> Most of the cost will be safety systems designed to prevent the battery from being exciting and even then a crash will likely set them off.
People say the same thing about Li-ion batteries yet they have proven to be significantly less likely to catch fire compared to ICE vehicles [1].
> people who don't want to admit that large scale electrification is a dumb idea. We electrified everything that made sense to electrify a half century ago.
I'm very curious to hear why you think this. If nothing else, the 'situation' with the Strait of Hormuz would seem to have shown the importance of energy independence achieved through large scale electrification. Individually, I couldn't go back to an ICE car or even garden tools, they're worse in every way.
Anything can happen, but you're predicting the future without any evidence. You just made up a scenario in your head, predicted it would come true, then you can't believe people would say it's ridiculous.
When was the last time this happened with a gas car? How often are fires happening with lithium iron phosphate?
You think a car is going to crashing into a building AND burst into flames AND be impossible to put out AND burn the building down?
When was the last time this happened? Let's think about odds and statistics super hard.
>When was the last time this happened with a gas car?
ICE car fires are easier to put out.
>You think a car is going to crashing into a building AND burst into flames AND be impossible to put out AND burn the building down?
EVs catching on fire and then being impossible to put out is something that has already happened, and in fact as I understand it the latter invariably follows from the former. The only new thing that needs to happen is the fire happening while the car is not out on a road, but inside a building where it can set other things on fire. The fact that the vehicle cannot be put out and can frustrate firefighting and rescue efforts makes an already dangerous situation even more dangerous.
Which part of any of this is straining your imagination?
>When did one crash into a building, catch on fire, and kill people? Surely this must have happened at some point for you to put all this together.
You can't think of a single example of an ICE vehicle crashing into a building, starting a fire, and a bunch of people dying? I can think of two such crashes happening the same day, involving jet engines.
I don't know why this is relevant, though. The topic of discussion is lithium batteries, not ICEs. A vehicle crashing into a building and starting a fire that kills people is not some science fiction scenario that should need to be defended. Your incredulity is straying into bad faith territory.
>you changed what you're saying
I changed it because I think it's it's pretty obvious that the concerning thing is the EV catching fire where it can easily spread to other things. Whether that's because the vehicle crashed or for some other reason is inconsequential. The reason I gave that example initially was because that's just what I happened to have in mind at the time; it makes sense that a crash could damage the batteries enough to cause a thermal runaway, rather than the car randomly bursting into flames for no reason.
>It's only a matter of time before someone gets hit by lightning after winning the lottery too.
Winning the lottery doesn't increase your chances of getting hit by lightning, nor vice versa, but crashing your EV does increase the chances that it can catch fire, and a building is one of the things it can crash into. Having a fire that cannot be put out likewise increases the chances that someone may die from it, compared to if the fire is easily to be put out.
I don't know, do you really find it that unreasonable to be a little bit concerned that cars now have these giant energy stores that if they fail they're impossible to control until they burn out completely?
You can't think of a single example of an ICE vehicle crashing into a building, starting a fire, and a bunch of people dying? I can think of two such crashes happening the same day, involving jet engines.
So your argument is that electric vehicles are dangerous because of 9/11 ?
That's what you said. Cars became planes and suddenly 9/11 is your example and somehow it means that someone will crash a car into a building, the car will light on fire and everyone in the building will dies. These are your words.
I'm not really sure what you think the difficulty is. A firefighter in fire protection gear hooks the burning car with a large metal chain, the other end goes to the fire truck, tow truck or winch, the car comes out of the building.
The building is made of ordinary building stuff like wood and plastic which can be extinguished using ordinary means, you just need to remove the car so it doesn't set it on fire again. The same means (dousing it with a fire hose) can temporarily lower the temperature of the car. Firefighters already have the equipment necessary to deal with toxic smoke.
I went in and played a few videos. I'm not sure if anything in there is "sobering" to me (as an EV owner), all the incidents that he shows make sense and the physics are easy to understand.
He seems to be pretty knowledgeable about battery and EV architecture and the stated facts and numbers seem solid, but it also sounds like he takes great care not to scare away his flock of EV-hating idiots.
Just because you state your opinion confidently, does not mean you are correct. For example, as of 2024, there are 30 billion kilograms of proven reserves of lithium, more than enough to replace every single one of the 1.5 billion ICE cars in the world with an electric car. Please focus more on getting the facts right, and less on speculating about the character of other commenters in an overemotional manner.
Elemental sodium is reactive. Ionic sodium is not, lest you blow up your dinner. Furthermore, the lithium part of a Li-ion battery isn't the flammable part, the electrolyte is.
> If you want to replace FF there is exactly one solution, that's nuclear.
> Stop acting like you care about this issue. You have never cared enough to learn about it, so until you do, stop spreading misinformation about how physics works.
It's wild for you, in particular, to take such a weirdly aggressive stance here. Zero basis in reality, just virtue signaling.
> Just like you (at the moment) are acting like you don't care if people die in fires.
There is nothing in my comment that could possibly be interpreted as meaning I don't care about people dying in fires.
> If you want to replace FF there is exactly one solution, that's nuclear.
We're talking about batteries, so I'm not sure how this is relevant unless you want reactors in cars?
> Stop acting like you care about this issue. You have never cared enough to learn about it, so until you do, stop spreading misinformation about how physics works.
I made a single, sourced, claim in my comment and didn't mention physics once?
> Too bad there isn't enough Li for everyone to have one.
Could this be why companies are looking at alternatives? Either way, this claim really should be provided with a source.
> there's only one state (South Australia) that doesn't agree on the major standard sizes: Pints are 470ml, schooners are 425ml, a half pint is 285ml, and a pony is 140ml.
> Source: I have pretty extensive drinking experience in pretty much all of the Australian capital cities, except Perth.
I don't drink as much as I used to so this might be a little outdated, but in Perth "Pints" are 570ml. It was rare, but becoming less so, for some places to serve you a 470ml schooner when you ordered a pint. We avoided those places.
...Embarrassingly, I have typo'd in my original post, and it's too late to edit. Pints are 570ml (not 470ml) everywhere on the East coast - hence why a half pint in Tassie is often called a ten - because it's 10oz, or half a 20oz/568ml pint.
> Advertised range should be the mean of the distribution, not the max.
Distribution of what? Assuming you mean the distribution of driving range achieved 'in the real world', how would that work before a car is sold? How often would it have to be updated in their advertising material? Over what sort of area would the distribution be calculated? How would anyone know if the advertised range of two different cars was even comparable?
Whilst the standardised tests could be improved, they are still the best way to compare products.
> should have to pay a KL divergence penalty on it that will be distributed to EV buyers as rebates
I get about 15% more range than advertised, should I have to pay a penalty for this?
This really sounds like 'but think about a poor car vendor!'. And a poor car vendor definitely can't build at least 10 pre-production cars, run them with both a lightest and heaviest loads and different patterns and calculate the mean and use it instead of the one with the maximum distance with a minimal load, right?
> This really sounds like 'but think about a poor car vendor!'.
It was absolutely not meant to come across that way. I just think it wasn't thought all the way through.
> And a poor car vendor definitely can't build at least 10 pre-production cars, run them with both a lightest and heaviest loads and different patterns and calculate the mean and use it instead of the one with the maximum distance with a minimal load, right?
This just sounds like vendor controlled slightly-less-standardised testing, not the real world based system they seemed to be arguing for.
> I get about 15% more range than advertised, should I have to pay a penalty for this?
No. You are just one datapoint within the distribution. If the distribution aligns with manufacturer's advertised distribution, nobody gets a rebate. If distribution is not aligned, manufacturer is penalized and everyone gets a rebate for being misled.
There are many variables and scenarios, yes.
This, however, is not an excuse not to provide some more data points that help people estimate what they are really getting...
Anyway Tesla has data from all their cars, they could use that.
> Later my boss told me not to do that again because it caused havoc with schedules and such.
Did you talk to anyone about your plans before you brought in the demo or let them know they were solved problems? Often these sorts of reactions come down to your boss not wanting their team to lose their jobs because of the perception that it can all be handled by one person who's happy to work weekends.
I wasn’t politically savvy enough to do that. Honestly, I don’t want to be. The reality was that the project really could have been done in a month by a couple of people. It got turned into an enterprise project with multiple unaligned teams with Gantt charts and milestones and everything.
Again, and I can’t emphasize this enough, for a Django CRUD app. It was a 4 person-week project turned into a major ordeal. No one should have lost their job; they should have been put to work doing the thousand other more productive things they could’ve been doing instead.
> No one should have lost their job; they should have been put to work doing the thousand other more productive things
I think that's exactly why you should have talked to your peers and let them know they were solved problems, unless the overengineering was intentional.
Sometimes you can explain things and not be heard until you demonstrate them. Then they have to accept that you’re not just BSing, that your idea does have at least some merit.
Also, never underestimate an enterprise’s ability to convince itself that it’s too big and complex for off the shelf tools. Sometimes that’s the case. Very often it’s not.
In this case, I’d also watched this all take shape over a couple of months. Being the new person, I assumed it was some necessarily complex beast that was beyond my scrappy experience and calling for Serious Engineering. Once I recognized it for what it was, I knocked out my weekend project shortly afterward because I couldn’t get it out of my head. As much as anything, I had the need to see if it really was as straightforward as I thought it could be. I didn’t sit on my idea for months while they toiled. I watched them toil for months before I understood the core of what they were making.
> Sometimes you can explain things and not be heard until you demonstrate them.
1000%. In my experience this isn't even a "sometimes". It's the opposite. Explaining/arguing in the abstract why a significant directional change is needed has little persuasive power. If you can demo something, you actually have a fighting chance, even if it barely works. It can be a working product, it can be charts, it can be a semi-functional mockup, whatever, but you have to show _something_ that isn't just talking about it. I learned this the hard way after advocating for things and getting shot down too many times.
> Also, never underestimate an enterprise’s ability to convince itself that it’s too big and complex for off the shelf tools. Sometimes that’s the case. Very often it’s not.
Couldn't agree more with this, also. I've seen an astonishing number of homemade job runner systems, homemade message queues, homemade databases, homemade web frameworks, homemade languages, etc.
One can make the argument that this is how technical progress happens, and in some sense, that's true (we wouldn't have a lot of nice things if this never happened), but it's rare. Like, really rare. Most shops would be better served with e.g. Django, Postgres, and HTML, deployed on Heroku (or your Heroku-equivalent of choice) rather than spending hundreds of human-months building "an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of $COMMON_OFF_THE_SHELF_TECHNOLOGY".
Wow, that just gave me a PTSD shudder. I started at one shop and they had a small team continually fighting against their home rolled message queue and task runner. After joining in the fray, asking about a million questions about why this is done like that, etc., I talked them into replacing it with a stock Python Celery setup. The original author of the local version protested, understandably, explaining why it couldn't possibly work.
It worked. It didn't require handholding. It continued working after I left there.
My coworker was a smart guy, but he got it in his head that their specific use case was something that couldn't possibly be served by a COTS project. Turns out, it could, and easily.
This story is more common than any of us would like to admit, myself included.
I can say this with some confidence because as a junior developer, I was often that person, and I didn’t really understand the collective lessons contained within e.g., Rails, Celery, etc.
I was enamored with doing something “cool” and “interesting” and I didn’t realize that this was distinct from and not actually as cool as solving someone else’s problem on time and under budget.
Easier said than done. If a company is in that situation already it's due to a reason. A new middle-manager would have a hard time convincing anyone, let alone a new IC. IMO you just go down with the flow and enjoy your new salary (which should hopefully be higher than the previous one) or start looking for your next gig
And it’s possible that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
I got a green light to do an integration in a week alone, which was planned for a team of 5 for half a year. We knew that it cannot be that much. So I delivered…
It was never used. It was purely political. The integration didn’t happen because it was “half a year”, but because middle management didn’t like the idea of integration for political reasons.
In fairness to Salesforce, it was the garbage third party apps in their ecosystem which got compromised and did the leaking, not Salesforce themselves.
On the other hand, programmers are happy to work with AI, which is incredibly limited and a pale shadow compared to the real "I" in educated and experienced meat brains.
Also, networking - in both space and time (among the living, the latter with the dead, one way from them to us) - is THE gigantic advantage of humans. Not to want to bother with it is an equally gigantic mistake, if you want to use being human to more than a tiny fraction of its potential.
If you are interested in creating solutions and useful systems, "politics", human networking, should be THE number one priority. Long before anything technical.
Important scientists and engineers were great networkers and communicators. They also knew which connections where worth making. Just like in the brain, fewer good connections are better than wildly cross-connecting everything.
What you’re saying is true. Yet, I can only willingly go along with so much terribleness before it hurts my soul. We only have so many days to do things we care about. The thought of throwing away 6 months of them for no defensible reason horrifies me, and I can’t, won’t, participate.
Edit: for a compensating control, I pair with senior leadership I can directly ask about this things. “Hey CTO, is there a reason we’re doing this thing so ass-backward? No? Can I go fix it then? Thanks!” Or, “oh, because we’re stalling to avoid this horrible customer’s demand, and no one’s really going to be working on it as their day job? Sigh, alright, I’ll look the other way.”
I let them be political so that I don’t have to be.
I'm not good at office politics, but I got better at not caring. Understanding what is erroneous stimuli, as an employee you don't have to respond especially if you aren't noticed. This is fairly easy for engineers, even lead engineers. Anywhere there is a buffer between you and other stakeholders.
Occasionally though, I do get thrust into it, mostly during a company pivot about something I wasn't hired to do. All the personalities to manage, I 100% fumble, but still deliver.
Omg! Who the hell cares if the "boss" got a heads up. When I'm in engineering or you're in engineering with me, we party the same way: better is better.
The bosses - hell management's job leading into organizational culture - is to stop politics from derailing good engineering and customer satisfaction.
It's not too tough for me. Now that you know where I stand the other side better get it's act together.
Drowning in politics helps nobody including the boss. It's a net loser.
Now I'm practical and empathetic: a surprise can bring heat. But then you breath and get a grip. Cool. But thereafter the right things better get done. Politics for a day - np - politics sapping know how making cynical SE'S think twice? Never.
I learned a lot from that job, mostly how not to lead people. Subsequent jobs that I’ve been at for longer stints have placed much more emphasis on delivering good work than on building complicated plans to someday hopefully maybe consider delivering good work.
Ideally discoverability would be wholly solved by organic word-of-mouth recommendations. First from yourself as the only person who knows this product category exist then from the people who accepted your recommendation, had it solve their problem and finally saw fit to recommend it themselves.
> the French term "fin-de-siècle" which is well understood by educated English speakers
This may not be as well understood as you believe. I am an educated English speaker, who has many educated English speaking friends and family, I have never heard this phrase.
> it's literally the same thing. anyone who claims otherwise is uninformed.
It's also extremely emotional language. I'm curious what your issue is with legally prescribed stimulats?
Stimulats allow me to be a functional human being who can do things like wash the dishes after dinner or put my clothes out to dry. Can you imagine not being able to function at even that basic level? It's literally suicide inducing.
He's alleged to have taught Chinese military pilots secret US Air Force techniques. This is supposed to be covered under conspiracy to export defence services.
People say the same thing about Li-ion batteries yet they have proven to be significantly less likely to catch fire compared to ICE vehicles [1].
> people who don't want to admit that large scale electrification is a dumb idea. We electrified everything that made sense to electrify a half century ago.
I'm very curious to hear why you think this. If nothing else, the 'situation' with the Strait of Hormuz would seem to have shown the importance of energy independence achieved through large scale electrification. Individually, I couldn't go back to an ICE car or even garden tools, they're worse in every way.
1. https://www.mynrma.com.au/open-road/advice-and-how-to/unders...
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