311–320 of 503 posts
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> I also wonder whether semis on certain well-defined long-haul routes (I-80 etc) could be partially automated, such that the driver could sleep in the back of the cab much of the time. Not sure if the technology is really there yet, though. Sure, it's called a train.
Maybe combined with autonomous electric forklifts to shuttle cargo to/from a waystation.
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While I didn't like the start/stop feature when I had a hire car briefly, I can't see how it would ever add a lag. By the time you have pressed the clutch pedal down to put it in gear, it has started.
Most cars in the US are automatics, and it does introduce a lag. I turn it off the moment I turn on the car. It caused me to almost have an accident when I was in stop and go traffic, specifically because of the lag. The person behind me did not expect me to start so slowly right after stopping (I had to wait for the engine shutoff and then to turn back on).
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Is paper junk mail still that much of a problem? I hardly receive any (but I've got one of those stickers saying I don't want it), and assumed it had died due to the rise of online advertising.
What does your sticker say?
Translation:
NO unaddressed printed advertising material, door-to-door news papers NO
These stickers are reasonably well respected here, and violating them leads to a barrage of complaints to the advertising company. Lots of people have them.
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People were dying because they couldn't hear the cars coming. Elderly, children, hard of hearing, people just looking at their phones or otherwise visually distracted. Noise pollution is a problem but the safety issues are more important.
Horns are a thing?
Also if I’m backing up would you rather a muted noise or me constantly hitting my horn?
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If you really want to be environmental, long haul trucking should go by rail.
Where the rail exists, yes. The US is not as densely populated as Europe, so outside coastal areas much less land has a train station even within 200 miles radius.
Meanwhile, Europe has so much passenger rail that freight is really tricky to run. For example, there is a really busy freight corridor from Rotterdam to Germany with rail dedicated solely to freight, but the rest of The Netherlands is pretty much 100% passenger. Europe uses a lot more inland shipping instead.
In Berlin, Deutsche Post use electric trikes and mail here is very efficient.
AIUI, the US Post Office does everything in one.
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...why is it so much more than the energy required to charge slowly? The battery might get a little warmer while charging, so that's some more waste heat, but the battery gains the same amount of stored energy either way.
You need bigger transmission lines to fast charge. That's expensive. You need to charge enough at the site to justify the line costs.
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Where the rail exists, yes. The US is not as densely populated as Europe, so outside coastal areas much less land has a train station even within 200 miles radius.
The US used to be littered with railroad. Density isn't a problem Here is a map from 189X[0] Auto supremacy was and still is a choice. [0] https://digital-collections.columbuslibrary.org/digital/api/...
It's still not not as dense as UK, Germany, or Netherlands, and cannot be, outside areas like North-East. What makes sense around places like NYC, Chicago, or Seattle, may not work equally well in Nebraska. Building a road and running trucks on it is just more affordable.
Also, rail is optimized to have ridiculously high throughput at the expense of latency. Rail is great at hauling grain, huge hunks of steel, wood, etc, but is too slow for time-sensitive stuff like flowers or that birthday present you ordered at a last minute with express delivery.
This is why relatively long-haul trucking exist in the US, despite the presence of a large and busy rail system, to the best of my knowledge.
(Passenger rail vs cars is another kettle of fish entirely.)
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Doesn't every gas motor start spew out some uncombusted fuel ?
Maybe? I think direct injection motors are actually pretty good at reducing that. Catalytic converters help too. But yeah, there’s more waste than an electric motor. The reassuring thing to me is that in just over 100 years we made the ICE so efficient. It’s a fundamentally wasteful design and we have taken it very, very far. With another 100 years of battery and electric motor development we will have equally impres…
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> I don't really understand why they went with a one-size-has-to-fit-all solution here when there's such a high variety of climates and terrains in the US. Makes logistics cheaper if you only have one model to take care of, and since these are bespoke vehicles you'll also save on costs because the factory only has to build one variation.
Dutch postal service PostNL has a wide variety of vehicles ranging from trucks to bicycles. And as far as I know, bicycles have always been a big part of the last few miles of mail delivery here. https://www.postnl.nl/over-postnl/pers-nieuws/beeldmateriaal...
I'm in the city center of a large Belgian city and 99% of my deliveries from both BPost and PostNL are still the regular white panel vans, even though both have local sorting centers.
