Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

With a new California law threatening to classify Uber drivers as employees, I examine if a law like that could really work or Uber can get around it, and also what happens if this makes drivers cost more -- and leads them to a tougher battle against their real competitor, the robotaxi.

Read more in my Forbes.com article If Uber drivers become employees, can uber escape that, plus how they compete with robotaxis

With a new California law threatening to classify Uber drivers as employees, I examine if a law like that could really work or Uber can get around it, and also what happens if this makes drivers cost more -- and leads them to a tougher battle against their real competitor, the robotaxi.

Read more in my Forbes.com article If Uber drivers become employees, can uber escape that, plus how they compete with robotaxis

If you fall asleep while driving with Autopilot, it's not a good idea, but you're much safer than falling asleep in a car that doesn't have it. Since a lot of accidents are caused by falling asleep, could this be the reason for Tesla's claim that driving with Autopilot is much safer than not? Or is that claim itself even valid? I outline the logic and math in my new Forbes site article at:

Tesla's "battery guru" from Halifax, NS released a paper on some new battery cells they have been testing in his lab and getting 6,000 cycles from 0 to 100% on. That's a lot better than today's cells which offer 2000 cycles from 20% to 80% if you are lucky. This could be very big for electric cars, grid storage and it is suggested even robotaxis -- but their needs turn out to be more straightforward than originally thought. But it does bring down the cost.

Because Tesla Autopilot is driving tons of miles it's having accidents, and the NTSB in investigating them. That gives us a window we would not have into what's happening. The NTSB report on a non-injury Autopilot accident came out recently, and let's just learn what Tesla's autopilot didn't perceive.

A recent Ford article on how they clean bug splatter off their LIDAR prompted me to write about how you do redundancy in robocars to deal with the inevitable failure of sensors and other components. It's a software way of thinking, not a "make the hardware more reliable" approach.

Read it at Ford's sensor cleaner keeps it seeing, but how do we handle failures?

A recent Ford article on how they clean bug splatter off their LIDAR prompted me to write about how you do redundancy in robocars to deal with the inevitable failure of sensors and other components. It's a software way of thinking, not a "make the hardware more reliable" approach.

Read it at Ford's sensor cleaner keeps it seeing, but how do we handle failures?

A big question for most EV buyers is how much range they need. It depends on your commute, your driving area and how much you want to take long road trips, and where you want to take them, but most people will be pretty happy with the 200-250 mile range cars that are starting to come out. But do you want to pay extra for more than 300 miles of range and get that long range Tesla?

Here's an article where I outline how to make that decision:

As I've written earlier, Tesla has the ability to load special "search" neural networks into the cars to hunt for things they want to use to train with. In this article on Forbes, I hypothesize the day when there's an Amber Alert, and police ask to load networks to search for the car and people involved, and it quickly works. And then police get a taste for this, not just in the USA but China and other places. Where does it lead and can we stop it?

Some customer satisfaction scores leaked from Waymo and were posted by "The Information." The story depicts the 70% 5-star rating as very much a glass-half-empty story, worrying about the problem rides. I think that's actually a very impressive score, and a sign of great things to come, which I detail in the new Forbes site story at:

Waymo's poor 70% satisfaction rate is actuall

Hyundai has put a solar panel on an electric car. Turns out that's "false green" and may end up using a lot of the solar energy to cool down the car after you park it in the sun. What do the economics on solar panels in cars look like?

See Hyundai puts a solar panel on an EV but it's probably false green

Another Tesla car crash, allegedly on autopilot, teaches us something about how well (or not well) Tesla is doing with its claimed ability to use its fleet of cars to quickly learn to identify unusual obstacles and situations. Here, a Tesla on autopilot crashes into a tow truck sticking out into the right lane (injuring the Tesla driver.) The driver says it was on Autopilot but that he was distracted for a few seconds.

Tesla advertised that the Model 3 is the safest car ever based on NHTSA's tests. NHTSA wrote them a letter saying, "stop saying that, you can't compare these scores across different weight classes."

Here's some analysis of who is right and why Tesla wins in the end at NHTSA and Tesla spar over safety claims

RV parks already have the infrastructure for charging electric vehicles on road trips. They just need somewhere decent for the road trippers to sleep and they can exploit a whole new market. Some already rent little cabins. If they add glamping tents they can serve customers at a low cost and could quickly fill out the many gaps in the EV trip network. In my new Forbes site article, I outline the things they could do, and give some advice to drivers too.

Ever watched solo "cheaters" go by in the carpool lane and been angry? Turns out carpool lanes don't really work and often make congestion and throughput worse, which is why they are converting them to "HOT" (carpool+toll) lanes where they can, to let enough solo drivers in to properly use capacity.

Turns out carpool cheaters create a similar result, and if the fines and enforcement are tuned, they can pay a similar amount.

Over 60,000 EV charging stations have been installed in the US. But a huge number of them see fairly light use because they are not in the right place for the current generation of electric cars, and not for the coming self-driving ones.