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Road engineering is a pretty mature discipline. If this idea can't pass some of the basic known challenges in a thought exercise, why bother testing it? For e
by danpat 12y ago
Road engineering is a pretty mature discipline. If this idea can't pass some of the basic known challenges in a thought exercise, why bother testing it? For example, they have no explanation as to how the tiles will be adhered to the surface. Silica has poor adherence to asphalt in wet conditions, and silica can react poorly with alkyds in portland cement. Both of those are big hints that it might be impossible to stick these tiles down for their claimed 20 year lifetime.
- mantrax5 12y agoA mature discipline means highly experienced experts. And the thing about experts: they can tell you what can already be done, and tend to reject anything different than what can already be done. It's a well-known caveat. Experts would rather focus on the flaws of the alternatives in order to "disprove" their viability, rather than try & find solutions for said flaws. This solar panel technology may not have all the benefits of traditional roads, but it has benefits which traditional roads don't. It's not possible to really know which set of pros/cons is better for us today, before the technology is tested and iterated upon, to weed out the inevitable issues that will pop up. Any new technology in the history of humanity has failed the "thought exercise" experiments of those deemed experts at the time. Cars, computers, airplanes, heck, even computer mice were called "impossible" at some point.
- joelrunyon 12y agoSeems like the best way to figure those issues out would be to start actively using them to discover the areas where the feature set starts to break down.
- atomicUpdate 12y agoWhat's your plan for when they fail, because we skipped the lab testing phase? Don't forget, a failure will likely include multiple cars in a collision on a faulty road surface (10's of thousands of dollars in damages and risk of loss of life).