Brad Ideas - Comments

Added road noise and partial power

Lunatic Esex — Sat, 19 May 2012 02:23:22 -0700

At highway speeds wouldn't a physical, metal-on-metal running contact with a rail or wire in the shoulder guardrail be rather noisy?

The ambient noise around the undercarriage of a train using a third rail is already rather noisy, so the added noise of third rail systems on trains aren't noticed so much. The train is already going to have significant sound insulation built in to it.

Cars, on the other hand, are designed around rubber on asphalt, and passengers are riding much closer to the wheels, road, and outside of the vehicle.

I could imagine a system that is only or specifically designed for large multi-axle vehicles like trucks and buses would have fewer problems with noise. In that case high overhead wires could be used and the issue of automobiles needing extremely long contact poles wouldn't exist. Of course then it wouldn't be so cost-effective to install the wires in the first place. Unless we go all the way (back) to the idea of road trains that you drive your car up into, for extended trips like between SF and LA...

Would a system like this need to provide full power to run a vehicle without it drawing any power at all from its onboard battery? Since one of the problems of electric vehicles is range, what about having the system simply augment a vehicle's battery, to extend its range? That way you'd get say X miles of range on a charge driving around town, but 2X miles of range with the power augmentation when driving in the "powered" lane on the highway. Your battery is still running down, but only half as quickly.

Without needing to provide full power to a vehicle, inductive power transfer might be more feasible, which would result in less added road noise.

I considered that

brad — Fri, 18 May 2012 19:52:12 -0700

And on a highway there should not be peds at all. You do need two contacts. Most 3rd rails run 600 to 1000 volts, and use DC (more power for same peak voltage) but at that voltage you need 20 to 33 amps for a car, which is a lot for a small contact. Overhead wires run from 1.5kv (often DC) to 25kv for high speed trains. One problem at those high voltages is running that kind of voltage into the car (to be transformed down usually) presents some risks, I would imagine.

You need to find a sweet spot that is high enough voltage to send the power without lots of current, but not so high as to be dangerous or arc etc.

Electrification

Steve H — Fri, 18 May 2012 16:46:24 -0700

Another solution to the safety problem of electrified rails on the shoulder of a highway would be to have the rail set back in a slot too small for a human hand to fit. A vehicle would need precise driving and a thin flexible contact able to handle the variations in movement.

That's a lot of entities

brad — Thu, 17 May 2012 08:49:08 -0700

I wonder if they all are legit reps for Constantin Films, the actual creator of the movie?

Car share

brad — Thu, 17 May 2012 08:48:05 -0700

Car share is cool but really is only taking off in certain segments as far as I know. The need to return the car to where you got it, and the requirement to walk to and from the car share lot are huge downsides compared to a vehicle that picks you up and drops you off with no other worries for you — much more efficient in sharing too, since you don’t have to park or “own” it while at your destination.

My more recent thinking suggests that we’ll actually put more miles on cars than we do today, though we will need to own fewer of them as a society. So when you think of a car’s depreciation as pricing it by the mile, instead of the year, the car industry does not shrink quite so much. It does change what it makes and how it sells it, though.

Criminalized?

efernalgumby — Thu, 17 May 2012 03:35:19 -0700

I was sent a pile of copyright notices for a short Hitler parody video I made. It has almost no views, because all it contains is my friends' in-jokes.

The wording of my notices seems to indicate I've done something wrong, and the only way to clear my account's standing is to take down the video. What would you do if you were me?

screenshot of the pile of notices: http://i.imm.io/pyWJ.jpeg

Car Industry Disruption

Thom Lanon — Wed, 16 May 2012 23:53:14 -0700

I wanted to agree in part and differ in part with your assessment of the car industry. Zipcar, Hertz and others will do much damage to domestic demand without autonomous cars piling on. However, replacing our current fleet and international demand, growth and ability to utilize autonomous cars efficiently leads me to think that legacy carmakers will continue to grow for many years.

However, even if this is not the case, newcomers like Tesla Motors, which will integrate autonomous technology seamlessly, will grow as vehicle electrification, drive-by-wire, and inductive charging become commonplace.

Throw in lithium-air, which should hit just as autonomous vehicles become ubiquitous, ~2020 according to IBM and their 500 mile battery project, and you have a recipe for incredible change.

Thanks for providing such a great source of information.

Thom

ebooks

DensityDuck — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:59:24 -0700

You see this kind of discussion a lot on ebook sites, where authors complain about how they can't make their book look like they want it to do in (Kindle/epub/mobi/text/whatever).

I always wonder why it really matters, because HTML 1.0 hand-coded in ASCII provides a surprising amount of formatting control, and it doesn't seem to me that anything beyond that improves the delivery of the actual content (which, as you point out, is the text.)

Brad is right

Anonymous — Tue, 15 May 2012 10:07:33 -0700

I have no less than a dozen garbage trucks going in and out of my small street during the week, and I work at home. The noise is unbelievable. Every one of these trucks needs to back out of the streets and it takes each one minutes to do so.

I'll also venture that if you have no awareness about the presence of a slow moving truck that's larger than many homes, a 100 decibel noise will do little to solve that problem.

Up to PSW

brad — Tue, 15 May 2012 09:22:07 -0700

They do have some videos of talks on their site, but they take some time to get them up. The talk went well, I think. The audience was engaged, laughed at all the right jokes, and asked a quite good and long series of questions.

Is there going to be a video

Brad (not brad) — Tue, 15 May 2012 04:02:03 -0700

Is there going to be a video posted? I would love to see this. I wanted to get down there last Friday, but the schedule just would not cooperate.

Marketing and legal issues

Anonymous — Thu, 10 May 2012 03:45:55 -0700

I am surprised at the general lack of interest in the recent advances made towards fully automated driving. From what I have seen in the news the Google car is presented as little more than a curiosity with virtually no comment on the deeper possibilities. Most people see only the car and not the very different (and efficient) transport system that may lie behind it.
At this stage of development this is not necessarily a bad thing as quietly building up a safe history of operation is probably critical for any future success.

When the time comes for marketing, still many years away, perhaps key players could sponsor a serious sci-fiction film with an automated driving system as a backdrop. Pictures are still worth many thousands of words.

The legal system basically interprets and applies the laws of the day. If the public embraced the idea of driver-less cars then over time the laws should change to accommodate this. (At least that is how democracy is meant to work). To win over the public, safety, low cost and convenience would be essential. I am sure many people will be working hard to achieve this.
When the court cases start, it will be interesting how much weight will be given to the overall safety of robocar as opposed to individual cases where it fails and causes fatalities. The question you raise of people being prosecuted for their human errors that could of been avoided by using automated transport is also going to create plenty of controversy.

I've lots of writing on this

brad — Wed, 09 May 2012 20:29:55 -0700

Try the decline of transit.

No public transit

Anonymous — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:27:31 -0700

Your thoughts on the technologies effect on public transport? I see governments and cities getting out expensive public transport if everyone gained access to robo vehicles. But this would likely add to the cost for the need of more roads and more traffic (robo traffic)

MIT article

Wild Bill — Tue, 08 May 2012 18:20:49 -0700

I read that article too, and found it thought-provoking. I like your dichotomies. Long live chaos!