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The Electric Car

blog.geoffralston.com

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Re: The Electric Car

#171

Post by quanticle »

JacobAldridge wrote: post #162

One element Geoff doesn't cover in the comparison, which I think will slow the take-up, is that the lifecycle of a phone ( And those (from memory, please correct with data) are median averages. For every person still toting an iPhone3 I imagine there are scores still driving a 1993 Camry. Smartphones exploded in use over the timeframe described, because the technology improved rapidly AND consumers upgraded 2-3 times…

4-5 years? Try more like 10. Cars have only gotten more and more reliable, and that, combined with the economic recession have meant that people hold on to cars for longer and longer.

Re: The Electric Car

#172

Post by prawn »

danhak wrote: post #129
prawn wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't all of their accidents been from other cars rear-ending them, while they've been stationary? Not even worth mentioning the accidents in that case.

> The Google cars have been rear-ended seven times, often when stopped "but also on the freeway," wrote Urmson, director of Google's self-driving car program. In other collisions, the cars were side-swiped or "hit by a car rolling through a stop sign." Eight of the 11 collisions were on city streets. http://bigstory.ap.org/article/297ef1bfb75847de95d856fb08dc0...

Mentioning accidents makes them sound dangerous. Mentioning that they haven't been at fault in any of them changes that significantly.

In their last monthly report they described the two incidents in detail and they were the fault of the human driver behind them and about as trivial as collisions get.

Re: The Electric Car

#173

Post by jannotti »

threeseed wrote: post #160
greglindahl wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait to buy an electric car until it's convenient for you to charge it?

I guess you have missed the big population trends of the last few decades. More and more people are moving to inner city apartments every one of which is not designed with electric cars in mind. And with property prices reaching astronomical amounts in many places e.g. Australia, UK, Europe, HK, SG the lure of cheaper but smaller apartments is only going to grow. For me this is is one of the big advantages of hydroge…

I agree there's a problem here, but the trend you point out is probably breakeven with respect to gas/electric. Many people how move into a dense city have no car at all.

(Those who do have more money and often garage their car, so they'll add charging to long term garages as demand increases.)

Re: The Electric Car

#174

Post by GutenYe »

reedlaw wrote: post #156

I can't believe he's comparing a $70,000 electric car to a huge bucket labeled "old-fashioned gasoline cars". Of course the $70,000 car is better in almost every way. I've driven a lot of electric cars in the $5,000 to $10,000 range and I assure you they are not better than "old-fashioned gasoline cars". Our last gas-powered car was a used Lexus that cost us $8,000. It's an extremely comfortable luxury car that seats…

Just one more thing, he forgot to mention that we still need to wait for Tesla Model 3.

Re: The Electric Car

#175

Post by krschultz »

threeseed wrote: post #160
greglindahl wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait to buy an electric car until it's convenient for you to charge it?

I guess you have missed the big population trends of the last few decades. More and more people are moving to inner city apartments every one of which is not designed with electric cars in mind. And with property prices reaching astronomical amounts in many places e.g. Australia, UK, Europe, HK, SG the lure of cheaper but smaller apartments is only going to grow. For me this is is one of the big advantages of hydroge…

It is massively cheaper to solve the problem of extending electricity 5 meters from the inside of the apartment building to the parking lot than it would be to build a global hydrogen distribution network.

Re: The Electric Car

#176

Post by krschultz »

jtokoph wrote: post #8
toomuchtodo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The truth is we're really not that close to fully-autonomous cars. Google cars are pretty damn close to level 4 autonomous vehicles. They've driven more than a million miles fully autonomously, and Google runs their self-driving vehicle algorithms against simulated virtual worlds constantly (with data previously collected from their self driving cars). We are so much closer to fully autonomous cars than people thin…

I've always thought that the Google cars have driven 95%+ of their miles in Mountain View, CA where every single aspect of the roads have been digitized, tested and tweaked a million times over. If you stuck one of these cars in a brand new city, it wouldn't work nearly as well.

That's the whole innovation. They reframed the problem in order to make it easier. Everyone used to think about how to get the car to comprehend everything in the world. Google just provides the car a highly detailed map and then the car has fewer things to focus on. They replace some of the complexity by using huge amounts of data. It's a very 'Google' solution really.

This is why Uber and others are scrambling to buy mapping companies. In the future the software goes hand in hand with a hyper detailed map.

Re: The Electric Car

#177

Post by ninkendo »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #5
danhak wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is we're really not that close to fully-autonomous cars. Even Elon Musk's most ambitious projections for "autopilot" are a car that can drive itself 90 - 95% of the time but will require an alert, licensed driver to take over if necessary. Secondly, I don't feel that the possible rise of truly autonomous vehicles (if that even occurs within the next ten years) affects the main point of this article. In fact…

> The truth is we're really not that close to fully-autonomous cars. Google cars are pretty damn close to level 4 autonomous vehicles. They've driven more than a million miles fully autonomously, and Google runs their self-driving vehicle algorithms against simulated virtual worlds constantly (with data previously collected from their self driving cars). We are so much closer to fully autonomous cars than people thin…

The number of miles driven autonomously doesn't really matter if drivers have to intervene even for a second to resolve an issue. If the car is driving by itself 99% of the time, that's not good enough for the "share an autonomous car" use case. It's no good at 99.9% either. Or 99.99%. It's a lot more interesting if google's cars actually had no steering wheel or way of intervening.

Because that's what we're talking about when we talk about the price reduction of a fleet of autonomous cars: the car driving to your house, completely on its own, with nobody in the car. 99.9% isn't good enough, and we're not even close to 99.9%. The difficulty of the last remaining difficult problems will only increase as we approach 100%, too.

I think completely driverless cars are a problem on a similar scale as AI or nuclear fusion, but with the timescales decreased... we're probably going to be always perpetually "five years out" from having them (as opposed to fusion's perpetual "30 years"), even though we're making improvements all the time. We just don't understand the scale of the problems we haven't solved yet.

Re: The Electric Car

#178

Post by sahat »

JimboOmega wrote: post #93
greglindahl wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For refill time, note that most electric car owners do almost all of their charging in their own garages overnight... not something that's common for gas-powered cars. Long trips are worse for electric cars, sure. But day-to-day driving? Charging is not an issue if you can charge in your garage.

For those of us who live in apartment buildings and don't have a garage where we can install such things, then what? To me this has always been the biggest obstacle of an electric car.

If you own a Tesla Model S and live near a supercharger network, charging is not an issue. Over 8,000 miles in my Model S, all powered exclusively by the superchargers, free of charge.

Note: I live in an apartment less than 2 miles from the nearest supercharger in Los Angeles and only 8 miles from work. So, the range is never a problem.

Re: The Electric Car

#179

Post by jannotti »

philwelch wrote: post #143
dragonwriter wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will probably have facilities for identifying that condition and either self-cleaning or notifying the central dispatch system that it needs to be taken out of the rotation until cleaned. Pretty much the same thing as a human-driven cab. Worst case, all those things fail, and a dirty cab shows up, and you reject it on the hailing app with an explanation of why, leading to some delay till you get the next available…

People are still disincentivized from soiling taxis by the presence of the driver. Though at the very least, you'll have to have a membership/accountability system in place, and that becomes harder and harder as you scale.

Cars can drive autonomously, but they can't sense a spill?

Re: The Electric Car

#180

Post by msandford »

chao- wrote: post #164
msandford wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So let me get this straight. In the "flyover country" where you DON'T get big city salaries, you're going to buy a $100k-$150k house because you don't make six figures. And then with all the leftover money that you don't have because you're not earning SF engineer salary, you're going to buy a car that costs anywhere from 25%-50% of your house?

Have you seen the vehicle culture in "flyover country"? You will absolutely see people put off repairs and upkeep to their house while they make sure they get a new car every 5 years (or stagger new cars with their spouse, 10 years for each because). If you haven't seen it, I can only ask you believe someone (me) with experience in it (various cities in Texas). Would it surprise you as well to learn that "SF engineer…

Yeah I've never lived in SF but I understand that the economics are different out there. Once you have a note on a million dollar house, what's another $80k for a car? It barely moves the needle.

But when your mortgage is only $1k/mo and then you have to spend another $1k/mo on a car (before insurance or "fuel" or anything else) you might start to wonder.

I've got a Subaru and I figure that car will cost me about $1500/year for the car and another $200/mo for fuel. That's $400/mo insured and everything versus the $1100-$1200 for the Tesla.

Look I'm not saying it's IMPOSSIBLE for people to buy electric cars. But the idea that somehow all the millenials who have generally been screwed by not buying real estate before interest rates went to zero are going to find the cash to start buying electric cars seems pretty laughable to me.

Will some do it? For sure! If you can pull down six figures somewhere with a reasonable cost of living it's totally doable. But there aren't too many places where you can make six figures without everything else costing more too.

EDIT: I live in flyover country. Always have. I'm talking from experience, not how I perceive things from my golden throne on the west coast.

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