If I remember right, they do, and it's probably like their pollution standards - on the book as the best in the world, but having so little bite that you have to create a national/global scandal in order to actually have them enforced against you.
Such as putting melamine in milk. A couple people were executed for that one.
I remember the proposals for sewer fiber networks at least a decade ago, even saw the robot that did the placement.
As for the gut bacteria, haven't we seen this with species like fruit flies? Their sperm packages are actually toxic(to kill competing sperm), too many generations difference between them though and it'll kill the female.
EVs are very much upcoming. The only thing holding Tesla back from making more cars is that they're already consuming something like half the LiIon cells produced on the planet.
It would probably be difficult to build the "disturbance detecting" chip in a way that couldn't be circumvented but that also wouldn't trip accidentally.
To be more clear, my 'tamper chip' is merely a storage device. If voltage is lost at pin 1, dump, if voltage present on pin 2, dump. If voltage on pins 3&4 don't match within tolerances, dump. After that, it's all about sensors hooked up. Careful design can minimize 'false alarm' trips, depending on where your relative paranoia lays. I've worked with equipment that have tamper alarms that a strong *bump* can trigger, then the device is unusable until you use a special key on it(and said key only works so many times).
Yes, the light idea is fairly simple to bypass if you know about it, but it also makes trying to hack the phone a pain if you have to do it in the dark. Makes you more likely to trip the other sensors - cut in the wrong spot, lift the wrong bit of case, etc...
That's why you get multiple people in a committee helping out. Other options include pressurizing the phone(you'd need a temperature sensor to to map the expected pressure).
The way I'd have the destruct work would be to encrypt everything and keep the key in a special tamper chip that will dump the key if a tamper trips.
Anyways, there are options to screw up your little proposal, such as a sensor inside that looks for disturbance. A light sensor where there should be no light, for example. Put a series of wires along the inside of the case, and if the resistance changes, such as from somebody cutting a wire trying to dremel their way in, trigger the tamper. Another option would be a button or something that's depressed normally. Remove a section of the case and it trips.
Oh, and you generally don't do a tamper 'proof' coating on screws, you do a 'tamper-evident' coating.
Want your own tamper evident coating? Buy a bottle of the cheapest, cheesiest glitter nail polish you can find. Coat the screws with a layer. Take a high resolution picture of each screw. Suspect tampering? compare the current coating with the picture.
As for deleting the data off the device, I'd probably simply encrypt everything on the device, with the key stored in a specific chip designed to dump said key if anything triggers it. No Key = No Data.
It's doable, but you need an Orion(*) class launcher to get enough material to GEO to build the first one.
Citation? I provided two sources that estimated the first cable would weigh between 9 and 20 metric tons. Regular heavy lifters can do that today.
Also, while a full length cable is the most useful for gravity launches, you don't need it if you stage your 'center' station an appropriate bit past the center. Included in one of the sites I found when doing research was a calculation on how long to make the outside cable, with a mass on the end rather than just more cable, on the basis of cost per kilogram to lift the end mass and cost per kilometer of ribbon. The longer the ribbon, the less mass you need, but if ribbon is 1000X as expensive as the endcap mass(which is effectively just the launch costs), then the cheapest system will still have a short outside ribbon.
Of course, once you have an extensive enough space presense in Earth Orbit and you start looking to visit elsewhere, the math changes as avoiding launch costs for those missions justifies extending the ribbon.
As for building from the ground up, I'd presume that the 'starter cable' would include enough mass on the opposite end to balance things out while you drag up more supplies. Obviously you can't just haul up another unless it's absolutely tiny - the 20 ton seed cable is only capable of lifing 600 kg. It also depends on how you end up constructing the cable - can the climbers 'weld' new ribbon to the existing or not? Or would it be better to have a special station up in GEO that can perform a complicated/touchy 'welding' process to actually increase the length of cable? What if you don't even bother connecting the ribbons, and have any climber connect to some or all of them individually?
Assuming that worked--you're using up more oxygen and more propellant--you could cut it down to two trips--one with five passengers and one with two. I'd be willing to bet that a Soyuz didn't have fuel to do that.
Nope, very much not enough fuel. Though perhaps a customized Soyuz launch could have reached them.
A critical item to realize is that you don't necessarily need to immediately evacuate them - get an unmanned cargo ship close enough stuffed with CO2 scrubbers, extra oxygen, batteries, and food should extend survival past 30 days to get something man-rated there. One problem I see is that they don't have 9 space suits to effect the transfer. So you might need to rig up some sort of pressurized tube*.
*Personally I'd go with near pure O2 in the tube, sufficient to keep the person concious, but the pressure low enough that you can keep it sealed.
I remember reading about a plane where there was a crawspace so you could do maintenance on engines while in flight. But I'll point out that cargo ships are often out of dock for 30+ days at a time, while planes are hardly ever up for more than half a day, after which they go through large amounts of maintenance.
the quantities required of neodymium (for the magnets in the motors), copper (for the moving coils in the motors) and lithium (for the batteries) to push around 2 tonnes of metal is basically... insane. there's not enough available on the planet. something has to give.
1. AC Induction motors like what are in the Tesla don't need rare earth magnets. 2. There's almost certainly more copper in your house than in a Tesla. 3. Besides's GrahamCox's mentioning that Lithium is actually very common, just generally widely distributed rather than concentrated(makes mining it a bit more painful).
I'd expect the chassis to rust out before it needed more than a new set of bearings.
Given that said chassis is mostly aluminum that'll be a while...
But then again, I've heard of motors made during Edison's time still being in service, and AC induction motors, properly treated, are about the longest living electric motor as well...
I wonder if we might see a return of reupholstery/interior refurbishment places - rather than replace your Tesla, swap the battery for a new one while you have it repainted, seats replaced, and dash fixed up a bit?
According to a quick Google search, that's $31,252. The question is, can they really shave enough off the cost of batteries (keep in mind a lithium battery is made from materials that must be mined and processed, it's not really about recouping R&D at this point) and still turn a profit at that price?
That's what the 'gigafactory' is intended to do. Cut the cost of the battery in half. Going by multiple websites, that would drop the cost of the 85kwh battery below $10k, and seeing as how they can produce cars for under $20k today, it seems doable.
It's probably something stupid like the emissions testing law having no exemption for a pure battery vehicle. Or maybe that it's also a 'safety' check.
No, I do not think that is even an unanswered question at this point. The biggest question I have is, will there be a STANDARD connector for quick charging batteries so that after driving 200 miles, can we re-charge the batteries in a few minutes no matter what brand of car we're driving?
If you're willing to pay the money, Tesla's deploying stations that can swap your battery in 90 seconds. If you're willing to sit down and have a bite to eat, Tesla's freesuperchargers will kick the requisite 200 miles into the battery over the course of ~20 minutes.
As for the 'standard connector', we don't have that yet, I agree. Currently it seems to be a toss-up between Tesla's propriatory connector(that it's willing to license..), J1772, and CHAdeMO. CHAdeMO is currently losing, being the 'nastiest' plug. The 'problem' with J1772 is that most such stations are substantially less powerful than a Supercharging station for Teslas.
Tesla does include a mobile connector that will attach to all the common plugs in the USA, from a 15A@120V standard socket all the way up to 50A@240V ones intended for RVs. No dedicated EV chargers handy? Find an RV park and you can still charge relatively quickly. 'Most' homes have at least 1 dryer socket somewhere, which should be able to charge a Tesla up enough overnight to get to a supercharger.
Right now, the ONLY thing that is preventing me from getting a Tesla is that I have to travel longer than 500 miles a few times a year, and renting a car for a week, three times a year is too expensive an option.
2015 might be your year then, that's when Tesla plans to have all of the USA within range of it's supercharger network. You say 'longer than 500 miles', With a Tesla that's 'start off full, charge maybe twice at supercharging stations, probably arrive at destination with a good bit of range remaining'.
In a nutshell make the batteries themselves removable and generic, but what do I know.
They are removable. The battery pack is roughly like an armored skateboard bolted to the bottom of the car. A mechanical swap takes 90 seconds.
As for generic, Tesla uses more or less standard 18650 cells from panasonic, basically the AA of LiIon rechargable batteries. The pack itself is propriatory at the moment, but what can you do? From what I understand the 'same' pack with generational improvements are going to be used with the Model X.
Nice try. They measured a drag race up to 111 miles per hour.
Average of 111.3 mph. Top speed of 114 mph, which to me indicates that the car hit 'top speed' rather quickly, per the article.
I also know that if you drag race normal gasoline vehicles and calculate the fuel efficiency from it you'll generally get a figure in the 'gallons per mile' range.
The site said their measurements indicate that Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA)’s Model S went from zero to 60 miles per hour in just 3.9 seconds and ran the quarter-mile at 12.4 seconds with an average of 111.3 miles per hour.
Oh certainly. Thing is, with stuff like them having to undertake 'special measures' to flip one, it sounds like it's a very stable platform for driving in as well.
The extra sprung mass of the battery might be part of what's keeping 'road noise' perception well below what most people are used to.
Perhaps it hasn't been addressed much, but from what I've seen part of the 'protection' is that you would be more or less continously extruding new cable(on the order of a couple miles a day!), so as time goes by the cable WOULD be refreshed.
Besides that, if you're sensible you're going to orient your ribbon so it's the narrow end that's facing most probable impacts, highly limiting it's cross section. Then you have to factor in that this material will be the strongest material used in space to date; it should be quite resistant to those effects.
Implied, maybe. But there are typically serious gains to be made quality wise when you go from the bottom end to the mid end, but going above that quickly gets you into 'bling' being more important than functionality.
A car built for quality isn't going to be as cheap as one built for that purpose, but it should fulfill various other functions better.
Where does the law of reducing returns kick in? Hard to say.
As bigjarom mentioned, what's holding us back right now from cheap lift via skyhook is that we haven't quite gotten our carbon nanotube strength up high enough. It's theoretically quite possible.
After that, it's just a question of how do we get enough materials and probably some sort of ribbon* making facility into GEO to actually do the laying. One idea I have is that rather than having to ship all materials to GEO, only to drop it towards the earth, you have a descending constructor that you supply. Though the orbital mechanics of resupplying it can get quite hairy...
*Modern design philosophies has the cable being more of a flat ribbon than circular.
Then you're wasting so much drone time and munitions that it's still more expensive. Plus, of course, unless you're killing everybody else period, the sanctions will kill you.
Oh, I agree that most of the time a heat pump system would be more efficient, and having one shouldn't add much weight at all as you're only extending the capabilities of the AC system a bit. Yes, cooling/heating the car while it's still plugged in should help as well. I suggested a hydrocarbon heat source for a number of reasons: 1. Functionality - you still get heat even at -40 2. Range - In extreme cold the heat source can not only heat the cabin, but the battery as well, enabling you to pull more of the energy from it, plus you're not using electricity to provide the heat. 3. Safety - If something happens, you're still capable of heat with an exhausted battery.
The fact that it's an econobox has more to do with that than it being an electric. As we see with the Model S and the roadster before it, performance is very possible for electric vehicles.
Slashdot Mirror
If I remember right, they do, and it's probably like their pollution standards - on the book as the best in the world, but having so little bite that you have to create a national/global scandal in order to actually have them enforced against you.
Such as putting melamine in milk. A couple people were executed for that one.
I remember the proposals for sewer fiber networks at least a decade ago, even saw the robot that did the placement.
As for the gut bacteria, haven't we seen this with species like fruit flies? Their sperm packages are actually toxic(to kill competing sperm), too many generations difference between them though and it'll kill the female.
EVs are very much upcoming. The only thing holding Tesla back from making more cars is that they're already consuming something like half the LiIon cells produced on the planet.
Can't you just read a book or magazine or sleep if you aren't driving?
Sometimes. Sometimes it makes me nauseous. Looking out the window only works for so long.
It would probably be difficult to build the "disturbance detecting" chip in a way that couldn't be circumvented but that also wouldn't trip accidentally.
To be more clear, my 'tamper chip' is merely a storage device. If voltage is lost at pin 1, dump, if voltage present on pin 2, dump. If voltage on pins 3&4 don't match within tolerances, dump. After that, it's all about sensors hooked up. Careful design can minimize 'false alarm' trips, depending on where your relative paranoia lays. I've worked with equipment that have tamper alarms that a strong *bump* can trigger, then the device is unusable until you use a special key on it(and said key only works so many times).
Yes, the light idea is fairly simple to bypass if you know about it, but it also makes trying to hack the phone a pain if you have to do it in the dark. Makes you more likely to trip the other sensors - cut in the wrong spot, lift the wrong bit of case, etc...
That's why you get multiple people in a committee helping out. Other options include pressurizing the phone(you'd need a temperature sensor to to map the expected pressure).
The way I'd have the destruct work would be to encrypt everything and keep the key in a special tamper chip that will dump the key if a tamper trips.
Anyways, there are options to screw up your little proposal, such as a sensor inside that looks for disturbance. A light sensor where there should be no light, for example. Put a series of wires along the inside of the case, and if the resistance changes, such as from somebody cutting a wire trying to dremel their way in, trigger the tamper. Another option would be a button or something that's depressed normally. Remove a section of the case and it trips.
Oh, and you generally don't do a tamper 'proof' coating on screws, you do a 'tamper-evident' coating.
Want your own tamper evident coating? Buy a bottle of the cheapest, cheesiest glitter nail polish you can find. Coat the screws with a layer. Take a high resolution picture of each screw. Suspect tampering? compare the current coating with the picture.
As for deleting the data off the device, I'd probably simply encrypt everything on the device, with the key stored in a specific chip designed to dump said key if anything triggers it. No Key = No Data.
It's doable, but you need an Orion(*) class launcher to get enough material to GEO to build the first one.
Citation? I provided two sources that estimated the first cable would weigh between 9 and 20 metric tons. Regular heavy lifters can do that today.
Also, while a full length cable is the most useful for gravity launches, you don't need it if you stage your 'center' station an appropriate bit past the center. Included in one of the sites I found when doing research was a calculation on how long to make the outside cable, with a mass on the end rather than just more cable, on the basis of cost per kilogram to lift the end mass and cost per kilometer of ribbon. The longer the ribbon, the less mass you need, but if ribbon is 1000X as expensive as the endcap mass(which is effectively just the launch costs), then the cheapest system will still have a short outside ribbon.
Of course, once you have an extensive enough space presense in Earth Orbit and you start looking to visit elsewhere, the math changes as avoiding launch costs for those missions justifies extending the ribbon.
As for building from the ground up, I'd presume that the 'starter cable' would include enough mass on the opposite end to balance things out while you drag up more supplies. Obviously you can't just haul up another unless it's absolutely tiny - the 20 ton seed cable is only capable of lifing 600 kg. It also depends on how you end up constructing the cable - can the climbers 'weld' new ribbon to the existing or not? Or would it be better to have a special station up in GEO that can perform a complicated/touchy 'welding' process to actually increase the length of cable? What if you don't even bother connecting the ribbons, and have any climber connect to some or all of them individually?
Assuming that worked--you're using up more oxygen and more propellant--you could cut it down to two trips--one with five passengers and one with two. I'd be willing to bet that a Soyuz didn't have fuel to do that.
Nope, very much not enough fuel. Though perhaps a customized Soyuz launch could have reached them.
A critical item to realize is that you don't necessarily need to immediately evacuate them - get an unmanned cargo ship close enough stuffed with CO2 scrubbers, extra oxygen, batteries, and food should extend survival past 30 days to get something man-rated there. One problem I see is that they don't have 9 space suits to effect the transfer. So you might need to rig up some sort of pressurized tube*.
*Personally I'd go with near pure O2 in the tube, sufficient to keep the person concious, but the pressure low enough that you can keep it sealed.
very few airplanes need in-air service.
I remember reading about a plane where there was a crawspace so you could do maintenance on engines while in flight. But I'll point out that cargo ships are often out of dock for 30+ days at a time, while planes are hardly ever up for more than half a day, after which they go through large amounts of maintenance.
You have a number of mistakes here:
the quantities required of neodymium (for the magnets in the motors), copper (for the moving coils in the motors) and lithium (for the batteries) to push around 2 tonnes of metal is basically... insane. there's not enough available on the planet. something has to give.
1. AC Induction motors like what are in the Tesla don't need rare earth magnets.
2. There's almost certainly more copper in your house than in a Tesla.
3. Besides's GrahamCox's mentioning that Lithium is actually very common, just generally widely distributed rather than concentrated(makes mining it a bit more painful).
I'd expect the chassis to rust out before it needed more than a new set of bearings.
Given that said chassis is mostly aluminum that'll be a while...
But then again, I've heard of motors made during Edison's time still being in service, and AC induction motors, properly treated, are about the longest living electric motor as well...
I wonder if we might see a return of reupholstery/interior refurbishment places - rather than replace your Tesla, swap the battery for a new one while you have it repainted, seats replaced, and dash fixed up a bit?
According to a quick Google search, that's $31,252. The question is, can they really shave enough off the cost of batteries (keep in mind a lithium battery is made from materials that must be mined and processed, it's not really about recouping R&D at this point) and still turn a profit at that price?
That's what the 'gigafactory' is intended to do. Cut the cost of the battery in half. Going by multiple websites, that would drop the cost of the 85kwh battery below $10k, and seeing as how they can produce cars for under $20k today, it seems doable.
It's probably something stupid like the emissions testing law having no exemption for a pure battery vehicle. Or maybe that it's also a 'safety' check.
No, I do not think that is even an unanswered question at this point. The biggest question I have is, will there be a STANDARD connector for quick charging batteries so that after driving 200 miles, can we re-charge the batteries in a few minutes no matter what brand of car we're driving?
If you're willing to pay the money, Tesla's deploying stations that can swap your battery in 90 seconds. If you're willing to sit down and have a bite to eat, Tesla's free superchargers will kick the requisite 200 miles into the battery over the course of ~20 minutes.
As for the 'standard connector', we don't have that yet, I agree. Currently it seems to be a toss-up between Tesla's propriatory connector(that it's willing to license..), J1772, and CHAdeMO. CHAdeMO is currently losing, being the 'nastiest' plug. The 'problem' with J1772 is that most such stations are substantially less powerful than a Supercharging station for Teslas.
Tesla does include a mobile connector that will attach to all the common plugs in the USA, from a 15A@120V standard socket all the way up to 50A@240V ones intended for RVs. No dedicated EV chargers handy? Find an RV park and you can still charge relatively quickly. 'Most' homes have at least 1 dryer socket somewhere, which should be able to charge a Tesla up enough overnight to get to a supercharger.
Right now, the ONLY thing that is preventing me from getting a Tesla is that I have to travel longer than 500 miles a few times a year, and renting a car for a week, three times a year is too expensive an option.
2015 might be your year then, that's when Tesla plans to have all of the USA within range of it's supercharger network. You say 'longer than 500 miles', With a Tesla that's 'start off full, charge maybe twice at supercharging stations, probably arrive at destination with a good bit of range remaining'.
Lifting all the "strands" necessary would take many thousands of launches.
Not from what I'm seeing. At least one source says that a 'starter' cable can be had as light as 9 metric tons. Another says 20.
A Falcon Heavy can lift over twice that to orbit, though maybe not all the way to geosync...
After you get the first thread down, you use that thread to lift more mass to increase capacity.
In a nutshell make the batteries themselves removable and generic, but what do I know.
They are removable. The battery pack is roughly like an armored skateboard bolted to the bottom of the car. A mechanical swap takes 90 seconds.
As for generic, Tesla uses more or less standard 18650 cells from panasonic, basically the AA of LiIon rechargable batteries. The pack itself is propriatory at the moment, but what can you do? From what I understand the 'same' pack with generational improvements are going to be used with the Model X.
Nice try. They measured a drag race up to 111 miles per hour.
Average of 111.3 mph. Top speed of 114 mph, which to me indicates that the car hit 'top speed' rather quickly, per the article.
I also know that if you drag race normal gasoline vehicles and calculate the fuel efficiency from it you'll generally get a figure in the 'gallons per mile' range.
The site said their measurements indicate that Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA)’s Model S went from zero to 60 miles per hour in just 3.9 seconds and ran the quarter-mile at 12.4 seconds with an average of 111.3 miles per hour.
Oh certainly. Thing is, with stuff like them having to undertake 'special measures' to flip one, it sounds like it's a very stable platform for driving in as well.
The extra sprung mass of the battery might be part of what's keeping 'road noise' perception well below what most people are used to.
Perhaps it hasn't been addressed much, but from what I've seen part of the 'protection' is that you would be more or less continously extruding new cable(on the order of a couple miles a day!), so as time goes by the cable WOULD be refreshed.
Besides that, if you're sensible you're going to orient your ribbon so it's the narrow end that's facing most probable impacts, highly limiting it's cross section. Then you have to factor in that this material will be the strongest material used in space to date; it should be quite resistant to those effects.
Implied, maybe. But there are typically serious gains to be made quality wise when you go from the bottom end to the mid end, but going above that quickly gets you into 'bling' being more important than functionality.
A car built for quality isn't going to be as cheap as one built for that purpose, but it should fulfill various other functions better.
Where does the law of reducing returns kick in? Hard to say.
As bigjarom mentioned, what's holding us back right now from cheap lift via skyhook is that we haven't quite gotten our carbon nanotube strength up high enough. It's theoretically quite possible.
After that, it's just a question of how do we get enough materials and probably some sort of ribbon* making facility into GEO to actually do the laying. One idea I have is that rather than having to ship all materials to GEO, only to drop it towards the earth, you have a descending constructor that you supply. Though the orbital mechanics of resupplying it can get quite hairy...
*Modern design philosophies has the cable being more of a flat ribbon than circular.
Then you're wasting so much drone time and munitions that it's still more expensive. Plus, of course, unless you're killing everybody else period, the sanctions will kill you.
Oh, I agree that most of the time a heat pump system would be more efficient, and having one shouldn't add much weight at all as you're only extending the capabilities of the AC system a bit. Yes, cooling/heating the car while it's still plugged in should help as well. I suggested a hydrocarbon heat source for a number of reasons:
1. Functionality - you still get heat even at -40
2. Range - In extreme cold the heat source can not only heat the cabin, but the battery as well, enabling you to pull more of the energy from it, plus you're not using electricity to provide the heat.
3. Safety - If something happens, you're still capable of heat with an exhausted battery.
Its an electric car, not a sports car.
The fact that it's an econobox has more to do with that than it being an electric. As we see with the Model S and the roadster before it, performance is very possible for electric vehicles.