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This is important to keep in mind when you read articles and/or studies about how electric cars or wind or solar power is impractical. A lot of the data these s

This is important to keep in mind when you read articles and/or studies about how electric cars or wind or solar power is impractical. A lot of the data these studies use is just obsolete. Say you have an opinion piece in a news paper that says that electric cars will always be expensive toys for the rich. It relies on a scientific paper published in a technical journal 2 years ago. The scientific paper does not perform original research but relies on a study published 2 years ago, which study relies on official data reported by companies six months before publication. Perhaps nobody in this propagation chain meant to mislead. But in the end they are using old data that assumes that battery costs are five times what they are in reality and twenty times what they will be in the near future (for example) and draws all the wrong conclusions. Similar things are happening with articles and public comments about renewable energy. There are numerous arguments about how we will always need coal power or nuclear power, or natural gas and they all base it on old studies with obsolete high costs of batteries. These articles commit a further error by also neglecting the every decreasing costs of solar and wind power. These articles are even more egregious because while a car lasts only 10-15 years a power plant is supposed to last at least 30 (for coal or gas) and up to 60 (for nuclear). Furthermore, nuclear plants take 5 to 10 years to even build. In those years the costs of batteries and renewables will only go down further. In the financial press there were many articles about how Tesla will never be profitable, how it is an extravagant way for shareholders to subsidize luxury car buyers, how it will always rely on government subsidies and will need more of them, etc. Well, guess what the federal tax credit expired and lo and behold tesla is profitable. They weren't necessarily lying. But they were using automotive industry assumptions, and the auto industry with their internal combustion engines is a mature industry with few opportunities for cost reductions. But as far as batteries and electric motors and power semiconductors go ... well we are just getting started on them and hopefully we will have many opportunities for cost reductions.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
Yes, using obsolete data from when tech was bleeding edge in 1999 to imply things about cost going forward is misleading. On the other hand using improvement over the same timeline, drawing a line on a graph and saying "look how X Y is gonna be in Z years" is the same exact type of stupid but pointed in a different direction. In 1991 lithium was highly immature technology and would take about a decade to make it into fragile electronics. It took another decade to make it into power tools. Now it's viable in high end commuter vehicles. If it was easy to predict the future a decade out with any reliability we wouldn't be having this discussion.
- ip26 6y ago
  drawing a line on a graph and saying "look how X Y is gonna be in Z years" is the same exact type of stupid And yet we do it every ~18 months with semiconductors. Imperfect to be sure, but if you don’t skate to where the puck is headed, you will miss opportunity.
  - dmoy 6y ago
    > And yet we do it every ~18 months with semiconductors. So, this is about to stop. Very soon. Quantum tunneling, yield rates, etc are all starting to be cost prohibitive. <10nm stuff was already delayed. There's plans for 3nm. It's unclear yet whether 2nm will work. Even if hypothetically it does, there's a very real limit - an atom is only 10x smaller than 2nm.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      On the one hand, I remember people saying the same about nodes much larger than those we currently use. On the other, yes: continue current trends and single atom transistors become standard in 10-32 years.
      - usrusr 6y ago
        I think it boils down to we will hit a wall, but we don't know exactly when we'll hit it. (and how hard, chances are that higher-hanging-fruit refinements will make the transition to stagnancy so gradual that we may not notice at all) A jump from "all past predictions failed" to "and so will all future predictions" seems rather bold to me. In the end it's like a somewhat upended variation of the "x decades to practical fusion" thing where we all hope that the old joke that x might be a natural constant is eventually proven wrong.
        ghaff 6y ago
        Well, the main direction of refinements at this point seem to be around composable/heterogeneous computing where we basically have a lot of hardware optimized for specific workloads and throw the complexity at the software people. i.e. now deal with GPUs, DPUs, FPGAs, xCPUs, etc. instead of (largely) just a standardized set of CPU instructions.
minitoar 6y ago
Are there many gains to be had on electric motors? I guess I sort of assumed those had seen quite a bit of optimization already.
- iknowstuff 6y ago
  > The engineers of Tesla motor's shocked everyone when they abandoned the versatile induction motor in Model 3 cars. They used a totally different motor called IPM-SynRM. Let's understand why the Tesla engineers made this crucial design change. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esUb7Zy5Oio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esUb7Zy5Oio
  - ninjinxo 6y ago
    Hrmm, so the cost and performance is much the same, but it adds value by creating a new talking point for Tesla owners to harangue others with.
    - callmeal 6y ago
      >Hrmm, so the cost and performance is much the same, but it adds value by creating a new talking point for Tesla owners to harangue others with. I know that hating on Tesla is a thing, but don't forget the higher torque, better efficiency, lower heat generation in the stator windings. And the fact that this type of motor first showed up in the Prius and Tesla made a better version of it. Yeah they're getting away with saying they invented it Prius were touting their continuously variable transmission instead of thier motors.
      - Robotbeat 6y ago
        I'm as big of a Tesla fan as any, but I'm both continuously impressed with how ahead-of-its-time the Prius was and continuously disappointed how lack-luster Toyota has been in pure electric cars. Toyota had like a decade lead on everyone else and just.... sat on it. Only invested in hybrids and hydrogen (which was and is a dead end). Toyota could've gone all-in on pure electric cars (and better plug-in hybrids than they had at the time) a good decade ago but instead they continue to waste money on hydrogen.... Only now finally announcing pure-electric cars in the US: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/10/22187113/toyota-electric-vehicles-us-suv-debut-hybrids https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/10/22187113/toyota-electric-... It's really sad. It's really bad for the climate that they just sat on the Prius drivetrain, which is 95% of the way to a pure electric car, for over two decades (it was released in 1997... it's 2021 right now!). Literally, people have modded (i.e. added extra battery capacity) Priuses from 2003 to be pure electric even at highway speeds with the same motor and controller. They had everything sitting right there. It's incredibly frustrating.
baybal2 6y ago
> Say you have an opinion piece in a news paper that says that electric cars will always be expensive toys for the rich. Well, you don't see poor people buying EVs that much. That's car manufacturer statistics, which I believe deserves a good degree of trust. In the market for new cars, poor people buy cheapest IC cars, but not cheapest EVs. I will take the point that middle class is now buying budget EVs, but you don't have real economy class EVs selling that well in the West, and in China as well. Wuling Mini EV will classify as a true economy class EV, but what people lauding it don't say it that Chinese IC vehicles in the same price range outsell Mini EV many, many times over.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > you don't see poor people buying EVs that much You do, however, see upper middle class people buying them. Which wasn't the case a decade ago, when the Leaf came out [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  How about hybrids like Priuses?
- WebDanube 6y ago
  I'm not a free market apologist by any means, but we also didn't see "poor people" or folks in the lower economic strata buy mobile devices and smartphones when they became first available, at least not the scale we're seeing now (without mentioning the fact that the devices were crazy expensive when first launched, adjusting for inflation). Economy of scale is a thing, and imo it's OK to use the rich and the wealthy as 'guinea pigs' of sorts (which mostly is voluntary as the wealthy are more likely to make riskier bets on new tech than people living paycheck-to-paycheck). As EV market extends downwards on the economic 'pecking order,' I'm really hoping even more drastic cost reduction and lower barriers of entry into the EV market for folks that are not rich.
  - iagovar 6y ago
    An expensive phone is about 500-1000€. A cheap EV is in the 20K neighborhood, and the functionality is pretty bad compared to a cheap second-hand utility car (pretty hard to travel outside your city). Even when regulations push prices up, it's still far more economical to buy a cheap gas car than a cheap EV. Even in Europe there are plenty of countries where many people can't afford an EV. They can afford second-hand ICE cars. So unless there can be a second-hand market of EVs for about 6K without worrying about the battery, and with a similar functionality of a second-hand ICE car, then yes, EVs will be for upper income brackets. And I'm not even mentioning that most people lives in apartment buildings, and it's very likely that your car sleeps in the street. I've seen this discussions around here. People won't buy EVs in the near future because they are expensive, have very low range, you have to have a house, or own a flat (because nobody will pay for a charger installation in a rented flat) with garage, etc. What people is buying is little electric Scooters. Most of them are <500€ and you can charge em everywhere. It makes sense for travelling inside a city. Spending 20K for not being able to go from Santiago to Madrid, doesn't make any sense.
sokoloff 6y ago
> while a car lasts only 10-15 years While it might be the case that today’s EVs will not be economically longer-lived than 15 years, the overall average age of a car in the US is 12 years, and most of my cars have been bought with 10 or more years on them as it makes for very inexpensive motoring (no need for collision or comprehensive insurance, no financing interest, and nearly no depreciation). I bought my 2015 LEAF new and suspect it will not be economically viable in 2030 while our 2005 Honda CR-V is 16 years old now, still going strong, and most likely will still be in service in 2030.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > no need for collision or comprehensive insurance, no financing interest, and nearly no depreciation But you need to maintain it and have it inspected instead! And you're also paying with your safety - ten years is a very long time in safety technology these days!
  - r00fus 6y ago
    Surely you jest. What safety features on standard vehicles became indispensable in the past 10 years? Note: things like collision avoidance and adaptive cruise are still luxury features and the OG poster wouldn’t have bought those anyway.
    - lumost 6y ago
      Collision avoidance is now standard tech. Subaru has been making automatic breaking/adaptive cruise control a standard feature of all new model designs. Legacies MSRP at 22k, and the 18k impreza is due for a redesign in 2022. A quick google shows that the 2021 versa may be the cheapest car with automatic breaking at $16600 MSRP. https://www.subaru.com/engineering/safety.html https://www.subaru.com/engineering/safety.html https://www.nissanusa.com/shopping-tools/build-price?models=versa&modelYear=current-year https://www.nissanusa.com/shopping-tools/build-price?models=...
      - brucehoult 6y ago
aidenn0 6y ago
There were similar things at the dawn of the jet age. Someone wrote a paper demonstrating that jet power could not improve over propeller power because radial-flow compressors generated too much drag and axial-flow compressors were too inefficient. What the author of the paper didn't know is that, contemporary to him, it was discovered that shaping each blade of an axial-flow compressor like an airfoil significantly improved efficiency. Thus a "physics problem" became a "manufacturing problem"
- MomoXenosaga 6y ago
  You can't predict a breakthrough but they tend to change everything.
  - m463 6y ago
    What's fascinating is that moores law was successful far longer than people imagined.
markdown 6y ago
> a car lasts only 10-15 years Is this normal where you live (presumably the US)? I find that really wasteful. Cars last twice that in my country, and we have tropical, seaside (salt = rust) weather to deal with.
- bdcravens 6y ago
  25% of cars are 16+ years, and the longevity of cars is increasing https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/28/25percent-of-cars-in-us-are-at-least-sixteen-years-old----record-high.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/28/25percent-of-cars-in-us-are-...
- mlindner 6y ago
  There's a lot of variation in the US depending on where you live. In California the car can be so old the paint has all come off but there's hardly any rust on the car because the air is very dry, it doesn't rain much, temperature variation is low and salt isn't used on roads. On the other hand you can be places like Canada or the northern midwest where Temperature swings by 100F between summer and winter, salt is used heavily on roads to melt snow, rain is common during the warmer months, and humidity levels in the summer are high. This causes cars, especially those not in covered garages to quickly rust and not last more than 15 years or so before too many components and body frame have rusted away.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    And meanwhile, my Highlander will be old enough to drink in a couple years, has lived everywhere from the East Coast to the Bay Area to (currently) the Great Basin, has been taken offroad on multiple occasions, has handled dozens of blizzards like a champ, and (knock on wood) is still hanging in there, even with my rather inconsistent maintenance. So I'd say a lot of this depends on the model, and possibly the make.
- Tagbert 6y ago
  In the US, the average age of all cars is 12 years, so a 10-15 year lifespan is pessimistic.
vmception 6y ago
Is there a good way to quickly understand this for any topic? Like, take something you might not be interested in and just "don't get". Your conclusions will be very quick but based on the current state of things. The people that "do get it" might be crazy, or they might be seeing a longer trend that they've been following so long that they never articulated it, and aren't even capable of articulating it. How is one supposed to form opinions on new topics where the state rapidly changes?
- philipkglass 6y ago
  There is no easy shortcut. There are some people who have kept up with academic research, commercial developments, and trend lines over enough time to filter out short term noise. Some of them blog or write long comments on HN. But unless you are one of those people yourself, you won't be able to tell which writers are trustworthy. You can rapidly filter a lot of noise out of energy news with knowledge of physics and chemistry from 100-level university courses (or equivalent) [1]. But most people never acquired this knowledge and a lot of those who have only retained it long enough to pass tests in school. 10 years later they don't remember the difference between power and energy or why some chemical reactions are exothermic and others endothermic. [1] This knowledge is actually helpful to filter news in general when it makes assertions about the physical world.
u320 6y ago
> There are numerous arguments about how we will always need coal power or nuclear power, or natural gas and they all base it on old studies with obsolete high costs of batteries. This is simply not true. I'm sure there are some bad articles out there but that's true for anything. See e.g. https://www.cell.com/joule/pdf/S2542-4351(18)30386-6.pdf https://www.cell.com/joule/pdf/S2542-4351(18)30386-6.pdf where they authors find non-intermittent power production to be necessary even under an assumption of a further 75% drop (from 2018 levels) in battery prices.
- pfdietz 6y ago
  No, they find "firming power" is needed. That could be hydrogen burned in turbines. Firming is not non-intermittent, it's dispatchable
an_opabinia 6y ago
While I agree with you broadly, Tesla loses money on its car business. It was profitable for a full year because of the money it makes from selling carbon credits. That’s not exactly a federal subsidy but it’s not making cars either. So I feel like going at this all angry complaining about imprecision or a lack of focus on details comes off ironic.
- minhazm 6y ago
  This is a common misconception that keeps getting repeated for some reason. It's silly to exclude the regulatory credit income but then also count things like stock based compensation and capitol expenditures for new factory builds. Tesla did $1.6 billion in regulatory credits in 2020. Tesla stock based compensation in 2020 was $1.7 billion due to Elon Musk's performance based compensation plan and TSLA skyrocketing. So the car business is clearly profitable. Then there's the capitol expenditure on building out new factories and expanding their production capacity. From Tesla's 2020 Q3 10Q filing: > we currently expect our capital expenditures to be at the high end of our range of $2.5 to $3.5 billion in 2020 and increase to $4.5 to $6 billion in each of the next two fiscal years. They're planning on spending up to $12 billion between 2021-2022 to build out new factories and expanding their capacity. Their car business is clearly profitable, they're just spending all of the money to grow.
  - an_opabinia 6y ago
    Is it a misconception? If the credit didn’t exist they would not be profitable. They lose money on the cars. They sell more cars, they lose more money. I like the company and I like electric cars, but I’m not stupid, I’m not misconceiving anything.
    - JeffL 6y ago
      Yes it's a misconception. Their profit margin on cars is consistently over 20%. They have large overhead costs that are more or less fixed like R&D that get amortized more and more as sales go up. They have massive net free cash flow every quarter even while building out new factories that will increase production capacity by 50% every year for the next several years, further increasing economies of scale and operating margins.
waheoo 6y ago
This same problem has plagued climate science as well, giving munition for deniers and otherwise just confusing the public. You want to see the real writing on the wall? The IPCC report takes 10 year old settled science and makes models using it. The real, more recent data is much, much worse.
- terafo 6y ago
  > The real, more recent data is much, much worse. Where can I read anything on this?
  - Qwertious 6y ago
    There's a video on YouTube, Gwynne Dyer -- Geopolitics in a Hotter World (2010) ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY ), which very briefly touches on it IIRC. I'm talking about the bit that starts at 8m30s on the video, but I highly recommend watching the whole thing (or at leas the 1-hour talk part - the Q&A is practically inaudible for me). Basically, the IPCC doesn't publish studies - they study compilations of studies, every 4-5 years. And when they start compiling, they have a cut-off date at the very start and only use studies that have been both completed and have passed peer review from before that date. Meanwhile, the studies themselves have the same problem - they obviously can't start the study with incomplete data and update the data as they go. The studies need to start with data that finished before they started the study. And on top of that, they're necessarily a reserved body (Icd say "conservative" but that's ambiguous in politics) - IPCC is run by a bunch of governments trying to figure out the bare minimum of emissions reduction they need to commit to, to not be negligent - they don't want to hear bad news unless it's certain. The end result is that the data in the report is 10+ years out of date.
    - waheoo 6y ago
      The (non political) conservatism is the major issue. They select for conservative non alarmist studies leaving more alarmist ones as outliers, the studies themselves do the same thing. The compounding effect of this along with the time lag is just so damn disturbing.
agumonkey 6y ago
I have a similar issue with climate change strategies. The people behind are surely more educated and mentally skilled than I, but I have a feeling they couldn't avoid ignoring false assumptions in the current model, which leads to bad policies and wasted time (and also anxiety).
iamgopal 6y ago
In the world where data is new oil, no body is going to give it for free or even for money as they themselves could use it for much higher profits. I assume all news assumptions or data to be wrong and look for after effect evidence that prove that it could be true.
godelski 6y ago
> This is important to keep in mind when you read articles and/or studies about how electric cars or wind or solar power is impractical. A lot of the data these studies use is just obsolete. My understanding is that phone batteries are extremely different from batteries for large storage. They have vastly different cycle and draw requirements (you can't quick draw on your phone battery). I don't think these studies are being nefarious, but looking at different batteries, where this article is averaging. Reading the article it doesn't give any inclination that they are differentiating these types of batteries.
- danans 6y ago
  IIRC, Tesla's first car batteries were made from laptop cells.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> Furthermore, nuclear plants take 5 to 10 years to even build. But that's the problem. The cost of solar and batteries is declining rapidly. For how long? We don't know. Exponential curves eventually flatten out. We had Dennard scaling until we didn't. So the question is, do they get cheap enough before they hit the wall? We have two choices. Choice one, build new nuclear plants, and then if alternatives are even cheaper, we pay the current/historical price for electricity for a while instead of some lower price (or the investors in the nuclear plants lose money, take your pick). This also gives us new nuclear plants to use to destroy all the stupid plutonium created by old nuclear plants, even if it costs more, and we really do have to get rid of that stuff. Choice two, we don't, and bet everything that the alternatives get cheap enough before we hit the wall. In which case we're completely screwed if we bet wrong, because it takes a long time to build new nuclear plants, so if we don't start now by then it'll be too late.
- ComodoHacker 6y ago
  So, diversify and do both?
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    Exactly. And for extra points, this phases out oil and coal faster. 1TWh of solar replaces 1TWh of coal, but 1TWh of solar and 1TWh of nuclear replaces 2TWh of coal.
- adrianN 6y ago
  They are already cheap enough. Renewables are much cheaper than nuclear and competitive with fossil fuels. We don't need another factor 10 cost improvement. All we need is political will to implement the change. We could be running 70% renewable in a couple of years if we wanted to. To get to 100% we might need to improve the cost effectiveness of power-to-gas facilities, but there is zero reason today not to replace the majority of our energy consumption with renewables.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
cookiengineer 6y ago
In general I agree with the renewable energy movement, and also with the ideas that come with modern approaches to electric mobility (like car sharing etc). The only point I have left that I have to agree with, and that's a huge one, is recycling. Our governments across the planet have failed to enforce sustainable recycling pipelines in the plastics industry, how would this be any different? Why is my laptop battery useless after a year and has only 60% power capacity? How is this even legal that warranty for batteries is 6 months? I think that in order to make more sustainable battery tech, we need better recycling pipelines for it. And more important: all the plastics, chips, and pcbs needed around it need to be 100% recycled, not upcycled. And manufacturs reusing only 10% of their materials aren't worth a shit. The ironic thing today is that a simple plumbum/acid based battery is more sustainable than a lithium ion one. It's energy density, however, is a joke. But it never gets useless, and is maintainable, and, more importantly, doesn't lose energy density over time so it's ideal for buildings that have a longer lifetime than a car.
- richardw 6y ago
  Checkout Ambri. Lots of videos on YouTube. I’d love to invest. https://ambri.com/technology/ https://ambri.com/technology/ Anyone got any cons?
cbmuser 6y ago
> This is important to keep in mind when you read articles and/or studies about how electric cars or wind or solar power is impractical. A lot of the data these studies use is just obsolete. Solar power and electric cars aren’t impractical because of the price tag of the technology but because of their fundamental properties. Solar power cannot produce electricity on demand which is why solar (and wind parks) can never compete in a free electricity market where prices are formed based on supply and demand. A product such as electricity is worthless if it’s all produced during peak hours even if demand is low to moderate at the time or extremely expensive when it’s hardly produced while demand is high. Even if solar and wind parks would cost nothing to build, this problem wouldn’t go away simply because prices are formed by supply and demand which have to be in balance for prices no to fall or jump extremely. This is the reason why Germany’s electricity costs twice as much to the end user as compared to France and still causes up to ten times as much of greenhouse gas emissions per kWh as compared to France. As for electric cars: The fundamental problem is refueling time and its geographical flexibility. A car with a combustion engine can be refueled within minutes anywhere on the planet. An electric car has to be refueled for at least an hour and needs to be recharged at a station while an ICE car can be refueled on the right-most lane of a highway if you run out of fuel and someone with a jerry can comes to your rescue. The fundamental problem with battery electric cars is that energy is changing its form during refueling (electricity => chemical form) which is why there is an upper limit to how fast such a car can be refueled. For ICE cars, the energy is put into your tank without changing its form which is why ICE cars can be refueled within seconds if necessary (see Formula 1 cars). This limitation is the main problem with battery electric cars and the reason why you won’t see any large numbers of police or emergency vehicles which are battery powered in the foreseeable future. There is a reason why solar/wind and electric cars remain highly subsidized in many countries despite of the fact that the technology is becoming cheaper. Both products wouldn’t be able to compete in a free market due to their fundamental shortcomings.
- HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
  A bad implementation of something doesn't mean the fundamental idea doesn't work. Germany phased out nuclear not coal for political reasons. There are plenty of examples of grid tier battery projects that have worked wonders with reducing peak demands.
aktan_00zerp 6y ago
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max_ 6y ago
It doesn't matter how much the price falls. The real question to answer is the efficiency compared to existing energy sources.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

Yes, using obsolete data from when tech was bleeding edge in 1999 to imply things about cost going forward is misleading. On the other hand using improvement over the same timeline, drawing a line on a graph and saying "look how X Y is gonna be in Z years" is the same exact type of stupid but pointed in a different direction. In 1991 lithium was highly immature technology and would take about a decade to make it into fragile electronics. It took another decade to make it into power tools. Now it's viable in high end commuter vehicles. If it was easy to predict the future a decade out with any reliability we wouldn't be having this discussion.

ip26 6y ago
drawing a line on a graph and saying "look how X Y is gonna be in Z years" is the same exact type of stupid And yet we do it every ~18 months with semiconductors. Imperfect to be sure, but if you don’t skate to where the puck is headed, you will miss opportunity.
- dmoy 6y ago
  > And yet we do it every ~18 months with semiconductors. So, this is about to stop. Very soon. Quantum tunneling, yield rates, etc are all starting to be cost prohibitive. <10nm stuff was already delayed. There's plans for 3nm. It's unclear yet whether 2nm will work. Even if hypothetically it does, there's a very real limit - an atom is only 10x smaller than 2nm.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    On the one hand, I remember people saying the same about nodes much larger than those we currently use. On the other, yes: continue current trends and single atom transistors become standard in 10-32 years.
    - usrusr 6y ago
      I think it boils down to we will hit a wall, but we don't know exactly when we'll hit it. (and how hard, chances are that higher-hanging-fruit refinements will make the transition to stagnancy so gradual that we may not notice at all) A jump from "all past predictions failed" to "and so will all future predictions" seems rather bold to me. In the end it's like a somewhat upended variation of the "x decades to practical fusion" thing where we all hope that the old joke that x might be a natural constant is eventually proven wrong.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        Well, the main direction of refinements at this point seem to be around composable/heterogeneous computing where we basically have a lot of hardware optimized for specific workloads and throw the complexity at the software people. i.e. now deal with GPUs, DPUs, FPGAs, xCPUs, etc. instead of (largely) just a standardized set of CPU instructions.

minitoar 6y ago

Are there many gains to be had on electric motors? I guess I sort of assumed those had seen quite a bit of optimization already.

iknowstuff 6y ago
> The engineers of Tesla motor's shocked everyone when they abandoned the versatile induction motor in Model 3 cars. They used a totally different motor called IPM-SynRM. Let's understand why the Tesla engineers made this crucial design change. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esUb7Zy5Oio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esUb7Zy5Oio
- ninjinxo 6y ago
  Hrmm, so the cost and performance is much the same, but it adds value by creating a new talking point for Tesla owners to harangue others with.
  - callmeal 6y ago
    >Hrmm, so the cost and performance is much the same, but it adds value by creating a new talking point for Tesla owners to harangue others with. I know that hating on Tesla is a thing, but don't forget the higher torque, better efficiency, lower heat generation in the stator windings. And the fact that this type of motor first showed up in the Prius and Tesla made a better version of it. Yeah they're getting away with saying they invented it Prius were touting their continuously variable transmission instead of thier motors.
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      I'm as big of a Tesla fan as any, but I'm both continuously impressed with how ahead-of-its-time the Prius was and continuously disappointed how lack-luster Toyota has been in pure electric cars. Toyota had like a decade lead on everyone else and just.... sat on it. Only invested in hybrids and hydrogen (which was and is a dead end). Toyota could've gone all-in on pure electric cars (and better plug-in hybrids than they had at the time) a good decade ago but instead they continue to waste money on hydrogen.... Only now finally announcing pure-electric cars in the US: https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/10/22187113/toyota-electric-vehicles-us-suv-debut-hybrids https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/10/22187113/toyota-electric-... It's really sad. It's really bad for the climate that they just sat on the Prius drivetrain, which is 95% of the way to a pure electric car, for over two decades (it was released in 1997... it's 2021 right now!). Literally, people have modded (i.e. added extra battery capacity) Priuses from 2003 to be pure electric even at highway speeds with the same motor and controller. They had everything sitting right there. It's incredibly frustrating.

baybal2 6y ago

> Say you have an opinion piece in a news paper that says that electric cars will always be expensive toys for the rich. Well, you don't see poor people buying EVs that much. That's car manufacturer statistics, which I believe deserves a good degree of trust. In the market for new cars, poor people buy cheapest IC cars, but not cheapest EVs. I will take the point that middle class is now buying budget EVs, but you don't have real economy class EVs selling that well in the West, and in China as well. Wuling Mini EV will classify as a true economy class EV, but what people lauding it don't say it that Chinese IC vehicles in the same price range outsell Mini EV many, many times over.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> you don't see poor people buying EVs that much You do, however, see upper middle class people buying them. Which wasn't the case a decade ago, when the Leaf came out [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Leaf
908B64B197 6y ago
How about hybrids like Priuses?
WebDanube 6y ago
I'm not a free market apologist by any means, but we also didn't see "poor people" or folks in the lower economic strata buy mobile devices and smartphones when they became first available, at least not the scale we're seeing now (without mentioning the fact that the devices were crazy expensive when first launched, adjusting for inflation). Economy of scale is a thing, and imo it's OK to use the rich and the wealthy as 'guinea pigs' of sorts (which mostly is voluntary as the wealthy are more likely to make riskier bets on new tech than people living paycheck-to-paycheck). As EV market extends downwards on the economic 'pecking order,' I'm really hoping even more drastic cost reduction and lower barriers of entry into the EV market for folks that are not rich.
- iagovar 6y ago
  An expensive phone is about 500-1000€. A cheap EV is in the 20K neighborhood, and the functionality is pretty bad compared to a cheap second-hand utility car (pretty hard to travel outside your city). Even when regulations push prices up, it's still far more economical to buy a cheap gas car than a cheap EV. Even in Europe there are plenty of countries where many people can't afford an EV. They can afford second-hand ICE cars. So unless there can be a second-hand market of EVs for about 6K without worrying about the battery, and with a similar functionality of a second-hand ICE car, then yes, EVs will be for upper income brackets. And I'm not even mentioning that most people lives in apartment buildings, and it's very likely that your car sleeps in the street. I've seen this discussions around here. People won't buy EVs in the near future because they are expensive, have very low range, you have to have a house, or own a flat (because nobody will pay for a charger installation in a rented flat) with garage, etc. What people is buying is little electric Scooters. Most of them are <500€ and you can charge em everywhere. It makes sense for travelling inside a city. Spending 20K for not being able to go from Santiago to Madrid, doesn't make any sense.

sokoloff 6y ago

> while a car lasts only 10-15 years While it might be the case that today’s EVs will not be economically longer-lived than 15 years, the overall average age of a car in the US is 12 years, and most of my cars have been bought with 10 or more years on them as it makes for very inexpensive motoring (no need for collision or comprehensive insurance, no financing interest, and nearly no depreciation). I bought my 2015 LEAF new and suspect it will not be economically viable in 2030 while our 2005 Honda CR-V is 16 years old now, still going strong, and most likely will still be in service in 2030.

chrisseaton 6y ago
> no need for collision or comprehensive insurance, no financing interest, and nearly no depreciation But you need to maintain it and have it inspected instead! And you're also paying with your safety - ten years is a very long time in safety technology these days!
- r00fus 6y ago
  Surely you jest. What safety features on standard vehicles became indispensable in the past 10 years? Note: things like collision avoidance and adaptive cruise are still luxury features and the OG poster wouldn’t have bought those anyway.
  - lumost 6y ago
    Collision avoidance is now standard tech. Subaru has been making automatic breaking/adaptive cruise control a standard feature of all new model designs. Legacies MSRP at 22k, and the 18k impreza is due for a redesign in 2022. A quick google shows that the 2021 versa may be the cheapest car with automatic breaking at $16600 MSRP. https://www.subaru.com/engineering/safety.html https://www.subaru.com/engineering/safety.html https://www.nissanusa.com/shopping-tools/build-price?models=versa&modelYear=current-year https://www.nissanusa.com/shopping-tools/build-price?models=...
    - brucehoult 6y ago

aidenn0 6y ago

There were similar things at the dawn of the jet age. Someone wrote a paper demonstrating that jet power could not improve over propeller power because radial-flow compressors generated too much drag and axial-flow compressors were too inefficient. What the author of the paper didn't know is that, contemporary to him, it was discovered that shaping each blade of an axial-flow compressor like an airfoil significantly improved efficiency. Thus a "physics problem" became a "manufacturing problem"

MomoXenosaga 6y ago
You can't predict a breakthrough but they tend to change everything.
- m463 6y ago
  What's fascinating is that moores law was successful far longer than people imagined.

markdown 6y ago

> a car lasts only 10-15 years Is this normal where you live (presumably the US)? I find that really wasteful. Cars last twice that in my country, and we have tropical, seaside (salt = rust) weather to deal with.

bdcravens 6y ago
25% of cars are 16+ years, and the longevity of cars is increasing https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/28/25percent-of-cars-in-us-are-at-least-sixteen-years-old----record-high.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/28/25percent-of-cars-in-us-are-...
mlindner 6y ago
There's a lot of variation in the US depending on where you live. In California the car can be so old the paint has all come off but there's hardly any rust on the car because the air is very dry, it doesn't rain much, temperature variation is low and salt isn't used on roads. On the other hand you can be places like Canada or the northern midwest where Temperature swings by 100F between summer and winter, salt is used heavily on roads to melt snow, rain is common during the warmer months, and humidity levels in the summer are high. This causes cars, especially those not in covered garages to quickly rust and not last more than 15 years or so before too many components and body frame have rusted away.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  And meanwhile, my Highlander will be old enough to drink in a couple years, has lived everywhere from the East Coast to the Bay Area to (currently) the Great Basin, has been taken offroad on multiple occasions, has handled dozens of blizzards like a champ, and (knock on wood) is still hanging in there, even with my rather inconsistent maintenance. So I'd say a lot of this depends on the model, and possibly the make.
Tagbert 6y ago
In the US, the average age of all cars is 12 years, so a 10-15 year lifespan is pessimistic.

vmception 6y ago

Is there a good way to quickly understand this for any topic? Like, take something you might not be interested in and just "don't get". Your conclusions will be very quick but based on the current state of things. The people that "do get it" might be crazy, or they might be seeing a longer trend that they've been following so long that they never articulated it, and aren't even capable of articulating it. How is one supposed to form opinions on new topics where the state rapidly changes?

philipkglass 6y ago
There is no easy shortcut. There are some people who have kept up with academic research, commercial developments, and trend lines over enough time to filter out short term noise. Some of them blog or write long comments on HN. But unless you are one of those people yourself, you won't be able to tell which writers are trustworthy. You can rapidly filter a lot of noise out of energy news with knowledge of physics and chemistry from 100-level university courses (or equivalent) [1]. But most people never acquired this knowledge and a lot of those who have only retained it long enough to pass tests in school. 10 years later they don't remember the difference between power and energy or why some chemical reactions are exothermic and others endothermic. [1] This knowledge is actually helpful to filter news in general when it makes assertions about the physical world.

u320 6y ago

> There are numerous arguments about how we will always need coal power or nuclear power, or natural gas and they all base it on old studies with obsolete high costs of batteries. This is simply not true. I'm sure there are some bad articles out there but that's true for anything. See e.g. https://www.cell.com/joule/pdf/S2542-4351(18)30386-6.pdf https://www.cell.com/joule/pdf/S2542-4351(18)30386-6.pdf where they authors find non-intermittent power production to be necessary even under an assumption of a further 75% drop (from 2018 levels) in battery prices.

pfdietz 6y ago
No, they find "firming power" is needed. That could be hydrogen burned in turbines. Firming is not non-intermittent, it's dispatchable

an_opabinia 6y ago

While I agree with you broadly, Tesla loses money on its car business. It was profitable for a full year because of the money it makes from selling carbon credits. That’s not exactly a federal subsidy but it’s not making cars either. So I feel like going at this all angry complaining about imprecision or a lack of focus on details comes off ironic.

minhazm 6y ago
This is a common misconception that keeps getting repeated for some reason. It's silly to exclude the regulatory credit income but then also count things like stock based compensation and capitol expenditures for new factory builds. Tesla did $1.6 billion in regulatory credits in 2020. Tesla stock based compensation in 2020 was $1.7 billion due to Elon Musk's performance based compensation plan and TSLA skyrocketing. So the car business is clearly profitable. Then there's the capitol expenditure on building out new factories and expanding their production capacity. From Tesla's 2020 Q3 10Q filing: > we currently expect our capital expenditures to be at the high end of our range of $2.5 to $3.5 billion in 2020 and increase to $4.5 to $6 billion in each of the next two fiscal years. They're planning on spending up to $12 billion between 2021-2022 to build out new factories and expanding their capacity. Their car business is clearly profitable, they're just spending all of the money to grow.
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  Is it a misconception? If the credit didn’t exist they would not be profitable. They lose money on the cars. They sell more cars, they lose more money. I like the company and I like electric cars, but I’m not stupid, I’m not misconceiving anything.
  - JeffL 6y ago
    Yes it's a misconception. Their profit margin on cars is consistently over 20%. They have large overhead costs that are more or less fixed like R&D that get amortized more and more as sales go up. They have massive net free cash flow every quarter even while building out new factories that will increase production capacity by 50% every year for the next several years, further increasing economies of scale and operating margins.

waheoo 6y ago

This same problem has plagued climate science as well, giving munition for deniers and otherwise just confusing the public. You want to see the real writing on the wall? The IPCC report takes 10 year old settled science and makes models using it. The real, more recent data is much, much worse.

terafo 6y ago
> The real, more recent data is much, much worse. Where can I read anything on this?
- Qwertious 6y ago
  There's a video on YouTube, Gwynne Dyer -- Geopolitics in a Hotter World (2010) ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY ), which very briefly touches on it IIRC. I'm talking about the bit that starts at 8m30s on the video, but I highly recommend watching the whole thing (or at leas the 1-hour talk part - the Q&A is practically inaudible for me). Basically, the IPCC doesn't publish studies - they study compilations of studies, every 4-5 years. And when they start compiling, they have a cut-off date at the very start and only use studies that have been both completed and have passed peer review from before that date. Meanwhile, the studies themselves have the same problem - they obviously can't start the study with incomplete data and update the data as they go. The studies need to start with data that finished before they started the study. And on top of that, they're necessarily a reserved body (Icd say "conservative" but that's ambiguous in politics) - IPCC is run by a bunch of governments trying to figure out the bare minimum of emissions reduction they need to commit to, to not be negligent - they don't want to hear bad news unless it's certain. The end result is that the data in the report is 10+ years out of date.
  - waheoo 6y ago
    The (non political) conservatism is the major issue. They select for conservative non alarmist studies leaving more alarmist ones as outliers, the studies themselves do the same thing. The compounding effect of this along with the time lag is just so damn disturbing.

agumonkey 6y ago

I have a similar issue with climate change strategies. The people behind are surely more educated and mentally skilled than I, but I have a feeling they couldn't avoid ignoring false assumptions in the current model, which leads to bad policies and wasted time (and also anxiety).

iamgopal 6y ago

In the world where data is new oil, no body is going to give it for free or even for money as they themselves could use it for much higher profits. I assume all news assumptions or data to be wrong and look for after effect evidence that prove that it could be true.

godelski 6y ago

> This is important to keep in mind when you read articles and/or studies about how electric cars or wind or solar power is impractical. A lot of the data these studies use is just obsolete. My understanding is that phone batteries are extremely different from batteries for large storage. They have vastly different cycle and draw requirements (you can't quick draw on your phone battery). I don't think these studies are being nefarious, but looking at different batteries, where this article is averaging. Reading the article it doesn't give any inclination that they are differentiating these types of batteries.

danans 6y ago
IIRC, Tesla's first car batteries were made from laptop cells.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> Furthermore, nuclear plants take 5 to 10 years to even build. But that's the problem. The cost of solar and batteries is declining rapidly. For how long? We don't know. Exponential curves eventually flatten out. We had Dennard scaling until we didn't. So the question is, do they get cheap enough before they hit the wall? We have two choices. Choice one, build new nuclear plants, and then if alternatives are even cheaper, we pay the current/historical price for electricity for a while instead of some lower price (or the investors in the nuclear plants lose money, take your pick). This also gives us new nuclear plants to use to destroy all the stupid plutonium created by old nuclear plants, even if it costs more, and we really do have to get rid of that stuff. Choice two, we don't, and bet everything that the alternatives get cheap enough before we hit the wall. In which case we're completely screwed if we bet wrong, because it takes a long time to build new nuclear plants, so if we don't start now by then it'll be too late.

ComodoHacker 6y ago
So, diversify and do both?
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  Exactly. And for extra points, this phases out oil and coal faster. 1TWh of solar replaces 1TWh of coal, but 1TWh of solar and 1TWh of nuclear replaces 2TWh of coal.
adrianN 6y ago
They are already cheap enough. Renewables are much cheaper than nuclear and competitive with fossil fuels. We don't need another factor 10 cost improvement. All we need is political will to implement the change. We could be running 70% renewable in a couple of years if we wanted to. To get to 100% we might need to improve the cost effectiveness of power-to-gas facilities, but there is zero reason today not to replace the majority of our energy consumption with renewables.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago

cookiengineer 6y ago

In general I agree with the renewable energy movement, and also with the ideas that come with modern approaches to electric mobility (like car sharing etc). The only point I have left that I have to agree with, and that's a huge one, is recycling. Our governments across the planet have failed to enforce sustainable recycling pipelines in the plastics industry, how would this be any different? Why is my laptop battery useless after a year and has only 60% power capacity? How is this even legal that warranty for batteries is 6 months? I think that in order to make more sustainable battery tech, we need better recycling pipelines for it. And more important: all the plastics, chips, and pcbs needed around it need to be 100% recycled, not upcycled. And manufacturs reusing only 10% of their materials aren't worth a shit. The ironic thing today is that a simple plumbum/acid based battery is more sustainable than a lithium ion one. It's energy density, however, is a joke. But it never gets useless, and is maintainable, and, more importantly, doesn't lose energy density over time so it's ideal for buildings that have a longer lifetime than a car.

richardw 6y ago
Checkout Ambri. Lots of videos on YouTube. I’d love to invest. https://ambri.com/technology/ https://ambri.com/technology/ Anyone got any cons?

cbmuser 6y ago

> This is important to keep in mind when you read articles and/or studies about how electric cars or wind or solar power is impractical. A lot of the data these studies use is just obsolete. Solar power and electric cars aren’t impractical because of the price tag of the technology but because of their fundamental properties. Solar power cannot produce electricity on demand which is why solar (and wind parks) can never compete in a free electricity market where prices are formed based on supply and demand. A product such as electricity is worthless if it’s all produced during peak hours even if demand is low to moderate at the time or extremely expensive when it’s hardly produced while demand is high. Even if solar and wind parks would cost nothing to build, this problem wouldn’t go away simply because prices are formed by supply and demand which have to be in balance for prices no to fall or jump extremely. This is the reason why Germany’s electricity costs twice as much to the end user as compared to France and still causes up to ten times as much of greenhouse gas emissions per kWh as compared to France. As for electric cars: The fundamental problem is refueling time and its geographical flexibility. A car with a combustion engine can be refueled within minutes anywhere on the planet. An electric car has to be refueled for at least an hour and needs to be recharged at a station while an ICE car can be refueled on the right-most lane of a highway if you run out of fuel and someone with a jerry can comes to your rescue. The fundamental problem with battery electric cars is that energy is changing its form during refueling (electricity => chemical form) which is why there is an upper limit to how fast such a car can be refueled. For ICE cars, the energy is put into your tank without changing its form which is why ICE cars can be refueled within seconds if necessary (see Formula 1 cars). This limitation is the main problem with battery electric cars and the reason why you won’t see any large numbers of police or emergency vehicles which are battery powered in the foreseeable future. There is a reason why solar/wind and electric cars remain highly subsidized in many countries despite of the fact that the technology is becoming cheaper. Both products wouldn’t be able to compete in a free market due to their fundamental shortcomings.

HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
A bad implementation of something doesn't mean the fundamental idea doesn't work. Germany phased out nuclear not coal for political reasons. There are plenty of examples of grid tier battery projects that have worked wonders with reducing peak demands.

aktan_00zerp 6y ago

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max_ 6y ago

It doesn't matter how much the price falls. The real question to answer is the efficiency compared to existing energy sources.