301–310 of 389 posts
Also, most countries are not that large. If we ignore the top 10 largest by area, possibly most of the domestic flights can be served.
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Yes, it doesn't even make sense to make electric trucks, let alone airplanes. Or they'd be mostly battery.
There are a lot of trucks that never go very far in a day. Many of them are used for "last mile" delivery. They start at a warehouse, get loaded, then go make a few deliveries and head back for the next load. While fast charging is needed, they don't go very far and thus don't need extreme range. It is a valid question though: how do we get more of the long distant freight onto trains. Followed closely by how to we g…
Maybe I missed it but they didn't delve much into the TAM. "Half of all flights in the world are under 2 hours." Then they give examples of Fjord-town hopping in Norway, or Island hopping in Hawaii, which seem very niche. Will they be able to compete in any of the busiest routes? Could it take me Melbourne-Sydney in 1 - 2 hours for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_flig...
I didn't get that far in the video but from where I live (NYC) two hours gets you to a lot of very common travel destinations: Boston, Massachusetts (1h) Washington, D.C. (1h) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (45m) Baltimore, Maryland (1h) Toronto, Ontario (1h 45m) Montreal, Quebec (1h 30m) Cleveland, Ohio (1h 45m) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1h 15m) Buffalo, New York (1h 10m) Providence, Rhode Island (45m) Portland, Maine (…
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You don't drive to islands.
Bridges are a thing
Report recently from my area.
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/transportation/transporta...
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Can I be the one to make the obligatory train comment? Moving hundreds of people 500 miles in comfort, using only electricity, is also a VERY solved problem.
Man, I’d love more trains but we can’t act like the infrastructure necessary to support them, if not present, is very challenging to develop. Even ignoring land acquisition (which is a big thing to ignore in populated areas where a train would most benefit the population), there are simple things like road crossings, other infrastructure crossing, etc. In this case an airplane may be simply a lower friction solution.
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> 125 miles … That’s less than two hours of driving. I don’t know where you live or what you drive, but I just punched in a destination 200 km away as the crow flies, the Alps are in the way and I’m looking at five hours of driving. Also, water.
That's nothing. I was crossing Himalaya's by crawling at even slower speed. Dayuuum, ... you're smart.
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I still don’t see what the problem is. The entire flight was likely just a few patterns and your earlier figure of 100 kWh (let’s assume they get their electricity for cheap) is already a serious amount of energy. It takes 100 kWh of energy to lift a 10.4ton object by about 3.2 km, so we’re obviously in the same ballpark for the maiden flight, and the rest is just drag. For drag, I’ll approximate the plane fuselage a…
The 100kwh number was based on a rate of electricity that is 1/6th the average cost of electricity in the area they did the flight. Even the absolute cheapest rate in that region is 4x the price I used. The price I quoted was a little less than the cheapest published electrical rate in North America, which isn’t in the United States. So you can barely make it work if you price electricity at a rate that doesn’t exist…
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There are a lot of trucks that never go very far in a day. Many of them are used for "last mile" delivery. They start at a warehouse, get loaded, then go make a few deliveries and head back for the next load. While fast charging is needed, they don't go very far and thus don't need extreme range. It is a valid question though: how do we get more of the long distant freight onto trains. Followed closely by how to we g…
yes i conceded that use case a bit bellow, it mostly makes sense in dense urban areas, where access to the grid is easy, and not emitting polution is at a premium. But even then it's a very difficult case to make before eg: electrifying buses, or more generally, decarbonising your electricity supply. If this made sense, musk tried to sell it a decade ago, it just doesn't. A lot of the value is that the majority don't…
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I'd dispute they do any of those better, they stole the IP, then used public funds to make cheaper versions in the hope of leading the markets, including by being artificially more affordable while there is any competition. Besides electric cars and solar, it's very debatable wether those will actually be ecological in the end. For ex. they are still opening massive amounts of fossil based electric plants, so the tru…
You're making a lot of assertions without citations here. If I look at a BYD at my local dealership, and compare it to a comparable spec German car (I live in the UK, so tariffs are not the thing shifting the needle here), I can see where the cost savings are and the trade-offs. I don't think they're artificially more affordable. I just think they're more affordable. Using public funds to invest in capital expenditur…
I'm not being super academic with citations, but the CCP investments in BYD, to the point it makes no sense to exist without aren't exactly hard to find secrets.
You're not comparing comparable things, in the UK, there is a great deal of expectations of what an employee has as rights for instance. There are extremely rigorous safety regulations that are very onerous. We can debate wether those are justified but it's a very complex topic you're brushing off. Their innovation seems mostly on small iterative gadgets, but look more closely into what they tolerate as self driving and the death it causes, and be sure you want that in the UK for profit margins.
I'm really not against neither subsidies nor artificially inflating one's strategic advantage at all to develop a market and corner the competition. I never said China is wrong to do what it's doing. What I am saying is that its dangerous for us outside of China to buy into it now. Beyond the security implications of chinese robots with sensors everywhere roaming about cities the CCP considers their ennemies, there's just the dependency risk, there's the "how much do you trust the people who fed paint to their babies to handle super dense explosives that cant be put out by water in dense cities", and the basic question, maybe its better to have the lightest car possible, not the most gadgetty with drones and ipads.
So the basic point above "China has more electric trucks therefore it makes economic sense" is helped by none of this