5 ms·

Asking sincerely: Why should we not simply pull over to do this? Planes obviously are a different situation, but cars can easily just stop. While cool to imagi

by jccc 6y ago

Asking sincerely: Why should we not simply pull over to do this? Planes obviously are a different situation, but cars can easily just stop. While cool to imagine, it seems unnecessarily complicated and unsafe to do this in motion on the road. [Edit: The prof and his team are quite serious about it, so I assume there must be a reason and I'm actually curious what it might be.]

irishcoffee 6y ago
This is the correct question. Planes did it because they had to. Highly trained pilots execute in-air refueling. Not kids with their folks teslas.
willis936 6y ago
It seems like a valuable proposition if we threw out the existing paradigms of road transport. If we throw out concepts such as ownership of vehicles and fuel and treat all road vehicles as one system of controlled individual elements, you could envision is a more efficient solution. Traffic jams would be lessened, trip times would be shortened, total fuel usage would go down, etc. On road-fueling would be one element in a world like this: road based freight delivery could run without stopping by using vehicles expected to have short journies to refuel the trucks along the way. This is all to define a hypothetical new paradigm in road transport and to quantify its potential consequences (good and bad). I had not thought about on-road refueling before and I think there is good value in pointing it out. We're not at the point where we're seriously charting a course to world like this, but we need to know what the world looks like before we can start to do that.
- bdamm 6y ago
  Many things are valuable if we throw out the constraints of dealing with existing reality. Even then I'm not sure it is valuable; roads suffer from lack of maintenance already. If anything we should be looking at how to make roads less expensive. Having autonomous vehicles disperse their weight to reduce prevalence of potholes, for example.
  - willis936 6y ago
    Right, and that is one thing to weight for when choosing the behavior of the system. While the article in question doesn't explicitly say this, I think these seemingly impractical solutions add to the theoretical toolkit that we can use to shape a road utopia, if society ever agrees on what that would look like. If society does ever agree on a road utopia and then consider it worthwhile to pursue, it will be valuable to have these ideas laid out. Perhaps they are useless today, but they motivate this idea. If they weren't proposed then the possibility of a future road utopia is entirely impossible.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  If we are "throwing out the existing paradigms of road transport” then why not throw out roads completely. Rails are way more efficient.
  - loa_in_ 6y ago
    That's true only if they reach all destinations
    - jakecopp 6y ago
      Yep, they do already! The future is here, just not evenly distributed (to the US :P) https://www.openrailwaymap.org/?lang=null&lat=48.21003212234042&lon=8.28369140625&zoom=5&style=standard https://www.openrailwaymap.org/?lang=null&lat=48.21003212234...
      - tdhoot 6y ago
        Can I go from my house to my friends house using only rails? My house to the supermarket? Not all pairwise points are connected by rails, while they generally are by roads.
        lmilcin 6y ago
        The post is about long distance travel.
        tdhoot 6y ago
        My point still applies.
- rdrock 6y ago
  An old-new paradigm of road transport, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll makes for a good read.
yawgmoth 6y ago
The non-serious answer is that we need to charge while driving to best emulate F-Zero https://youtu.be/BIe4AvKLSa4?t=217 https://youtu.be/BIe4AvKLSa4?t=217
- nitwit005 6y ago
  That was a mid-air repair of another flying vehicle.
  - ta17711771 6y ago
    F-Zero & F-Zero X allowed you to use the shield bar as boost-fuel as well.
baltimore 6y ago
Because charging takes much longer than filling up with gas. If someone is willing to pay a premium for charging while driving to reduce total trip time, that's a business opportunity.
- goodcanadian 6y ago
  This is often said, but I am not so sure. Fast-charging takes somewhat longer than filling with gasoline/petrol, but I usually also want a bathroom and coffee break. I can easily do that while my car is charging. That is not really true while dispensing gasoline. It is not so obvious to me that I am losing out time-wise. This is not idle speculation. I own an electric car. Furthermore, the vast majority of my charging occurs at home, over night. The total amount time I have saved by not having to visit gas stations for literally months is significant.
  - vonmoltke 6y ago
    > Fast-charging takes somewhat longer than filling with gasoline/petrol, but I usually also want a bathroom and coffee break. It's more than "somewhat". I can put over 400 highway miles of range into my vehicle in five minutes with a gas pump. It takes 30 minutes to put half that into an EV. I don't want to stop for half an hour every 200 miles. > This is not idle speculation. I own an electric car. Furthermore, the vast majority of my charging occurs at home, over night. The total amount time I have saved by not having to visit gas stations for literally months is significant. It sounds like you don't have many days where your driving exceeds the range capacity of your vehicle. The technology in the article, and the post you are responding to, are in the context of long-distance highway travel. It's for cases where a vehicle must be recharged in the middle of a trip, even when it starts with a full battery.
    - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      * I don't want to stop for half an hour every 200 miles.* Ugh, I don't even want to drive 200 miles in a day if I can avoid it.
    - 6y ago
valuearb 6y ago
Commercial planes don’t even do midair refueling, because it’s expensive and dangerous.

by jccc 6y ago

irishcoffee 6y ago

This is the correct question. Planes did it because they had to. Highly trained pilots execute in-air refueling. Not kids with their folks teslas.

willis936 6y ago

It seems like a valuable proposition if we threw out the existing paradigms of road transport. If we throw out concepts such as ownership of vehicles and fuel and treat all road vehicles as one system of controlled individual elements, you could envision is a more efficient solution. Traffic jams would be lessened, trip times would be shortened, total fuel usage would go down, etc. On road-fueling would be one element in a world like this: road based freight delivery could run without stopping by using vehicles expected to have short journies to refuel the trucks along the way. This is all to define a hypothetical new paradigm in road transport and to quantify its potential consequences (good and bad). I had not thought about on-road refueling before and I think there is good value in pointing it out. We're not at the point where we're seriously charting a course to world like this, but we need to know what the world looks like before we can start to do that.

bdamm 6y ago
Many things are valuable if we throw out the constraints of dealing with existing reality. Even then I'm not sure it is valuable; roads suffer from lack of maintenance already. If anything we should be looking at how to make roads less expensive. Having autonomous vehicles disperse their weight to reduce prevalence of potholes, for example.
- willis936 6y ago
  Right, and that is one thing to weight for when choosing the behavior of the system. While the article in question doesn't explicitly say this, I think these seemingly impractical solutions add to the theoretical toolkit that we can use to shape a road utopia, if society ever agrees on what that would look like. If society does ever agree on a road utopia and then consider it worthwhile to pursue, it will be valuable to have these ideas laid out. Perhaps they are useless today, but they motivate this idea. If they weren't proposed then the possibility of a future road utopia is entirely impossible.
lmilcin 6y ago
If we are "throwing out the existing paradigms of road transport” then why not throw out roads completely. Rails are way more efficient.
- loa_in_ 6y ago
  That's true only if they reach all destinations
  - jakecopp 6y ago
    Yep, they do already! The future is here, just not evenly distributed (to the US :P) https://www.openrailwaymap.org/?lang=null&lat=48.21003212234042&lon=8.28369140625&zoom=5&style=standard https://www.openrailwaymap.org/?lang=null&lat=48.21003212234...
    - tdhoot 6y ago
      Can I go from my house to my friends house using only rails? My house to the supermarket? Not all pairwise points are connected by rails, while they generally are by roads.
      - lmilcin 6y ago
        The post is about long distance travel.
        tdhoot 6y ago
        My point still applies.
rdrock 6y ago
An old-new paradigm of road transport, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll makes for a good read.

yawgmoth 6y ago

The non-serious answer is that we need to charge while driving to best emulate F-Zero https://youtu.be/BIe4AvKLSa4?t=217 https://youtu.be/BIe4AvKLSa4?t=217

nitwit005 6y ago
That was a mid-air repair of another flying vehicle.
- ta17711771 6y ago
  F-Zero & F-Zero X allowed you to use the shield bar as boost-fuel as well.

baltimore 6y ago

Because charging takes much longer than filling up with gas. If someone is willing to pay a premium for charging while driving to reduce total trip time, that's a business opportunity.

goodcanadian 6y ago
This is often said, but I am not so sure. Fast-charging takes somewhat longer than filling with gasoline/petrol, but I usually also want a bathroom and coffee break. I can easily do that while my car is charging. That is not really true while dispensing gasoline. It is not so obvious to me that I am losing out time-wise. This is not idle speculation. I own an electric car. Furthermore, the vast majority of my charging occurs at home, over night. The total amount time I have saved by not having to visit gas stations for literally months is significant.
- vonmoltke 6y ago
  > Fast-charging takes somewhat longer than filling with gasoline/petrol, but I usually also want a bathroom and coffee break. It's more than "somewhat". I can put over 400 highway miles of range into my vehicle in five minutes with a gas pump. It takes 30 minutes to put half that into an EV. I don't want to stop for half an hour every 200 miles. > This is not idle speculation. I own an electric car. Furthermore, the vast majority of my charging occurs at home, over night. The total amount time I have saved by not having to visit gas stations for literally months is significant. It sounds like you don't have many days where your driving exceeds the range capacity of your vehicle. The technology in the article, and the post you are responding to, are in the context of long-distance highway travel. It's for cases where a vehicle must be recharged in the middle of a trip, even when it starts with a full battery.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    * I don't want to stop for half an hour every 200 miles.* Ugh, I don't even want to drive 200 miles in a day if I can avoid it.
  - 6y ago

valuearb 6y ago

Commercial planes don’t even do midair refueling, because it’s expensive and dangerous.