It's not quite there. It doesn't yet read stop lights. It'll stop if there's a car ahead of you, but not if there isn't one. It also doesn't know how to handle small traffic circles or 90 degree turns. Aka: it's not yet intended for city driving.
But it's pretty dang close to being a home-to-destination solution. Navigate-On-Autopilot was a big step in that direction.
Note that even when the car "can" do everything on its own, that doesn't mean it going to jump straight to Level 5 autonomy. For the foreseeable future, "human + vehicle" will continue to be safer than "vehicle alone".
One of the main points of an autonomy system is to improve safety via pairing the vehicle's constant attentiveness with a human's decision-making ability. The more annoying you make your system with its nagging, the less people will use it, defeating any safety advantages.
Tesla actually has spent money on the hardware that would be needed. Look. You see that? That's a driver-facing camera. Every Model 3 has one. So what "cost savings", exactly, do you think they're getting?
Tesla has experimented endlessly over the years with nag frequencies, types of nag, and types of driver monitoring. This is what they've arrived at as the best balance between "encouraging people to actually use it" and "discouraging inattentive driving". And by and large, it works very well - even if some drunk happened to pass out at the wheel. Which, while we're on that subject... what's the alternative? Have drunks ever been prone to not driving? When a drunk passes out at the wheel, would you rather the car just crash? It's still DUI either way, but in the former case, everyone walks away unscathed, while in the latter case some random person has a drunk crash into and possibly kill them.
That's not to say that the current approach is perfect - far from it. There's a difference between a naggy, "oh my god you looked away from the windshield" system, and a system that can detect if a person has passed out (but still had their hands on the wheel), for example. Implementing the latter would very much be a good thing. But with the former, if you drive people off of using it, you lose out on any potential for improving safety.
The distinction is "going to space" vs. "going to orbit". His listed "competitors" - Blue Origin and SpaceX - aren't targeting "space", they're targeting orbit. It's an entirely different thing, and involves your craft gaining more than an order of magnitude more energy than simply crossing the Karman line. 100000m * 9,81 m/s = 0,981 MJ/kg. 1/2 * (7800m/s)^2 + 350000 * 9,81 = 33,8535 MJ/kg - that is to say, over 34 times more energy**.
** In practice, the consumed energy distinction isn't as stark, as both vehicles have to deal with air resistance and gravity losses for the first part of the flight - but on the other hand, it's a far-more-than-linear increase in difficulty to add more delta-V, since you have to lift the fuel to lift your fuel, and lift the fuel to lift that fuel, and lift the fuel to lift that fuel...
Strangely, Tesla's went up over 6%, apparently on the same news.
Which was annoying to me, because - despite being heavily invested in Tesla - I was looking to pick up some call options on the cheap yesterday, but the ask price kept racing ahead of whatever bid price I set:P
This would not be useful for electric cars, although mainly due to the cycle life issues (and presumably cost issues, but we can't know that yet). This would be most interested for various "specialty" applications - applications where power is drained only slowly (thus rendering the ionic conductivity issue moot as well as the cycle life issue). Perhaps remote sensors or the like. I'd think they'd also be quite desirable in military drones designed to circle over a given location for as long as possible. For applications like that, you don't need a huge number of cycles out of the batteries, and cell cost is not a limiting factor, but what you need above all is energy density.
For the mass market, though, it's more of an issue of how the tech (particularly cycle life and cost) evolves. Hopefully investors in this company realize that they're betting on where this tech might go rather than where it is as things stand.
It's not BS, but it is hype. The founder and CEO is this guy, who just recently published this paper on their tech. The cells reportedly lost 25% of their capacity in just 50 cycles. They also reported a "high" ionic conductivity of 3.15e-3 S cm-1, which is an order of magnitude less than traditional liquid electrolytes. They conducted their discharge tests at a mere 0,1C.
Interesting plant, though. It likes very acidic soils - tolerating pHs as low as soda. It also likes high levels of alumium, which are normally toxic to most plants.
Like most science news in general, the coverage on this is poor. There are tons of Camellia species (the tea genus) which don't produce caffeine, many of which are consumed. What makes this one (Camellia ptilophylla) special is the very high theobromine content in the leaves (6%), thus the apparently recent English name, "cocoa tea".
Tea contains a lot of interesting compounds, and the ratios between each one vary a lot depending on the Camellia species. Some have meaningful caffeine (including ones with much higher levels than C. sinensis (3%), including C. japonica (5%)). Others have little to none.
EHD propulsion is well modeled, and it's just not possible to achieve a high thrust density per unit of propulsive surface area at reasonable efficiency. It's a more interesting concept for propulsion of lighter-than-air aircraft, where you have an extremely large surface are and can have your electrodes double as surface reinforcement. But the electrode longevity problems remain. So does ozone generation.
On the upside, EHD propulsion is surprisingly efficient when surface area is not a limiting factor. You're moving a large mass of air at low velocity rather than a small mass of air at high velocity, which leads to higher propulsive efficiency.
Apparently "the future" means that Ford will leave your car idling in the sun while they sell off data about where you live and work to the highest bidder.
On the upside: one good recession and Ford will go bankrupt. They're barely hanging on as it is. Which is why they're getting so desperate with extra revenue streams, like that "selling your personal data" idea. That said, I'm sure the Ford brand will still live on; it has plenty of fans. Whoever buys them will probably just keep the lines running largely as they were before, after ditching Ford's accrued debt.
Yes, because permafrost-ripping excavators are trivial, low-maintenance things to run. (/snark)
(note that permafrost on Mars is much harder than on Earth)
Distillation absolutely can be done, but it's something you have to engineer for, with a good understanding of the properties of your feedstocks. It's not something you can just go straight to Mars with and start digging and just assume everything is going to work. The ideal case would be a sample return of cores of the area that you plan to mine.
Don't get me wrong, this absolutely can be done. There are many different ways being researched to achieve it (particularly the mining; there's some really creative concepts). But the TRL level for all is low at present.
Um, are you high? Perhaps the "Science Guy" should learn a little bit about Mars before talking about it. A large portion of the planet has permafrost at or near the surface.
I'm not actually that much of a Mars advocate, and think the simplicity of using water there is overplayed (people talk about it like it's some sort of pure snow that you just pick up and melt, but it's (mostly) a rock-hard toxic brine mixed with sand and clay) - but come on, if you're going to talk about something, learn the basics.
As a point of comparison, compare half a million dollars in batteries vs. what your article cites for the power line work:
Royal Electric arrived on-site in November 2010, with an $8 million contract, as sub for general contractor Kenny Construction (acquired by Granite Construction in December 2012), according to Rodger Dalton, Royal’s project superintendent. Royal has already done similar projects in the past and has a crew specialized and trained to manage the TBM-related tasks.
“There is a great deal of high-voltage and data work being done, and they are handling all aspects of the job,” said Bob Rautenberg, Kenny Construction project manager.
There's some confusion here. As a general rule, TBMs are powered by high voltage lines carrying a couple megawatts of power. Diesel-powered trains carry the spoils away, where conveyors are not used. Powering a TBM with HV lines requires laying the lines, a quite expensive affair that TBC is replacing with hot-swapped battery packs (simple calculations show that it should only take about half a million dollars in batteries), carried in and out by the spoils trains. Diesel trains require powerful ventilation systems, for obvious reasons, which are also another significant capital cost which is eliminated by the use of battery-powered electric trains.
Continuous casing - I'm assuming by this you mean concrete. This method can only be used when the ground is pretty strong and self supporting.
No. I mean exactly what I said: the TBM does not stop for casing. They're designing for casing of new segments - regardless of the type of casing - to be conducted while the TBM is still pushing off the previous casing segment(s), and without it having to stop to advance the segments that it pushes off of. In-situ concrete casting - what you suggested as an alternative - has never been publicly discussed by TBC.
Hot swappable discs - as by definition the discs installed are all required to excavate the complete face area, if any are withdrawn from service you have incomplete excavation. You could only possibly do this by having overlapping cutter heads, which would duplicate costs for negligible gain
Correct on everything but "negligible gain". The cost of extra cutter heads is far smaller than the cost savings of not having to stop the TBM.
considering typical downtime for cutter heads is a few hours every 3 days or so
Even if you did only have a 24:1 operation:downtime ratio, that would still justify the use of extra cutter discs and hot swapping. Tunneling costs are linearly proportional to tunneling speeds. Cutting disc costs are a small fraction thereof. And the more discs you have, the more the wear is spread out.
Faster head speeds - the cutting ability of a cutting disc is dictated by the rotational head speed and pressure applied at the cutting edge. Too much pressure/speed and you get accelerated wear and too much heat generated which also leads to accelerated disc wear.
Precisely. Which is why TBC's plan to increase head speeds is to use highly cooled, advanced alloy cutting discs. Because - to reiterate - disc costs are a small fraction of the total project costs, so increasing their costs to dramatically increase tunneling speeds is a no-brainer.
The best material we have is tungsten carbide mounted in a ceramic matrix
Carbide bits (not very commonly used on TBMs) are used for abrasion resistance, not for overcoming thermal limitations. Generally TBM cutting discs are simple martensitic steel alloys, and wear is by tribocorrosion. The limited use of carbide bits on TBMs has generally been in soft ground, to avoid slip-related wear on the discs. Cutting discs cut via pressure-induced fracture of the rock, and tungsten carbide is a more brittle material than steel. When you use carbide bits on hard rock, they tend to fracture, and then the uneven load quickly causes the rest of the bits to fracture.
There are few companies in the US that have more experience with advanced heat-and-corrosion-resistant alloys - and keeping them cool under extreme conditions - than SpaceX. You don't get more hostile conditions than rocket engines, and SpaceX has been pushing the bounds on them to extremes (check out the sort of conditions that Raptor operates in, it's nuts). TBC's goal is to apply that knowledge to cutting discs.
Meanwhile in the real world, Tesla consumes more EV batteries than everyone else in the world combined, with Giga alone making about half of the world's total (~20GWh/yr out of ~40GWh/yr). Tesla's US sales make everyone else's look like a rounding error.
As for Boring Company, their goals are low-cost PRT. That's the whole point of Loop and Hyperloop. But maybe you'd feel better if the rich were banned from riding? Even their first non-demonstration-scale project (the Chicago Loop) is to charge half as much as an Uber ride. By the time they're up to Prufrock, fares are supposed to be cheaper than bus tickets (but go straight to your destination at high speeds).
It's one thing to be dubious about their probability of success. But it's an entirely different thing to misrepresent their goals.
Indeed. They're not magically jumping straight to Prufrock. Godot is mostly (but not entirely) standard. Prufrock is their target, which involves continuous casing, hot swappable cutting discs, and much faster head speeds. Linestorm is intermediary between them.
Godot is operational now. Linestorm is under construction. Prufrock is in design.
It's all about probabilities. The satellites all have to have a mechanism to deorbit them at end-of-life. So if you can get some given estimate of reliability out of the satellites remaining operational through deorbit and the deorbit function working, you can estimate the number of failures you will have, and model the significance of these failures (including how errors in your reliability estimates might affect the outcomes).
Smaller satellites means less potential for debris in the case of a collision, and faster natural deorbit times. For a satellite, the crosssection of thermosphere/exosphere that they pass through is proportional to their radius squared, but their mass is proportional to their radius cubed, so the smaller you make a satellite, the quicker it tends to reenter. Just the fact that we're talking LEO satellites makes any failure modes less significant; GEO failures are more problematic, as the debris persists for much longer, orbits are much more shared, and it's much harder to track GEO debris.
The most recent 7518 satellites are going to be particularly short-lived without reboost, orbiting at only 340km. That's quite close; they're going to need very frequent reboosts. Without reboosts I'd expect them to reenter after only 1-3 months. Remember that ISS (~330km) needs reboosts several times per year, and that's obviously a far higher kg/m^2 object than a Starlink satellite.
Slashdot Mirror
My apologies. In the future, I'll do all of my own illustrations for no reason whatsoever.
It's not quite there. It doesn't yet read stop lights. It'll stop if there's a car ahead of you, but not if there isn't one. It also doesn't know how to handle small traffic circles or 90 degree turns. Aka: it's not yet intended for city driving.
But it's pretty dang close to being a home-to-destination solution. Navigate-On-Autopilot was a big step in that direction.
Note that even when the car "can" do everything on its own, that doesn't mean it going to jump straight to Level 5 autonomy. For the foreseeable future, "human + vehicle" will continue to be safer than "vehicle alone".
One of the main points of an autonomy system is to improve safety via pairing the vehicle's constant attentiveness with a human's decision-making ability. The more annoying you make your system with its nagging, the less people will use it, defeating any safety advantages.
Tesla actually has spent money on the hardware that would be needed. Look. You see that? That's a driver-facing camera. Every Model 3 has one. So what "cost savings", exactly, do you think they're getting?
Tesla has experimented endlessly over the years with nag frequencies, types of nag, and types of driver monitoring. This is what they've arrived at as the best balance between "encouraging people to actually use it" and "discouraging inattentive driving". And by and large, it works very well - even if some drunk happened to pass out at the wheel. Which, while we're on that subject... what's the alternative? Have drunks ever been prone to not driving? When a drunk passes out at the wheel, would you rather the car just crash? It's still DUI either way, but in the former case, everyone walks away unscathed, while in the latter case some random person has a drunk crash into and possibly kill them.
That's not to say that the current approach is perfect - far from it. There's a difference between a naggy, "oh my god you looked away from the windshield" system, and a system that can detect if a person has passed out (but still had their hands on the wheel), for example. Implementing the latter would very much be a good thing. But with the former, if you drive people off of using it, you lose out on any potential for improving safety.
The distinction is "going to space" vs. "going to orbit". His listed "competitors" - Blue Origin and SpaceX - aren't targeting "space", they're targeting orbit. It's an entirely different thing, and involves your craft gaining more than an order of magnitude more energy than simply crossing the Karman line. 100000m * 9,81 m/s = 0,981 MJ/kg. 1/2 * (7800m/s)^2 + 350000 * 9,81 = 33,8535 MJ/kg - that is to say, over 34 times more energy**.
Reaching orbit is a little bit of "up" and a LOT of "across". Or, as XKCD put it: how the public thinks going to orbit works vs. how it actually works.
** In practice, the consumed energy distinction isn't as stark, as both vehicles have to deal with air resistance and gravity losses for the first part of the flight - but on the other hand, it's a far-more-than-linear increase in difficulty to add more delta-V, since you have to lift the fuel to lift your fuel, and lift the fuel to lift that fuel, and lift the fuel to lift that fuel...
Strangely, Tesla's went up over 6%, apparently on the same news.
Which was annoying to me, because - despite being heavily invested in Tesla - I was looking to pick up some call options on the cheap yesterday, but the ask price kept racing ahead of whatever bid price I set :P
This would not be useful for electric cars, although mainly due to the cycle life issues (and presumably cost issues, but we can't know that yet). This would be most interested for various "specialty" applications - applications where power is drained only slowly (thus rendering the ionic conductivity issue moot as well as the cycle life issue). Perhaps remote sensors or the like. I'd think they'd also be quite desirable in military drones designed to circle over a given location for as long as possible. For applications like that, you don't need a huge number of cycles out of the batteries, and cell cost is not a limiting factor, but what you need above all is energy density.
For the mass market, though, it's more of an issue of how the tech (particularly cycle life and cost) evolves. Hopefully investors in this company realize that they're betting on where this tech might go rather than where it is as things stand.
It's not BS, but it is hype. The founder and CEO is this guy, who just recently published this paper on their tech. The cells reportedly lost 25% of their capacity in just 50 cycles. They also reported a "high" ionic conductivity of 3.15e-3 S cm-1, which is an order of magnitude less than traditional liquid electrolytes. They conducted their discharge tests at a mere 0,1C.
Interesting plant, though. It likes very acidic soils - tolerating pHs as low as soda. It also likes high levels of alumium, which are normally toxic to most plants.
Like most science news in general, the coverage on this is poor. There are tons of Camellia species (the tea genus) which don't produce caffeine, many of which are consumed. What makes this one (Camellia ptilophylla) special is the very high theobromine content in the leaves (6%), thus the apparently recent English name, "cocoa tea".
Tea contains a lot of interesting compounds, and the ratios between each one vary a lot depending on the Camellia species. Some have meaningful caffeine (including ones with much higher levels than C. sinensis (3%), including C. japonica (5%)). Others have little to none.
EHD propulsion is well modeled, and it's just not possible to achieve a high thrust density per unit of propulsive surface area at reasonable efficiency. It's a more interesting concept for propulsion of lighter-than-air aircraft, where you have an extremely large surface are and can have your electrodes double as surface reinforcement. But the electrode longevity problems remain. So does ozone generation.
On the upside, EHD propulsion is surprisingly efficient when surface area is not a limiting factor. You're moving a large mass of air at low velocity rather than a small mass of air at high velocity, which leads to higher propulsive efficiency.
Welcome to Ford. Marketing slogan: The future is built.
Apparently "the future" means that Ford will leave your car idling in the sun while they sell off data about where you live and work to the highest bidder.
On the upside: one good recession and Ford will go bankrupt. They're barely hanging on as it is. Which is why they're getting so desperate with extra revenue streams, like that "selling your personal data" idea. That said, I'm sure the Ford brand will still live on; it has plenty of fans. Whoever buys them will probably just keep the lines running largely as they were before, after ditching Ford's accrued debt.
Now the stage is set for the Alan Parsons Project.
If your plan is to import explosives to get water, you've already failed.
Yes, because permafrost-ripping excavators are trivial, low-maintenance things to run. (/snark)
(note that permafrost on Mars is much harder than on Earth)
Distillation absolutely can be done, but it's something you have to engineer for, with a good understanding of the properties of your feedstocks. It's not something you can just go straight to Mars with and start digging and just assume everything is going to work. The ideal case would be a sample return of cores of the area that you plan to mine.
Don't get me wrong, this absolutely can be done. There are many different ways being researched to achieve it (particularly the mining; there's some really creative concepts). But the TRL level for all is low at present.
This really is not true. It's so abundant in places that just scraping the surface reveals it.
Water is very common on Mars. Its just frozen. In rock-hard permafrost. And contaminated, both with salts and a number of toxic chemicals.
Um, are you high? Perhaps the "Science Guy" should learn a little bit about Mars before talking about it. A large portion of the planet has permafrost at or near the surface.
I'm not actually that much of a Mars advocate, and think the simplicity of using water there is overplayed (people talk about it like it's some sort of pure snow that you just pick up and melt, but it's (mostly) a rock-hard toxic brine mixed with sand and clay) - but come on, if you're going to talk about something, learn the basics.
As a point of comparison, compare half a million dollars in batteries vs. what your article cites for the power line work:
There's some confusion here. As a general rule, TBMs are powered by high voltage lines carrying a couple megawatts of power. Diesel-powered trains carry the spoils away, where conveyors are not used. Powering a TBM with HV lines requires laying the lines, a quite expensive affair that TBC is replacing with hot-swapped battery packs (simple calculations show that it should only take about half a million dollars in batteries), carried in and out by the spoils trains. Diesel trains require powerful ventilation systems, for obvious reasons, which are also another significant capital cost which is eliminated by the use of battery-powered electric trains.
Whistles innocently ;)
Ignoring the troll above me.
No. I mean exactly what I said: the TBM does not stop for casing. They're designing for casing of new segments - regardless of the type of casing - to be conducted while the TBM is still pushing off the previous casing segment(s), and without it having to stop to advance the segments that it pushes off of. In-situ concrete casting - what you suggested as an alternative - has never been publicly discussed by TBC.
Correct on everything but "negligible gain". The cost of extra cutter heads is far smaller than the cost savings of not having to stop the TBM.
Where are you getting "a few hours every 3 days or so"? That's in no way normal. The average TBM only spends about 40% of its time actually boring (see Figure 5).
Even if you did only have a 24:1 operation:downtime ratio, that would still justify the use of extra cutter discs and hot swapping. Tunneling costs are linearly proportional to tunneling speeds. Cutting disc costs are a small fraction thereof. And the more discs you have, the more the wear is spread out.
Precisely. Which is why TBC's plan to increase head speeds is to use highly cooled, advanced alloy cutting discs. Because - to reiterate - disc costs are a small fraction of the total project costs, so increasing their costs to dramatically increase tunneling speeds is a no-brainer.
Carbide bits (not very commonly used on TBMs) are used for abrasion resistance, not for overcoming thermal limitations. Generally TBM cutting discs are simple martensitic steel alloys, and wear is by tribocorrosion. The limited use of carbide bits on TBMs has generally been in soft ground, to avoid slip-related wear on the discs. Cutting discs cut via pressure-induced fracture of the rock, and tungsten carbide is a more brittle material than steel. When you use carbide bits on hard rock, they tend to fracture, and then the uneven load quickly causes the rest of the bits to fracture.
There are few companies in the US that have more experience with advanced heat-and-corrosion-resistant alloys - and keeping them cool under extreme conditions - than SpaceX. You don't get more hostile conditions than rocket engines, and SpaceX has been pushing the bounds on them to extremes (check out the sort of conditions that Raptor operates in, it's nuts). TBC's goal is to apply that knowledge to cutting discs.
Subways are like underground trains. Loop is like underground SkyTran.
Meanwhile in the real world, Tesla consumes more EV batteries than everyone else in the world combined, with Giga alone making about half of the world's total (~20GWh/yr out of ~40GWh/yr). Tesla's US sales make everyone else's look like a rounding error.
As for Boring Company, their goals are low-cost PRT. That's the whole point of Loop and Hyperloop. But maybe you'd feel better if the rich were banned from riding? Even their first non-demonstration-scale project (the Chicago Loop) is to charge half as much as an Uber ride. By the time they're up to Prufrock, fares are supposed to be cheaper than bus tickets (but go straight to your destination at high speeds).
It's one thing to be dubious about their probability of success. But it's an entirely different thing to misrepresent their goals.
As for your comments about turning "this tunnel"... "this tunnel" is simply a demonstrator. Little more than an amusement park ride for the general public. It's neither meant as a transportation solution nor to make money; it's meant to inform their engineering for their subsequent tunneling activities. Heck, they're outright planning to have it end at a watchtower made from compressed tailings bricks, manned by a knight who shouts insults at passers-by in a bad French accent.
Indeed. They're not magically jumping straight to Prufrock. Godot is mostly (but not entirely) standard. Prufrock is their target, which involves continuous casing, hot swappable cutting discs, and much faster head speeds. Linestorm is intermediary between them.
Godot is operational now. Linestorm is under construction. Prufrock is in design.
How can people here actually be this bad at detecting snark?
It's all about probabilities. The satellites all have to have a mechanism to deorbit them at end-of-life. So if you can get some given estimate of reliability out of the satellites remaining operational through deorbit and the deorbit function working, you can estimate the number of failures you will have, and model the significance of these failures (including how errors in your reliability estimates might affect the outcomes).
Smaller satellites means less potential for debris in the case of a collision, and faster natural deorbit times. For a satellite, the crosssection of thermosphere/exosphere that they pass through is proportional to their radius squared, but their mass is proportional to their radius cubed, so the smaller you make a satellite, the quicker it tends to reenter. Just the fact that we're talking LEO satellites makes any failure modes less significant; GEO failures are more problematic, as the debris persists for much longer, orbits are much more shared, and it's much harder to track GEO debris.
The most recent 7518 satellites are going to be particularly short-lived without reboost, orbiting at only 340km. That's quite close; they're going to need very frequent reboosts. Without reboosts I'd expect them to reenter after only 1-3 months. Remember that ISS (~330km) needs reboosts several times per year, and that's obviously a far higher kg/m^2 object than a Starlink satellite.