Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly

Re:Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly by dzdt on Sunday September 02, 2018 @09:37AM (#17896956)

"I live in an apartment, I can't charge one on the street."

The electric car revolution is going to come at the same time as the self-driving revolution. That will change the calculus of parking significantly. No longer does your car need to be parked right next to your building to be convenient: it can be anywhere a short drive away and summoned at the touch of a button. So charging infrastructure doesn't have to be at every on-street location; it can be centralized to parking lots or garages on a neighborhood basis.

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Re:Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly by tjoff on Sunday September 02, 2018 @10:12AM (#17897058)

That's either a very pessimistic view of electric car progress or a very optimistic view of self-driving capabilities.

I think electric car revolution will be at least two decades earlier than self-driving.

As far as electric goes we are starting to reap benefits of vast investment in better tech, manufacturing and vehicles purpose built for it.

Self-driving is very far away and the best publicly available systems only do slightly more than lane-assist, the by far simplest part of self-driving.

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Re:Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly by mattferderer on Sunday September 02, 2018 @12:40PM (#17897555)

The earliest electric cars I noticed on the streets were glorified golf carts. They were ideal for very short distances, like getting to work & running errands.

Couldn't self driving cars in the very near future follow this same path? Find a very densely populated area. Get self driving cars to work very well in that area for short trips. Slowly expand to similar areas?

I haven't followed either of these very closely, so please correct me where I'm wrong.

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Re:Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly by adrianN on Sunday September 02, 2018 @03:00PM (#17898109)

That's kind of where self driving busses go. The first prototypes run short routes on aiports or something like that. But I don't think that short routes on normal streets are significantly easier than long routes on normal streets.

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Re:Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly by darkerside on Sunday September 02, 2018 @01:38PM (#17897799)

You're coupling a very complex solution (self driving) to a much simpler one (electric vehicles) in order to solve a niche problem (urban dwellers without garage parking) who could either be served with other potential solutions, like charging at workplace, or might simply become even less likely to own a car than they already are.

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Re:Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly by hakfoo on Monday September 03, 2018 @09:09PM (#17905891)

You arguably don't even need full self-driving for that.

A special "autonomous park/return mode", say, capped to 10kph, only following a single preprogrammed route, with a complete lead foot on the brake. Nobody would want to ride in an everyday self-drive that had those restrictions, but it's perfectly acceptable for an empty trip to a central parking structure.

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Re:Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly by pja on Sunday September 02, 2018 @12:47PM (#17897575)

it can be anywhere a short drive away and summoned at the touch of a button

The roads around where I live are /already/ at nose to tail capacity at the times I might actually want such a service. What do you think is going to happen when you add electric cars travelling from wherever they're being stored to the customer?

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Re:Electric Vehicles’ Day Will Come, and It Might Come Suddenly by skybrian on Sunday September 02, 2018 @01:02PM (#17897641)

If it makes carpooling and/or getting to public transportation easier, it could improve things.

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