On Aug 6, 2014, at 12:26 PM, Lee Hart via EV <ev@lists.evdl.org> wrote:
>>>> expecting the car to plug itself into a wall outlet / cable is asking a >>>> bit much. > >>> I can easily imagine a robot arm that can reach out, find and connect to >>> some >>> contacts mounted somehow on the front license plate area. > >> That's a lot of moving parts to break, especially considering how many people >> have trouble not running over things in the garage already. Plus the hazard >> of people or pets or other things getting caught up in the mechanism. > > This strikes me as a non-problem that keeps getting elevated into something > much bigger and more complicated than it needs to be. I think you're right. What's exciting to me is that two technological advances are starting to mature at the same time, and that the two of the together will potentially be much more significant than either would be separately. ICE and EV cars are both equally well suited to autonomous driving, but EV cars are _much_ better suited to autonomous recharging than ICE cars are to autonomous refueling. At-home EV recharging is already more than plenty good enough for all but the idle super-rich. At-home charging isn't merely a solved problem; it never really was a problem in the first place. On-the-go EV recharging is only a problem when the miles driven in a day are greater than the miles the car gets on an overnight charge. Save for road trips, the Tesla is already there and others will soon follow as battery prices continue to drop. And plugin hybrids such as the Volt and my Mustang project also have that problem "well enough" solved; if most people only filled up their gas tanks a few times a year rather than a few times a month, many (but not all) of our fossil fuel problems would magically go away. What EVs do at this time when many new cars can already drive themselves in limited ways is open up the possibility for fleets of fully autonomous nearly maintenance-free magic carpets. _That's_ the exciting bit. How they wind up charging themselves isn't something anybody other than the mass market manufacturers really need to worry about. b& -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 801 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20140806/f9f8086a/attachment.pgp> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
