I don’t know what an “akku battery” is, but this explanation is essentially correct. Battery technology for transportation usage is simply not mature, and any standard that is developed now would be superseded by advances in technology. This is an example of a situation in which it is better to let market competition and technical development drive out an acceptable standard; the result may not be optimum, but it will likely be more functional than any interface standard we could come up with today.
I think something like this would actually be practical for the central areas of cities. Disallow private vehicles within the limits of the city business center - only commercial delivery vehicles, taxis and so on. Then build large areas like public transit “park and ride” lots on the periphery, where you can leave your highway car and check out NEVs to zip around the city in. You retain the convenience of having personal transit, and have people using electric in the environment it’s practical for.
(NEV is “Neighborhood Electric Vehicle”. As a class, these are vehicles intended for local street use, usually with a top speed of 30 or 40 mph, and a small range. They can be made more economically than electric vehicles intended to actually replace cars. Think “glorified golf cart”. Many states, like CA, make them legal for city streets, with the proviso that they stay off highways. Note that even electric vehicles with modest top speeds can have quite good acceleration from a standing start, another reason that electric is a good choice for city stop-and-go driving. That, and regenerative braking.)
This sounds like a very expensive and potentially disastrous use of public money that would doubtless be rife for corruption in competition for the provider and maintainer of these vehicles, and may very likely have the effect of driving out businesses from said city center whose potential clients can’t reach them efficiently. I don’t say this in the abstract; similar proposals are advanced every few years for San Francisco, and as pain-in-the-ass that the city is for driving and parking in, virtually no one but a few die-hards think that this is anything like a good idea, especially for the several hundreds of millions of dollars that it is estimated to cost just to set up such an infrastructure. ZipCars are useful because the fill a niche for people who don’t need a car on a daily basis; requiring everyone to participate in a ZipCar-like mandatory program would be onerous and fiscally unconscionable, not to mention practically unworkable.
Really? So I can take my cell phone battery out of my phone and put it in your phone and it will work, right? Is that what you’re saying? Obvious overstatement. :rolleyes:
Akku is short for accumulator and the word we use in Germany to differentiate rechargable batteries (called Akkus) from one-way batteries (called batteries); I used the double term to make things clear.
Actually, most recent technological developments went the other way: VHS vs. Betamax, Blue-ray vs. DVD: it’s not the better technology that won, but the company with the market edge.
Because the legal arm of the govt. failed to step in and mandate one plug for all chargers of mobile phones, we have over a dozen different types, dito for the akkus themselves - but normal batteries have a standard size with name and letter code; it took the industry ages to come up with the USB plug to solve the problem of half- a-dozen plugs of different shapes and sizes; etc.
I wish there would be an international law conference, like in the early days of telecom and mail, to agree on international standards in plug shape, size, voltage etc. These standards can be updated as often as necessary, and small modules can be added to make big ones, but it would certainly speed up development work if the car makers wouldn’t depend on one single Akku manufacturer, but could choose one standard module and get on with developing the rest of the car.
Um, there are some cities like London that have banned private cars practically from the inner city, yet it hasn’t collapsed business, people either take the public transport or ride a scooter.
We have “call- a -bike” where you borrow a bike, and there are companies that rent cars like Avis and Hertz; how would this scheme be different? You could certainly allow more than one provider.
It is in the abstract if its being proposed and then po-pohed because nobody can imagine it; you just start with the project and people will like it.
As for tax dollars - besides the aspect of making a project to create jobs, which is rather urgent in the US currently - you don’t need a lot of money for Park and Ride, and private companies would provide the cars, just like Avis and Hertz and others currently do.
All I can say is that similar small-scale schemes certainly do work. We haven’t gone 100% electric mandatory yet, but that’s because it’s currently not yet technologically possible - but a lot of inner cities are banned to types of cars, or impractical to drive in.
It is ironic that you battery cells as an analogy, as standards for batteries are not drafted or enacted by a government organization, do not limit the classes of battery cells to a minimum necessary minimum, and took several decades after the introduction of the battery cell as a consumer product to formalize standards. Battery standards are provided by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association and the International Electrotechnical Commission (each has their own set of standards but for consumer cells are essentially identical), and there are literally hundreds of different cell types for different applications. The USB standard does not provide enough power to charge the batteries on many smartphones, and while the chargers you see may have the same form and fit factor as a MiniUSB or MicroUSB plug, they do not conform to the USB standard interface.
This is paramount to saying, “I wish aircraft manufacturers would pick one engine size/configuration/output and get with developing the rest of the aircraft.” The battery on an electric car is such a large and critical part of the design of the car (and likely to be the largest single component by mass) that to dictate the placement and interface based upon the existing technology would be an onerous constraint upon design authority and the ability to optimize the design for efficiency, serviceability, and safety. Design by committee, especially a body that does not have the empirical basis for assessing the most optimum parameters, is inevitably detrimental.
Please provide a cite that the City of London has banned privately owned automobiles. Regardless, London is already well-provided with both public transit (provided and maintained at great cost by the government) and hired cabs.
Job creation by public works projects is never an efficient use of tax revenue, and is rarely regarded as being a useful economic stimulus, especially when the result is to create yet another self-sustaining government bureaucracy. As for the costs, while it doesn’t cost much to build a Park & Ride lot in the otherwise undesirable real estate adjacent to an interstate, it costs a lot to build lots and garages in an urbanized area adjacent to a city center, as you describe in your proposal.
For private companies to provide cars, including loss, theft, and vandalism, they have to justify their costs based upon anticipated revenues. They would also have to maintain adequate inventory for peak usage. Rental car companies do this by charging rates that are several times the daily purchase and maintenance costs for a privately-owned vehicle and then reselling the vehicles after a couple years of service before they become maintenance liabilities. This business model works for business travelers whose costs are covered by their employer, or vacationers who are willing to pay a premium for the convenience of not having to rely on public transportation. Similarly, the carless residents of major cities may find it more economical to pay a high usage fee on a ZipCar for their infrequent usage. But if you had to pay rental car costs for everyday use you would find the cost burdensome and inconvenient.
As with any proposal that requires major infrastructure, the seemingly simple problems are actually very complex, especially when it comes to emergent technologies and large scale logistics, and predicting the cost of accommodating the unknowns is a business fraught with pitfalls. Consider a simple example; the steering wheel. At the early days of the automobile, there were a number of control devices, including rudders, pedals, reigns, et cetera in addition to the new . A standard could have easily selected any of these other features which bore some similarity to previous horse-drawn carriage controls rather than the new-fangled steering wheeel, and indeed, early designs for the wheel were not very handy. As the technology improved and automobile speeds increased, however, the steering wheel became ubiquitous as both a very effective control device and also serving as a driver hold/restraint, as well as acting as a collection point for other controls such as the horn, turn indicators, shifter, gear indicator, radio controls, et cetera. Even modern efforts to replace the steering wheel with something smaller such as a steer-by-wire joystick have served to highlight was an ergonomic marvel the steering wheel actually is. And yet, the adoption of this control was a complete de facto standard without any legislation or regulation guiding it.
In the case of nascent technologies such as electric cars, it is almost always better to sit back and let the market proof out the most readily accepted features–even if they are not the most technically optimum or obvious from inception–and then generate a post hoc standard that captures those features.
I would like to add that researchers at MIT have made some progress with what is called Semi-Solid Flow Cell battery, where the cathodes and anodes are small particles suspended in a thick liquid. So basically you could recharge at night for your daily commute (like any other battery) but when you take a car trip, you can just pump out the discharged fluid from your cars tank (for them to recharge for the next customer), and pump in charged fluid. This would be really nice, if it works out.
As I think you know, London hasn’t banned private traffic, but it has imposed rush hour tolls high enough to reduce substantial amounts of traffic (hard to imagine those fillthy tree-hugging socialists successfully using a market mechanism, I know).
Are you saying that San Francisco isn’t well provided with public transit and taxis?
And, are you arguing that London (or any other city) spends more on public transit than on building and maintaining surface roads, space for free parking, traffic enforcement, etc.? Not to mention external costs of private cars – pollution, oil spills, etc.
Um yes, I ignored that part about “Banning all private cars!” as obviously hyperbole/ strawmen. No, the govt. doesn’t go around towing your private car, or bash it into a metal lump if you cross the city line.
In Germany, a lot of cities got into problems with fine dust pollution being too high, so one of the things they did was to issue four different classes to vehicles based on how much they pollute (green, yellow, red and no placard), and post which colour placard is allowed to enter the city. At the beginning, all three were allowed and only the older ones that didn’t meet the red placard standards had to stay out; now the red ones aren’t allowed any longer.
So again, people can still own and drive private cars; it’s just difficult and a lot of trouble in addition to the usual stress of standing in a traffic jam for 45 min. or not finding a parking space in the inner city.
No, it isn’t. Aircraft manufacturers have one standard-sized fuel opening, because the airports would tell them to fuck off if everybody had a different-sized opening for the fuel-hose, or wanted a different kerosin-mixture.
What models Boeing and Airbus develop has no influence outside practicability and flyability (passing the safety standards of the FAA).
Getting a standard together for the electronic world, which is sadly under-regulated, would help innovation. A lot of effort is now wasted on trying to dominate the market to enforce your standards on everybody else; a neutral body, staffed with researchers, could look at scientific data and decide what’s really best.
Your faith in the market to produce the best solution is not borne out by any past examples.
Oh yes, I keep forgetting that the US is incapable of having a public transport system. Except cities like NY which do have a subway (though it certainly should be improved), or Chicago (dito). Because the US is such a backward country that it’s both technologically incapable of building street cars and buses, and caught up too much in ideology to invest money for the public good if there is no profit for a few shareholders.
So Roosevelts work program to overcome the Depression was a fail? Or did you not learn enough history?
And who said that an enormous self-sustaining bureaucracy results from Park+Ride, car-swapping or public transport? Sure, if you want to do it the wrong way to see it fail to have your ideology confirmed, you could set it up that way. Only nobody in Europe does that, and what we have works nicely.
Um, the park+Ride is on the outskirts, where the S-Bahn and subway stations are. Inside the city center there is not enough space.
Yes, it would cost money to re-design the current suburbs because they are not suited to the developing fuel situation.
It also costs money to spend time and fuel in traffic jams, and the costs keep going up. So either your country can adapt to the coming changes now, or keep delaying it while things get more expensive, and be left behind by development.
You’re really comparing the size of a fuel opening in a $50M jet to the battery design in a battery powered car? The size of the fuel port in a jet is as big a design feature as the size of the 12V power jack in a car. Agreeing on a standard barely rises to “trivial” status.
The battery in a battery powered car is a central feature of the car design. It’s large, heavy, high technology, expensive and a distinguishing feature. It is absolutely the equivalent of standardizing the engine in an ICE car, and doing so will stifle innovation.
Standardizing them is ONLY helpful in a roadside recharge strategy, and we all know that the vast majority of usage is going to be home recharge, anyway. You’re going to need a large inventory of expensive high technology batteries waiting for summer weekends, when folks go on longer than usual drives.
This is an diversion. My analogy was to aircraft engines, which influence vehicle performance significantly and cannot be arbitrarily selected, not the fueling interface, which has virtually no influence on vehicle performance and can thus be almost arbitrary in configuration.
I work with engineering standards for design, inspection, and testing every day. Practically all working standards are evolved from industry standard practices as a posterieori developments; in other words, the industry figured out what works which was then codified into a standard for future compliance. In the cases I can think of offhand where a standard or specification was developed an a priori fashion, the spec proved to be limiting or unworkable. Many municipal codes for energy efficiency fall into this category, in that the code does not reflect actual developments in technology, and thus restricts or prevents use of the most current and efficient technologies.
For a more concrete example, the US Department of Defense developed a 2" videotape format called Octaplex in the mid-Sixties. You’ve probably never heard of it (despite being developed from the more popular Quadraplex format) because it didn’t catch on, even with the military. While the format was innovative for its day, the equipment to use it was very expensive to manufacture, and the lack of use outside of a few technical applications made it very costly to procure and maintain. Even within the DoD the applications were limited, and it was rapidly phased out in favor of the commercial 1" IVC 700/800/900 tape and then the ubiquitous 3/4" U-Matic cartridge format due to more readily available tapes and equipment. The same could be said for computer languages developed as a priori specifications such as JOVIAL and ADA; while both were technically good standards, they ended up being programming language isolates that were not well-supported or maintained and in which there are relatively few programmers working today are genuinely expert. Code written in such languages is being replaced by more common languages (evolved as user-supported de facto standards that were later codified) as the architectures that supported it are deprecated
The market often doesn’t develop or select the very best technical solution, but it generally evolves and adopts standards for solutions that are “good enough” for any practical purpose, which is often superior to a standard developed at the very infancy of technological development. Forcing electric car manufacturers to adhere to a standard battery configuration before that technology is mature in both form and performance characteristics doesn’t free the designers from having to worry about a battery configuration; it constrains engineers to design around an imposed constraint which may well prove to be non-optimal or even detrimental.
This is such an vitriolic, ill-informed, and blatantly baiting statement that I’m not going to bother addressing it.
While the construction of electrical distribution and transportation infrastructure certainly came with benefits for the nation as a whole (and therefore had an ultimately positive impact on American society and industry) most modern macroeconomic scholars agree that the Keynesian “priming the pump” argument of massive fiat spending to generate economic stimulus is not an efficient use of public funds and can have some detrimental monetary impacts such as increasing inflation and thereby devaluing existing currency. Or did you not learn enough about economics?
Do we have to keep reminding you Europeans that our political subdivisions are frequently larger than your entire countries? That in many cases our towns are 10-15 or more km apart? The cost of maintaining rails to all the major cities and a network of node larger towns would be amazingly prohibitive? That running busses from the small towns to the larger nodes would be also amazingly expensive?
I live on a country road, the nearest village is 7ish km away. The closest a bus for transport would ever come to my house is about 5 km. If my husband were to try and commute to his job 75km away it would take his driving 20 km to the town that actually has a bus that goes to Hartford, ride it into Hartford, change to a city buss to go across the city, then pick up a northern route bus - roughly 2 and a half hours, by the scheduling. He can make the same drive in 1 hour. We have no commuter light rail that is of any use to 85% of the population of the state that does not commute to New York City for work. We are hardly unusual in working this type of distance from home. In the US many people rarely live within 10 km of work because of changing jobs while locked into a mortgage. Only people who rent tend to move to the neighborhoods of their jobs. My state [Connecticut] is one of the small ones. Most states are the size of Germany or France … and we have some that are almost the entire size of western Europe .. look at California, Texas, Alaska.