Japanese auto completely missed the memo on software. Many of them won't make the ev transition. It's hard to imagine what Japanese economy is going to be like once their auto industry is gutted.
I think it's a shame that the EV regulations and incentives (at least in America) are not as friendly for traditional hybrids and plug-in hybrids. They have basically zero downsides compared to full ICE or full EV, and would still make a massive dent in emissions.
PHEVs in particular - most people are going under 100 miles a day, so there would be 0 emissions.
They need oil changes. Some don't mind, but I do. It's a downside.
EVs do have downsides, but so do ICE and hybrid.
IMO getting under your vehicle twice a year is a good thing and more people should be encouraged to do it. Getting eyes on the stuff hidden underneath before it gets bad enough to start breaking is always useful.
For people like myself, looking at the underside of a car is worthless. I wouldn't even begin to be able to recognize something needs attention until it's very obviously broken. And even then, I might not know.
If you're paying someone else to do it, presumably they're a set of eyes that's a bit more experienced with cars and can more confidently identify the sorts of things one could see from the perspective of an oil change.
This is honestly not true - there is an order of magnitude less parts in an EV drivetrain vs a modern ICE car. You can go a decade between seeing a service center in an EV, largely thanks to regen braking/one pedal driving allowing you to avoid new pads or discs. There is no transmission in virtually all EVs, with drive direct from the motor through a fixed gear etc. The motor's moving parts are effectively friction free - the rotor and stator in an EV never touch, so there is no wear.
I think anyone currently running both an EV and a gas car will have similar experiences; The EV needs tires, cabin air filters and wiper blades from new to the 10 year mark, there are no other regular trips. The only scheduled fluid change on a tesla is a relatively inexspensive 10 year battery coolant swap.
My suspension and brakes get inspected for safety issues every time I get new tires on the EV - I'm fine with not getting under it too.
I’m almost there with the old-school way: a manual transmission and downshifting to decelerate.
While not as effective, drum brakes really lasted a while.
Their automatics on the other hand…
For example, the electric-only range for the 2012 Prius PHEV is 15 miles, not enough for many people's daily commute unless you can plug in at both destinations. The 2023 Prius Prime is around 40, which is much better, so maybe you can just plug in at night at home.
It is only the 5th generation Prius that is truly designed around having a higher capacity battery pack, ditto for the recent RAV4 PHEV model. The 4th gen Prius fits in the larger battery pack as compromise, with reduced cargo area and wasted volume.
I would have bought a Prius Prime in 2017, and tried to get the tax credit, but there were several issues. There weren't many available in my area, the standard 2017s had driving and parking assist, while the Prime did not, reduced cargo area with no spare tire, and the price, because even with the tax credit was a bit too high for my liking. Just went with a standard Prius instead, and definitely have not regretted the choice. Today I'd buy a PHEV RAV4 or 5th gen Prius though.
Once we collectively get over range anxiety a whole new world is going to open up in EVs.
I very much doubt we will ever get over it. We are specifically asked to abandon a feature we enjoyed for a century. We will likely only get over it when there are EVs that simply do not have this sacrifice.
The average person doesn’t need hundreds of miles of range on a single charge assuming the charging infrastructure is there, and it’s getting there.
I’m not sure what your point is. You are in favour of wasting limited non-renewable resources because you personally take road trips?
The point is that the convention BEV is not that desirable, and that people will never accept its limitations. The solution is simply producing another kind of zero emissions vehicle without this problem. That is something we can easily do now. The only opposition at this point seems to be BEV fanatics who have basically closed their minds to this fact in the same way ICE car fanatics closed their minds to EVs a decade ago.
I agree that huge batteries are a waste, but I think there's basically no future in fossil fuel ground transportation. Hybrids are a transitional technology we might use for awhile because we don't have the EV production capacity.
In the long run I think we're better off electrifying our major highways so cars and trucks can charge without stopping. There are several ways to do it, of which induction is the least practical and most expensive.
And that doesn't count how much better things get if you fully charge the electric 25-mile range battery and measure the mpge.
Additionally, I offer into evidence what happens if you rent a Prius Prime and drive up to the valet at the hotel of your choice. Answer: they won't come and help you. Reason: they'll think you're an Uber driver. Upshot: the idea that Uber drivers could or would eat the cost of worse gas mileage due to dead weight is fatuous.
Toyota does a 10 year manufacturer warranty; the availability and price of used ones older than 10 years (I think they're called Prius Plug-in) should tell you that Toyota has a handle on the complexity of the system they built.
Toyota. Oh what a feeling.
Also, anyone who has one: hit me up if you're thinking about getting rid of one of these pieces of dead weight.
Yes you need big teams to deliver huge projects. Operating systems, compilers, languages, etc all take huge investment to build out. The thing is though the initial conditions have a massive downstream effect. The core contributions by genius 10x computer scientists and software engineers set the pace for everyone else. Unix, C, Linux, Git, LLVM, Perl, Python, who knows what else. It's the individuals or small dedicated teams doing it the 'wrong' way, or going for a weird untested approach that starts a small speck that snowballs into huge multi-billion industries.
The culture and economic conditions in the US are perfect for this to work. Japan, and for different reasons and certainly not the the same scale Europe, not so much.
It's still not clear when (and if) the ev transition will happen. There are many unknowns.
The robot had odometry from the wheels, though it was a bit noisy due to the construction of the omnidirectional mechanism. They decided to ignore wheel odometry and use only an odometry module based on the planar lidar, essentially visual odometry. This worked fine in most circumstances, but basically completely failed in hallways as they lacked distinctive features. This interfered with my work which involved the robot navigating around the office.
I had worked on this problem before, and ROS has an excellent sensor fusion library for dealing with multiple noisy sensor readings. You just need to combine wheel odometry and laser odometry with a kalmann filter, and the sensor fusion library makes this relatively easy.
However even though I worked at a Toyota office with full time Toyota employees, and the code was pretty much off the shelf ROS code, and the robots were produced in very low volumes and only in use at Toyota, they wouldn't give me the source code. I think maybe they wouldn't even give me root access.
Still, I was able to control the names of ROS topics using the ROS launch files (it has been a while since I worked with ROS and I forget some of the terms). I remapped the lidar odometry topic to an intermediary topic name instead of /odom, then directed the intermediary topic in to the sensor fusion module along with the wheel odometry, then mapped the sensor fusion output to /odom. The system got odometry information but now it did not come from the lidar odometry but from the sensor fusion module, so it was happy.
The fix worked great. It had normal behavior when lidar was good, and had reliable odometry in long hallways. I was finally able to implement my office navigation code.
I did my best to communicate these changes back to Toyota. They had not been very helpful when I was asking for help solving the issue, but I had hoped that since I had it working they would appreciate this. I asked where I could file a git issue or otherwise push the code to some private git repo.
They were not using git. Ultimately I was instructed to email the raw code files I had used along with instructions for how to integrate it. I found this quite surprising. I have no idea if they ever implemented the changes I suggested, but I kind of doubt it. From what I have heard of japanese software practices, they basically do not accept code suggestions from the bottom up.
I know of some people who worked for Toyota Research Institute who said they were trying to get the Toyota folks to integrate silicon valley coding rigor in to their systems. Maybe they had success, I don't know. But certainly 6 years ago things were a total mess.
This was refreshing to read. Within my bubble in tech, it's often easy to get jaded about how _unrigorous_ our "engineering" often is.
That's not "silicon valley", that's "anywhere remotely modern" coding rigor. Sounds like they need to get with the times, especially with regards to developing systems with software stacks that are a couple orders of magnitude larger than in the recent past (like 15 years ago).
What exactly makes u come to this conclusion?
https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/04/16/how-japan-is-losin...
But any of their engineers could tell them the same thing, so what'd be the point?