First off, it's not 260k according to this article. Secondly, you say 260k total like that's a large number. That's half a year's Model 3 production. At the 500k rate (the target is to eventually raise it to 700k, once they actually start advertising).
Drivers that sleep in their trucks are typically on routes much longer than the ranges Telsa trucks will have.
You ignored supercharging, and the fact that drivers in Europe more to the point have to spend 3/4 of an hour stopped every 4 1/2 hours of driving. Not every country allows semi drivers to sit behind the wheel nonstop all day (which is IMHO insane). Secondly, "sleep" is not the only time that a truck spends idling.
In fact, come to think of it, there are probably very few cases where it makes sense to have a convoy of trucks only going a couple hundred miles all to the same destination.
Right, we'll just pretend that the regional haul market doesn't exist, that there aren't huge fleets specifically dedicated to it, and many models of semis designed specifically for regional hauling.
What would you describe as "beach weather" - the CA coast between LA and SF, perhaps? Seattle to Portland is about 1/3rd as bright. Still meaningful, although not as much power.
Aside from which what business schedules deliveries that can only be made on sunny days?
Huh? "only be made"? Did you forget that the vehicle still has a battery pack and can supercharge, regardless of whether it also gets power from a trailer? Solar power could be a supplement, not a replacement. Even on a bright sunny day it couldn't power a semi on its own.
Hang out anywhere that people discuss Teslas. The shorthand for the vehicles is the MS, MX and the M3 (there is no shorthand for the Roadster). Given that the Tesla Model 3 is going to be produced in numbers order of magnitude than the BMW M3 ever was, I'd recommend getting used to it sooner rather than later.
The BMW M3 over its three-decade history has produced something like 100-150k total vehicles (it was around 100k as of 2010, so estimating 150k as an upper bound is being generous). The Tesla Model 3 will be produced at 500k per year as of next year.
You got me curious about the amount of power that could be produced by a semi trailer... since as you note, they're almost always outside. The large end of trailer sizes is 2,6m by 17,37m by 4,27m. We'll assume that the top and one long side have an average sun angle of 45 degrees and there's no solar on the front or rear of the trailer (although there could be). The top has an area of 45,16m^2 and the sides an area of 74,17m^2, for a combined area of 119,33m^2. On a sunny day, the angle-adjusted insolation is around 707W/m, so the trailer would be receiving 84,4kW and, at 22% panel efficiency, generating 18,6kW. While that's not enough for a fully "solar powered semi", it's definitely meaningful bonus power (that's enough to entirely power an electric SUV at highway speeds).
For those curious what an "unload time in tens of minutes" means for supercharging: given a sufficient charge rate (aka Supercharger V3, which is battery buffered so that the grid connection doesn't limit it), 20 minutes fills the first 50% of the pack, 20 more fills up to 80% (some can hit 80% in as little as 30m total), 20 more to 90%, and 40 more to 100%. So for a 200mi semi low on battery at arrival:
20 minute unload: 100 miles 40 minute unload: 160 miles 60 minute unload: 180 miles
For a 300mi semi low on battery at arrival:
20 minute unload: 150 miles 40 minute unload: 240 miles 60 minute unload: 270 miles
That's assuming that Tesla hasn't improved their battery tech for Semi.
As for "range figures" - not only could things like solar trailers significantly improve range (as you note, that's a lot of surface area), but there's a more fundamental aspect - speed is a major impactor of range, and semis drive slower than cars. Furthermore, if they have the aforementioned platooning, then all trailing vehicles will use significantly less power than the lead vehicle. Lastly, EVs are much less affected by hilly terrain (where the start and end altitudes are the same) and traffic than diesel semis (minor congestion actually improves EV ranges - steadily flowing congestion can improve it significantly).
Except that's not true. The greatest cost for a semi operator is not the driver. It's diesel. Costs double what the driver costs on average.
And given that M3 is priced extremely aggressively versus other vehicles in its class on a feature-for-feature, performance-for-performance basis (even ignoring tax credits and energy / maintenance savings), and that Tesla is working with established fleet operators on Semi, I have little doubt that Semi will priced very aggressively as well. Shipping companies are all about the bottom line. They'll amortize any cost if it saves them more in the long run.
it cost $50, you had to schedule your swap (it still took a mechanic - there's just so many connections to deal with, and it's so important to get it right), and ignoring the normal complaints about battery swap (who wants someone else's old battery? Who wants to stockpile batteries of any type, let alone of every type of vehicle on the road, with their constantly changing / advancing battery technology, all with their very different battery needs depending on vehicle type (form factor, power, energy, etc) - and ten times worse if you can't convince all manufacturers to standardize, which you probably can't?), it wasn't actually that much faster than supercharging once you added in the overhead (all of the time before and after the robot does its work). Oh, and you had to come back to pick up your old battery (paying again) or they'd start charging you storage fees.
It was just a total non-starter. Tesla (rightly) decided that supercharging, and continually decreasing charge times, is the way to go. Ion mobility (minimum charge time) is a tunable parameter balancing off against other aspects (mainly energy density), and always improving with time; in the extreme case it can be as little as seconds. Vastly more power can be pumped through a given sized cable with liquid cooling and/or higher voltages. Externally-provided cooling lets you draw waste heat out of the battery pack faster than onboard radiators can get rid of it, letting you actually use the faster charge times enabled by improved ion mobility. Etc. It's better to just keep reducing charge times rather than trying to swap out some key structural element with major, sensitive power and cooling connections.
Model 3 isn't even designed for battery swap at all.
Rapid charges are generally good enough, and it's possible to make them even faster with higher charge powers and charger-provided coolant. And with Supercharger v3, there will be a battery buffer in the charger, so the charging station's max power is no longer limited by the grid.
For people talking about the "time wasted stopping to charge", several important points.
1. In the EU, you have to stop frequently. Minimum 45 minutes per 4 1/2 hours for commercial drivers. You can lose your license if you don't. So rapid charging stops aren't a slowdown at all.
2. Paying the driver is under 20% of the cost of shipping by truck, and amortizing the truck's capital cost a bit over 20%. But fuel is around 40% for the total cost (the rest is things like maintenance, insurance, etc). So if you can halve fuel costs in half and slash maintenance, you're cutting a quarter off of your shipping costs, which can more than pay for the additional drivers and trucks to compensate for the ~half an hour charging every ~3 hours.
3. This shouldn't need to be said... because it was in the article... but the guy was talking about regional haul shipping, not long haul. Believe it or not, not every shipment travels thousands of miles.
Now lets bring up the side benefits.
1. An EV drivetrain will be ridiculously powerful. I have little doubt that Tesla will be making these as the most powerful semis in the world, as it's much easier to do with an EV drivetrain. Hills will be laughed off. To be more specific, Tesla has stated that they plan to use the M3's drivetrain (which propels a 1600kg car from 0-60 in 5,1-5,6 seconds) in Tesla... except that they plan to have one motor for each wheel. That's going to be a crazy amount of power. And speaking of hills, they'll recoup the energy on the downslope.
2. Semis waste a huge amount of energy idling, to power accessory loads for the driver and/or the cargo. Because the engines are so large, idling guzzles huge amounts of fuel. A variety of solutions have been come up with over the years, such as auxilliary microgenerators and window-mounted "tethers" at truck stops (TSE) which provide climate control and 120V power for drivers. EVs, however, have what owners often refer to as "camping mode". Since you never have to idle an engine, they use only the power that is needed to provide climate control and accessory loads while you're parked. Sleeping in an EV is a quiet, perfectly climate-controlled experience, and depending on the weather usually only takes 1-2% of the battery per hour if you're not plugged in (nothing if you are).
3. An EV semi would not be affected by noise, pollution, and idling regulations, which limit or prohibit semi access to some areas, and which have become more common with time.
4. While the earlier price analysis was for the US, it's a much more extreme difference in other places in the world. Where I am, for example, diesel is about $7/gal, and they're looking to hike taxes on it soon - it'll probably end up around $8/gal. I don't know what percentage of a fleet operator's costs here are fuel, but it's going to be a lot more than in the US.
5. We're so far just comparing base vehicles. But Tesla is working on value-added features as well, such as EAP and platooning. The latter is, from a technical standpoint, much easier than EAP (locking onto a vehicle and holding position relative to it). Even if you don't take the driver out of the loop, you're saving a ton of energy for the trailing vehicles. Meaning not only reducing costs, but also that you can periodically swap who's the lead vehicle and extend the whole platoon's range.
Versus passenger EVs, semis have a number of other big things going for them.
1. Unlike the passenger vehicle market, the shipping industry is all about the numbers, all about the bottom line - and c
They implied that Tesla is currently having people drive something that its engineers deem unsafe. This is simply not the case at all. If the engineers were complaining about selling FSD, they're not complaining about anything that consumers are actually driving.
Everyone who buys FSD does so on their assessment of how likely they think it is that Tesla will actually deliver. There is zero confusion among anyone who buys it about the fact that they can't use it right away; the option always includes the "you can't use this until it's finished and legally approved" disclaimer next to it. It all comes down to how optimistic or pessimistic you are about the technology. I'm a pessimist, and will not be buying it. Some of Tesla's engineers working on it are apparently also pessimists. I'm not surprised. It's a crazy-hard task, and very different from human-supervised autosteer / EAP.
Sorry to be so blunt, but it's journalistic malpractice. The author is confusing Enhanced Autopilot (EAP) with Full Self-Driving (FSD). To be clear:
* Some safety features related to autopilot, such as automatic braking and the like, are available to everyone for free.
* EAP is an optional add-on available today ($5k on the Model 3 if purchased at the time of buying the vehicle, $6k as an over-the-air upgrade) which provides lane-following (requires hands on the wheel and driver attention) and driverless summon features (very low speed, "back out of / into a tight space / drive down the parking lot" stuff without a driver in the car). More to the point, there are two entirely different versions that have existed over the year. AP 1.0 was used on earlier vehicles, based on software and hardware from Mobile Eye. Tesla and Mobile Eye split in a contract dispute. Mobile Eye claims that Tesla wasn't using their hardware right. Tesla says that Mobile Eye found out that Tesla was working on an in-house Autopilot system and demanded that they stop as a precondition to get to continue to use their hardware. Mobile Eye says they knew about Tesla's internal work but didn't feel threatened by it. Regardless, Tesla was forced to switch to their internal version, AP 2.0, which was a step backward. AP 2 is just now catching up to the features of AP1.
* FSD is Tesla's current goal, where the vehicle can drive itself without you having to have your hands on the wheel or paying constant attention. You cannot use FSD, even if you buy it. It costs $3k on the Model 3 ($4k as an over-the-air upgrade later). The article is talking about FSD being rolled out before engineers think it's ready. To reiterate: you can only buy FSD right now, you can't use it until it's ready. Tesla apparently tried to clarify this for the author:
When reached for comment, a Tesla spokesperson referred back to the company website, where a disclaimer for Autopilot reads that “self-driving functionality is dependent upon extensive software validation and regulatory approval.”
The author apparently nonetheless still failed to understand what that means. You Cannot Use FSD. Period. If engineers are complaining about FSD being rolled out too soon, they're complaining about Tesla selling something that its drivers aren't going to be able to use for too long of a period of time. And you know what, I fully agree with the engineers in that regard - I think it's wrong of Tesla to sell something that there's a big question as to whether they'll be able to get it working reliably enough or pass the serious regulatory barriers in its way.
But if engineers are complaining about FSD, then it's not complaints about EAP. Because the two are very distinct things. EAP isn't perfect, don't get me wrong - and the 1.0 / 2.0 switch was a big setback (they still don't use all of the cameras on the vehicle). But it also pesters drivers enough if they show signs of not paying attention to the road (e.g. not holding onto the wheel) in order to overcome its imperfections (the level of pestering was significantly increased after AP1's fatal accident, in which the driver was apparently watching movies during most of his trip).
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies has nothing to do with Musk. More to the point, the only thing Musk initially stated about Hyperloop that he's now starting to go back on was that he wasn't going to get personally involved with it.
Actually, when your goal is to make space travel mass market, making things aesthetically appealing is a key aspect. Musk's goal is not and never has been $25m trips to space for the select few; he wants to make space travel a common occurrence.
As for "solid spacesuit", I assume you mean like the NASA AX series, which are built more like atmospheric diving suits than traditional space suits. And the answer is the same reason why NASA doesn't use them - while mobility in them is superb, they're significantly heavier. About the only place in the solar system where it makes sense to use them at present (in combination with insulation and either a heat-absorbing material (akin to Venera) or a heat pump with cooling channels, and a bellows balloon) is the surface of Venus. A more popular research topic is hybrid pressure / hard suits, where you have certain parts rigid (such as the torso) and others inflated.
Wow, better warn SpaceX of their horrible oversight! I'm sure nobody at SpaceX thought of ensuring mobility during their design and testing phases, and I'm sure NASA does not have any mobility requirements - better warn them both, stat! Thank you, Anonymous Coward, for saving the space program!
It should be immediately obvious to anyone who examined it under any sort of microscope (regardless of their sensory inputs) that there's analog data encoded there on the grooves. They shouldn't even need "instructions" to recognize that and digitize the data. A spectral analysis should show variations in frequencies, with all sorts of clustering. Regardless of what senses they perceive through, they should be able to map it to one or more of them - either as 1d data, or in 2d as a spectrogram. Enough analysis should allow them to determine that most of the audio is acoustic vibrations, so they'd map it to whatever method they best use when studying or perceiving acoustic vibrations.
Analysis of the the image section should readily show that there are 115 distinct groupings, each comprised of 3 similar patterns of 512 separate signals, and that each separate signal is correlated with but subtly different to the one before it. This should suggest 115 groupings of 2-axis data measured over 3 related but distinct parameters. Which they can then map to whatever they use best to perceive 2-axis or 3-axis data. Again, further analysis should be able to figure out analogues of certain images to natural phenomenon that they recognize (for example, images of planets and moons, or the solar spectrum diagram). This would then let them figure out that the images represent optical data on specific frequencies of light in the visual spectrum, which they could then map to however they best prefer to represent light in that spectrum.
In short, I have no doubt that they could properly "read" the records. It's more a question of how much they could actually understand of the content. The silhouettes look to be particularly confusing. And even "natural place" images could be highly deceptive - for example, this island. If they knew nothing of trees, that might be percieved as a type of aa lava on top two dissimilar layered volcanic or sedimentary features.
To be fair, we could do it better today. If we were willing to make the decoding more complex, we could make it digital with error-correcting codes, allowing for much higher amounts of data storage at the same level of durability, or conversely much more durability at the same level of error storage.
Physical indentations with a precious metal coating is probably the best storage means available today. But a on-off linear representation rather than wasteful grooves would be a much better choice. Also, if we were willing to pay a higher production cost (and make for much more complicated playback), we could go 3d in the data representation.
I'm looking at the images and it's funny to see things go obsolete that the team probably never thought of as potentially becoming obsolete. For example, this image. Whoops!;)
Hard to say. Each Voyager spacecraft could pass tens of thousands of stars in the next billion years (Voyager 1 passes its next star after 40k years) - depending on your definition of "pass". And they're pretty radar-reflective.
Whether they'd ever be recovered depends really on the answer to the Fermi paradox.
BTW, I'm listening to the record right now... it sure would be fun to be an alien species tasked with decoding it. I doubt they could get far on the voice, but a lot of the nature and machinery sounds probably could be deciphered, with enough work.
Yes, a guy watching Harry Potter while driving and getting in an accident after ignoring seven separate warnings from his car to pay attention to the road is totally the same thing as building a robot to kill people.
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First off, it's not 260k according to this article. Secondly, you say 260k total like that's a large number. That's half a year's Model 3 production. At the 500k rate (the target is to eventually raise it to 700k, once they actually start advertising).
You ignored supercharging, and the fact that drivers in Europe more to the point have to spend 3/4 of an hour stopped every 4 1/2 hours of driving. Not every country allows semi drivers to sit behind the wheel nonstop all day (which is IMHO insane). Secondly, "sleep" is not the only time that a truck spends idling.
Right, we'll just pretend that the regional haul market doesn't exist, that there aren't huge fleets specifically dedicated to it, and many models of semis designed specifically for regional hauling.
We're in a Tesla thread, talking about Teslas.
What would you describe as "beach weather" - the CA coast between LA and SF, perhaps? Seattle to Portland is about 1/3rd as bright. Still meaningful, although not as much power.
Huh? "only be made"? Did you forget that the vehicle still has a battery pack and can supercharge, regardless of whether it also gets power from a trailer? Solar power could be a supplement, not a replacement. Even on a bright sunny day it couldn't power a semi on its own.
Hang out anywhere that people discuss Teslas. The shorthand for the vehicles is the MS, MX and the M3 (there is no shorthand for the Roadster). Given that the Tesla Model 3 is going to be produced in numbers order of magnitude than the BMW M3 ever was, I'd recommend getting used to it sooner rather than later.
Maybe in your corner of it, homie.
The BMW M3 over its three-decade history has produced something like 100-150k total vehicles (it was around 100k as of 2010, so estimating 150k as an upper bound is being generous). The Tesla Model 3 will be produced at 500k per year as of next year.
You got me curious about the amount of power that could be produced by a semi trailer... since as you note, they're almost always outside. The large end of trailer sizes is 2,6m by 17,37m by 4,27m. We'll assume that the top and one long side have an average sun angle of 45 degrees and there's no solar on the front or rear of the trailer (although there could be). The top has an area of 45,16m^2 and the sides an area of 74,17m^2, for a combined area of 119,33m^2. On a sunny day, the angle-adjusted insolation is around 707W/m, so the trailer would be receiving 84,4kW and, at 22% panel efficiency, generating 18,6kW. While that's not enough for a fully "solar powered semi", it's definitely meaningful bonus power (that's enough to entirely power an electric SUV at highway speeds).
For those curious what an "unload time in tens of minutes" means for supercharging: given a sufficient charge rate (aka Supercharger V3, which is battery buffered so that the grid connection doesn't limit it), 20 minutes fills the first 50% of the pack, 20 more fills up to 80% (some can hit 80% in as little as 30m total), 20 more to 90%, and 40 more to 100%. So for a 200mi semi low on battery at arrival:
20 minute unload: 100 miles
40 minute unload: 160 miles
60 minute unload: 180 miles
For a 300mi semi low on battery at arrival:
20 minute unload: 150 miles
40 minute unload: 240 miles
60 minute unload: 270 miles
That's assuming that Tesla hasn't improved their battery tech for Semi.
As for "range figures" - not only could things like solar trailers significantly improve range (as you note, that's a lot of surface area), but there's a more fundamental aspect - speed is a major impactor of range, and semis drive slower than cars. Furthermore, if they have the aforementioned platooning, then all trailing vehicles will use significantly less power than the lead vehicle. Lastly, EVs are much less affected by hilly terrain (where the start and end altitudes are the same) and traffic than diesel semis (minor congestion actually improves EV ranges - steadily flowing congestion can improve it significantly).
Except that's not true. The greatest cost for a semi operator is not the driver. It's diesel. Costs double what the driver costs on average.
And given that M3 is priced extremely aggressively versus other vehicles in its class on a feature-for-feature, performance-for-performance basis (even ignoring tax credits and energy / maintenance savings), and that Tesla is working with established fleet operators on Semi, I have little doubt that Semi will priced very aggressively as well. Shipping companies are all about the bottom line. They'll amortize any cost if it saves them more in the long run.
it cost $50, you had to schedule your swap (it still took a mechanic - there's just so many connections to deal with, and it's so important to get it right), and ignoring the normal complaints about battery swap (who wants someone else's old battery? Who wants to stockpile batteries of any type, let alone of every type of vehicle on the road, with their constantly changing / advancing battery technology, all with their very different battery needs depending on vehicle type (form factor, power, energy, etc) - and ten times worse if you can't convince all manufacturers to standardize, which you probably can't?), it wasn't actually that much faster than supercharging once you added in the overhead (all of the time before and after the robot does its work). Oh, and you had to come back to pick up your old battery (paying again) or they'd start charging you storage fees.
It was just a total non-starter. Tesla (rightly) decided that supercharging, and continually decreasing charge times, is the way to go. Ion mobility (minimum charge time) is a tunable parameter balancing off against other aspects (mainly energy density), and always improving with time; in the extreme case it can be as little as seconds. Vastly more power can be pumped through a given sized cable with liquid cooling and/or higher voltages. Externally-provided cooling lets you draw waste heat out of the battery pack faster than onboard radiators can get rid of it, letting you actually use the faster charge times enabled by improved ion mobility. Etc. It's better to just keep reducing charge times rather than trying to swap out some key structural element with major, sensitive power and cooling connections.
Model 3 isn't even designed for battery swap at all.
Tesla actually did have a battery swap station. It turned out to be uneconomical and unpopular.
Link
Rapid charges are generally good enough, and it's possible to make them even faster with higher charge powers and charger-provided coolant. And with Supercharger v3, there will be a battery buffer in the charger, so the charging station's max power is no longer limited by the grid.
For people talking about the "time wasted stopping to charge", several important points.
1. In the EU, you have to stop frequently. Minimum 45 minutes per 4 1/2 hours for commercial drivers. You can lose your license if you don't. So rapid charging stops aren't a slowdown at all.
2. Paying the driver is under 20% of the cost of shipping by truck, and amortizing the truck's capital cost a bit over 20%. But fuel is around 40% for the total cost (the rest is things like maintenance, insurance, etc). So if you can halve fuel costs in half and slash maintenance, you're cutting a quarter off of your shipping costs, which can more than pay for the additional drivers and trucks to compensate for the ~half an hour charging every ~3 hours.
3. This shouldn't need to be said... because it was in the article... but the guy was talking about regional haul shipping, not long haul. Believe it or not, not every shipment travels thousands of miles.
Now lets bring up the side benefits.
1. An EV drivetrain will be ridiculously powerful. I have little doubt that Tesla will be making these as the most powerful semis in the world, as it's much easier to do with an EV drivetrain. Hills will be laughed off. To be more specific, Tesla has stated that they plan to use the M3's drivetrain (which propels a 1600kg car from 0-60 in 5,1-5,6 seconds) in Tesla... except that they plan to have one motor for each wheel. That's going to be a crazy amount of power. And speaking of hills, they'll recoup the energy on the downslope.
2. Semis waste a huge amount of energy idling, to power accessory loads for the driver and/or the cargo. Because the engines are so large, idling guzzles huge amounts of fuel. A variety of solutions have been come up with over the years, such as auxilliary microgenerators and window-mounted "tethers" at truck stops (TSE) which provide climate control and 120V power for drivers. EVs, however, have what owners often refer to as "camping mode". Since you never have to idle an engine, they use only the power that is needed to provide climate control and accessory loads while you're parked. Sleeping in an EV is a quiet, perfectly climate-controlled experience, and depending on the weather usually only takes 1-2% of the battery per hour if you're not plugged in (nothing if you are).
3. An EV semi would not be affected by noise, pollution, and idling regulations, which limit or prohibit semi access to some areas, and which have become more common with time.
4. While the earlier price analysis was for the US, it's a much more extreme difference in other places in the world. Where I am, for example, diesel is about $7/gal, and they're looking to hike taxes on it soon - it'll probably end up around $8/gal. I don't know what percentage of a fleet operator's costs here are fuel, but it's going to be a lot more than in the US.
5. We're so far just comparing base vehicles. But Tesla is working on value-added features as well, such as EAP and platooning. The latter is, from a technical standpoint, much easier than EAP (locking onto a vehicle and holding position relative to it). Even if you don't take the driver out of the loop, you're saving a ton of energy for the trailing vehicles. Meaning not only reducing costs, but also that you can periodically swap who's the lead vehicle and extend the whole platoon's range.
Versus passenger EVs, semis have a number of other big things going for them.
1. Unlike the passenger vehicle market, the shipping industry is all about the numbers, all about the bottom line - and c
They implied that Tesla is currently having people drive something that its engineers deem unsafe. This is simply not the case at all. If the engineers were complaining about selling FSD, they're not complaining about anything that consumers are actually driving.
Everyone who buys FSD does so on their assessment of how likely they think it is that Tesla will actually deliver. There is zero confusion among anyone who buys it about the fact that they can't use it right away; the option always includes the "you can't use this until it's finished and legally approved" disclaimer next to it. It all comes down to how optimistic or pessimistic you are about the technology. I'm a pessimist, and will not be buying it. Some of Tesla's engineers working on it are apparently also pessimists. I'm not surprised. It's a crazy-hard task, and very different from human-supervised autosteer / EAP.
It's a lot simpler than that:
This article is bullshit.
Sorry to be so blunt, but it's journalistic malpractice. The author is confusing Enhanced Autopilot (EAP) with Full Self-Driving (FSD). To be clear:
* Some safety features related to autopilot, such as automatic braking and the like, are available to everyone for free.
* EAP is an optional add-on available today ($5k on the Model 3 if purchased at the time of buying the vehicle, $6k as an over-the-air upgrade) which provides lane-following (requires hands on the wheel and driver attention) and driverless summon features (very low speed, "back out of / into a tight space / drive down the parking lot" stuff without a driver in the car). More to the point, there are two entirely different versions that have existed over the year. AP 1.0 was used on earlier vehicles, based on software and hardware from Mobile Eye. Tesla and Mobile Eye split in a contract dispute. Mobile Eye claims that Tesla wasn't using their hardware right. Tesla says that Mobile Eye found out that Tesla was working on an in-house Autopilot system and demanded that they stop as a precondition to get to continue to use their hardware. Mobile Eye says they knew about Tesla's internal work but didn't feel threatened by it. Regardless, Tesla was forced to switch to their internal version, AP 2.0, which was a step backward. AP 2 is just now catching up to the features of AP1.
* FSD is Tesla's current goal, where the vehicle can drive itself without you having to have your hands on the wheel or paying constant attention. You cannot use FSD, even if you buy it. It costs $3k on the Model 3 ($4k as an over-the-air upgrade later). The article is talking about FSD being rolled out before engineers think it's ready. To reiterate: you can only buy FSD right now, you can't use it until it's ready. Tesla apparently tried to clarify this for the author:
The author apparently nonetheless still failed to understand what that means. You Cannot Use FSD. Period. If engineers are complaining about FSD being rolled out too soon, they're complaining about Tesla selling something that its drivers aren't going to be able to use for too long of a period of time. And you know what, I fully agree with the engineers in that regard - I think it's wrong of Tesla to sell something that there's a big question as to whether they'll be able to get it working reliably enough or pass the serious regulatory barriers in its way.
But if engineers are complaining about FSD, then it's not complaints about EAP. Because the two are very distinct things. EAP isn't perfect, don't get me wrong - and the 1.0 / 2.0 switch was a big setback (they still don't use all of the cameras on the vehicle). But it also pesters drivers enough if they show signs of not paying attention to the road (e.g. not holding onto the wheel) in order to overcome its imperfections (the level of pestering was significantly increased after AP1's fatal accident, in which the driver was apparently watching movies during most of his trip).
It's not that simple. Materials can behave differently in a vacuum than they do at atmospheric pressure.
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies has nothing to do with Musk. More to the point, the only thing Musk initially stated about Hyperloop that he's now starting to go back on was that he wasn't going to get personally involved with it.
Outside is vacuum, inside is double pressure.
Actually, when your goal is to make space travel mass market, making things aesthetically appealing is a key aspect. Musk's goal is not and never has been $25m trips to space for the select few; he wants to make space travel a common occurrence.
As for "solid spacesuit", I assume you mean like the NASA AX series, which are built more like atmospheric diving suits than traditional space suits. And the answer is the same reason why NASA doesn't use them - while mobility in them is superb, they're significantly heavier. About the only place in the solar system where it makes sense to use them at present (in combination with insulation and either a heat-absorbing material (akin to Venera) or a heat pump with cooling channels, and a bellows balloon) is the surface of Venus. A more popular research topic is hybrid pressure / hard suits, where you have certain parts rigid (such as the torso) and others inflated.
Wow, better warn SpaceX of their horrible oversight! I'm sure nobody at SpaceX thought of ensuring mobility during their design and testing phases, and I'm sure NASA does not have any mobility requirements - better warn them both, stat! Thank you, Anonymous Coward, for saving the space program!
Yes, I remember when History aired that episode...
Well, if you're talking content for primitives, you better give it a reentry/landing system and aim it at a planet considered likely to have life.
Oh geez, are we now to become the monolith aliens from 2001? ;)
It should be immediately obvious to anyone who examined it under any sort of microscope (regardless of their sensory inputs) that there's analog data encoded there on the grooves. They shouldn't even need "instructions" to recognize that and digitize the data. A spectral analysis should show variations in frequencies, with all sorts of clustering. Regardless of what senses they perceive through, they should be able to map it to one or more of them - either as 1d data, or in 2d as a spectrogram. Enough analysis should allow them to determine that most of the audio is acoustic vibrations, so they'd map it to whatever method they best use when studying or perceiving acoustic vibrations.
Analysis of the the image section should readily show that there are 115 distinct groupings, each comprised of 3 similar patterns of 512 separate signals, and that each separate signal is correlated with but subtly different to the one before it. This should suggest 115 groupings of 2-axis data measured over 3 related but distinct parameters. Which they can then map to whatever they use best to perceive 2-axis or 3-axis data. Again, further analysis should be able to figure out analogues of certain images to natural phenomenon that they recognize (for example, images of planets and moons, or the solar spectrum diagram). This would then let them figure out that the images represent optical data on specific frequencies of light in the visual spectrum, which they could then map to however they best prefer to represent light in that spectrum.
In short, I have no doubt that they could properly "read" the records. It's more a question of how much they could actually understand of the content. The silhouettes look to be particularly confusing. And even "natural place" images could be highly deceptive - for example, this island. If they knew nothing of trees, that might be percieved as a type of aa lava on top two dissimilar layered volcanic or sedimentary features.
To be fair, we could do it better today. If we were willing to make the decoding more complex, we could make it digital with error-correcting codes, allowing for much higher amounts of data storage at the same level of durability, or conversely much more durability at the same level of error storage.
Physical indentations with a precious metal coating is probably the best storage means available today. But a on-off linear representation rather than wasteful grooves would be a much better choice. Also, if we were willing to pay a higher production cost (and make for much more complicated playback), we could go 3d in the data representation.
I'm looking at the images and it's funny to see things go obsolete that the team probably never thought of as potentially becoming obsolete. For example, this image. Whoops! ;)
Hard to say. Each Voyager spacecraft could pass tens of thousands of stars in the next billion years (Voyager 1 passes its next star after 40k years) - depending on your definition of "pass". And they're pretty radar-reflective.
Whether they'd ever be recovered depends really on the answer to the Fermi paradox.
BTW, I'm listening to the record right now... it sure would be fun to be an alien species tasked with decoding it. I doubt they could get far on the voice, but a lot of the nature and machinery sounds probably could be deciphered, with enough work.
Depends on what you mean by "interstellar debris". Space is very, very, very empty.
Yes, a guy watching Harry Potter while driving and getting in an accident after ignoring seven separate warnings from his car to pay attention to the road is totally the same thing as building a robot to kill people.