My observation, based on the driver's comments and the Tesla efficiency chart, is that you could go close to 500 miles at 30 mph, which is almost a reasonable speed.
Note the context that the title comes with. Tesla cars will break 620 miles when driving slowly (under 30 mph), not 620 miles using the EPA rating which is commonly used when addressing this issue.
An interesting thought experiment: when we have AI driven electric vehicles used to transport goods (and thus no human labor costs in the equation), will driving behaviors for some types of shipments be optimized for fuel economy at the expense of slower speeds? Will some trucks be driving the minimum speed limit on highways to save electricity?
This is already done, effectively. Freight trains often move pretty slowly because it's efficient, even though obviously the technology exists to make trains go really fast. According to this (if I understand what it's talking about correctly), the average speed of a freight train in the US is barely over 20MPH:
The average mainline long-haul speed of a freight train is probably around 50mph. The average speeds of freight trains are remarkably lower since trains spend a lot more time stopping (if you're dealing with local freight, you're going to be stopping every few miles to detach or attach a few train cars). Looking at <http://www.railroadpm.org/Performance%20Reports/BNSF.aspx>, the intermodal trains (which tend to be between major shipment terminals and not including local businesses) are averaging at ~30mph.
Is that because the slow speed is efficient, or because it's cheaper to avoid improving the track to support higher speeds?
Freight trains in Europe are much faster[1] -- but that could be because they often need to fit in with the schedule of passenger trains using the same lines (which themselves require the track to be maintained to a high standard).
[1] Citation needed, I only have observations of them going at a decent pace through stations I'm waiting at.
The train networks in the US are more optimized for, and better at freight traffic, while Europe is more optimized for, and better at, passenger traffic
> In fact, the freight rail system is so efficient that to some extent we've obviated the need for the Panama Canal. Many Asian container ships bound for Europe actually make port in Seattle or Vancouver, offload their containers onto trains which shoot across the country to New York or another eastern port where they are reloaded on ships for the trip to Europe.
Though I suspect soon enough the Northwest Passage will be clear for enough of the year that most freighters will just sail through the Arctic. Perhaps both Panama's government and North America's railroads should be pushing hard for a carbon tax.
Good question, I'm not sure how much speed plays a role in train efficiency. It's no doubt some of each of your alternatives, I imagine. Even the higher speed ones are more like 60-70MPH. Nobody seems to be the least bit interested in building a TGV freight version, for example, even to run on existing TGV lines.
[1] has rolling resistances for railways and cars on roads, which are almost an order of magnitude apart.
Intuitively, I'd expect that once the train has accelerated, it will keep its momentum very nicely, and (if electric) can easily return energy if it does need to slow down.
I can't find a real-world coasting distance for a train on level track, only reports during accidents/near misses -- 5km under emergency braking on a slight downhill slope, for one! [2]
Rolling resistance is roughly constant with speed, so it's unimportant for efficiency. The main driver of changes of efficiency with speed is aerodynamic drag, because that increases with the square of the speed. Trains presumably have very low aerodynamic drag because they're long and thin.
The calculation is straight forward. The coefficient given for rolling resistance is 0.0004 for rail which means that .0004W is the frictional resistance of the track. Given a train going at velocity v then the train is accelerated by friction at a rate of -.0004W/m (F=ma so a=F/m) which is equal to -.0004g (W=mg).
Then to stop it will take t = v/.0004g which means that you will travel vt/2 in that time.
For example, if a train is cruising along at 30 mph (44 fps) then it takes 44 ft/s / .0004(32.2 ft/s^2) = 3416 seconds to stop which means that the train travels 14.2 miles under ideal conditions.
I suspect that the average speed of a moving train is higher than that, though. (In the same way that you can't take distance to the office divided by time to get there and conclude anything about average driving speed, due to time at stop lights, time in stop-and-go traffic, etc. When you're actually moving, you're moving faster than that statistic indicates.)
I also wonder if we're going to see an increase in traffic due to zero-occupant traffic. Supposing that the car of the future can drive itself home when I'm at work and pick me up at the end of day, will that mean that there's going to be a lot of cars on the road just transporting themselves and nothing else? This might be particularly common in cases where a single car is shared by multiple people.
I think individual car ownership will disappear. You will commission a car to get from point A to point B (with the options of lower costs if you are willing to pick up passengers en route) and then the car will go on and do other trips. Your own car just sits there almost all the time, that's really inefficient and expensive.
Eliminating car ownership makes a lot of sense in any urban area, but I bet people will continue to hang on in rural and some suburban areas.
In rural areas, an autonomous vehicle would need to travel long distances to pick up and drop off folks. It could be prohibitively expensive or inconvenient. People also use vehicles for other things in these areas, both work and play, which do not fit into the taxi model.
In suburbia, the taxi idea could work, but there might be advantages to owning your own vehicle. Maybe a family will own one autonomous vehicle, just one, but it would be in constant use throughout the day: mom goes to work, dad picks up donuts for coworkers, son goes to school, daughter goes to soccer practice, son goes to track practice, dad goes to get groceries, mom goes to get dinner, son goes to friend's house, daughter goes to football game, mom goes out to gym, etc. You'd have your one family car zipping back and forth between all these events in the family, picking people up, dropping them off, going off to do something else, and coming back again. Having an autonomous car in the family could make sense depending upon the costs.
If driverless cars are a "thing" in the future then what is Uber's USP? Why would you use Uber rather than one of a dozen other companies? Is it just their capital advantage? Their network of now unemployed drivers? Just the name and nothing else?
What is it exactly that keeps Uber in business with driverless cars?
The switching cost between apps is practically zero so if someone else manages to figure out a better routing / experience with picking up people (some people use UberPool for dating, really creepy shit!) etc then Uber will become a footnote in history quick. It's now hard to disrupt Uber in its own market but when it's a new market?
* Why would it have to go home? It could just drive out of town to any cheap loitering lot.
* Why not put it to work. It could transport people or packages during that time.
* Mostly, in such a future, you probably won't own a car. You'll rent or lease access, and the price to take a nice autonomous mini-bus will be super low while remaining convenient.
That'd be interesting and it seems to make sense. Since business's optimize for cost and AI driven trucks don't need breaks and won't have limits on driving for extended periods of time (presumably) it seems it'd make sense to optimize for electricity use and delivery times. I don't see why they wouldn't drive as slow as they needed if that would produce greater profits for the shippers while not reducing the end consumer experience with late deliveries.
Oil tankers optimize for both fuel consumption and timely (= at the right moment for the spot market) arrival. If prices are low, tankers can get 'parked' for months. If that's the case at one's destination (or rather: possible destinations), there is no need to rush there.
I also think truck drivers already adjust their speed depending on economic reality. If, say, you are transporting fresh flowers towards an airport, arriving in time is more important than when you are transporting furniture to a furniture shop.
That certainly is true at the extreme ends. Drivers who drive to be transplanted organs between hospitals get special training to drive fast, while drivers driving garbage to a landfill likely will not be pressed for a timely delivery (although I do not rule out that someone who knows the latter business will tell me that missing one's reserved spot for delivery at a landfill can cost a lot of money)
Minimum speed limit? As far as I'm aware, in the US you are supposed to go the posted speed. You could get a ticket for going slower if you are impeding traffic trying to safely go the posted speed. Are there roads in the US that specifically allow a range of speeds (beyond the variation seen because human drivers don't follow the law)?
> Minimum speed limit? As far as I'm aware, in the US you are supposed to go the posted speed.
The posted speed is usually an upper bound (though in some cases only a presumptive one, not a conclusive one, the way the law is actually written.)
> You could get a ticket for going slower if you are impeding traffic trying to safely go the posted speed.
You can get a ticket for impeding traffic, but usually going slower than the limit is not sufficient for that. (And may not even be necessary.)
> Are there roads in the US that specifically allow a range of speeds (beyond the variation seen because human drivers don't follow the law)?
Every highway (which is much broader than freeways) in California that doesn't have an expressly posted minimum speed limit, plus every one that does have an expressly posted minimum speed limit that isn't identical to the posted maximum limit. (California Vehicle Code Sec. 22400 allows a minimum speed limit to be established and posted -- which is still, where established, a soft limit -- and provides a violation for impeding traffic with or without such a limit, but does not set the posted maximum speed limit as a minimum speed limit, soft or otherwise, where no minimum speed limit is posted.)
Part (a) of VC Section 22400 is what I was remembering from way back when I took driver training, and it states "No person shall drive upon a highway at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic, unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation, because of a grade, or in compliance with law."
Wouldn't driving below the posted speed limit when there are no hazardous conditions fall under "as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic"?
> Wouldn't driving below the posted speed limit when there are no hazardous conditions fall under "as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic"?
Not normally, driving below the posted maximum speed limit would not, in and of itself.
It might -- and, given the soft nature of upper limits, it might even without driving below the posted maximum -- in the presence of other traffic, depending on the road (what will impede traffic on a single-lane road is different than what will impede traffic on a multilane road) and particular traffic conditions.
I understand that, but I guess I'm of the opinion that while we provide leeway to humans because of our nature, an automated system that drives below the speed limit in the case that it is blocking or restricting traffic be reducing the number of lanes flowing at full speed really has no excuse, other than purposefully slowing the normal flow to save money. I imagine that might be successfully litigated.
Could/would they drive well below the speed limit without legal problem when no traffic is around? I imagine they could, but I'm less interested in that (but understand my question was ambiguous).
> You can get a ticket for driving slower than traffic, despite driving at the speed limit?
Some speed limits in California are soft (it depends which of the provisions allowing speed limits they are adopted under, or whether they are the default limits.)
It is legally possible for traffic to exceed the speed limit where those limits are soft without necessarily being illegal, unreasonable, or safe.
It may, in some circumstances, therefore, possible to impede reasonable flow of traffic while driving at the speed limit in those cases, thus breaking the law.
> Could you, in the same situation, also get a ticket for following the traffic—i.e. breaking the speed limit?
Yes, but if the circumstances were such that someone could be impeding traffic at the speed limit, it would also necessarily be true that it would possible for you to exceed the speed limit and not be breaking the law. But the burden of proof would be on you to show that the driving was safe.
Yes, and in states with a 'basic speed law', or similar, you can even earn a ticket for driving substantially below the posted speed limit. The Utah driver's handbook and license test, for instance, explicitly call out that road conditions may be such that the maximum safe speed is 0 mph.
Some states (forget which I was driving through) have posted minimum speeds on highway.
Others I'm sure there is a generic lower limit "clause".
I've never seen a state that didn't have a "at a speed safe with current rode conditions". So, that you can still get a ticket going 65 in a 65 but there happens to be a blizzard going on.
I doubt any state requires you to go exactly the posted speed limit.
There are cases of people getting obstruction of traffic tickets for going at the speed limit. It happened in Toronto. One guy got a speeding ticket in the merge lane, so in a pique he did the posted limit in the fast lane, which normally moves 15-20 mph faster than the limit. He caused a traffic jam and got an obstruction ticket. He fought the ticket and lost. Sorry, can't find a link now.
Many roads also have signs and states have laws along the lines of stay right except to pass. So if you're not actively passing in the left lane, you're breaking the law in many places even if you're going at the speed limit. I expect few tickets are given out for this even though it causes dangerous behavior.
In the article they mentioned a previous record setting drive:
"As readers might recall, a new record was established last month by one enthusiastic Model S owner, who drove a painful 24-miles-per hour to make it a stunning 452.8 miles on a single charge. (The car is advertised as having a 265-mile range.)
Musk didn’t elaborate on whether someone would need to drive just as slowly to reach 620 miles in 2017. We’d guess that’s not what he had in mind, though."
"1000 kilometers... hmm. Well, it depends under what circumstances for a thousand kilometers. As it is, the record right now for model s is 800 kilometers (496 miles). That's the furthest that anyone has driven a model s. ... Now, in order to do that, they did drive at a relatively slow speed, so, you know, we're talking, I think they drive at 40 or 50 kilometers an hour (25-30mph) or something like that. But I think, my guess, we could probably break a thousand kilometers within a year or two. ... 5 to 10% a year"
It seems, to me, slow driving ("circumstances") is what he had in mind.
Reminds me of a joke that goes something like this. "If you never have sex (or maybe it was "if you cutoff your testicles"?) you will live an extra 10 years. And the punchline is "you call that living?".
Why in the world does it matter at all if you can drive many miles at an unrealistic average speed? You call that driving?
Having trouble accepting Elon Musk’s claim that Teslas will be capable of fully autonomous driving in 3 years.
One of the difficulties I am having is that I’m not aware of another advanced technology that just popped into the consumer market overnight like we’ve been told to expect with self driving cars.
There’s always a gradual evolution of a technology over time. There’s very little of that evolution seen with this technology. There’s self-parallel parking cars, there’s autopilot-style cruise control systems, but we’re going to instantly leap from that to fully autonomous driving?
It's like aliens visiting and giving us some far-future tech overnight.
These haven't just sprung into existence. They have been worked on consistently for at least two decades. Carnegie Mellon has research dating back to the mid 1980s on this topic.
Self driving cars have been driven up and down various parts of the SF bay region for several years now. Google's self driving cars have driven over 1 million miless. They report that their vehicles have been involved in 12 accidents, none of which are the fault of the vehicle's self driving capabilities.
The only reason they will appear to 'pop' into the consumer market overnight is because this technology is politically charged and simultaneously so important to society that it is being overengineered to improve success and safety. The moment self driving cars has its first accident after being released to consumers, the media will likely flip, ignoring mountains of data demonstrating how much more safe these vehicles are to provide a sensationalized report on the dangers of self driving cars. The safer they are and the more data backing this up, the less likely this will derail the technology.
They have an "urgent stop" button, which passengers can use. Presumably that's unnecessary, though, as I'd expect the vehicle can detect an accident and will stop. Tow trucks could take over, at that point.
In accidents involving self driving, it could be easier to go to the root cause of accident, as these cars shall have lots of data for that incident and environment (like a black box).
current google car tech relies on brute forcing visual mapping, breaks down in snow.
self-driving cars are controlled by software, written by humans, riddled with bugs. see Nest on how awesome this works for physical stuff. the aircraft industry has the correct coding practices, NONE of which are being applied by the current research teams. multi-redundant systems in play, with even more training for the operator. competing with human drivers is really hard. a shit ton of signal processing, etc. going on. all this techy-BS is belittling the awesomeness of the human brain and central nervous system.
Technically, crashes caused by Google's self driving car is not "12 per 1 million," it is "0 per 1 million." which is significantly better than "1.85 per million" for humans. Inversely, crashes caused by humans involving a self driving car is 12 per 1 million. Not a good record for humans. :)
It's also important to take note where the driving is. In densely populated regions, you are more likely to have minor accidents such as fender benders than on the open road. However, the open road is more likely to get you killed if you are involved in an accident due to speed.
All this "techy-BS" is not belittling humans by creating self driving cars. I strongly believe the opposite is true, humans are amazing because we can build artificial intelligent systems to handle these kinds of tasks for us and let us focus on bigger and better problems than steering a car. Your same argument falls flat with other technologies. Why have a computer add numbers when we have a wonderful brain that can do the same? I argue that it is because we build systems to augment and work around our deficiencies. One of those deficiencies is our driving skill. Over 30,000 in the US alone die due to auto accidents. Self driving cars has the potential to eliminate most of these deaths. Ideally, we'll get to a point where a death on the road makes national news because of its rarity.
Interesting stats, and gives a good estimate but it's off by at least an order of magnitude.
1. Autonomous google crashes have been entirely small rear end fender benders. It might be 10x or more safer when accounting for this. You must look at the speeds and types of crashes and account for this in the safety calculation.
2. For safety it's less relevant but for insurance purposes Google has yet to (technically/legally) cause a crash so already it's cheaper for your wallet than a human driver. Progress =)
As far as I was aware, in none of the 12 accidents Google's autonomous vehicles have been involved in has the autonomous system been in control. They've all been manually operated at the time of collision.
Oh I meant its off in that its not an apples to apples safety comparison. Not all crashes are created equal. As of yet atonomous cars have only had specific types of (safer) crashes.
This should be included in the safety comparison as looking at raw crash number is not enough.
You're underestimating the awesomeness of the human brain to tackle big problems. I want to be drunk, watching movies, pleasuring myself in the backseat of an autonomous Uber during my two-hour commute in and out of the city. Open your mind.
> we’re going to instantly leap from that to fully autonomous driving
If you had lived and owned a car in Mountain View, you would have been used to driving alongside fully autonomous cars for years now, and the move wouldn't seem nearly as instant.
It's been about a month. I guess I just missed them.
As a side-note, I love that I can't tell if a comment is true or sarcastic-faux-science-fiction, and it ends up being true. We live in a really cool time.
It might just be where I walk vs where you walk - I usually see them on Shoreline and between Shoreline and Castro, sometimes on El Camino in that span. A few weeks ago I saw one of the slow pod cars holding up a bunch of traffic in he right lane on El Camino because its top speed is too low for the flow there. :-D
I haven't seen any of the pod cars yet but I've seen a couple of the Lexus SUV's. I've even seen a few in San Francisco but they're not Google's. I seem to end up biking next to the same one every week or so in Dogpatch. It's a dark red Nissan Leaf without any labeling. I wonder what company owns it.
> There’s always a gradual evolution of a technology over time. There’s very little of that evolution seen with this technology. There’s self-parallel parking cars, there’s autopilot-style cruise control systems, but we’re going to instantly leap from that to fully autonomous driving?
In addition to cars that park themselves and cruise control that handles full stop/start, modern cars also keep you in the lane, prevent imminent collisions, monitor blindspots, detect pedestrians and more. If you can't see autonomous vehicles coming in the near future you aren't looking.
On the one hand, Musk has been known to exaggerate timelines. All of Tesla's cars have ended up being released behind schedule (the first Model X cars are being delivered tonight, multiple years late). I doubt we'll really have fully autonomous Teslas in three years.
On the other hand, there is one interesting, unique aspect to the approach that Tesla is taking: their cars all have internet access, and could potentially learn from each other. Within a year they're going to have partial autonomous driving on over 100k cars in the wild, which is going to allow Tesla to generate an enormous amount of training data very quickly.
I'm no expert, so I don't really know how valuable this kind of data would be for building new autonomous driving systems, but it seems like it could have the potential to dramatically accelerate their progress in this area.
Keep in mind Google's autonomous car team says they'll have a product commercially available in 4 years. So a Musk 3 years might well equal a Google 4 years.
Well Musk has not a good track record with announcements like that.
That said, not quite sure what else he could really do. Car production cycle are long and capital heavy. The buying cost is also very large, so to maintain a media presence you can't really iterate every year like with other tech widgets.
Other manufacturers make prototypes between model refreshes and go to various car shows, so far Musk is able to that by just talking to the press. Good for him, saves Tesla a bunch of money until the competition in electric car market really picks up !
"Well Musk has not a good track record with announcements like that."
Yup, very much like a politician. You get the sense that he is playing their game. They'll give him a hand but he has to speak their language. Promises made to the public are more like optimistic goals in which potential complications aren't accounted for and instead reserved as explanations for revised promises.
I'm a Musk fan, don't get me wrong, but there is a level of dream fuelling manipulation behind his approach that feels political.
That whole [i]warning the public about dangerous AI thing[/i] actually felt like a big political money push to me. Designed to overwork the imaginations of the public and get government more interested in throwing money at the tech.
Tesla doesn't make prototypes and go to car shows because they did away with the yearly update model. Instead they are constantly adding new features and improvements to the car instead of waiting for some big update. So you might get a car today that has something a car made yesterday doesn't have.
"We're probably only a month away from having autonomous driving, at least for highways and for relatively simple roads. My guess for when we'll have full autonomy is about three years, approximately three years. However, regulators will probably not allow full autonomy for maybe... at least one to three years after that. So, it depends on the particular market -- some markets the regulators will be more forward leaning than others. But in terms of when will it be technologically possible, three years."
I wonder just what he means by "full autonomy" though. When he refers to "autonomous driving...for highways" that means that the car manages the steering and acceleration but the driver is alert and involved at all times, and ready to take over any time the car can't handle something. I wonder if he's referring to a similar concept that works in more situations, rather than a car that can drive with nobody in it.
Or he might just be optimistic and mean full automatic driving. Hard to tell.
They have, but there's a big list of caveats that go with that. Google's cars are very clearly extremely safe on dry highways in good visibility when humans are ready to take over if there is construction on the highway and so on and so forth. That's where they've got hundreds of thousands of miles.
The cars may well be substantially better than that right now, but they don't have a million miles of experience in more challenging conditions.
Google (as well as some auto manufacturers) have made impressive progress. I'm actually encouraged that full autonomy (as in I can legally read a book) on a subset of limited access highways in appropriate weather conditions is something we might see within 10 years on a mainstream luxury car.
I am sadly far more skeptical about the general case.
Not just well mapped but also what do they do when there are temporary detours? I can't imagine a situation where an automated driving car copes well with a temporary human based stop/go situation (without signs - I'm talking really temporary here like a construction site with a vehicle backing up). Maybe I'm wrong.
I've been thinking about this. What do humans do when they don't know exactly where they are or there are detours/other off map difficulties? They mindlessly follow the cars in front of them. Waze at at small scale! The autonomous cars just need to a) not be willing to crash and b) follow the car(s) in front of them when in doubt...
The problem can be separated into navigation and situational awareness. The autonomous car won't ever be lost, and I guess it would be easy enough to prompt the passenger for input if it got stuck deciding where to proceed.
To be fair, as a human I don't feel particularly adept at driving in bad weather, so an autonomous vehicle that simply slows down to where it "feels confident" and uses some kind of radar to avoid collisions won't be doing too badly.
Some humans have an inability to handle driving in good weather, heavy traffic, at high speeds, to avoid drinking, to avoid driving when tired, let alone bad weather.
There's a mostly straight street on my very ordinary and safe commute home. When it's raining at night and the road is wet and reflecting street lights, it's actually very difficult to see the lane markings and make sure you're sticking to your lane. And in those conditions, it's not always safe to be constantly checking your blind spot for a car beside you. This is in an urban environment, no snow, no crests or crazy curves, no risk of fallen trees, and I find that a stressful drive despite having driven that road thousands of times.
As an historic note with little relevance to your point, this wasn't solved until the US entered the second world war and the government built a bunch of them for heavy bombers, which were later converted into civilian use.
That's why the flying boats, like the Boeing 314 Clipper, were the go-to plane for long distance travel pre-war. There's no need for a runway when you can land and take off on water.
"lack of mechanics"
This isn't really true. The early cars could be fixed by most any mechanic or blacksmith. Remember, farm equipment was already pretty mechanically complicated.
Hence "As an historic note with little relevance to your point".
At best, treat it as comment about how hard it is to think what detractors to X might have said before X became wide-spread. I believe your example of 'lack of mechanics' is poorly chosen; akin to saying 'My biggest gripe with hearing about fully autonomous cars is that they will be so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe would own them.'
As a real-world examples I think are better, 'My biggest gripe with hearing about telephony is there won't be enough operators to handle the number of calls.' 'My biggest gripe with hearing about computers is that they are too bulky.' 'My biggest gripe with television is I'm at work when my favorite show is on.'
In theory, as storage costs approach 0, computers get faster and and vision becomes more sophisticated, road conditions shouldn't matter too much.
These cars are going to be scanning constantly in nice weather, it shouldn't be a stretch to then figure out relative position with GPS and then use the distance to 'known' trees / signs / landmarks from previous trips to determine lane position.
I'm sure there are barren areas where this would be tough (I've driven I-80 through snowy Nebraska about a dozen times en route to ski vacations in Colorado) but "stay between the snow banks" should be a decent start for autonomous driving.
I mean, even pilots have to take control sometimes. In great conditions autonomous cars will arrive quicker than many believe. However, most people (myself included) would NOT trust an autonomous car, essentially operating in beta, to navigate a new england winter. That functionality is going to come and can even be pushed OTA later.
I now wonder if you will just pay $199 for the "blizzard package" or something. I suspect Tesla wouldn't do something like this, but just like Mosaic, they get to shape a lot of the early thought behind this.
If a car company charged more to simply turn on a feature that ought to exist, like driving in a blizzard, then I would never buy a car from them. ever. I only have one life to lose and it's not going at the hands of some scummy company that intentionally holds back software it can install in an instant so it can nickle and dime me.
Upgrades generally not just(or possibly even) safety software, will have an assigned value of the developer hours assigned to creating and maintaining upgrades and will be built into the cost of cars. Unlike 4 wheel drive, which legitimately needs to be more expensive having much more hardware, software releases can leverage pre existing APIs and hardware interfaces.
If we assume that either all cars have the software priced in, a "good actor" would allow you to pay less for "blizzard navigation software" if you lived in S. California.
At this point, Tesla is so new that they will make it as attractive as possible and push all of their updates for free. I also have a high degree of trust, at least relative to other auto companies, in Tesla. One would imagine GM, or another less scrupulous company would try to do something like this if they were the front runners.
edit: Point taken though. I am also not keen on some of the other car and boat manufacturers producing identical engines, and then having you "pay" to unlock more horepower.
Go 620 miles how? Different battery technology? More batteries? Reduced chassis weight? Lighter powertrain designed for a lower top speed?
A new 2x battery technology seems unlikely. There's nothing that good coming on line within three years. Panasonic is already setting up Tesla's battery cell plant, so that decision has been made. (Panasonic makes the cells, Tesla packages them; many of the employees at Tesla's "superfactory" work for Panasonic.)
The gigafactory will more than double the worlds production of lithium-ion batteries, which will drive the cost down. This will allow Tesla to pack more batteries in the car for a similar price.
The quote in the GP seems to imply otherwise. In case you missed it, "Right now, Musk says Tesla could make their cars with a 500 mile range—they don’t do it because it would increase the cost of the car."
Aerodynamic resistance is key, and it goes up with the square of your speed, so driving slowly lets you go much farther. If you want to set a distance record in an EV, you want to drive around 25-30MPH.
The current record in a Tesla is over 500 miles, while the official range is under 300. Musk's comment was about how ongoing small battery improvements will allow the record distance, driven at 25-30MPH, to break 1000km in the next couple of years.
But all the idiot news organizations out there either misunderstood it entirely or saw it as an opportunity to drum up page views, and are either outright presenting it as a practical range, or are at least not trying very hard to present the real context, as is happening with this article.
i'd say giving the amount of money on the table, not only 2x, more like 10x is very likely. If you look at the actual amount of the lithium ions and actually participating oxidizer in the battery - it is 5% at best out of the total battery weight. So even modest progress at the decreasing of the weight of the "non-active" components would lead to multiple "x" of capacity/weight improve. And this is without even getting into metal-air territory.
The money has been on the table for a long time (considering how many places lithium batteries are used in) yet still no considerable improvement. I really wish 10x energy density would be possible in the next few years, but 10x is definitely in the lithium/aluminium-air territory, and don't see any indication of that being commercialised within 2-3 years
If the last graph on this page is correct, then lithium batteries have seen at least a 2x improvement in all the important metrics since they've been introduced:
You are right, on average doubling every 10 years or so - I suppose that is considerable improvement, though still frustratingly slow compared to advances in transfer speeds, computing power, disk/memory capacity etc.
It would be fantastic if this was a problem where solutions are accelerated significantly (ie. 10x jump in a few years) by throwing more money at it, but I am not sure it's the case.
Frustratingly slow considering how important batteries are, too. It's interesting to think about what would happen if you had some sort of magic battery, say a 1kg 10cm^3 cube that cost a dollar to make and held 1000kWh of energy. The changes would be huge. The electric grid would become vastly more efficient, wind and solar would suddenly become vastly more practical, virtually all cars would become electric, etc.
Compare to a similarly magic CPU. That would be cool, but it wouldn't change the world. (Until somebody figures out how to run superhuman AI on it, anyway.)
> a 1kg 10cm^3 cube that cost a dollar to make and held 1000kWh of energy
1MWh is 3600000000 or 3.6GJ. 3.6GJ/L is twice the energy density of Uranium, and 3.6GJ/kg is 40 times the specific energy (energy/mass). We wouldn't need a power grid anymore because we could just charge batteries on the moon and lob them to earth.
If we're in dreamland, we can just think about what'd happen with instantaneous subspace energy transmission. We could get rid of batteries and electrical grids altogether and we'd just turn the moon, mars and mercury into giant solar arrays. I'd wager that's more likely to happen than a 1L/1kg 3.6GJ battery too.
>> a 1kg 10cm^3 cube that cost a dollar to make and held 1000kWh of energy
>1MWh is 3600000000 or 3.6GJ. 3.6GJ/L is twice the energy density of Uranium, and 3.6GJ/kg is 40 times the specific energy (energy/mass). We wouldn't need a power grid anymore because we could just charge batteries on the moon and lob them to earth.
well, these densities is fusion energy. No need to charge at all. Just scoop up some He-3 on the moon :)
Turning the moon into giant solar arrays isn't useful because it's really expensive to put stuff up there and hard to maintain it, not because of the difficulty of transmitting the resulting power. I mean, it is difficult, but not that difficult. Even with magic power transmission technology, you'd be better off covering parts of the Earth with solar panels, rather than celestial bodies.
If you can essentially store unlimited energy, there is no need to "put stuff up there", you can just go and shuffle it around from the rest of the solar system. Putting it anywhere other than earth avoids further damaging the planet's ecosystems, and is a step towards the direct exploitation of the sun itself.
True, but looking at the trend in energy density improvements in Li ion batteries, it's linear and seems like it would take more than 2 years to achieve a 2x improvement: http://www.batteryuniversity.com/images/parttwo-55h.gif
The problem with reducing the mass of the non-Li portion of the battery is that all of the practical candidates for the anode are metal oxides (e.g. Co, Fe, Mn oxides). Unless the whole metal oxide motif is replaced, you can't really achieve significant mass savings. There are research groups and startups working on alternate anode and cathode materials but there are tradeoffs in power density and safety. Also given that these approaches are still in the research phase, it'll take at least a couple of years before they reach commercial testing.
You could say the same about gasoline, yet MPG varies widely across vehicles.
On my EV, I can drastically change the battery's range (from 80 to 120 predicted miles) based on driving behavior, much of which could be "shaped" by software. "Softwareing" 50% more distance out of that stored energy matters.
That's because petrol has ~20 times more energy per KG than Lithium Ion cells, and engines are only ~30% efficient at converting it into movement (vs electric motors at 90%).
There's more potential for various optimization in an internal combustion engine.
EVs have been designed from the get go with most of the possible software optimizations...
What are we doing now, about 1 mile per 5 pounds of battery? I don't see it. He has been very good at making promises but not on delivering. With this track record I figure 2020 at the earliest and it likely won't be Tesla. GM will beat him to market with a car of 200 mile range in the 30-40k range.
Reducing weight is a very difficult issue here, all manufacturers try to reduce the weight of their cars and lugging a thousand pounds of batteries doesn't help. Frankly I think all electrics are not ready for prime time, improved REX solutions are better. Traditional engines perform badly accelerating from a stop but can be very efficient one speed improves. So some combination similar to the Volt but with more base EV is probably going to be a sweet spot. (figure 100 EV/300REX).
Plus this doesn't even touch the elephant in the room, long distance trucking where weight is always an issue and range. Neither of which favor batteries.
I would much prefer Elon solve a more constant problem that would start the next generation off on the right track, Tesla needs to lead the industry in electrifying school buses.
I know Elon Musk gets a lot of flak for throwing out unreasonable predictions, but I watched this interview a couple of days ago and didn't think much about the claim because it was an off-the-cuff guess instigated by the interviewer.
It wasn't like Elon made a special announcement to tell the world about this. The press picks up anything he says and makes it into a big "announcement". I saw several headlines that made it seem like an official announcement. I guess he should be more careful when he's thinking out loud.
Yeah, the context was linked above, it was really just off-the-cuff;
He was asked about 1,000km range:
1,000 kilometers... hmm...
Well, it depends under what circumstances for
a thousand kilometers. As it is, the record right
now for Model S is 800 kilometers (496 miles).
That's the furthest that anyone has driven a Model S.
Now, in order to do that, they did drive at a relatively
slow speed, so, you know, we're talking, I think they
drive at 40 or 50 kilometers an hour (25-30mph) or
something like that.
But I think, my guess, we could probably break
a thousand kilometers within a year or two..
5% - 10% per year.
This seems possible by simply doubling the battery size, along with modest improvements to efficiency. Sure, it'd add another 1200 pounds, but that's still lighter than a pickup truck.
With a price drop due to the gigafactory, they might even be able to do it for the same cost of the current models.
Perhaps someone more knowledgeable could chime in about whether or not that'd be possible. It seems like there could be enough room for another layer of batteries, with only a modest change to the shape of the car.
http://my.teslamotors.com/forum/forums/max-load-model-s indicates that the weight of (passengers + cargo) in the model S should not exceed 962 pounds. So adding 1200 pounds of battery to the model S to get that range is out of the question.
Even if you could, if you add 1200 pounds, power usage will go up.
So, you will have to change the design of the car to accommodate the larger battery weight. It is unlikely that you can do that without adding further weight, increasing power usage further, or tremendously increasing the price of the car.
Historically this is the rocket equation, which led to multi-stage rockets. I'm not sure we'll see multi-stage electric cars anytime soon. Although with progress in autonomous vehicles, some kind of first stage or trailer could drop off and drive itself back home...
At that point, you do not even need rocket style staging. Instead, when you are low, have a battery car meet you and dock while you are driving along the highway. Once you are recharged, the battery car can go back to the charging station, or to another customer.
Of course, I do not forsee this being a cost effective approach, even without the regularty hurdles of highway speed docking.
Or maybe something like the Bombardier Primove http://primove.bombardier.com/ inductive charging system could be viable for private cars on motorways? Apparently Bombardier has started to pitch it as something suitable for cars: http://primove.bombardier.com/media/news/news-detail-page/ar... . I can only imagine there would be some nasty transmission losses at various stages, though.
It seems this system requires the car to be stationary while charging but it would be like using cars as electric trollies. Hmmm I wonder if cars on hwys could have an automatically deployed arm for contacting a third rail or overhead wire?
Fuel efficiency is dominated by other factors, so no it won't.
When every pound of fuel requires 5 pounds to lift it, things go one way. When every pound of fuel requires a tenth of a pound to push it, things go another way.
Not really, consider the extreme of a car shaped object with a volume of 99.9% battery, something of that shape can only go a certain distance X, where X is big, but moving a car shaped object X+1 is not possible with current (oh the pun) battery technology. One way to travel X+Y would be to put it on a flatbed electric tow truck with loaded range of Y, correct? In that case the tow truck is the first stage and the car is the second.
I am serious about the self driving 4 wheeled trailer full of batteries. Given the irrational claim that an electric car is useless to (all) Americans unless it can drive over 1000 miles per day, the best way to fight that irrational claim is to provide an equally irrational solution. So the proper way to fight an irrational thought experiment of needing to drive over existing electric car range, is provide the irrational solution of something like "mid-air refueling" but mid-highway instead of mid-air and electrical power instead of Jet-A. I've toyed with the idea of patenting it and publicizing it to make a political statement, but I generate good ideas a lot faster than I implement them, so ....
No need to own the self driving battery trailer, just pop up a smartphone app and your GPS talks to the closest charger's GPS and nature takes its course. With advanced enough communications it can drive in formation with a semi-autonomous car, tailgating is perfectly safe at 85 if your reflexes are faster than a couple nanoseconds and the existing wireless charging systems means the charger trailer doesn't need to actually touch your car.
Its amusing to think of a charge cart like this rolling around a parking lot as a public service to attract shoppers. No need to pull ultra high current charge cables to every lamp post or embed chargers in asphalt.
Running out of space to put more fuel is not related to the rocket equation.
With a battery-powered sedan, you could go much further without bothering to detach the trailer, because it wouldn't contribute much to the air resistance.
You need to be driving in near-vacuum if you want it to be about fuel pushing fuel.
You can make something very sleek, slow, ultra-high-distance and invoke the rocket equation... but it's not a sedan.
That's lighter than some pickup trucks. A modern single cab 8ft 1/2ton 4x4 usually comes in just under 5000lbs (curb weight). Variants with longer cabs are usually in the low 5000s. Single cab 8tf 90s pickups come in in the low 4000s.
Sure you could dump an extra 1200lbs on the Tesla but you'd have to strategically dump another 300lb of metal at the vehicle itself if you want the chassis to last.
I couldn't find part numbers for any wearable suspension/steering parts so I can't compare t to other vehicles but I'd bet that the chassis is very finely tuned to the weight that it has to carry and that there's not much wiggle room for extra while maintaining a the designed life expectancy.
I couldn't find anyone talking about replacing long-term wear items (I didn't look hard) which does seem to indicate that they're overbuilt. I can see why Tesla may want to give people a good impression of EVs and not want to take the risk of using anything but an overbuild chassis on which to make that point (the Chevy volt on the other hand...)
Crazy, my lack of a driver's license might outlive the need for one after all. I'd been thinking of finally getting one these last few years (the Netherlands is very forgiving to non-drivers particularly if you work in the city you live as I do). Although I can't help but express a bit of skepticism on the 3 year timeframe, that seems overly optimistic.
Tesla expect batteries (and hence real-world range) to improve by about 5% a year. This 620mile thing he's talking about is the record distance for driving slowly on a single charge, which is of academic interest only.
This stood out to me, too. On the one hand, hearing him say it is a little unnerving. On the other, it's oddly comforting to know that he truly believes we're in a race against the clock to save civilization, and that someone like him is doing everything they can to prevent the end of it (at least on the environmental front; he's probably nervous about other dangers, too, that he'd have less control over, e.g. geopolitics).
Seeing that reaction from him helps explain in my mind how he's been able to accomplish as much as he has. It really feels like he's a man on a mission and that he's going to run through walls to accomplish it.
Other comments have compared him to a politician. I think that's laughable. He has a consistent track record of 'doing.' Politicians have not earned that reputation.
Yeah, good point. How awesome would it be if cars were modular and upgradable like tower PCs. Buy today, because you you can incrementally upgrade tomorrow
Is he trying to cannibalize current sales? I've got a Model X reserved but I'm almost ready to bail when I hear things like this are so just a couple years away.
Of course not. The range given in the title comes with the context(which is not explicitly given). The average speed to obtain that mileage is very low.
My understanding is the Tesla vehicles are a platform, and that even if you purchase a X now, you'd be able to upgrade the various components for autonomous driving and extended range.
Who cares ? Make battery swap the standard option, build enough swap stations, and sell me a cheaper car without battery.
I want to pay for "battery as a service", I don't need to own a battery, I don't want to charge it, just bill me by the KWh used (which should better be competitive to gas).
> I want to pay for "battery as a service", I don't need to own a battery, I don't want to charge it
Renault in Europe are part-way there with their EVs ( the Fluence, Zoë and Twizy ) You buy the car but pay a battery-lease to Renault each month, when the battery capacity falls below 80% they call you in to a garage and swap-out the pack.
You still have to pay for charging, though.
The Renault approach appears to be appreciated by people who are dabbling in EVs as a hobby ( e.g. wealthy folk in leafy areas of London ) but is offputting to people looking to replace their internal-combustion cars. £70 minimum per month for rental + cost of charging quickly exceeds the cost of diesel in the UK.
These stations don't get used much because Tesla sells a battery with every car they make. If the cars came without the battery, there would be a lot of demand, but would also require the infrastructure to be in place to support long range travel. It's a classic chicken and egg problem.
What Tesla discovered is that bootstrapping the battery swap infrastructure off of battery owners doesn't work, since owners are reluctant to pay for swapping out their battery over recharging the one they own.
Yeah, I know the story. The result shouldn't surprise anyone, the swap approach works only if there are enough swap stations so that buying a battery-less car makes sense.
As long as all Teslas come pre-equipped with a very expensive battery, it makes little economic sense to let it depreciate while you are paying to use another battery.
I would love a fully autonomous car, however I would want to see multiple layers of security in place to prevent hacking. The last thing I want is to end up dead because a hacker thought it would be funny to steer my car into a ditch.
Autonomous within 3 years ... So Elon is planning to massively disrupt the legal and insurance industries? Both those will need a lot of changes before anyone can drive down the road in a privately owned fully autonomous car.
In my country, car insurence is mandatory and I don't see it being removed with autonomous cars. So the income for insurance companies remains similar. Crashes will be reduced however, so the expenses for the insurance companies will go down and thus profit margins will go up.
crashes aren't really an expense. If someone causes $3000 worth of claim their rate will be increased such that by the time it's back to it's pre-claim level the difference between the pre-claim rate and increased will be approximately the amount paid. Don't believe me? Run the numbers.
It's medical stuff that actually costs the insurance companies money. Look at modern cars. The engineers aren't the ones drooling over 10+ airbags. Setting of 10 explosions close to people in a safe way is a PITA and the hardware takes up precious weight and space that could be used for something else. Consumers aren't demanding cars that get crushed like a tin can totaled out when you get rear ended at 10mph or back into a pole. The "safety at the cost of all else" designs that have been creeping into cars do keep people out of the (expensive) hospital but at a highly increased cost of ownership and with sacrificed performance in other areas (including efficiency).
The first I in IIHS doesn't stand for consumer. That's not who they're trying to protect.
You leave me the impression that you would rather increase the risk of biological injury with the benefit of less property injury. I for one am happy to see the safety trends and think that it should be taken even further. In fact I see autonomous vehicles as a strategy for this. It would decrease the probability that some person will crash into me.
How much do insurance companies make from meteor insurance or air plane crash insurance? Very little. These events are so rare that overhead costs cut into profit margins.
I am mainly talking about the first 5-10 years of autonomous cars being available. Beyond that, I won't even attempt to make any predictions.
During this first decade, most cars on the roads will still be human-driven. I don't see the insurance end-user cost being decreased much for the autonomy-capable car owners. If anything, I see it costing more during the very first years until there's more statistics & operational experience. So even if there's some price reduction during the later years of the first decade, I think it will probably only even out with the initial premium, at best.
As for new overhead costs, I guess during the initial years there could be a learning period of how to handle crash drama where the car owners don't agree as easily to what happened and who's at fault. Those same first years the A.I. will probably be pretty buggy as well, with some surprising crashes.
However I think the insurance companies will account for these new overheads and raise the price accordingly.
Overall, I don't think investing in car insurance is a goldmine opportunity. I do think that they will continue to make nice profits and definitely shouldn't be sold short. At least not for the reason of autonomous cars by themselves, maybe sell short a selection of companies whose management you think will be unable to adapt.
The recent oil price changes made me wonder if the future of cars will be EV or continue to be ICE. It's not because of the current low price of oil. It's what caused it, which is fracking. Fracking has been known for a long time. But it suddenly became viable when oil was at $100+. And it was so successful it crashed the global price of oil.
When oil reaches $100 again, what other new technologies will be viable? What about $200, $300? This could easily happen due to decreasing oil reserves and increasing demand for a carbon tax due to climate change. Many assume that the path from here is EV.
But at $200, $300, the technologies to make oil may become viable. There are technologies right now (I think Audi demonstrated something last year) to take CO2 from the air and combine with hydrogen to make oil. This kind of technology also goes very well with renewable power like wind and solar. The big issue with wind and solar is storing excess electric generation. Most think batteries are the solution. But what about just making oil instead?
All of this works directly with the huge current infrastructure and investment in oil and cars. It even provides a much easier solution to reducing climate change than EV. Just create a government regulation that requires all gas to be at least 10% from carbon neutral source. They already did it with ethanol (E10). And if more CO2 reduction is required, they can just keep increasing the percentage mix.
When all of these technologies are viable, gas will probably be very expensive. I don't know what the number will be, but let's imagine it's $10 per gallon. That's very expensive, but is it enough for everyone to throw away their cars and buy EV? Is it enough to pay the premium for EV?
EVs are just plain better in a lot of ways, even if you ignore CO2 emissions and other pollution and the whole "green" thing entirely.
Obviously opinions will vary from person to person, but a lot of people already consider Tesla's Model S to be the best car out there, not as an environmentally-friendly EV, but just as a plain EV.
If gasoline magically became 50 cents/gallon tomorrow and was sourced entirely from carbon-neutral and environmentally-friendly places, I certainly would not trade in my Tesla for a gas car just because of that.
The problems with EVs at this point are range, cost, and charging infrastructure. Range and infrastructure are negligible problems for Tesla for many people right now, and are being improved constantly. Cost is not negligible for most, but that's being addressed, slowly.
This is how new approaches enter. They start off with something that's very expensive but clearly better, then work their way down. For some reason it took Tesla to do this, rather than one of the existing car makers.
An aside regarding ethanol: this is widely regarded as a complete boondoggle in the US with no environmental benefit whatsoever, because ethanol takes about as much energy to produce as you get out of it. It's only carbon neutral if you completely ignore all the industry that goes into agriculture.
> It even provides a much easier solution to reducing climate change than EV. Just create a government regulation that requires all gas to be at least 10% from carbon neutral source.
It's laughable to think about this now. But nature doesn't care about liberal/conservative or democrat/republication. The effects of climate change are already happening (California drought). As the effects become more obvious and clear, and the younger generation replaces the old, the political climate can change quickly. EV is simply not a general solution. People keep their cars for a long time and there's no way that infrastructure can change fast enough (for example, all the urban areas with apartments and no personal garages).
Nature won't wait for us to upgrade and change our infrastructure to be EV friendly. So what if there's a way to keep the current system but reduce CO2 at the same time? Fracking was once laughed at as not economically viable. Then it suddenly was. Technologies to make oil is now laughed at. Will it still be when oil is at $200 or $300?
Lithium is mined in a variety of places like Australia, Chile, Argentina, China, etc[0]. Not a whole lot of lithium production in the US, although there are significant lithium reserves in the US. I would assume Tesla/Panasonic gets their lithium from all of these places.
Very recently Tesla agreed to start buying lithium in Nevada[1] which is also where the new battery factory will be.
It sounds aggressive, but most of the hurdles at this point are regulatory and insurance related (at least during fair weather conditions). Uber is aiming to have autonomous cars within two years and Google is actively testing local autonomous commuter cars, so it seems feasible. Also note that current Tesla cars (assuming you are in the beta program) can drive themselves on highways today.
I mean fully autonomous, like let it drive to pick up the kids on its own. Not a really advanced cruise control / break if it sees an accident about to happen.
Uber's map system can't even correctly get me from my house to my work without leading the driver into an alley.
I think we'll get 95% of the way to autonomous, but I sort of doubt we'll have a car that you can, for example, sleep in while it's driving you around.
I hope I'm wrong. I'd love to buy one in 3-6 years.
Car companies already travel all over the US to test varying parts of the vehicle, with individual teams ending up in places like death valley, alaska, or north carolina's tail of the dragon. Why would they not do the same for autonomous testing?
Sure, they would. But they've done most of the initial development on dry roads. Snow driving is rather a different beast, and has had less development and testing time (because the first step is to get it to work at all, in the best conditions).
Sure, they'll test it on snow. And I'll probably trust it on snow, eventually. But I'll trust it on snow later than I'll trust it on dry roads.
There are fully autonomous vehicles today! Driving right now in all probability. For Tesla to copy/buy/partner with them sounds totally reasonable to me.
He did say regulators would take another 1-3 years. So 4-6 before, you can "operate" an autonomous car.
But those are Google cars. Why aren't we hearing reports of sightings of Tesla's self driving cars? If they are so close then by now there should have been many stories about them, just like there are about Google's cars. Instead all we have is Elon Musk talking about them.
I wish he didn't do this. He should stop comparing "record-breaking" numbers with each other, and instead focus on what "normal driving" would get you. He's only going to encourage other auto makers to be highly misleading about their numbers, too. I was hoping Tesla would keep that in check. Oh well.
> Musk didn’t elaborate on whether someone would need to drive just as slowly to reach 620 miles in 2017. We’d guess that’s not what he had in mind, though.
He is saying that by 2017 he believes Tesla cars will be able to drive 620 miles under normal driving conditions.
No, he didn't say that at all. "We’d guess that’s not what he had in mind" is Techcrunch editorializing. Musk himself didn't say what he had in mind.
Given that 620 miles is roughly triple a Tesla's current everyday range and it's unlikely that battery performance will triple in the next two years, it seems a lot more plausible that he's thinking of extending the current hypermiling techniques -- add a special software mode, tuck in a few extra battery packs around the edges, etc. -- than about some fundamental innovation that would yield 620 miles from typical driving habits. If he really meant the latter, he could have said so, but keeping it vague allows him to make an ambitious-sounding prediction that is, strictly speaking, still pretty straightforward for Tesla engineers to fulfill.
Normal driving conditions for a 500mi trip are substantially different than those for five 100mi trips. Generally speaking, people going 500+mi (highway driving) all at once aren't doing so at 55mph or 65mph unless they're towing/hauling something. A reasonable speed to go 500+mi is 70-90mph. Nobody going that far wants to sit in a car any longer than they have to. A lower speed is reasonable for a trip of less distance.
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/3lc8hu/tesla_m...
My observation, based on the driver's comments and the Tesla efficiency chart, is that you could go close to 500 miles at 30 mph, which is almost a reasonable speed.
Note the context that the title comes with. Tesla cars will break 620 miles when driving slowly (under 30 mph), not 620 miles using the EPA rating which is commonly used when addressing this issue.