A fork lift truck, a milk float or an electrically assisted bicycle is not a “usable electric car”.
Oh, and another thing. You were the one who started this off using swear words. I actually gave some details of why your tinfoil hattery about electric cars is wrong. And that’s why I wrote “Sorry, no”; because anyone who thinks “Electrics are a no brainer” doesn’t understand motor vehicles, doesn’t understand batteries and doesn’t understand power delivery. You are simply not competent to pontificate on the subject.
You tell me what you actually know about battery technology and its capabilities and I’ll tell you what I know. But it could get tedious. I’ve designed high power battery and DC systems, I know a fair bit about the capability and lifecycle costs of all the major technologies used in traction, and I tell you straight that if you tell me that usable electric cars have existed for decades, taking the definition of usable as being “replacing an existing gasoline or Diesel car without serious constraints”, then either you are a troll or you don’t know what you are talking about. If you want to argue give me something I can do the maths on - and I’ll write it down here for everybody to see and judge who knows what they are writing about.
I’ve seen conversion kits and real people building and converting from scratch since the 80s. Please don’t go right to “he must be a troll” when the problem might be with your lack of experience.
I’m not even particularly enamored of battery electrics; I figured it would break through with automotive hybrids, a well-used industrial technology plus a small store of battery reserve. No surprise, it was the Prius that got things going.
Li-ion didn’t require the internet to drive development, (NiMH was an alternative that’s stuck around because it’s robust and RoHS) but the monopolists in the auto industry sure didn’t drive development.
And give up on the troll stuff. I visit on mobile so I’m not going to go point by point. Some of every comment, from everyone, is left as an exercise for the reader. Do a little bit of historical research before you assume no one’s thought about the issue before 2002. Yes, I rolled my eyes a bit at the AI stuff. It doesn’t and can’t work without overcoming some fundamental points of failure. It literally does not work, except maybe on literal rails.
Battery tech is different, it’s essentially incremental, waiting for a disruption to the fundamentals, maybe, but for 150+ years, we’ve had batteries that do battery-like shit. Our shitty AIs needs rails, chess rules, a pedestal in the concrete, or deadman switches on qualified, alert operators. Self-driving away from rails is always going to be an MTV-Jackass-style abnegation of good judgement.
And if AIs get to the point of having good judgement? They’ll want time off and limited hours. And good for them for demanding it. And getting it. Somebody has to.
Oh, I’ve seen them. I’ve seen the $7000 electric car (with $140000 of donated engineering). I’ve watched a local group believe the hype, announce a project and then discover that a free lunch doesn’t exist. I have not seen a single successful conversion - and by successful I mean “having the same performance envelope as a low end supermini”, which is a pretty low bar.
But there is very little in your long post that is solid enough to respond to. It’s full of nonsequiturs, for a start. You haven’t given me a single concrete example, just hand waving. That’s why I used the T word. I work in amps, volts, coulombs, discharge rates, thermal efficiency, heat dissipation, stuff like that. Not “we’ve had batteries that do battery-like shit”, which is just tautological woo.
I think too you are muddying the waters by equating “AI” with self driving cars. Nobody calls an aircraft autopilot AI. I suggested that the solution when it comes will be the result of large numbers of discrete safety feature coming together and then running on roads which will gradually acquire the necessary sensing and wireless networking support. I think it’s a hard computing problem, though some of the sensors like LIDAR will probably need some of the technologies which have emerged from AI research, like neural nets. Judgement won’t come into it. Let’s face it, most human drivers are absolutely crap at judgement, despite which the system kind of functions. To me your argument is like saying “Self driving cars require Harry Potter magic, Harry Potter isn’t real, therefore no self driving cars.” Since the first statement is incorrect, the argument fails.
When people use it, intelligent judgement fills in the gaps in a way that autonomous driving cannot. It doesn’t have to be an especially good day for a human to do a consistently decent job when a non-intelligent processing system using laser, visible, and microwave sensors is inexplicably blind and simply slides off the road. Have you considered how much more difficult the avoidance-of-objects problem is when all the objects are within 100m, and there are frequently stationary and other obects within 2m? And have you seen how magnificently bad machine vision actually is at basic function?
Human vision isn’t better or as multi-modal, but it maintains a model in our head, so we can literally drive blind-ish with very 6-sigma-like quality rates. The difference is our consciousness, wringing the last bit from our squishy experience and our stake in our own lives.
And frankly, because the titans (?) of self-driving technology seem to be just pumping their own egos, ideology, or fundraising programs, I feel fine being skeptical. 20 years ago I was skeptical of battery electric, but not hybrid. Mostly I knew that hybrid was what was going to crack the market.
For autonomous, what will crack the problem is autonomous light rail mixing freight and passenger traffic in an urban and exurban setting, matching the nearest interstate for volume and trashing auto traffic for accident rate and lack of congestion.
This self-driving car bullshit is like trying to make nuclear airplanes before learning how much of a shitshow the technology is. It’s adorable, in a way, but at some point it just becomes a scam of regulatory capture and corporate malfeasance. At least the self-driving shit offers a smaller containment risk. It’s still stupid war shit scamming the stock markets with a very underpants-gnomes kind of business model.
The missing step is that they’re trying to make future commuting better without light rail, 'cause commies. It’s just magical thinking that won’t move in an “acceptable” way without doing the homework or allowing the natural technology to happen, and without allowing that the end-fantasy (self-driving limo on clear roads) may not happen.
Also, bud, you never cited an amp yourself, or any other kind of circuit analysis (which for modern systems is going to be a many-dimensional LUT in application), so… no offense, but fuck your expectations about my discourse. Manage your own shit.
https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201208/backpage.cfm
Nothing has really changed since.
You don’t need a “many-dimensional LUT” to understand “1% of the energy density of gasoline”. I think you are deliberately trying to overcomplicate the whole issue by coming up with technical terminology designed to hide the elephant in the room which I referred to in the original post. Put bluntly, it makes little difference if the powertrain of an electric car is 85% efficient or 90% when the energy storage by weight of the battery is 1% of that of gasoline (and much less for lead acid or nickel metal hydride). Even in an absolute best case scenario with good regeneration you are going to end up with a vehicle with around 400kg of batteries (Tesla) and corresponding unaffordability for normal people; and in the worst case scenario versus a hybrid you are looking at 800kg to match the performance.
However…this is my last post on this because you are clearly more concerned to be offensive than to engage seriously. “No offense” - perhaps an anger management course is in order.
Dude, I started out untechnical and got called a troll, then got technical, got called out on that. And apparently the economies of scale and the weight of drivetrain got past you so we’re back to being blissfully devoid of technical and life experience. Carry your goalposts and opaque motives elsewhere. I will flag your next iteration of this abusive nonsense. Be a human being.
Let’s take a break.
This topic was automatically opened after 8 hours.
Do mutants dream of electric cars?
Google already nabbed ‘Nexus ‘n’’. Just pointing that out. 
Doesn’t stop me starting an electric car company called buster and naming one of the models friendly.
The cut of your jib, I like it, sir.
It’d have to compete against my internal combustion Mercer-mobile!
Yeah but I hear it has problems climbing hills.
As an aside is Jalopnik’s RSS feed broken for anybody else or is it just me?