Yo, I'm with that company doing the AV scooters and bikes, and yes it's much easier to nav than a car, we're looking at two magnitudes easier as far as computing power. We won't do autonomous with riders on-board so we can go slow and be conservative. Sensors are more than two orders of magnitude cheaper, we can use ToF laser rangefinders that are close to mobile phone grade.
Yeah, Seattle. Legislators and city govs have been super friendly and eager to help us, and we're still keeping really good pedal assist. The worst case scenario is in some areas we can disable throttles and make our pedal assist boost factor absurdly high. Making the case to govs for throttles on our bikes is easier than with a company who wants to sell ebikes to the public because we're not trying to get bicyclists to purchase our bikes. We're trying to get people to skip car trips and make connecting to public transit actually doable for them. So far this resonates with city planners.
I think you're exactly right. I'm a pretty hardcore cyclist and I commute 20 miles total every day but the number of people willing to exert massive effort for their commute is super small. My company is working on self-delivering shared ebikes and we recently made the decision to include a throttle because most folks won't ever be capital-B Bikers.
The scooters have been a good lesson for us as they've highlighted the importance of fun and friendliness in a shared vehicle. I don't think any of the shared ebikes are coming close to the right combination of factors that make people want to ride them. Scooters have nailed it, but their big problem is how easy it is to copy the model.
Yes, nothing is more depressing than listening to the a16z podcasts where they're discussing the minutiae of well-established b2b saas strategies for capturing long tail revenue. Shit, let's build some robots instead.
Definitely, will be interesting to test. We have several cameras onboard so that we can see what happened but an equal concern with vandalism is how people feel about being watched. We want to avoid feeling like your neighborhood is suddenly a panopticon. Still unsolved.
Hah, yeah it reminds me of a runaway shopping cart when you see our bike rolling. We expect people will get used to it eventually but we have some ideas to test in the future on how to make it more obvious, such as giving the bike a ‘face’ and having it lit up with LEDs that are visible from all angles. Def not a solved problem, but as far as design problems go it’s a pretty fun one.
Weel, we're in Bellevue. It's a super fun problem to work on and one of the first thing we figured out was that trikes won't work because of their width and difficulty to ride, so we got a two-wheeled bike to balance. The autonomy problems are easier than cars in a lot of ways, and this Uber case is something we don't deal with because our bikes can always stop when presented with a no-go situation since we're only autonomous when no one is riding.
This is absolutely the right analysis of how these systems work and why you can't expect autonomous cars to halt traffic deaths. What the Uber crash has shown us is that the tolerance for AVs killing people is probably exactly zero, not some (very meaningful) reduction like 10x or 100x less.
My company didn't start with this zero tolerance thing in our minds, but it turns out our self-delivering electric bicycles have a huge advantage for real world safety because they weigh ~60lbs when in autonomous mode and are limited to 12mph. This equals the kinetic energy of myself walking at a brisk pace, or basically something that won't kill purely from blunt force impact. I think the future for autonomy will be unlocked by low mass and low speed vehicles, not cars converted to drive themselves.
Interesting, hadn't considered a different bicycle shape so that it looks like it isn't empty at a glance. Will look into this.
The delivery is totally possible, it doesn't really even take extra tech. The key insight we've found is that cities don't really care about helping make delivery cheaper, but they deeply believe in improving transportation. The city planners we've spoken with love this because they want to be free to design cities that aren't car centric, and to do that they need a massive shift from car usership.
Big tech benefits/savings over autonomous car computing reqs; it can stop on the side of the road if it gets confused, if it crashes no one dies, our speeds will always be low
The biggest ones produce over 5 megawatts at peak capacity, I think someone has built over 10 megawatts but I'm not sure.
5 megawatts is a pretty useless figure for most people to imagine, and I think imagining it in units of homes-powered isn't great either because we don't have a sense of the heat or kinetic energy equivalent because our homes are quiet machines. A 260 horsepower car (think new minivan) at full throttle is producing about .2 megawatts, so the worlds largest turbines are generating the same power as 10/.2=20 minivans at full power.
Another way to think of it is in terms of heat. A big stovetop burner will generate about 3000 watts of heat, so a minivan is like 65 burners at full blast, and a 10 megawatt turbine is like 3300 burners.
The Carnot limit applies specifically to heat engines but later proofs on the 2nd law of thermodynamics still cap the conversion of heat to useful energy. As long as you keep that in mind, 19% Carnot efficiency is really impressive for a system like this with a small temp difference and no moving parts. I find their watts per cubic region an odd way to measure it given that you need heat flow across a surface to generate juice.
This is an incredible outcome and really shows how much work these UW grad students and Dr Smith have been working on low power passive tech. Great stuff, I wish more people in software were versed in physical tech so they could create hardware to enable their ideas.
I drove into a dust storm in Central Washington in a rental Volvo several years back and autobraking saved me from rear ending a car. I made it out, but a huge pileup ended up happening just behind me. https://www.kiro7.com/news/massive-crash-closes-eastbound-i-...
It tells you a lot, 20k cars in one city is a huge problem if you can't run while it rains, then you need to move them all to a storage location. If they do multiple cities then there are only so many without rain being likely, and expanding to more cities means your mapping needs to be done in those locations.
I wasn't commenting on feasibility or logistics, more on the state of their progress and if they can fully replace current services in cities or if it will augment them. If, for example, they don't work during heavy rain, then they cannot replace Uber/Lyft in most East Coast or Northern US cities.
Gyroscopic forces are not the dominant force keep a bicycle upright, this has been demonstrated with bicycles with counter-rotating wheels. Steering geometry of the front wheel is what self-stabilizes a bicycle.
Alex Roy is the most unlikable car reviewer out there, but somehow he keeps in the same circle as Demuro, Farrah, and (kinda) Harris. His reviews suffer because of his weird ego and self consciousness.
I couldn't make it very far through this video, I was reminded too much of an unattributed quote from Twitter, "Stephen Fry is a stupid person's idea of what an intelligent person is like".
You should read the history of retail, general stores used to be places you ordered goods from or where you had the counter person pick out your goods from the shelves behind them. Piggly Wiggly revolutionized this model by letting customers pick out goods and bring them to the front of the store, and Sears changed the whole economy by giving rural Americans (most people at the time) access beyond the monopoly of their local general store.
No, I still expend enough power to keep my heart rate at ~160bpm during my ride, but now I cut my commute time in half and I ride more than twice as often.
I daily a Felt Nine E-20, it's a mountain bike with front suspension. I also have a Cube 400 and a Juiced u500 cargo bike.
I recommend spending $3k on a bike with a Yamaha or Bosch motor, it's easy to justify that crazy price if you look at the money you'll save in gas/payments/gym expenses. Most importantly, I enjoy my commute now and I feel like a part of the city in a way that car commuting doesn't give you. Also, get a pedal-assist bike not one with a hand throttle, trust me it's not better to have a throttle.
Disclaimer: My new startup is ebike related but I'm not going to be selling any bikes or hardware.
I live in Seattle and there are a lot of hills when going east/west because it's a glacial area and the glaciers come down from Canada north/south. Fun!
Riding an ebike has dramatically changed the routes I take when commuting because I now prioritize safety and enjoyment over pure efficiency or avoiding inclines. My commute is 25 minutes on an ebike vs 70 on a regular bike, or 30 in a car in traffic.