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.
AI Coding is great helper but not a substitutue for producing decent looking apps.
Anytime I let lose AI (Both Codex and Claude), they end up producing slop that is overcomplicated, and that looks like a generic tutorial interface. Great for toy apps but not for serious one.
When I do most of the architecture, and use AI to 'fill in the blanks' or just finish some functionality here and there, then AI is great.
The main reason is that it is trained by public code that is mostly tutorials, and simple apps, so AI can't build a great looking one by itself (or it doesn't how to do large apps). But for specific features, it is great.
TLDR: It is still a 'fill in the funcionality here' type of help. Folks that are successful with letting 'multiple agents' running in the background are mostly for backend work where the results are easier to verify.
Also, there is a lot of LARPING in twitter sphere exaggerating what AI can realistically do right now. But I can see how it can affect entry level jobs. AI is still like an CS intern, or very very junior engineer.
LMAO, this thing is so ugly. It looks like a generic Chinese EV. Interior looks good, but the exterior is just a boat. 5.05m long, 2m wide, 5000lbs heavy.
Looks like a mix of the Jag Epace and the Mustang EV/Mache
Can't believe they are asking 600k for this thing.
It is almost like Ferrari is trying to punk its customers.
I worked at Instagram during this (not at the EeE, but saw enough of it, to see that it was a mess).
I think the reason for dropping it, is more of a technical issue and user experience, rather than a 'desire' issue or company will. From my understanding, Zuck wanted this. The implementation was a mess, and folks have different expectations about messages to appear at every platform. Having messages disappear between devices/web, or having to back up encryption, keys, etc... it was just a terrible user experience. Even employees, disliked this feature.
This was not something actually asked by users, but more of a feature done in order to thwart all the types of legal issues created when folks use the platform.
At some point, I counted, there were 64 'leads', just to make this happen. Each lead, had a certain area, or surface/views, which means we are talking about hundreds of folks involved to make this happen (across fb and ig).
It was a boodongle, and it was something that users didn't ask.
Ps. I know, many here at HN really care about this, but the average user was not willing to put up with the degradation of the user experience in order to make this happen.
All workarounds, require weakening E2E, which made it pointless.
Ultimately, If you want a truly E2E, you will have to use a platform specifically made for it. IG/FB are just not it.
Even Telegram, doesn't have it enabled by default, unless you specifiy it.
I don't know all the details because I'm not a cryptologist, but Wire messenger seemed to have solved this in a way that wasn't annoying. I haven't used it since they pivoted, so can't speak much to its implementation, but I remember it working seamlessly across devices.
I wish Ferrari would bring their manuals back. Their gated manual was such a joy to use.
There is probably enough demand (look at the used prices, where manuals sell 40% more), but the new management seems keen to just try to squeeze as much profit as they can from their current tech stack.
They have ceased to become a great fun car, to more just something to show off/luxury empty toy.
I don't think that's the reason. Modern supercars have so much power that the average person that can afford them is going to wreck the drivetrain in a very short while if they have to manage all that power themselves. Automatic gearboxes are far more forgiving. You see the same with Porsches that have manual gearboxes, if you read out the ECU you'll see them overrev many times more than with the autos, if at all (in fact I don't recall seeing an auto that had overrevved).
You are not getting it. There are plenty of cars that have 600+ hp and are manual.
The Ferrari Roma, or Amalfi, are within that 600hp - 800hp range.
Simply, the new leadership thinks there is not enough market for it, and that's why. Mainly, because in the 2010-2015 era, when the pdk/dual clutch became popular, folks stopped buying manuals. But that attitude has changed, and folks are wanting for more manual experiences.
It is basically a Mustang body on a tesla chasis... which misses the point of having a classic car.
While there is nothing wrong with converting your classic car to electric, if the powertrain is shot (they are harder to maintain as they age), but IMO, it looses the charm of the point of having a classical car.
Few years ago, there was a trend to do these conversions, but that stopped as people realised the car loses its charm and the feel of having old classic car, and most of them are not being used as dailies anyways.
Whoever designed the modern version of it, did an awesome job. Modern porsches (past 2000) have gotten a bit too boring, and it needs to be bring some more color in their line up.
I left Meta a while ago... but these layoffs (multiple rounds every year) have been very demoralizing to the folks there.
I survived all three rounds of layoffs, but I saw multiple great colleagues (some of them had been there for 10+ years), getting laid off. After so many re-orgs, I had enough and quit. It was just not worth it (all that uncertainity, people were unhappy, hunger games into trying to get a good rating, etc).
I think Zuck is taking its "Meta" failure (VR) into his own employees. After their treatment, many good people don't want to join Meta anymore, hence he had to spend so much money into buying engineers to join.
It’s so funny to see the likes of Zuck, telling the world they take “full responsibility” for the bad decisions they spend fortunes on, and then fire everyone else while they suffer no direct consequences at all.
Right. People on here are just ignoring the fact that the fantastically expensive metaverse effort has failed, and it's pretty obvious that people working on it thus no longer have anything to do, so will mostly be let go. The article even mentions this as a likely cause.
I mean I get it, Meta is evil, inefficient etc, but this layoff round seems pretty predictable.
Lol... Hey now, I am Albanian, and we have delicious food. :) And export a bunch of random things (like Oregano, Olive Oil, Lavender, Shoes, etc..), and some steel and oil. But, mostly 'light industry' stuff.
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.
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