One of the next obvious steps for self-driving vehicles is “flocking” or drafting; this is an almost trivial problem once two or more vehicles are autonomously locked within a few inches of each other.
Once we solve autonomous driving. Decades out.
Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?
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Re: Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have a car only a few inches behind you and you spot a problem and need to emergency brake, you can't actually start braking until the car behind has started braking, otherwise the car behind will crash into the back of you. If you have 3 cars in a row, and the first car spots a problem, it can't start braking until after the 2nd car has started, but the 2nd car can't start braking until after the 3rd car has…
The idea is predicated on autonomous control and presumably the vehicles communicate in real time...they all brake together at the delta V of the least capable member.
The "real time" control loop between the sensor on one car and the brakes on the same car is much tighter than that between the sensor on this car and the brakes on another car and then feedback from the other car that braking has started.
I don't actually know how long it takes between the computer deciding to brake and the car actually starting to slow down, but I expect you can't just throw out a message saying "I'm braking immediately" and start braking without any kind of confirmation that the message was received, and expect it to be OK.
But maybe you can afford to wait for a confirmation? The speed of light is pretty fast, and you're not transmitting that many bytes.
Especially if you consider that a human could easily take 200 milliseconds to react to something even if it's really paying attention. You could request a braking confirmation from the other side of the Atlantic and still come out ahead!
Re: Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?
#13Wouldn't it make more sense to build the charging into the road?
We could make the road out of interlocking hexagonal solar panels
This was done as you probably know [1] but it's not clear that the road surface is a good place for solar panels. They get dirty and damaged. It's certainly orthogonal to charging vehicles on the road, given we know how to transmit power already.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...
Re: Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?
#14One of the next obvious steps for self-driving vehicles is “flocking” or drafting; this is an almost trivial problem once two or more vehicles are autonomously locked within a few inches of each other.
> two or more vehicles are autonomously locked within a few inches of each other.
Never going to happen so long as potholes and poorly patched roads exist.
Re: Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?
#15Asking sincerely: Why should we not simply pull over to do this? Planes obviously are a different situation, but cars can easily just stop. While cool to imagine, it seems unnecessarily complicated and unsafe to do this in motion on the road. [Edit: The prof and his team are quite serious about it, so I assume there must be a reason and I'm actually curious what it might be.]
This is the correct question. Planes did it because they had to. Highly trained pilots execute in-air refueling. Not kids with their folks teslas.
Re: Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could make the road out of interlocking hexagonal solar panels
This was done as you probably know [1] but it's not clear that the road surface is a good place for solar panels. They get dirty and damaged. It's certainly orthogonal to charging vehicles on the road, given we know how to transmit power already. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...
Indeed [2]
BTW when searching on Google it is quite obnoxious that it doesn't navigate to the actual URL but instead prefixes it with Google..
[2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/first-s...
Re: Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?
#17Why bother? With top line EV ranges reaching close to 400 miles, after that amount of time I need to get out of the car. If you want people to be able travel huge distances cleanly without stopping, then what you’re actually looking for is a train.
Re: Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could make the road out of interlocking hexagonal solar panels
This was done as you probably know [1] but it's not clear that the road surface is a good place for solar panels. They get dirty and damaged. It's certainly orthogonal to charging vehicles on the road, given we know how to transmit power already. [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...
Are you saying charge vehicles on the road using i.e. inductors underneath the road?
Re: Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?
#19One of the next obvious steps for self-driving vehicles is “flocking” or drafting; this is an almost trivial problem once two or more vehicles are autonomously locked within a few inches of each other.
Just build high speed rail. It’s available today, rather than in some hypothetical future once autonomous cars work.
Re: Can electric cars on the highway emulate plane-to-plane refueling?
#20Asking sincerely: Why should we not simply pull over to do this? Planes obviously are a different situation, but cars can easily just stop. While cool to imagine, it seems unnecessarily complicated and unsafe to do this in motion on the road. [Edit: The prof and his team are quite serious about it, so I assume there must be a reason and I'm actually curious what it might be.]
It seems like a valuable proposition if we threw out the existing paradigms of road transport.
If we throw out concepts such as ownership of vehicles and fuel and treat all road vehicles as one system of controlled individual elements, you could envision is a more efficient solution. Traffic jams would be lessened, trip times would be shortened, total fuel usage would go down, etc. On road-fueling would be one element in a world like this: road based freight delivery could run without stopping by using vehicles expected to have short journies to refuel the trucks along the way.
This is all to define a hypothetical new paradigm in road transport and to quantify its potential consequences (good and bad). I had not thought about on-road refueling before and I think there is good value in pointing it out. We're not at the point where we're seriously charting a course to world like this, but we need to know what the world looks like before we can start to do that.