Electric Vehicles – It's Not Just About the Car
about.bnef.com
about.bnef.com
> Another powerful driver for the uptake of electric vehicles is that they are a vastly superior platform for autonomous driving, infotainment, connected vehicle and transport-as-a-service technologies, ... And it simply makes no sense to have an inherently analogue power unit – vibrating, volatile-liquid-consuming, hot-polluting-exhaust-producing – at the heart of a fully digital, sensor-pervaded, solid-state-electronics-controlled system.
I don't think there's anything true about this statement, basically. There's no reason not to put automated driving, connected vehicle, and transport-as-a-service technologies in petrol cars (as long as it's still economical to make and sell petrol cars).
Your car's infotainment system does NOT care how your car is propelled.
And the vibration argument is idiotic. The NVH caused by a modern car's engine is nothing compared to the NVH caused by rolling down a poorly-maintained asphalt street on rubber tires, especially with modern tires which use relatively high pressures to improve efficiency (both in gas cars and EVs).
Is this moron going to next try to claim that we need "digital suspensions" too? What about the analog power units in EVs? (Sorry, but motor controllers are inherently analog too. Motors don't work with 1s and 0s.)
So is automatic driving. As Chris Urmson of Google points out, their self-driving cars have no car-to-car communications. They don't need it, and don't want it.
Self-driving cars as transport-as-a-service have many of the problems of Personal Rapid Transit. We have yet to see the first system deployed, despite lots of hype. At least four vendors (Mercedes, Local Motors, Yandex, and a university in France) have shown prototypes of small self-driving buses, but none of them are routinely carrying passengers without a driver. The vehicle technology isn't the problem. It's the riders. Dealing with disabled riders, vandalism, jerks, and people not paying remains a problem.
You're right that there's no reason to not put these technologies into petrol cars. But there will be two opposing forces from that point forward: the computerized side of the car trying to expand its digital signal-path tentacles through the whole architecture, and the traditional petrol motor and its associated parts resisting change-for-the-sake-of-change in favor of well-known (analogue) engineering solutions.
In the end, I suspect the force of computerization will "win", and what we'll end up with is every car essentially being an electric car architecturally, just with some cars containing a petrol-fed electric generator under the hood.
Such an architecture likely won't be as fuel-efficient as current hybrid designs are! But it will win anyway: due to the vertical integration possible in electronic systems, it'll likely be much, much cheaper to produce, and more reliable. The "core" of your car—everything that's not sensors or motors—will be a $50 daughterboard, not even worth diagnosing when there's a problem, just popped out and replaced. Just like phones are today.
The analogue components of a car can, and indeed already do, have out-of-band digital monitoring. That secondary digital supervision feeds both your dashboard, and the pin-outs repair shops connect to. It even feeds things like fuel-efficiency microcontrollers that, in their roundabout way, send commands back to the motor.
But the architecture of even current electric cars goes far beyond this: electric cars don't monitor the analogue components with digital sensors, they simply have ADCs connected right to the sensors, and take the now-digital signal from the sensor and feed it to the car's CPU, where that signal—that data, now—can produce many separate outputs.
Surprisingly (given the last 30 years of robotics), the key advantage of electric cars over petrol ones is that the petrol architecture is inherently subsumptive—digital "cognitive" actions overriding lower-level, directly-connected analogue "reflex" actions—while the electric architecture can centralize data-flow. You don't have to worry about the driver attempting to move the car with the parking brake enabled; the information of "gas pedal depressed" goes through the "brain" of the device, where it also knows that the "parking brake engaged" line is high, so its desired-torque output should just stay at zero.
You can do all of this centralization in an ICE car. Electronic throttles and switches aren't new. (Though the design I've seen for this case is "oh, driver pushed the pedal, let's disengage the parking brake since they probably just forgot about it.")
I don't think we're even headed that way. Not faster than petrol is going to become uneconomical due to renewables or at least government incentives/tariffs.
> But the architecture of even current electric cars goes far beyond this: electric cars don't monitor the analogue components with digital sensors, they simply have ADCs connected right to the sensors, and take the now-digital signal from the sensor and feed it to the car's CPU, where that signal—that data, now—can produce many separate outputs.
This is a statement without meaning. Nothing about petrol engines prevents ADCs connected to sensors.
> Surprisingly ... while the electric architecture can centralize data-flow.
This also seems kind of meaningless.
> You don't have to worry about the driver attempting to move the car with the parking brake enabled; the information of "gas pedal depressed" goes through the "brain" of the device, where it also knows that the "parking brake engaged" line is high, so its desired-torque output should just stay at zero.
This is just drive-by-wire. Again, nothing about drive-by-wire is exclusive to electronic-drive vehicles. For example, all aircraft are powered by kerosene and yet modern aircraft are all fly-by-wire.
There's basically very little about the drivetrain that actually matters to any of this technology. The key advantaged of an electronic drive train that I would highlight, in roughly most to least important, are:
* Reduced maintenance and mess
* Emissions, and access to renewable energy as it increasingly powers the grid
* Regenerative braking (but note that even some analogue vehicles have this in
the form of flywheel energy storage), and
* High torque
I don't see car repair shops going away. The only group that may die is Jiffy Lube and good riddance to them. Last time I checked... electric cars need their tires rotated (and all tire maintenance associated with that: Tire Repair, Tire balancing, etc. etc.).
Brakes still need to be replaced: which means the brake fluid industry needs to remain, along with brakes and rotors need to be continuously produced.
Electric cars still need coolant flush every few years. Both for coolant reasons and anti-corrosion reasons. Windshield wipers will crack. Windshields will continue to be replaced. Bodywork needs to repair damage from accidents.
So hell, even the lowest tier, crap repair shop (Jiffy Lube) will still be around 30 years from now. Jiffy Lube's current work is:
* Oil Changes -- the only thing that Electric Cars don't need
* Brakes
* Fluids (coolant / brake fluid. I guess transmission fluid might go away)
* Tires
If model s is any indicator to the future of EV car reliability than basically that leaves jiffylube maybe handling:
* tires * fluids
There would be huge drop in need for brake maintenance. I have no idea where their profit center sits, but I can't imagine it's only in tires and fluids?
My car (2014 Ford Focus) is 2 and 1/2 years old. Here are the list of things I've done to my car:
* Three oil changes and tire rotations. The tires should be rotated every 7500 miles or so, regardless of the vehicle.
* New Windshield Wipers -- Rubber degrades when exposed to the sun over long periods of time. I had to replace my windshield wipers recently.
* Air Conditioning Filter -- Pollen gets in there. Replaced at 20,000 miles (a few months ago).
* Windshield Wiper fluid -- I top it off every month or so.
* Three punctured tires -- Why are there so many screws on the road? Uggghhhhh. I check tire-pressure weekly and top it off at a gas-station to 35 PSI.
The only thing the Tesla gets rid of, compared to my car, are the three oil changes, which happen whenever I rotate my tires anyway. (I do oil changes / tire rotations myself. Very easy job)
The cost of full-synthetic oil + filter is $35, spent every 7500 miles for the oil change. Its basically negligible.
My previous car was a Nissan Maxima with 150,000+ miles on it. My family changed its brakes twice in its lifetime (hand-me-down from my father as I left for college). I think people are severely overestimating the amount of times brakes need to be changed.
What do you do when you're waiting for your gas to fill up? Might as well be productive, right? Plus, air-pump stations are all over gas stations. If you're getting your gas filled up, might as well check tire pressure while you're at it.
Leave a pressure gauge in your car.
Many gas stations around me don't allow you to walk away from the pump, they have removed the locking latch on the handle that lets you do that. If there ever is a latch, I use that time to wash the windows.
For inflating, one of these is small, really simple and works just fine:
https://www.amazon.com/Ryobi-P737-18-Volt-Inflator-Included/...
Oil... that's trickier. You want the engine cool, otherwise the oil will burn you when you touch it. You also should park at a flat spot before checking.
I check as often as I can, but its maybe once a month for oil. Usually once a week for a few weeks after an oil change, to make sure that nothing is leaking.
If The Model S is any indicator of the future of EV car reliability, then things are awful.
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-consumer-repo...
Edmund's had to replace their drive unit 3 times (FOUR drive units in two years!!). Tesla clearly has a lot of kinks they need to work out still.
I'm not sure why the article is so confident about battery life. It's not just about total lifetime mileage. As the battery degrades, the capacity drops and so its range decreases, making the car progressively less useful. It's not like the car gets to the claimed 70000 miles and then drops dead.
Tesla has been out many years now and their battery degradation has been beating expectations so far. The 100k mi taxi that was posted a few weeks ago was only showing ~2% loss and I think he had the car for quite a few years.
I think it's been shown that with proper thermal management battery degradation is not a major factor.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/near-annual-replacem...
The lithium batteries last a very long time, at least.
Tires are the biggest thing. Jiffy Lube has a lot of competition here, from places like Discount Tire and many other such places. I didn't even know Jiffy Lube did tires, and there's no way I'd go there for that (or anything else for that matter). Yes, windshields will still need replacement, and bodywork will still be needed for crashes. Windshield wipers? If you can't put on your own windshield wipers from Autozone, you need to be committed; everyone does that themselves, or gets a spouse/neighbor/friend to do it for them in 20 seconds. (It'd be better if they still sold the rubber refills instead of making us replace the whole assembly for $20.) But most cars probably never see a bodyshop, and windshields are normally replaced by mobile technicians. Body shops will be needed less too due to automated driving, driver safety aids, etc.
Modern cars are already ridiculously reliable, but after 10 or so years they start having some problems because of the gas engine mostly, especially if it hasn't been maintained that well. They're even extending oil-change intervals in them to 10-15k miles (many cars now have sensors and displays that tell you when to change it). EVs will need a little less maintenance (because of the oil), but the biggest difference will be the relative lack of need for major repairs when the car is older.
The oil change places will die out as EVs pick up unless they are smart enough to install L3 charging stations and charge a small fee for their use.
(I fill the washer fluid myself.)
That's one trip a year.
In contrast, my Subaru requires about 2 oil changes a year, and the garage that does the oil changes doesn't do safety inspections. Thus, my Subaru requires three trips a year.
Huge difference. Hopefully my Subaru is the last gas car I need to buy.
Huh, we don't got that in my State.
Tire Rotations are typically bundled with the oil change. As far as I'm concerned (in the area that I live in), getting rid of oil changes doesn't do anything really. Still gotta go in for the tire rotation.
I mean, I do it myself manually. Because rotating tires is braindead easy to do, and oil changes aren't much harder. Frankly, tires are heavy and are the "harder" part of the job IMO.
Also, if people decide not to own their own cars, fleet maintenance is a different kind of market.
The anticorrosion chemicals wear out every five years, so you need to replace them.
Why? There are only three obstacles, but they are quickly getting eliminated.
1: Battery cost for long-range EVs is quickly dropping.
2: Charging time is also improving. We really only need to get down to about 10-15 minutes for a quick charge. That's enough time to pee, poop, and get a snack during a long road trip.
3: Charging ubiquity is also improving. For people who can't charge at home, businesses like grocery stores, malls, and restaurants provide a great opportunity to charge without making an extra trip to the gas station.
Essentially, anyone who is price conscious at all will be on electric, which means 90%+ of the market.
My girlfriend bought an electric bike four years ago, but that was a little too early, and when we moved to a place with stairs the electric bike had to go. But the person who bought it on Craigslist loves it and rides it to drop her kid off at daycare, then to work.
If you haven't ridden a pedal-assist electric bike, you should stop by your local bike shop and try one out. They're quite remarkable, but in a way that is difficult to appreciate over text. I personally don't need one because I ride on flat terrain, so I prefer a Novarra Gotham (https://www.rei.com/product/888337/novara-gotham-bike-2016); still, the appeal is there.
Seems to work quite nicely already with locking and registration.
I haven't used one, and I don't understand why they are electric - the city is as flat as a pancake anyway.
What do you think about the idea that broad-based, multi-sector automation will remove some of the essential challenges in life, and ultimately weaken cognitive abilities?
My logic is that as we increase our conveniences, our requirement for physical exertion diminishes and the average body mass grows. So, will the same thing happen to our minds - without the need to exercise them will their performance diminish?
If so, will that create a class of knowers and non-knowers, and if so who is responsible for non-knowers?
I read a lot of desperation in the comments here and elsewhere while at the same time believing generally that we live in a golden age (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12373014).
Its true that future humans may end up as overweight, wheelchair ridden as depicted in Wall-E. But It can also go the other way. Technology has also made fitness to be very popular, for instance. We won't know until it comes to pass. Evolution has generally favored fitness though (e.g. endorphins are released during exercise) so it seems unlikely that the obesity epidemic will spread everywhere or be so complete.
Go to any trendy city in America now and walk around downtown. You'll see a bunch of upper-middle-class people, and none of them are fat. People now spend time doing physical fitness activities that they didn't in decades past. They also eat a lot better; there's more awareness about some foods being unhealthy. In America, we're seeing a divide between the urban culture and the rural culture, where urban (mostly white) people have good economic success mostly, and are healthier, while rural people are going the other way; hang out with rural people sometime and you'll find they generally have terrible health. They eat cheap, crappy food, and they drive everywhere, and don't spend any time exercising.
Ultimately, in the farther future, obesity will be cured by medical means. It's not really that complicated, and there's been a lot of research lately into how gut microbes affect it, and it turns out it's enormous. I predict that pretty soon we'll have gut microbe transplants being used to eliminate obesity, with people having their e.coli eliminated and replaced with versions that are engineered to keep them from getting fat, regardless of exercise. It won't be that long after that that they figure out how exercise affects the body and are able to replicate that with pharmaceuticals.
Go read it: do you see any differentiation between urban and rural people at all? Do you see any differentiation between different regions of the nation? If the answer is no, then it's all bullshit. It's like trying to look for trends among programming language usage by averaging in ALL computer users. Since most computer users don't write any software at all, the clear trend is that no significant number of people use Python, Java, C++, C#, or really any programming language at all, so we should just cut off support for programming languages.
83 years later, in the same city, the Freedom Tower was completed. It had one more floor, but took 102 months to build and cost $4B.
Obviously that's only two data points, but it's broadly representative of the general trend. Our capacity to build infrastructure has declined dramatically over the past century. Obviously we're still able to do it, but the costs and timescales have increased by orders of magnitude.
NO, IT IS NOT REPRESENTATIVE OF ANYTHING.
So many things changed between 1931 and 2013, and the circumstances surrounding ESB and 1WTC are so different (9/11, for one) the comparison is utterly meaningless.
On the other hand it doesn't seem like the Freedom Tower construction had a very good record either (but I couldn't find any info on deaths):
> In fact, The News found at least 81 incidents involving dangerous work conditions at the site since construction began in 2003. Through this year, at least 42 of those incidents involved workers falling from a height far enough to seriously injure themselves.
Obviously, safety has gotten better over the years, but it's not like people were falling off the ESB left and right during construction.
Also, we have the benefits of modern technologies now: safety technologies, cranes, etc. It should be both faster and safer to build something that size, just like we can build cars now that are better than Model Ts in every single way. But it isn't.
It's not about pensions, and it certainly isn't about healthcare (we don't have nationalized healthcare in the US, we have a complete fucking mess). The problem is politics and bureaucracy. We just can't get stuff done like we used to.
- elbphilharmonie hamburg
- Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg
and many more:
You can read an english article about that here: http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/disastrous-publ...
Most of these desasters are caused by underbidding and then the company buys in personal that isn't trained for the job. The company fails, the prise rises (mostly higher than other offers) actually this gives a bad reputation to the building industry. Also in germany many more projects failed, and the politcs removed a lot of stuff that untrained people could raise a building company. like the "master"-title need that was completly removed (in most handcraft work) and the quality suffered.
another reason why quality suffers is also of course that there are more materials and the stuff gets more complex due to more safety restrictions, this also means that its no longer possible that a single person could understand the process as a whole. you often also see that in minor vehicle repair shop even the one's from the car vendor, most of the time the bigger problems can't be solved by them and the car needs directly go back to the vendor company. this wasn't true a while ago, so the reasons why quality suffered are mostly:
- complexity
- less trained people
- less trained supervisory
- rush for the smallest possible price
Germany and public projects are a extreme example if all 4 things of the above are true. P.S.: These things do happen for technology projects, too in germany.
http://www.plugincars.com/cars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_electric_cars_currentl...
The current model I'm putting through its paces a mid-drive Bosch based bike http://www.ebco-ebikes.co.uk/products-page/ebco/ebco-ucl-70/
I am 20st 8 or 130kg. It does rather well although I failed to get it up this hill https://scontent-lhr3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/t31.0-8/14086433_101541... near Avoncliff (Winsley Hill).
I've come to the conclusion that e-bikes are not just a bicycle with motor. It is not cycling in the sense of sport cycling or leisure cycling. It is a transformative form of transport that offer you the freedom and the range you need within an urban (and lesser extent rural) environment to just simply get from A to B while being connected to your local community.
I've been lending the bike out to various people whenever I have stopped. The Deliveroo (takeaway delivered by bike) couriers were absolutely stunned how different it is. There isn't a single person that hasn't tried the bike out that hasn't been absolutely stunned at what it can do. It really is nothing like cycling.
I think the biggest impact for me is that I don't worry about hills any more. It also gives you significant acceleration from a standing start. You are usually up to 16mph within a 4-5 pedals. This is really important when vehicular cycling. I feel a lot more confident in traffic on one of these.
Everyone seems to be talking about self-driving cars. Seriously, at an urban level, do not discount just how important the e-bike is. It's the most efficient and fastest way you can go from A to B in a city.
One other thing, don't buy a cheap bike. The mid-drive systems are expensive but they are the best on the market. Hub motors are just not as good.
I can only suggest you try one of them. Find a local stockist and go borrow one for an hour.
Of note my wife has one with a throttle. She has a bad knee. She refused a mobility scooter, but a lovely blue bike with a basket on the front looks good and she can peddle as much as she is physically able to, and then let the bike take her home.
E-bikes are stunning. Really really amazingly good modes of transport.
After testing the one today on a 40mile round trip, I will state, next time I'm taking my normal gravel bike. For leisure they are just not as demanding physically so not as much fun for that. But that's me. For getting around the city of Bath, I will always use the e-bike. Arrive fresh and relaxed. I feel I can easily explore the city now without having to worry about hills.
Yes I will be getting different vendors and styles. The one I have is the first one, so I'm working with the editor on the style of my review next week.
Should be similar to the "Justin says" "Dave says" sections of this article http://ebiketips.co.uk/content/reviews/electric-bikes/ebco-u...