Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

As you might guess, my recent switch to an electric car is revealing a variety of things to me, so you will be seeing more on that in the coming period.

Here's a moderately surprising result of switching to an electric car. Here in California, my electric bill went down. Just by a little, but in essence the (green) energy for my car is coming for free.

On my recent bill I used 900kwh and paid $168. 2 months ago I used 700kwh and paid $178. I drove around 900 miles. A small amount of my car electricity came from Tesla superchargers or other charging stations. Most was from my house. Yes, I use an above average amount of electricity already.

Why this this happen?

Here is my gallery of photos and notes of interesting or silly products from CES 2019.

As we enter election season, people wonder who the right candidate for the Democrats (or never-Trumpers) to stand against Trump is.

There are many factors, but let me start with some generic factors for the Democrats at any time.

As an update to my proposal for a special circuit breaker to assist in managing home power I thought I would propose a much simpler alternative for those who have a dryer plug in their garage.

We continue to see lots of reports of a "pull back" on robocars, a "winter" of sorts. It is often presented as "the problem was harder than people expected" I discussed some of this in the prelude to my 2018 year in review.

My feet are aching, as usual, after 3 days on the CES show floor, and the question people always ask others there is "what have you seen that was interesting?"

I'm on my way to CES tonight, and am surprised to have not seen much robocar news yet from there. I'll publish some reports of what I see. The first modest announcement is the creation of a public education collective called PAVE which is the first consortium to have almost all the major players.

As I posted earlier I purchased a Tesla Model 3, the mid-range version with one motor and autopilot.

There are many reviews of this car out there, so I will go quickly over the common issues to get to areas I can give a special perspective on.

A frequent theme of mine has been my identification of "proving you have done it" as the greatest challenge in producing a safe robocar.

I've ranted a few times about the flood of customer satisfaction surveys we get. It seems you can't buy a tube of toothpaste without being pushed to fill out a survey on it.

By coincidence we see two significant announcements today from people who were former leaders on the Google car project, now in their own companies.

Scooters from Lime and Bird have been causing a stir as they move quickly into cities. There's been blowback, because riders travel recklessly, often on sidewalks, and they also leave scooters just lying on the sidewalk, blocking things, because as dockless scooters you can drop them anywhere. Riders are also getting hurt, these are not the safest things to ride.

So cities are striking back, trying to stop, regulate or collect money from these scooter operators.

Some news items, and then some analysis of the energy needed to reposition and charge all the dockless scooters from Lime and Bird.

Waymo announced today they will begin commercial operations in the Phoenix area under the name "Waymo One." Waymo has promised that it would happen this year, and it is a huge milestone, but I can't avoid a small bit of disappointment.