All cars obsolete by 2020 according to Toyota

i prefer the "suspend gravity" mode for flying cars... much more efficient

 

Could you imagine the liablity nightmare a flying car would actually cause?

Flick a lit cigarette out the window.

Flying drunk.

Speeding.

You get the point. If not, how many FPG (FEET per gallon) do you actually think it could deliver? And how much do you think that fuel would cost?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(john1701a\";p=\"97570)</div>

It would have to be a fully automated system, there is no way you could allow manual control of an "aircar" and have it share the same airspace as commercial traffic.

The autoflight system would have to be fully coupled (Already exists and used on 747-400, fly-by-wire Airbus, 777, most bizjets, etc), it would need terrain awareness such as EGPWS (Already exists), and it would need transponder with collision avoidance (Already exists).

This technology is very expensive.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(jayman\";p=\"97765)</div>

Who would be liable for that?

Automation is not bullet-proof. Someone ultimately has to responsibility. S*** happens. That is "snow", of course. There's simply no way to predict every possible outcome in bad weather, including what to do when encountering accidents caused by other vehicles.

 

John:

It doesn't matter if you wish to discuss aviation or industrial process control, automation has dramatically improved safety and uptime. It certainly isn't cheap to implement though, and as a society we have to ask if it's "worth" it.

True, there is no such thing as "zero" error and more than a cursory examination of statistics (Weibull, Monte Carlo Simulation, ANOVA, etc) will handily prove it. There is also no such thing as an "accident" everything happens for a reason.

The whole point of automating a system is to "rationalize" the system, to remove uncertainty and human error to the greatest possible extent. Like a modern fly-by-wire airliner.

Although airline pilots are the first to suggest their direct action may have saved a flight from disaster, the sad fact is over 3/4 of regularly scheduled passenger airline crashes are still due to human error, especially CFIT (Controlled Flight Into Terrain).

Yet the average airline passenger is terrified of flying since they have no "control" over the process. They just sit there for the entire flight. Show them a modern LCD flight deck and they'd probably freak out, no more daredevil with the goggles and scarf.

It's bad enough that folks can drive cars on public roads with little to no direct supervision. More often than not they're s*** faced too. Or tired, or thinking about work or the wife or the dog or whatever.

Now translate that environment to a three dimensional phase space (Federally controlled airspace) where you have to worry about pitch, roll, and yaw while maintaining a *very* tight vertical navigation (Altitude) and lateral navigation, velocity, etc.

It would be like a meat grinder, mangled bodies everywhere.

So I obviously support *increased* automation, not less of it.

The issue of "failure" is also a non-issue. There is an entire branch of statistics devoted to determining the reliability of individual components and overall systems. I'm sure in your career you've heard of FRACAS (Failure Reporting Analysis and Corrective Action System), DRACAS (Defect Reporting Analysis and Corrective Action System), the simpler MTBF, MTTR, etc.

Jay

 

when air cars come in (and they wont) then we will have something to worry about.

 

Regarding the whole issue of automation and safety, it's worth noting that Toyota are huge fans of this approach. Perhaps surprising given today's nasty litigious society? Anyway, check out their "vision of zero road accidents" over here: http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/safety_presen/t...tech/index.html - really interesting!


Some highlights, which they are completely serious about introducing into real cars (and some of which are already implemented in Japan).

* Night vision head up display (already available on selected models)

* Radar pre-crash safety - uses a millimetre wave radar at the front of the car to detect unavoidable crashes and stiffens everything up (brakes, suspension, seatbelts) to limit damage.

* 2004 model Celsior has this, but now with camera sourced visual information in addition to the radar!

* The next step, and they are completely serious about this, is that if the system thinks you are about to crash, the brakes will be applied at maximum force at the last minute - regardless of what you think!

* Radar cruise control is now common, but they want to make the car brake automatically when it thinks you should be doing so.

* Vehicle stability control - if the computer thinks you're not doing a good enough job of handling a corner, it will take over control and steer for you! Already partially introduced.

* Lane keeping assist - stray over the white lines (as you might if drifting off) and a buzzer warns you. Take no notice of the buzzer and it will over-ride you and steer back into lane for you!

* Pedestrian recognition - some advanced stereo camera image analysis.

* Car - car networks - I've long believed that ad-hoc car-car networks could save a lot of accidents and congestion. Toyota are keen to put it into practice (as are Mercedes).

8)

 

Clett:

Exactly, and all this is being accomplished with technology the military (DARPA, etc) developed +25 years ago. Systems now being prototyped will provide fully-coupled autodrive and terrain/traffic awareness.

The whole point to that expensive exercise is to minimize uncertainty/error to the greatest extent possible. By removing most of the variability from the traffic situation, you can safely deal with increased densities while minimizing bottlenecks.

I would imagine the greatest challenge to overcome is *not* a technical one, but a legal one. I would think the ACLU and other civil liberties nuts would jump all over this approach.

After all, Ricers have the "right" to race down a public street and kill a pedestrian or innocent motorist. And bar patrons have the "right" to get s*** faced, stagger to their car, and careen into a minivan full of little kids.

Look at the oversight of the aviation industry now. Everything is documented, there are CVR and FDR in all passenger airliners. Pilots grumbled about this at first, but it's easy to prove how much safer aviation has become thanks to all the training and oversight.

When I look around in traffic at all the aggressive and outright criminal driving, and lax to non-existent enforcement, I truly wonder why I don't see more crashes. As it is, things are getting scary out there.

Jay

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(jayman\";p=\"98012)</div>

I definitely agree on this point!

Frankly I'm amazed the car companies are considering this at all though, given how spectacular the financial damage could be following even a handful of compensation claims.

Ironically, road transport would almost certainly be much safer with vehicle automation and many less lives would be lost. But the blame in all the remaining accidents would lie firmly at the door of the company who developed the software - so who would or even could accept that kind of responsibility?

At least when flying there is little danger of drunk pedestrians stepping out in front of you!

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(clett\";p=\"98256)</div>

Well, what about the financial damage from road transportation just the way things are right now? Indirectly we're paying for it out of much higher insurance bills, directly it's coming out of taxes.

In the UK, for FY2002, the estimate of all injury/fatality and incident only crashes is 17.7 billion pounds:

http://www.dft.gov.uk/stellent/groups/dft_....hcsp#P64_10638

In the United States, just the alcohol-related crashes add up to at least $114.3 billion dollars for FY2000 alone:

http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/PEOPLE/injury/alc...cohol/GUIDE.htm

Unless the car crash is more spectacular than usual, it doesn't even rate more than a few inches in the back section of a newspaper. In contrast, aviation incidents and crashes are so rare that you suddenly get "we're interrupting our normally scheduled programming to bring you the latest news of a plane crash ..."

I still find it highly ironic that people don't want to reduce or eliminate their "control" over the driving experience, given the high economic toll. But they freak out at passively sitting in the seat for a +2 hour plane ride. Especially when they see the pilot walk down the aisle towards the head.

"Hey! Who's driving the plane?!?"

"The airplane is "driving" the airplane, now shuttup and let me nap you knuckle-dragging imbecile."

This is almost verbatim the quote I had to use to get some shuteye on a recent flight. Fortunately I'm a big fellow so the obviously intoxicated passenger next to me thought better of starting a fight.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(clett\";p=\"97316)</div>

Actually, they should stick to their guns on that one.

Even if, theoretically, a LiIon battery could recharge in 5 minutes, it doesn't solve the problem.

A practical EV battery is (and is likely to remain, physics being what it is) ~50 kWh. To charge that in 5 minutes would require 600 kW (i.e. more than 1/2 a megawatt), even assuming 100% efficiency.

To put that in perspective, among other things, you're going to need to use a robotic arm in a sealed chamber with the driver and passengers nowhere nearby in order to charge it, because for reasonable size wires you're going to need to run that charger at around 3000 volts/200 amps.

I will remind everyone that SLAC was recently closed down for 6 months when a *licenced electrician* shorted out a mere 480 volt circuit, the resulting explosion nearly causing his death.

Also, unless something is done to raise charging efficiency significantly above 90%, you're going to dissipate something like 6 kWh (or 360 kJ) in that 5 minutes, mostly located in the spot of highest resistance in the system (probably some small weakened spot inside one of the battery cells, eek).

Leaving aside for the moment where a "gas station" for electric cars is going to get the 3 MW needed to recharge, say 5 cars simultaneously, it's still not practical.

Electric vehicle batteries will forever continue to take a relatively long time to charge. It's not a technological problem, it's just physics. The only way around that would be battery exchange, which has its own host of problems.

Now, that isn't usually a problem and EVs can be wonderful things, especially for commuting, but if you want a general purpose vehicle usable for long family trips it's not going to cut it.

The main lesson that GM learned from the EV1 program is that people in general aren't all that willing to buy a special-purpose commute vehicle (which might be a problem if trying to make a business case for it, there being a strictly limited number of fanatics available).

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(ratrent\";p=\"98411)</div>

And you're likely to spot weld any connectors you use to attach the charger to the battery.

Also, you use 50 kWh as an example EV battery. However, I've read that the RAV4 EV used a 28 kWh battery which gave it only an 87 mile range. I figure 300 miles is probably the minimum acceptably range for a general purpose car, so now we're talking about a 100 kWh battery.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(rcroft\";p=\"98422)</div>

I've seen some evidence that modern EVs may be able to achieve ~300 mile range on 50 kW, so I was being generous.

BTW, speaking of the environment, at those power levels about the only kind of switching that's going to work even vaguely reliably is liquid mercury. Yummy.

 

Ratrent, I do agree that charging at half a megawatt has a whole load of problems all of its own! I also agree that charging this quickly would lead to a huge amount of heat to get rid of (not trivial, but some of it at least could possibly be stored in a thermos for later heating in the car - like in the Prius?).

But this is only an issue with forecourt charging. Charging elsewhere means you could have a 10 minute charge time, and the problem is halved at a stroke. Make it half an hour, and a 50kWh pack would require only 100 kW, or an hour and only 50 kW is required which is the same as only 5 domestic electric showers.

I actually don't see a future for charging at forecourts for exactly the reasons you state. Instead, I see supermarkets and parking lots in particular offering electric charging at up to, say 50kW, as an incentive to you shopping there, and also making an additional profit from the charging costs. By the time you get out of the shops, the car has a full 'tank' of 200-300 miles. The main strengths of the Toshiba battery in EV terms though, while I did mention its fast charge capability, are the low temperature performance and the enormous cycle life, which no fuel cell can compete with.

I suppose the big question is, how will the gasoline merchants, ie Shell, BP etc survive? Will they start buying up all the parking lots in the country and outfitting them with charging points? I suppose they could start renting out these, to motorists wanting to go on long trips, but other than that, I can't see them being able to compete. Time to sell shares in BP and buy them in Walmart and Toshiba methinks! :wink:

 

Clett's right. Why assume that you'll fuel EVs the same way as petrol cars? It's as daft as assuming that you'd fuel petrol cars the same way as horses or steam engines, or thinking that electricity will be delivered to your house by truck and left in the electricity cellar.

Every technology has its own way of doing things. There's no reason why you'd normally charge an EV in mid-journey at a special "filling station". It makes no sense. The infrastructure required to provide charging points at parking spaces is pretty trivial, so it's most logical to charge slowly while parked. Major destinations and your own home parking spot would have the facilities.

For those rare occasions where you do need to charge on the way somewhere, for a long journey, maybe it'll take 10 minutes, but you can leave it charging while you pay, go to the toilet, have a cup of coffee, whatever.

Don't fall into the trap thinking that every technology has to work exactly the same way as the previous one.

Personally I can't wait for proper electric vehicles to be commercially viable. And every hybrid that gets sold just helps the necessary battery technology get cheaper and cheaper. That's one of the main reasons I bought a Prius.

 

One of the complaints about hydrogen fuel cell cars is that there isn't an infrastructure in place to deliver hydrogen to the consumption points. EV car enthusiasts like to point out that there already exists an electricity transmission infrastructure to just about everywhere.

However, I would like to disagree with this seemingly obvious point. We don't have an infrastructure in place to deliver the electricity needed to charge EV cars.

Our electricity transmission infrastructure is pretty much at it's limit. Here are a few examples illustrating this...

You might remember that about 2 years ago, there was a blackout across the entire Northeast. The last explanation I heard was that the transmission lines connecting part of Ohio to the power grid sagged due to too carrying too much electricity. When transmission lines are overloaded, they heat up and sag. These lines sagged low enough to come in contact with trees and then shorted out, dropping parts of Ohio from the grid. The power grid was designed a half century or more ago to handle just this kind of scenario. However the power grid no longer has the extra capacity needed to cope with it. Therefore, the extra load on the power grid due to the loss of a section in Ohio caused a domino effect that shut down the entire grid in less than 10 seconds.

You might also remember the rolling blackouts in California about 5 years ago. California doesn't have enough generation capacity to serve it's consumption needs in the summer. Usually it receives the extra electricity it needs from the hydroelectric dams on the Columbia river in Oregon. Well, 5 years ago they had a drought and Oregon didn't have the extra capacity needed to provide California with it's needs. To prevent the entire California power grid from shutting down, they started instituting rolling blackouts where they would shut down sections of California for 15 minutes at a time to reduce the power load.

Now add the electricity consumption of EV cars to the mix. I have a fairly modest commute of 20 miles each way. So I go about 800 miles a month just in commuting. If you add in my weekend usage and my wife's travels, then we probably travel about 1200 miles a month. If we assume that an EV car would use 50 kWh of electricity to travel 300 miles, then we would use about 200 kWh of electricity every month just for driving. I'll have to check my electric bill, but I'm pretty sure that exceeds the monthly electricity consumption in our house.

Now imagine the result of doubling the electricity usage in every suburban home with a power grid that is already at capacity.

Upgrading the power grid means building more generation plants and more transmission lines. That's really expensive and takes a long time to do. It will likely cost as much and take as long as creating a hydrogen distribution system. Added to that is the fact that nobody wants a new generation plant in their neighborhood and nobody wants high voltage transmission lines in their back yard, so you will have a massive political battle at the same time.

 

Yeah those gas companies are not stupid. They will adapt as the market changes. Shell already has hydrogen stations.

 

The established view among the EV folk (and the power companies) is that the EVs would help them out a lot by charging at night, when demand is low. It's a real headache switching off a powerplant for the night-time lull, so EVs would really help out in that respect.

Charging at night using up this spare capacity could provide electric fuel for about a third of the cars on the road before changes need to be made.

In future though I think a lot more people will be making their own electricity.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(clett\";p=\"98618)</div>

I don't know about that... I wonder what percentage of cars are actually parked in a garage? Or even in a driveway for that matter. I have this gut feeling that most people would end up charging the car at a charging station for quite some time. But hey, I've been wrong before.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(clett\";p=\"98593)</div>

from the two scenarios above, we can only have one or the other. however, it will most likely be the first scenario. therefore every degree of heat lost will lengthen the charge time.

now there are batteries being developed that will charge in much shorter periods of time will near perfect efficiency. they are still experimental and appropriately expensive but are being groomed to be the replacement for this type of high capacity application