I'm not clear on how this will work. How does the system know that a floormat is holding the pedal as opposed to me mashing it to the boards? Sometimes I want to hold the throttle wide open and accelerate as quickly as possible. Turning onto a busy highway is a great example. I can just see some cheap car manufacturer trying to implement a low-cost throttle interrupter and causing pile ups when someone turns into traffic and their engine shuts down in 70mph traffic.
I'm not trying to be a jerk but you might consider rentals.
When I need a pickup truck to haul something I don't go buy one...I rent one for about $20 a day. No insurance, no maintenance, no payments, no tires, etc. We are, after all, talking about hybrids not paying for themselves and we should also consider whether it is financially feasible to own a car versus renting if your need is only occasional. Yes, I own a car...but I don't also need to own a pickup. I just don't need it that often so renting is the perfect solution for me.
One issue in the US is that there's no incentive to use diesel in hybrids because we don't use "Euro diesel." Our diesel still uses sulfur as a lubricating agent which is part of what makes it such an extreme polluter and would raise the emission level of a hybrid thereby eliminating any government subsidies. And while we are on the topic of diesel cars in Europe...nothing pisses me off more than seeing 70-80+mpg diesel cars (NOT hybrids) that you can buy all day long in the UK while we have to struggle to get 40-50mpg here. Granted, Euros get better fuel and pay a lot more for it but it's just another indicator that the American auto industry is holding back on what they will develop in the US because they aren't done milking old technology and marketing to the "muscle car" mentality.
Back on topic. I bought my Prius in 2009 and while the financial bottom line may not work out to my advantage I sure like not having to spend $100 every week or two to fill it up. Besides, I really like the car and unless it gets destroyed, stolen or starts having lots of problems I'll keep it.
This sounds similar to senior design projects that were being done when I was studying EE. Contact the nearest university with mechanical and electrical engineering programs and find out what's required to sponsor a senior design team.
Watch the video again and pay attention to the road-going portion toward the end. The body leans as do the wheels. It is more like a motorcycle than a car in this respect and it should keep it from rolling over in all but the most extreme cases. That said, I've never been a fan of the single-front-wheel design for trikes. The increase in weight means you need a lot of braking power. Under hard braking on a motorcycle approximately 70% of the braking is done by the front wheel. If you double the weight of the vehicle you will just push it into a skid. Even with ABS this will translate into dangerously long stopping distances.
In the comment "some prior art systems" I wonder if they are referring to ray tracing programs like POV-RAY. I recall that was incredibly slow depending on light sources and texture detail but the results were stunning for early 90s technology.
Ask him how long before the meaning of the word "loose" is expanded to include the definition of "lose." That mistake is made so often I expect it will become accepted and eventually considered correct.
And is it even scalable and manufacturable? I worked in a silicon fab for years and it was like pulling teeth to get another $5M implanter purchased. The size of the vacuum chamber on the tool shown in the article will probably take hours to pump down to the vacuum needed to operate. To do any volume with that design you'll have to have several of those machines in operation. Hopefully that operating principle can be optimized around smaller batch sizes requiring a less expensive tool so you can have several running in parallel.
This must be a relatively new development. Count the number of 90's era Toyota Corollas you see on your drive home tonight. I'd wager most of those are pushing 200k miles thin sheet metal and all. I guess my point is that there may be exceptions.
On the other hand you are right about "cheapening" but sadly it's not restricted to cars. People think nothing of spending $200 on a phone and chucking it in the bin two years later when their contract is up and the next new shiny object has drawn their attention. Manufacturers have noticed this trend and are designing things now for this "disposable" generation. I was recently replacing a major appliance and the maintenance guy where I was shopping told me that at a training class he recently attended the company rep told him major appliances are now made to last 5-7 years. I was shocked at this because my mom had the same washer, dryer and stove for the entire 18 years I grew up at home...and there were 8 people in that farm household so it was not light-usage.
Bottom line is, people expect cheap so that is exactly what they get.
not to mention local retailers, restaurants, electricians, riggers, machinists, plumbers/pipefitters, custodial services, cafeteria workers, etcetera etcetera.
I work for the only large corporate employer in a smallish town and there are so many ways that it helps the local economy aside from the money earned by the people employed by that company. There are so many trades that work under contract at our site I can't even name them all. If we closed shop the impact would be huge.
Typical.;) After giving it more thought I actually suspect that autonomous vehicles should be more consistent than drivers...who are totally ***king random not to mention apparently blind.
I graduated in EE in 2008 after 6 years of working full time and school part time (no loans! YAY!). Anyway, my computer for the whole time was an old HP TC1100 tablet PC. It was revolutionary as at the time it was the only truly convertible tablet that could work as a slate or a regular laptop. I took many hundreds of pages of hand written notes using the standard Journal application that came with XP Pro Tablet. Great handwriting recognition made notes fully searchable and so forth. You could even export them to a web compatible format so you could share them with classmates or view them on other machines.
Since I was in an engineering field, my computer needed to do more than just be a note-taker. I used it for Matlab, PSPICE, cygwin, Office, Eclipse, Sketchup as well as some custom programming applications that the school had for their robotics program. Point is...I think most students will still need a laptop even if they have a tablet for taking notes. For me the TC1100 did everything well. Truly, in my opinion it was one of the best machines HP has ever produced. I in 6 years I never had a problem with it.
When I finished school the computer was still going strong but was getting dated. My brother still uses it today.
I don't know if the tablet PC market has kept up since the new "pad" craze but when I was using it Microsoft was really supporting the platform well.
I'm running Ubuntu on a netbook and I've set up an XP VirtualBox for running Google Sketchup because it has issues in Wine. I also keep a partion for Win7 around for the rare occasions I want to watch Netflix on my computer. Usually I use the PS3...but sometimes the wife is watching some abomination like "E" or Dancing With The "Stars" and I feel compelled to leave the room). I should be able to get Neflix to stream smoothly on the XP VM but I haven't spent too much time optimizing it yet.
He should be able to give us a fair assessment of how much it will cost to buy off each of the candidates. After all, that's the only metric that matters.
The part about this that alarms me is that it is public knowledge where "the nation's only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility" is located. Whether or not it is actually the only one, expect this to be on the short list of our enemies' targets.
A very good point but clearly the ratio of claim awards to premiums is not an exact balance. It can't be or insurance companies would not make a profit. Insurance companies make A LOT more money on premiums than they pay out in claims and if you threaten to cut into their premium income they will not like it.
You may be right. I'm just a natural pessimist. Besides that...I generally hate lawyers and insurance companies so take my comments with a grain of salt.:)
How will this affect the automotive insurance industry? If I have a car that does all of my driving then I should never have an at-fault collision. So it only makes sense to me that my rates should be a fraction of what they are now.
If the insurance industry sees this as a potential threat to their profits then I think they will lobby hard to keep it from advancing.
I think we are likely to see this adopted and put into wide use before we see people start really warming up to voice activated text messaging. Few things outrage me more than a driver staring at their lap while they are "driving." At least with autonomous vehicles someone is paying attention to the road.
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I'm not clear on how this will work. How does the system know that a floormat is holding the pedal as opposed to me mashing it to the boards? Sometimes I want to hold the throttle wide open and accelerate as quickly as possible. Turning onto a busy highway is a great example. I can just see some cheap car manufacturer trying to implement a low-cost throttle interrupter and causing pile ups when someone turns into traffic and their engine shuts down in 70mph traffic.
I'm not trying to be a jerk but you might consider rentals.
When I need a pickup truck to haul something I don't go buy one...I rent one for about $20 a day. No insurance, no maintenance, no payments, no tires, etc. We are, after all, talking about hybrids not paying for themselves and we should also consider whether it is financially feasible to own a car versus renting if your need is only occasional. Yes, I own a car...but I don't also need to own a pickup. I just don't need it that often so renting is the perfect solution for me.
Also check out zipcar.com
One issue in the US is that there's no incentive to use diesel in hybrids because we don't use "Euro diesel." Our diesel still uses sulfur as a lubricating agent which is part of what makes it such an extreme polluter and would raise the emission level of a hybrid thereby eliminating any government subsidies. And while we are on the topic of diesel cars in Europe...nothing pisses me off more than seeing 70-80+mpg diesel cars (NOT hybrids) that you can buy all day long in the UK while we have to struggle to get 40-50mpg here. Granted, Euros get better fuel and pay a lot more for it but it's just another indicator that the American auto industry is holding back on what they will develop in the US because they aren't done milking old technology and marketing to the "muscle car" mentality.
Back on topic. I bought my Prius in 2009 and while the financial bottom line may not work out to my advantage I sure like not having to spend $100 every week or two to fill it up. Besides, I really like the car and unless it gets destroyed, stolen or starts having lots of problems I'll keep it.
This sounds similar to senior design projects that were being done when I was studying EE. Contact the nearest university with mechanical and electrical engineering programs and find out what's required to sponsor a senior design team.
Watch the video again and pay attention to the road-going portion toward the end. The body leans as do the wheels. It is more like a motorcycle than a car in this respect and it should keep it from rolling over in all but the most extreme cases. That said, I've never been a fan of the single-front-wheel design for trikes. The increase in weight means you need a lot of braking power. Under hard braking on a motorcycle approximately 70% of the braking is done by the front wheel. If you double the weight of the vehicle you will just push it into a skid. Even with ABS this will translate into dangerously long stopping distances.
Perhaps and appropriate punishment would be a job at Foxconn. At least Apple then has a direct influence on the suffering of the offending individual.
I have a patent pending on that idea. You'll be hearing from my lawyer.
In the comment "some prior art systems" I wonder if they are referring to ray tracing programs like POV-RAY. I recall that was incredibly slow depending on light sources and texture detail but the results were stunning for early 90s technology.
Ask him how long before the meaning of the word "loose" is expanded to include the definition of "lose." That mistake is made so often I expect it will become accepted and eventually considered correct.
And is it even scalable and manufacturable? I worked in a silicon fab for years and it was like pulling teeth to get another $5M implanter purchased. The size of the vacuum chamber on the tool shown in the article will probably take hours to pump down to the vacuum needed to operate. To do any volume with that design you'll have to have several of those machines in operation. Hopefully that operating principle can be optimized around smaller batch sizes requiring a less expensive tool so you can have several running in parallel.
On the other hand you are right about "cheapening" but sadly it's not restricted to cars. People think nothing of spending $200 on a phone and chucking it in the bin two years later when their contract is up and the next new shiny object has drawn their attention. Manufacturers have noticed this trend and are designing things now for this "disposable" generation. I was recently replacing a major appliance and the maintenance guy where I was shopping told me that at a training class he recently attended the company rep told him major appliances are now made to last 5-7 years. I was shocked at this because my mom had the same washer, dryer and stove for the entire 18 years I grew up at home...and there were 8 people in that farm household so it was not light-usage.
Bottom line is, people expect cheap so that is exactly what they get.
Print all your ransom notes/bomb threats, etc. on a yellow background. Problem solved.
counting down until /. is ordered to remove the above comment...5...4...3...2...
I work for the only large corporate employer in a smallish town and there are so many ways that it helps the local economy aside from the money earned by the people employed by that company. There are so many trades that work under contract at our site I can't even name them all. If we closed shop the impact would be huge.
Typical. ;) After giving it more thought I actually suspect that autonomous vehicles should be more consistent than drivers...who are totally ***king random not to mention apparently blind.
We will have autonomous vehicles long before we can convince people to stop texting behind the wheel.
Since I was in an engineering field, my computer needed to do more than just be a note-taker. I used it for Matlab, PSPICE, cygwin, Office, Eclipse, Sketchup as well as some custom programming applications that the school had for their robotics program. Point is...I think most students will still need a laptop even if they have a tablet for taking notes. For me the TC1100 did everything well. Truly, in my opinion it was one of the best machines HP has ever produced. I in 6 years I never had a problem with it.
When I finished school the computer was still going strong but was getting dated. My brother still uses it today.
I don't know if the tablet PC market has kept up since the new "pad" craze but when I was using it Microsoft was really supporting the platform well.
I'm running Ubuntu on a netbook and I've set up an XP VirtualBox for running Google Sketchup because it has issues in Wine. I also keep a partion for Win7 around for the rare occasions I want to watch Netflix on my computer. Usually I use the PS3...but sometimes the wife is watching some abomination like "E" or Dancing With The "Stars" and I feel compelled to leave the room). I should be able to get Neflix to stream smoothly on the XP VM but I haven't spent too much time optimizing it yet.
An alien egg the size of an aircraft carrier? Now I'm scared.
He should be able to give us a fair assessment of how much it will cost to buy off each of the candidates. After all, that's the only metric that matters.
The part about this that alarms me is that it is public knowledge where "the nation's only nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly facility" is located. Whether or not it is actually the only one, expect this to be on the short list of our enemies' targets.
You may be right. I'm just a natural pessimist. Besides that...I generally hate lawyers and insurance companies so take my comments with a grain of salt. :)
How will this affect the automotive insurance industry? If I have a car that does all of my driving then I should never have an at-fault collision. So it only makes sense to me that my rates should be a fraction of what they are now. If the insurance industry sees this as a potential threat to their profits then I think they will lobby hard to keep it from advancing.
I think we are likely to see this adopted and put into wide use before we see people start really warming up to voice activated text messaging. Few things outrage me more than a driver staring at their lap while they are "driving." At least with autonomous vehicles someone is paying attention to the road.
And cloud servers don't use hard drives?