)
You're forgetting, rivers don't stand still. One can interpret the velocity of the water as relating to the volume of an imaginary water column above the surface, h=v/(2g). So a 10m/s (22mph) flow is equivalent to a 5 meter (197") water column. The force of fast flowing water is a more significant impact than the water depth, at least in a worst case.
I'm not sure what you mean by "at those volumes". Volume is relatively irrelevant in this context, and only really matters for the motor itself anyway (batteries, having no moving parts, can be water sealed on their own easily), and modern electric motors can be pretty tiny versus their power output. What matters is flow rate combined with pressure. The required flow rate in turn is related to the heat output of the motor. A "normal" motor for a vehicle like this a couple meters per second airflow in peak conditions, while a really high power low profile motor like one of the EMRAX ones at peak would need somewhere along the lines of 15m/s airflow at these sort of pressures (average airflow needs being much lower than the peak). Either way, at pressures of only several PSI, you're just looking at a rotary-vane air compressor, nothing like a piston-driven shop compressor or the like.
The other alternative is of course a submarine-style waterproof rotary joint. But it's an extra cost, will cost you some energy, and either way you still need to cool your motor and pack (unless you only ever operate in a very low power regime)
Yeah, try to drive one of those in the sort of lava fields we have here, it'd bottom out before it even gets started. ;) Even on less extreme terrain, its clearance looks like a pretty big flaw - it can hardly drive on a flat slope without nearly bottoming out, let alone uneven terrain. They could raise the center, but then they'd also be raising the CG because not on the driver but the batteries are in that center bit, and on an offroader you really want a low CG.
Seems to me the solution is to put the batteries next to the hub motors. Something right next to the hub should never bottom out, and as they're low so the CG will stay low. It also allows you to reduce or eliminate your in-arm power wiring (esp. good given all of the bending that goes on in those swing arms), thus reducing wire mass, wire cost, and wire resistance. If you fully eliminate the in-arm power wiring you'd have to charge the packs individually, but even if you retain it you could reduce it to smaller wires that only need to be able to handle charging currents and inter-pack charge balancing, not peak discharge currents. Having the batteries next to the hub motors, you could upgrade them to pretty much whatever power level you wanted.
Another problem I see is with the use of hub motors. Everyone loves them until they start messing around with them and then the problems start to become clear. One, they're unsprung mass, which reduces your ride quality. Two, they're harder to cool, which limits performance. And three, you shake them to bits even on normal roads, let alone offroad. I'd prefer each wheel being hooked up to a small high power motor, connected to the wheels via a stubby CV joint (which should lose only a fraction of a percent of the energy transmitted). That way you keep your unsprung mass low, your motors are easy to cool, and they're not shaken to bits.
This thing is underpowered, but with some proper design choices there's really no limit to how high powered it could become.
The last issue I see is, if you're making an offroader, do you really want motors and wiring connections somewhere that they're going to get wet? Do you want to have your wheel drop into a deep puddle and suddenly short out? It seems to be that they really should have the motors (and as per above, battery packs) protected by a cowling. For transmitting the power to outside of the cowling I see two options. One is to use a waterproof rotary joint, like submarines use, although those are somewhat lossy. A better option might be to have the rotor simply penetrate the cowling (with only a small clearance around it) and use your pack / battery air-cooling system to maintain sufficient positive pressure inside to resist water influx - around 5-10 PSI should be enough for unbridged river crossings, while only 1-2PSI would be needed if you only want to be able to handle the occasional puddle. The air ingress to the cooling system would need to be located as high as possible, of course, whatever design one chooses.
(Yeah, this is something I've been thinking about for quite a while, I'd love to build my own go-anywhere electric vehicle some day ;) )
Sometimes their "philanthropy" is self-serving. Paul Allen is currently in my country with his huge-arse luxury yacht with its two helicopters and two submarines, parked not at the harbour because his boat is too big, but just sitting out in the bay blocking the view. But because he explores shipwrecks and the like (something that he does for fun), it's called charity, and he gets welcome to park his floating palace at no cost.
Program crashing at startup? Okay, let's add debugging statements.
Can't get the debugging statements to execute? Okay, let's try removing code.
Doesn't fix the problem? Okay, let's keep removing more... and more...
A couple hours later, so much code was removed that the entire program had become nothing more than an empty main function that still crashed. This led to the following rule which I try to follow to this day: Make sure that you're actually compiling and executing the same copy of the code that you're modifying. ;)
Indeed, Titan the easiest large world to explore by drone, so long as they tolerate the cryogenic conditions. A highly efficient version could potentially fly continuously just on RTG power (there have been proposals along these lines), although anything adapted to deal with the added weight / inefficiency of hardware to carefully land, collect samples, carry them, etc would probably have to use flight batteries.
I called you daft for not understanding the concept that someone who runs a swapping service station covers all costs related to their business activities and rolls them into what they charge for service, just like every other business does. I fail to see what is hard about this for you to understand. The answer to "who pays for X cost" is *always* "the service provider, with the costs indirectly passed on to their customers via the rate charged".
Really, you think that bad fuel can't damage an engine? It can and does. And it's the supplier who ultimately bears the cost. No, "bad electricity" is not a proper analogy (although your sarcasm in this regard is funny given how many devices are damaged by surges every year); a gas station fuels vehicles by insertung fuel into them, while a swapping station fuels vehicles by inserting pre-charged batteries into them. Batteries correspond to fuel in this context.
In what world do you live where car parts are regularly inspected by the manufacturer after being installed into the vehicle? Cars have hundreds if not thousands of parts more safety critical than a battery pack, and yes, manufacturers *are* liable if their failure modes due to damage pose an unreasonable risk of injury. Think of a famous failure case - say, for example, the Ford Pinto fires. Were the gas tanks defective? Nope. But the cars had an unacceptably bad failure mode in certain types of crashes, and it fell on the manufacturer to fix it - as it always does. A part must meet its use case, and if its use case is "deliver electricity from a swappable system and not burn the vehicle down if damaged", it has to contain the necessary safety systems to do that.
Lastly, you're still stuck in bizarro world where ICE vehicles full of combustible fuel are incombustible, whereas EVs with no combustable fuel and more often than not with batteries less flammable than a block of cheese (once again: *not all li-ions are the same*!) burst into flames left and right. Meanwhile, in the reality that the rest of us live in, the opposite is true. Heck, last summer I saw a flaming hulk of a passenger car with fire crews trying to put it out to extract the burned bodies of the two tourists who had been driving it. Meanwhile, Teslas and Leafs have been in many wrecks - go to Google Images and search for "crash tesla" or "crash leaf". Where are the fires from these oh-so-flammable vehicles? Yes, they have happened, but at a much lower per-vehicle rate than gasoline cars according to NTSB stats. Sorry, but your fire conceptions are just not based in reality.
On the Moon or Mars they wouldn't reach very far. But a RTG-powered version on Titan would have unlimited range (although may need to land periodically to recharge its flight batteries). And even a rocket or gas jet version would have quite significant range on an asteroid.
Such a design is obviously going to be very mission sensitive, hence the need for different propulsion systems. Some missions would benefit significantly as well from wings to allow for long distance flight on bodies with atmospheres (Venus, Titan, maybe Mars, etc). A couple worlds, such as Titan, might benefit from landing floats. And so forth. But that's where rapid prototyping tech (such as 3d printing) becomes useful - they engineer the base model and then can play around with variants with ease. Hopefully in the end they'll have a sample collector module with a workable version for almost any body in the solar system. And for the interests of science, we really need something like that, a universal adaptable drone module - to be paired with a universal adaptable ion tug module, one of a couple variants of a universal adaptable reentry / landing modules, and the same for adaptable ascent modules.
It's impressive what science can be pulled off on the surface of another world. But it's nothing compared to what we can do here on Earth with a sample return.
Seriously, you can't be this daft. The operator, of course, with the price rolled into the service cost.
No, they're not. Even your laptop battery estimates its capacity, and that's about as simple as li-ion battery packs get. Coulomb counting, voltage measurements at start and end compared to the charge temperature, charge voltage curve shapes, direct measurement of pack heating over the course of charge to measure internal resistance, and about half a dozen other methods are all usable and widely used to estimate capacity remaining in a pack. Pretty much every modern EV and hybrid in existence checks its battery pack's performance at least at the pack level, if not the individual cell level (Tesla does it at the "brick" level), to see how it's aging and when components or the pack as the whole need to be replaced.
Measuring remaining battery capacity is a concept older than the light bulb.
Just like gas stations check their gas for impurities that can cause damage to an engine? No, it's the manufacturer's issue to ensure that the product meets its stated usage specs - in this case, the specs including safe handling of damage and X number of swap cycles. Meeting damage control specs is why Tesla isolates each cell in a canister to prevent failure propagation. And why packs always come with fuses/breakers that blow when the pack gets wet or there's otherwise a short.
(Just ignoring that many types of li-ions don't burn even when abused. Tesla uses standard cobalt-based 18660s, which is why they have to have a failure isolation system, but vehicles like the Volt and Leaf use more stable spinel chemistries)
Tesla's battery packs have an 8 year, unlimited-mile warranty. Even if we assume that they're only good for 1000 full charge cycles (which should be well on the low end), at 30 tonne-miles per kWh of charge, times 1000 cycles, and $150/kWh for the pack, that's 200 tonne-miles per dollar of pack capital cost. A diesel truck will get about 120 tonne-miles per gallon of diesel, and diesel costs somewhere in the ballpark of 6x more than electricity per unit range (depends on your location), meaning that the electric version saves about 3-4$ per dollars of energy cost per dollar of pack capital cost.
Wait, so you're picturing them being done individually, one after the next? Seriously? *smacks forehead*
In the parallel world where EVs are always catching on fire, and petroleum-fueled vehicles aren't - quite unlike our actual world.
You know, that would be the best prank ever. Convincing Clarkson that he's getting a new TV show but having the actual point being to secretly film him when he's not acting for the fake "show", as they subject him to situations that would be increasingly uncomfortable for a speed-obsessed labour-hating hot-headed racist diva. Sort of "Top Gear" crossed with "An Idiot Abroad". ;)
When it comes to a truck which will have a sizeable number of large batteries, you're pretty much statistically guaranteed to never have more than a dud or two so long as the battery management process is sound.
By, for example, any of the dozen or so methods already used for this purpose?
By rolling that into the swapping cost?
Could you please ask questions a little harder than "What does 1+1 equal?" I'm seriously not getting why you don't already know the answer to these questions you're asking.
Wait a minute, you think that when people talk about battery swap they're talking about someone going up and swapping batteries by hand?
Many companies have already demonstrated battery swap for cars, which is a far harder target than trucks. With trucks, my preferred mounting is on the trailers themselves (with the cab having its own, non-swappable batteries). You already have, today, stuff mounted to the underside of trailers. It's right where the structural strength is already located and you have tons of open space underneath for easy access and standard form factors. It's an order of magnitude easier challenge than for cars, which you practically have to have disassemble their frames to get their batteries out.
Battery swap in the much harder case of cars can be done in less than a tenth that time.
And you're envisioning that one would load all of the batteries only on one side or something...?
And think about having the tank you plan to switch out be a standardized external tank mounted in a standard form factor on a standard trailer.
Assuming an overall pack energy density of 200 Wh/kg, 1kWh would weigh 5kg. A typical truck may move around 1 tonne 120 miles per gallon of diesel. A gallon of diesel contains about 10kWh of energy. An electric motor will use it about 2,5 times more efficiently than a diesel ICE, so 120 miles per gallon of diesel equates to 300 miles per 10kWh of electricty, or 30 miles per kWh electric, or 30 miles per 5kg of battery pack. So every 30 miles of range you want takes up 0,5% of your cargo mass. If you want say 300 miles range then it would consume 5% of your payload.
On the other hand, the price difference in the cost of fuelling the truck (diesel vs. electricity) would be massive. For each tonne of cargo (assuming 300 miles vehicle range and an average haul distance per hour of say 60 miles), giving up 50kg of cargo to enable to you spend $0,30 on electricity ($0,10/kWh) instead of about $1,80 on diesel ($2,70/gal), or a savings of $1,5 for giving up 50kg of cargo. If we scale to say 50 tonnes of cargo then this equates to giving up 2,5 tonnes (5%) of your cargo to save $75 per hour.