JRP3
Hyperactive Member
As I said, the problem is the public. At least in your own vehicle you have some insulation from them.
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Tesla BEV Competition Developments
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I'm annoyed by people talking on the phone, too small seats, thinly spread schedules (ever lived in a village where the bus arrives 2x per day?), multiple changes, delays, waiting in the cold/hot, and I get sick more frequently when using public transport. All of that has not much to do with being working or being poor.
I use both public transport and my diesel car. I try to avoid driving the car, but most of the time it ends up taking 2x the time to use public transport, and as soon as I'm not driving alone it's prohibitively more expensive.
The upsides of public transport are price (when considering TCO and having no car) and environment. And automated shared electric vehicles will be competitive on both. Trains are very heavy and therefore not that environmental friendly compared to EVs. I'm guessing that the optimum for environment and cost is small buses with maybe 8 seats. Even very small vehicles with 120cm width and just two seats in a row might be feasible in the future, when safety is less of a concern because of reliable automated driving. Automated vehicles will also be able to use different rubber compounds for tires reducing abrasion of the rubber, again because safety is less of a concern.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Fantasyland.
If you go back and read that German article, their train system is suffering from congestion at junctions. Two tracks of railway can carry as many people as a 10-lane expressway. Can you imagine trying to replace even one hourly ICE train service with cars? Have fun in your "autonomous taxi / rental car" as you slog along at 0 miles per hour in an endless traffic jam.
I know, the fantasyland fans will say "tunnels!" Yeah, 10 tunnels for each railway line, and then you all wait at the pod elevators, which come out where? Sure. For the price of *this* idiocy, we could tunnel all the railway lines, and build and operate *five times as many of them*, which would solve an awful lot of problems.
Public transportation and *specifically rail* is the only option for extremely busy extremely crowded routes. Autonomous taxis and rental cars are fine for vacant rural areas such as the one I live in, but they're just comedy material for corridors with thousands of people travelling back and forth every hour.
I don't know why so many people don't understand this because it's actually very simple:
-- low capacity needs --> cars (whether private or taxi)
-- high capacity needs --> big long trains
From studying transportation for a long time, I've concluded there really isn't anything in the middle -- i.e. buses have a niche so narrow it makes little sense. Obviously for really short distances, walking replaces everything, both cars and trains, and bicycles have a place next to walking, but that's for short distances.
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P.S. The rural areas where cars are best are the hardest areas to make cars autonomous, so much though I'd love rural robotaxis, I don't expect to see them in my lifetime. We do have normal taxis driven by humans, of course -- an extremely slow option in a rural area since you have to wait for the taxi to come to you from its hub.
OK, so you're one of the sane ones who understands that passenger rail *is* a necessity for a big city. I think we can communicate
I drive, obviously. The number of lunatics who cut me off, passing on the right while speeding, is terrifying. I'd rather be in a subway, where I'm safe from rageaholics with death machines.
I swear 2/3 of the people on the road don't know how to drive -- tailgating is endemic. We should establish "driver's licenses" or something.
Instead, Tesla is, last I checked, selling an "Autopilot" which actually allows you to set unsafe following distances. (Not helpful, Elon!)
Basically backwards and incorrect. Think about weight *per passenger*, and remember that rolling resistance for steel-on-steel is much lower than for rubber-on-asphalt.
You're wrong. The optimum is actually super-long trains which are full running extremely frequently, Japanese style. (Japan has the lightest-weight trains, by the way.) This has actually been studied; you don't have to guess.
(Well, the *real* optimum is everyone living within walking distance of work and shopping and everything they need, but that's the second-best.)
Many people (less than half) will still want to live in rural, spread-out areas, of course. And for them (us?) the optimum seems to be, for what it's worth, private electric vehicles.
Arguably the problem is actually suburbs. Dense urban areas + trains work fine. Spread-out rural areas + cars work fine. Many suburbs are not dense enough for trains to work but are too dense for cars to work.
You've given me too many likes lately, so I need to balance things out.
NYC subway subway stats per Wikipedia:
Car holds 250 people
Train has 8 to 11 cars
Average speed is 17 MPH (top speed 55)
Departure rate, 2-5 minutes
So 10 car train at 17 MPH moves 10×250×17 = 42,500 people miles per minute.
At 16 people per pod, and a speed of 60 MPH, it would take 44 pods to equal that rate.
At every 3 minutes, distance between trains is 4,488 feet. Pod nose to nose spacing would need to be 102 feet, if only a single tunnel were used.
424 unique stations. NYC is 303 sq miles, so average coverage is 1 station per 0.71 square miles or a square 0.85 miles per side. So worst case average distance would be around 2,200 ft. 3-7 blocks depending on orientation. A pod station every block would have a density 21 times higher, thus reducing the usage of each. If the sub was every 3 minutes per train, and it takes 44 pods with 21x stations, that puts it at about 1.5 minutes per elevator. Mini stations at buildings would be smart.
Most of the most obnoxious people I've encountered on public transport are middle class people who are drunk or high. I've seen some sketchy people who looked like they were probably poor, but the worst thing they did was glare at people and look menacing.
Probably about half of people take care of things whether they own it or not, but the other half treat the things they don't won with a lot less respect and they get funky fast without a legion of cleaners making sure the muck doesn't get out of control. Most transportation companies and municipalities don't spend the money so the vehicles end up looking funky in short order.
This is probably a more severe problem in the US than anywhere else in the world, but most industrialized countries have growing suburbs so they're catching up to the US. Park N Rides can help getting people from suburbs to urban centers for work and back, but the routes need to be laid out efficiently. When I lived in Seattle the mass transit system was so poorly laid out that when I looked at taking the bus to work when I started working in Redmond, I gave up after 4 transfers and 3 hours one way. If I went into work very early, I could get there in 1/2 hour driving.
Portland laid out the light rail better than Seattle did its bus system, but the highways around the whole region have progressively become more crowded over the 15 years we've lived here. I dread having to go to the Tesla service center and every time I think about it, I am so grateful I can telecommute full time for work (I work for a company in California).
We live in the outer suburbs of Portland. It's nice out here, but it's pretty much impossible to live here without some form of private motor transport. There is bus service, but it's a few buses a day and a very long run to get anywhere. One day I saw how many people were on the bus and started doing some calculations in my head. For the number of people on that bus, the fuel used to get them to their destination was more than if each of those people had driven economy cars alone.
Light rail works great when the population density is very high, but once you get outside the built up part of a city, it starts to become a money losing proposition. Rail is very expensive to build and has high maintenance costs. Buses have high fuel usage, and require a support network too. Running a large bus with less than about 12 passengers is a money and energy losing proposition. Small buses are more fuel efficient, but they require just as many people supporting them as a large bus (one driver per bus, but mechanics, dispatchers, etc.) Ultimately it costs more per mile to run a small bus than a big one.
Driverless, autonomous taxis would be a good transportation alternative for suburbs and rural areas, but they need to drop people off at Park N Ride type hubs or the roads in the cities will be clogged. There is a possibility of getting traffic flowing much faster if all cars are autonomous and all are in communication with one another. Then you won't get the slow down from stops you get now as every car in the string waiting will know when the signal changed and can start moving at the same time and they don't need to be spaced like cars are now because every car knows what every other car is about to do in essentially real time. Traffic lights can be eliminated too as cars will know if another car is approaching an intersection and will change speed so they miss each other.
But just one person driving their own car in this scenario and everything goes back to the way it is now. At some point we may have autonomous only roads, but a lot of roads will have to be able to support legacy cars for a long time to come.
I'm not sure we will ever have a system regulators decide is safe enough that vehicles can run completely without drivers paying attention. I look at the airliner industry where the edge conditions are far, far fewer than on roads and the automated flying systems are decades ahead of autonomous driving and planes are still required to have two pilots.
If autonomous cars need to have a live driver there even if the car is doing 99% of the work, then that person needs to get paid and the whole autonomous taxi idea remains as expensive as Uber or Lyft today. Good news is those people aren't pushed out of the workforce. Automation already threatens mass unemployment. But it also means the predictions of fleets of fully automated cars running around everywhere are as real as flying cars predicted since the 50s.
Mader Levap
Member
Now THERE'S a great barometer by which to judge the entire platform!
The sheer number of stupid things that I've had to fix, many of them due to arcane design decisions, on my daughter's Jetta has led to my not being in any big hurry to acquire another VW...
I think you overestimate the distance needed between two vehicles for safe operation. IIRC in one Boring Company thread you said there is a requirement of the distance between any two vehicles to be at least the stopping distance at the travel speed. I believe this to be wrong. The following examples:
- Flocks of birds
- Bicycle riders (in cities with heavy bicycle traffic. I experienced it in Münster, Germany for example)
- Racecars
Racecars obviously frequently have accidents, but these accidents would be reduced to a minimum with 20% less speed and automation.
I was complaining about tailgating for years, and yet the consequences appear to be limited or people had stop doing it and police would punish it harder. Both my Mercedes and the Model X I tried allow uncomfortably close distances to the car in front. Mercedes is conservative enough that I don't accuse them of allowing unsafe following distances. That is what made me change my mind.
In a fully automated world where all vehicles talked to one another, there would have to be something like stop lights to allow pedestrians to cross in areas where pedestrians are common. Where pedestrians are less common, cars passing can notify other cars around that a pedestrian is waiting and all cars can stop and allow the people to cross.
I agree having to leave a gap of the stopping distance between cars probably is being overly conservative. Unless a car hits something that stops it almost immediately, any car that needs to stop for any reason would take some time to slow down and stop. The reason people keep gaps between themselves and others has more to do with human reaction time than stopping distance. If you have normal reaction times and are following too close, you might plow into the car in front of you if that car has to brake hard.
Race cars don't rear end each other very often, even though they are following close in part because race car drivers tend to have better reaction times than the general public, and the situations where someone might have to stop suddenly are rarer on a race course. When a car loses control, those immediately around them might get caught up in it, but cars on other parts of the course are warned something has happened with flags and via radio.
If you had automated cars that talked to one another all the time, If a car had to stop for some reason, all the cars behind would know within a millisecond and would react far faster than a human could.
Dynastar
Member
Heck yes. Changing the oil on our VW TDI Sportswagon was so annoying. And the intercooler icing that could have easily destroyed the engine... Would not want to sign up for that kind of engineering again.
RobStark
Well-Known Member
Rivian pickup deliveries set to begin in late 2020. Rivian taking $1k reservations now.
105 kWh, 135 kWh, 180 kWh packs.
At launch only two bigger packs available. Prices start at $69k before any incentives.
About the size of a GMC Canyon Crew Cab. What passes today for a midsize 5 passenger pickup truck.
Rivian R1T Electric Pickup Truck Shocks World In LA Debut
105 kWh, 135 kWh, 180 kWh packs.
At launch only two bigger packs available. Prices start at $69k before any incentives.
About the size of a GMC Canyon Crew Cab. What passes today for a midsize 5 passenger pickup truck.
Rivian R1T Electric Pickup Truck Shocks World In LA Debut
Rivian pickup deliveries set to begin in late 2020. Rivian taking $1k reservations now.
105 kWh, 135 kWh, 180 kWh packs.
At launch only two bigger packs available. Prices start at $69k before any incentives.
About the size of a GMC Canyon Crew Cab. What passes today for a midsize 5 passenger pickup truck.
Rivian R1T Electric Pickup Truck Shocks World In LA Debut
That is a well designed truck!
Looking forward to the Ford and Chevy lost sales reports.
Nice.
Is it just me, or does the front look like a crab?
Is it just me, or does the front look like a crab?
JohnSnowNW
Active Member
I like the design, but I think they should be able to get more range out of the 105kW pack...
Now, 230 miles is more than enough range for my use-case (weekend home depot runner), but I'm not willing to shell out $69k for that. I do hope others will.
Now, 230 miles is more than enough range for my use-case (weekend home depot runner), but I'm not willing to shell out $69k for that. I do hope others will.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Yeah not sure about the headlights but overall I like the design. I do wonder how they plan to do a 180kWh pack.
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