Electric Vehicle Thread!

Eh, so there's quite a lot of backstory to that story.

First things first, the person being interviewed is is John Bernal. This guy is indeed a former employee of Tesla and worked in the FSD development group, specifically in the group which applies metadata tagging to collected scene data and detected objects. He got fired because he thought himself a tester (he wasn't) and set up a YouTube channel to do test reviews of the product -- a violation of the terms and conditions of his employment there. https://nypost.com/2022/03/16/tesla-employee-fired-after-driverless-tech-youtube-reviews/

Pay attention to his job title "data annotation specialist" which is not the same as "Bonafide FSD tester." Sure, yeah, the guy obviously has NO BONE TO PICK AT ALL with Tesla firing him. Obviously we can all be fully confident he's an unbiased, non-axe-grinding source at this point. And to be blunt, whether any of us agree with Tesla being morally right to fire him or not, apparently it was quite clearly spelled out in his employment contract that he wasn't allowed to do it.

"But Albuquerque, just because he got fired doesn't mean he isn't right about all the other things! Maybe that even makes him MORE right than you want to admit!" I hear you saying.

Ok, so let's talk about radar elimination: at no point are FSD cars just willy-nilly running into shit without the radar function. How many times in the last two years have we all read about "oh look at this Tesla crash into a bunch of shit... OMG I bet FSD is in trouble now!" then followed by "Local / state / federal Investigators show that autopilot was not enabled during the crash into [firetruck, bottom of cliff, 130mph sustained acceleration crash into a pole, a shitload of cars at the end of a tunnel]", citing examples from rote in the last six weeks. Radar is not necessary for driving; you as a human do not have radar and somehow (I presume) you don't run around bumping into shit.

"Yeah but obviously they're doing slimy things, just listen to his anecdote about Lombard street -- it's super obvious they're cutting corners!" I hear your next retort.

So the largest statistical outlier of a city street they can possibly think of, quite possibly North America's most treacherous street, was being shown on YouTube as "See, FSD can't navigate the worst possible street we can drive on!!" So as a bit of a thumb-your-nose to the situation, Tesla sat down and made FSD drive the street correctly. And so what? Care to guess how Waymo works in the scant few places where it's permitted to operate? Or Blue Cruise? Or that Level 3 Mercedes thing that was proclaimed as better than Tesla? All three of those are pure examples of 100% human-mapped route traversal. Yeah, so when Waymo and BlueCruise and Mercedes do it with direct human effort, it's the right way -- when Tesla does it for a ridiculous exception case like Lombard Street, it's completely the wrong way?

"But see Albuquerque, that's the point! Waymo totally works and FSD doesn't! Mercedes beat Tesla to L3 capability, which obviously means Tesla's method is pure shit and cannot be scaled or trusted."

So here's the trick: Have any of you looked at the littany of requirements to enable the Mercedes Level 3 autonomous driving? It only works on pre-mapped highways (no city streets at all), it only works at 40mph and below (how does that even work on a highway?), it cannot drive directly into the sun, it cannot drive in any precipitation or fog, it cannot operate in any road construction zone, it cannot interact with emergency vehicles, oh and the very best part: Mercedes L3 autonomous driving only works if it has another car to follow. Yeah, so if you have nobody to follow? You're screwed, that's it.

Surely Waymo is better, right? Except it only works in very specific geofenced areas, only where 100% human-mapped routes exist, it cannot make any turn that isn't a right turn, it doesn't operate in precipitation either, you can't actually operate it as your own vehicle so it's only available in "taxi form."

None of this is to say FSD is "ready", just like Waymo isn't "ready" and Mercedes L3 only "ready" in the most laughable sense. Tesla has a very long way to go (and maybe, honestly, never) before FSD can be trusted to drive without a human. That doesn't mean the answer is 100% human-routed behavior like Waymo and Blue Cruise and Mercedes, because there are more miles of road construction than there will ever be humans hired to update and maintain navigation data. They'll never catch up, it's a physical impossibility.

The only way self driving cars of any sort actually come to fruition is through machine learning and AI models, whatever those might be. And honestly, even then it's not really fully solvable -- there will always end up being some driving problem which a machine has no rational way to understand how to deal with. Want an example? Try pulling into or leaving a school parking lot to pick up or drop off your kids. If it's anything like the schools I've been around for decades, even "normal humans" can't figure that shit out right -- mostly because "normal humans" are the ones routing traffic and jacking it up for everyone else.

So yeah, it seems like a poorly sourced hit piece to me. But what do I know?
 
Interesting article.

Doesn't exactly inspire confidence that the programmers reportedly moved across from Tesla to twitter aren't getting on top of the ongoing issues over there, either, though there won't be much technology interlap between Tesla/twitter.

Ultimately, Musk is so egotistical that he'll continue to plough ahead regardless of what he is advised by staff who know better than him. The traditional car manufacturers are being more circumspect about the development of self-driving technology and are making sure they are using LIDAR/RADAR to be as careful as possible. Musk doesn't have the same experience of getting his arse sued back into the stone age when things go wrong as most of these older companies do, so is ploughing ahead regardless.

If/when it fails, it will be someone else's fault, of course.
 
I actually think Waymo has the right business model and that Tesla should have FSD as a subscription instead of something you buy.
 
Tesla does indeed offer their FSD as a subscription model.

And fully agreed with Elon being an egomaniacal asshole who would rather just shove shit thru. I'm really hoping the Tesla board of directors boots his ass as the CEO.
 
They didn't have only one source.

But several of the sources remain anonymous because of fear of reprisals.
 
They didn't have only one source.

But several of the sources remain anonymous because of fear of reprisals.
So, conjecture, bias, and anonymity.

Sure, let's roll with the hit piece. Did they somehow forget to ask about it running over kids too?
 
Sure, those who are Tesla and Musk apologists will tend to call any kind of critical look as a hit piece and those who tend to think worse of them will think it's a look inside what's happening.

Let's see if the approach that Tesla/Musk adopted for FSD ends up working better than the competition.
 
Emergency brakes (even on Volvo trucks) only work if your foot isn't on the gas. If your foot comes off the gas or is actively on the brake, the braking system will take over.

The advancement in the braking systems are twofold: making sure you're actually stopping in time (wherever feasible, eg if the car determines you're not on the brakes hard enough to avoid the impending collision) and then autonomous management of individual brakes to maximize stopping grip and thus minimize stopping distance.
 
Podcast discusses how fast the Chinese EV industry is developing, particularly the Chinese manufacturers who surprised Euro auto execs at the surprising jumps in quality at a recent Shanghai auto show.


Really worrisome because VW Group books about half its profits on sales in China -- probably not EV sales but overall auto sales.

More salient, they talk about the plans of these Chinese manufacturers to push into export markets. They have the #1 EV in Israel and are establishing brand presence in Europe and ultimately targeting the US.

An industry analyst notes that Europe and the US have these deadlines of 2030, 2035 and 2040 for when the last new ICE cards would allow to be sold in their markets.

While domestic manufacturers have all committed and invested on transitioning quickly to EVs, he doesn't see them being able to pull it off in time. So that presents opportunities for Chinese EVs in both Europe and the US, because they've locked up key supply chains -- for batteries, motors, etc.

But the question is, what would it be like for the first American owners of Chinese EVs in America? Somewhat akin to owning a Japanese car in Detroit in the '80s? The Japanese haven't been vilified to the extent the Chinese have been in the last few years.
 

List updated with a few more EVs which will get the full $7500 credit but most of the additions are future EVs, not those which are on the market now.

The narrow list of EVs that qualify for federal tax credits has already grown again. Ars Technica notesthe US government has restored multiple electric rides to the list of vehicles that get at least some credit. The 2023 VW ID.4 (the first US-made model) receives the full $7,500 incentive, as do the upcoming Chevy Blazer EV, Equinox EV and Silverado EV. Rivian R1T and R1S buyers can also get a $3,750 credit provided their configuration slips under the $80,000 cap.

When the Internal Revenue Service outlined the original list, just six EVs could get the full tax credit. This included the Cadillac Lyriq, Chevy Bolt, Chevy Bolt EUV, Ford F-150 Lightning, Tesla Model 3 and Tesla Model Y. Other EVs and plug-in hybrids only received partial credits, such as the Chrysler Pacifica PHEV and Ford Mustang Mach-E.



Now is there a quality difference between ID.4s made in the US vs. those made in Germany? Probably moot by now, Americans can probably only get the 2023 US-made model here.
 

Another EV Power Challenge: Cooling the Charger Cables​

an experienced team led by Issam Mudawar (Betty Ruth and Milton B. Hollander Family Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University) analyzed, devised and tested a way to increase the current-carrying capacity from its present maximum of 520 A to over 2,400 A. Mudawar has been working for 37 years on ways to more efficiently cool electronics by leveraging how liquid captures heat when boiled into a vapor. The work was done in conjunction with the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea.

To achieve this significant increase in capacity, the team employed fluid-based cooling for the power cable. The team accomplished this via rigorous fluid and thermal modeling, detailed equations and additional insight into the dynamics of cooling.

PMDL-122_cooling-EV-charger-cables_Fig2.png

Their work shows just how complicated the EV charging problem is as it reaches higher currents, as well as the advanced efforts needed to understand and solve these problems. It is described in extreme detail in two somewhat overlapping and very lengthy papers in the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer. Each is packed with copious analysis, modeling data, detailed tables, insights and results.
 
There's a WaPo article about conservatives who are EV enthusiasts. So they spoke to people in places like Plano, TX and other places which voted for Trump in 2020 and other red districts.

The conservatives even formed Tesla car clubs and take pains to tell reporters of the article that they gravitated to EVs because of the cool tech and high performance, with environmental concerns at best incidental.

Or they don't believe EVs are better for the environment but they like them because cars are fast and bleeding technology.

Most of these districts though are well behind blue districts in places like CA as far as per capita EV ownership.

The TX district with the highest per capita EV ownership is around Austin, coming in at like 29th in the nation..


Well it could be worse, seems most conservatives are vocally hostile to EVs, resenting tax credits, deriding it as cars for the rich, or deluded liberals who don't realize that they're charging their EVs with coal-generated electricity.
 
,,, or deluded liberals who don't realize that they're charging their EVs with coal-generated electricity.
I wanted to respond to this part here.

There have been a multitude of meta-analyses around this precise topic -- can an EV still be more "clean' than a gasoline car, if the energy it consumes comes from a coal-fired plant? The answer is, although you might disbelieve it, yes it can and yes it likely is.

Coal fired plants are nasty for the environment, of that there is no question. At the same time, the combination of Whr/mi efficiency of an "average" EV, combined with the overall charging and discharging efficiency of the EV battery cells on average, combined with the electrical transmission efficiencies on average, and finally combined with the coal electrical generation carbon generation ends up with even those worst-case circumstances allowing EV's to be less carbon-polluting than their ICE counterparts within about 60,000 miles (give or take, depending on some local variables.)

Keep in mind, fueling an internal combustion engine depends on an amazing number of other electrical energy consumers and internal combustion engines to arrive in an individual fuel tank in a car. Electricity to run the oil drilling systems 24/7, electricity to run the oil pumps 24/7, and electricity to run the enormous oil and gas refineries -- did we stop to ask what sort of electrical generation stations they power those drills, pumps and refineries with? Then when all that electricity is done, we get to fuel the trains and trucks to transport the refined materials to distribution points, and fuel the tanker trucks which carry the fuel the fueling stations.

Someone will bring up cobalt and lithium mines, which require many of the same items. The difference is, that cobalt and lithium can still be recycled, after it's used a few thousand times over. Oil-based fuels are used once and gone, which means there absolutely must be a continuous supply of carbon at all times -- and their carbon begets more carbon.

So, no, even coal fired plants powering an EV end up being more carbon-efficient than ICE, and it's not any sort of loony lib conspiracy, it's just simple math.
 
And for those that are concerned with cobalt and lithium. Just buy the cars without them?

Currently there's only 1 brand making cars with sodium battery, but in the future there's probably will be more.

And if okay with lithium but not with cobalt, there are cars with LFP battery.
 
LFP batteries are my personal favorite because I tested them for durability and cycle life years ago and they were pretty awesome. I know they were not as energy dense so the range was a bit lower but they were very robust.
 
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