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The Electric Car

blog.geoffralston.com

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Re: The Electric Car

#251

Post by snogglethorpe »

rhino369 wrote: post #65
rosser wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TFA is drawing a parallel between the way smartphones, as heralded by the iPhone, transformed the mobile phone market, and the way electric cars, as heralded by the Model S, will do to the car market. That's what the one has to do with the other.

But it's a really poor parallel. People wanted a smartphone because it was a total game changer. Electric cars are not. I'm an electrical engineer and I only sort of give a shit what kind of powertrain by car has. My mom? Doesn't know or care how her car works. My dad? Probably against electrical out of old man-back in my dad behavior. Cost will be the big change. Once an electric car is cheaper than gas, the public…

Smartphones weren't a "total game changer", they were a jump in CPU power and interface smoothness, but the trends were already there (maybe not in the U.S., I dunno).

Re: The Electric Car

#252

Post by thaumasiotes »

CountSessine wrote: post #108
thaumasiotes wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mapping the roads isn't challenging. How do you think humans perform at driving through brand new cities?

Humans don't need cm-scale precise maps in cities to avoid jumping curbs and running into streetlamps. But that's still a requirement for all autonomous cars that have been demonstrated.

I don't see why this matters, though. cm-scale maps aren't hard to produce.

Re: The Electric Car

#253

Post by ams6110 »

toephu2 wrote: post #229
mschuster91 wrote: post #118

While I agree with the author that electric vehicles will in not long time dominate the car market, I strongly disagree with point #3: > Gas stations will start to go out of business as many more electric cars are sold, making gasoline powered vehicles even more inconvenient. Gas stations even today don't make money with gas, it's next to a loss leader to get customers into the store and spend money on snacks and car…

>Gas stations even today don't make money with gas I've heard this a lot, but is this really true? Gas is highly regulated in the U.S. and supposedly a Mom & Pop gas station's gas is just as good as Shell or Chevron..(because they are inspected yearly by the local county's Weights and Measurements department) But the price difference can be quite large, e.g., 15%+ higher sometimes. Also I'm curious how Costco gas is…

In most areas all the gas comes from the same distribution terminal. Some companies have some proprietary additive blends but in general it really makes very little difference where you buy it (assuming the retailer doesn't have a problem like groundwater getting into the storage tanks, etc).

Re: The Electric Car

#254

Post by Gibbon1 »

msandford wrote: post #180
chao- wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 $15…

Actually I do live in SF. If you put a million dollar note on a house you are the mother of all house poor.

One point I make is the Tesla is luxo-sport car. Costs a lot new like any other sporty car. So the cost of a new Tesla vs a used gasoline power car isn't really a fair comparison. Looking on Craigslist, you can get a used Nissan Leaf $10k, cost per mile is $0.035. One can run numbers but the cost of ownership is probably $300/mo.

Problematical in places like SF is the lack of parking and thus lack of charging. Though large numbers of people do have or rent garages. In Suburbs a problem can be many people have long commutes that exceed the range of an electric car.

Interestingly a friend just threw down for one of those million dollar homes in SF and is considering an electric car to avoid having to ride the google bus. I'll be interested in how it works our for him. I do have another friend that lives in Oakland, he has a leaf seems to like it.

Re: The Electric Car

#255

Post by _ph_ »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #242
_ph_ wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most electric cars have regenerative breaking. So just lifting off the power pedal will decelerate it (regaining energy for the battery). This means, in most situations you don't even have to switch over to the break pedal, which is quite convenient. For this reason I miss my old stick-shifted car which had a short gear reduction ratio. I could drive it in the city without breaking except for reaching a stop.

That is actually clever. Did not know that. Indeed that somewhat change the driving behaviour. Does it add more value than the cost premium of the electric car? Doubt it.

We are currently looking at the first generation of mass-made electrical cars. With the second generation in about 2 years from now, we can expect significant cost reductions making most discussions about a "cost premium" moot - the advantages of the concept of the electrical cars are going to stay though.

Re: The Electric Car

#256

Post by _ph_ »

toephu2 wrote: post #235

Seems that this article fails to mention that owning a house is a prerequisite to buying an EV (electric vehicle). If you rent a room in a house, it's unlikely the landlord is going to install a charger just for you, and the same goes for apartment complexes. So that already excludes a large portion of the population from buying an EV. I bet 90% of EV owners are not renting their residence. (The other 10% can charge…

Adding an electrical outlet to parking spot is not very expensive, so as soon as there is a demand on the market, landlords are going to add them to the parking spaces, like they do with other ammeneties, like kitchens or air conditioning. Or at least allow the renter to install one.

Re: The Electric Car

#257

Post by kenrikm »

bpodgursky wrote: post #152
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?

Bay area house prices are not proportional (even discarding the effects of higher marginal tax rates). 150K salary for a million dollar house is not easy; 150k house on 50k salary (and a 3x salary difference is a bit of an exaggeration, while house prices are not) is much more plausible.

I bought a foreclosed 70k house in Miami in 2009 (4br - 2.5bth, now worth 150k - rented and cash flow positive) I've lived in the bay area since 2012 It hurts knowing I could buy two or three more houses with what I pay in rent here, similar houses in the bay cost 600-700k yes it really is a 5-10x difference #sigh

Re: The Electric Car

#258

Post by bsder »

CountSessine wrote: post #113
bsder wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say this like people are good at driving in rain or snow. They are not. There is a reason for all of those pileup pictures whenever there is severe weather in the US. Self-driving cars are going to be WAY better in bad weather than any human could ever be. They will be able to "see" in conditions that humans couldn't dream of. They will be able to control steering far better on slick surfaces. They will be able t…

You say this like people are good at driving in rain or snow. They are not. I've driven in 42 winters on icy roads with thick snow and limited visibility, without the aid of GPS which has a funny way of disappearing in inclement weather. Google's cars have been demonstrated driving in exactly 0 winters under those conditions. Because they know it would be a disaster. There is a reason for all of those pileup pictures…

People said this about nav systems. I know I did. Sure, Google maps was great on the Interstate, but put it on the side roads of Pittsburgh, PA and nav was completely toast.

Guess what? A couple years later and nav systems were better than 99% of people even in places like Pittsburgh. I haven't bought a Thomas Guide (remember those?) in 10 years, I think.

It's going to be like this for self-driving cars. It will be slow progress for a while and then it will just go exponential. Part of the slow progress is that nobody wants to have the first fatality in a self-driving car as it will be an absolute PR disaster.

Re: The Electric Car

#259

Post by kenrikm »

ninkendo wrote: post #177
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…

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…

Ahh but you miss an important point - humans are not 100%.. it does not need to be 100% it only needs to be better then your average human.

Re: The Electric Car

#260

Post by bsder »

CountSessine wrote: post #113
bsder wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say this like people are good at driving in rain or snow. They are not. There is a reason for all of those pileup pictures whenever there is severe weather in the US. Self-driving cars are going to be WAY better in bad weather than any human could ever be. They will be able to "see" in conditions that humans couldn't dream of. They will be able to control steering far better on slick surfaces. They will be able t…

You say this like people are good at driving in rain or snow. They are not. I've driven in 42 winters on icy roads with thick snow and limited visibility, without the aid of GPS which has a funny way of disappearing in inclement weather. Google's cars have been demonstrated driving in exactly 0 winters under those conditions. Because they know it would be a disaster. There is a reason for all of those pileup pictures…

> But they didn't drive that fast thinking that the snow was actually falling leaves or that the windshield was dirty or that the car was suddenly moving backwards, or any of the other ridiculous things that an AI will begin thinking when it falls out of a switch statement, encounters a case it wasn't trained on, or loses its GPS signal.

Except that autonomous cars will have lidar and radar which sees through rain and snow, accelerometers and wheel monitors to integrate position even in the face of GPS loss, and infrared and ultraviolet cameras which can see much further than human eyes.

You are right. Autonomous cars are worse right now. But they will be way better than humans really quickly.

Look at how fast the DARPA challenge went from "can't complete the course" to "had to slow the vehicles down for safety".

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