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THE Self-Driving Car / Ridesharing Thread

Discussions of conventional and alternative energy production technologies.

Re: THE Self-Driving Car / Ridesharing Thread

Unread postby ennui2 » Tue 06 Sep 2016, 01:09:56

"If the oil price crosses above the Etp maximum oil price curve within the next month, I will leave the forum." --SumYunGai (9/21/2016)
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Re: THE Self-Driving Car / Ridesharing Thread

Unread postby kublikhan » Tue 06 Sep 2016, 01:28:18

pstarr wrote:Sorry, but I just don't see anything sacred about the March of Progress or human ingenuity. Sorry to bring you and mosennui down again. :cry: I know. I am such a Debbie-Downer. The Death of Party lol
It's more like you are just stuck in the past. Tech changes rapidly. If you do not keep your knowledge up-to-date it will very quickly become obsolete.

pstarr wrote:I would not bet the store on superconducting, neural nets, quantum computing, biological microprocessors or light-speed computers. It's all conjecture.
Yeah I wasn't talking about some of the more out there stuff. I was talking about stuff already being done today such as Intel's "Tick Tock" model. The "Tick" is the die shrink. That's what let's you pack more and cheaper transistors into a smaller space. And every 2 years Intel has managed to shrink it's die like clockwork. Until now. As transistors get smaller and smaller pulling off this trick has gotten harder and harder. For over a decade there have been predictions of the death of Moore's Law. Well it is finally happening. Instead of taking 2 years Intel is taking longer. Instead of a 2 step process it will be 3 step. Not Tick-Tock but now Process-Architecture-Optimization. This doesn't mean progress will stop. It just means die shrinks will slow down. Intel is on 14nm now. They are rolling out 10nm next year. The 7nm process is already in the development stage. This shrinking will stop eventually. But it has not yet. And even when it does, that is only the "Process" section where progress stagnates. There is still "Architecture" and "Optimization". So it is incorrect for you to claim computing progress has stopped just because die shrinks are taking longer than 2 years now.

pstarr wrote:Even multi-core CPU's have barely advanced processing power, and is mostly a cute sales tool. We've known this for decades.
Application developers have made great strides to introduce multi-threaded support into their applications. Video encoders, compression tools(WinRar, WinZip, etc) and OSes were among the first to add support for this. And it helps ALOT. It is not just some cute sales tool. I am speaking from personal experience here. My video encoding runs much faster on my new multi core system. There are Benchmarks here if you don't believe me. Nowadays even game developers have added multithread support. I couldn't even run a game I bought on my old dual core. I had to go upgrade my system because the minimum it requires is a quad core, which is becoming pretty standard nowadays:

Dragon Age: Inquisition Minimum Requirements
CPU Speed: AMD quad core CPU @ 2.5 GHz, Intel quad core CPU @ 2.0 GHz
Dragon Age: Inquisition System Requirements

Those are just my personal experiences with how multi-core has improved computing. I'm sure there are plenty of others.
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Re: THE Self-Driving Car / Ridesharing Thread

Unread postby ennui2 » Tue 06 Sep 2016, 09:34:10

It's informative for anyone else reading the thread but this is all you'll expect from PStarr:

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Re: THE Self-Driving Car / Ridesharing Thread

Unread postby ralfy » Tue 06 Sep 2016, 21:46:34

The problem isn't so much the computing power needed for self-driving cars but the material resources and energy needed to create such a system.
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Re: THE Self-Driving Car / Ridesharing Thread

Unread postby vox_mundi » Wed 07 Sep 2016, 12:17:28

Michigan may soon allow self-driving cars without drivers

LANSING, Mich. – Right now, Michigan law requires self-driving cars to contain a human back-up driver to take over in the case of an emergency. However, those rules could soon change.

Bills approaching the Michigan Legislature would allow self-driving to be tested on public roads without a driver under certain conditions.

The bill is expected to be approved by the Senate on Wednesday, and could likely reach Governor Snyder’s desk in a few months.


The bills also would authorize the public operation of driverless cars and tight “platoons” of commercial trucks to travel in unison at electronically coordinated speeds.


Google’s self-driving cars will detect police vehicles

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Google has developed a police vehicle detection system for their self-driving cars. The detection system automatically detects police vehicles based on the pattern of flashing lights on the police cars. For example, in the US, the police vehicles often have a flashing light system with four different light sources in a generally horizontal configuration. The four light sources emit a red light and a blue light alternatively.

Once a police vehicle is detected, the self-driving car manoeuvres itself to yield to the police vehicle; for example, by pulling over to a side of a road.

The system can also be used to detect other types of emergency vehicles such as ambulances based on ambulance light patterns.


Tauranga the venue for New Zealand's first official autonomous vehicle demonstration

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Autonomous driving will become a reality in New Zealand in November when Tauranga hosts the country's first official demonstration of how it all works.

A specially kitted-out Volvo will demonstrate the technology along a 15 km stretch of public road - with other vehicles also using the road.

It's going to happen during the New Zealand Traffic Institute (Trafinz) conference, which will look at how New Zealand's transportation industry is embracing and adapting to rapid and complex changes in urban centres and rural communities.


Watch a Volvo executive play chicken with a self-driving truck in an underground mine

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Volvo just released a short, highly produced video of its autonomous truck driving itself through an underground mine as a demonstration of its technology in rough conditions. It also features a Volvo executive risking his life by playing chicken with the driverless vehicle.

With a movie trailer-like soundtrack throbbing in the background, the truck is shown driving itself through the twisting corridors of Sweden’s Kristineberg mine, which is over 4,000 feet below the surface. There is no driver behind the steering wheel, even though it appears to be turning itself.

As the music reaches a crescendo, the truck stops mere inches from a man in a mining helmet and yellow slicker, who turns out to be Torbjörn Holmström, Volvo’s chief technology officer. (It’s reminiscent of that scene from 1989’s Batman when the self-driving Batmobile brakes in front of our hero with barely an inch to spare.)

“Thank you for stopping,” Holmström says to the truck, before climbing in the cab. From the passenger seat, Holmström says the autonomous truck is the first in the world that can “drive itself through these difficult conditions.”

Holmström admits the stunt made him nervous. “No matter what type of vehicle we develop, safety is always our primary concern and this also applies to self-driving vehicles,” he said. “I was convinced the truck would stop but naturally I felt a knot in my stomach until the truck applied its brakes!”


Major job losses feared when self-driving cars take to the road

... Many ride-hailing drivers are dubious about their future but figure they will have time to devise a Plan B.

“Most drivers know (autonomous cars) are coming; it’s just a matter of when,” said Christian Perea, who drives part time for Uber and Lyft in San Francisco and writes for the Rideshare Guy blog. (Lyft is also pursuing driverless taxis through a partnership with General Motors.) “But I don’t think it will be a situation where robots show up one day and clean house within five minutes. It will happen slowly enough for me and others to adapt and find other ways of earning money.”

The majority of Lyft and Uber drivers work part time, studies show. Many drivers already plan to transition to other work, as spates of price cuts by Uber and Lyft have hurt their income, Perea said.

Edward Escobar, a San Francisco driver and founder of the Alliance for Independent Workers, an association of ride-service drivers and other contractors, takes a dim view.

“Uber has Walmartized the process and brought on people to be like spokes in a wheel, replaceable, expendable,” he said. “Most drivers will get the short end of the stick” when autonomy happens. Meanwhile he’s already looking ahead, diversifying the types of gigs he does.

Labor leader Andy Stern sees the biggest potential hit to America’s 3.5 million truck drivers. “Commercial truck driving is going to be the leading edge of a tsunami of labor displacement,” said Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union. “It’s not something the next generation is going to have to deal with — it’s going to happen in the next decade.”

Truck drivers, he noted, support a vast web of workers whose own jobs may be imperiled.

“We’re talking millions of jobs: the drivers themselves, but also the people in insurance, repairs, restaurants, hotels,” Stern said. “I think it’s incredibly irresponsible that no one’s making plans for this.”


Volvo, Autoliv Team Up to Develop Self-Driving Cars

Chinese-owned Volvo Car Group and auto safety group Autoliv said on Tuesday they would form a joint venture to develop autonomous driving software as automotive firms across the industry race to embrace the emerging technology.

The two Sweden-based companies said in separate statements the new company would have an initial work force of about 200 staff taken from both parent companies, a number that would increase to more than 600 over the medium term.

The joint venture, which is to be headquartered in Gothenburg, Sweden, and had yet to be named, will develop advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous drive (AD) systems for use in Volvo Cars.


Glad you enjoyed the articles, evilgenius
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Re: THE Self-Driving Car / Ridesharing Thread

Unread postby vox_mundi » Wed 07 Sep 2016, 14:40:52

Mercedes van will be a mothership for fleets of delivery robots

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It’s robots to go. A van pulls up in a village street and a ramp extends to the pavement from a side door. A swarm of wheeled robots trundle down the ramp and head off down local streets on missions of their own. Their cargo delivered, they head back up the ramp and the van drives off.

This is the vision behind a new collaboration between delivery robot start-up Starship Technologies based in Tallinn, Estonia, and German car maker Mercedes-Benz.


Mercedes-Benz has a Vision of autonomous, drone-launching delivery vans

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The Vision Van concept itself is a battery-electric vehicle intended for dense urban delivery, with about 100 horsepower and a range of just under 170 miles. Ignore the drones; the really neat stuff is in back. There's a "one-shot" loading system, essentially fitted smart racks that slide into the cargo area robotically. At the delivery location, the rack with the package maneuvers itself automatically to a pass-through just behind the driver, preventing time lost both loading the van efficiently and repacking the cargo area to get the packages ready for the next delivery. When it's done, the robot slides out the rack and slides in the next one. The robot loader isn't quick, but this is all a concept anyhow.

The precariously-perched rooftop drones look neat, and they also are loaded automatically through a port in the roof. It's an interesting idea to have delivery trucks serve as mobile drone carriers

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Lowe’s Set To Debut Robot Sales Associate This Fall

Robots and on-board ovens deliver on Zume’s promise of better pizza

Robot to build 11 houses in world-first for Perth

Robotic bricklaying company Fastbrick Robotics has signed an agreement with a Perth-based builder to construct the world’s first brick homes using the company’s innovative machine.


SoftBank's Robot Buses to Take Grandparents Home on Country Roads

If you had to invent the perfect place to roll out self-driving buses, Japan would be it.

The country boasts an immaculate and extensive road network. Much of the aging population relies on public transport, especially in the countryside, to get around. And that customer base is shrinking; fewer passengers equals less fares. As a result, only a third of the country's bus companies are profitable, forcing regional governments to step in to support them.

That's why SoftBank Group Corp. is building driverless buses, which the Tokyo-based company estimates can cut operating costs by half.
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Re: THE Self-Driving Car / Ridesharing Thread

Unread postby vox_mundi » Fri 09 Sep 2016, 13:58:05

Ford is getting into Buses and Bike-Sharing, because Cars aren’t cutting it anymore

Ford, purveyors of Built Ford Tough Ford trucks, announced today it was doing more things designed to appeal to people who aren’t interested in owning cars (or Built Ford Tough Ford trucks, for that matter). The company is acquiring Chariot, a private, crowdsourced shuttle service based in San Francisco, and is investing in Motivate, the largest operators of bike-share programs in the US.

It also announced plans to set up a new division within the company tasked with advising cities directly about “mobility solutions (to peak oil),” CEO Mark Fields told The Verge Friday.

It’s another sign that Ford, one of the oldest and most storied car makers in the world, is aware of that the writing on the wall is not favorable to car companies. Consumers are trending away from personal car ownership, and toward ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft, which have both been recently emphasizing carpooling as the next big idea in transportation. In fact, over the last year, Fields has tried to position his company as an honest-to-god competitor to Silicon Valley upstarts like Google and Tesla by investing in self-driving cars, as well as mobility ventures like car-sharing and private transit.

Ford said that while it is starting out in San Francisco, it plans to expand its new shuttle service to five additional cities over the next 18 months, including one international city. But the company is keeping those cities under wraps for now “for competitive reasons,” Fields said.


Self-driving buses are now on the road in Helsinki

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Finland’s capital, Helsinki, is known for many things: Marimekko, a forthcoming Guggenheim outpost, its new public sauna. But now, the Finnish city is making headlines for hosting two of the world’s first self-driving buses.

For the next month, a pair of electric-powered Easymile EZ-10 vehicles are carrying up to 12 public passengers along a fixed route in Helsinki’s Hernesaari neighborhood. The buses were previously tested on closed roads in the Netherlands and in a small Finnish town just north of Helsinki. But this trial—with autonomous buses carrying riders along public urban streets—is one of the first of its kind anywhere on the globe.

Members of the public can hop on and off at pre-defined points along the route.

"Mostly, people have seen the press and aren’t surprised there's a robot bus," said Harri Santamala, the road test project lead. "But every once in a while we meet local people who haven’t heard about it. They don’t quite believe it. They’re asking, ‘Really? Is it possible that I can get in?’ We’re saying ‘Yes.’"

As Alissa Walker wrote in her examination of self-driving buses, studies looking at the projected impact of such vehicles is overwhelmingly positive: "By nearly every metric, the self-driving buses improved on the current condition: emissions were down, congestion was down, and the city needed fewer overall vehicles. Not only that, but the experience was better for riders, who didn’t have to wait or make transfers, meaning they could spend more time working or with their families."


Russia's Yandex enters the self-driving market with a shuttle bus

Internet search giants making self-driving cars appears to be a trend, and Russia's Yandex wants in. It's partnering with Daimler, truck maker Kamaz and government-backed researchers at NAMI on an autonomous shuttle bus that could carry up to 12 people and travel about 124 miles on a charge. Yandex is contributing its experiences with artificial intelligence, computer vision and voice recognition, and it'll even be central to the interface -- you'll use a Yandex-linked mobile app to pinpoint your destination. NAMI has said it will start testing the shuttle bus in 2017

If nothing else, this is further evidence that driverless transportation is quickly becoming a worldwide phenomenon.


Three-wheeled electric vehicle set to go on sale this year

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A three-wheeled, one-seater electric vehicle could be on the road later this year in the U.S. and Canada.

Electra Meccanica Vehicles Corp. of Vancouver, British Columbia, officially unveiled the one-seat Solo on Friday. The Solo could go on sale as early as November pending approval by U.S. and Canadian regulators. It costs around $15,500.

The Solo is classified as a car in Canada and as an autocycle in 41 U.S. states, Holland said. That means it doesn't require users to wear a helmet or have a motorcycle license, but it also doesn't have some safety features that are required in cars, like air bags.

The company sees the vehicle as ideal for low-speed commutes but it does have some safety features. Those include a backup camera, chrome-alloy tubes built into the side for crash protection and aluminum crush zones in the front and rear. The Solo's body is made from the same strong but lightweight aluminum composite as the floor on a Boeing 787.

The Solo has two front wheels and one rear wheel and is 10 feet long, or about 14 inches longer than a Smart car. It looks pretty normal in front: It's nearly as wide as the Smart and has a hood, headlights and grille. But it tapers off sharply in the back. There's a plug hidden under its license plate.

The Solo is powered by a lithium-ion battery that can go 100 miles on a charge. It takes three hours to fully charge the battery using a 220-volt outlet or six hours using a 110-volt outlet. It has a top speed of 80 mph and goes from zero to 60 mph in 8 seconds, which is equivalent to a Toyota Camry.
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Re: THE Self-Driving Car / Ridesharing Thread

Unread postby ennui2 » Mon 12 Sep 2016, 11:06:36

This is an answer to PStarr's defeatism about autonomous cars dealing with glare, fog, snow, rain, etc...

And this is with existing hardware. Add in another generation of two of better sensors and the child-chasing-ball apocalypse is looking more and more unlikely.

http://mashable.com/2016/09/11/elon-mus ... K19kU6Hmqa

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Re: THE Self-Driving Car / Ridesharing Thread

Unread postby vox_mundi » Mon 12 Sep 2016, 15:16:43

And now, a short respite from our perennial internecine sniping ...

It's September which means you already missed Burning Man but there's still 1 more week till Wasteland Weekend at California City, CA

Pete can come as himself ...

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Oh, what a day... what a lovely day!

The World’s First All-Post-Apocalyptic Car Show!

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Self-Driving Car - just because we want to stay on topic


... ride eternal, shiny and chrome.
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Re: THE Self-Driving Car / Ridesharing Thread

Unread postby evilgenius » Tue 13 Sep 2016, 12:33:57

I think the only reason why we haven't already seen Moore's Law die is because of multi-core processors. Remember back when everything was single core and the clock speed of them was about as fast as it could go? That was when multi-core stepped in. Old single core laptops from that day with higher front side bus speeds and a fast processor are still nice things to have around. I think it is true that is is hard to program for multi-core. The dirty little secret is that young people are not born able to program. They have been raised in a social environment where they don't like to go around like that is the case, though. This leads to a lot of half done programs that work, but are not nearly as well done as they could be. Because of this the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is king. If most programmers only had Notepad they would be sunk. Not that IDE's are bad, but they don't handle making stuff run multi-core any better than you would imagine something that doesn't have the utmost incentive to do so would. There is also a bias toward coding over database design and implementation. It's simply more sexy.

That being said, I don't think that the processors are what limit an autonomous vehicle. Connection availability and speed are more likely to do that. When I think about what needs to happen for autonomous vehicles to really work well I think about the commercials all of us see for each of the phone service providers. Every one of them shows maps where there are holes, huge holes. There are roads in those holes. Onboard processors can do some, but to really make the thing rock it will take an internet connection that is fast and reliable. We only just passed the point in human history where over half of people live in cities. That means just under half still live where there could be holes. The kind of coverage needed has always been possible, as it could have been rolled out as policy along with the current system, but it has about as much incentive behind it as IDE's to automatically handle correcting programmer's code to make it run multi-core.

Oddly enough, I suppose, the best place to look for solutions is probably places like Africa, where there hasn't been very good internet, nor even electricity historically. The solutions arrived at in order to roll out service in new ways, thus avoiding the cost of providing it the traditional way, may also be the answer to those holes in the cell provider's maps. I guess we'll just have to watch and see if there is a large enough market that develops for the innovation to take place at a cost that is really affordable. It needs to be cheap enough such that if even nobody lives there it can be put in place.
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Re: THE Self-Driving Car / Ridesharing Thread

Unread postby vox_mundi » Tue 13 Sep 2016, 13:19:41

Nvidia Unveils Artificial-Intelligence Tech For Baidu Self-Driving Cars

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Nvidia (NVDA) on Tuesday unveiled a palm-sized AI computer to be used by China internet giant Baidu's (BIDU) self-driving cars.

Among a series of AI and other announcements it made at a chip industry conference in China, Nvidia said the new Drive PX 2 artificial-intelligence platform for "AutoCruise" functions will let vehicles use "deep neural networks to process data from multiple cameras and sensors." It said the product will let Baidu and other customers "accelerate production of automated and autonomous vehicles."


Nvidia releases Pascal GPUs for neural networks

The Pascal architecture is continuing to find its way through Nvidia's product line-up, with today marking the introduction of its Tesla P4 and P40 GPUs.

According to Nvidia's specs sheet, the P40 clocks in at 12 teraflops for single precision calculation and 47 trillion int8 operations per second thanks to 24GB GDDR5 memory with 346GBps bandwidth, and 3,840 CUDA cores. The less powerful P4 offers 5.5 teraflops for single precision and 22 trillion int8 operations per second, backed by 2,560 CUDA cores and 8GB GDDR5 memory with bandwidth of 192GBps.

Designed for artificial intelligence and running neural networks, the P40 will be available next month, while the P4 will arrive in November.

The company said the chips offer four times the performance of its M40 and M4 launched last year. Compared to using an Intel Xeon E5-2690v4, which was launched earlier this year, Nvidia claimed its offering is 40 times more power efficient while being 45 times faster to respond.


New programming language delivers fourfold speedups on problems common in the age of big data

This week, at the International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are presenting a new programming language, called Milk, that lets application developers manage memory more efficiently in programs that deal with scattered data points in large data sets.

In tests on several common algorithms, programs written in the new language were four times as fast as those written in existing languages. But the researchers believe that further work will yield even larger gains.

Milk simply adds a few commands to OpenMP, an extension of languages such as C and Fortran that makes it easier to write code for multicore processors. With Milk, a programmer inserts a couple additional lines of code around any instruction that iterates through a large data collection looking for a comparatively small number of items. Milk's compiler—the program that converts high-level code into low-level instructions—then figures out how to manage memory accordingly.

With a Milk program, when a core discovers that it needs a piece of data, it doesn't request it—and a cacheful of adjacent data—from main memory. Instead, it adds the data item's address to a list of locally stored addresses. When the list is long enough, all the chip's cores pool their lists, group together those addresses that are near each other, and redistribute them to the cores. That way, each core requests only data items that it knows it needs and that can be retrieved efficiently.


We took a ride in Ford's self-driving car

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Detroit is not the city I associate with autonomous cars, but it soon may be. On Monday, Ford Motor Company announced plans to sell autonomous cars to the public by 2025. I hopped in the back seat of a self-driving Ford Fusion at the company’s Product Development Center in Dearborn, Michigan on Monday to get a glimpse into what that autonomous future could feel like.

Unlike the rite of passage of becoming a student driver, taking a ride in an autonomous car means mean putting your life in the hands of the machine. But in actuality, riding in Ford’s well-behaved self-driving car was an unremarkable experience. Ford has programmed its cars to drive in a manner one might expect from a nervous student driver. It took long pauses to wait for pedestrians to cross at the intersection. It braked for several seconds after a full-size F-150 pulled out in front of it. ... In a mere two years, Ford employees will be invited to use its autonomous cars to move around the campus.

Ford’s glimpse into the future is meant to show that the company is serious about its plans to bring a self-driving car to the ride-share market in 2021 and eventually to dealerships. Ford is enthusiastic about what self-driving will mean to its future, and plans to grow its presence in Silicon Valley.

In August, Ford announced intentions to bring a fully autonomous vehicle — essentially cars without steering wheels or brake pedals — to the ride-sharing space in five years. In a speech Monday, Fields told reporters that by mid-decade people could buy self-driving cars and he hopes to make the technology available to millions.

Ford began developing its self-driving technology in 2005, more than 10 years ago.


This New Electric Bus can Drive 350 Miles on One Charge

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The Catalyst E2 Series, a new electric bus from Proterra, a leading North American manufacturer, is set to hit the streets next year. Musk’s top of the line Model S gets 315 miles per charge. Proterra’s newest? Up to 350 miles on city streets—enough, in many places, for a full day’s worth of routes. Last month, this Goliath logged 600 miles on a Michelin track on one juice.

Personal electric cars are great, but larger vehicles like buses and trucks (at least those that operate in cities) are arguably better. Public buses, in particular, are perfect candidates for electrification. They drive predictable routes, so don’t need a sprawling charging infrastructure. Long charge times (three to five hours for the E2) don’t matter, since they’re usually parked overnight.

The secret to the new Proterra bus’s longevity is its twin mattress-sized battery pack, says Matt Horton, the company’s VP for sales. It can store up to 660 kWh, helpful when motoring a 27,000-pound, 40-foot bus. Compare that to the relatively mini batteries behind your favorite electric passenger car: 60 kWh in the Chevy Bolt, and 100 kWh in the largest Tesla Model S.

Lightweight materials help on range. So does the Prius-style regenerative braking system, which can help re-capture up to 92 percent of the bus’s kinetic energy. This is the only thing that current bus drivers will have to relearn, says Horton: No more brake-stomping.

A few cities have already hopped on board: Foothill Transit, which operates near Los Angeles, will get its E2 Catalysts on the road in 2017. Philadelphia already has older Proterra models on the road, and others have purchased e-buses from its competitors. According to the American Public Transit Association, nearly half of the country’s public buses are hybrids or run on alternative fuels.

While transportation accounts for 26 percent of American greenhouse gas emissions, buses are just four percent of that. Plus, a “clean” bus is really only as pristine as its energy source. If a city is getting all its electricity from burning coal, an electric bus ain’t so great.


Angry drivers have a higher risk of collision, new research shows

... "Even minor aggression, such as swearing, yelling or making rude gestures, can increase the risk of a collision," says lead author Dr. Christine Wickens, scientist in CAMH's Institute for Mental Health Policy Research. The study was published in Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour.
Nearly one-third of Ontario drivers reported acts of minor aggression. Drivers who said they had also made threats, attempted or succeeded in damaging another car or hurting someone, had the highest odds of collision—78 per cent higher than those whose aggression was considered minor. This risk is comparable to those who use cannabis and drive.

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Last edited by vox_mundi on Tue 13 Sep 2016, 13:31:04, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: THE Self-Driving Car / Ridesharing Thread

Unread postby vox_mundi » Tue 13 Sep 2016, 13:43:49

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Hold on tight to the Past, Pete. It seems it's all you have left.

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Ex-Google Car Chief, Mercedes, Nvidia Partner To Train Self-Driving Car Engineers

... The first of its kind educational program consists of three 12-week terms, with for-profit educational service Udacity charging $800 per term. Coursework will focus on “deep learning, computer vision, sensor fusion, localization and controllers,” Thrun said. “To this end, we have our own Udacity car that students will work on to build and run code.”
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late.
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Re: THE Self-Driving Car / Ridesharing Thread

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Tue 13 Sep 2016, 17:35:10

pstarr wrote:I don't know Vox? Nvidia? I used to play doomie 1st-person shooters on Nvidia chipsets running on Intel 3.2 GHz platform. Back when I was a child. It gave me headaches with those doomy sound affects and jerky 2D cartoon resolution. Now that I am all grown up and returned to the real world, I think I understand the limits to computer resolution, pattern control and recognition. And the all-too-important and necessary 4D rendering

Must not forget that children playing in the street are also actually in real time. Unlike you techie wannabee weenies. lol

I predict your denial of technological reality re computers will stand you in no better stead as far as making predictions than your denial of economic reality re the MSM (i.e. the real world).
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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Re: THE Self-Driving Car / Ridesharing Thread

Unread postby ennui2 » Tue 13 Sep 2016, 19:24:26

How long before vox and Outcast_Searcher are added to PStarr's "troll" list for humiliating him with substantive rebuttals?

It's not us, Pete, it's you.

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Re: THE Self-Driving Car / Ridesharing Thread

Unread postby kublikhan » Tue 13 Sep 2016, 20:16:25

evilgenius wrote:I think the only reason why we haven't already seen Moore's Law die is because of multi-core processors. Remember back when everything was single core and the clock speed of them was about as fast as it could go?
Moore's law was not about clock speeds. It was about transistor density. Since the time of single core processors and today, transistor density continued to increase apace with Moore's Law. And clock speed alone does not determine how fast your processor is. Lower clocked processors from today are faster than higher clocked processors from 10 years ago:
Why are newer generations of processors faster at the same clock speed?

Or check out real world results. A 9 year old Athlon X2 3.2 Ghz getting stomped by a modern Intel Core i7 At 3.1 Ghz:
iTunes
Adobe Premiere

evilgenius wrote:Old single core laptops from that day with higher front side bus speeds and a fast processor are still nice things to have around.
Maybe if you are running 10 year old software. Running modern software on a 10 year old computer is not going to be pretty. Things got so ugly that Apple actually got hit with a Class Action Lawsuit because when their old devices got upgraded to the latest OS version they slowed to a crawl. And that's if you are even allowed to install on old hardware.
The oil barrel is half-full.
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