Yes. In fact hopefully it is (much) faster, since the self-driving cars will be so much more reliable than meat-popsicle cars.

First, a person can't instantly recognize anything. We have significantly longer reaction times than computer systems. If a child and a dog run out into the street at the same time, a self-driving car has a better chance of hitting neither of them. A human on the other hand will take a lot longer to start braking at all, and in all probability (if the time scales are so low), not actually put any thought or reasoning behind their reaction, they will just try to swerve out of the way, possibly resulting in both being hit.

I wouldn't really like to be liable for those things, but I wouldn't really like to be liable if I did them either. That said, you are absolutely correct in that there are deep legal questions to be answered before we can have ubiquitous self-driving cars. At first blush it seems like the manufacturers are the correct place to put the liability, as in a properly designed system, the only input the driver should have is the destination. You can obviously expect them to fight tooth and nail to not take on this liability, though. It's a very interesting question, but let's actually try to answer it instead of just saying it doesn't work in the currently existing legal framework.

That's one possibility yes, but the reason for it would be to keep the dangerous meat-popsicle cars away from the much safer, much faster, much more efficiently packed autonomous cars.

I see you don't watch the news. Trains derail all the time, wrecking much of their cargo, sometimes spilling nasty chemicals.

So what you are proposing is... a train network. That seems to have worked out incredibly well. Sarcasm aside, it absolutely has for its use-case, but you still see millions of single-occupant cars on the road every day for a reason; that's not going away.

Try digging into this list, you might be able to find something relevant through there.

That's why SpaceX is planning to put these satellites into a lower orbit at around 1200 km.

Collecting the waste heat of the exhaust is a great idea. Except in a standard car you wouldn't particularly care about getting electricity out, so you would want to feed that energy back into the propulsion system somehow... hmm, sounds exactly like a turbocharger.

I've long since abandoned Firefox, but Thunderbird is still my email client of choice. The closest competitor in the Windows ecosystem is Postbox, and it's based on Thunderbird anyway.

This.. this is... genius!! I would pay real currency for a theatrical cut, director's cut, and Kip Thorne's cut of Interstellar!

TortoiseSVN already does this. It uses the hooks in Office to create what is basically a "track-changes" copy, where previous version is the base, and new version is if you accept all changes. This is about as good as it gets to diffing Word files, and flows logically with how they were intended to be used in businesses anyway. It will do the same for Excel, but it's... a monster that should never be allowed to live.

For me, The Hobbit wasn't well-received because 300 pages of children's book does not equal three feature length films, and stereoscopic 3D is a detraction. The higher frame rate was in the otherwise barren "plus" column.

If you are in charge deplete mode (i.e. running off the battery), the Volt will not turn on the ICE nor engage it to the wheels regardless of speed. It is the sources that led to that misunderstanding that I am trying to get to stop spreading false information =/ Sources: a) I own a Volt; b) GM's head of electric propulsion; c) Popular Mechanics; I could keep digging up more if you'd like.

If you watch the "Deep Dive" videos on YouTube, you'll see that the system is actually not that complicated: a fixed planetary gear set with three clutches that only mate when speed-matched. This is much simpler than the transmission in most vehicles, including automatics, standards, and CVTs, so it is disingenuous to say that it could be a maintenance problem. Is it more complicated than a single electrical motor connected only to the wheels? Yes. On the scale of possible automobile complexity is it really that complex? No, not really. Have a look inside a dual-clutch automated manual transmission.

Lastly, I would be very surprised if GM moved away from the Voltec drivetrain. They have invested a lot of money in designing it, and these very aspects that we're talking about are what make it stand apart from other parallel, series, and parallel+series hybrids out there. The fundamental decision is if you're committed to lugging around an ICE to drive a generator, how do you make the most efficient use of it across the full range of driving scenarios? The Cadillac ELR is based on the Voltec drivetrain (slightly different ICE, possibly slightly different motors, and certainly different software) and operates in the same fundamental way.

p.s. The next-generation Volt has already been unveiled, and the new generation of Voltec drive-train appears to operate in much the same manner; they even indicate that a key development is to couple the two motors together in even more driving scenarios

At what opportunity cost? The post you replied to asked about someone struggling financially. If they are struggling financially, then likely the only way to get that $100 per month to put away is to borrow it. The cost of this would erode much of the benefit.

Haha, +1 on that first point. Hurrah for nuanced opinions!

You are exactly right, the Volt cannot be described using the existing "hybrid" terminology. That is why GM fought to call it an "extended-range EV", but no one could get past the part where the engine drives the wheels (sometimes). It's a shame, really. They caved for the ELR; despite having the same basic drive-train (different ICE, probably slightly different motors/electronics, and definitely slightly different software) they are calling it a hybrid :(

Please provide a citation for that being a pure series hybrid being the original intent. Please also provide a citation discussing how the one driving scenario we've discussed above prevents the range extender from being transitioned to a larger battery or a fuel cell. As a counter point, here's one that shows that it wouldn't be difficult at all. Since the ICE is not needed for maximum acceleration or vehicle speed, the Volt does not need that mechanical connection, it is simply an optimization of the equipment that they already had on board for the existing design. Replace the ICE with a battery and you get some higher EV range, but when it runs out it runs out. Replace it with a fuel cell and a Hydrogen tank and you can replenish the battery from that, but now you have to deal with the lack of Hydrogen infrastructure and the challenge of transporting it safely.

The Volt is not a series hybrid. It is not a parallel hybrid. It is not a pure battery-EV. It can be any one of those things depending on driving conditions and state of charge. If you peruse this website and sort by EV% (distance traveled in EV mode as a percentage of total distance traveled) you can see people using their Volts anywhere from nearly completely EV mode all of the time to nearly always series/parallel-hybrid. Obviously there is a use-case for the entire spectrum.

Why all this "likely" talk? The video I linked to is the first in a series of presentations by Pamela Fletcher, the head of GM's electric drive train division. She talks about the trades and the systems design that led to what we have now; it's really pretty interesting. Basically they started out with exactly what you want: a traction motor driving the wheels directly, and a generator motor attached to an ICE, with only electricity flowing between them. Then they said "hey wait a second, electric motors are less efficient at higher RPM; can we use this second electric motor to reduce the speed of the first through a high gear ratio, thus improve overall efficiency at high speeds? By golly we can!". That is why the generator motor is able to couple to the traction motor at high speeds to drive the wheels together.

The fact that there is a mechanical linkage when you then enter charge deplete mode is actually a by-product of wanting the ICE connected to the generator motor, but also wanting the generator motor connected to the planetary gear set. It's not something that was baked in from the start as a "core ideal" or goal, it was something that came about as the result of a number of other trades.

The biggest downside to going this route is that there are intermediate periods of time where the ICE will be free-wheeling, which means they required a throttle assembly. If the generator motor were always attached to the ICE output shaft, you wouldn't need a throttle, because you could just cap the RPM using back torque from the generator motor.

After warming up, the ICE is generally operating at wide-open throttle (peak efficiency for a given power output). Its RPM is capped by the torque put on it by the generator motor and, when in that situation, the planetary gear set. By adjusting the flow of current (and thus the torque) between the two motors, and using the battery as a buffer for transient events, they can adjust the output power of the engine simply by adjusting its output RPM. Keep in mind that the electric motors are not lossless and neither is charging/discharging the battery. Any power going from the ICE output shaft to the drive shaft mechanically is not subject to the losses of going through two electric motors (one to generate the electricity, then a second to turn that electricity back into mechanical energy).

In almost every vehicle, the wheels have independent half-shafts that are connected to each other and to the main drive shaft via a differential. The design of this differential is sometimes different (open vs limited slip vs Torsen, etc.). This applies for pretty much any mass-market vehicle you can think of. The Volt was never looking at individual drive motors for each wheel (neither did Tesla for the Roadster, S, D, or X; do you think there might be a reason for that?).