Crystal ball

[Joz]

4 hours ago, LeeM said:

 I read that recently too @Troubleshooter

 Suck them in with low prices, then when you have a steady clientele, whack the prices up! Not much the consumer can do about it either. 

Seems like a common formula for start up industry.

[smit2100]

13 hours ago, Fishcop said:

Must only be Radelaide   Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne are all running various non-diesel powertrains for all network buses.  Natural gas and EV mostly - and yes it's a bit of virtue signalling but it is keeping the particulate count down measurably.

My theory is that in the cities, Apple/Amazon/Tesla/Google will have an autonomous net work of self-driving vehicles that we 'subscribe' to  like Netflix.  You just hail a vehicle as needed through your phone/watch/implant.  The vehicles will be rolling about 24/7 and using your own car will be a rarity.  The cost of road trauma will be nearly zero as all the vehicles will be networked, you can get drunk and still get home, your grandkids will laugh at you when you talk about operating a dino-powered Porsche.

Yeah Joint venture between tesla and amazon. Teslazon

  Tesla will have the  autonomous  heavy haulage to get to amazons distributuon centers and the courier / postie  will be replaced  by e-house  parcel box  and a amazon dronie. A new age letter box that will e chipped and has a top lid with flaps that opens up wirelessly to a drone bluetooth signal  and the drone drops the parcel the into your home ebox  to the millimetre   via gps and the ebox lit shuts once the parcel is in the box via sensors in the e_ box.  The question is who is who owns the airspace above your house / apartment block  in terms of rogue drone flight paths and edronie noise polilution.  Roof tops of apartments with direct access via stairs  by all apartment users will be worth a bomb.   Eg decked out with bigger eboxes that are leased by apartment owners  for bigger deliveries like food stuffs etc .  Those eboxes can be tenp comtrolled.    Smaller  parcels  will be relegated  to   v  eboxes on balconies.  

[smit2100]

17 hours ago, Skidmarks said:

 

And it’s all very well for us here.  We have the access to capital and social wealth to act.  But much (most?) of the world is not so fortunate.  Me driving an EV is not going to make much difference to the air quality in a “developing economy” so the big task is also there.  And they can’t do it and won’t do it without a good alternative . And fair enough too.  And certainly not whilst we’re talking a big game but playing a small one. 

^ re most of the world is not so fortunate.  

I've paid my bills over the last 3.5 years out of 7 by signing up to flyin / flyout work on a 4 on 2 off off roster ( thats 4 months in country and 2 weeks R and R  on 2 fossil fuel based projects with capex that will probably exceed all in north of circa  34 plus billion USD for both projects ( currently  on the 2nd project overseas) One project was based in a country with a population north of 1 billion on a third expansion of a  facility that was the biggest petrochemical complex in world at the time of starting the  3rd expansion of the facility.    The project expansion basically facilitated  the procesding of an additonal 1.2 million barrels of crude oil a day and had  downsteam plastic plants along with  gasification plants that  processed  waste petroluem coke from the cracker  ( solid tar used in bitumen) used in into recyled  sythetic gas .  The gassication plant was also designed to take coal as well as pet coke and convert it  to synthetic gas as well.  I got driven to work ( in navi mumbai, navi mumbai to mumbai airport . Rajkot to Jamnagar. Flew company jet direct from mumbai to site ( via airforce base near the site but more often flew cattle  class from Mumbai to Rajkot.   I saw bugger all porsches  on the road in circa 2.5 years.

I am currently working on a LNG project on a fly out gig in another country with north of 1 billion people  ( couple of weeks ago had a lazy news flash that an  estimated 375 million in hard lockdown due to Covid.  On the current gig not allowed to drive a vehicle again and get driven to work to a fabrication a yard that has a circa 2 million square meter footprint excluding rhe 2 quaysides  where we load large module processing units and pipracks  onto vessels to be shipped to the project site.    Circa 60 mintues in the morning and  with no traffic and a fair bit longer in the evening.  Also did quarantine stint last year in Shanghai ( 2 weeks hard in hotel and 1 week under testing but  free to leave the hotel.  Never seen some many porsches  on the road in the circa week i  was there .  Eg taycan turbo's to 911 gt2 rs. And macamacan s everwhere.   Where i are am currently living see at least  20 plus porsches a day along with  Electric cars, buses, and the odd  30 year old 3 wheel  deliver  carts converted  to elecric are and a heck off  a lot of couriers delivering goods and food on electric scooters and electric bikes   Mumbai had dirty noisy   tuk tuks. 

The punchline on the tail of two big countries and associated cities is that based on my eyes and experiences, China are so far in front of India that India have no concept of lane control.  How can you got automous in India in say Mumbai with their pothole ridden road network. particularly  along with total disarray with unstructured pedestrians.  How can you write an algo for all those variables.    I cant recall hitting or seeimg a pothole in Shanghai or where I  am am based near Macau.  Had never been to China at the  time but the project sponsor who had involvement on oil and gas projects  across the Asia pacific region and constantly on the road  overseeing  mega projects had a classic quote I will never forget back in 2017.  He is of Indian heritage but an American citizen.  Stuck with him in Mumbai traffic, he said  if  China stopped doing any infrastructure development today, it would take India 50 years to catchup ( particularly Shanghai ( 60 million)  vs Mumbai (all of Australia living in a footprint similiar to Melbourne/ Geelong greater area)  .  Having now witnessed and experienced both countries / cities, absolutely concur. In terms of electric trasport,  China are well down the  motorised path.  I live next to one shopping mall  and another about 2 kms away.  One has a permant  e vehicle shop ( Byd)  and semi permanent sites where footraffic  is for volkwagons  and two other chinese local electric brands.  At the other mall.  2 large shops with revolvong displays of cars eg  porsche taycans , masarati's china electric brands along with  a permanent tesla on level 2 of tte mall.

Even the older generation are getting around on electric scooters whilst bonding with grandkids.  Years ahead of Oz and India.  Crap pic but there are  two seats on that electric scooter ( clealy see black one ),  but there is grey one in front if for the grankid. Also two sets of handlebars on the steering bar.  Grandma / par sits  and steers and throttleuates, whilst the grand child sits with hands on the  handle bars  lower down and feet on  foot pegs attached to the scooter deck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Coastr]

Amazons entry into the autonomous vehicle space is zoox (google it), and has a stake in Rivian.  The new Amazon electric delivery vans (US only) are built by Rivian.  Despite pioneering the space other companies have got the jump on drone deliveries, Amazon is still not doing drone delivery.  Google is doing test delivery of small packages in Logan right now, of all places.  However the Amazon drone delivery will be able to do big packages more efficiently when it finally does get going.  In Australia we'll be getting our packages via clapped out hi-ace for quite some time yet, I suspect.  You can already get deliveries into your garage in the US - share your garage opener details somehow (not sure how it works) and the delivery person can open your remote for you and drop your stuff inside.  It's a pretty good idea actually.

Amazon and Tesla - don't think so!  Jeff and Elon are not buddies.  Lack of co-operation between Google/Amazon/Microsoft etc will probably push the entire industry forward due to the competition-  the autonomous driving winner will take a big chunk of money, but there will always be choice, I don't think it will be winner take all.

As for who owns the air space above your house - not sure, but it's not you the home owner.  Try building something above the permit level and you'll find out you don't own that space.  I agree that drone delivery does have a serious noise problem but it's not actually worse than someone cranking up the leaf blower.  It's also hard to say whether the inevitable accidents and failures will be worth the removal of vehicles from roads doing deliveries.  But it's clear the future is direct home delivery of everything from Vindaloos to Vibrators.  I'd be selling off any mid-size retail holdings as it will either be convenience store (fully automated) or big-box bunnings and precious little inbetween.

Agreed on the India roads - I had a conversation with an Indian national once who argued passionately that Indian roads were pretty safe because the speeds were lower and everyone was alert.  I laughed and said let's check the road death statistics.  They shut up after that - India road deaths/100,000 vehicles = 130, Australia 7.4.   Crossing the road in India is an exercise in extreme threat analysis and spatial awareness.  Haven't been to China but have seen plenty of pictures.

[hugh]

 

[PhilH]

Having lived in both Shanghai (2 years) and Mumbai (5 years) and having several car crashes in both, I can say Mumbai was most fun.  When you ran into someone, or they ran into you, it was an expected outcome from a day out - mostly minor scratches etc, whereas in Shanghai it was always a drama with police called and hours at a police station.

I always equate driving I’m Mumbai like being on an enormous dodgem car track.

Don’t get me started on driving In Jakarta or Bangkok.  They were worse!

[LeeM]

3 hours ago, Coastr said:

 Google is doing test delivery of small packages in Logan right now, of all places.

 From what I see on the news, isn't that a dodgy area with some questionable inhabitants? 

[Joz]

22 hours ago, LeeM said:

 From what I see on the news, isn't that a dodgy area with some questionable inhabitants? 

Nooooo!😂

[MFX]

New cars are changing over to EV and our new ICE sports cars will probably be the last hold outs. That said, trucks and commercial vehicles are not going EV any time soon as the range/charge time is not viable. Hydrogen still has a long was to go to be a good alternative as I understand it, as it is still a lot more clunky and much slower to fill up even compared to LPG. Also I believe hydrogen cars are basically electric anyway as the hydrogen engine is just an onboard generator and not directly connected to the wheels.

EV conversions of our old cars is not really worth while either. I actually considered building an EV 356 as my next project, but it was not worth doing in my view. Even after removing the engine, you basically have to fill every spare inch of the car with batteries to get even a modest 200-250km range, and that adds 300kg to the cars original weight. Yes it would be much faster in a straight line, but the light nimbleness of the car would be lost. To make things worse, you wouldn't be able to fast charge it, so you are really stuck with a car that is only really good for a short blast close to home, or cars and coffee. Not good for much else.

[tomo]

Yep it's  all crazy, When I first got envolved in cranes some 40 years ago they were diesel electric.

[LeeM]

29 minutes ago, MFX said:

I actually considered building an EV 356 as my next project, but it was not worth doing in my view. Even after removing the engine, you basically have to fill every spare inch of the car with batteries to get even a modest 200-250km range, and that adds 300kg to the cars original weight. Yes it would be much faster in a straight line, but the light nimbleness of the car would be lost. To make things worse, you wouldn't be able to fast charge it, so you are really stuck with a car that is only really good for a short blast close to home, or cars and coffee. Not good for much else.

 I vaguely remember you mentioning about the EV 356 before. 

 Don't you fkn dare!!!! 😅

 I just don't understand why anyone would do that to a classic car of any sort. Apart from what you mentioned re weight and range, it's also a costly exercise when some of these shops are charging (no pun intended) $30-60k for the conversion. What's the attraction...to win the traffic light grand prix? 🤔 🙄

I watched a show a while ago where the singer of Red Hot Chili Peppers had a 67 Camaro converted. Went like stink, but sounded like a bench grinder and the charge lasted around 150km. I think it's bloody stupid personally, but that's me.

 

[Coastr]

Electric conversions are neat for what they are - something interesting and blisteringly fast to show off to your friends.  They won't be worth much over the long term because it's all proprietary tech and each one will be different to figure out why it doesn't run.   The batteries will degrade over time inevitably.

[MFX]

On 27/04/2022 at 19:39, Coastr said:

Electric conversions are neat for what they are - something interesting and blisteringly fast to show off to your friends.  They won't be worth much over the long term because it's all proprietary tech and each one will be different to figure out why it doesn't run.   The batteries will degrade over time inevitably.

The other big issue with EV conversions on old cars, is you no longer have the engine noise to cover up all of the squeaks and rattles

[OZ930]

10 hours ago, MFX said:

The other big issue with EV conversions on old cars, is you no longer have the engine noise to cover up all of the squeaks and rattles

You still have a stereo, just turn up the volume.  Fixed 😆