brad's blog

No, cars won't circle around in traffic to avoid paying for parking

For many years, people have wondered if people might tell their robocars to just drive continuously around the block rather than pay for parking. I've written before about how that doesn't make sense, but a recent paper from Adam Millard-Ball of UC Santa Cruz tries to make a real case that it could make economic sense, even if it's antisocial.

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New Forbes.com post: The in car experience of the robocar will be quite minimalist

I have started doing some of my posts on forbes.com. They invited me to contribute and I felt it is worth finding out if it extends my reach. For now, I will link to posts here, and eventually I will perhaps build a special RSS feed to combine the posts I do there with the ones here to make it easy for readers.

This is what everybody does today when they travel.

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I got an electric car. My electric bill went down

Here's a moderately surprising result of switching to an electric car. Here in California, my electric bill went down. Just by a little, but in essence the (green) energy for my car is coming for free.

On my recent bill I used 900kwh and paid $168. 2 months ago I used 700kwh and paid $178. I drove around 900 miles. A small amount of my car electricity came from Tesla superchargers or other charging stations. Most was from my house. Yes, I use an above average amount of electricity already.

Why this this happen?

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EVSEs (car chargers) should be designed to do pass-through on dryer plugs

You probably have this (or the 4-pin version) in your laundry area

As an update to my proposal for a special circuit breaker to assist in managing home power I thought I would propose a much simpler alternative for those who have a dryer plug in their garage.

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Tesla in autopilot whacks a robot at CES (or does it?)

I'm on my way to CES tonight, and am surprised to have not seen much robocar news yet from there. I'll publish some reports of what I see. The first modest announcement is the creation of a public education collective called PAVE which is the first consortium to have almost all the major players.

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The utilitarian math overwhelming says we should be aggressive in robocar development. How do we do that?

A frequent theme of mine has been my identification of "proving you have done it" as the greatest challenge in producing a safe robocar.

This accident was caused by a human driver. Like 12M others each year in the USA

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