Ford, after dragging their feet for years, does seem to be finally getting serious. And while they are saying they're working on a BEV pickup, I think a PHEV pickup will be the popular choice. First of all, towing with a BEV is a problem, so having the gas engine there to supplement the range makes sense. Secondly, it lets them spread their available battery supply across more vehicles. I only hope their PHEV will have decent electric range. That hasn't been Ford's strong point in the past.
It's an interesting point, which some of the BEV true believers will hate because you know, they have religion. I have both a Volt for my daughters and a Tesla for myself.
I think the Volt is an interesting car, and a PHEV can make a lot of sense for some people. I'm sorry that GM killed that car, but I think we're about to see a bunch of other companies coming out with PHEV (I just hope they have reasonable electric range, unlike the Subaru that has 13 miles of electric range... the Volt got that right... 40-50 miles of electric range seems to be the sweet spot for a PHEV).
My thoughts are that if you can afford a BEV with a big battery and a good charging network for road trips (i.e. my Tesla) that is the best solution of all. However, it's not a cheap car with the long range battery.
If you have a relatively short commute, one of the shorter range BEVs like the Leaf may work for you, especially if you have a second car in the family. I leased a Honda Fit EV for a few years (until my daughter crashed it) and it worked out perfect. I had about a 50 mile commute (round trip) so I could easily do it each day, and even have enough charge if I had to make a stop on the way home, or run an errand at noon. I found myself using my ICE car about once a month, i.e. once a month I had to do a trip that the Honda wouldn't do.
We replaced the Honda Fit EV with a Chevy Volt (3 years old, $13,000). During the warmer months the Volt gets 42 miles between charges. This is enough that my daughter can do her commute to college totally on electricity. During the winter, the range falls to about 30 so she either charges the car at school (they have 2 chargers for an entire college, but she can usually charge) or she ends up running the gas engine for part of the trip home. Usually in the winter I find that the car has burned about 2/10ths of a gallon each day, i.e. she burns about a gallon a week commuting.
If she wants to visit her boyfriend, it's 180 mile round trip so she ends up burning gas for a good bit of the trip. Still, the car gets 40 mpg so it's still economical for her.
The obvious downside of a PHEV is that if you only use electricity 100% of the time, why are you dragging around a complete ICE powertrain that you never use, and if you constantly drive much further than the electric range, why are you dragging around a heavy battery instead of just using a car that gets 50+ mpg? So, the PHEV makes sense to me for people who have a broad mix of trip lengths that don't fit well into a ~100 mile car like the Leaf, but do enough short trips that pure electric gets used a fair percentage of the time.
It's certainly true that current BEV work best for a homeowner. I did talk with another Tesla owner a couple months back. He drove into the parking lot at the shopping mall and plugged into one of the free chargers there. I laughed and asked him why he was bothering to charge his 310 mile car at the mall?
Turns out he lives in an apartment, and there's no charging at his work. So, whenever he goes someplace where there is a charger, he plugs in, and that happens enough during the week that with the large battery he never runs out.
Still, I think that we'll need to solve the charging problem for people who live in apartments if we want widespread adoption of EVs.
Sure, for now it's a while to wait for the 'super charger' when you need to charge away from home, but I suspect that all things considered the average electric car owner will never be spending that much time 'filling up' comparatively.
You're right. I've had my Tesla M3 for 6 months now, and I've used the Supercharger network twice. Once was just to test that it worked, and once was "just in case" so I'd be sure to get home with enough charge. Today I wouldn't have bothered, the range estimation is accurate enough that I would trust it today if it says I'm going to get home with more than 10%.
As an example of my normal use, tomorrow I have to pick up another pilot at one airport and we have to drive to our helicopter maintenance facility. It's 176 miles of highway driving, 3 hours and 20 minutes round trip, and I'll have plenty of charge to do the entire trip without stopping to charge, even though we do go right past a Supercharger on the way. According to "A Better Route Planner" if I leave home with a 90% charge, I'll finish the day back home with 34% left. I'll plug in when I get back and by the time I use the car next it'll be fully charged.
I'm really curious to hear that myself. In the famous words of HAL 9000:
Well, I don’t think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.
Which of course doesn't address your comment. So yeah, the fact that a design defect may have crept through the process raises lots of questions in my mind.
I would say that the evidence is that software is incredibly difficult to get 100% right, so that it will do the correct thing under all circumstances. Companies like Boeing are incredibly good at the job, and yet even they get stuff wrong.
What I'd like the average slashdot reader to understand is that it's bogus to think that there are simple answers to a lot of the issues. An incredible amount of thought goes into the process. I worked on avionics software and I can tell you that the average software engineer has no idea what goes into producing Level A safety critical software. Our parent company had a Level A autopilot, and it took an entire year to do a full release test of that software. The process was that involved.
In the past I've been critical of Airbus and liked Boeing's philosophy better - the control yokes move, are interconnected, etc. Same thing with the auto-throttle... when the computer moves the throttle the physical handles move so the crew knows what the computer is up to. In this case, the suspect system trims the aircraft and you can see that the trim wheels are moving. Yet obviously it is confusing crews to the point that they lose control of the airplane.
So yeah, I'll agree with you... it's incredibly easy to produce software that does the wrong thing, especially in the corner cases where the computers are getting garbage in. The NTSB database is full of the results.
They didn't run out of gas, they disengaged altitude hold mode on the autopilot inadvertently and didn't notice the loss of altitude in time to do anything about it. Widely used to teach pilots that someone has to keep flying the airplane while the rest of the crew debugs the situation.
Since you mention CRM you're probably thinking of a different accident, maybe Avianca Flight 52 (a Boeing 707) that was run out of gas... but that was mostly because the Captain didn't understand English and the co-pilot didn't keep the Captain informed enough about whether ATC understood their low fuel situation. (they had informed the previous controller about their fuel situation but after a frequency change the Captain was confused about whether the current controller knew about their fuel situation).
I think you're mixing up fly-by-wire with the previous technology. Fly by wire is what we have: the pilot tells the computer what they want to happen (through the controls) and the computer tells the control surfaces what to do. I have to say that I don't like the idea of a FBW system without a manual reversion mode. Software is just too difficult to get right. The manufacturers are worrying about a bunch of stuff, safety is one of them, but economics is what sells airplanes so there are tradeoffs Airbus and Boeing make that you and I might not agree with.
As for training for the impossible... it comes down to pragmatism. Yes, the "impossible" can happen, but do you really want to spend time training people for the impossible? If the goal is to reduce the overall accident rate you're much better off spending additional training effort on things that are more likely to happen than the "impossible" ones like United 232... I heard a talk by Al Haynes about that accident and it was very impressive that they got the airplane (mostly) on the ground... but it probably doesn't make sense to train people for that kind of thing - better to improve the mechanical systems to make it even more impossible.
Bell had a terrible crash in 2016 testing their FBW 525 helicopter - they lost the crew. It reinforced my fears about software flying the aircraft (and now, automobiles). It's a tricky thing to get right. Arguably Boeing and Airbus (and Embraer and Bombardier) and probably some of the top organizations in the world for writing reliable code, but obviously even they have a hard time getting it right 100% of the time...
No, you're trying to grossly oversimplify the problem, and it's causing you to say things that are silly.
Having worked as a vendor to the avionics group at Boeing, and having had a student who wrote test code for the 777, I can tell you that the testing / verification process for their software is mind boggling. They've had decades to fine tune their processes for creating reliable computer software. Believe me, you sound idiotic second guessing them, and it doesn't sound like you're a pilot either...
The one thing I will agree with you about is that the system should trust the crew. However, I must say that some of my airline captain buddies would strongly disagree with that. Just look at Air France Flight 447 as a perfect example of why trusting the crew can go wrong. However, I still lean towards this... if you don't trust the crew then it's like the old joke about the perfect crew:
The ideal flight crew is a pilot and a dog.
The pilot is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to bite the pilot if he touches anything.
Seriously, if the automation is so complicated and opaque that the crew can't tell what it's doing and why... that's a problem. The move towards more automation seems to be to make up for an inexperienced crew... I think more training / sim time is the right solution, not more automation. Still, both Airbus and Boeing seem to think more automation is the right way to go.
I'll be interested to hear what they learn from the FDR...
I'm curious as well, and also curious about the legality of face detection camouflage (which I don't see how they could force you to remove)... https://cvdazzle.com/
I actually think Tesla has made the right tradeoffs. I don't want to carry around a 600 mile battery... Why do I want to carry that much weight when my average day is 40-100 miles? When the energy density gets that high I'd rather have a lighter car that can go 300 miles. Getting the 15%-75% charging times down is the right thing to do for people who are on a road trip, so I see the V3 as a great move.
One of the reasons I got the LongRange battery in the Model 3 (besides that it was my only choice at the time) was that I knew from previous experience that I would take a big hit on range in the winter. So, the "310" rating gets me a good reliable 200 miles in the dead of winter, and more like 260-280 in the summer going at "normal" highway speeds.
If I lived in a warm place like Southern California I'd consider the small battery, not having to deal with the cold weather issues. Again, as long as the Supercharger network is dense enough to get me from city to city, I'd rather have the smaller (cheaper, lighter) battery for everyday driving than some humongous battery that I almost never use the capacity of...
The key to the Tesla in my mind is the Supercharger network... Most of the other charging infrastructure dates back to the days of crappy EVs with tiny batteries that were only used around town. We use the Chargepoint network for our old Honda Fit EV and now for the Volt, but never for the Tesla. The Tesla has enough range to never charge when out and about... and the Chargepoint network is more of a destination thing... you charge when you get to your destination, it's not really convenient for along-the-way charging the way the Supercharger network is.
When the other automobile manufacturers get serious about selling EVs (we're still 5 years away from them WANTING to sell you one instead of an ICE) then maybe some of them will partner with Tesla on the Supercharger network. Or maybe Tesla will spin the Supercharger network off as a separate corporation?
I've posted this a few times: I never understood why Tesla pursued self driving so vigorously. In my mind, a really nice electric car was groundbreaking enough that I didn't see the need, and I saw a lot of downsides.
One downside is certainly that I didn't think they could pull off FSD ever. When I got my Model 3 last October and saw how poorly Autopilot worked, I couldn't believe Tesla ever believed they could improve it enough to FSD. They need many orders of magnitude improvement before they'll be able to turn it loose on city streets by itself. Waymo seems to have the strongest story, and I think they're still 15-20 years away from a coast to coast drive without intervention.
Another huge downside is that FSD is a bet your company proposal. First there are all the lawsuits if you can't make it work... But even worse is the liability. And the more cars on the road, the worse the liability gets. Every time a pedestrian gets hit, there goes millions of dollars. Every time the car runs itself into a truck and kills the occupants, more millions of dollars. Aviation went through a phase where half the cost of a GA aircraft was for the liability insurance. I could see that happening for automobiles as well.
I don't see that they have any choice but to immediately refund everybody who paid for FSD. It'll cost them a lot more if they have to be sued for it. And they'll still get sued... they might end up having to buy back some cars from people who claim they wouldn't have bought the car if it wasn't for the FSD promises. Cheaper to buy the car than go to court.
Right now seems to be one of the more difficult times for Tesla. Certainly their announcement of closing all their stores worries me. And I really like Elon (being an engineer myself I appreciate his humor and way of looking at things). But I have to say, I think it was a huge mistake for him to have gone down the FSD pathway. He should have partnered with Waymo with no promises of the technology ever making it into a Tesla... It's one thing to overpromise a bit on schedules to push the workforce... that's pretty common in high tech. But overpromising stuff like FSD just gets you sued. I hope Tesla survives.
>> My car won’t go faster than 130 mph because they discovered that around that speed, the back-end has an annoying habit of leaving the ground.
Ah, fond memories of my Fiat X 1/9 which, at around 110 mph would lift the front wheels enough off the ground that the steering wheel would stop steering the vehicle! Discovered on the way home from a race in Maine on a flat stretch of highway...
>>140. County road, late at night. 68 Vette, 327, 350 HP. Enjoyed. Wouldn't buy the Volvo.
Fast enough on my CBR 1000RR to not want to post numbers here. But I have to say, at the rated speeds for that motorcycle one does start dwelling on the what ifs. "What if my front tire blows?" "What if my chain breaks?" Those sorts of things.
My Tesla Model 3 is speed limited to 155, although I heard we will be getting an over-the-air update to raise that to 165... Sweet!
And yeah, although I understand where Volvo is coming from, I also wouldn't buy a car governed to such a slow speed. Not sure why, but somehow it seems wrong!
The stuff you see them spray on the aircraft before takeoff is a glycol fluid, typically propylene glycol. Typically the hot stuff you see being sprayed on is Type 1 which is only good for about 5-15 minutes, so either the plane needs to be sprayed just before takeoff, or they'll also spray on a non-hot glycol fluid with a thickener in order to put a thick layer on the aircraft. That can then allow the aircraft to wait as long as 80 minutes before takeoff.
The Type 1 stuff costs between $5-$7 per gallon, so imagine how much money is being spent at a big airport during weather that is requiring deice of all the aircraft taking off.
Although we call the stuff "de-ice" fluid, Type 1 will remove snow, slush, etc., in addition to ice, which I'm not sure the material discussed in this article would do.
In flight, the critical areas (leading edges, ailerons, tail surfaces) will either have a heating strip or rubber bladders, or in some cases a glycol distribution system (TKS) to prevent ice accumulation. This seems to me to be what this material would be good for.
Until ranges get up to 400 mile range of an IC engine, with the 1-2 minute recharge time of a gas fill-up EVs will remain niche cars for people who live in cities and seldom travel.
Ranges probably won't ever get to 400 miles except maybe vehicles like pickups that may have extra large batteries for towing... but for a regular passenger car 300 miles is more than enough almost everywhere in the US as long as you have access to DC fast charging (like Tesla's SuperCharger network). I've yet to jump in my Model 3 and enter a destination that it can't get me to.
Adding the weight of a bigger battery to go a distance that you almost never go just makes the vehicle inefficient for most of it's use. I got the Long Range battery for my Model 3 because it was the only choice, and because I live in Boston where the cold winter weather can have an impact on range, but so far I've never had a problem with range. Frankly, I'd consider getting a smaller battery next time because I so seldom use the range I have now...
I had a day a couple months ago where I had to drive up to New Hampshire, then down south of Boston, then out to Amherst (central MA) and back... That was 5 1/2 hours of driving that day... (a little over 300 miles). I spent 15 minutes at a Supercharger out near Amherst, and that was it. Really, to stop for 15 minutes over 5 1/2 hours of driving was nothing...
I have to travel from Boston to Atlanta GA this month and I considered driving the Tesla there just to experience a long distance trip. It's 1,088 miles, about 19 hours of driving. I'd spend 2.5 hours charging along the way which might sound like a lot, but I'd want to stop a few times for bathroom breaks, and to grab a bite to eat, so the charging probably adds about 1 hour to the trip, compared to taking an ICE car.
I've driven EVs for 5 years now and I don't carry a charging cable with me. I would say most people here don't unless they're going on a road trip and their worried that they may need to plug into some random electrical outlet like in an RV park...
Sounds like you have a different setup where you are at (the public chargers I'm used to, the cord is part of the charger). Maybe light-pole chargers (sounds more like a plug, actually) won't have a cord and you'll have to carry one with you (which sounds pretty inconvenient if it has to be 20 feet long to make it from the charging port on your car to the light pole). It still is going to lie on the ground. And while it might generate enough heat to keep it above freezing while charging, if you show up at home and have to plug in, are you expecting that it'll still be charging the next day when you go to use the car? Or will it have stopped sometime during the night and cooled to ambient at which point it'll be frozen to the ground? (not to mention that L1 probably doesn't produce enough heat, and maybe even L2 wouldn't when the temperatures are below freezing).
So what are the advantages to a setup like that versus a buried wireless charger in every parking space? I assume that on-street parking will be low voltage/current charging, meant to charge cars overnight, so the high voltage/current capability of a corded solution probably isn't that big an advantage in this use, compared to a high speed charger like a Supercharger. (WiTricity talks about 11 kW charging speeds, btw).
I certainly think wireless is going to be more costly, so that's certainly a possible downside. Is there another reason that you don't like the wireless solution for on-street parking?
Well, we already have the problem that depending on the location of the charging port, it can take a pretty long cable to reach it. The Tesla is probably the worst because the charging port is on the road side of the car, so the cable has to be long, which means in snow and ice situations you're going to encounter the cable frozen to the ground when you try to drag it to your car... All while trying to negotiate icy streets/sidewalks. And having a long cable is asking for a snowplow to snag it as it goes by. And you know, just that much more of a chance of falling as you're trying to do this in a windy snowstorm. And making sure the charge cable isn't covered in snow that's going to eventually corrode the receptacle in your car. Just a bunch of minor annoyances.
Driving into the parking space and activating the wireless charger before you even shut off the car seems a whole lot more convenient.
I have a Volt (and a Tesla) and I agree that a PHEV, especially one like the Volt with 40-50 miles of electric range is a great way to ease into EV for many people.
I hope GM is planning on using the Volt powertrain to produce a crossover PHEV. Not sure, I know they said their future is BEV, but I think for the next decade a lot of people will want the insurance of having the gas engine for backup.
This might have been a legitimate concern with BEVs only having a range of 80-90 miles, but the newer ones with > 200 miles of range... it's similar to the gas station: if one charger is broken you have enough charge to get to the next one.
I plan on arriving at my next charging location with 20% battery to spare. That's 60 miles in the Tesla at rated efficiency. Plenty to get to the next charger. And I'll second the plug (ha!) for Plugshare. People do check-ins so you know which chargers are broken (which isn't that common anyway). In fact, stupid ICE drivers parking in charging spots was a bigger issue than broken chargers. That'll be solved when municipalities allow a BEV to have an ICE towed when it blocks a charger...
When I had a BEV with 85 miles of range I used Plugshare all the time... and never got stranded or even close to stranded. You can make up scary scenarios all day, but the reality is that it's not an issue, and especially so with the cars with large batteries.
So, this sort of happened to me... A few weeks ago we got an emergency call at 2:00 am and we had to jump in the Tesla and head halfway across the state. Since I wasn't planning a trip, the car was only charged to 70%... That was plenty to make the trip and back. There were two Superchargers I went by on that trip, so if 70% hadn't been enough I could have stopped for 10 minutes and gotten enough to finish the trip.
What if the car had been driven down to 20% and I forgot to charge it? Again, 10 minutes at the Supercharger would have been enough to get to the destination, and then I could have charged at the other Supercharger before I came home.
You have to construct a really unlikely scenario before a car like the Tesla M3LR won't work as well as an ICE.
So, in a case like that I guess you call for Lyft or Uber... but it's not really realistic.
Also, the scenario where the "car isn't charged enough" is pretty unlikely anyway, since you tend to plug in all the time. The car simply isn't sitting around uncharged in normal use.
Well, unless you have a Tesla where the Superchargers make that simple.
Hopefully all the other manufacturers will do the same thing. Certainly Tesla has shown that it's doable.
Also, I know nobody likes to think this way, but if it was only once, or even once a year, renting a car is certainly a possibility. But I like the Supercharger approach even more.
I agree with you, and this fits a bit with my own experience. I always get shouted down by the purists for saying this in the electric vehicle forums, but I think that PHEV will be the first electric car for many people, and then their next car will be BEV. As you say, there's a mental reluctance to jump into the BEV pool without knowing for sure that it will meet your needs.
Having had a Tesla for a couple months, I can say there's nothing like having a big battery. It alleviates most of your range anxiety. I've had work days where I've had to drive all over Massachusetts and it works out just fine... So, either big battery or PHEV and most people will be happy. (of course we see some PHEVs with really crappy range like the new Subaru with 17 miles... Hopefully we'll see more and more like the Volt with 40-50 miles of electric range... With range like that it's pretty easy to use almost no gasoline at all).
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Ford, after dragging their feet for years, does seem to be finally getting serious. And while they are saying they're working on a BEV pickup, I think a PHEV pickup will be the popular choice. First of all, towing with a BEV is a problem, so having the gas engine there to supplement the range makes sense. Secondly, it lets them spread their available battery supply across more vehicles. I only hope their PHEV will have decent electric range. That hasn't been Ford's strong point in the past.
Especially when you see some of the electric time attack cars people have converted. Pretty cool!
It's an interesting point, which some of the BEV true believers will hate because you know, they have religion. I have both a Volt for my daughters and a Tesla for myself.
I think the Volt is an interesting car, and a PHEV can make a lot of sense for some people. I'm sorry that GM killed that car, but I think we're about to see a bunch of other companies coming out with PHEV (I just hope they have reasonable electric range, unlike the Subaru that has 13 miles of electric range... the Volt got that right... 40-50 miles of electric range seems to be the sweet spot for a PHEV).
My thoughts are that if you can afford a BEV with a big battery and a good charging network for road trips (i.e. my Tesla) that is the best solution of all. However, it's not a cheap car with the long range battery.
If you have a relatively short commute, one of the shorter range BEVs like the Leaf may work for you, especially if you have a second car in the family. I leased a Honda Fit EV for a few years (until my daughter crashed it) and it worked out perfect. I had about a 50 mile commute (round trip) so I could easily do it each day, and even have enough charge if I had to make a stop on the way home, or run an errand at noon. I found myself using my ICE car about once a month, i.e. once a month I had to do a trip that the Honda wouldn't do.
We replaced the Honda Fit EV with a Chevy Volt (3 years old, $13,000). During the warmer months the Volt gets 42 miles between charges. This is enough that my daughter can do her commute to college totally on electricity. During the winter, the range falls to about 30 so she either charges the car at school (they have 2 chargers for an entire college, but she can usually charge) or she ends up running the gas engine for part of the trip home. Usually in the winter I find that the car has burned about 2/10ths of a gallon each day, i.e. she burns about a gallon a week commuting.
If she wants to visit her boyfriend, it's 180 mile round trip so she ends up burning gas for a good bit of the trip. Still, the car gets 40 mpg so it's still economical for her.
The obvious downside of a PHEV is that if you only use electricity 100% of the time, why are you dragging around a complete ICE powertrain that you never use, and if you constantly drive much further than the electric range, why are you dragging around a heavy battery instead of just using a car that gets 50+ mpg? So, the PHEV makes sense to me for people who have a broad mix of trip lengths that don't fit well into a ~100 mile car like the Leaf, but do enough short trips that pure electric gets used a fair percentage of the time.
It's certainly true that current BEV work best for a homeowner. I did talk with another Tesla owner a couple months back. He drove into the parking lot at the shopping mall and plugged into one of the free chargers there. I laughed and asked him why he was bothering to charge his 310 mile car at the mall?
Turns out he lives in an apartment, and there's no charging at his work. So, whenever he goes someplace where there is a charger, he plugs in, and that happens enough during the week that with the large battery he never runs out.
Still, I think that we'll need to solve the charging problem for people who live in apartments if we want widespread adoption of EVs.
Sure, for now it's a while to wait for the 'super charger' when you need to charge away from home, but I suspect that all things considered the average electric car owner will never be spending that much time 'filling up' comparatively.
You're right. I've had my Tesla M3 for 6 months now, and I've used the Supercharger network twice. Once was just to test that it worked, and once was "just in case" so I'd be sure to get home with enough charge. Today I wouldn't have bothered, the range estimation is accurate enough that I would trust it today if it says I'm going to get home with more than 10%.
As an example of my normal use, tomorrow I have to pick up another pilot at one airport and we have to drive to our helicopter maintenance facility. It's 176 miles of highway driving, 3 hours and 20 minutes round trip, and I'll have plenty of charge to do the entire trip without stopping to charge, even though we do go right past a Supercharger on the way. According to "A Better Route Planner" if I leave home with a 90% charge, I'll finish the day back home with 34% left. I'll plug in when I get back and by the time I use the car next it'll be fully charged.
I'm really curious to hear that myself. In the famous words of HAL 9000:
Well, I don’t think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.
Which of course doesn't address your comment. So yeah, the fact that a design defect may have crept through the process raises lots of questions in my mind.
I would say that the evidence is that software is incredibly difficult to get 100% right, so that it will do the correct thing under all circumstances. Companies like Boeing are incredibly good at the job, and yet even they get stuff wrong.
What I'd like the average slashdot reader to understand is that it's bogus to think that there are simple answers to a lot of the issues. An incredible amount of thought goes into the process. I worked on avionics software and I can tell you that the average software engineer has no idea what goes into producing Level A safety critical software. Our parent company had a Level A autopilot, and it took an entire year to do a full release test of that software. The process was that involved.
In the past I've been critical of Airbus and liked Boeing's philosophy better - the control yokes move, are interconnected, etc. Same thing with the auto-throttle... when the computer moves the throttle the physical handles move so the crew knows what the computer is up to. In this case, the suspect system trims the aircraft and you can see that the trim wheels are moving. Yet obviously it is confusing crews to the point that they lose control of the airplane.
So yeah, I'll agree with you... it's incredibly easy to produce software that does the wrong thing, especially in the corner cases where the computers are getting garbage in. The NTSB database is full of the results.
They didn't run out of gas, they disengaged altitude hold mode on the autopilot inadvertently and didn't notice the loss of altitude in time to do anything about it. Widely used to teach pilots that someone has to keep flying the airplane while the rest of the crew debugs the situation.
Since you mention CRM you're probably thinking of a different accident, maybe Avianca Flight 52 (a Boeing 707) that was run out of gas... but that was mostly because the Captain didn't understand English and the co-pilot didn't keep the Captain informed enough about whether ATC understood their low fuel situation. (they had informed the previous controller about their fuel situation but after a frequency change the Captain was confused about whether the current controller knew about their fuel situation).
I think you're mixing up fly-by-wire with the previous technology. Fly by wire is what we have: the pilot tells the computer what they want to happen (through the controls) and the computer tells the control surfaces what to do. I have to say that I don't like the idea of a FBW system without a manual reversion mode. Software is just too difficult to get right. The manufacturers are worrying about a bunch of stuff, safety is one of them, but economics is what sells airplanes so there are tradeoffs Airbus and Boeing make that you and I might not agree with.
BTW, split flaps: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cf...
As for training for the impossible... it comes down to pragmatism. Yes, the "impossible" can happen, but do you really want to spend time training people for the impossible? If the goal is to reduce the overall accident rate you're much better off spending additional training effort on things that are more likely to happen than the "impossible" ones like United 232... I heard a talk by Al Haynes about that accident and it was very impressive that they got the airplane (mostly) on the ground... but it probably doesn't make sense to train people for that kind of thing - better to improve the mechanical systems to make it even more impossible.
Bell had a terrible crash in 2016 testing their FBW 525 helicopter - they lost the crew. It reinforced my fears about software flying the aircraft (and now, automobiles). It's a tricky thing to get right. Arguably Boeing and Airbus (and Embraer and Bombardier) and probably some of the top organizations in the world for writing reliable code, but obviously even they have a hard time getting it right 100% of the time...
No, you're trying to grossly oversimplify the problem, and it's causing you to say things that are silly.
Having worked as a vendor to the avionics group at Boeing, and having had a student who wrote test code for the 777, I can tell you that the testing / verification process for their software is mind boggling. They've had decades to fine tune their processes for creating reliable computer software. Believe me, you sound idiotic second guessing them, and it doesn't sound like you're a pilot either...
The one thing I will agree with you about is that the system should trust the crew. However, I must say that some of my airline captain buddies would strongly disagree with that. Just look at Air France Flight 447 as a perfect example of why trusting the crew can go wrong. However, I still lean towards this... if you don't trust the crew then it's like the old joke about the perfect crew:
The ideal flight crew is a pilot and a dog.
The pilot is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to bite the pilot if he touches anything.
Seriously, if the automation is so complicated and opaque that the crew can't tell what it's doing and why... that's a problem. The move towards more automation seems to be to make up for an inexperienced crew... I think more training / sim time is the right solution, not more automation. Still, both Airbus and Boeing seem to think more automation is the right way to go.
I'll be interested to hear what they learn from the FDR...
I'm curious as well, and also curious about the legality of face detection camouflage (which I don't see how they could force you to remove)... https://cvdazzle.com/
I actually think Tesla has made the right tradeoffs. I don't want to carry around a 600 mile battery... Why do I want to carry that much weight when my average day is 40-100 miles? When the energy density gets that high I'd rather have a lighter car that can go 300 miles. Getting the 15%-75% charging times down is the right thing to do for people who are on a road trip, so I see the V3 as a great move.
One of the reasons I got the LongRange battery in the Model 3 (besides that it was my only choice at the time) was that I knew from previous experience that I would take a big hit on range in the winter. So, the "310" rating gets me a good reliable 200 miles in the dead of winter, and more like 260-280 in the summer going at "normal" highway speeds.
If I lived in a warm place like Southern California I'd consider the small battery, not having to deal with the cold weather issues. Again, as long as the Supercharger network is dense enough to get me from city to city, I'd rather have the smaller (cheaper, lighter) battery for everyday driving than some humongous battery that I almost never use the capacity of...
The key to the Tesla in my mind is the Supercharger network... Most of the other charging infrastructure dates back to the days of crappy EVs with tiny batteries that were only used around town. We use the Chargepoint network for our old Honda Fit EV and now for the Volt, but never for the Tesla. The Tesla has enough range to never charge when out and about... and the Chargepoint network is more of a destination thing... you charge when you get to your destination, it's not really convenient for along-the-way charging the way the Supercharger network is.
When the other automobile manufacturers get serious about selling EVs (we're still 5 years away from them WANTING to sell you one instead of an ICE) then maybe some of them will partner with Tesla on the Supercharger network. Or maybe Tesla will spin the Supercharger network off as a separate corporation?
I've posted this a few times: I never understood why Tesla pursued self driving so vigorously. In my mind, a really nice electric car was groundbreaking enough that I didn't see the need, and I saw a lot of downsides.
One downside is certainly that I didn't think they could pull off FSD ever. When I got my Model 3 last October and saw how poorly Autopilot worked, I couldn't believe Tesla ever believed they could improve it enough to FSD. They need many orders of magnitude improvement before they'll be able to turn it loose on city streets by itself. Waymo seems to have the strongest story, and I think they're still 15-20 years away from a coast to coast drive without intervention.
Another huge downside is that FSD is a bet your company proposal. First there are all the lawsuits if you can't make it work... But even worse is the liability. And the more cars on the road, the worse the liability gets. Every time a pedestrian gets hit, there goes millions of dollars. Every time the car runs itself into a truck and kills the occupants, more millions of dollars. Aviation went through a phase where half the cost of a GA aircraft was for the liability insurance. I could see that happening for automobiles as well.
I don't see that they have any choice but to immediately refund everybody who paid for FSD. It'll cost them a lot more if they have to be sued for it. And they'll still get sued... they might end up having to buy back some cars from people who claim they wouldn't have bought the car if it wasn't for the FSD promises. Cheaper to buy the car than go to court.
Right now seems to be one of the more difficult times for Tesla. Certainly their announcement of closing all their stores worries me. And I really like Elon (being an engineer myself I appreciate his humor and way of looking at things). But I have to say, I think it was a huge mistake for him to have gone down the FSD pathway. He should have partnered with Waymo with no promises of the technology ever making it into a Tesla... It's one thing to overpromise a bit on schedules to push the workforce... that's pretty common in high tech. But overpromising stuff like FSD just gets you sued. I hope Tesla survives.
>> My car won’t go faster than 130 mph because they discovered that around that speed, the back-end has an annoying habit of leaving the ground.
Ah, fond memories of my Fiat X 1/9 which, at around 110 mph would lift the front wheels enough off the ground that the steering wheel would stop steering the vehicle! Discovered on the way home from a race in Maine on a flat stretch of highway...
>>140. County road, late at night. 68 Vette, 327, 350 HP. Enjoyed. Wouldn't buy the Volvo.
Fast enough on my CBR 1000RR to not want to post numbers here. But I have to say, at the rated speeds for that motorcycle one does start dwelling on the what ifs. "What if my front tire blows?" "What if my chain breaks?" Those sorts of things.
My Tesla Model 3 is speed limited to 155, although I heard we will be getting an over-the-air update to raise that to 165... Sweet!
And yeah, although I understand where Volvo is coming from, I also wouldn't buy a car governed to such a slow speed. Not sure why, but somehow it seems wrong!
so, entrapment?
The stuff you see them spray on the aircraft before takeoff is a glycol fluid, typically propylene glycol. Typically the hot stuff you see being sprayed on is Type 1 which is only good for about 5-15 minutes, so either the plane needs to be sprayed just before takeoff, or they'll also spray on a non-hot glycol fluid with a thickener in order to put a thick layer on the aircraft. That can then allow the aircraft to wait as long as 80 minutes before takeoff.
The Type 1 stuff costs between $5-$7 per gallon, so imagine how much money is being spent at a big airport during weather that is requiring deice of all the aircraft taking off.
Although we call the stuff "de-ice" fluid, Type 1 will remove snow, slush, etc., in addition to ice, which I'm not sure the material discussed in this article would do.
In flight, the critical areas (leading edges, ailerons, tail surfaces) will either have a heating strip or rubber bladders, or in some cases a glycol distribution system (TKS) to prevent ice accumulation. This seems to me to be what this material would be good for.
Until ranges get up to 400 mile range of an IC engine, with the 1-2 minute recharge time of a gas fill-up EVs will remain niche cars for people who live in cities and seldom travel.
Ranges probably won't ever get to 400 miles except maybe vehicles like pickups that may have extra large batteries for towing... but for a regular passenger car 300 miles is more than enough almost everywhere in the US as long as you have access to DC fast charging (like Tesla's SuperCharger network). I've yet to jump in my Model 3 and enter a destination that it can't get me to.
Adding the weight of a bigger battery to go a distance that you almost never go just makes the vehicle inefficient for most of it's use. I got the Long Range battery for my Model 3 because it was the only choice, and because I live in Boston where the cold winter weather can have an impact on range, but so far I've never had a problem with range. Frankly, I'd consider getting a smaller battery next time because I so seldom use the range I have now...
I had a day a couple months ago where I had to drive up to New Hampshire, then down south of Boston, then out to Amherst (central MA) and back... That was 5 1/2 hours of driving that day... (a little over 300 miles). I spent 15 minutes at a Supercharger out near Amherst, and that was it. Really, to stop for 15 minutes over 5 1/2 hours of driving was nothing...
I have to travel from Boston to Atlanta GA this month and I considered driving the Tesla there just to experience a long distance trip. It's 1,088 miles, about 19 hours of driving. I'd spend 2.5 hours charging along the way which might sound like a lot, but I'd want to stop a few times for bathroom breaks, and to grab a bite to eat, so the charging probably adds about 1 hour to the trip, compared to taking an ICE car.
I've driven EVs for 5 years now and I don't carry a charging cable with me. I would say most people here don't unless they're going on a road trip and their worried that they may need to plug into some random electrical outlet like in an RV park...
Sounds like you have a different setup where you are at (the public chargers I'm used to, the cord is part of the charger). Maybe light-pole chargers (sounds more like a plug, actually) won't have a cord and you'll have to carry one with you (which sounds pretty inconvenient if it has to be 20 feet long to make it from the charging port on your car to the light pole). It still is going to lie on the ground. And while it might generate enough heat to keep it above freezing while charging, if you show up at home and have to plug in, are you expecting that it'll still be charging the next day when you go to use the car? Or will it have stopped sometime during the night and cooled to ambient at which point it'll be frozen to the ground? (not to mention that L1 probably doesn't produce enough heat, and maybe even L2 wouldn't when the temperatures are below freezing).
So what are the advantages to a setup like that versus a buried wireless charger in every parking space? I assume that on-street parking will be low voltage/current charging, meant to charge cars overnight, so the high voltage/current capability of a corded solution probably isn't that big an advantage in this use, compared to a high speed charger like a Supercharger. (WiTricity talks about 11 kW charging speeds, btw).
I certainly think wireless is going to be more costly, so that's certainly a possible downside. Is there another reason that you don't like the wireless solution for on-street parking?
Well, we already have the problem that depending on the location of the charging port, it can take a pretty long cable to reach it. The Tesla is probably the worst because the charging port is on the road side of the car, so the cable has to be long, which means in snow and ice situations you're going to encounter the cable frozen to the ground when you try to drag it to your car... All while trying to negotiate icy streets/sidewalks. And having a long cable is asking for a snowplow to snag it as it goes by. And you know, just that much more of a chance of falling as you're trying to do this in a windy snowstorm. And making sure the charge cable isn't covered in snow that's going to eventually corrode the receptacle in your car. Just a bunch of minor annoyances.
Driving into the parking space and activating the wireless charger before you even shut off the car seems a whole lot more convenient.
I have a Volt (and a Tesla) and I agree that a PHEV, especially one like the Volt with 40-50 miles of electric range is a great way to ease into EV for many people.
I hope GM is planning on using the Volt powertrain to produce a crossover PHEV. Not sure, I know they said their future is BEV, but I think for the next decade a lot of people will want the insurance of having the gas engine for backup.
This might have been a legitimate concern with BEVs only having a range of 80-90 miles, but the newer ones with > 200 miles of range... it's similar to the gas station: if one charger is broken you have enough charge to get to the next one.
I plan on arriving at my next charging location with 20% battery to spare. That's 60 miles in the Tesla at rated efficiency. Plenty to get to the next charger. And I'll second the plug (ha!) for Plugshare. People do check-ins so you know which chargers are broken (which isn't that common anyway). In fact, stupid ICE drivers parking in charging spots was a bigger issue than broken chargers. That'll be solved when municipalities allow a BEV to have an ICE towed when it blocks a charger...
When I had a BEV with 85 miles of range I used Plugshare all the time... and never got stranded or even close to stranded. You can make up scary scenarios all day, but the reality is that it's not an issue, and especially so with the cars with large batteries.
So, this sort of happened to me... A few weeks ago we got an emergency call at 2:00 am and we had to jump in the Tesla and head halfway across the state. Since I wasn't planning a trip, the car was only charged to 70%... That was plenty to make the trip and back. There were two Superchargers I went by on that trip, so if 70% hadn't been enough I could have stopped for 10 minutes and gotten enough to finish the trip.
What if the car had been driven down to 20% and I forgot to charge it? Again, 10 minutes at the Supercharger would have been enough to get to the destination, and then I could have charged at the other Supercharger before I came home.
You have to construct a really unlikely scenario before a car like the Tesla M3LR won't work as well as an ICE.
So, in a case like that I guess you call for Lyft or Uber... but it's not really realistic.
Also, the scenario where the "car isn't charged enough" is pretty unlikely anyway, since you tend to plug in all the time. The car simply isn't sitting around uncharged in normal use.
Well, unless you have a Tesla where the Superchargers make that simple.
Hopefully all the other manufacturers will do the same thing. Certainly Tesla has shown that it's doable.
Also, I know nobody likes to think this way, but if it was only once, or even once a year, renting a car is certainly a possibility. But I like the Supercharger approach even more.
I don't know about arguably dangerous. The current chargers perform tests to insure continuity before non-signaling voltage and current are turned on.
That said, I think that wireless charging is probably the future of on-street parking, and eventually public parking lots and parking garages as well.
I think it's more a question of who's going to bear the cost of electrifying all those parking spaces?
I agree with you, and this fits a bit with my own experience. I always get shouted down by the purists for saying this in the electric vehicle forums, but I think that PHEV will be the first electric car for many people, and then their next car will be BEV. As you say, there's a mental reluctance to jump into the BEV pool without knowing for sure that it will meet your needs.
Having had a Tesla for a couple months, I can say there's nothing like having a big battery. It alleviates most of your range anxiety. I've had work days where I've had to drive all over Massachusetts and it works out just fine... So, either big battery or PHEV and most people will be happy. (of course we see some PHEVs with really crappy range like the new Subaru with 17 miles... Hopefully we'll see more and more like the Volt with 40-50 miles of electric range... With range like that it's pretty easy to use almost no gasoline at all).