21–30 of 133 posts
Why bother? With top line EV ranges reaching close to 400 miles, after that amount of time I need to get out of the car. If you want people to be able travel huge distances cleanly without stopping, then what you’re actually looking for is a train.
Why bother? With top line EV ranges reaching close to 400 miles, after that amount of time I need to get out of the car. If you want people to be able travel huge distances cleanly without stopping, then what you’re actually looking for is a train.
What about an autonomous semitruck that could run 24 hours a day except for unloading/reloading cargo, refueling, and maintenance?
Edit: as some have pointed out, it’s more a failure of policy.
Asking sincerely: Why should we not simply pull over to do this? Planes obviously are a different situation, but cars can easily just stop. While cool to imagine, it seems unnecessarily complicated and unsafe to do this in motion on the road. [Edit: The prof and his team are quite serious about it, so I assume there must be a reason and I'm actually curious what it might be.]
Asking sincerely: Why should we not simply pull over to do this? Planes obviously are a different situation, but cars can easily just stop. While cool to imagine, it seems unnecessarily complicated and unsafe to do this in motion on the road. [Edit: The prof and his team are quite serious about it, so I assume there must be a reason and I'm actually curious what it might be.]
It seems like a valuable proposition if we threw out the existing paradigms of road transport. If we throw out concepts such as ownership of vehicles and fuel and treat all road vehicles as one system of controlled individual elements, you could envision is a more efficient solution. Traffic jams would be lessened, trip times would be shortened, total fuel usage would go down, etc. On road-fueling would be one elemen…
Asking sincerely: Why should we not simply pull over to do this? Planes obviously are a different situation, but cars can easily just stop. While cool to imagine, it seems unnecessarily complicated and unsafe to do this in motion on the road. [Edit: The prof and his team are quite serious about it, so I assume there must be a reason and I'm actually curious what it might be.]
I know it is difficult to handle when you do not own the battery but I would guess 90% of private long distance trips are return trips, so you could swap batteries at your trusted former gas station every 200 miles and then on the way back home do the same and get your old battery back at your last stop and keep that pack for all your short day to day trips. But somehow, this idea seems to be 100% abandoned.
Edit: Follow up conspiracy: Could it actually be because the battery is the one component of an EV that degrades the fastest and thus cars would last much longer (and no manufacturer would want that) if you could just swap the main battery every 100.000 miles or so?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about an autonomous semitruck that could run 24 hours a day except for unloading/reloading cargo, refueling, and maintenance?
Trains. The fact that long haul semi trucks are a thing is a failure of infrastructure. Edit: as some have pointed out, it’s more a failure of policy.
One of the next obvious steps for self-driving vehicles is “flocking” or drafting; this is an almost trivial problem once two or more vehicles are autonomously locked within a few inches of each other.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have a car only a few inches behind you and you spot a problem and need to emergency brake, you can't actually start braking until the car behind has started braking, otherwise the car behind will crash into the back of you. If you have 3 cars in a row, and the first car spots a problem, it can't start braking until after the 2nd car has started, but the 2nd car can't start braking until after the 3rd car has…
The idea is predicated on autonomous control and presumably the vehicles communicate in real time...they all brake together at the delta V of the least capable member.
Why bother? With top line EV ranges reaching close to 400 miles, after that amount of time I need to get out of the car. If you want people to be able travel huge distances cleanly without stopping, then what you’re actually looking for is a train.
What about an autonomous semitruck that could run 24 hours a day except for unloading/reloading cargo, refueling, and maintenance?