351–360 of 424 posts
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Agreed. A first-order approximation leaves a lot to be desired, but it's better than a zeroth-order approximation.
Not necessarily. If you're coming up to the end of a logistic ("S") curve, then assuming a linear growth (or worse, a fixed rate of increase each year, ie exponential growth) is much worse of an assumption than assuming zero change, if you extrapolate too far.
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Are there many gains to be had on electric motors? I guess I sort of assumed those had seen quite a bit of optimization already.
They are so close to 100% efficiency that the possible gains are modest.
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> And yet we do it every ~18 months with semiconductors. So, this is about to stop. Very soon. Quantum tunneling, yield rates, etc are all starting to be cost prohibitive. Even if hypothetically it does, there's a very real limit - an atom is only 10x smaller than 2nm.
> So, this is about to stop. Very soon. Quantum tunneling, yield rates, etc are all starting to be cost prohibitive. People have been saying that for over 10 years though. "Very soon" keeps being punted off by another 5 years every 5 years.
And outside of data centers, single-thread performance is still king.
Performance per watt has improved, but that's not a metric the typical end user cares much about.
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They are already cheap enough. Renewables are much cheaper than nuclear and competitive with fossil fuels. We don't need another factor 10 cost improvement. All we need is political will to implement the change. We could be running 70% renewable in a couple of years if we wanted to. To get to 100% we might need to improve the cost effectiveness of power-to-gas facilities, but there is zero reason today not to replace…
They're cheap enough when they're not being used as baseload. To get to 100% renewable you would need to pay for storage and then have enough over-supply to deal with extended periods of overcast. That's a lot more expensive. This is another reason to do both. Use nuclear for baseload and you remove all the storage you would need for solar to work overnight. Meanwhile demand is higher during the day when solar is gen…
This is important to keep in mind when you read articles and/or studies about how electric cars or wind or solar power is impractical. A lot of the data these studies use is just obsolete. Say you have an opinion piece in a news paper that says that electric cars will always be expensive toys for the rich. It relies on a scientific paper published in a technical journal 2 years ago. The scientific paper does not perf…
> This is important to keep in mind when you read articles and/or studies about how electric cars or wind or solar power is impractical. A lot of the data these studies use is just obsolete. Solar power and electric cars aren’t impractical because of the price tag of the technology but because of their fundamental properties. Solar power cannot produce electricity on demand which is why solar (and wind parks) can nev…
FYI, the cost of individual cells has long, long gone below $100 per kWh in wholesale volumes. And believe the cost of a pack itself is very quickly approaching $100/kWh as well if not crossed it already. Making batteries is still a rather profitable business with double digit margins, it's just latest equipment, and cathode materials became way more expensive, and hard to get than what small battery makers can affor…
> FYI, the cost of individual cells has long, long gone below $100 per kWh in wholesale volumes. Electric bicycle batteries are still $500 for 500Wh (consumer price, but 10x as expensive).
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Collision avoidance, speed limiting, adaptive speed limiting, adaptive headlights, lane keeping, blind-spot warning, ISO-FIX anchors, far stronger pillars, reversing cameras, lane exit monitors, SOS buttons and GPS reporting, far more air bags, door-cyclist collision warnings, seat-belt pre-tensioning, some have pre-collision suspension raising, etc, etc, etc. I just went from a 2009 Land Rover to a 2020 Land Rover,…
How do you people leave out ESC - it saved my life at least once or twice and it’s obvious how well they work. What leaves me even more fumbled is how easily RWD Tesla’s spin out and crash with regen and snow. Take the gas pedal of and you’re going off roading. With normal car you’d struggle to even trigger ESC, let alone loose it.
Where did you get this info from? This is contrary from everything that I've heard from my local Tesla owners group. To the point that they don't even have to swap to snow tires during winter.
Some video examples:
[1] https://youtu.be/v_bfRm5hGN4?t=203
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I'm as big of a Tesla fan as any, but I'm both continuously impressed with how ahead-of-its-time the Prius was and continuously disappointed how lack-luster Toyota has been in pure electric cars. Toyota had like a decade lead on everyone else and just.... sat on it. Only invested in hybrids and hydrogen (which was and is a dead end). Toyota could've gone all-in on pure electric cars (and better plug-in hybrids than t…
For Toyota, it wasn't the engineering, design, nor the manufacturing that was the bottleneck. It was sourcing of the batteries. Toyota sold 100k Priuses it's first year (2005), and peaked at 237k Priuses in 2012. At that time, nobody had the capacity (nor the materials), to produce that many battery packs for full EV use. In hind sight, they could have committed fully to LiIon batteries for the future, but in early 2…
Turned out, solid state batteries are much harder to mass-produce than they thought. Supposedly they will have prototype this year.