Electric cars..been reading on the other forum...I have some thoughts

[Blobcat]

Would qualify for ULEZ

That was my thought exactly when I saw it - shows how perverse behaviour is the result of new rules and laws.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions springs to mind.

We should do things because it's the right thing to do, although what the right thing to do isn't always that clear and personal and business interests tend to get in the way and cloud judgement...

 

[js190d]

Battery powered cars have been around since before Karl Benz's first car. At one point they were almost as popular as petrol but died off due to being unable to compete on range.
You're a bit out of date on the battery tech. Tesla have developed a 1 million mile battery pack. Li-ION is set to be replaced by other technologies in the very near future which not only promise increased range but also much more rapid (near instant) charging. Super capacitor and battery technologies are converging and will greatly enhance the range and diminish recharge times. It could be argued a fuel cell is just a different type of battery and fundamentally should be classified as electric vehicles.

Your ethical decision is moot as I'm sure no driver ever makes that conscious decision. They will invariably react to the first input and set in motion a train of events that cannot then be stopped. In most cases they fixate on what they are trying to avoid and drive straight into it as a result. It could even be argued that an autonomous vehicle would often not get into that position in the first place as it would have access to data that we humans would not by being aware of data from nearby vehicles. We already have autonomous systems that can take off, fly and land large commercial airliners and we think nothing of that. I am equally certain there have been more accidents where the cause of the accident has been pilot error as opposed to autonomous system failure. In fact the only autonomous system crashes I can think of right now were the MCAS ones.
Many military aircraft are unable to be flown without the assistance of avionics.

Autonomous systems always err on the side of safety unlike humans. Humans are unpredictable in their actions and don't always take the best option. If you look at modern automated warehouses and factories they often use autonomous forklifts etc and rarely have issues. Amazon is a prime example (pardon the pun). Our own MBs were built using automated systems that carried components around the factory without human intervention.

Data privacy is an issue everywhere and it's for that reason those good folks at the EU introduced GDPR regulations to try to restrict what information is taken, how it's used and how the individual can have it removed.

Autonomy in cars is coming whether we like it or not. Electric cars are likewise coming like it or not. Enjoy your diesel while you can.

From what i can see people do not want electric and especially electric autonomous cars. But like you say we will have them if we like it or not.

I am scratching my head trying to remember the last time this tactic for selling an expensive product worked? Is it the enviromental angle that you think will persuade people to buy something they don't want?

Of course the other option is to legislate petrol & diesel cars off the road. Politically this is a non starter as well. Maybe little Saint Greta will persuade everyone they are killing the planet and make people think it is unethical to drive a petrol or diesel. Might convince a few snowflakes and millionaire neo liberals in London but it just won't work for the majority. Maybe normal folk should just not be allowed to drive any more.

Tesla is a company built 99.9% on hype. Fact is if you take apart a battery pack from a Tesla it is a lot of AA batteries.. Old technology. If i was you i would not be putting any deposit down on Mr Musk's rocket trips to Mars any time soon.

The ethical considerations of a human in crash are instant and instinctive. A computer is stupid and has to be told what to do so all parameters have to be laid out for a computer to make any sense of the situation it is in. This is impossible. Just from a legal perspective it is also deeply problematic.

In the last 4 years 5 people have died using Tesla's autopilot system. That is the reality of Teslas autonomous technology, it does not work very well. How are these cars still allowed on our roads?

You cannot compare automated factories or aircraft systems to the complexity of an automated car running in a live situation
which has limitless unknown variables.

But freedom of choice and all that so if you want to buy one then go for it. Personally i would rather just take a taxi, train or bus than buy or use an autonomous car.

 

[Frontstep]

Teslas batteries are more akin to laptop batteries than AA's they evolve continually and are currently made with Panasonic.

How many have died due to the faults in autonomous systems is a moot point.

Tesla’s “Autopilot,” after all, is not an autopilot system and Tesla require you to have hands on the wheel, in one accident the driver hadn't touched the wheel in 13 minutes before he crashed into a fire truck.

I have some confidence for the future that an autonomous system is far far better than many of the drivers I know and see.

Teslas are improving rapidly and currently they lead the pack.

The future is electric, for now.

 

[LostKiwi]

The last time we bought something expensive we didn't want was probably diesel cars. When they were first released they were noisy, smelly and pretty unpleasant but people bought them because they were given tax breaks and they were perceived to be cheaper to run than petrol.
The same tactic will work again and will likely be the route the sheeple will take.

The Tesla battery isn't AA cells, they are 18650 cells, chosen for their ubiquitous availability, reliability and ease of packaging. It also allows for failed cells to be easily mapped out through software and physically replaced at a later date if necessary.

There is a fundamental difference between how a computer can react compared to a human. A human when faced with a difficult or unexpected situation will either react instinctively (which has no guarantee of being the correct action), freeze and do nothing or carry on in the hope the situation resolves itself. Computer programming can simply tell the vehicle to stop. Maximum failsafe. If there are other autonomous vehicles they will also react to the signal to stop and do it far faster than any human (who will typically take 750ms to react). At 70 mph that's around 30 feet before anything happens. A computer would react in less than 1/10th that time. Bearing in mind it may have additional information from surrounding vehicles there is a strong probability it could have reacted near instantly.

When looking at fatalities with autonomous vehicles you also need to ask how many people died in non-autonomous vehicles in the same period then divide by the number of miles travelled. I would be surprised if the fatalities per mile travelled was higher in autonomous vehicles but I'm not surprised people quote 5 in 4 years as it makes a great headline.
Of 43 autonomous vehicle accidents in California 13 were where the autonomous car was rear ended by a human driven car.
Interesting article here:
https://www.thedrive.com/sheetmetal...ng-into-accidents-because-they-drive-too-well

In the UK JLR are constantly driving autonomous cars around the Midlands, especially in the Coventry area. I've yet to hear of an accident where the JLRvehicle was at fault.
It's very easy to read attention grabbing headlines and draw incorrect conclusions from incomplete data.

 

[LostKiwi]

As expected:
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2016/01/11/394557.htm

 

[js190d]

The last time we bought something expensive we didn't want was probably diesel cars. When they were first released they were noisy, smelly and pretty unpleasant but people bought them because they were given tax breaks and they were perceived to be cheaper to run than petrol.
The same tactic will work again and will likely be the route the sheeple will take.

The Tesla battery isn't AA cells, they are 18650 cells, chosen for their ubiquitous availability, reliability and ease of packaging. It also allows for failed cells to be easily mapped out through software and physically replaced at a later date if necessary.

There is a fundamental difference between how a computer can react compared to a human. A human when faced with a difficult or unexpected situation will either react instinctively (which has no guarantee of being the correct action), freeze and do nothing or carry on in the hope the situation resolves itself. Computer programming can simply tell the vehicle to stop. Maximum failsafe. If there are other autonomous vehicles they will also react to the signal to stop and do it far faster than any human (who will typically take 750ms to react). At 70 mph that's around 30 feet before anything happens. A computer would react in less than 1/10th that time. Bearing in mind it may have additional information from surrounding vehicles there is a strong probability it could have reacted near instantly.

When looking at fatalities with autonomous vehicles you also need to ask how many people died in non-autonomous vehicles in the same period then divide by the number of miles travelled. I would be surprised if the fatalities per mile travelled was higher in autonomous vehicles but I'm not surprised people quote 5 in 4 years as it makes a great headline.
Of 43 autonomous vehicle accidents in California 13 were where the autonomous car was rear ended by a human driven car.
Interesting article here:
https://www.thedrive.com/sheetmetal...ng-into-accidents-because-they-drive-too-well

In the UK JLR are constantly driving autonomous cars around the Midlands, especially in the Coventry area. I've yet to hear of an accident where the JLRvehicle was at fault.
It's very easy to read attention grabbing headlines and draw incorrect conclusions from incomplete data.

Not a fan of the diesel engine? Maybe you should look into them in a bit more detail as they are in fact a much superior product to your average petrol engine that is why they are more expensive. Personally i find the injection pump on my 190d a great piece of precision mechanical engineering.

18650 cells look almost identical to AA batteries, and are not exactly cutting edge technology.

https://www.batteryjunction.com/18650.html

So the code in an autonomous car just needs to say stop when it thinks it is in a collision situation? When they have total control over all functions of a car they need to do far more than that. They need to "think" and work out the best solution instantly.

5 dead in 4 years is not a headline it is a fact. If you think this is not an issue then i am baffled. If your computer controlled SMART kitchen oven decided to burn your house down 5 times in 4 years would you think there was a problem?

Human driven cars crash as well and people die but this is due to human error. It is not relevant to autonomous fatalities which are down to the code that car has been programmed with and are therefore entirely avoidable. If they were coded correctly those people would not have lost there lives.
Not fit for purpose.

 

[Taffy7hfa]

Warning ! possibly unrelated post ! My 18 year old daughter is currently saving her pennies so that she can spend £250 on a record player, not a cheapo novelty item but proper separate turntable, amp & speakers, apparently she is not alone among her peer group in her fondness for old fashioned vinyl albums, she already has about a dozen and is planning on expanding her collection as she loves the way they sound, look & feel.
Not that surprising ? maybe, but when I went with her to our local HMV store, I was truly amazed at the huge amount of the shop floor taken up by shelving crammed with vinyl albums, some classic's from the 60's,70's but loads of new artists as well, not to mention lots of large display cabinets filled with assorted turntables, speakers etc. What's all this got to do with electric cars ? maybe not a lot as I don't suppose there is much of an environmental downside to vinyl, but who could have predicted that an old out of date technology like vinyl would be returning so strongly with new generations, it makes very little sense. It seems that this generation have abandoned CD's and now either listen to music on spotify Itunes or vinyl, I can't help thinking there may be some significance for the car industry in the unpredictability of future generations and what they will or won't want to spend their hard earned on.

 

[LostKiwi]

Not a fan of the diesel engine? Maybe you should look into them in a bit more detail as they are in fact a much superior product to your average petrol engine that is why they are more expensive. Personally i find the injection pump on my 190d a great piece of precision mechanical engineering.

18650 cells look almost identical to AA batteries, and are not exactly cutting edge technology.

https://www.batteryjunction.com/18650.html

So the code in an autonomous car just needs to say stop when it thinks it is in a collision situation? When they have total control over all functions of a car they need to do far more than that. They need to "think" and work out the best solution instantly.

5 dead in 4 years is not a headline it is a fact. If you think this is not an issue then i am baffled. If your computer controlled SMART kitchen oven decided to burn your house down 5 times in 4 years would you think there was a problem?

Human driven cars crash as well and people die but this is due to human error. It is not relevant to autonomous fatalities which are down to the code that car has been programmed with and are therefore entirely avoidable. If they were coded correctly those people would not have lost there lives.
Not fit for purpose.

The 18650 "looks almost identical to AA batteries" but is in fact quite a bit larger.
Have you ever actually seen an 18650 in the flesh? It doesn't sound like it.

As for the rest of my post you either didn't read it or didn't understand.
The failsafe condition for any computer control is that in the event of an unhandled exception you stop. In other words anything outside its ability to deal with through standard programming or learned behaviours. This is something a human does not do and which often leads to problems.
5 dead in 4 years IS a headline as it conveniently ignores the thousands killed by human drivers in the same period. Furthermore how many of those 5 dead were the fault of humans failing to respond to the car warning of a hazard and requesting the human intervene (at least 1) or of the human in the other vehicle? Without facts it's a headline.
If people drove correctly there wouldn't have been those several thousand fatalities, but in your world that seems to be OK.

Research has shown that even now autonomous vehicles have fewer accidents per million miles than humans. That statistic will only improve.

 

[A.J.]

I have watched two interesting reviews on YouTube regarding electric cars, one with surprising results and the other with expected results.

The first one was from Carwow where a test was made of the quoted range of several models. Surprisingly the MB EQC ran out of sparks in the shortest time sadly. The one with the longest range turned out to be the Kia Niro surprisingly. The review is worth a watch

The second one was 'Harry's Garage' Harry put the Jaguar i-pace through the mill. The review wasn't so much about the I-pace but more about the anxieties of owning an EV. The results of that to me made an EV a definite NO. Again worth a watch.

 

[js190d]

Ok so a "hightech" Tesla costing £90000 is powered by many thousands of 18650 batteries that look a lot like AA batteries (but are a bit bigger) that you can buy in Tesco. Very space age. Old tech not high tech. Think 1970's milkfloat but a lot quicker, although the milk float was probably better built.

I fail to see why you are trying to compare computer driven cars crashing to human controlled cars crashing. Comparison is irrelevant and proves nothing.We all know humans crash cars that is established. We also know computers crash cars.

The issue is a person has programmed the computer controlled car to drive and react in certain ways and because of this programming people have been killed. The programmer is culpable because there code has not ensured occupant safety. In effect the software in the Teslas involved was faulty and not fit for purpose.

 

[LostKiwi]

You can't buy 18650 batteries in Tesco.
You were the one comparing computer controlled cars to human when you raised the headline 5 dead in 4 years conveniently ignoring the thousands dead at the hands of human drivers.
The point there being that we accept it from humans but not from computers that are inherently safer.
You also chose to ignore the autonomous Volvo that killed a pedestrian because the human in charge of the computer ignored the warnings given by the computer and failed to take action.
Fundamentally autonomous cars remain the responsibility of the driver. The autonomy (at least at this stage) is not the responsibility of the programmer as laws dictate human overseers must be present to take control. If the autonomy fails it's up to the human to take back control.
Full autonomy will come but not until the law is satisfied the public are sufficiently protected and some laws updated.

 

[js190d]

You can't buy 18650 batteries in Tesco.
You were the one comparing computer controlled cars to human when you raised the headline 5 dead in 4 years conveniently ignoring the thousands dead at the hands of human drivers.
The point there being that we accept it from humans but not from computers that are inherently safer.
You also chose to ignore the autonomous Volvo that killed a pedestrian because the human in charge of the computer ignored the warnings given by the computer and failed to take action.
Fundamentally autonomous cars remain the responsibility of the driver. The autonomy (at least at this stage) is not the responsibility of the programmer as laws dictate human overseers must be present to take control. If the autonomy fails it's up to the human to take back control.
Full autonomy will come but not until the law is satisfied the public are sufficiently protected and some laws updated.

Ah so i see while Tesla are using the driver as a beta tester for their software they absolve themselves of all responsibility when a car decides to drive itself head first into an oncoming truck.
I will stick to my diesel i think. The video above also features rather a lot of the Tesla's big AA batteries.

 

[Vintage Racer]

Thank f**k i'll be dead before I need to buy one..........in the meantime, i'm off to take the V12 for a run!

 

[LostKiwi]

Ah so i see while Tesla are using the driver as a beta tester for their software they absolve themselves of all responsibility when a car decides to drive itself head first into an oncoming truck.
I will stick to my diesel i think. The video above also features rather a lot of the big AA batteries.

No it's not about absolving responsibility, we're talking legal requirements.
Every manufacturer currently testing autonomous vehicles can only do so when there is a qualified driver present to override the autonomy if required - exactly the same as the reason we have pilots in commercial airliners.

 

[Alfie]

Over 90% of most peoples journeys are under 200 miles. Given most electric cars can now do that how exactly are they not fit for purpose for most of the journeys driven?
My daily commute involves a 4 mile drive to the train station, 45 minutes on a train then 10 minute walk with the reverse on the way home. An electric car would suit that perfectly (I haven't bought one as at present I'm not in the market to replace any cars though I did look into a Twizy).
One of our suppliers is only allowing electric cars on their car scheme. Clearly they believe they are fit for purpose.
Even if I had to give up my V8s I'd take an electric car next time round if the price was right.

They are not fit for purpose yet and I stress YET because they can only do one 200 mile trip or 2 x 100 mile trips before they need recharging for eight hours. Okay, less if you use one of those fast chargers at a service station. But who wants to stop for 45 minutes at a service station each evening on your way home if you can find one?. Lets not forget you cannot get a fast charger for the home.

Until the EV can match the versatility of the ICE its not fit for purpose.

I did look at getting a Smart EV for popping into and out of town. Might fit the bill as I have other more versatile modes of transport. But i'm not paying nigh on £30k for a smart car.

 

[Alfie]

No it's not about absolving responsibility, we're talking legal requirements.
Every manufacturer currently testing autonomous vehicles can only do so when there is a qualified driver present to override the autonomy if required - exactly the same as the reason we have pilots in commercial airliners.

Actually the reason we have airline pilots is because no-one would get on an aircraft that didn't have them. The technology to fly a plane from A to B without a pilot, safely has been there for years. Its simply customer perception that's all.It used to be that all flights had a flight engineer. They have gone.

 

[M80]

The technology to fly a plane from A to B without a pilot, safely has been there for years.

Perhaps not for the 737 Max yet though.

 

[Rappey69]

All this range anxiety is based on a car travelling further than its claimed range, when in reality the vast majority of drivers hardly ever do this (as previously mentioned)
The charging infrastructure here is not that great at the moment but can only get a lot better.
A guy in the usa drove 2000 miles ,just stopping to sleep. He used superchargers so his recharge time was not that long and figured an ice car would have stopped similar times to refuel, toilet break, food etc if a family was on board. After visiting relatives he then drove another 2k miles back home.
Usa has a much better network and even had chargers along the grand canyon..
As a commuting vehicle an electric car ticks so many boxes. Very cheap to run, no cold start issues ,will happily work at -40c when ice engines struggle to start. Countless short journeys are absolutely no problem, can enter any green zone city etc.
Every morning you wake up your car is fully charged and ready to cover 200+ miles.
Motorway services must be onto a winner as more and more electric cars stop for a quick charge and refreshments !

 

[AMGeed]

^ You keep singing about the virtues of an electric car, which is understandable as no doubt they will be the future of motoring. But the UK is nowhere near ready for that yet, or the forseeable future should everyone be forced to switch to an EV.

How come you have not got an EV yet if they are so great?

 

[Blobcat]

As I said above I was using an all electric i3 for awhile, range down to less than 60 miles after 3 years of pretty much living on a 125a fast charger. Range anxiety as soon as you got in the car and if you were stuck in commuting traffic the range would just fall away.
It had ~165 miles range when new even then ~80 miles you’d be after a charger.
That tech isn’t mature enough (if it ever will be)...