The problem occurs when the 'friend' is an idiot and lets the true relationship slip out when he's injured and unhappy with the payments.
I say 'idiot' because only an idiot would rat out his driver when the consequence is that the insurance company gets to cancel the driver's insurance and NOT pay out for the accident, making the claims fall on the driver's personal assets. Good luck getting blood from a stone...
The fact that medallions trade for that much indicates that taxis are still profitable and new players are willing to pay that much for a medallion in order to enter the market.
However the medallian trade helps ensure that established players remain established and profitable. Ergo anti-competitive.
My company has a HUGE advantage if it bought the first 1k or so medallions when they were first issues for $10 or so and has kept them ever since.
The required licenses must be expensive for a reason.
Existing taxi companies lobby for restrictions on the number of cars... No reductions for them, of course. But we have to 'keep the roads clear'.
A LOT of the taxi requirements in many areas* amount to anti-competitive measures along the lines of the rules that ban Tesla from selling cars in many states due to independent franchise requirements.
*given that taxi rules will vary down to cities in most cases,
Interesting, but even if we assume that the standard problems with google glasses are ignored/remediated like the GG's battery life when recording*, head movements and such, I could simply wear a button-up shirt with a camera in the pocket. A lot easier to sit still that way and get a good recording. Or better yet set the camera up away from me under an arm rest or something.
Besides, wasn't it found that most camcorder recordings of movies was coming from projector operators?
*Couldn't you run a cable to a supplemental battery pack?
A quick google search says 10Gbps, if anything it's 100 mbps per channel. With coax data transmission is much like you having your own set of spectrum to play with, as opposed to having to contend with others over the air.
if you need to transmit more, just use more spectrum. This does eventualy cut into availability of that spectrum for other uses such as TV though, since there are limits in regards to keeping frequencies from interfering with each other and cost of the circuits to generate and read the radio-type signals.
Yeah, but you implied that I thought that any other charger was 'bad'. I don't really. I think the connector isn't as good, but that's minor.
I didn't state it well, but without a battery pack as large as Tesla's you can't even charge at those wattage levels without roasting your battery. Thus the comment about needing at least a 'medium range' EV before using it's connector and the supercharger network becomes a selling feature.
Even the 'blows out of the water' is a statement of power - a race engine will blow most street engines 'out of the water', but it doesn't mean that the street engines are bad. They'll get you somewhere eventually far beyond where the race engine is a mess on the side of the road.
Really, it just goes to show how different a market Tesla is currently playing in compared to other EV makers.
Make the chargers open source. Charge for the car side of the connection. Have some sort of cost-sharing system for the network, much like ATMs.
IE the more chargers you own, the more you're paid. The more cars you sell, the more you pay.
Sell a lot of cars but have no chargers? Pay a lot of money for access to the network. Have a lot of chargers but no cars? Get paid wheelbarrels of money to keep them going.
Refuelling for short trips is about 5 minutes. Longer ones takes a swap, just like now.
This ignores that charging capacity scales with battery size. IE it doesn't matter if your battery pack is 1 cell or 3 thousand of them, the charge time from empty to full is going to take about the same amount of time, assuming you have enough power to meet the limit.
Chop the battery of a Tesla by 2/3rds and you chop it's charging capability(watts) by 2/3rds. Roughly.
I'd wager that if Ford, GM, Toyota, et al started making *competitive* plug-in hybrids that also used these supercharging stations, Tesla would also sell more cars as a result. (the marketing drones would call this synergy)
I'll add that I've heard that his licensing terms are such that any companies using his tech can't lock out Tesla. Logically speaking, if an auto company starts using his charge technology that means they'll also be putting charging stations in. More charging stations equals more reason to buy a Tesla due to lowered range anxiety.
The more EVs out there, the more reason to put in charge stations to attract their business.
For us non-Tesla electric drivers using the "bad" chargers...
I wouldn't call them 'bad', they're just lower power and the plug isn't as 'nice' as the Tesla's. Somehow Tesla managed to get away with only having 2 power wires, vs separate AC and DC power lines on the other interfaces. Makes Tesla's sleeker, less clunky.
The lower power, as I mention, doesn't really matter until you have a vehicle with a big enough battery to take that charge, and as you mention, the higher power isn't really going to be required in town anyways.
You'd have to have a Tesla pretty low on charge in order for even a lvl2 charger to not fully charge it over the course of a movie.
When you can pull into the CircleK and purchase a few kWh of juice while grabbing a burrito, that's when electric cars will really take off.
Given the ability to charge at home, without even needing to visit the CircleK, as well as the large numbers of absolutely free charging stations, I'd say that EVs will take off when the average price drops enough to avoid sticker shock* while and battery capacity(buffered by high speed charging/battery swaps) climbs enough to overcome range anxiety. The Nissan Leaf isn't high enough ranged to avoid range anxiety, and the Model S still gives sticker shock.
That being said, visits to 'convenience' stores are typically too short to really benefit from charging. I see sit down restaurants, malls, and superstores benefitting more.
*Batteries costing 1/4-1/3rd of what they do now will help; I've read that Tesla probably already has the cheapest batteries per kWh by a considerable margin, and the Gigafactory is an attempt to cut even that in half.
I'm surprised no one has jumped to lock out the small fry yet.
Chademo and J1772 are apparently in quite the fight right now, while Tesla forges ahead with it's superior propriatory solution.
The problem with 'locking out the small fry' is that: 1. There's effectively no small fry around yet 2. The base is too fragile as of yet to seriously try it. Right now it's more profitable to share stations.
That would most likely end up with an ugly solution being pushed on us. For example, mandating the USB standard does reduce the number of cables, up to the point Apple wants to release it's iPad sized iPhone.
Current open standards for EV charging stations max out at 60kW, half of what Tesla's superchargers put out. Less than half given that Tesla is actually looking to increase power even more. Even the 'next update' standards only up that to 90kW for J1772.
Tesla is being a bit like apple here, but it's pushing a truly superior standard by what I'm reading. Both higher power and more convenient to the user.
BTW, the supercharging stations Tesla have been building feature an equal number of non-propriatory charging stations - for every supercharger there's a J1772 connection, at least at some sites.
Are the superchargers a unique selling point of their products or are they an enabling infrastructure?
At this point the former, but he's made statements in the past he'd like it to be the latter. Of course, of the common-build EVs*, his has the largest battery packs capable of taking the fastest charge. At 120 kW, a supercharger station blows most other EV stations out of the water.
For example, J1772 maxes out at 19.2kW at AC level 2, and 90kW for DC level 2., with the DC lvl 2 standard not even being finalized yet, and DC level 3 still in the initial planning stages. CHAdeMO's wiki is less useful, but it's connector is limited to 62kW. It's homepage lists chargers that max out at 60kW.
I'll also say that compared to Tesla's chargers, the alternatives are indeed clunky. I think that Tesla compatibility might be a compelling choice if I'm making a moderate(150+ miles) or longer ranged EV if it enables me to sell access to the supercharger network as a feature point.
*Disclaimer because I'm sure there's one-offs that can do just the same.
that the market has been blessed by the government as THE vehicle with which to save for retirement by making these purchases tax free
The rules for 401k/IRA/Roth and such are wider than that. Did you know that if you structure it right you can actually use these funds to buy and speculate in real estate?
As long as some basic rules are followed, any alternative markets would be equally eligible for these funds.
Given that a Tesla model S, currently the longest ranged production EV, only has ~300 miles of range (480km), I think that's a very unfounded statement. Ergo my point that it's tough to drive that far at once, giving you the opportunity to charge the battery multiple times.
I can only speculate that at some point regular sellers and buyers will 'take their business elsewhere' because the parasitism of HFT and it's successors reaches the point that NOT using the standard markets is more cost effective.
Right now for all the money it 'makes', HFT is still a very very small amount of total margin. Either you hit diminishing returns and stability, or the system will suffer an upheaval. I've heard that there are already alternative markets being set up that ban/limit HFT.
If we could set up an "on-demand" aluminum re-smelter which operates only when grid-demand for electricity drops, the power plant could be run at a steady level 24/7.
That's a big 'could'. There's substantial energy penalties for turning them off.
Personally, I'm sort of hoping that EV batteries that are operational but too worn out for their original purpose(so holding 40-70% of original charge) are repurposed into standby/grid evening batteries. At a couple dozen kWh per pop, 1 battery per couple households would be enough to completely normalize electricity use.
It's tough to break 1.2k km driven in a day( ~800 miles). If you're getting the first 500 km off the lithium batteries, that's 700 out of the aluminum air battery, then you stop for the night and presumably recharge the lithium. That would make a 3 day trip 1500 off LiIon, 2100 from the aluminum battery, so they're probably counting on a few less miles/day on average.
They're probably counting on a touch more than 1k km/day though.
470 km per day LiIon, 530 Al. 1000 km/day. Reasonable.
Sure, the rechargable pack lasts long enough for the short drives once I'm there, but the return trip is going to suck
Or, you know, you stop at a local station IN Vegas and have your battery swapped there for the trip back. Do you expect to be able to drive that far without visiting a gas station?
There are literally dozens, and that's a pretty common part.
Air filters are worse. My Toyota Tacoma uses the same oil filter as my Saturn SC2 did. A truck using the same filter as a coupe? Tha'ts interesting.
I wonder how many oil filters you'd need if you looked only at new build cars today. Would you find that you can cover 90% of vehicles with about 6 filters? 2 for 4 cylinders, 2 for six, and 2 for eight*?
Just picking on Fram - Honda Accord/Civic/Crosstour/CR-Z: 7317 Subaru Impreza/Legacy: 7317 Nissan GT-R: 7317 Nissan 370Z/Altima/Juke/Maxima/: 6607 Toyota Avalon/Camry: 9972 Ford Fiesta/Focus/Fusion/Taurus: 3614 BMW 300-600, Z series: 10075 (11007 otherwise)
That's an awful lot of cars on 6 filters, and most car manufacturers only seem to use 1-2 filters for their car line.
Looking at TGH3614(my filter), it's used by 34 makers(note that cars/light truck are mostly counted separately). Chrysler LOVES it, 23 model lines use it(over years, admittedly). Dodge and Toyota does as well.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem occurs when the 'friend' is an idiot and lets the true relationship slip out when he's injured and unhappy with the payments.
I say 'idiot' because only an idiot would rat out his driver when the consequence is that the insurance company gets to cancel the driver's insurance and NOT pay out for the accident, making the claims fall on the driver's personal assets. Good luck getting blood from a stone...
The fact that medallions trade for that much indicates that taxis are still profitable and new players are willing to pay that much for a medallion in order to enter the market.
However the medallian trade helps ensure that established players remain established and profitable. Ergo anti-competitive.
My company has a HUGE advantage if it bought the first 1k or so medallions when they were first issues for $10 or so and has kept them ever since.
Maybe the problem is not with Uber, but with the cost of being licensed. Is ~200,000 Euros really justified?
200k EU is cheap compared to NYC's $1M medallians.
It's blatently anti-competitive.
A NYC taxi medallian can break $1M..
And that doesn't include other regulatory costs, insurance, vehicle, nothing.
The required licenses must be expensive for a reason.
Existing taxi companies lobby for restrictions on the number of cars... No reductions for them, of course. But we have to 'keep the roads clear'.
A LOT of the taxi requirements in many areas* amount to anti-competitive measures along the lines of the rules that ban Tesla from selling cars in many states due to independent franchise requirements.
*given that taxi rules will vary down to cities in most cases,
Interesting, but even if we assume that the standard problems with google glasses are ignored/remediated like the GG's battery life when recording*, head movements and such, I could simply wear a button-up shirt with a camera in the pocket. A lot easier to sit still that way and get a good recording. Or better yet set the camera up away from me under an arm rest or something.
Besides, wasn't it found that most camcorder recordings of movies was coming from projector operators?
*Couldn't you run a cable to a supplemental battery pack?
A quick google search says 10Gbps, if anything it's 100 mbps per channel. With coax data transmission is much like you having your own set of spectrum to play with, as opposed to having to contend with others over the air.
if you need to transmit more, just use more spectrum. This does eventualy cut into availability of that spectrum for other uses such as TV though, since there are limits in regards to keeping frequencies from interfering with each other and cost of the circuits to generate and read the radio-type signals.
This is pretty much my point.
Yeah, but you implied that I thought that any other charger was 'bad'. I don't really. I think the connector isn't as good, but that's minor.
I didn't state it well, but without a battery pack as large as Tesla's you can't even charge at those wattage levels without roasting your battery. Thus the comment about needing at least a 'medium range' EV before using it's connector and the supercharger network becomes a selling feature.
Even the 'blows out of the water' is a statement of power - a race engine will blow most street engines 'out of the water', but it doesn't mean that the street engines are bad. They'll get you somewhere eventually far beyond where the race engine is a mess on the side of the road.
Really, it just goes to show how different a market Tesla is currently playing in compared to other EV makers.
Make the chargers open source. Charge for the car side of the connection. Have some sort of cost-sharing system for the network, much like ATMs.
IE the more chargers you own, the more you're paid. The more cars you sell, the more you pay.
Sell a lot of cars but have no chargers? Pay a lot of money for access to the network. Have a lot of chargers but no cars? Get paid wheelbarrels of money to keep them going.
Refuelling for short trips is about 5 minutes. Longer ones takes a swap, just like now.
This ignores that charging capacity scales with battery size. IE it doesn't matter if your battery pack is 1 cell or 3 thousand of them, the charge time from empty to full is going to take about the same amount of time, assuming you have enough power to meet the limit.
Chop the battery of a Tesla by 2/3rds and you chop it's charging capability(watts) by 2/3rds. Roughly.
It is an interesting idea though.
I'd wager that if Ford, GM, Toyota, et al started making *competitive* plug-in hybrids that also used these supercharging stations, Tesla would also sell more cars as a result. (the marketing drones would call this synergy)
I'll add that I've heard that his licensing terms are such that any companies using his tech can't lock out Tesla. Logically speaking, if an auto company starts using his charge technology that means they'll also be putting charging stations in. More charging stations equals more reason to buy a Tesla due to lowered range anxiety.
The more EVs out there, the more reason to put in charge stations to attract their business.
For us non-Tesla electric drivers using the "bad" chargers...
I wouldn't call them 'bad', they're just lower power and the plug isn't as 'nice' as the Tesla's. Somehow Tesla managed to get away with only having 2 power wires, vs separate AC and DC power lines on the other interfaces. Makes Tesla's sleeker, less clunky.
The lower power, as I mention, doesn't really matter until you have a vehicle with a big enough battery to take that charge, and as you mention, the higher power isn't really going to be required in town anyways.
You'd have to have a Tesla pretty low on charge in order for even a lvl2 charger to not fully charge it over the course of a movie.
When you can pull into the CircleK and purchase a few kWh of juice while grabbing a burrito, that's when electric cars will really take off.
Given the ability to charge at home, without even needing to visit the CircleK, as well as the large numbers of absolutely free charging stations, I'd say that EVs will take off when the average price drops enough to avoid sticker shock* while and battery capacity(buffered by high speed charging/battery swaps) climbs enough to overcome range anxiety. The Nissan Leaf isn't high enough ranged to avoid range anxiety, and the Model S still gives sticker shock.
That being said, visits to 'convenience' stores are typically too short to really benefit from charging. I see sit down restaurants, malls, and superstores benefitting more.
*Batteries costing 1/4-1/3rd of what they do now will help; I've read that Tesla probably already has the cheapest batteries per kWh by a considerable margin, and the Gigafactory is an attempt to cut even that in half.
I'm surprised no one has jumped to lock out the small fry yet.
Chademo and J1772 are apparently in quite the fight right now, while Tesla forges ahead with it's superior propriatory solution.
The problem with 'locking out the small fry' is that:
1. There's effectively no small fry around yet
2. The base is too fragile as of yet to seriously try it. Right now it's more profitable to share stations.
Perhaps legislation would be the best option"
That would most likely end up with an ugly solution being pushed on us. For example, mandating the USB standard does reduce the number of cables, up to the point Apple wants to release it's iPad sized iPhone.
Current open standards for EV charging stations max out at 60kW, half of what Tesla's superchargers put out. Less than half given that Tesla is actually looking to increase power even more. Even the 'next update' standards only up that to 90kW for J1772.
Tesla is being a bit like apple here, but it's pushing a truly superior standard by what I'm reading. Both higher power and more convenient to the user.
BTW, the supercharging stations Tesla have been building feature an equal number of non-propriatory charging stations - for every supercharger there's a J1772 connection, at least at some sites.
Are the superchargers a unique selling point of their products or are they an enabling infrastructure?
At this point the former, but he's made statements in the past he'd like it to be the latter. Of course, of the common-build EVs*, his has the largest battery packs capable of taking the fastest charge. At 120 kW, a supercharger station blows most other EV stations out of the water.
For example, J1772 maxes out at 19.2kW at AC level 2, and 90kW for DC level 2., with the DC lvl 2 standard not even being finalized yet, and DC level 3 still in the initial planning stages.
CHAdeMO's wiki is less useful, but it's connector is limited to 62kW. It's homepage lists chargers that max out at 60kW.
I'll also say that compared to Tesla's chargers, the alternatives are indeed clunky. I think that Tesla compatibility might be a compelling choice if I'm making a moderate(150+ miles) or longer ranged EV if it enables me to sell access to the supercharger network as a feature point.
*Disclaimer because I'm sure there's one-offs that can do just the same.
This might be a surprise to you, but it has already happened.
Not surprising at all, the reason I said the comment about alternative markets.
that the market has been blessed by the government as THE vehicle with which to save for retirement by making these purchases tax free
The rules for 401k/IRA/Roth and such are wider than that. Did you know that if you structure it right you can actually use these funds to buy and speculate in real estate?
As long as some basic rules are followed, any alternative markets would be equally eligible for these funds.
Given that a Tesla model S, currently the longest ranged production EV, only has ~300 miles of range (480km), I think that's a very unfounded statement. Ergo my point that it's tough to drive that far at once, giving you the opportunity to charge the battery multiple times.
Interesting, I'd never read about the Dutch tulip panic before...
I can only speculate that at some point regular sellers and buyers will 'take their business elsewhere' because the parasitism of HFT and it's successors reaches the point that NOT using the standard markets is more cost effective.
Right now for all the money it 'makes', HFT is still a very very small amount of total margin. Either you hit diminishing returns and stability, or the system will suffer an upheaval. I've heard that there are already alternative markets being set up that ban/limit HFT.
If we could set up an "on-demand" aluminum re-smelter which operates only when grid-demand for electricity drops, the power plant could be run at a steady level 24/7.
That's a big 'could'. There's substantial energy penalties for turning them off.
Personally, I'm sort of hoping that EV batteries that are operational but too worn out for their original purpose(so holding 40-70% of original charge) are repurposed into standby/grid evening batteries. At a couple dozen kWh per pop, 1 battery per couple households would be enough to completely normalize electricity use.
It's tough to break 1.2k km driven in a day( ~800 miles). If you're getting the first 500 km off the lithium batteries, that's 700 out of the aluminum air battery, then you stop for the night and presumably recharge the lithium. That would make a 3 day trip 1500 off LiIon, 2100 from the aluminum battery, so they're probably counting on a few less miles/day on average.
They're probably counting on a touch more than 1k km/day though.
470 km per day LiIon, 530 Al. 1000 km/day. Reasonable.
Sure, the rechargable pack lasts long enough for the short drives once I'm there, but the return trip is going to suck
Or, you know, you stop at a local station IN Vegas and have your battery swapped there for the trip back. Do you expect to be able to drive that far without visiting a gas station?
There are literally dozens, and that's a pretty common part.
Air filters are worse. My Toyota Tacoma uses the same oil filter as my Saturn SC2 did. A truck using the same filter as a coupe? Tha'ts interesting.
I wonder how many oil filters you'd need if you looked only at new build cars today. Would you find that you can cover 90% of vehicles with about 6 filters? 2 for 4 cylinders, 2 for six, and 2 for eight*?
Just picking on Fram -
Honda Accord/Civic/Crosstour/CR-Z: 7317
Subaru Impreza/Legacy: 7317
Nissan GT-R: 7317
Nissan 370Z/Altima/Juke/Maxima/: 6607
Toyota Avalon/Camry: 9972
Ford Fiesta/Focus/Fusion/Taurus: 3614
BMW 300-600, Z series: 10075 (11007 otherwise)
That's an awful lot of cars on 6 filters, and most car manufacturers only seem to use 1-2 filters for their car line.
Looking at TGH3614(my filter), it's used by 34 makers(note that cars/light truck are mostly counted separately). Chrysler LOVES it, 23 model lines use it(over years, admittedly). Dodge and Toyota does as well.
*With some crossover between 6 and 8.
Impossible with fixed lithium batteries?
I guess the Tesla Model S's batteries aren't 'fixed' then.