Live data from Hacker News

Tesla shares 48V architecture with other automakers

electrek.co

481–490 of 504 posts

Re: Tesla shares 48V architecture with other automakers

#481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was never worth it to retool for decades ? Or was there a pathological lock-in between suppliers and manufacturers that prevented even the most obvious innovations from happening if they required any amount of coordination?

Since car manufacturing, and design, wasn't held back at all by something like auxiliary current, the reason more likely was people not wanting to waste energy to improve on something that is working just fine for everyone.

Also 48 V semiconductors are more expensive and not so easily available.

Re: Tesla shares 48V architecture with other automakers

#482
post #473

what I want to know... Is this really what the document looked like? Or was it artistic license for the video? https://www.rivianownersforum.com/attachments/tesla-48v-jpg.... "How to Design a 48V Vehicle You incompetent boobs! Do we REALLY have to do your homework for you? XXOO, Elon" I saw this on https://youtu.be/L6WDq0V5oBg

[dead]

Re: Tesla shares 48V architecture with other automakers

#483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Faster slew rate for all switch supplies in the system. Nothing directly runs 48v.

Nothing "directly" runs on 12V either. All electronics will have stepdown converters in both the 12V and 48V use case. Motors, solenoids and incandescent bulbs can be made to work with either voltage (the same way we do for 24V systems in heavy goods vehicles here in Europe).

> Nothing "directly" runs on 12V either.

Motors, bulbs, relays.

Re: Tesla shares 48V architecture with other automakers

#484
post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

48V has been considered for automotive for decades. The problem was not know how. It simply has never been worth it before to retool things in practice. It's also electrically a lot more noisy. The limit of what is considered low volt is like 60v or something.

Mercedes-Benz has been using 48V systems since 2016. https://paultan.org/2016/10/31/mercedes-benz-reveals-first-d... This dynamic, where Tesla "announces" something that the rest of the industry has been doing for a while anyway, and a bunch of star-struck enthusiasts and stock manipulators tout it as an example of Tesla' "super smart innovation", is getting tiresome.

U mean Apple?

Re: Tesla shares 48V architecture with other automakers

#485
post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I hope nobody's doing that, rechargeables have been so good for so long. I'm just now retiring some that I bought in the 2007-2011 timeframe which have started to fail, but my 2015 purchases are still going strong with hundreds and hundreds of charge cycles on 'em. I haven't used alkalines since the 80s.

I have not had great luck with rechargeables. They have a lower voltage than regular AA, so I find that most sensitive electronics just start out thinking the battery is already low and then stop running before the battery is fully discharged. My Z-wave keypad lock is one of those. AA batteries last about 2 months, rechargeables start giving a low battery warning after a week and hardly last 2-4.

Have you tried lithium rechargeables with the built in converters?

Re: Tesla shares 48V architecture with other automakers

#486
post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

24V is common in trucks, and yet never made it to regular cars because there was never sufficient reason. Using a higher voltage is not an innovation (it's an obvious change, and we've gone from 6V to 12V to, in some cases, 24V already) - rather it's just a slight efficiency improvement in largely non-critical systems, with not a lot of incentive to take on the cost of transition. In a a personal ICE vehicle, the onl…

The 12v battery performs the very significant safety feature of allowing the HV battery to be disconnected when the car isn’t ready to move. You’d need to have a converter in the HV battery to avoid that down side, and then you have a new downside of a fault could cause your 12v line to be HV instead.

Fair point, but I imagine disconnecting is mainly to avoid live HV wiring throughout the vehicle, and thus reducing risk of catastrophic shorts or arcing.

If the aux supply is near or in the battery, leaving that connected would while the rest of HV is interrupted would probably not cause any notable increase in risk.

At the same time, vehicle fires have been caused by a shorted auxillary battery (I have personally experienced an entire industrial building burn down because the 12V battery in a parked ICE car shorted and went up in flames), so I imagine only having one battery to worry about is a risk reduction.

Re: Tesla shares 48V architecture with other automakers

#488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for another EV manufacturer. Good God I would love to switch from CAN to ethernet. We already have way too many CAN buses and we're considering adding more. But it will take decades for our suppliers to even consider the switch. We just paid Bosch $15M for an upgrade to our brakes, they promised the change in six months, it took them two years and quite a few additional millions of dollars, and it's filled wit…

Well, then you should maybe ask why do you need such complexity, when cars 5-10 years did not needed to do exactly same task - taking a person from point A to point B.

First of all, there are regulatory issues, that continually demand more both in terms of efficiency and in terms of safety. System that were innovative 10 years ago are not a requirements and new system are recommended and will soon be required. And that is just for minimal compliance. If you actually want to be up to date on safety systems you need even more.

Second, if you are a company you need to actually sell product. And turns out costumers don't want technology from 10-20 years ago. Costumers actually buy stuff with more technology in it. No matter if people on HN rather drive a Honda from early 90s.

So to just tell a company 'just go back in time and that will solve your problem' is simply not gone convince anybody.

Re: Tesla shares 48V architecture with other automakers

#489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk has publicly stated that CAN is too slow for modern cars, which is why they chose ethernet for the Cybertruck. https://youtube.com/watch?v=ky1Z2klPalw

CAN buses run into bandwidth issues at some point. Just remove all the OTA, car-as-a-service and de-facto surveillance crap, and one should be able to get away with CAN buses. Nothing wrong with ethernet, but listening to Musks statements, especially in fields I have some not even deep knowledge, alwqys like listening to a very confident, but otherwise clueless, 1st semester student selling you semester 2 basics as t…

The question is do you want to have something that is high performance or something that you 'can get away with'.

We get it, you don't like the features of modern cars. Well sure if they built the car you would like, then CAN bus is fine. But that's simply not where the future is going, if you like it doesn't matter. Its simply not relevant when car CEO discuss what is needed for modern cars.

You solution of 'just remove X,Y,Y features' is just a laughable suggestion here. Its like saying 'you don't need a new graphics card', I play 'Star Craft: Brood War' just fine. Ok I agree, I don't play AAA games either but to criticize a Nvidia CEO for saying the need higher performance would be totally absurd.

Cars will get more electronics parts, more cameras, more safety equipment, more communication and so on and so on. Moving to higher voltage and PoE is simply a logical thing to do given that reality.

If Musk is so utterly clueless, what of the things he said is actually wrong? Musk even literally said its not 'hot shit', its just bringing things up to date. But that's the simple facts of the automotive industry, lots of 'we did it because we have always done it' and despite it not being 'hot shit' its really hard to change.

So in the automotive industry, such changes are great because if you are building millions of something, it makes a very bit difference.

Seems to me you are reading into it what you want to read into it.

Re: Tesla shares 48V architecture with other automakers

#490
post #167
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla's greatest innovation is simply leadership. Everyone knew castings were the way to go, but noone did it. Now people like Volvo are doing them, and I expect a lot of others to do it as well. Everyone knew that 48V would be a big benefit, but noone did it. TBH, in a few years, we may be saying similar things about drive-by-wire without a mechanical backup. But it is too early to say definitively.

What everyone was waiting for was for Italians to make the huge casting press so that castings could be done in mass production at automaker margins.

Except it was Tesla that went to the Italian casting press manufacturer and the made it a project together. Tesla asked for the biggest they had and asked for bigger and basically bought 5 years of machines, allowing them to do the necessary investment. And Tesla also used its own internal materials team to develop alloys to optimize the process to make it practical for high volume production lines like Model Y.
Post reply on HN