My experience driving my Tesla for two years is that the whole range anxiety thing is disappearing very quickly. I just got back from a trip from the Bay Area to Reno and back. In every case where I stopped to grab lunch or dinner my car was fully charged before I finished my meal. In one case I stopped just to make a quick pit stop and pick up a 6-pack of cider and by the time I returned to my car I had added another 40 miles of range, and the only reason I stopped was I had to stop, not my car. I had my choice of places where I could stop too as well as a choice in routes I could take. The car also tells me how much range I will have once I reach the destination and will route me to superchargers along the way if needed. This is a vast improvement over a year ago when I made the same trip. A year ago there was one supercharger that was somewhat off the route. I had to go to Folsom to charge then switch over to highway 80. I arrived in Reno with around 20 miles of range left. This time the software was updated to automatically take the superchargers into account. By the end of this year it looks like 5, 101 and 395 will be well covered for north/south and by next year 99 will also be covered. I can also charge at just about any RV park that has power hookups and Tesla has been seeding 20KW chargers at many hotels in vacation areas like Carmel and Monterey. By the time their low cost car will be available you should be able to drive just about anywhere.
The time for charging is not the big deal people make it out to be. In most cases there are places to eat or shop close by.
On the return trip I stopped in Truckee to grab a quick bite at a Panda Express. Before I finished my car was fully charged. I could have driven a lot further but I was hungry. Later I stopped in Manteca to charge and eat and again, my car was fully charged well before I finished eating. Charging is not like filling up with gas. When filling up my gas car I need to get out of the car and stand there filling it up. There is no reason to stay at the car while it is charging although you could. It's also a chance to stretch your legs and use the money you would normally spend on gas on food or other things.
I agree. It also just goes to show how far behind GM is compared to Tesla. I've had my Tesla Model S for over two years and I have to say that GM's response has been pathetic at best. Their Cadillac ELR was supposed to be the Tesla killer, it failed miserably. Tesla is years ahead when it comes to battery technology, having much higher energy density at much lower cost. Tesla's skateboard design is also much better when it comes to interior room and storage space.
Saying a 3.3KW charger is adequate is a joke. The only reason that it's even possible to go up to 20KW with the SAE J1772 connector is because Tesla fought hard for it. I have a 20KW charger at home and it comes in handy. Sadly few public charging stations come anywhere near that, though most I've used will handle at least 6KW (30-32A, 208/240V) and the RV hookups are often 10KW (40A, 240V). Usually I rarely bother to use the public charging units unless they're free since it's cheaper to just charge at home where I can charge at 80A, 240V which adds around 55 miles of range per hour. The one time I had to use a public charging station to reach my destination it was painful since it only added 18 miles of range per hour so I was stuck an hour waiting until I had enough range to reach the Gilroy supercharger. Fortunately it looks like by the end of the year they'll have a spot around Monterey.
GM also has no real answer to Tesla's supercharger network which is years ahead of anyone else. I just used it a few days ago to travel from the Bay Area to Reno. In every case, it took longer for me to eat lunch or dinner than it took for my car to charge. Hell, I added 40 miles of range (which I didn't even need) when I stopped in Truckee just to use the restroom and pick up a 6-pack of hard cider at Safeway. Tesla's network is building out very quickly (go to their supercharger site to see). I made the same trip to Reno last year but this year there were 4 more superchargers along the route. Last year I had to make a short jog over to Folsom to charge, this year I had my choice of places along the route. Right now there are multiple routes across the country. I can drive all the way from San Diego to Edmonton, Canada or anywhere along the East Coast. By the end of this year it looks like most of the major north/south routes in California will be covered, 5, 101 and 395 and by the end of next year 99 will also be covered. They have also been helping seed a lot of hotels around the country with 20KW chargers in a lot of the vacation spots.
As far as batteries go, Panasonic may be manufacturing Tesla's batteries, but Tesla owns much of the intellectual property of their batteries and holds numerous patents on them. The Tesla batteries are quite a bit cheaper with a higher energy density and they seem to be fairly reliable as well.
Tesla has also shown that it's possible to create a car with a very low coefficient of drag that isn't butt ugly. I say this as a former Prius owner.
Which is funny, since Tesla has one of the lowest coefficient of drag of any commercial vehicle sold, which just goes to show that you don't have to be butt-ugly to have a low coefficient of drag.
That reminds me of the first accident I was in. I was 16 and had only been driving for around a year (6 months with a license) when while driving home from school the car in front of me suddenly changed lanes without warning. In front of me was a car stopped to make a left turn over a pair of double yellow lines (clearly illegal). The car I drove (one of my parent's cars, a 1970 Toyota Corona) had really crappy brakes, they were supposed to be power brakes, but I think Toyota forgot the power part. With every ounce of strength I managed to stop in time (it was impossible to make the wheels lock up, the brakes were that crappy!) but the car behind me wasn't so lucky. He hit me, forcing me into the car in front (who should never have stopped there to begin with). When the cop arrived the first thing he said was I was at fault, likely because I was 16, until it was shown that the only reason my car got sandwiched was due to the driver behind me and the stupid woman who stopped to make a left turn there. So even though I rear-ended the car in front of me, I wasn't at fault. I hated that car but the damned engine wouldn't die on it.
This reminds me of my grandmother who drove with a suspended license and Alzheimers. She'd get lost driving around the block and my grandfather wasn't much better. Hell, she even got a new car when the dealership convinced her to trade in her old car because the check engine light came on for only a few hundred dollars, even though she didn't have a valid drivers license and obviously wasn't all there. Thankfully the police were finally able to put a stop to her driving and we were able to commit her to a place where she could get the proper care. We didn't know (but suspected) that she was driving and the way the laws are it can be difficult to stop. When she showed up at the retirement home where my grandfather was staying they called the police because they knew she shouldn't be driving and she got belligerent, suddenly making it a lot easier to get her committed and take away her keys for good.
4 out of 48 is useless. You need to look at the number of miles driven. I suspect that these cars drive a lot of miles. A more meaningful metric is how many accidents per 100K miles driven. Also one needs to look at who was at fault for the accident and if it was avoidable. In two of the four cases, the cars were not under autonomous control at the time. I suspect that when all of the data is taken into account that the cars are safer than average.
I saw a pedestrian get hit because of this. The pedestrian waited until the sign said "don't walk" and the light for cross traffic turned green before she proceeded to walk across the street. One lane had a line of cars, the other lane was free and the light was green for some time while we waited. The pedestrian stepped right in front of a truck who had the right of way. Fortunately two of the people in the car I was in were EMTs. It was a clear case of the pedestrian being at fault. A few weeks later the exact same thing almost happened but at the last second the pedestrian realized his mistake and ran and missed getting hit by only a few inches.
Even with defensive driving some accidents are unavoidable. I've been in several where I was stopped with nowhere to go. Once I was waiting in traffic at an off-ramp and got side-swiped because the other inexperienced driver panicked when changing lanes. I've been backed into while stopped in a parking lot (despite laying on the horn). I've been rear-ended after being forced to panic stop by an idiot driver who stopped to make a left turn over a double yellow line. The car in front of me suddenly changed lanes, I stopped (barely, I was 16 and my parent's clunker had wish brakes, you wish they'd work), the car behind me didn't. My favorite was when I was driving highway 17 in the Santa Cruz mountains during a heavy rainstorm. A car two cars ahead of me hit the brakes on a curve, lost control and did a 360 spinout, hitting the car in front of me. I avoided him, or so I thought, until his car rear-ended me. That took talent! Fortunately no damage to my clunker.
It depends on the number of miles driven for those four cars and where they were driven. I suspect that those cars are driving a hell of a lot more than your standard driver. You also need to look at where the accidents happened and what the statistics are for that area. Also, who was at fault and could the accident have been avoided? In two of the four cases, the cars were not under autonomous control at the time.
Battery evolution has been moving along at a fairly steady pace averaging around a 5-8% improvement in capacity per year. In addition, the longevity has been steadily increasing and charge times have been steadily decreasing and cost have been dropping fairly rapidly, much faster than predicted.
If you compare today's batteries used in cars compared to those a decade ago there is really no comparison. Today's batteries have much higher capacities, much longer life and at a much lower cost.
Here's a chart from 2012. Tesla is selling their grid storage battery packs at around $250/KWh and with the gigafactory the prices will be further reduced. This is the price point where BEVs start to become price competitive with gasoline cars.
The Tesla AC induction motor has a fairly flat torque curve to around 6000RPM where it starts to drop off gradually. There are no permanent magnets in the Tesla motor. The synchronous motors seem to drop off faster in their torque curves from what I've seen.
As far as the energy required to build batteries, Tesla's gigafactory will be solar powered. They also last a lot longer than 5 years as has been shown with the original Roadster batteries, which are lasting much better than they expected. The model S batteries are much improved over the original Roadster batteries as well. If they die after 5 years, why would Tesla offer an unlimited mile 8-year warranty. From some of my conversations with Tesla they should last well over 8 years for most people. If the full cycle range were limited to only 3,000 cycles that's still well over 600,000 miles for the 85KWh battery pack since you get well over 200 miles per charge. Owners have already exceeded 100,000 miles and not seen any significant drop in range or performance. Recycling the batteries takes even less energy than it does to produce the batteries using virgin material. The batteries also contain only around 3% lithium. The other materials are pretty common, carbon, cobalt and aluminum.
I agree, that's not a hack. I work on bootloaders and need to directly access low-level hardware registers and whatnot on 64-bit MIPS processors. I only need about a page of assembly code to do things like set up part of the L1 cache as stack memory and initialize a few registers before switching to C code. For some of the registers that require assembly to access we have macros to hide it. I certainly don't consider it a hack. Even inline assembly isn't necessarily a hack since some things require it, such as atomic operations, dealing with caches and stuff like that.
This is great news. When I was in college the microprocessor design class used a variant of MIPS though this started the quarter after I took the class. In my class we had to wire-wrap a 16-bit MIPS-like CPU using discrete chips and a couple programmable ones. MIPS is relatively easy to implement for educational purposes due to the simple instruction encoding and clean architecture. MIPS, unlike some other processors like ARM, also allows you to add your own instructions using coprocessor 2 which can be a great way to differentiate a processor and enhance it for different tasks. MIPS is a much simpler design compared to ARM or even PowerPC. MIPS is still widely used, especially in networking devices.
For example, my current employer has added a lot of instructions useful for encryption and hashing as well as some useful atomic instructions.
The move from 32-bits to 64-bits is actually quite clean on MIPS which did not require any major changes to the instruction set other than adding 64-bit instructions and sign-extending the 32-bit instructions. There are a few warts on it, such as the fact that the instruction following a branch instruction is always executed (SPARC is the same way). This is no longer all that useful with modern superscalar architectures and the branch delay slot can't always be filled with something useful. Things are also a bit cramped for 32-bits since only the lower 2GB of memory is available for user-space. Kernel space (KSEG0) is from 0x80000000-0x9fffffff and an uncached copy is at 0xa0000000-0xbfffffff. 0xC0000000 - 0xDFFFFFFF can be mapped using the translation look-aside buffer, making another 512MB available to the kernel. Both of these address ranges map directly to the lower 512MB of RAM which somewhat limits things. In 64-bit mode this isn't a problem though since all addresses are sign-extended. Another nice feature in kernel mode is that all physical addresses can be directly accessed, without requiring any special mapping other than setting bit 63 to 1.
Most MIPS processors do not use a hardware page table walker, instead relying on a software configured translation look-aside buffer. When there's a page miss, a quick interrupt occurs to replace an entry in that table with some hardware assist. This goes back to the original philosophy of keeping the hardware design simple. Due to the way it works, it allows total freedom with how page tables are represented in the operating system though there can be a slightly bigger overhead compared to hardware page tables.
The instruction set is quite clean and the instruction encodings are quite simple with only a few classes of instructions, unlike ARM64. Instruction decoding can be handled with only a few look-up tables. MIPS assembly language is far simpler and straight forward than, say X86 and it's quite mature, though not all processors implement all instructions. Many embedded MIPS processors lack floating point and the multimedia extensions, and many are 32-bit only. This helps cut cost and power when making chips for devices that don't need these features. MIPS also can scale up nicely. For example, the chips I work with currently scale up to 48 cores per chip and with two chips running in tandem Linux runs on 96 cores, all with a coherent cache. The newer ABIs are nice in that the only real difference between N32 and N64 is that pointers are 64-bits instead of 32-bits, just about everything else is the same so you get all of the features of 64-bit registers but keep the compactness of 32-bit pointers. This has been present for many years and is a fairly recent addition to X86 and ARM.
Bluetooth low power can use very little power. I have some Bluetooth Stick 'n Find stickers that claim to go 9 months on a cr2032 battery. My experience with them is that they last at least that long. It's great when I misplace my keys.
I wear my watch all the time, including in the shower. I like it because it does one thing well, tell me the time and date. I never have to set it except for daylight savings (it synchronizes itself every night) and I don't have to wind it up or charge it (it charges itself via solar). It's also waterproof to 100M and pretty tough (I tend to be hard on watches). If it breaks I'm also not out $600 and it won't go obsolete in a year.
My father was is engineer who worked on some aerospace and defense stuff while I was growing up. He worked on a data recorder that went up on Skylab. He offered to fly up and fix it if anything went wrong. My mother has always been big on astronomy. I've been Elon Musk's various ventures for quite a while (and ended up buying a Tesla). I've always been impressed with his forward thinking and the smart people he surrounds himself with. My day job is working on the U-Boot bootloader and a little Linux kernel work. Maybe someday it'll even be pushed upstream, but right now it's always not enough time and it's a LOT of code, significantly more than all of the ARM SOCs combined.
Which is basically what I said in my second paragraph. It was a good talk. It's not everyday when you can sit down and talk with a rocket scientist in a casual environment.
A couple of months ago I was having a discussion with a fellow from Space X who designs the hydraulic systems and we spoke about a number of issues. This was right after the failed landing due to it running out of hydraulic fluid. I asked about how reusable the engines are and he said that they run test burns lasting hours. The launch is only a few minutes. According to what he said, it should just be a simple matter of refueling and adding more hydraulic fluid and probably some other simple things without having to do a major overhaul. The engines are very reliable.
I asked about why they don't reuse the hydraulic fluid and he said that it was cheaper and lighter to not reuse it. He also said that they knew it could run out and that the next version would have more.
I had this problem and after trying several things I finally found a solution: Buy an Anker USB cable. I tried just about everything else with my tablet. I have a USB power meter. The Nexus 7 2012 seems to be extremely sensitive to the resistance in the USB cable. The Anker cable is much fatter than most cables I've tried. Before I switched to this cable I've had my tablet go dead while plugged into the charger.
Here's what else I tried: I replaced the USB connector on my tablet (fairly easy to do). This helped but I still had problems. I tried numerous chargers including the Anker charger, which helped but didn't solve the problem. I tried many different USB cables. Some would help briefly but none ever charged quickly, the best one was the stock one that came with the tablet, but even that didn't work too well.
Once I switched to the Anker cable I was able to charge at over 1A for the first time. None of the other cables came close and I tried a lot of cables, including the Amazon Basics cables (which are otherwise nice cables).
I don't see much drop in range in my Tesla when I use the AC. Heating it will impact the range, though if I pre-heat it using shore power then the range drop is quite a bit less.
Hydrogen is not cleaner and generates more greenhouse gases than a decent hybrid or diesel vehicle. The only way to make hydrogen in an affordable manner is to crack natural gas. You use 20% of your energy capacity of the hydrogen just compressing it. And the hydrogen must either be generated on-site (around 70% efficient) or transported in tanker trucks which aren't very efficient for the energy density. Fuel cells also suck. They're maybe 50% efficient at best and quickly start to degrade. By 70K miles the fuel cell output has dropped to around 70% of its rated capacity and have dropped considerably in their efficiency.
The Tesla battery typically contains over 90% of its original capacity at 100,000 miles.
Fuel cell cars right now are very heavily subsidized and don't make a lot of sense. They're certainly not very green when you take into account the well to wheel efficincy. A hybrid vehicle or a diesel vehicle is more efficient than a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle.
That's what I ran into years ago when I ordered my Prius. I could get any car I wanted as long as it was white or possibly black. I wanted neither and a certain set of options. I had to wait 6 months to get the car I wanted, and it was my 3rd choice for color. They kept offering me white cars which I didn't want.
When I ordered my Tesla I chose exactly what color and options I wanted. I still had to wait 6 months but I got exactly what I ordered. The service I've gotten from Tesla is far better than the service I have gotten at any dealership by far.
The dealers like to make the claim that they protect the consumer. This is total BS. My father bought a Fisker Karma (I tried to talk him out of it) and once they went bankrupt, so did his service and warranty support.
To understand her position you need to understand where she's coming from. She's probably one of the few politicians to have seen gun violence first hand. She was there when the SF Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated. She grabbed Harvey Milk's wrist to check for a pulse and her finger entered one of Milk's bullet wounds and was badly shaken by the event.
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My experience driving my Tesla for two years is that the whole range anxiety thing is disappearing very quickly. I just got back from a trip from the Bay Area to Reno and back. In every case where I stopped to grab lunch or dinner my car was fully charged before I finished my meal. In one case I stopped just to make a quick pit stop and pick up a 6-pack of cider and by the time I returned to my car I had added another 40 miles of range, and the only reason I stopped was I had to stop, not my car. I had my choice of places where I could stop too as well as a choice in routes I could take. The car also tells me how much range I will have once I reach the destination and will route me to superchargers along the way if needed. This is a vast improvement over a year ago when I made the same trip. A year ago there was one supercharger that was somewhat off the route. I had to go to Folsom to charge then switch over to highway 80. I arrived in Reno with around 20 miles of range left. This time the software was updated to automatically take the superchargers into account. By the end of this year it looks like 5, 101 and 395 will be well covered for north/south and by next year 99 will also be covered. I can also charge at just about any RV park that has power hookups and Tesla has been seeding 20KW chargers at many hotels in vacation areas like Carmel and Monterey. By the time their low cost car will be available you should be able to drive just about anywhere.
The time for charging is not the big deal people make it out to be. In most cases there are places to eat or shop close by.
On the return trip I stopped in Truckee to grab a quick bite at a Panda Express. Before I finished my car was fully charged. I could have driven a lot further but I was hungry. Later I stopped in Manteca to charge and eat and again, my car was fully charged well before I finished eating. Charging is not like filling up with gas. When filling up my gas car I need to get out of the car and stand there filling it up. There is no reason to stay at the car while it is charging although you could. It's also a chance to stretch your legs and use the money you would normally spend on gas on food or other things.
I agree. It also just goes to show how far behind GM is compared to Tesla. I've had my Tesla Model S for over two years and I have to say that GM's response has been pathetic at best. Their Cadillac ELR was supposed to be the Tesla killer, it failed miserably. Tesla is years ahead when it comes to battery technology, having much higher energy density at much lower cost. Tesla's skateboard design is also much better when it comes to interior room and storage space.
Saying a 3.3KW charger is adequate is a joke. The only reason that it's even possible to go up to 20KW with the SAE J1772 connector is because Tesla fought hard for it. I have a 20KW charger at home and it comes in handy. Sadly few public charging stations come anywhere near that, though most I've used will handle at least 6KW (30-32A, 208/240V) and the RV hookups are often 10KW (40A, 240V). Usually I rarely bother to use the public charging units unless they're free since it's cheaper to just charge at home where I can charge at 80A, 240V which adds around 55 miles of range per hour. The one time I had to use a public charging station to reach my destination it was painful since it only added 18 miles of range per hour so I was stuck an hour waiting until I had enough range to reach the Gilroy supercharger. Fortunately it looks like by the end of the year they'll have a spot around Monterey.
GM also has no real answer to Tesla's supercharger network which is years ahead of anyone else. I just used it a few days ago to travel from the Bay Area to Reno. In every case, it took longer for me to eat lunch or dinner than it took for my car to charge. Hell, I added 40 miles of range (which I didn't even need) when I stopped in Truckee just to use the restroom and pick up a 6-pack of hard cider at Safeway. Tesla's network is building out very quickly (go to their supercharger site to see). I made the same trip to Reno last year but this year there were 4 more superchargers along the route. Last year I had to make a short jog over to Folsom to charge, this year I had my choice of places along the route. Right now there are multiple routes across the country. I can drive all the way from San Diego to Edmonton, Canada or anywhere along the East Coast. By the end of this year it looks like most of the major north/south routes in California will be covered, 5, 101 and 395 and by the end of next year 99 will also be covered. They have also been helping seed a lot of hotels around the country with 20KW chargers in a lot of the vacation spots.
As far as batteries go, Panasonic may be manufacturing Tesla's batteries, but Tesla owns much of the intellectual property of their batteries and holds numerous patents on them. The Tesla batteries are quite a bit cheaper with a higher energy density and they seem to be fairly reliable as well.
Tesla has also shown that it's possible to create a car with a very low coefficient of drag that isn't butt ugly. I say this as a former Prius owner.
Which is funny, since Tesla has one of the lowest coefficient of drag of any commercial vehicle sold, which just goes to show that you don't have to be butt-ugly to have a low coefficient of drag.
That reminds me of the first accident I was in. I was 16 and had only been driving for around a year (6 months with a license) when while driving home from school the car in front of me suddenly changed lanes without warning. In front of me was a car stopped to make a left turn over a pair of double yellow lines (clearly illegal). The car I drove (one of my parent's cars, a 1970 Toyota Corona) had really crappy brakes, they were supposed to be power brakes, but I think Toyota forgot the power part. With every ounce of strength I managed to stop in time (it was impossible to make the wheels lock up, the brakes were that crappy!) but the car behind me wasn't so lucky. He hit me, forcing me into the car in front (who should never have stopped there to begin with). When the cop arrived the first thing he said was I was at fault, likely because I was 16, until it was shown that the only reason my car got sandwiched was due to the driver behind me and the stupid woman who stopped to make a left turn there. So even though I rear-ended the car in front of me, I wasn't at fault. I hated that car but the damned engine wouldn't die on it.
This reminds me of my grandmother who drove with a suspended license and Alzheimers. She'd get lost driving around the block and my grandfather wasn't much better. Hell, she even got a new car when the dealership convinced her to trade in her old car because the check engine light came on for only a few hundred dollars, even though she didn't have a valid drivers license and obviously wasn't all there. Thankfully the police were finally able to put a stop to her driving and we were able to commit her to a place where she could get the proper care. We didn't know (but suspected) that she was driving and the way the laws are it can be difficult to stop. When she showed up at the retirement home where my grandfather was staying they called the police because they knew she shouldn't be driving and she got belligerent, suddenly making it a lot easier to get her committed and take away her keys for good.
4 out of 48 is useless. You need to look at the number of miles driven. I suspect that these cars drive a lot of miles. A more meaningful metric is how many accidents per 100K miles driven. Also one needs to look at who was at fault for the accident and if it was avoidable. In two of the four cases, the cars were not under autonomous control at the time. I suspect that when all of the data is taken into account that the cars are safer than average.
I saw a pedestrian get hit because of this. The pedestrian waited until the sign said "don't walk" and the light for cross traffic turned green before she proceeded to walk across the street. One lane had a line of cars, the other lane was free and the light was green for some time while we waited. The pedestrian stepped right in front of a truck who had the right of way. Fortunately two of the people in the car I was in were EMTs. It was a clear case of the pedestrian being at fault. A few weeks later the exact same thing almost happened but at the last second the pedestrian realized his mistake and ran and missed getting hit by only a few inches.
Even with defensive driving some accidents are unavoidable. I've been in several where I was stopped with nowhere to go. Once I was waiting in traffic at an off-ramp and got side-swiped because the other inexperienced driver panicked when changing lanes. I've been backed into while stopped in a parking lot (despite laying on the horn). I've been rear-ended after being forced to panic stop by an idiot driver who stopped to make a left turn over a double yellow line. The car in front of me suddenly changed lanes, I stopped (barely, I was 16 and my parent's clunker had wish brakes, you wish they'd work), the car behind me didn't. My favorite was when I was driving highway 17 in the Santa Cruz mountains during a heavy rainstorm. A car two cars ahead of me hit the brakes on a curve, lost control and did a 360 spinout, hitting the car in front of me. I avoided him, or so I thought, until his car rear-ended me. That took talent! Fortunately no damage to my clunker.
It depends on the number of miles driven for those four cars and where they were driven. I suspect that those cars are driving a hell of a lot more than your standard driver. You also need to look at where the accidents happened and what the statistics are for that area. Also, who was at fault and could the accident have been avoided? In two of the four cases, the cars were not under autonomous control at the time.
Battery evolution has been moving along at a fairly steady pace averaging around a 5-8% improvement in capacity per year. In addition, the longevity has been steadily increasing and charge times have been steadily decreasing and cost have been dropping fairly rapidly, much faster than predicted.
If you compare today's batteries used in cars compared to those a decade ago there is really no comparison. Today's batteries have much higher capacities, much longer life and at a much lower cost.
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blo...
Here's a chart from 2012. Tesla is selling their grid storage battery packs at around $250/KWh and with the gigafactory the prices will be further reduced. This is the price point where BEVs start to become price competitive with gasoline cars.
http://www.mckinsey.com/insigh...
Battery prices are already at or below where they were predicted to be in 2020 just a few years ago.
http://theenergycollective.com...
On average, battery energy doubles every ten years.
http://kk.org/thetechnium/2009...
http://electronicdesign.com/po...
The Tesla AC induction motor has a fairly flat torque curve to around 6000RPM where it starts to drop off gradually. There are no permanent magnets in the Tesla motor. The synchronous motors seem to drop off faster in their torque curves from what I've seen.
As far as the energy required to build batteries, Tesla's gigafactory will be solar powered. They also last a lot longer than 5 years as has been shown with the original Roadster batteries, which are lasting much better than they expected. The model S batteries are much improved over the original Roadster batteries as well. If they die after 5 years, why would Tesla offer an unlimited mile 8-year warranty. From some of my conversations with Tesla they should last well over 8 years for most people. If the full cycle range were limited to only 3,000 cycles that's still well over 600,000 miles for the 85KWh battery pack since you get well over 200 miles per charge. Owners have already exceeded 100,000 miles and not seen any significant drop in range or performance. Recycling the batteries takes even less energy than it does to produce the batteries using virgin material. The batteries also contain only around 3% lithium. The other materials are pretty common, carbon, cobalt and aluminum.
I agree, that's not a hack. I work on bootloaders and need to directly access low-level hardware registers and whatnot on 64-bit MIPS processors. I only need about a page of assembly code to do things like set up part of the L1 cache as stack memory and initialize a few registers before switching to C code. For some of the registers that require assembly to access we have macros to hide it. I certainly don't consider it a hack. Even inline assembly isn't necessarily a hack since some things require it, such as atomic operations, dealing with caches and stuff like that.
This is great news. When I was in college the microprocessor design class used a variant of MIPS though this started the quarter after I took the class. In my class we had to wire-wrap a 16-bit MIPS-like CPU using discrete chips and a couple programmable ones. MIPS is relatively easy to implement for educational purposes due to the simple instruction encoding and clean architecture. MIPS, unlike some other processors like ARM, also allows you to add your own instructions using coprocessor 2 which can be a great way to differentiate a processor and enhance it for different tasks. MIPS is a much simpler design compared to ARM or even PowerPC. MIPS is still widely used, especially in networking devices.
For example, my current employer has added a lot of instructions useful for encryption and hashing as well as some useful atomic instructions.
The move from 32-bits to 64-bits is actually quite clean on MIPS which did not require any major changes to the instruction set other than adding 64-bit instructions and sign-extending the 32-bit instructions. There are a few warts on it, such as the fact that the instruction following a branch instruction is always executed (SPARC is the same way). This is no longer all that useful with modern superscalar architectures and the branch delay slot can't always be filled with something useful. Things are also a bit cramped for 32-bits since only the lower 2GB of memory is available for user-space. Kernel space (KSEG0) is from 0x80000000-0x9fffffff and an uncached copy is at 0xa0000000-0xbfffffff. 0xC0000000 - 0xDFFFFFFF can be mapped using the translation look-aside buffer, making another 512MB available to the kernel. Both of these address ranges map directly to the lower 512MB of RAM which somewhat limits things. In 64-bit mode this isn't a problem though since all addresses are sign-extended. Another nice feature in kernel mode is that all physical addresses can be directly accessed, without requiring any special mapping other than setting bit 63 to 1.
Most MIPS processors do not use a hardware page table walker, instead relying on a software configured translation look-aside buffer. When there's a page miss, a quick interrupt occurs to replace an entry in that table with some hardware assist. This goes back to the original philosophy of keeping the hardware design simple. Due to the way it works, it allows total freedom with how page tables are represented in the operating system though there can be a slightly bigger overhead compared to hardware page tables.
The instruction set is quite clean and the instruction encodings are quite simple with only a few classes of instructions, unlike ARM64. Instruction decoding can be handled with only a few look-up tables. MIPS assembly language is far simpler and straight forward than, say X86 and it's quite mature, though not all processors implement all instructions. Many embedded MIPS processors lack floating point and the multimedia extensions, and many are 32-bit only. This helps cut cost and power when making chips for devices that don't need these features. MIPS also can scale up nicely. For example, the chips I work with currently scale up to 48 cores per chip and with two chips running in tandem Linux runs on 96 cores, all with a coherent cache. The newer ABIs are nice in that the only real difference between N32 and N64 is that pointers are 64-bits instead of 32-bits, just about everything else is the same so you get all of the features of 64-bit registers but keep the compactness of 32-bit pointers. This has been present for many years and is a fairly recent addition to X86 and ARM.
Bluetooth low power can use very little power. I have some Bluetooth Stick 'n Find stickers that claim to go 9 months on a cr2032 battery. My experience with them is that they last at least that long. It's great when I misplace my keys.
I wear my watch all the time, including in the shower. I like it because it does one thing well, tell me the time and date. I never have to set it except for daylight savings (it synchronizes itself every night) and I don't have to wind it up or charge it (it charges itself via solar). It's also waterproof to 100M and pretty tough (I tend to be hard on watches). If it breaks I'm also not out $600 and it won't go obsolete in a year.
My father was is engineer who worked on some aerospace and defense stuff while I was growing up. He worked on a data recorder that went up on Skylab. He offered to fly up and fix it if anything went wrong. My mother has always been big on astronomy. I've been Elon Musk's various ventures for quite a while (and ended up buying a Tesla). I've always been impressed with his forward thinking and the smart people he surrounds himself with. My day job is working on the U-Boot bootloader and a little Linux kernel work. Maybe someday it'll even be pushed upstream, but right now it's always not enough time and it's a LOT of code, significantly more than all of the ARM SOCs combined.
Which is basically what I said in my second paragraph. It was a good talk. It's not everyday when you can sit down and talk with a rocket scientist in a casual environment.
A couple of months ago I was having a discussion with a fellow from Space X who designs the hydraulic systems and we spoke about a number of issues. This was right after the failed landing due to it running out of hydraulic fluid. I asked about how reusable the engines are and he said that they run test burns lasting hours. The launch is only a few minutes. According to what he said, it should just be a simple matter of refueling and adding more hydraulic fluid and probably some other simple things without having to do a major overhaul. The engines are very reliable.
I asked about why they don't reuse the hydraulic fluid and he said that it was cheaper and lighter to not reuse it. He also said that they knew it could run out and that the next version would have more.
Depending on the distance, a carrier pidgeon might be faster since it can carry a lot of packets, probably at least a few TB of flash.
I had this problem and after trying several things I finally found a solution: Buy an Anker USB cable. I tried just about everything else with my tablet. I have a USB power meter. The Nexus 7 2012 seems to be extremely sensitive to the resistance in the USB cable. The Anker cable is much fatter than most cables I've tried. Before I switched to this cable I've had my tablet go dead while plugged into the charger.
Here's what else I tried:
I replaced the USB connector on my tablet (fairly easy to do). This helped but I still had problems.
I tried numerous chargers including the Anker charger, which helped but didn't solve the problem.
I tried many different USB cables. Some would help briefly but none ever charged quickly, the best one was the stock one that came with the tablet, but even that didn't work too well.
Once I switched to the Anker cable I was able to charge at over 1A for the first time. None of the other cables came close and I tried a lot of cables, including the Amazon Basics cables (which are otherwise nice cables).
I don't see much drop in range in my Tesla when I use the AC. Heating it will impact the range, though if I pre-heat it using shore power then the range drop is quite a bit less.
Hydrogen is not cleaner and generates more greenhouse gases than a decent hybrid or diesel vehicle. The only way to make hydrogen in an affordable manner is to crack natural gas. You use 20% of your energy capacity of the hydrogen just compressing it. And the hydrogen must either be generated on-site (around 70% efficient) or transported in tanker trucks which aren't very efficient for the energy density. Fuel cells also suck. They're maybe 50% efficient at best and quickly start to degrade. By 70K miles the fuel cell output has dropped to around 70% of its rated capacity and have dropped considerably in their efficiency.
The Tesla battery typically contains over 90% of its original capacity at 100,000 miles.
Fuel cell cars right now are very heavily subsidized and don't make a lot of sense. They're certainly not very green when you take into account the well to wheel efficincy. A hybrid vehicle or a diesel vehicle is more efficient than a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle.
That's what I ran into years ago when I ordered my Prius. I could get any car I wanted as long as it was white or possibly black. I wanted neither and a certain set of options. I had to wait 6 months to get the car I wanted, and it was my 3rd choice for color. They kept offering me white cars which I didn't want.
When I ordered my Tesla I chose exactly what color and options I wanted. I still had to wait 6 months but I got exactly what I ordered. The service I've gotten from Tesla is far better than the service I have gotten at any dealership by far.
The dealers like to make the claim that they protect the consumer. This is total BS. My father bought a Fisker Karma (I tried to talk him out of it) and once they went bankrupt, so did his service and warranty support.
To understand her position you need to understand where she's coming from. She's probably one of the few politicians to have seen gun violence first hand. She was there when the SF Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated. She grabbed Harvey Milk's wrist to check for a pulse and her finger entered one of Milk's bullet wounds and was badly shaken by the event.
See the Moscone Milk Assassinations.
It seems that Mozilla will also be dropping CCNIC..