4 ms·

This is neat tech, of course. I am not criticizing when I ask: Isn't this a solution without a problem? How hard is it to get out of the car and plug in the c

This is neat tech, of course. I am not criticizing when I ask: Isn't this a solution without a problem? How hard is it to get out of the car and plug in the charge cord? Then there's the question of simple alternatives to a highly complex and potentially dangerous robotic solution. Think children in the garage. Without thinking too hard the first thing that comes to mind is something like the contact rods that electric trams use. These could come out of the top or bottom of the car and make contact with suitably designed safe power delivery system. Another option would be something like the jacks used to lift Formula 1 cars during pit stops. Yet another would be a "docking station" you literally drive into, with contacts that connect through the front of the car. With self-driving Teslas this could be symbiotic. Finally, something like the rig used to refuel jets in flight (probably too complex but I thought I throw it on the table). I could also see something like a one meter diameter coil assembly that normally lays flat on the ground. When the car parks on top of it the motorized assembly comes up and couples with a matching coil on the bottom of the car for power transfer without exposed high voltage connectors. In the end I go back to: how hard is it to plug in a cord? Have we gotten that lazy?

ceejayoz 12y ago
> How hard is it to get out of the car and plug in the charge cord? For the average person? Not very. For the self-driving Teslas of the future? Pretty hard. Same thing for disabled folks who might appreciate not having an additional step in getting out of the car.
- rebootthesystem 12y ago
  > For the self-driving Teslas of the future? Pretty hard Care to explain that? How does a self-driving car make getting out of the car and plugging in a cord "pretty hard".
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    The car takes you and your kid to work/school, then goes to a charging depot or back home. Who's plugging it in?
    - rebootthesystem 12y ago
      That's ridiculous. You are reaching in a feeble attempt to win an argument supporting a senselessly complex solution. OK. I'll play your game. Charging depot: Docking station that the car aligns with and drives up against or onto. Contacts come up, down, in out of either the car or the docking station. It can be as simple as a very inexpensive device on the ground and a compliant wall (to allow for accidents) with alignment markers (high contrast cross, circle, whatever). One might even be able to design it so that it is a drive through docking station with the car stopping in the middle during the charging process. Or, how about the famed battery swap system. Nearby charging station? Well, if cars have 300+ mile range and you charge at home there should be zero need for locating charging stations all over a city. And yet, it can be as simple as a cord in a parking lot at work. No robotics needed. Return home: Put simply. I, and I would guess this is true for most people, have exactly zero interest in my auto-drive car returning home, opening the garage and driving in to charge. Why? Well, more than one reason. Let's just say that bedroom communities would be prime for burglaries. All you have to do is wait for auto cars to let you in. In both cases the whole idea of having your car drop you off and then go back home or to a distant charging station is simply ridiculous. I'll only mention two issues with this, but there are more. First, you just doubled traffic and congestion. If every car is a self-driver and they all return home, you now created a mess of traffic as every car now has somewhere else to go rather than just being parked for the work day. You don't have kids, do you? There is no way in the universe that I would leave my kids inside my self-driving car to be delivered to school. That, on the face of it, is also a ridiculous idea. It would be beyond irresponsible to leave kids in a car driving around town given that, well, shit happens. Second, you are wasting HUGE amounts of energy driving cars around that simply do not need to drive around. The average commuter in the US travels 25 minutes to work. About 1.7 million travel 90 minutes or more each way. About 2.2 million travel 50 miles or more. You are talking about having self-driving cars effectively drive 50 miles to deliver a person, 50 miles back to park and charge, then 50 miles to go pick them up after work and 50 miles to return them home. In other words, you turned a 100 mile round trip into a 200 mile insanely and utterly pointless trip. Seriously, please, try to reason a bit. If you are in the Tesla cargo cult club, fine, you win. You are right. A complex robot is the only sensible way to charge an electric car. On the other hand, if you are not a Tesla fan boy. THINK. A technologically simple docking station is BY A HUGE MARGIN a far more sensible idea. Please don't try to invent ridiculous scenarios to support an equally ridiculous idea. Sometimes ideas are bad. Nothing wrong with that. You don't have to agree with me. Just give it 10 or 20 years and you'll see which approach succeeds in the market. Or none of them. After all, my initial point in this sub-thread is still valid: What the heck is wrong with a simple charge cord? Nothing.
rebootthesystem 12y ago
...and with almost absolute predictability anything that even remotely challenges Musk/Tesla is down-voted on HN. This is a legitimate question. This robotic snake problem is solving a problem that does not exist. And, please, don't invoke the handicapped card as someone already did. They manage just fine today. Anyone, handicapped or not, who qualifies to drive a car can handle plugging a cord into a socket. A 7 year old kid can do it. So why throw a $30,000+ robot at a non-existing problem. I'll tell you why: Musk understands marketing. With oil prices so low and nothing significant coming out of Tesla they all but evaporated from public view. There is/was no news to be had about Tesla. The SUV is tanking. That's a non-story. So, how do we get people talking about Tesla again. We put out outrageous-yet-brilliant-sounding futuristic ideas that are easy to consume by the average Joe and blog writers can parrot liberally. Musk/Tesla sound like geniuses and the general public doesn't even take a millisecond to apply critical thinking to what they just read. The ONLY way a complex robotic auto-charge system might have a tenuous level of applicability is in the context of self driving cars AND "driven" by people so extremely handicapped that they would not be allowed to drive a car today. In other words, paraplegic, severe Parkinsons or other ailments. That scenario is decades away. And, even then, a simple drive-on docking station would be far cheaper, reliable and easier to install than some kind of a robotic snake rig. I love technology as much as anyone on HN and i have been involved in industrial and educational robotics my entire adult life. Yet, I have to be honest with myself and not treat everything like a nail just because I have a hammer. So Tesla will sell you a $30,000 robotic snake for your $80,000 car while Toyota will probably sell you a $3,000 floor-mounted docking station for their $30,000 car. And so will all other manufacturers. Because it makes sense.
- greglindahl 12y ago
  Can you give a reference for the snake costing $30,000? I don't see it mentioned in Elon's tweet, or any of the articles about it.
- slayed0 12y ago
  Allowing the car to be charged with no human interaction in paramount to creating a system of driver-less cars. Imagine the car drops you off at work and then parks itself in a charging area a few blocks away where it can plug itself in. (this is just a theoretical example of course but I hope it demonstrates the value of a system like this).

ceejayoz 12y ago

> How hard is it to get out of the car and plug in the charge cord? For the average person? Not very. For the self-driving Teslas of the future? Pretty hard. Same thing for disabled folks who might appreciate not having an additional step in getting out of the car.

rebootthesystem 12y ago
> For the self-driving Teslas of the future? Pretty hard Care to explain that? How does a self-driving car make getting out of the car and plugging in a cord "pretty hard".
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  The car takes you and your kid to work/school, then goes to a charging depot or back home. Who's plugging it in?
  - rebootthesystem 12y ago
    That's ridiculous. You are reaching in a feeble attempt to win an argument supporting a senselessly complex solution. OK. I'll play your game. Charging depot: Docking station that the car aligns with and drives up against or onto. Contacts come up, down, in out of either the car or the docking station. It can be as simple as a very inexpensive device on the ground and a compliant wall (to allow for accidents) with alignment markers (high contrast cross, circle, whatever). One might even be able to design it so that it is a drive through docking station with the car stopping in the middle during the charging process. Or, how about the famed battery swap system. Nearby charging station? Well, if cars have 300+ mile range and you charge at home there should be zero need for locating charging stations all over a city. And yet, it can be as simple as a cord in a parking lot at work. No robotics needed. Return home: Put simply. I, and I would guess this is true for most people, have exactly zero interest in my auto-drive car returning home, opening the garage and driving in to charge. Why? Well, more than one reason. Let's just say that bedroom communities would be prime for burglaries. All you have to do is wait for auto cars to let you in. In both cases the whole idea of having your car drop you off and then go back home or to a distant charging station is simply ridiculous. I'll only mention two issues with this, but there are more. First, you just doubled traffic and congestion. If every car is a self-driver and they all return home, you now created a mess of traffic as every car now has somewhere else to go rather than just being parked for the work day. You don't have kids, do you? There is no way in the universe that I would leave my kids inside my self-driving car to be delivered to school. That, on the face of it, is also a ridiculous idea. It would be beyond irresponsible to leave kids in a car driving around town given that, well, shit happens. Second, you are wasting HUGE amounts of energy driving cars around that simply do not need to drive around. The average commuter in the US travels 25 minutes to work. About 1.7 million travel 90 minutes or more each way. About 2.2 million travel 50 miles or more. You are talking about having self-driving cars effectively drive 50 miles to deliver a person, 50 miles back to park and charge, then 50 miles to go pick them up after work and 50 miles to return them home. In other words, you turned a 100 mile round trip into a 200 mile insanely and utterly pointless trip. Seriously, please, try to reason a bit. If you are in the Tesla cargo cult club, fine, you win. You are right. A complex robot is the only sensible way to charge an electric car. On the other hand, if you are not a Tesla fan boy. THINK. A technologically simple docking station is BY A HUGE MARGIN a far more sensible idea. Please don't try to invent ridiculous scenarios to support an equally ridiculous idea. Sometimes ideas are bad. Nothing wrong with that. You don't have to agree with me. Just give it 10 or 20 years and you'll see which approach succeeds in the market. Or none of them. After all, my initial point in this sub-thread is still valid: What the heck is wrong with a simple charge cord? Nothing.

rebootthesystem 12y ago

...and with almost absolute predictability anything that even remotely challenges Musk/Tesla is down-voted on HN. This is a legitimate question. This robotic snake problem is solving a problem that does not exist. And, please, don't invoke the handicapped card as someone already did. They manage just fine today. Anyone, handicapped or not, who qualifies to drive a car can handle plugging a cord into a socket. A 7 year old kid can do it. So why throw a $30,000+ robot at a non-existing problem. I'll tell you why: Musk understands marketing. With oil prices so low and nothing significant coming out of Tesla they all but evaporated from public view. There is/was no news to be had about Tesla. The SUV is tanking. That's a non-story. So, how do we get people talking about Tesla again. We put out outrageous-yet-brilliant-sounding futuristic ideas that are easy to consume by the average Joe and blog writers can parrot liberally. Musk/Tesla sound like geniuses and the general public doesn't even take a millisecond to apply critical thinking to what they just read. The ONLY way a complex robotic auto-charge system might have a tenuous level of applicability is in the context of self driving cars AND "driven" by people so extremely handicapped that they would not be allowed to drive a car today. In other words, paraplegic, severe Parkinsons or other ailments. That scenario is decades away. And, even then, a simple drive-on docking station would be far cheaper, reliable and easier to install than some kind of a robotic snake rig. I love technology as much as anyone on HN and i have been involved in industrial and educational robotics my entire adult life. Yet, I have to be honest with myself and not treat everything like a nail just because I have a hammer. So Tesla will sell you a $30,000 robotic snake for your $80,000 car while Toyota will probably sell you a $3,000 floor-mounted docking station for their $30,000 car. And so will all other manufacturers. Because it makes sense.

greglindahl 12y ago
Can you give a reference for the snake costing $30,000? I don't see it mentioned in Elon's tweet, or any of the articles about it.
slayed0 12y ago
Allowing the car to be charged with no human interaction in paramount to creating a system of driver-less cars. Imagine the car drops you off at work and then parks itself in a charging area a few blocks away where it can plug itself in. (this is just a theoretical example of course but I hope it demonstrates the value of a system like this).