Re: The EV thread
Reply #141 –
Yes it is interesting the market tactics of long term and short term.
I'd stay away from anything life preserving that starts with "AI", it's a lot of smoke and mirrors, you won't be seeing AI in hospital devices for a long long time yet, until it appears in intrinsically safe type hospital devices don't expect an AI car to be reliable. This is not to confuse complex machinery with something like AI diagnosis of cancer or test results which might we be more reliable than people, however even so people are unlikely to be removed from the loop.
The marketing people are pretty loose at defining car reliability and safety, the systems they build and sell are safe in a statistical sense, they won't kill people any faster than other human drivers, but they aren't as yet safer than human drivers in all circumstances.
I've read a report recently that suggests all EV markets are about to take a hit, followed by a boom. The problem is the existing stock sitting in huge numbers are likely to be redundant before they ever reach the showroom floor due to new battery and energy management technologies coming on stream. For me the EVs alone are not the issue, because even if they can recharge faster or store more energy for longer range, the infrastructure to charge them is still years and years away! FFS, they are threaten blackouts locally from two days of hot weather causing too much load on the system, that's a fraction of the load any significant percentage of EVs will need.
Tesla are spinning new batteries to last 6x longer, "Last" is a bit sneaky, they don't mean drive 6x further they mean the battery has a lifetime 6x longer. Ironic because the batteries in reality don't last anywhere near as long as the old original marketing claimed, but they get away with it because most suburban drivers do not notice the range diminishing. So I gather what the marketing people really mean by 6x longer is that we are now supplying batteries that will actually last as long as they originally claimed they would!
China is an interesting case, my Shanghai associate travels by road to some regional cities on a regular basis, one of his trips takes him past field after field of obsolete EV stretching as far as the eye can see, which by official reports are "stored waiting for recycling!" The only recycling being completed there will be conducted by mother nature. My associate, who works in the polymer / elastomer industry, tells me the particulates coming off the degrading tyres alone are now considered toxic waste in some regions.