theluketaylor

i3 was a fascinating car and remains one of the best used cars currently available, but it had 2 bets that BMW lost badly.

1) That batteries would remain really expensive. Lithium batteries have been falling in price for a long time and EV demand was only going to drive new innovations and economies of scale, so even at the time that seemed like a poor bet. BMW wasn't entirely wrong since battery prices stayed quite high during the model lifespan, but it didn't really matter because bet 1) lead to bet 2) 2) Carbon Fibre construction. BMW bet that EVs would need to be light to extract range from small batteries, so they made a CFRP monocoque and made a wager they could find ways to manufacture CFRP at scale more cheaply. They were pretty wrong (though it has led to an explosion of carbon fibre trim options on M models that is nearly pure profit)

i3 had such a small battery, but it still had the huge EV cost penalty that made early EVs very niche. That proved pretty fatal, though the few that got one did tend to really like them.

That double failure scared BMW pretty badly and they retreated to shared platforms, so every EV they sell can't take advantage of the packaging benefits being an EV allows. There are huge spaces for engines up front that is nearly all wasted.

Despite that deficiency BMW has invested a ton into their EV powertrains, so they actually have some of the best efficiency out there.

Mercedes is taking legal liability for their L3 system. That's better than Tesla

GM's supercruise allows safe hands free driving as a L2 system. That's better than Tesla

Waymo is operating a true L4 system in multiple markets. That's better than Tesla.

Tesla has a better than average L2 system in autopilot. They have a downright dangerous L2 system in FSD that through its very design encourages unsafe driving habits. It lulls drivers into a false sense of security, but FSD can still hand control to the driver at the very last moment when they are unprepared to safely operate a vehicle.

Research has shown the L2 systems that border on L3 capability are dangerous, which is why all of the competition is staying well clear of that design and yet Tesla is forging ahead. There are times when going against the grain is a path to innovation, like Tesla using thousands of small cells to deliver viable BEVs. Or SpaceX using fast iteration on cheap reusable rockets. This isn't one of those cases as research has shown this pathway is not just non-viable, it's a safety risks to the public. There is a reason everyone else is working on L3 and L4 and developing it under carefully controlled testing conditions and methodologies. Tesla just slaps 'beta' on it and sends 4000 lbs of steel out hoping it doesn't run anyone over. When SpaceX rockets blow up during testing no one gets hurt. That is not true of FSD development.

I love my Tesla, but FSD is dangerous and the marketing was well into scam territory. There is a reason NHTSA and the FTC both have gotten involved.

When I was a teen in Calgary the transit agency was really good at dealing with issues like this during peak periods. They would pair or triple busses together and alternate stops. If someone requested the stop the drivers would radio to coordinate. Sometimes both buses would have a requested stop, but they would work together so only one bus allowed new riders on. The non-loading bus would quickly drop off passengers and leave while the other stayed behind to handle new riders. Nearly all the stops had dedicated out of traffic space for the bus, so the leap-frog maneuver was really simple. A small amount of low cost infrastructure and some operational cooperation enabled much better service.

Except commercial and amateur air travel seems to now be stuck in a local maxima deeply similar to what the parent talks about, avoiding risk by doing the same thing. There are good processes to improve the safety of existing operations and good reasons to keep doing proven things, but innovation is deeply choked.

See the decades long process of trying to switch away from leaded aviation fuel. Small aircraft are all running engine designs from the 1960s despite huge advances in internal combustion and fuel composition in other applications. Getting a new engine design or fuel mixture approved has proven effectively impossible, so processes have defaulted to doing things the exact same way to avoid risk.

See also the 737 MCAS debacle. Boeing was highly incentivized to keep the 737 flight characteristics exactly the same to avoid needing to re-certify the airframe or re-train pilots they invented MCAS to mimic the old behaviour and didn't tell pilots about it, leading to deadly results. Rules designed to allow change actually perversely made it a better option to avoid change (or at least avoid the appearance of change), so risk behaviour defaulted to do it the same way as before.

Extensive analysis of Tesla and NHTSA crash reporting (some by NHTSA themselves) shows that autopilot and fsd do not have significantly better safety outcomes than manual drivers or drivers aided by other non-tesla assistance systems.

This NHTSA report is pretty damning about Tesla's cavalier attitude towards the design of safe systems.

https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2022/INCR-EA22002-14496.pdf

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/04/26/tesla-...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2020/10/28/new-te...

https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-risky-deaths-cra...

The legacy car makers have flirted with 48V components for decades but haven't been willing to do the hard work to realize all the benefits it brings. The germans in particular are stuck in limbo. For their PHEV and BEV cars they are shipping 12V for all traditional functions, 48V for advanced functions like active suspension and anti-roll bars, and high voltage systems for the traction motor. Complete mess.

It's frustrating to be a Tesla owner. For every great engineering choice they make like going all in on 48V they make a user hostile choice like removing stalks and selling "full self driving" that is downright dangerous.

My mother did the exact same thing. When I was a kid we hosted a 3 refugee sisters who were new to Canada. Despite a significant language barrier my mother tried to explain the dinnerware was unbreakable and they didn't need to worry about it too much. She tossed a plate on the floor to demonstrate. It landed on edge and shattered everywhere. The poor refugees were so confused about why this white woman has just destroyed a perfectly good plate.

Especially with a robot that can harvest and sort different crops. Monocultures are unsustainable, but currently there isn’t really any other economic choice to keep a farm running. Technology like this is going to open so many new possibilities.

To be in the realm of fair non-compete compensation needs to be total comp and not just base salary. In the US while not working you need to cover healthcare costs and many roles have a significant portion of comp from percentages of sales, bonuses, and other incentives. Just a base salary payment during a 6-12 month furlough would be a big pay cut for many.

There also likely needs to be some additional compensation for lost time in the market when skills are atrophying or new experience isn't being gained.

Non-competes have a place, but there needs to be tons of rules around their use, like only being available for specialized and other high paid roles. Something like 3x-4x median salary to be a position eligible for a company to even propose a non-compete.

Snowflake also made it hard to have good practices, giving them further culpability. There was no setting for customers to force their entire tenant to enforce MFA. Customers had to depend on each person with access to do the right thing, something that is unlikely to be universally true.

The problem with that plan is social engineering attacks. CSRs are often careless and will accept 'a bunch of random letters and numbers' as the answer rather than validating each character.

Better to randomly select a long dictionary word or hypenate a few together. Equally unguessable but easily verified, so it won't be weakened during a phone conversation.

The range killer is really drag, not weight. Weight contributes, but at high speed drag is such a large draw that nearly nothing else matters.

The rolling resistance coefficent of a car tire is about 0.01 and the force grows linearly with mass. Drag is v^2 and the coefficients are more like 0.2 - 0.3 of the frontal area on most EVs.

Weight savings don't offer that much range savings so there isn't much incentive to pull weight out of a design, especially when carbon fibre tub construction is so much more expensive.

BMW made a bet batteries would remain very scarce and expensive, a bet they lost pretty throughly.

Under JR's definitions 150% capacity means people have enough space to read a newspaper. It's 200%+ that is the image of Japanese people being pushed onto the train by the white gloved staff.

Montreal's new REM is running pretty short trains at 30 trains per hour and still has capacity for over 40,000 people per hour. 60 trains per hour with longer trains can do even more. Only a handful of places on earth have the density to require any more capacity than a fully automated double track metro can deliver, and those places all have the tax base to easily support quad tracking or actually better is building multiple parallel lines nearby with strong connectivity.

Nearly all metros with capacity issues have old, slow sections that limit the entire network (NYC looking at you) or have paused on expanding the network for generations (NYC looking at you again, 2nd ave subway notwithstanding).

Ferrari broke their model this cycle. Their high end customers have put up with this for decades since the hypercars always gain value. Most people let them gather dust for a while, then sell them for a tidy profit once the Ferrari quiet embargo on aftermarket sales goes away.

This time they got really greedy and tried to insert a limited production mid-engine model into the middle, under the La Ferrari hypercar but above the 'base' mid engine car they have been making forever. The problem is that SF90 isn't special enough. It's the same basic technology as the much cheaper 296 (which is plenty fast and special) and no SF90 has re-sold for above or even that close to MSRP. All the special customers have taken a bath on SF90 and I hear are pretty annoyed with Ferrari.

They also tried to toss in the SP line of cars, further diluting the special, limited nature of the hypercars.

In the watch world sports watch means a tool watch, something designed for a specific purpose like supporting an occupation, military use, or while participating in a sport (mainly uppercrusty sports). Sports watches have taken over, and can really be thought of as everyday watches since people are wearing rolex submariners with tuxedos now.

Sport watches started with things like the JLC Reverso, which was designed to meet a challenge of a watch that could survive a polo match. The case includes a swivel that lets the dial flip around to keep it protected while playing.

Quartz watches upended watch makers across every price point, totally destroying the bottom of the market. The survivors moved towards mechanical watches as luxury items, and even the holy trinity of Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe, and Vacheron Constantin had to respond. Audemars Piguet revealed the luxury sport watch Royal Oak in 1972 and there wasn't any going back. PP designed Nautilus in 1976 and Vacheron brought out the Overseas in 77. These 3 lines make up a huge chunk of the holy trintiy business now.

Some of that blame can be laid at the feet of north american two staircase fire code requirements.

Rules that all units need 2 different staircases really dictate the sort of layout that is physically possible, nearly always resulting in a long central hallway with stairs at either end that feels very impersonal. The resulting units are also not great places to live, with windows on a single wall. Every bedroom needs an egress window, so building 3+ bedroom units almost never pencils out. It's all 1-2 bedroom 'starter' apartments, rather than the types of beautiful 'for life' apartments you'd see in pre-war new york buildings.

Since the staircases are required no matter what, developers are incentivized to stretch the horizontal distance between them as far as possible to amortize the space penalty of the stairs, making the building feel even more impersonal once inside.

If single stairs plus a sprinkler or other fire suppression was allowed multifamily buildings could be set on much smaller lots, with more corner units that have windows on 2 sides or even small, skinny apartments with half or the full floor dedicated to 3-4 bedroom units. The interiors would have far more light and the buildings would be much more human-scale, all contributing to things feeling a lot more personal. There could also be a lot more green space and gathering space scattered in smaller parcels, breaking up the hulking 5+1s we have all become used to.

To nit the nit, Canada is a bicameral legislative system, but the upper house (Senate) is appointed rather than elected and is generally deferential to the House of Commons (though not always). Senators tend to sit for a long time and take a lead role in things like long term reports and recommendations from the civil service.

The Prime Minster and Cabinet hold executive power. The PM and individual ministers have far more power than the US president in some cases, less in others, especially with a very different set of powers delegated to the provinces. The Prime Minister controls the legislature itself and its agenda far more directly than the US President.

The Speaker of House role is very different and while it's an MP from the government, they are expected to be highly neutral in all matters (something the current speaker is struggling with).

The PM is not the head of state the way the US President is. That role is held by the Governor General, who has quite extreme theoretical power. In practice they defer to the sitting government in nearly all cases.

Porsche has a similar solution for race tracks and remote press events. A 2.1 MWh trailer that can dispense power at 3.2 MW.

I think they are doing some clever things with solar to keep it charged (basically constant trickle charge with whatever they can generate), but the array might be pretty massive.

https://www.porsche.com/stories/mobility/how-does-a-mobile-c...

Where train networks are extensive, frequent, and reliable the ridership numbers are huge, orders of magnitude beyond what a road network of equal right of way could hope to support.

I have no issue with people choosing a car. I have issues where a car is the only choice due to the built environment being actively hostile to all other forms of transportation. Walking --> Cycle --> Train depending on how far you want to travel is far more sustainable and opens options for far more people than car-centric infrastructure where only a car is functional.

Building out a train network also doesn't mean we shouldn't also have a quality road network as well; there are plenty of long tail needs where a vehicle that can go direct point-to-point is very valuable. We just need to be building more than just a road network as roads alone simply cannot handle the needs all travellers.

I'm comparing roughly similar right of way width requirements. Super-wide roadways are awful for pedestrian safety and walkability since it means destinations worth going to are further apart. Using huge amounts of space for the transportation network itself puts huge limits your goal of the most options open to the most people. Trains being incredibly space efficient is why so many people love them so much. Roads for cars are the exact opposite.

When you compare total CAPX and OPEX including the vehicles themselves and then actually moving people from place to place trains crush everything else. A highway-mile might be cheaper to build than a rail-mile, but it requires maintenance and replacement far more often and the vehicles don't last any where near as long. Large amounts of total costs like vehicles and fuel are shifted to the traveller, reducing the options for many unless they meet a certain economic threshold.

Compared to the progressive utopia that is sitting in traffic? Passenger vehicle lanes move 1500-2000 cars per hour. Even with extensive carpooling and possible future technology that allows cars to bunch more, 10-15k people per hour is likely the limit. A double tracked train line can easily push 40-50k per hour without much stress and with grade separation can be fully automated with short dwell times and huge frequency.

I'm a huge fan of ebikes and other micromobility solutions for solving the last mile problem that has always plagued rapid transit, especially in low density areas. You want to move huge amount of people any significant distance? You need a train. Pretty much every proposal I've seen to move masses of people without a train ends up being train but worse, either in OPEX or CAPX (usually both).

> if there's a less progressive transportation modality I can't imagine what it would be

Genuinely curious what is meant by this since if I was asked what the most progressive ideal city layout was I'd respond with extensive, highly connected, frequent metro lines with islands of density around the stations that included plenty of non-market rate housing options within easy walk of each station. When more housing is needed extend the lines and start a whole new island of density. Make sure plenty of public green space is accessible from the metros just beyond the density islands.

Inter-city connections would be broadly similar, just zoomed out. Each city an island of density connected by fast and frequent rail.

Grand Paris Express will be 200 km of new track to provide massive new connectivity to the Paris suburbs. Some extends existing lines, most is completely new lines adding connectivity between RER lines much further from central Paris to enable many trips to avoid the centre of the city. It's a combination of new tunnels and elevated guideway to be fully grade separated.

Closer to home I'd point to Montreal REM which will be 67 km of track in new elevated guideway when it's all done using automated trains. Phase 1 opened last summer. They did re-use an existing tunnel through downtown, but it needed extensive repairs and reconditioning as it hadn't been is use for nearly a century.

If you're interested in what systems around the world look like and what's been possible to build I'd highly recommend RMTransit. Canadian like me, so many videos are focused here, but he has tons of explainers on metro and train systems all over the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris_Express

https://www.youtube.com/@RMTransit

Brightline itself is basically a property play. They buy up land around the proposed stations and then the train service makes that land more valuable and it's either leased or sold off for profit. The train is really a loss leader or breakeven proposition.

Moving people around tends to not be that great a business in general. Providing them services once they are there is a money printing machine.

2 km long trains are not long in the US anymore; in the west 3-4 km lengths are being seen more and more often. Turns out slower, longer trains filled with bulk commodities are better for business since they don't have tight delivery deadlines. There are towns where the train comes through for 45 minutes+.

Rail operators have also discovered a really nice side effect of ultra long trains: you don't have to pull into a siding to let a passenger train by as required by law if your train is longer than the siding.

Brightline managed to deliver their Florida line pretty much on time and on budget.

The only real challenging part of the route is going to be pass out of the inland empire where the I-15 grade is a really steep. The rest of the project is pretty straightforward, with rights of way already in place and very few expensive and complex grade crossings. They picked this city pair and route very carefully to have an excellent chance to succeed both on construction simplicity and ridership. I'm not sure they will actually open in time for the 2028 Olympics, but I wouldn't bet against 2029 operations.

As for high speed, it won't be able to sustain true high speed rail velocity across the whole route (150mph / 250 kph), but it will be much faster than driving and there will be long stretches that are very high speed.

The NYC MTA map is pretty geographic by metro map standards. There are some obvious distortions, like Manhattan being wider than it actually is and it's not actually vertical as noted before. It also includes a lot of surface street and neighbourhood references. Most metro maps just focus on station names.

Compared with something like the London Tube map or Paris Metro map it's extremely geographic.

https://new.mta.info/map/5256

That makes sense in a vacuum, but in the real world not everyone is a lawyer and corporations have a vast power imbalance compared with a member of the general public. It's incredibly easy to bury something surprising among many other clauses, such as only scheduled flights being covered and not charters. The idea certain potentially surprising clauses need to more prominent seems pretty reasonable on balance. The onus is still on the signing party to read them, but they are afforded the opportunity to notice among many clauses these are ones that deserve special attention.

That means there will always be an argument around what a reasonable party would consider a surprising clause, but contract law disputes deal with nuance, edge cases, and what a reasonable party would expect all the time. With rulings like this corporations will air on the side of caution when taking big swings in forming their agreements since litigation is so costly and the outcome so uncertain. Consumers gain a little power back (though still far from equal footing).

This should only apply when there are large power imbalances, such as individual people entering agreements with vast multinational corporations. When big corps ink deals with each other caveat emptor should reign; they have equal opportunity to review and understand the terms and therefore have to live with the consequences.

All the areas of the US undergoing population growth absolutely require air conditioning to be livable spaces, like Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Arizona. AC is not optional in nearly every place substantial building is taking place.

Heat pumps mean that heating and cooling are provided by the same device, so the cost of having cooling as a well as heating is zero, having one means having the other.

Zoning costs are not well accounted for by the article since it’s based on all the housing that actually got built. Zoning cost to society also includes all the homes that didn’t get built because it was illegal to put a shovel in the ground.