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Comment by eptcyka | Hacker News Reader

Never become dependent on doing hideously complicated things. You will eventually struggle to choose to do something more efficient, as the european auto industry is currently displaying. The car where thid motor will be used will, given current market sentiment, be a massive flop. Here they are showing off how complex the manufacturing process is. Surely we’d all be better off with simpler and cheaper processes.

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China is working on the same type of engine: https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/chinese-axial...

Ye, and I’d wager China will put that motor into affordable vehicles first, not some BS AMG GT 4 door/4 seat hyper car.

Mercedes always brings their latest technologies to the highest tier of cars first. Almost every major innovation has first debuted on the S class

This entire product is easier to build than the existing technology, has more simple tooling and will be simpler and cheaper.

Designing the manufacturing machinery is exactly what happens in any manufacturing process. Those robots are general purpose that have been adapted for the required tasks, that's a normal process.

Why would you build a motor that's twice as heavy with copper and much wider when you don't need to?

He says, typing on one of the most hideously complicated things humanity has created.

Efficiency and cost savings at scale usually involve an increase in complexity: in mass manufacturing, complexity is generally a fixed cost and so can be amortized over larger volumes.

By that logic we should all just be writing assembly manually. Screw hideously complicated higher level languages. Screw LLMs in particular, so complicated!

A typical modern car is already hideously complicated and a different type of motor would not change this.

What is the current market sentiment? Share of EVs is slowly rising so having a good motor as important as ever.

> Never become dependent on doing hideously complicated things

Is Mercedes stupid?

How did Carl Benz dare to do something as hideously complicated as building the first gasoline-powered car in history?

And why did they kept inventing complicated stuff that ended in all modern cars like ABS, adaptive cruise control, direct fuel injection, emergency brake assist, etc, etc?

Not all of those inventions are bad. But not all of them are coming from a place of necessity. All of them do increase complexity. My gripe with Mercedes is not that they are constantly pushing boundaries on what can be done with more tech. My main gripe is that the EVs they are building are essentially as complex as the ICE cars and follow largely the same design principles as the ICE cars. For instance, in the EQS, instead of applying engine breaking when the driver takes their foot off the pedal, they went to great lengths to _move the break pedal_ in proportion to the amount of engine breaking that is currently being applied as per the VCUs command. And yet the door cards on the EQS are not up to the standard of an S class.

My main gripe with MB is that they have this new technology that could simplify things and let them build a better product. Instead of building around it, they shove it in to their existing designs. I was expecting an electric S class to be more akin to a Lucid Air sans the teething problems of a new company. Instead, we get weak attempts at solving non issues.

And whilst they are certainly not in the market of producing affordable vehicles, I would hope that using EV tech they could create a better version of their existing fleet. I do not think anyone buying an A class cares about the 4 popper under the hood - losing it and simplifying radically, in my mind at least, would give them more budget and leeway to create a more compelling product.

    > "instead of applying engine breaking when the driver takes their foot off the pedal, they went to great lengths to _move the break pedal_ in proportion to the amount of engine breaking that is currently being applied as per the VCUs command"

Regenerative braking slows the car more aggressively than an ICE where you take your foot of the gas, so the pedal change isn't putting on the brakes, it's communicating to a driver used to ICE that the car is slowing more than might be expected.

There may also be a sports-related reason for people who habitually left-foot brake.

It depends how much you draw from the motor/generator. One can modulate it as they want, whatever can't go into the battery due to chemistry or drive constraints can be disposed of as heat.

You clearly have never used a car like that. You develop muscle memory for where the pedal is - finding that the pedal is not where it used to be does not inspire much confidence.

Every other manufacturer has managed to control regen breaking via throttle modulation - even ICE hybrid cars have been doing that for ages.

I've used left-foot-braking in my (ICE-powered) daily driver for years.

Regenerative braking is very different to taking your foot off the accelerator in a conventional ICE car, it's much more powerful a stopping force than traditional engine-braking.

I understand the rationale for moving the pedal to illustrate the amount of "braking" force. I'll admit I'm not exactly a typical driver though.

Why not move the gas pedal too, when using cruise control then?

    > "Why not move the gas pedal too?"

I'd support that. It does feel unusual in most cars' cruise control that you can push the accelerator to three-quarters of its travel before you start to accelerate (e.g. if cruise control is at 50–60mph).

If you push the gas pedal, you'd expect to go faster, wouldn't you?

They used to, but not by design. Back when throttles were still cabled I could feel the cruise control doing its thing by lightly resting on the pedal.

The equilibrium of "good enough vs technological simplicity" for cars was probably reached in the 1950s. Everything after that was more or less solving "non-issues" with ever-increasing complexity ;)

And why had that cars be to be refueled in pharmacies?

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Wiesloch_Stadtapotheke_E...

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