That's a less efficient protocol than 9pfs and virtiofs, even if you subtract the encryption.
An example of improving efficiency: virtiofs has a relatively recent feature to map pages from host memory directly into guest memory, but that's a lot of risky acrobatics if your priorities are reliability and isolation...
... but it's not supported by Virtualization Framework's built-in virtiofs "folder sharing". (sad face)
... but someone could build it on top of the new macos 27+ custom virtio device support. (intrigued face)
I was curious how this thing works and asked Claude to visualize it -- mostly to see how good Fable is and I have to say, what it made was good enough for me to get a gist of it. Posted it here
Every plausibly cool electric car innovation leads me to the same thought: “5-10 years from now, the restomod potential will be wild once these come down in cost.” For this, I am imagining retrofitting a Pontiac Fiero to reduce as much weight as possible and see if extended flight becomes possible.
As an antique BMW enthusiast, I know some people that have swapped electric motors in to 2002s and 2000 CSLs and they said it was actually a pretty disappointing experience. You lose the vintage driving experience entirely.
wtf are you talking about? I drive one of these cars every day (that I need to drive, which isn’t that often really) without leaded gasoline.
It’s the punchy little m10 motor, 4 speed transmission, and incredibly low curb weight that make these cars fun to drive. You lose all that with an electric conversion.
As an aside, the most powerful F1 engine ever put on the track was made by modifying the little 4-banger m10 found in the BMW 2002. Fun fact.
> As an aside, the most powerful F1 engine ever put on the track was made by modifying the little 4-banger m10 found in the BMW 2002. Fun fact.
Supposedly BMW lacked a dyno that went high enough so it's an educated guess what the actual hp was, but definitely over 1,300hp... from a 4-cylinder (turbo charged, and only lasted a few laps, but still) engine!
I'd throw in the manual gearbox, the noise, vibration, smell, and being able to see the mechanical workings as well. We can get a punchy, lightweight vehicle with an EV conversion, but as you've heard from others, that leaves something to be desired
But yes, the vibration, sound, and feel of the incredibly simple (as in stripped down, not unsophisticated) mechanics around you all very much contribute to the special feeling of driving these cars.
My 1976 BMW 2002 is actually my first car. I used to drive it to high school more than half my life ago, and I still drive it today. I’ve driven some other classic cars, luxury and sport, and simply nothing feels like a 2002. Just a beautiful, balanced, timeless design.
I'm pretty sure the subtext of that comment was that the benefit of electric motors in retro cars is the emission reduction (and possibly cost and maintenance reduction), and not improved specs/experience. Saying "ye but it worsens the experience" misses the point.
But this is a thread about modifying 50-70 year old cars with electric drivetrains.
There are so few of these cars on the road anymore that I think very little progress is to be made on emissions levels by converting them to electric, especially when you consider that you’re ruining the driving experience.
From the animation: "Torque grows with the cube of diameter"
That seems like a pretty cool cheat-code to get more power. Perhaps it will mean you will start having cars with more distance from the ground to accommodate the large dia motor wheels.
Number 1 problem is battery weight though. Not electric motors.
I have a 84 w123 300D, and would love to add some more power to it. Lightweight hub motors would be great, but any decent size battery would be at least 200lbs+, which is hard to do on a old chasy.
Something to keep in mind with hub motors is that they’re unsprung weight, vs the battery pack is pretty much always sprung. While that’s not a huge differentiator for efficiency, it sure cuts down on the abuse the wheels and hub motors will experience
its less hard than you'd think unless you're really going for long range.
for my sailboat I am getting rid of a 300lbs diesel and a 30gallon fuel tank with a 45lbs PMAC.
That means I have opened up about 465lbs for batteries.
Now, with a sailboat you're never truly out of range -- but the point stands : these things are so much lighter than ICEs on average that there is a lot of opportunity even with battery weight as it is (and it's getting better daily).
I guess there's always the risk for a rig failure.
I looked a bit on doing the same, but came to the conclusion that it will be expensive to fulfil racing rules requiring the boat to be able to maintain speed for 5 hours ie around 25-30 NM range.
As it is now, I have about 500 NM diesel range on my boat, which is basically 3-4 days continuous runtime. Cutting it down to 25nm and 5 hours requires minimally 100kWh.
For a blue water boat, 500 NM is not quite acceptable, but can be fixed with jerrycans for a couple of dollars. An all electric blue water boat would clock in at an unrealistic 2MWh of batteries with a weight at least 20 metric tonnes. 10x the load capacity of my boat.
This is silly, but I've also wondered if you could make a boat that can anchor and recharge batteries from ambient current, sort of like stationary regenerative braking. I'm sure it would take way too long to be worth it, but it was a fun idle thought.
Perhaps the paddle wheel[0] will interest you, the spinning is used to calculate the velocity of the boat. Probably some other propeller or similar would be more practical - like a kicker motor that's easily lowered over the side. Just spitballing.
I don't think it'd be worth it considering solar options. Even wind generators are not "super efficient" in comparison but I don't have data.
I'm sure it wouldn't be worth it, because otherwise people would be doing it, it just seemed like a cool way to supplement solar or even to allow for indefinite underwater drones. Like, imagine a deep-sea research drone that could spit out an anchor and recharge whenever the battery got low. Almost certainly a case of "Cool, wouldn't really work well"
> BYD can be lighter because they skip on safety gear and proper structural elements - in my experience.
I'd love to hear more about your experience with BYD. The ex just bought one and my kids ride in it daily. I helped negotiate the sale - I drive a Tesla and I'm very happy with the BYD.
Brazilians got a bunch of them and they are super common in Brazil. Also common - broken suspension parts from driving them in Brazil.
Also, the only cars I’ve ever ridden on that the top of my head literally touches the headliner while sitting in the back seat. Other than that, they seem good?
Top-of-the-line NMC cells have energy density around 250Wh/kg at the pack level. The newer solid-state batteries can reportedly increase this to 400Wh/kg.
So a reasonable 75kWh battery pack is going to weigh around 300kg and in future around 200kg. This is... not a lot, actually. To a point where shaving off 20-30 kg from the electric motor weight is going to result in a noticeable performance/price difference.
Teslas also don't have "crazy" weight. Model 3 is 1700kg and a comparable (in size) Ford Focus is 1300kg.
The Model 3 performance model (more equivalent to the M3) weighs over 4K lbs. The model you are quoting is the lowest range and lightest of all Teslas.
i know series hybrids aren't as efficient as parallel hybrids (thanks technology connections!), but i wonder if they'd be a good candidate for fun restomods.
drop in a tiny, powerful electric motor and a small battery (crammed in whatever location is best for weight distribution), and then wire up a little genny powered off your existing fuel tank that can jump in as a range extender
Series hybrids can compete with parallel hybrids, because the full decoupling of the engine from the wheels claws back some of the efficiency you lose through the energy conversion. It's series-parallel hybrids they can't really compete with, because those are able to do the same trick, but they also lose less energy in conversion, because the engine does some of the heavy lifting.
Series hybrids are great for packaging, though. Parallel and series-parallel commit to certain packaging decisions like having a transmission, or a long, monolithic unit, because it's the mechanical coupling that buys them smaller motors and potentially better efficiency. Series hybrids don't care about any of that, so even though you have bigger motors and potentially higher losses, you have more freedom over where things go.
Personally, I think there's a massive untapped market in converting old cars to hybrid engines. You wouldn't try to upgrade the old engine, you'd design a smaller and more power dense package and rip all of the original gear out. Because electrification lets you cut the size of the engine down so aggressively, this is probably a feasible strategy. As you pointed out, series hybrids are probably best suited to this because of their packaging flexibility. As others have pointed out, there's tremendous potential there for replicating original driving characteristics using software and the electric motor. And if we're being honest, off-road vehicles probably should get rid of the transmission and low range, because electric motor torque is just better. As is, the potential for cars is enormous, but we're getting the worst possible outcomes thanks to legislation.
Yeah, my comment was hand-waving away a bit of the reality of it, but swap the Fiero engine for a battery and some of these and it's got to be close to achieving full lift.
Reducing the motor mass by 200 kg means you've just removed 10% of the weight of the vehicle. You could theoretically now reduce the battery pack by 10% as well.
Not true. The CdA (coefficient of drag multiplied by frontal area) matters far more for range than the weight for range. That is a smaller EV, which may very well be heavier can have a higher range and efficiency.
Electric engines are already very efficient (particularly compared to internal combustion). If you go from 90% to 95% efficiency, you don't save much in terms of battery.
ETA: Internal combustion engines half a century ago had an efficiency of 20%, now they're at 40%. That cuts the fuel you need to carry in half. Electric engines are near 100%, and as I said, going from 90% to 95% efficiency cuts required battery by a bit more than 5%, so peanuts.
But the motor is not the only thing that needs to be cooled. It’s mainly the battery, which has a narrow operating range. The power electronics that convert AC to DC also need to be cooled.
So you’re halving the cooling needs of the motor, which is nice but small compared to the other two. And even then, total cooling doesn’t impact range that much compared to warming the battery in cold climates.
If we halve waste-heat generation for a practical widget enough times, then we won't need liquid cooling for that widget at all. If the trend continues and gets good enough, then maybe we can get all the way to a complete passive-cooling snoozefest.
That's pretty boring, but boring is good. The systems we use every day without a thought because they boringly Just Work are, perhaps, our greatest successes.
Yup, the visualization didn't help me understand the concept any more than plain text. Superficial in the way that you would expect from a system that has no real world reference for what it is creating.
To get something better I expect more than a one-shot is needed, and the knowledge to guide it in the right way.
Thanks for sharing. I wish it was a bit more interactive especially when there are parameters, e.g. "Widen the disc and torque rises with diameter cubed" I wish there was a slider to see that effect and thus maybe why there might be a sweet spot.
Also I have "The Way Things Work" on my desk right now and can't help but wonder, could you adapt some of the pages of the book this way? It seems like exactly the kind of content that would benefit from such 3D (interactive) visual explainers.
Oof... well thanks for sharing but that's basically unusable for me. It neatly all packed in a 2MB file containing all assets, threejs, etc.
I assumed it's based on a three.js template due to the `Rendered live with three.js · Drag anywhere to orbit the model` kind of showcase but unfortunately that's not linked. I also imagine the 3D models are more that primitives (at least the arrows showcasing the flow) but I don't know where they came from, if that are also from a template or repository or if they are generated from a tube mesh.
So... I'm genuinely grateful that you took the time to share but I don't think I can do something with this except restarting from scratch, especially if it's one-shot.
I'd suggest, if you don't mind the extra effort, that you add a ReadMe.md in the repository to clarify how you did this, at least model name, version and prompt.
I mentioned elsewhere too. This was a one-shot thing that made me wow so I thought I share. You're kind with your comments but others are just hating it, even so I said 1. I don't know this motor technology and 2. It was a one shot experiment
If I had time and making a polished web page was my goal I could probably do better but this was not the point!
Very neat. Thank you for sharing! I assume this was one shot as well -what sort of prompt did you use?
I’m sure folks would be interested even in a blog post comparing just this process with different Anthropic models if that’s something you do and need a content idea. :)
Can you make a version of this that is more in the style of "the way things work" the cool inventions book from the 90s with cavepeople and wooly mamoths and that illustration asthetic?
Just as impressive was its ability to publish the source and get the version up on my personal site. That was also a one shot but aided by context and skills I have available for these purposes.
Thanks but I'm aware of it, linked to an alternative just yesterday (but might replace by the InternetArchive one instead). A Web version would be so neat as we'd be able to link to pages, even states of the interactive explanation, rather than the whole thing but it's already great to have that basis.
Yeah so the relationship between speed, power, frequency, size (both in the direction of primary flux excitation and in the direction orthogonal to both that and the movement), and torque at nominal values of current density (for a given conductor losses are proportional to the square or this value and to the total mass of that conductor in the machine; that's independent of any of the other scaling parameters; note this is absolute power not percentage) and peak flux limitations (core saturation, permanent magnet demagnetization), are sadly not trivial if you express them in a way that is even just _valid_ for the modern days where we can support electrical frequencies up to around a megahertz at scales up to around 100 kW, and even harder when you remember that core material has severe frequency dependence of it's limits.
E.g. for example for a given electrical frequency and decent radial flux synchronous machine, power density is quite static and torque density can actually be dialed quite freely from 2-pole machine (turboset in gas turbine running on the grid at 3600 rpm (or 3000 rpm outside NA and some Pacific Islands) to 40(+) (example deployed at Hoover dam, 180 rpm).
At those higher pole counts, the center of the rotor is no longer electromagnetically active, because the magnetic field lines keep to a narrow ring only about as thick as each pole is wide.
Unfortunately it's mechanically not that trivial to handle a cylindrical shell with a small air gap (this needs to be significantly smaller (about at least 10x) than the pole width) when using substantial torque and speed.
Circumferential velocity is practically limited by hoop strength of whatever the outer region of the rotor is made of, even if it's all very nicely balanced, because eventually the magnetic armature flux source (wires or magnets) will fly out.
Higher electrical frequencies limit the field winding core's magnetic permeability (magnetic field/force strength amplification relative to vacuum, for same electrical current) which hurts efficiency by dropping the useful mechanical power component of field voltage while the voltage resulting from the current (that needs to happen to cause the magnetic field in the direction of movement that causes the mechanical force) due to wiring resistance stays. (I think the permeability gives the ratio between voltage and current for otherwise identical mechanical load conditions and winding shape?)
Thinner wires have less fill factor because the insulation has to stay the same thickness as per-winding voltage stays, but magnetically inactive terminations are less wasteful (for losses and mass) when a decent number of effective turns (>>1, think >10~50 for most of the benefits) are used.
Note while the armature necessarily has an even number of poles in it's construction (north/south), the field is not forced to that.
Indeed, the iirc most smooth torque (under practical mechanical feasibility limitations and without undue sacrifice of efficiency) results from having a prime number (of field windings, in WYE-style connection) exactly one off from the armature pole count.
Note that for low losses all these torque-smoothing techniques _require_ only a single electrically directly driven winding in each slot (per mechanical field pole) and with that only GCD(field_slots, (armature_poles / 2)) windings get to share an electrical half-bridge (one single wire going to a single voltage-output terminal on the electronics board; note mainstream BLDCs have 3 of these, classic fridge compressors have 2, and modern stepper motors (e.g. 3D printer) have 4).
Any time you have multiple windings driven by different electrical source voltages you're wasting heat in the winding because the lowest-loss would require all conductor in the slot to to perfectly evenly share current.
There's just one problem with that: you need a nearby slot with exactly opposite phase to even possibly use more than a single (half) turn of "winding" in the slot.
If the voltage is still enough to not loose too much in the connections, you can use transistors developed for efficiently powering modern computer chips from comfortable voltages like 12V, but even then a "winding" has to be much longer than an armature pole to mitigate the losses of spreading the return current sideways to where a slot carries the current in the reverse direction.
Once the voltage at the transistor is over around 10V the benefits of more precise control of the field magnetization to the armature position (and how the shapes distort the field lines from anything that would look like a sine wave) could be useful.
In theory that'd also provide direct access to electronically control the air gap (well, net force normal to the air gap "surface") which _could_ be an alternative to mechanical bearings for very thin-shell constructions.
See maglev trains for a pretty practical application of using an electric motor to also levitate the "rotor" in a place where a mechanical bearing ("train wheels + bogies") performs poorly.
Hundreds of examples of axial flux motors exist online. If you look at the visualization it shows the iron cores in a perpendicular orientation with the hub. This is correct, but loses so much of what makes these specific motors interesting. The angled nature of the grey cores and copper wrapping smoothes the transition between each magnetic field.
Basically it is a pretty version of a dumbed down partially incorrect answer. With a knowledgeable user it would be very good, but he has no idea he is wrong. I’m not sure what Dunning Kreguer with graphics should be called.
You don't. You didn't know before either. The difference is trust. How do you trust it as much as you do the hypothetical humans making such representations? That's up to you.
I think humans develop expertise and brand names and get called out when they make mistakes and if they are too wrong, their reputation is damaged.
This doesn’t seem to apply to AI for some reason. It keeps generating incorrect results after incorrect results, yet people continue to trust its output.
Human trust differs from mathematical trust. And branding / marketing abuses the ambiguity.
There is no shame in a "likely to hallucinate" model that can be instantiated 1,000 times across 1,000 different machines spread throughout our planet. So, human trust is broken by machine trust.
I've starting going back to books, either at the library or e-books. Librarians are very good at telling you if nonfiction is biased, outdated, or incorrect.
> I think humans develop expertise and brand names and get called out when they make mistakes and if they are too wrong, their reputation is damaged.
Take a look at the Forbes billionaires list and some of their statements. Or maybe at the politician fact checkers. If only being wrong damaged reputations.
The question is for you to answer, first. Gotta do that work. (My answer will differ from yours.)
Then, predictably, finding the collection of supporting details + vetting the content in question.
This is an issue we, technology-folk, ought to help guide our non-tech-co-folk through engaging with, BTW. Our responsibility is rising with tech becoming more deeply entrenched / required for society's operations.
Yeah, I'm at once awed that something like that can be auto-generated (I presume?) and disappointed that it doesn't usefully or practically improve my understanding, beyond written synopses and human videos, at all.
Stuff like this reminds me that we still need a human in the loop to edit, to improve, to advance.
Auto-from-scratch just doesn't really achieve anything of actual value.
I am not an expert, but I do know some physics and I know how to read, and I’m pretty sure this is full of BS. Also it’s a really crappy visualization.
I wonder how developing electric motors compares to combustion engines. My hunch says that it’s the main reason the Chinese high-tech electronics industry was able to develop and iterate leading electric vehicles so fast. (Edit: My more clarified point is regarding the machinery required + place to accommodate them to work on electric motors vs. ICE metal parts and all the intermediary parts transfering power in the drivetrain. The shop in the video is smaller than many would imagine.)
When these hopefully go to the next generation Formula E cars, we’ll see some crazy improvements in cornering. The newest generation already has active 4WD. I imagine this can bring even better torque adjustment improvements.
The Chinese EV industry is actually lead by development of batteries, especially CATL. Along with the pack engineering, which is good old Mech.E stuff about heat transfer and physical strength.
Secondarily power electronics; at that scale, you can't just pick a bigger transistor and call it a day.
By comparison the motors seem to be a mostly solved problem, although I'm sure there's still some scope for power-to-weight engineering there, it's not as critical as the battery pack.
And is development of batteries (and better magnetics) not just chemical engineering and material science?
Motors might be a 'solved problem' - there might not be much innovation, Maxwell's laws aren't changing any time soon, but there will surely be a lot of incremental improvement - an early 1900s ICE is considerably worse than a 2000s ICE.
> n early 1900s ICE is considerably worse than a 2000s ICE.
But how much worse is a early 1900s electric motor from a modern one? I can't find data, but I suspect the first electric motor from the 1830s is more efficient than a modern ICE (even if we assume the ICE is built for efficiency, screw emissions). There is some room for improvement, but there isn't much difference between our best motors and perfection (a carnot cycle by contrast is as best much worse than perfection)
Early electric motors were awful, because there was no good way to control their speed.
For example, DC motors used in some late-1900s trains still had a giant variable resistor in series with their motor, burning away a huge chunk of the power as heat to force the motor to run at a lower speed during acceleration. AC motors weren't much better.
Electric motors only became truly efficient when variable-frequency drive became viable, which was in the 1980s due to semiconductor innovation.
Helped along by the somewhat Wild West attitude towards worker safety and industrial regulation - high energy density batteries are hard to get right, and extremely dangerous if done wrong. During manufacturing in particular.
> The Chinese EV industry is actually lead by development of batteries
This is the core point, but it applies for the whole of the industry. Motors just don't matter. An electric motor is an almost vanishing component of the weight and complexity of an electric vehicle. Cut the mass of the thing *in half* and you're looking at 100kg savings, tops. You could do that with a Model Y by just changing the roof material to something boring and not glass. You could almost do it by shrinking the oversized-as-is-the-fashion wheels.
So... it's great that Mercedez-Benz is producing these, I guess. But it won't make their cars anything more than incrementally better. Which is why we're seeing them crow about it in a press release and not a spec sheet.
If they’re small, light, and cheap, you can put 4 of them on the car and get independent all-wheel drive and insane acceleration.
We have a dual-motor EV and our lease is expiring this year. We have our eyes on the GLC EV, which will land in the U.S. with a tri-motor design at first. There’s no fun in a single-motor EV.
I thought that for a long time the german supply chain had an advantage in terms of the precision engineering to create drive chains for ICE - but EV's don't have the same number of moving parts and hence... end of advantage?
All the industrial processes and machine tool development that happened in the ICE car industry over the last century (and the electronic hardware manufacturing, more recently) was available day one.
According to wikipedia[1] the first industrial steam engine (1712) was invented almost 100 years before the invention of the steam locomotive (1804), arguably its greatest evolutionary feat.
>I wonder how developing electric motors compares to combustion engines. My hunch says that it’s the main reason the Chinese high-tech electronics industry was able to develop and iterate leading electric vehicles so fast.
The talent had very little impact to be honest. The primary factor was a government looking 50 years down the road seeing that:
1. ICE engines have little to no long-term future in transportation.
2. global warming is a thing whether the right wing in the US likes it or not.
3. They were never going to overtake the West in ICE engines and had to attack from a different angle.
The US' lack of breakthroughs in EVs has little to do with technology or expertise and everything to do with an administration that is openly hostile towards EVs and renewable energy in general. For the rest of the planet, EVs becoming the primary form of transportation is just an obvious and logical conclusion, even if it takes us another 25-50 years to get there.
China saw it and decided to heavily incentivize and subsidize the rapid expansion of EVs both to fix the air quality issues in China and corner the market.
> The US' lack of breakthroughs in EVs has little to do with technology or expertise and everything to do with an administration that is openly hostile towards EVs and renewable energy in general.
It has nothing to do with the current administration either. For one thing, China's dominance predates it. For another, the EU and Japan have failed equally hard at capturing any meaningful EV marketshare.
The current admin is actively hostile to EVs, but I think the real problem was the chicken and egg issue of charging stations: they wouldn't be built because there wasn't enough demand for them and EVs would be limited in sales because they wouldn't have chargers to use on the road.
This is where Tesla made a huge difference with Supercharger stations. I am no fan of Elon, but that work was fundamental in making EVs viable in America.
Nevertheless, there seems to be zero buy-in from commercial players in the US. It's such a weird uphill battle.
I live in the US, but every summer I spend a month in Sweden, and the past two years I've rented EVs for the entire stay, and the buildout of chargers these past 4-5 years has been astonishing. It's gone from crap to fantastic in a very short time, and that's without massive government intervention or subsidies or screaming and cajoling.
Because in Sweden, the primary driver of charging stops along highways and in the cities are gas stations.
They already make all their profit from incidental purchases and not the gas itself, so them pivoting to EV charging stops makes perfect sense. They already have the infrastructure in place to sell you overpriced hotdogs and coffee and snacks for your road trip, they already have restrooms in place.
But they also do the same in the cities, it seems like every city gas station has also put up a couple of 350W charging stations. It's not half-assed, they mean business. They all see the writing on the wall, in neighbouring Norway EV's are 90+% of all new car sales, Sweden is at ~30% right now, and climbing, so gas stations will go out of business if they don't pivot to EV charging.
It's fundamental market economy forces at work, the kind of stuff that the US normally prides itself of.
I think it's because the incumbents do not know how to build competitive, desirable, affordable EVs. I'm just an armchair observer, but that makes a fair amount of sense.
The other part is that a lot of money is made in the production and sale of fuel and those players have significant influence in how things work -- this is evident in the Trump admin's demonization of renewables and going all in on fossil fuels.
Watching all this craziness from the sidelines is crazymaking and heartbreaking. We can only keep China at bay for so long, and then when the dam breaks the domestic auto makers are going to go down, along with the whole economic ecosystem that supports them. It doesn't have to be this way...
In Europe, Tesla generally has a single-digit EV marketshare, so over 90% of consumers don't care about or use the Supercharger network, and are obviously demanding charging locations.
Two years ago in Sweden I rented a random Chinese EV , a NIO ET7, and its onboard navigation system was fully connected to all the major charging networks, so I could see charging stations, their speeds, and open stalls directly in the car navigation, no external apps needed. So there's a whole perfectly functioning non-Tesla ecosystem, and pretty much everything is tap-to-pay, so no apps, no registrations, no memberships, no nothing. And no lock-in.
Kinda ironic that Teslas big start and Supercharger buildout is now holding the US back compared to the rest of the world.
1. There is still no good answer for air transport, trans-oceanic shipping, long-haul trucking, and long-distance rail. ICE will be used there for a good while longer.
I think air transport and oceanic shipping will probably still take time owing to energy density concerns, but there are electric trucks already (with trials of roadside charging rails that can actively charge during driving), and for a large part of the world, electrified trains are the norm. It's a uniquely US problem that rail isn't electrified, even other major OECD countries are above 50% if not more, while in places like India it is almost 100% electrified railway (one of the largest networks in the world).
With mandatory breaks you have to take while trucking in a lot of countries, is it really that far out? I would imagine you could charge while you sleep.
I don't think we have the battery power density to power an 80,000 lb (~36,200 kg) truck at 65mph for 11 hours as allowed by the DOT Hours of Service Rules and Regulations (though I believe a 30 minute break is required after 8 hours, and the 11 hours of driving has to be within a 14 hour window, so some recharging stops may still work within those limits).
It would be awesome if they would implement a crude rule: no computers. You can use a computer to design the car--CAD/CAM/CAE are all fine--but no stored program computers are allowed in the race car. I think that would improve F1 tremendously.
Very funny idea. That basically means a carbureted gas engine, or a direct injection diesel with a mechanical governor and mechanically timed injection pumps - can't run a direct injection gas engine without a digital engine control unit, because the injection timings are much to precise to do mechanically.
So, basically '60s Formula 1. Might be fun to watch. We'd certainly see some crazy engine designs and a lot of re-fueling pit stops...
> can't run a direct injection gas engine without a digital engine control unit, because the injection timings are much to precise to do mechanically.
This is not accurate, the first production direct injection gasoline automotive engine was in the 1954 Mercedes-Benz 300SL. It's true, you probably won't be running piezoelectric injectors without computer controls, but there's nothing preventing direct injection.
But that would make it interesting. How many of the advances we've made in the past 75yrs could be accomplished some other way if you take the computer away? You don't need a computer to accomplish nanosecond timing. Maybe there's a clever analog way to run piezoelectric injectors.
To phrase it maybe a little more provocatively: how would you accomplish the precise timing necessary to achieve spherical implosion? This was possible with analog electronics in 1945. Surely in 2026 we can also build analog piezoelectric fuel injection systems.
To play devil's advocate, this starts to get into the territory of, how do you define a computer? If the analog circuitry is using sensors and passive components to inject fuel at spark at just the right time under varying conditions, "computing" them, one might say...
Maybe "no integrated circuits" might be a finer line.
A stored program computer, that is a device which can run arbitrary programs from storage, is a pretty rigorously defined thing. Like, we all have a pretty clear shared understanding that things like FPGAs and microcontrollers are computers, whereas you can have integrated circuits which don't have these capabilities.
To be clear, I don't think making elaborate analog ICs would be really "cheating" so long as they don't put a generic von Neumann machine on it.
EDIT: to be more clear, what I'd be trying to achieve with a rule change like this is making "computation" a somewhat larger investment in time and difficulty. By and large, at least in my opinion, profligate, non-essential computation has enabled many of the things that have made the sport less interesting. It's also made cars suck a lot. This would impose kind of a tax on those things.
Most F1 fans have an opinion on F1 regulations. I like your take.
I want to see F1 car design be about function/performance above all. I want to see awesome gadgets using insanely clever design. Then ideally that design should influence built items in the rest of the world.
F1 used to be influential in creating and developing high technology. Now it seems to be about gathering high technology from elsewhere so as to meet the insane regulations most efficiently.
> develop and iterate leading electric vehicles so fast.
How do you know this for a fact? Chinese press releases? You've driven one? Some auto blogger drove one?
After world war 2 Gorbachev or whoever visited the United States and during that trio visited a supermarket. He thought it was a facade, possibly, put on just for him, there's no way Americans are this prosperous (or whatever, this good at agriculture, farm equipment, etc)
Also do the race cars have 4 wheel drive, or all-wheel drive? I'm wagering all-wheel with "torque vectoring" and "Yaw control", like a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X.
I am somewhat confused at the intensity of pushback for the statement “leading electric vehicles.”
Chinese EVs are leading and that doesn’t necessarily mean being the best, most advanced vehicles. They are leading in value/pricing, and in many regions they are leading in sales.
BYD sells almost double the EV volume of Tesla globally as of December 2025. They are objectively leading in that respect.
I think the parent comment of yours made a good point (or at least adjacent to a good point) about China’s ability to enter the market: they can’t compete with 100 years of internal combustion engine development along with the vast parts supplier network of the West, but they can compete on battery chemistry, battery supply, motors, and the more vertically integrated EV space where automakers don’t need to depend on a huge network of parts suppliers like they did in the past.
I also think that a lot of pushback to the innovation that China is delivering is criticism that is stuck in the past. If you buy a Xiaomi car, it integrates perfectly with all your Xiaomi consumer devices. You can control your rice cooker or robot vacuum from your car’s integrated infotainment system. This type of approach was exactly what Apple was going to deliver before they abandoned their automotive project.
Or, you can buy a Mercedes and you’ll get a car with more precise handling and perfectly tuned driving characteristics. The infotainment system looks like Windows Vista.
Which side of the aisle do you think most consumers care about? I think most people buy into Xiaomi’s approach.
I wouldnt be so harsh even with chinese combustion engines, its at this point a meme that is just copy pasted because everybody says so, but without actual experience. People dont understand how China is 3x bigger than Europe and 4x bigger than US, the scale of that market is absurd and competition numerous and fierce.
I've had MG suv rented recently with just gasoline engine and it was fine. This comes from long term bmw driver, they are not on the exactly same level, but light years ahead from similarly prices ie french vehicles. Handling was fine too, probably the biggest shock for me, this is where french, italian etc are losing me (bmw effect). And they cost 1/3 of bmw.
True, and on a similar wavelength, nobody seems to care that Kia/Hyundai engines are super mid.
Heck, nobody seems to care that Toyota engines/transmissions sound like a vacuum cleaner and have pretty mediocre NVH on models like the Corolla, but they buy those products for reliability and efficiency.
Semiofftopic but somehow I took offense at the Vista comparison. Aero Glass was peak UI design to me, and I'd certainly prefer it to modern paradigms like flat controls, or to stretch it even further, Corporate Memphis etc.
Curse you, Apple and Jony Ive. You only needed to tone skeuomorphism down not kill it.
I’m genuinely delighted that this reaction to that little phrase came up! It was definitely something of a half-joke on my part: the Mercedes infotainment system is very well-regarded, but it does not look “modern” compared to something like a Tesla, Rivian, or Xiaomi.
The hyperscreen from a physical hardware perspective looks strangely dated to me as well, depending on the specific car model.
Listening to the heads of the American and European car companies say the same and driving in them in china. I know that is different than personally disassembling one and reviewing it, but I am not sure the incentive for the other companies to say they have inferior products, unless it was a play for subsidies or deregulation of some form.
Personally I feel that the rest of the world continues to dramatically under estimate China’s progress and technological advancement at our own peril. Is there fluff and are their lots of untrue claims, of course, but that is certainly not something they have a monopoly on.
It's because the West still views Chinese people as dumb laborers: just a bunch of cheap bodies who can do nothing more than screwing together our brilliant inventions.
China creates something of equal quality as a Western company? It must've been IP theft! China competes on price? It must be state subsidies! China creates something innovative? Don't use it - it'll send your data back to the CCP! Or just pretend it doesn't exist.
In reality Chinese people aren't idiots. We've spent a couple of decades giving away all of our manufacturing knowledge for a few cents of shareholder value, so it is not exactly surprising that they now possess that knowledge - and are able to build upon it. China is dealing with huge demographic changes, so obviously they've been pushing for automation, so it shouldn't be a surprise that those factories are now rapidly automating. Which we could've done in the West, but outsourcing it to cheap Chinese labor was cheaper in the short term.
For every genius in the West there are ten geniuses in China, and with their top-down economic policy they are able to apply it where it truly matters.
We created our own worst enemy, and are now crying foul. If we don't get rid of our outdated racist biases soon and start treating China like the successful superpower that it is, we're going to get completely steamrolled in the next few decades.
So it looks like axial flux, the OG was introduced in 1820 something and it wasn't easy to manufacture. So radio flux came after that and has been around ever since. So axial flux is making its come back this year!
The video is very interesting too about decompounding returns when the motor is less with the other things need to weigh less too.
Especially the bit about potentially not needing brakes in the near future because the regen is so capable. Which would lead to less weight and less parts even again!
Also found it fascinating, although on the discussion about brakes I thought about how regen braking turns off in my EV when the battery is full, because there is no where to put the power. So you either keep some of the battery always available to soak up braking energy (and hope people never charge to full at the top of a mountain and exhaust the buffer) or you include a set of normal brakes for when regen is not possible, both options negating the weight savings. Right?
Interesting, it seems like keeping the battery at some level below 100% (e.g. 80%) would make sense then because I don't think regen would ever top it off that much right?
My understanding is that after 80% the rate of charge a lithium ion battery can accept diminishes.
Could the 80% Li-on battery accept the charge from the brake regen fast enough? Or would it still have to be drained somewhere else if the battery could not accept it?
i wonder how much heat you'd have to dump if you just used a resistive load and heatsinks. aluminum isn't very heavy. Look at the size of a rotor and brake shoe on modern cars, it can't be that much larger surface area as a heat sink to dump the charge. Although someone would have to test it. Since EV are so smart, wouldn't they know that all routes generally are downhill, and thus stop the charge at 80% or something? Further, the absorption phase means you have to dump excess current somewhere anyway if you're over 80% charged.
A few years ago I built a few small ones in my home lab. They are extremely efficient. With the right setup, have insane torque, and don’t require a lot of energy to do it. The best part for me was that they are completely brushless by design and are easily to keep clean.
From your link: "The scam-blocking service is based on modern cloud technology, and it’s scalable, and easy to deploy" - I don't think we need another SaaS parasite for this as protocol-level solution like STIR/SHAKEN is a better approach IMO. The problem is that operators are not incentivized to do anything with spam/scam.
I don't understand how this isn't the default. I get multiple calls every week, sometimes many per day, from people saying I called them. This has been going on for years... (Portugal)
The telephone system design stretches back to the days when it operated purely electro mechanically so there wasn't even the data to know who the original caller much less a way to implement validation to ensure the call was actually from that number. That plus common carrier rules (at least present here in the US) required all the networks to connect every incoming call to prevent them from blocking out competitors. CallerID is a late addition patch on a system designed to remain compatible with the old exchanges and countries have only recently (in legal and bureaucratic terms) modifying laws to allow for blocking and screening.
As finn. I can verify scam calls are non-existent lately few do occasinally popup, but its like 2000 times better than before. When i learned about this originally, i was shocked like how this is not default?
Gotta remember the phone system used to run on electromechanical relays not digital systems and the digital upgrades since then were designed to be compatible with the old systems with common carrier rules requiring networks to route calls by default so blocking and verification weren't really built into any of the systems and interfaces between carriers.
Do you think this is a problem with the EU? I don't. I think it's a problem in the way that Big Tech operates: by function of theft and laundering of data, and by screwing end-users and consumers in favor of profits.
It may be a problem with EU regulations. It’s hard to see how Apple could be certain they had complied with the EU DMA law, given its based on vague outcomes rather than clear requirements with extremely large penalties. The fact the EU was only willing to require the DMA regulations be met by large foreign companies doesn’t inspire confidence.
And it’s not like there is a thriving tech ecosystem of successful EU tech companies showing how it’s done. So there is a lot of ambiguity on how companies can reasonably comply without huge risk of 10% global revenue.
Delaying a technology release is not going to stop that in the long term. Society, culture, and the support tooling just needs to adapt. Just like how AI coding is still in the early days.
The sooner people learn the risks and build the infrastructure to make it fail less the better.
> All these points are valid, and OpenAI did a great job identifying potential risks, especially misuse and biases, at an early stage.
Many of the OpenAI employees who were focused on these risks in GPT-2 later founded Anthropic, notably Dario [1]. Since the beginning and continuing through today Anthropic describes itself as an "AI safety and research company" [2]
I'm not sure if the OpenAI of today has the same focus on safety, or if they do the minimum to not look irresponsible given Anthropic's effort.
People quote the "GPT-2 is too dangerous to release" thing as if it were wrong, but given all the slop all over social media and how it's used to create division and attack social cohesion, he was clearly right.
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