Sadly too true... I own some land just north of Reykjavík and just had a shipping crate full of window panes blow over in ~130mph winds last saturday. One place measured 163 mph.
BS. Sorry, but you don't live here. We took on massive austerity (average 30% cuts across the board) during our *last* government, and the new government has been cutting down even further to pay for massive tax giveaways to the upper class - the "leiðrétting" money to people with expensive homes at the expense of higher food taxes and a higher retirement age, the elimination of the veiðigjald on the fishing barons, etc.
Yeah, it gets weary being lectured by foreigners about how lovely the political situation in Iceland is these days. It's miserable. We're ruled by a bunch of smug self-centered nepotistic dissent-silencing indifferent-to-the-law bastards.
First off, while you can't see it anymore due to a robots.txt page, I could previously show you on the Internet Archives what Landsbankinn's old Icesave page looked like. Just one or two clicks from the front page anyone could go there and read their account insurance policy. The account insurance policy was thus: the primary insurer was a private fund established by the Icelandic government. The secondary insurer was the UK government.
Now, either you put a ton of money into an account without reading the readily accessible information about what was backing the account, meaning you're an idiot, or you're willingly blaming the government of Iceland for something that they never promised to insure
Secondly, the UK and the Netherlands took Iceland to the EFTA court. Guess what? They Lost. The EFTA court ruled that Iceland did indeed follow all EU banking laws and that the private fund met the letter and spirit of the law. Just because your banks chose government backing rather than a private fund doesn't mean that you can retroactively damn us for having not made such a ridiculous decision.
Lastly, the UK government *did* pay out all insured minimums, as the secondary insurer. Meaning that if you lost £30,000, you're complaining about losing money that wasn't bloody insured. Which makes you even more of an idiot and a whiner. Were you really so stupid as to put a huge amount of money into an account without checking what the insured minimum for the account was, and then claim that an entity that never promised to ensure any of your account - the government of Iceland - "stole" it?
Iceland is increasingly sounding like one of the most democratic places in the world.
HAHAHAHAAAA...... oh god the foreign views of Iceland are always hilarious.
Just to let you know, it's questionable whether we even qualify as a democracy any more. Our current government has declared itself the right to void bills from parliament signed by the previous administration, at the stroke of a pen. Our gun-smuggling personal-data-revenge-leaking media-threatening stealing-tax-money-for-themselves government.
We also have Víkingasveitin (The Viking Squad). They're sort of like something between a small special forces and a big SWAT team.
Oh, and our coast guard's been buying some serious guns recently. They're still small, of course, like the country, but they're hardly unarmed. Our current government is really big into guns. They tried to equip every last police car with two guns, one of each being a military-issue submachine gun.
Actually, a literal translation of the "Pirate Party" to Icelandic would be Sjóræningjaflokkurinn. A pirate is a sjóræningi (sea-thief) and a political party is a flokkur (group). Pírati is not an Icelandic word, but an homage to the international pirate party movement. And "partý"? That's the word for party as in "Hey, I went to a great party" the other day, not a political party. It's a rather silly name, but hey...;)
I don't know what it is that determines turnout. Here in Iceland our parliamentary elections usually get about 85% turnout. No mandatory voting. Why so much here and so little in the US? Beats me. (don't off the bat assume that this means that politics here are somehow better than in the US... it's questionable given the administration's recent power grabs whether we should even be considered a democracy anymore. If Obama suddenly declared that a bill passed and signed by Bush that he didn't like is no longer in force - no new legislative action revoking it - what would you call that?)
Either a 50kw feed OR a built-in trickle charge battery pack. Rapid chargers are already expensive, so its not like it'd triple the cost, and they sit idle most of the time.
I have trouble getting excited about any of GM's electric offerings. I'm the sort of person who thinks Aptera's airplane-like streamlining was beautiful: long, moderate cross section, gradual taper, nearly no low pressure wake. And of course there's the weight reduction / safety aspects of working with foam or honeycomb-core composites. Plus we're now seeing prototype tires which can change their pressure to vary their rolling drag / grip based on road conditions. In short, there's no shortage of things that can be done to radically reduce energy consumption - and thus radically increase range and range-per-minute charge rates. Does GM have any plans to do anything significantly revolutionary with energy consumption, or are we going to just be looking at more of the same?
While using multiple motors is of course more expensive than a single larger motor, how much does it increase the overall cost, after considering how it lets you simplify elsewhere? For example, one engine front and one rear can give you 4WD / AWD without a driveshaft and a differential or transfer case. An engine on each pair of driven wheels (not talking in-wheel) lets you omit an axle and differentials (two of each in the case of 4WD / AWD). Given the advantages of individually-driven wheels, how much more expensive is it actually?
By and large, GM's electric offerings certainly haven't been slow, but they haven't been exceptional performing, like one might see with a Roadster or Model S. Why is this? Of course there are costs to increasing performance, but it's not as extreme of a curve as getting more power out of an internal combustion vehicle. Little tiny motors can put out the power output of whole large ICE engines. Why not make a higher power output more standard or at least give more performance options?
Most people think of the battery pack as the only reason why electric cars tend to be expensive, but I remember in the Volt's early days when Lutz admitted that the main reason for the price rise from the projections was that the powertrain turned out to be so expensive. To people with experience with EV hardware, the cost of powertrain components was no such surprise. In true mass production they should be cheap due to their simplicity, but in low volumes they're often anything but.
How much progress has GM been making with getting the powertrain costs down?
Haven't even read the article, but I can tell you that such a thing is pretty much an essential requirement to have a chance of commercializing any sort of laser-driven inertial confinement fusion. A fusion reactor that can only fire off a pulse once every day or so is pretty worthless;) The other high repetition rate component that you need is a high repetition precision injection of holhraums.
There's two main types of reactors in particular to which this would apply. First you have your pure inertial confinement fusion schemes, like NIF, where it's all about single super-high energy compression pulses. Secondly you have your hybrid inertial confinement approaches like HiPER where you combine a weaker compression pulse with a thermal pulse so that you don't need to achieve such extreme compression. I'm personally rather fond of the second, but it's not as mature.
I got burned out and was out of money. We had a pilot project with GM, they really liked the software, but I just couldn't keep going.:(
It's by the way part of the reason I really hate the patent system, it games everything against small players. Not that patents were ever used against me - but because I had to *get* patents, everyone wants to know what's in your patent portfolio before they even consider investment or contracting with you. I had to spend a whole programmer's salary of my own money paying for patent attorneys just to get a most minimal amount of coverage. Which meant that all of the programming work fell on me. And everything about the auto industry is such a colossal money pit... hiring marketing people to get you in the door, having these ridiculously expensive dinners with execs, and on and on. I lost so much money on that thing.
This was in the days before kickstarter and the like took off, it might have been easier to raise enough money to stand a chance these days. But I just couldn't keep doing it. I was overworked and broke and totally out of my comfort zone managing a company. I never should have listened after all the people who beta'ed what I planned to be a free tool told me "oh my god you have to commercialize this!" :
Calculating range is a lot trickier than you might think, as so many factors come into play. I once started a company that worked on such range calculation software, we had to use very detailed vehicle models, use weather forecasts, historical weather data (to estimate road conditions - for example, snow, ice, water etc on the road), reasonably high resolution altitude models, real-time traffic data, traffic estimation, accessory power consumption (including factoring in weather data for climate control systems), driver behavior modelling, etc, and of course the fact that there's not straight roads going out to any given point in any given direction. And everything plays off everything else. The ambient temperature might affect your battery pack temperature which might affect its voltage which might affect the efficiency of the drive system and so forth. We discovered a lot of unexpected behavior, like how in order to get accurate wind resistance calculations we had to estimate realistic wind gusting patterns because the average wind speed (and direction) doesn't give the same results as a wind varied around an average. And there were a lot of things that we just didn't have and couldn't get data on, such as components of the car that weren't performing at the level that they should when new (though we had some ideas on how to estimate that), decisions that the driver might make later (such as to turn on/off accessories, change their driving speed, make unexpected stops, etc), and so forth.
The standard approach of just drawing a circle around a person might work sometimes but be way, way off at other times. The actual range of an electric vehicle is a sort of pointy polygon warped along terrain contour lines and extending out the furthest on straight moderate-speed country roads with few stop signs / lights.
Interestingly enough, while we had varying levels of interest from most major manufacturers, there was one manufacturer who made it clear right out that they do all of their software stack devel on such aspects in-house and have no interest in working with an outside entity. That manufacturer was Tesla.
.. range. For example, more charging stations and/or a better locator (perhaps with a partnership with a nationwide chain of stores or two), better range calculation, a service to have charging trucks come out to you to you should you run out of charge (maybe even heading to the point where you would run out of charge before it even happens so that there's no wait), or all sorts of other possibilities. There's no guarantee that it actually means more range.
Ah, the old "American English is a corruption of good pure British English" attitude. Sorry, but both languages have been devolving from their divergence point, neither is more pure than the other. For example, British English is non-rhotic (r-dropping), while except in a few regional accents (ex: Boston), American English isn't. 17th century English was rhotic, like American English; people weren't going around saying "hard" and "yard" as "haad" and "yaad". American English retains secondary stresses more, for example "secretary" and "dictionary" rather than "secretr'y" and "dictionr'y". American English also has little T-glottalization, like 17th century English, while modern British English does it heavily (ex: "city" as "ci-ey"). The more cockney you sound, the less you sound like a 17th century English speaker. As for vowels, American English wins some of those comparisons and loses others - but for example the american A in words like "cat" and "path" is historic, unlike the British pronunciations which match the a in "father" (of course, if you want to go even further on accuracy, Scottish English retains the historic vowel pronunciation better than both British and American English - something I think most Brits would be loathe to admit.;) )
Langauge shifts usually happen faster in urban environments than rural ones. Here in Iceland, for example, one sees the same thing with the countryside accents much closer to historical accents than that of the Reykjavík metro area. Throughout much of its history, the US was a sparsely populated agricultural country, while the UK was industrialized and urban. In fact, one word that is still used commonly used in British english - "reckon" - is largely looked down on as hick talk in the US, in that its use has significantly declined from its historic commonness in American urban environments in the past century but has been retained in rural ones. Counterbalancing the historic rural nature of the US was the significant need for new words, having been thrust into a very different environment. Both sides of the pond met with heavy interaction with people speaking foreign languages and adopted words from them, although the levels of exposure to each language and words borrowed were different.
Anyway, if you're curious, one can find a number of other evolutions from 17th century English here, both on the American and British sides.
Um, that is the nature of mapmaking, reflecting the changing landscape due to, say, old roads being bulldozed and new roads being built. At a faster rate than linguistic change, I might add.
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Sometimes people demand "cash" from us, but they forget, there's no "C" in the Icelandic alphabet.... ;)
Sadly too true... I own some land just north of Reykjavík and just had a shipping crate full of window panes blow over in ~130mph winds last saturday. One place measured 163 mph.
We're no stranger to bad driving conditions...
All of you who think that Iceland is some sort of anti-capitalist liberal paradise, you should know that Icelanders are making fun of you.
And we did not default on our national debt. This is a common myth. We were (and still are) actually rather crushed by it.
Actually only a very small percentage of our major bankers who caused the crisis went to jail. Ask, say, Björgólfur Thor how he's doing these days.
BS. Sorry, but you don't live here. We took on massive austerity (average 30% cuts across the board) during our *last* government, and the new government has been cutting down even further to pay for massive tax giveaways to the upper class - the "leiðrétting" money to people with expensive homes at the expense of higher food taxes and a higher retirement age, the elimination of the veiðigjald on the fishing barons, etc.
Yeah, it gets weary being lectured by foreigners about how lovely the political situation in Iceland is these days. It's miserable. We're ruled by a bunch of smug self-centered nepotistic dissent-silencing indifferent-to-the-law bastards.
BS.
First off, while you can't see it anymore due to a robots.txt page, I could previously show you on the Internet Archives what Landsbankinn's old Icesave page looked like. Just one or two clicks from the front page anyone could go there and read their account insurance policy. The account insurance policy was thus: the primary insurer was a private fund established by the Icelandic government. The secondary insurer was the UK government.
Now, either you put a ton of money into an account without reading the readily accessible information about what was backing the account, meaning you're an idiot, or you're willingly blaming the government of Iceland for something that they never promised to insure
Secondly, the UK and the Netherlands took Iceland to the EFTA court. Guess what? They Lost. The EFTA court ruled that Iceland did indeed follow all EU banking laws and that the private fund met the letter and spirit of the law. Just because your banks chose government backing rather than a private fund doesn't mean that you can retroactively damn us for having not made such a ridiculous decision.
Lastly, the UK government *did* pay out all insured minimums, as the secondary insurer. Meaning that if you lost £30,000, you're complaining about losing money that wasn't bloody insured. Which makes you even more of an idiot and a whiner. Were you really so stupid as to put a huge amount of money into an account without checking what the insured minimum for the account was, and then claim that an entity that never promised to ensure any of your account - the government of Iceland - "stole" it?
HAHAHAHAAAA...... oh god the foreign views of Iceland are always hilarious.
Just to let you know, it's questionable whether we even qualify as a democracy any more. Our current government has declared itself the right to void bills from parliament signed by the previous administration, at the stroke of a pen. Our gun-smuggling personal-data-revenge-leaking media-threatening stealing-tax-money-for-themselves government.
We also have Víkingasveitin (The Viking Squad). They're sort of like something between a small special forces and a big SWAT team.
Oh, and our coast guard's been buying some serious guns recently. They're still small, of course, like the country, but they're hardly unarmed. Our current government is really big into guns. They tried to equip every last police car with two guns, one of each being a military-issue submachine gun.
Actually, a literal translation of the "Pirate Party" to Icelandic would be Sjóræningjaflokkurinn. A pirate is a sjóræningi (sea-thief) and a political party is a flokkur (group). Pírati is not an Icelandic word, but an homage to the international pirate party movement. And "partý"? That's the word for party as in "Hey, I went to a great party" the other day, not a political party. It's a rather silly name, but hey... ;)
Okay, well for what it matters, Píratapartýið (which by the way is a rather silly name in Icelandic) supports copyright law reform.
I don't know what it is that determines turnout. Here in Iceland our parliamentary elections usually get about 85% turnout. No mandatory voting. Why so much here and so little in the US? Beats me. (don't off the bat assume that this means that politics here are somehow better than in the US... it's questionable given the administration's recent power grabs whether we should even be considered a democracy anymore. If Obama suddenly declared that a bill passed and signed by Bush that he didn't like is no longer in force - no new legislative action revoking it - what would you call that?)
Either a 50kw feed OR a built-in trickle charge battery pack. Rapid chargers are already expensive, so its not like it'd triple the cost, and they sit idle most of the time.
I have trouble getting excited about any of GM's electric offerings. I'm the sort of person who thinks Aptera's airplane-like streamlining was beautiful: long, moderate cross section, gradual taper, nearly no low pressure wake. And of course there's the weight reduction / safety aspects of working with foam or honeycomb-core composites. Plus we're now seeing prototype tires which can change their pressure to vary their rolling drag / grip based on road conditions. In short, there's no shortage of things that can be done to radically reduce energy consumption - and thus radically increase range and range-per-minute charge rates. Does GM have any plans to do anything significantly revolutionary with energy consumption, or are we going to just be looking at more of the same?
While using multiple motors is of course more expensive than a single larger motor, how much does it increase the overall cost, after considering how it lets you simplify elsewhere? For example, one engine front and one rear can give you 4WD / AWD without a driveshaft and a differential or transfer case. An engine on each pair of driven wheels (not talking in-wheel) lets you omit an axle and differentials (two of each in the case of 4WD / AWD). Given the advantages of individually-driven wheels, how much more expensive is it actually?
By and large, GM's electric offerings certainly haven't been slow, but they haven't been exceptional performing, like one might see with a Roadster or Model S. Why is this? Of course there are costs to increasing performance, but it's not as extreme of a curve as getting more power out of an internal combustion vehicle. Little tiny motors can put out the power output of whole large ICE engines. Why not make a higher power output more standard or at least give more performance options?
Most people think of the battery pack as the only reason why electric cars tend to be expensive, but I remember in the Volt's early days when Lutz admitted that the main reason for the price rise from the projections was that the powertrain turned out to be so expensive. To people with experience with EV hardware, the cost of powertrain components was no such surprise. In true mass production they should be cheap due to their simplicity, but in low volumes they're often anything but.
How much progress has GM been making with getting the powertrain costs down?
Haven't even read the article, but I can tell you that such a thing is pretty much an essential requirement to have a chance of commercializing any sort of laser-driven inertial confinement fusion. A fusion reactor that can only fire off a pulse once every day or so is pretty worthless ;) The other high repetition rate component that you need is a high repetition precision injection of holhraums.
There's two main types of reactors in particular to which this would apply. First you have your pure inertial confinement fusion schemes, like NIF, where it's all about single super-high energy compression pulses. Secondly you have your hybrid inertial confinement approaches like HiPER where you combine a weaker compression pulse with a thermal pulse so that you don't need to achieve such extreme compression. I'm personally rather fond of the second, but it's not as mature.
I got burned out and was out of money. We had a pilot project with GM, they really liked the software, but I just couldn't keep going. :(
It's by the way part of the reason I really hate the patent system, it games everything against small players. Not that patents were ever used against me - but because I had to *get* patents, everyone wants to know what's in your patent portfolio before they even consider investment or contracting with you. I had to spend a whole programmer's salary of my own money paying for patent attorneys just to get a most minimal amount of coverage. Which meant that all of the programming work fell on me. And everything about the auto industry is such a colossal money pit... hiring marketing people to get you in the door, having these ridiculously expensive dinners with execs, and on and on. I lost so much money on that thing.
This was in the days before kickstarter and the like took off, it might have been easier to raise enough money to stand a chance these days. But I just couldn't keep doing it. I was overworked and broke and totally out of my comfort zone managing a company. I never should have listened after all the people who beta'ed what I planned to be a free tool told me "oh my god you have to commercialize this!" :
Calculating range is a lot trickier than you might think, as so many factors come into play. I once started a company that worked on such range calculation software, we had to use very detailed vehicle models, use weather forecasts, historical weather data (to estimate road conditions - for example, snow, ice, water etc on the road), reasonably high resolution altitude models, real-time traffic data, traffic estimation, accessory power consumption (including factoring in weather data for climate control systems), driver behavior modelling, etc, and of course the fact that there's not straight roads going out to any given point in any given direction. And everything plays off everything else. The ambient temperature might affect your battery pack temperature which might affect its voltage which might affect the efficiency of the drive system and so forth. We discovered a lot of unexpected behavior, like how in order to get accurate wind resistance calculations we had to estimate realistic wind gusting patterns because the average wind speed (and direction) doesn't give the same results as a wind varied around an average. And there were a lot of things that we just didn't have and couldn't get data on, such as components of the car that weren't performing at the level that they should when new (though we had some ideas on how to estimate that), decisions that the driver might make later (such as to turn on/off accessories, change their driving speed, make unexpected stops, etc), and so forth.
The standard approach of just drawing a circle around a person might work sometimes but be way, way off at other times. The actual range of an electric vehicle is a sort of pointy polygon warped along terrain contour lines and extending out the furthest on straight moderate-speed country roads with few stop signs / lights.
Interestingly enough, while we had varying levels of interest from most major manufacturers, there was one manufacturer who made it clear right out that they do all of their software stack devel on such aspects in-house and have no interest in working with an outside entity. That manufacturer was Tesla.
.. range. For example, more charging stations and/or a better locator (perhaps with a partnership with a nationwide chain of stores or two), better range calculation, a service to have charging trucks come out to you to you should you run out of charge (maybe even heading to the point where you would run out of charge before it even happens so that there's no wait), or all sorts of other possibilities. There's no guarantee that it actually means more range.
Of course, it could mean that.
Ah, the old "American English is a corruption of good pure British English" attitude. Sorry, but both languages have been devolving from their divergence point, neither is more pure than the other. For example, British English is non-rhotic (r-dropping), while except in a few regional accents (ex: Boston), American English isn't. 17th century English was rhotic, like American English; people weren't going around saying "hard" and "yard" as "haad" and "yaad". American English retains secondary stresses more, for example "secretary" and "dictionary" rather than "secretr'y" and "dictionr'y". American English also has little T-glottalization, like 17th century English, while modern British English does it heavily (ex: "city" as "ci-ey"). The more cockney you sound, the less you sound like a 17th century English speaker. As for vowels, American English wins some of those comparisons and loses others - but for example the american A in words like "cat" and "path" is historic, unlike the British pronunciations which match the a in "father" (of course, if you want to go even further on accuracy, Scottish English retains the historic vowel pronunciation better than both British and American English - something I think most Brits would be loathe to admit. ;) )
Langauge shifts usually happen faster in urban environments than rural ones. Here in Iceland, for example, one sees the same thing with the countryside accents much closer to historical accents than that of the Reykjavík metro area. Throughout much of its history, the US was a sparsely populated agricultural country, while the UK was industrialized and urban. In fact, one word that is still used commonly used in British english - "reckon" - is largely looked down on as hick talk in the US, in that its use has significantly declined from its historic commonness in American urban environments in the past century but has been retained in rural ones. Counterbalancing the historic rural nature of the US was the significant need for new words, having been thrust into a very different environment. Both sides of the pond met with heavy interaction with people speaking foreign languages and adopted words from them, although the levels of exposure to each language and words borrowed were different.
Anyway, if you're curious, one can find a number of other evolutions from 17th century English here, both on the American and British sides.
Um, that is the nature of mapmaking, reflecting the changing landscape due to, say, old roads being bulldozed and new roads being built. At a faster rate than linguistic change, I might add.
Hear hear!
Let's hope that their friends aren't so mean as to stagmatize them!