I want to agree with this statement (assuming "China or Russia" can be replaced with a generic "overseas"), but my experience tells me otherwise.
Only because you aren't comparing things from the right perspective. You are thinking about a few malfunctioning teams. But think of it this way. That smartphone you have in your pocket was built by some very bright and capable Chinese engineers. Russia has a space program that arguably exceeds ours in many ways. To pretend that none of them are any good at coding because you've seen a few who didn't have what it takes is not a logical position to hold.
The immigrants I've worked with, while nice (very much so), and knowledgeable in very specific technology, have no broad critical thinking skills, software design/architecture skills, or outside-the-box thinking.
And some immigrants are guys like Elon Musk. There is a range just like with every population including Americans. Substitute "americans" for immigrants in your sentance and I could say exactly the same thing in many cases. The notion that Americans are better or smarter is just xenophobic nonsense easily refuted. There are and awful lot of very smart guys from China and India and elsewhere. The US is 5% of the global population so the notion that we have some sort of monopoly on smarts is dangerously foolish. There are plenty of people overseas (many educated here) who are every bit as good at engineering and programming as anyone here in the US. We should be trying to bring those smart people here as fast as we possibly can.
I want the H-1B visas overhauled not only to ensure America jobs stay American, but also so these immigrants aren't exploited.
The flaw in your reasoning is in assuming there is such a thing as an "American job". Americans have earned one of the highest standards of living in the world by out competing workers and companies in other countries. But that doesn't mean we get to stop competing. If we want to stay on top we're going to have to work our ass off to stay there.
It's like the idiotic Trump rhetoric about bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US. Those jobs left because US labor was too expensive. The only way we are getting labor intensive manufacturing jobs back in the US is for US wages to fall substantially relative to other countries. Do you really want a bunch of $2/hour jobs or should we focus our energies on trying to do something more economically reasonable?
The following socialist programs should be eliminated completely: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. We need to roll the Federal government back to what it was prior to 1913.
There is a saying that you shouldn't tear down a wall until you completely understand why it was built in the first place. We have those programs because they address problems that were not being adequately handled before those programs were created. You seem to have some naive nostalgia that somehow things were better prior to 1913. They weren't.. You are demonstrating that you are either a troll or an idiot for suggesting otherwise. You are suggesting eliminating health care and financial security for millions of our most vulnerable citizens, mostly the elderly and poor.
The number $X spent on defense obscures the fact about how each defense dollar is spent.
It doesn't really matter how each defense dollar is spent. The problem isn't what specifically we are spending it on but the fact that we are spending too much of it on defense in total. We have a $600 billion defense department budget as of 2016. That is more than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, India, France and Japan combined. We could be getting amazing efficiency from our military spending and it would still be a pointless boondoggle. Our military is really just an inefficient jobs program. The money could be put to far better use as research dollars or to fixing our education system, or repairing/building our infrastructure. Instead we have the sort of military that a paranoid banana republic might build at vast cost. Are you aware that we borrowed almost exactly the ENTIRE defense department budget last year? We are like the guy who buys a Ferrari and then wonders why he's having trouble paying the rent.
We should literally know how much our government is spending on each tool, supply, or service being requisitioned, and what is included with each tool, supply, or service.
Let's stipulate that that was somehow magically possible. (it isn't) What exactly would you do with that information? Are you going to go argue that a secretary at NASA was being extravagant when she requisitioned a stapler? Beyond a certain point the cost of maintaining that information is greater than the value you get from maintaining it.
I'm an accountant and one of the principles of accounting is that you don't bother tracking something if the cost of tracking it is greater than the value gained from doing the tracking. Your proposal would waste an unbelievably vast amount of money on the overhead required to keep track of every paper clip. Far more money than you could possibly save by doing so. FAR more. For big ticket items, sure there should be reasonable transparency. But thinking that you can keep track of everything in fine grained detail and get actual positive value out of doing so is just naively unrealistic. It provably cannot be done.
If you want to stop being taxed then explain to me how you plan to fund roads, bridges, education, police, firemen, defense, schools, medical care, etc. You planning to fund those things yourself voluntarily? How do you plan to get others to help out? I've never heard someone whining about taxes with a good answer for this but maybe you can be the first.
Let us be free to spend our money how we see fit, rather than forcibly confiscating it and wasting it.
First prove how society wouldn't fall apart by eliminating taxes.
It is very easy to waste other people's money. Governments excel at this.
If you think governments are so good at wasting your money go ahead and move somewhere where you won't be taxed. There are countries where this happens or where it happens very little. I assure you that you won't find living there to be very pleasant however. Taxes are the price you pay to live in a civilized society.
The only government spending that really matters is Medicare/Medicaid, Defense, and Social Security. Those together account for about 3/4 of the federal budget. Any discussion of federal spending that doesn't involve those four programs is pointless and/or grandstanding. Stuff like NASA and education are almost rounding errors in comparison to those four programs.
That's also why anyone who talks about cutting taxes without also talking about cutting either Medicare or Defense is completely full of shit because we don't pay enough in taxes to cover those programs today. We certainly can't afford to cut taxes when last year we borrowed $600 billion to cover the $600 billion defense department budget. Cutting taxes without cutting Medicare or Defense is simply handing the bill to your children which makes the people doing it assholes. Believing that cutting taxes will magically increase government revenues through growth makes the people saying either idiots or charlatans or both.
If you change that current system that awards visas randomly, without regard for skill or wage, to a skills-based awarding, it makes it extremely difficult to use the visa to replace or undercut American workers [...] It's a very elegant way of solving very systemic problems in the H-1B guest worker visa."
This person is either extremely naive or lying through their teeth. Awarding visas for skills does not automatically translate to paying comparable wages to receive those skills. They would have to monitor wages and ensure that the wages being paid do not fall below the median wages for the job and sharply limit the number of visa recipients to prevent flooding the market and thus driving down the median wage.
Of course the problem is that reforms to the H1B visa program risk being basically a form of protectionism. It's potentially little different than slapping a tariff on imported products and has many of the same consequences. It ensures better wages for a small group of workers, typically at the expense of higher product costs for everyone else. For example if we protect steel workers from cheaper imported steel (presuming no dumping) we make cars more expensive the far larger general population. We hurt consumers to protect jobs that possibly don't need protecting. If the workers want to keep wages high they can unionize or lobby and that's just fine but honestly it's something of a loosing proposition if the labor they are doing can be done elsewhere. Programming and many other tech jobs are labor intensive work (albeit skilled labor) and if the labor can be gotten elsewhere for a lower price, sooner or later it will be. There is nothing magical about computer code written in the US versus in China or Russia.
What you get a few minutes after the event is less that 5% of the story and is based mostly on rumours and speculation.
What I get is all the available information at the time. As that information becomes available I get it basically immediately. You're assertion that just 5% of the information is available immediately is made up numbers not based on any actual evidence.
What I get the next day in my newspaper is almost 90% of the story and the journalists (if they are any good, depends on the newspaper) have already eliminated most of the speculation and rumours.
Even if we stipulate that "speculation and rumor" have been magically eliminated within 24 hours (rarely true in practice) it still is well behind the news cycle and an unnecessary delay. While you are waiting 12-24 hours for your paper, the rest of us have been reading the information as it comes out, much of it from those very same journalists. Newspapers in paper form aren't magically more accurate than the same words written online. Furthermore you are limiting yourself to a substantially smaller number of sources by getting your news from a paper (people rarely read more than 1-3) versus the entire spectrum of sources available through the net, both good and bad.
Anachronistic a newspaper might be, but depending on the paper it can certainly deliver a more accurate, balanced and realistic view of the world.
Newspapers do not possess information or analytical resources which are not available through internet sources. In fact most newspapers are working frantically to get online because their business model is dangerously close to obsolete so their thoughts are available online too. I can read your newspaper source plus literally hundreds of other sources at the same time without having to wait 24 hours for some journalist to spoon feed me their (probably biased) interpretation. I don't trust any single source no matter how reliable and if you depend on an actual physical newspaper for your news then you are doing yourself a disservice.
...and a $90,000, 0-60 3 sec Tesla is not a status symbol?
Exactly where did I talk about Tesla specifically in regards to pickups in this thread? I'm talking about the fact that people buy pickups who clearly do not need pickups and would be better served by a different type of vehicle. Yes Tesla's are status symbols but they are purchased by people who would mostly otherwise buy a Mercedes or BMW. Equally absurd in its own way EXCEPT for the fact that there are no other vehicles on the market quite like the Tesla. Every other pure EV out there is some ugly econobox that performs like crap.
Tell me, what size refridgerator can you fit in the frunk?
Hard to say since Tesla has only teased their version of a pickup and won't have one on the market for several years.
God, I am so tired of TV news programs that show jiggly, bouncy, shaky video clips from some "witness's" cell phone.
You watch the news on TV? How quaint! I haven't seen a TV news broadcast in years since they're typically well behind the actual news cycle.
And the TV producers think it is news! More often than not, I have been quite happy to wait until next morning to read all about the event, whatever it was, in the newspaper.
Oh and you read a paper too! The next day even. You're quite the anachronism. The rest of us just found out about it on the internet a few minutes after it happened.
Yeah, well the key there is that they do haul things.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that a majority of pickups are not used to tow anything and even those that do only do so occasionally. Trucks are often as not status symbols rather than practical tools. You don't need a $40-60K pimped out ride to haul a trailer. People use them as daily drivers even when doing so is wildly uneconomical.
Ever tried hauling a 6-ton horse trailer with a sedan?
Most people that own pickups will never haul a 6 ton horse trailer either. No sure what your point is.
Trucks from 30 years ago somehow managed to tow all the stuff we do now and they did so with substantially less horsepower and torque. Pickup buyers are mostly feeding their egos rather than rationally examining their needs. I own a pickup that can tow 5000lbs and it's been plenty for everything I've ever needed. I use the heck of out of the pickup bed. It has about 260hp which is more than plenty for most people's needs. True some need something beefier but that's the exception that proves the rule.
Sounds like you and I have more or less the same ideas about EV pickups. I'm just baffled that nobody has really tried to make one yet. It seems obvious to me that a pickup is among the best candidates for electrification but maybe there is something I don't understand. I agree about the detachable ICE idea though depending on the application an integrated one would be fine too.
I drive a Honda Ridgeline as my daily driver and Honda could easily make that truck into a PHEV. Just convert some/all of the in bed trunk into a battery storage area and it could easily be turned into a hybrid. And Honda already knows how to do hybrids pretty well. I think they'd sell quite a few if they marketed it correctly. Instead they've just made a sort of mediocre pickup version of a Honda Pilot. Good vehicle but less than it could be.
A human only needs around 1l of water a day to survive.
You will respirate and pee away well more than 1 liter per day under normal circumstances even if you aren't in a desert and are doing nothing active. Water requirements can easily exceed that substantially if you are sweating significantly or if it is very hot.
What is the cost per unit of water generated? It doesn't matter if it works if it is prohibitively expensive per unit of water generated. If the economics of it don't make sense it will never be used at scale.
Who on earth is so stupid to believe that "a billion" people live in "deserts"?
How about the United Nations? Strictly speaking it isn't all desert but apparently well north of a billion people live in water stressed parts of the world or areas threatened by desertification.
Nevertheless a device like this might be useful in all warm/humid areas.
Maybe. The real question is how much does it cost per unit of water generated. To be useful it would have to generate a rather sizeable amount of water even to just cover drinking and basic cleaning needs.
It's implied by the descriptive term "semi truck".
Semi trucks are used for a lot more than just long haul transport. If it can make it 500 miles (not unreasonable) that's plenty far enough to cover regional transport needs which cover a huge percentage of the market. Local routes are an enormous market.
EV's have more flexibility in location of the radiator but I believe some if not all still have them.
The point was that they don't need the radiator UP FRONT at the nose of the vehicle where it completely screws up aerodynamics. Some can still use one but EVs can place it in different spots where it won't reduce fuel economy nearly so badly.
800ft-lbs sounds like pocket change for an electric pickup. I dont tinhk they care one bit for torque becus if they where nuts about that electric is the way to go.
It's not that they don't care but rather that they understand how much torque electric motors generate. To them they hear electric and they (incorrectly) think Prius and those "commie liberal eco-nuts" instead of more accurately thinking diesel-locomotive. My point is that their choice of pickup rarely has much correlation with their actual needs and they insist that pickups keep Flintsone's era technology even when it actually harms performance.
It is all about coal rolling
No argument that there definitely is a fair bit of this going on. People that do this are just of big of assholes as those who ride Harley-Davidson motorcycles because they like the noise.
Yeah, an EV pickup would be awesome... but still too expensive, I think.
I think you're being a little too pessimistic. Prices for battery packs are falling and in a few years when someone (Tesla?) bothers to do this sort of truck I think the economics of it will be fairly reasonable. Pricey at first to be sure like any new technology but I think there is cause for optimism looking forward.
You'd need a 200+ kWh battery to have reasonable range while towing.
Not if you made it a hybrid. I think a hybrid actually makes more sense for a pickup anyway, especially for a work truck. Problem is that nobody has bothered to do an electrified pickup properly yet, hybrid or pure EV. But if we go pure EV, GM has stated that their costs for battery packs are already around $145/kWh which would put your 200kWh battery pack at around $29,000. Expensive sure, but not prohibitively so. If they can build the rest of the truck for under $30,000 (and we know they can) then they are competitive with current high end pickups right out of the gate. Make it a hybrid and you could cut the cost of the battery pack by more than half.
I mean, ICEV trucks are $60K and people do buy those -- lots of them -- but at more than double the price?
Like I said, I don't think you'd have to double the price to get something pretty reasonable on the road.
I think a pickup would actually be a great use case for a Volt-like hybrid: electric with a diesel engine backup for when you need the range.
Agreed. I've been saying something similar for years. I've thought something similar for long haul trucks as well. A diesel electric hybrid semi just seems to make all the sense in the world. Make it a diesel electric powertrain similar to a locomotive for the bigger trucks. Diesels work great on the highway at steady state speeds. The electric motors could be used for acceleration and the truck could go electric only around town.
Since pickups should normally be work vehicles, they might need more range than what an all-electric could currently do (though they do have a lot more space for batteries).
The hybrid would also allow them to power their tools for longer than would be possible with just an EV. Quite frankly an EV-hybrid pickup just seems to make a huge amount of sense if they could be bothered to do it right. It's probably the most practical electrified vehicle they could make for the mass market. Makes WAY more sense than a sedan or hatchback.
That's the thing. Most pickup buyers don't buy their pickups for pragmatic reasons. In fact they buy them seemingly for whatever the opposite of pragmatism is. They buy them for their ego. They lust after features they will seldom use or don't need. Less than 10% everactually go off road but they are built like tanks. Most have way more power and torque than is actually needed. They are bigger than is actually needed. They get terrible gas mileage and attempts to modernize the technology in them is viewed with suspicion.
I get that this could be useful, but where if they can make a semi-truck it seems like they could make an electric pickup.
I think the problem there is that the typical buyer of a pickup is... ummm, rather conservative so it's a harder sell. It's a big market but the typical buyer tends to have some rather backwards notions about what makes for a drool-worthy vehicle. Go pick up a copy of Diesel Power magazine if you don't believe me. These are people who all too often think getting 12mpg while belching smog is just fine and think they "need" 800ft-lbs of torque even though they rarely haul anything. I think selling them on an EV pickup is going to be a tougher sell than a family sedan.
Don't get me wrong, I'd buy an EV pickup in a heartbeat. My daily driver is a pickup and I'd happily replace it with an EV if one was good enough. All sorts of advantages to electrification of a truck. Tons of torque, electric power on tap to run power tools, more cargo space, fuel efficiency, etc. What's not to love? Though I have to admit that in many cases a hybrid pickup might make more sense especially as a work truck.
A driverless lorry could park a trailer accurately, correctly, and safely at a loading dock.
So can one with a human driver. They do it every day all over the world with excellent results. Nothing wrong with letting the computer do it but let's not pretend humans can't handle the task.
The sensors would tell it exactly how it aligns and moves, versus a human who uses some visual information and some prior information (intuition) to estimate without a real data stream.
You think there are no sensors on trucks to assist the human drivers in docking? You need to go visit a warehouse sometime.
Given how critical aerodynamics are for ev's, I wonder if they'll be able to streamline the vehicle without it looking like a phallus on wheels.
Aerodynamics are just as important for gas powered vehicles as they are for EVs. Wind resistance doesn't care what you have under the hood. Besides, EVs have an advantage there because they don't need a radiator up front screwing up the air stream.
Nothing says long haul trucking like a vehicle with a 200 mile range and a 6 hour recharge time.
Who said it was a long haul truck? And if you're going to make up bogus numbers for range at least try to make them credible. Be more clever with your snark next time.
Those countries that pull the plug don't care about IP addressing. All they care about is staying under the radar so they can continue commuting crimes against humanity.
Often true but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything. I don't know if this proposal will help or hurt but it's an interesting idea.
Slashdot Mirror
I want to agree with this statement (assuming "China or Russia" can be replaced with a generic "overseas"), but my experience tells me otherwise.
Only because you aren't comparing things from the right perspective. You are thinking about a few malfunctioning teams. But think of it this way. That smartphone you have in your pocket was built by some very bright and capable Chinese engineers. Russia has a space program that arguably exceeds ours in many ways. To pretend that none of them are any good at coding because you've seen a few who didn't have what it takes is not a logical position to hold.
The immigrants I've worked with, while nice (very much so), and knowledgeable in very specific technology, have no broad critical thinking skills, software design/architecture skills, or outside-the-box thinking.
And some immigrants are guys like Elon Musk. There is a range just like with every population including Americans. Substitute "americans" for immigrants in your sentance and I could say exactly the same thing in many cases. The notion that Americans are better or smarter is just xenophobic nonsense easily refuted. There are and awful lot of very smart guys from China and India and elsewhere. The US is 5% of the global population so the notion that we have some sort of monopoly on smarts is dangerously foolish. There are plenty of people overseas (many educated here) who are every bit as good at engineering and programming as anyone here in the US. We should be trying to bring those smart people here as fast as we possibly can.
I want the H-1B visas overhauled not only to ensure America jobs stay American, but also so these immigrants aren't exploited.
The flaw in your reasoning is in assuming there is such a thing as an "American job". Americans have earned one of the highest standards of living in the world by out competing workers and companies in other countries. But that doesn't mean we get to stop competing. If we want to stay on top we're going to have to work our ass off to stay there.
It's like the idiotic Trump rhetoric about bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US. Those jobs left because US labor was too expensive. The only way we are getting labor intensive manufacturing jobs back in the US is for US wages to fall substantially relative to other countries. Do you really want a bunch of $2/hour jobs or should we focus our energies on trying to do something more economically reasonable?
The following socialist programs should be eliminated completely: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. We need to roll the Federal government back to what it was prior to 1913.
There is a saying that you shouldn't tear down a wall until you completely understand why it was built in the first place. We have those programs because they address problems that were not being adequately handled before those programs were created. You seem to have some naive nostalgia that somehow things were better prior to 1913. They weren't.. You are demonstrating that you are either a troll or an idiot for suggesting otherwise. You are suggesting eliminating health care and financial security for millions of our most vulnerable citizens, mostly the elderly and poor.
The number $X spent on defense obscures the fact about how each defense dollar is spent.
It doesn't really matter how each defense dollar is spent. The problem isn't what specifically we are spending it on but the fact that we are spending too much of it on defense in total. We have a $600 billion defense department budget as of 2016. That is more than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, India, France and Japan combined. We could be getting amazing efficiency from our military spending and it would still be a pointless boondoggle. Our military is really just an inefficient jobs program. The money could be put to far better use as research dollars or to fixing our education system, or repairing/building our infrastructure. Instead we have the sort of military that a paranoid banana republic might build at vast cost. Are you aware that we borrowed almost exactly the ENTIRE defense department budget last year? We are like the guy who buys a Ferrari and then wonders why he's having trouble paying the rent.
We should literally know how much our government is spending on each tool, supply, or service being requisitioned, and what is included with each tool, supply, or service.
Let's stipulate that that was somehow magically possible. (it isn't) What exactly would you do with that information? Are you going to go argue that a secretary at NASA was being extravagant when she requisitioned a stapler? Beyond a certain point the cost of maintaining that information is greater than the value you get from maintaining it.
I'm an accountant and one of the principles of accounting is that you don't bother tracking something if the cost of tracking it is greater than the value gained from doing the tracking. Your proposal would waste an unbelievably vast amount of money on the overhead required to keep track of every paper clip. Far more money than you could possibly save by doing so. FAR more. For big ticket items, sure there should be reasonable transparency. But thinking that you can keep track of everything in fine grained detail and get actual positive value out of doing so is just naively unrealistic. It provably cannot be done.
Stop taxing us.
If you want to stop being taxed then explain to me how you plan to fund roads, bridges, education, police, firemen, defense, schools, medical care, etc. You planning to fund those things yourself voluntarily? How do you plan to get others to help out? I've never heard someone whining about taxes with a good answer for this but maybe you can be the first.
Let us be free to spend our money how we see fit, rather than forcibly confiscating it and wasting it.
First prove how society wouldn't fall apart by eliminating taxes.
It is very easy to waste other people's money. Governments excel at this.
If you think governments are so good at wasting your money go ahead and move somewhere where you won't be taxed. There are countries where this happens or where it happens very little. I assure you that you won't find living there to be very pleasant however. Taxes are the price you pay to live in a civilized society.
The only government spending that really matters is Medicare/Medicaid, Defense, and Social Security. Those together account for about 3/4 of the federal budget. Any discussion of federal spending that doesn't involve those four programs is pointless and/or grandstanding. Stuff like NASA and education are almost rounding errors in comparison to those four programs.
That's also why anyone who talks about cutting taxes without also talking about cutting either Medicare or Defense is completely full of shit because we don't pay enough in taxes to cover those programs today. We certainly can't afford to cut taxes when last year we borrowed $600 billion to cover the $600 billion defense department budget. Cutting taxes without cutting Medicare or Defense is simply handing the bill to your children which makes the people doing it assholes. Believing that cutting taxes will magically increase government revenues through growth makes the people saying either idiots or charlatans or both.
If you change that current system that awards visas randomly, without regard for skill or wage, to a skills-based awarding, it makes it extremely difficult to use the visa to replace or undercut American workers [...] It's a very elegant way of solving very systemic problems in the H-1B guest worker visa."
This person is either extremely naive or lying through their teeth. Awarding visas for skills does not automatically translate to paying comparable wages to receive those skills. They would have to monitor wages and ensure that the wages being paid do not fall below the median wages for the job and sharply limit the number of visa recipients to prevent flooding the market and thus driving down the median wage.
Of course the problem is that reforms to the H1B visa program risk being basically a form of protectionism. It's potentially little different than slapping a tariff on imported products and has many of the same consequences. It ensures better wages for a small group of workers, typically at the expense of higher product costs for everyone else. For example if we protect steel workers from cheaper imported steel (presuming no dumping) we make cars more expensive the far larger general population. We hurt consumers to protect jobs that possibly don't need protecting. If the workers want to keep wages high they can unionize or lobby and that's just fine but honestly it's something of a loosing proposition if the labor they are doing can be done elsewhere. Programming and many other tech jobs are labor intensive work (albeit skilled labor) and if the labor can be gotten elsewhere for a lower price, sooner or later it will be. There is nothing magical about computer code written in the US versus in China or Russia.
What you get a few minutes after the event is less that 5% of the story and is based mostly on rumours and speculation.
What I get is all the available information at the time. As that information becomes available I get it basically immediately. You're assertion that just 5% of the information is available immediately is made up numbers not based on any actual evidence.
What I get the next day in my newspaper is almost 90% of the story and the journalists (if they are any good, depends on the newspaper) have already eliminated most of the speculation and rumours.
Even if we stipulate that "speculation and rumor" have been magically eliminated within 24 hours (rarely true in practice) it still is well behind the news cycle and an unnecessary delay. While you are waiting 12-24 hours for your paper, the rest of us have been reading the information as it comes out, much of it from those very same journalists. Newspapers in paper form aren't magically more accurate than the same words written online. Furthermore you are limiting yourself to a substantially smaller number of sources by getting your news from a paper (people rarely read more than 1-3) versus the entire spectrum of sources available through the net, both good and bad.
Anachronistic a newspaper might be, but depending on the paper it can certainly deliver a more accurate, balanced and realistic view of the world.
Newspapers do not possess information or analytical resources which are not available through internet sources. In fact most newspapers are working frantically to get online because their business model is dangerously close to obsolete so their thoughts are available online too. I can read your newspaper source plus literally hundreds of other sources at the same time without having to wait 24 hours for some journalist to spoon feed me their (probably biased) interpretation. I don't trust any single source no matter how reliable and if you depend on an actual physical newspaper for your news then you are doing yourself a disservice.
...and a $90,000, 0-60 3 sec Tesla is not a status symbol?
Exactly where did I talk about Tesla specifically in regards to pickups in this thread? I'm talking about the fact that people buy pickups who clearly do not need pickups and would be better served by a different type of vehicle. Yes Tesla's are status symbols but they are purchased by people who would mostly otherwise buy a Mercedes or BMW. Equally absurd in its own way EXCEPT for the fact that there are no other vehicles on the market quite like the Tesla. Every other pure EV out there is some ugly econobox that performs like crap.
Tell me, what size refridgerator can you fit in the frunk?
Hard to say since Tesla has only teased their version of a pickup and won't have one on the market for several years.
God, I am so tired of TV news programs that show jiggly, bouncy, shaky video clips from some "witness's" cell phone.
You watch the news on TV? How quaint! I haven't seen a TV news broadcast in years since they're typically well behind the actual news cycle.
And the TV producers think it is news! More often than not, I have been quite happy to wait until next morning to read all about the event, whatever it was, in the newspaper.
Oh and you read a paper too! The next day even. You're quite the anachronism. The rest of us just found out about it on the internet a few minutes after it happened.
Yeah, well the key there is that they do haul things.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that a majority of pickups are not used to tow anything and even those that do only do so occasionally. Trucks are often as not status symbols rather than practical tools. You don't need a $40-60K pimped out ride to haul a trailer. People use them as daily drivers even when doing so is wildly uneconomical.
Ever tried hauling a 6-ton horse trailer with a sedan?
Most people that own pickups will never haul a 6 ton horse trailer either. No sure what your point is.
Trucks from 30 years ago somehow managed to tow all the stuff we do now and they did so with substantially less horsepower and torque. Pickup buyers are mostly feeding their egos rather than rationally examining their needs. I own a pickup that can tow 5000lbs and it's been plenty for everything I've ever needed. I use the heck of out of the pickup bed. It has about 260hp which is more than plenty for most people's needs. True some need something beefier but that's the exception that proves the rule.
Sounds like you and I have more or less the same ideas about EV pickups. I'm just baffled that nobody has really tried to make one yet. It seems obvious to me that a pickup is among the best candidates for electrification but maybe there is something I don't understand. I agree about the detachable ICE idea though depending on the application an integrated one would be fine too.
I drive a Honda Ridgeline as my daily driver and Honda could easily make that truck into a PHEV. Just convert some/all of the in bed trunk into a battery storage area and it could easily be turned into a hybrid. And Honda already knows how to do hybrids pretty well. I think they'd sell quite a few if they marketed it correctly. Instead they've just made a sort of mediocre pickup version of a Honda Pilot. Good vehicle but less than it could be.
A human only needs around 1l of water a day to survive.
You will respirate and pee away well more than 1 liter per day under normal circumstances even if you aren't in a desert and are doing nothing active. Water requirements can easily exceed that substantially if you are sweating significantly or if it is very hot.
What is the cost per unit of water generated? It doesn't matter if it works if it is prohibitively expensive per unit of water generated. If the economics of it don't make sense it will never be used at scale.
Who on earth is so stupid to believe that "a billion" people live in "deserts"?
How about the United Nations? Strictly speaking it isn't all desert but apparently well north of a billion people live in water stressed parts of the world or areas threatened by desertification.
Nevertheless a device like this might be useful in all warm/humid areas.
Maybe. The real question is how much does it cost per unit of water generated. To be useful it would have to generate a rather sizeable amount of water even to just cover drinking and basic cleaning needs.
It's implied by the descriptive term "semi truck".
Semi trucks are used for a lot more than just long haul transport. If it can make it 500 miles (not unreasonable) that's plenty far enough to cover regional transport needs which cover a huge percentage of the market. Local routes are an enormous market.
EV's have more flexibility in location of the radiator but I believe some if not all still have them.
The point was that they don't need the radiator UP FRONT at the nose of the vehicle where it completely screws up aerodynamics. Some can still use one but EVs can place it in different spots where it won't reduce fuel economy nearly so badly.
800ft-lbs sounds like pocket change for an electric pickup. I dont tinhk they care one bit for torque becus if they where nuts about that electric is the way to go.
It's not that they don't care but rather that they understand how much torque electric motors generate. To them they hear electric and they (incorrectly) think Prius and those "commie liberal eco-nuts" instead of more accurately thinking diesel-locomotive. My point is that their choice of pickup rarely has much correlation with their actual needs and they insist that pickups keep Flintsone's era technology even when it actually harms performance.
It is all about coal rolling
No argument that there definitely is a fair bit of this going on. People that do this are just of big of assholes as those who ride Harley-Davidson motorcycles because they like the noise.
Yeah, an EV pickup would be awesome... but still too expensive, I think.
I think you're being a little too pessimistic. Prices for battery packs are falling and in a few years when someone (Tesla?) bothers to do this sort of truck I think the economics of it will be fairly reasonable. Pricey at first to be sure like any new technology but I think there is cause for optimism looking forward.
You'd need a 200+ kWh battery to have reasonable range while towing.
Not if you made it a hybrid. I think a hybrid actually makes more sense for a pickup anyway, especially for a work truck. Problem is that nobody has bothered to do an electrified pickup properly yet, hybrid or pure EV. But if we go pure EV, GM has stated that their costs for battery packs are already around $145/kWh which would put your 200kWh battery pack at around $29,000. Expensive sure, but not prohibitively so. If they can build the rest of the truck for under $30,000 (and we know they can) then they are competitive with current high end pickups right out of the gate. Make it a hybrid and you could cut the cost of the battery pack by more than half.
I mean, ICEV trucks are $60K and people do buy those -- lots of them -- but at more than double the price?
Like I said, I don't think you'd have to double the price to get something pretty reasonable on the road.
I think a pickup would actually be a great use case for a Volt-like hybrid: electric with a diesel engine backup for when you need the range.
Agreed. I've been saying something similar for years. I've thought something similar for long haul trucks as well. A diesel electric hybrid semi just seems to make all the sense in the world. Make it a diesel electric powertrain similar to a locomotive for the bigger trucks. Diesels work great on the highway at steady state speeds. The electric motors could be used for acceleration and the truck could go electric only around town.
Since pickups should normally be work vehicles, they might need more range than what an all-electric could currently do (though they do have a lot more space for batteries).
The hybrid would also allow them to power their tools for longer than would be possible with just an EV. Quite frankly an EV-hybrid pickup just seems to make a huge amount of sense if they could be bothered to do it right. It's probably the most practical electrified vehicle they could make for the mass market. Makes WAY more sense than a sedan or hatchback.
That's the thing. Most pickup buyers don't buy their pickups for pragmatic reasons. In fact they buy them seemingly for whatever the opposite of pragmatism is. They buy them for their ego. They lust after features they will seldom use or don't need. Less than 10% everactually go off road but they are built like tanks. Most have way more power and torque than is actually needed. They are bigger than is actually needed. They get terrible gas mileage and attempts to modernize the technology in them is viewed with suspicion.
I get that this could be useful, but where if they can make a semi-truck it seems like they could make an electric pickup.
I think the problem there is that the typical buyer of a pickup is... ummm, rather conservative so it's a harder sell. It's a big market but the typical buyer tends to have some rather backwards notions about what makes for a drool-worthy vehicle. Go pick up a copy of Diesel Power magazine if you don't believe me. These are people who all too often think getting 12mpg while belching smog is just fine and think they "need" 800ft-lbs of torque even though they rarely haul anything. I think selling them on an EV pickup is going to be a tougher sell than a family sedan.
Don't get me wrong, I'd buy an EV pickup in a heartbeat. My daily driver is a pickup and I'd happily replace it with an EV if one was good enough. All sorts of advantages to electrification of a truck. Tons of torque, electric power on tap to run power tools, more cargo space, fuel efficiency, etc. What's not to love? Though I have to admit that in many cases a hybrid pickup might make more sense especially as a work truck.
A driverless lorry could park a trailer accurately, correctly, and safely at a loading dock.
So can one with a human driver. They do it every day all over the world with excellent results. Nothing wrong with letting the computer do it but let's not pretend humans can't handle the task.
The sensors would tell it exactly how it aligns and moves, versus a human who uses some visual information and some prior information (intuition) to estimate without a real data stream.
You think there are no sensors on trucks to assist the human drivers in docking? You need to go visit a warehouse sometime.
Given how critical aerodynamics are for ev's, I wonder if they'll be able to streamline the vehicle without it looking like a phallus on wheels.
Aerodynamics are just as important for gas powered vehicles as they are for EVs. Wind resistance doesn't care what you have under the hood. Besides, EVs have an advantage there because they don't need a radiator up front screwing up the air stream.
Nothing says long haul trucking like a vehicle with a 200 mile range and a 6 hour recharge time.
Who said it was a long haul truck? And if you're going to make up bogus numbers for range at least try to make them credible. Be more clever with your snark next time.
Those countries that pull the plug don't care about IP addressing. All they care about is staying under the radar so they can continue commuting crimes against humanity.
Often true but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything. I don't know if this proposal will help or hurt but it's an interesting idea.