Electric vehicles

[TRITON]

@TRITON being into your ebikes, who is the asian company people seem to buy the frame / motor / battery from and then once imported they get the rest of the parts to complete the bike. I have spoken to two lots of cyclist and both said they imported the core ebike bits from asia and one of them wrote down the company name for me but I have lost the paper.

Not had any replies unfortunately, but I found the forums owner Chinese frame builds
See if you recognize any of the frame makes




The only big name company ive heard of that sells bare Ebike frames is Trek.
eg
https://www.swinnertoncycles.co.uk/..._medium=affiliate&utm_campaign=shopforwardcss

 

[Just4Fun]

Take two identical cars and put extra weight in one, and it will be less economical.

Not necessarily.

Take 2 cars like my first car, the 1966 Mini. On one, add some weight in the form of a modern ECU-based ignition system. For sure it would be heavier than the original, but it would also be more economical. Modern cars have a lot more aero features such as front air dams. These also add weight but make the car more economical. You can find a lot of things like that.

Of course not all weight in modern cars improves economy. For example, modern cars are longer at the front to incorporate crumple zones. These take extra material and so add weight. They also make the car safer. Do you want to reduce safety in order to reduce weight?

Other weight adds or improves other features. For example, modern cars have more sound-proofing than older vehicles. This adds weight but makes them more comfortable. Most people don't want the noise levels we used to accept in our cars, and are prepared to pay the increased up-front and running costs necessary to achieve the added comfort.

It is the same with any of the weight added to modern cars. It is all added for a reason, to add or improve some feature. No manufacturer adds weight (and cost) to their products for no benefit. If the cost-benefit equation is not to your liking, don't buy those vehicle. If you know of some way to get the benefits without adding the weight, go ahead and make your fortune - car manufacturers are waiting to hear from you. (No pun intended.)

 

[Daz]

Soon your smart meter will tell you when you can charge your vehicle, good luck!

 

[Blackswanwood]

Soon your smart meter will tell you when you can charge your vehicle, good luck!

Not sure what your point is?

There are already electricity tariffs which enable you to charge at a lower cost when demand is lower for which you need a smart meter. If you need to charge immediately you still can but obviously you pay more. Everyone is a winner.

 

[Agent_zed]

There is no reason for cars to weigh less either. Weight is not important. Large & heavy cars can be more economical than smaller and lighter cars. Why not consider a car's economy rather than its size or weight?

As an example, my first car was a 1966 850cc Mini. It used 50% more fuel than my current BMW yet had much worse performance, far less comfort and weighed far less.

I'm sorry if my example of an old car weight vs new car weight was confusing.

I was not in anyway comparing the actual car and it's technology from the past with the current offerings. The statement I was making was that people currently buy huge SUV type cars because they want huge SUV type cars. There was a reply along the lines that people sometimes need big cars to go the dump or carry some furniture and there was no way they could possibly do that without a huge car.

My point is that similar sized cars existed in the past that were far lighter whilst having the same capacity.

If we apply that to modern cars it makes more sense to drive an estate car rather than driving an SUV type car that will in all likelyhood have a bigger drag coefficient and overall more weight, especially if the SUV is 4x4.

I'd also argue there is in most cases no need for either, as a small car with a roof rack or trailer will do the odd job of getting an ikea wardrobe home once every few years. Yes there are a few people who want to tow caravans (an argument for another day) and a few people in the outer hebrides that actually need 4x4, but the vast majority of people have a huge car and 90+% of the time use it to haul <=100kg of human around.

 

[Agent_zed]

For my book just out (AI Fairness and Beyond, but it's priced for practising lawyers and libraries so I doubt it will be on anyone here's Christmas list) I tried to work out how close the quality of driving is, using data from California which has seen the most extensive use of self driving cars on the roads.

My analysis suggests that in 2019 the quality of driving was roughly equal - self-driving cars caused slightly more reported accidents than human drivers, but with less damage and injury (and it was probable that many human accidents were unreported whereas all self driving car accidents had to be reported to the regulator). Deaths per 100,000 miles were certainly lower than for human drivers. [Sources for the analysis: Jun Wang, Li Zhang, Yanjun Huang, Jian Zhao and Francesco Bella, ‘Safety of autonomous vehicles’ (2020) Journal of Advanced Transportation 1; US government statistics, crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/813060.]

I'm confident that self driving cars have improved since then, and that human drivers have not.

Societal acceptance lags behind statistics, of course, but it gets there if the technology proves itself safe enough for humans to feel comfortable with it. Remember that trains were seen as far more dangerous than horses in the early 1800s (at 40 mph humans would obviously be unable to breathe), and bicycles were too dangerous for women to ride because they would become infertile. More recently, the first fly-by-wire passenger aircraft caused a similar outcry, and even ABS on cars was seen as suspect.

I'm confident we will see self-driving cars on some UK roads within around 5 years. From what I know, rural roads are a special challenge and might be quite a lot further away - surprisingly, the technologies being developed to allow drones to fly in uncontrolled airspace might be a possible route towards self-driving cars on rural roads.

It is interesting and time will indeed tell, but as you mentioned your analysis has come from data in California. I have not been to California so I am prepared to be corrected but I would guess that most of their roads are far bigger and straighter than that of the UK and mainland Europe. Randomly dropping into suburbs on google maps shows huge roads that have cars parked either side with enough space to easy pass two cars inbetween.

A significant amount of roads around my town are in part 1 lane due to parked cars and require a lot of manoeuvring and thought at where to stop and pass. Driving in Bristol (my nearest city) is the same in many places. I'd be interested to see the results of numerous autodriving cars trying to navigate many of the streets at the same time.

Additionally it would be interesting to know when the autodriving is taking place. If it is only being turned on on nice big roads on sunny clear days I would guess you would get less accidents overall, especially if it is turned off when it is raining or snowing. i.e. Has self driving miles been driver selected to take control only on the more safe driving days?

 

[John Brown]

[Anecdote] A friend of mine used to run a small garage, and he spoke of people who brought their old Merc estate cars in for an MOT, and would say "I only keep it for running stuff to the tip 3 or 4 times a year". He'd reply that it would be cheaper to hire a Rolls Royce 2 or three times a year than to tax, insure, service etc.[/Anecdote]

 

[Rhossydd]

My point is that similar sized cars existed in the past that were far lighter whilst having the same capacity.

If we apply that to modern cars it makes more sense to drive an estate car rather than driving an SUV type car that will in all likelyhood have a bigger drag coefficient and overall more weight, especially if the SUV is 4x4.

As has been demonstrated earlier; More weight isn't necessarily a bad thing if it brings significant benefits. Small estate cars disappeared because too few people bought them and people prefer SUV type cars. They give better visibility and are far easier to access if you're trying to get children in or if you have mobility/flexibility issues.

One problem of perception here is that SUV is used generically, but individual cars that get described as such vary a lot in size from genuine monsters like the Range Rovers and Q7s down to small SUVs with a size and economy similar to most cars like the Dacia Duster or VW Tiguan.

 

[woodieallen]

Cyber security failures are common to all types of power generation and distribution. Similarly physical attacks on infrastructure.

Fossil fuels add to insecurity through reliance on global markets for both price and delivery.

Or have I missed something??

Yes you have but I can't go into details...sorry.

 

[Blackswanwood]

It is interesting and time will indeed tell, but as you mentioned your analysis has come from data in California. I have not been to California so I am prepared to be corrected but I would guess that most of their roads are far bigger and straighter than that of the UK and mainland Europe. Randomly dropping into suburbs on google maps shows huge roads that have cars parked either side with enough space to easy pass two cars inbetween.

A significant amount of roads around my town are in part 1 lane due to parked cars and require a lot of manoeuvring and thought at where to stop and pass. Driving in Bristol (my nearest city) is the same in many places. I'd be interested to see the results of numerous autodriving cars trying to navigate many of the streets at the same time.

Additionally it would be interesting to know when the autodriving is taking place. If it is only being turned on on nice big roads on sunny clear days I would guess you would get less accidents overall, especially if it is turned off when it is raining or snowing. i.e. Has self driving miles been driver selected to take control only on the more safe driving days?

There are bigger and wider roads in the US but that doesn’t mean they don’t have tight spaces to navigate. They also have to cope with more lanes and congestion that is as bad if not worse than we see in the UK.

The Waymo taxis are operating 24 hours a day on all types of roads. This picture was taken on a Sunday morning on the waterfront in San Francisco. It’s quiet at the time it was taken but it was packed later as there was an air display on and they were coping fine.

As I mentioned earlier I was sceptical but having seen them I feel differently.

 

[Agent_zed]

Cyber security failures are common to all types of power generation and distribution. Similarly physical attacks on infrastructure.

Fossil fuels add to insecurity through reliance on global markets for both price and delivery.

Or have I missed something??

It was interesting in 2021 when Texas had a bad winter and power failure. There were many quick to blame windfarms for the failure due to icing on the blades. What they didn't want to tell anyone was that the whole system including the Gas power stations had failed as they hadn't winterised the systems. But you can't let people know that fossil fuels aren't the greatest can you.



I believe that was when Governer Ted Cruz took a trip to Cancun to enjoy the sun, whilst everyone else was left in the cold.

 

[Agent_zed]

There are bigger and wider roads in the US but that doesn’t mean they don’t have tight spaces to navigate. They also have to cope with more lanes and congestion that is as bad if not worse than we see in the UK.

The Waymo taxis are operating 24 hours a day on all types of roads. This picture was taken on a Sunday morning on the waterfront in San Francisco. It’s quiet at the time it was taken but it was packed later as there was an air display on and they were coping fine.

View attachment 187345

As I mentioned earlier I was sceptical but having seen them I feel differently.

Hopefully better than a year ago for causing jams. Although apparently still causing issues honking each other whilst parking at night

The waymo system use Lidar and I think optical, which certainly seems to be far better than the optical system that Tesla uses.

 

[Rhossydd]

They also have to cope with more lanes and congestion that is as bad if not worse than we see in the UK.

Motorway 'lanes' and congestion are a simple geometric solution to solve.
Our 'lanes' are less easy to navigate and far less of a simple mathematic problem to solve when you meet on coming traffic.

The lane below is less than a mile from the M25, but narrow, busy, no official passing places, encroaching foliage and often is used by livestock, cyclist and pedestrians.
This is hardly a demanding road compared to many others in the UK.

 

[JackEasy]

Find it laughable that the UK is talking about autonomous driving vehicles when the whole country doesn’t even have mobile internet or radio for that matter.
UK should focus on catching up to the 21st century before talking about adopting 21st century technology.

 

[paulrbarnard]

It is interesting and time will indeed tell, but as you mentioned your analysis has come from data in California. I have not been to California so I am prepared to be corrected but I would guess that most of their roads are far bigger and straighter than that of the UK and mainland Europe. Randomly dropping into suburbs on google maps shows huge roads that have cars parked either side with enough space to easy pass two cars inbetween.

A significant amount of roads around my town are in part 1 lane due to parked cars and require a lot of manoeuvring and thought at where to stop and pass. Driving in Bristol (my nearest city) is the same in many places. I'd be interested to see the results of numerous autodriving cars trying to navigate many of the streets at the same time.

Additionally it would be interesting to know when the autodriving is taking place. If it is only being turned on on nice big roads on sunny clear days I would guess you would get less accidents overall, especially if it is turned off when it is raining or snowing. i.e. Has self driving miles been driver selected to take control only on the more safe driving days?

C2C will let the vehicles negotiate before they even see each other. It actually opens the possibility for very smooth travel in narrow streets. They could even adhoc decide on a one way policy on a group of surrounding roads.

 

[paulrbarnard]

Hopefully better than a year ago for causing jams. Although apparently still causing issues honking each other whilst parking at night

The waymo system use Lidar and I think optical, which certainly seems to be far better than the optical system that Tesla uses.

Tesla are not self driving vehicles…

 

[Agent_zed]

Tesla are not self driving vehicles…

Someone should let Mr Musk know, as he's been saying it since ~2018

 

[paulrbarnard]

Someone should let Mr Musk know, as he's been saying it since ~2018

He is already facing law suits for his misleading and unsafe marketing from both government and private individuals. Tesla web site and owners documents all state that FSD (Full Self Driving) is not a self driving system and that the driver has to remain in control of the vehicle. Tesla is an ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System) solution not AD (Automated Driving)

 

[Delaney]

That's because people are being sold the 'wrong' type of EV. The future isn't having a great big SUV that is exactly the same as the ICE version. Small 1 or 2 seater EVs is where people should be heading for commuter cars.

They aren't quite right yet but the Citreon Ami and the Renault Twizy are where it should he heading.

I like to imagine if city traffic overnight changed to being the above type of cars. Parking would be so easy, there would be far less queues and the air wouldn't be so awful. You could even easily pass down side streets that are currently jammed full of huge cars, making it single lane in a lot of streets.

The issue is, you cannot provide the battery storage and infrastructure to do what you want.

Do you remember when the Uk tried to build what’s now called the ‘millennium dome’?

All of these things seem silly.
The government went in a huge motorway widening programme, increasing pollution, decreasing safety and at a huge cost, when all they had to do, was charge middle lane hoggers for hogging the middle lane.
There was no need to add an extra lane.
When someone hogs the middle lane on a 3 lane motorway, you effectively now have a two lane motorway.
It’s the same with EV’s.
Fuel is plentiful, cars are ever more efficient, reliable, cheap to buy and make, everyone can
buy one. It has great strategic importance in times of war, It can be stored safely, it can be moved around easily and used at source without the nees for complicated and or expensive technology, that will never be available to the masses.

 

[Delaney]

Driverless vehicles don't get angry, drunk, tired, emotional, argue with the boss, worry about money, hormonal, etc etc etc.

They have other potential flaws - inadequately tested software, faulty sensors, poor quality control.

Autonomous vehicles do not need to be perfect - merely better than their flesh and blood alternative.

They are very close!!!

This idea you have of ‘close’ is impossible to state because you have no idea the gap between ‘it works’ and ‘it needs a driver at all times’. That last jump could be vast.
It is likely that we’re closer to ‘working’ self driving cars, and having done no research at all, than we are to them being truly safe.