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The Electric Car

blog.geoffralston.com

341–349 of 349 posts

Re: The Electric Car

#341
post #281
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you won't see 24/7 usage on most cars, just like you don't see 24/7 usage on all electrical power stations. Unless someone finds an economic activity that you can throw basically unlimited car-hours at in the night time. The yield can be low, but it has to be higher than the variable cost of one more car hour.

Surplus of night time car-hours can support a market for cheap delivery.

I thought about that, too. But I'm not sure whether that's not done better and cheaper by more specialised vehicles (eg trucks)?

Re: The Electric Car

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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).

exactly, so who is making the extra 10% profit? or it's nonsense that owning a gas station is a low margin business?

Re: The Electric Car

#343
post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's obvious to the researchers developing the cars. That doesn't make it simple or easy to solve, something as basic and simple as the halting problem cannot be solved. Data does not help you much in those 0.001% of situations where there is no data or too small a dataset to conclude anything. An AI can only act according to it's training. If we for a moment assume that it comes from the collective experie…

What's hard about detecting the signal ahead as well as the driver behind? The car might just elect to push through the orange rather than stopping abruptly. It could check and make that decision faster than any of us. Or, if paused in traffic with a car approaching too quickly from behind, it could eat up some of the space in front of it to escape/minimise collision. It could balance this decision with the risk of s…

Until it can with certaincy detect the child on the bike behind bushes heading towards the road, it's not ready for 100% autonomous driving. It really doesn't matter how smart or how much experience it does have, if the sensors are inferior to humans.

Re: The Electric Car

#344
post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's hard about detecting the signal ahead as well as the driver behind? The car might just elect to push through the orange rather than stopping abruptly. It could check and make that decision faster than any of us. Or, if paused in traffic with a car approaching too quickly from behind, it could eat up some of the space in front of it to escape/minimise collision. It could balance this decision with the risk of s…

Until it can with certaincy detect the child on the bike behind bushes heading towards the road, it's not ready for 100% autonomous driving. It really doesn't matter how smart or how much experience it does have, if the sensors are inferior to humans.

For some time now they've been able to detect temporary road signs from amongst advertising and other general signage. i.e., changes in speed, maintenance warnings, etc.

If a human can see the child on the bike behind bushes, the car can too. Plus it can do it from multiple cameras at once. And calculate the speed and trajectory. And quickly work out the optimal course of action.

I really think you're overestimating the ability of humans (who get drunk or distracted, routinely speed, etc) and underestimating the progress of self-driving cars.

Re: The Electric Car

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I guarantee you that self-driving cars will not be the mainstream even in 15 years. Probably more. Want to make a Long Bet on that? I'm willing to bet up to $1000 USD, loser pays winner's choice of 501(c)(3) US charity org, that self-driving cars will be mainstream in under 10 years.

How gauche! No, I don't want to make a Long Bet on that. I don't live in the United States where every CS graduate gets a Ferrari as a signing bonus (maybe a self-driving Ferrari one day). $USD1000 is clearly a lot more money to me than it is to you. But if you'd like to take your own side of the bet and choose your own charity, please feel free. Moreover, I'd like to know what the terms of that bet that you'd be mak…

Why does it matter how much $1000 is to you if you can guarantee that you won't lose - which you did just a few comments up the tree? And remember, he said "up to", so perhaps you'd feel more comfortable at $100? Or $10?

"The usual touchstone, whether that which someone asserts is merely his persuasion -- or at least his subjective conviction, that is, his firm belief -- is betting. It often happens that someone propounds his views with such positive and uncompromising assurance that he seems to have entirely set aside all thought of possible error. A bet disconcerts him. Sometimes it turns out that he has a conviction which can be estimated at a value of one ducat, but not of ten. For he is very willing to venture one ducat, but when it is a question of ten he becomes aware, as he had not previously been, that it may very well be that he is in error. If, in a given case, we represent ourselves as staking the happiness of our whole life, the triumphant tone of our judgment is greatly abated; we become extremely diffident, and discover for the first time that our belief does not reach so far. Thus pragmatic belief always exists in some specific degree, which, according to differences in the interests at stake, may be large or may be small." - Immanuel Kant

Re: The Electric Car

#346
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until it can with certaincy detect the child on the bike behind bushes heading towards the road, it's not ready for 100% autonomous driving. It really doesn't matter how smart or how much experience it does have, if the sensors are inferior to humans.

For some time now they've been able to detect temporary road signs from amongst advertising and other general signage. i.e., changes in speed, maintenance warnings, etc. If a human can see the child on the bike behind bushes, the car can too. Plus it can do it from multiple cameras at once. And calculate the speed and trajectory. And quickly work out the optimal course of action. I really think you're overestimating…

I'm not overestimating humans, I never said they couldn't fail. What I base my comments on, is people I know that study AI research (mostly graduate students and some doing their doctorate). All of them say that even state of the art AI for a specific purpose, let's say something as simple as face detection (not recognition, just "this is a face") fails for a lot of inputs.

That is not to say some people that are drunk or tired and make the same mistakes as an AI in a driving scenario - the difference is that a computer will always be confused by a scenario that it cannot understand (and in worst case misintreped it), whereas humans have a much easier timer making sense of such situations.

Until we have a strong AI with sensory capabilities akin to our own, I doubt we'll see truly selfdriving cars that require no human intervention. I'd love to be proved wrong, but the research is having a hard time breaking the last 1% needed.

Re: The Electric Car

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's crazy about 875,000 miles? Most personal gasoline cars last approximately 200,000 miles, but people rarely keep them that long because for the average driver the car is 10-20 years old. The interior will wear out long before the engine. If the car manufacturers built the drivetrain to last 400,000 miles, they would just be wasting money. If the car is running 24/7 at 30 mph, you would top 250k miles per year.…

I find it hard to imagine a conventional petrol powered car only lasting 200,000 miles. Which manufacturers only build cars to last 200,000 miles? I can't think of a car I, or my family, have owned which hasn't lasted at least twice that long. My current car is a 2002 BMW E39 530D. It has almost 900,000 kms on the clock and is still going strong on the original engine. The cloth interior is still in quite reasonable…

In some sense, if a vehicle is well built, properly maintained, and driven gently, it will last forever. You just replace the car part by part over time.

The issue is if it's poorly maintained or it's abused, or if it's not well built. And a sizable percentage of cars in the fleet fall into at least one of those categories. The number that we need to worry about from a policy perspective is not the life of the car in the best case scenario, it's the life of the car in the expected scenario.

Re: The Electric Car

#349
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A battery is on the order of the same cost as fixing an automatic transmission (which basically all US cars have--most of the US can't drive a stick anymore). And, in terms of labor, a battery is WAY easier to replace than a transmission.

There's an even bigger bonus that in ten years the battery pack will probably be cheaper and have a better range. So while the replacement may be expensive the car will be dramatically better afterwards.

And you can recycle (sell) the battery pack after you replace it. What do you think is going into Tesla's Power Wall? Why do you think they're pushing leases so aggressively?
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