We should put self driving cars on tracks so they are always out of the way and have easily predictable behavior. Maybe we can even link the cars together for efficiency or something like that.
We should put self driving cars on tracks so they are always out of the way and have easily predictable behavior. Maybe we can even link the cars together for efficiency or something like that.
You can further optimize the setup by not installing engines/motors in all of them. So maybe you have one car providing locomotion, with the rest following behind and designed for carrying.
And all the power could just come from a few large centralized facilities that are super efficient. We could just use thin strands of metal to get it to the vehicles over head…
Of course, the maintenance on those wires outside of the city means that you'd make electric trains with large batteries on them instead.
https://evmagazine.com/articles/tesla-launches-first-all-ele...
Expense is correlative to scale, likely it's cheaper to deploy pantographs than battery factories.
Why did India build a high speed freight corridor with overhead power when they could have used batteries instead? Because the quantity of battery to power the trains doesn't exist, and overhead wires do.
I don't think I buy BEV trains to be honest. I'm struggling to think of a proper reason why they might be better compared to normal electric trains.
But the linked article is pretty light on info, so I'll reserve judgement till more info comes to light.
They are good for infrequently used track and places where overhead wires would be in the way, like that very Tesla employee shuttle on it's own track and container ports.
It's not the best way to go for mainline track and not suitable for long distance high speed trains.
If it's infrequently used, a dual mode diesel-electric can fill that use case today.
If we do all of that, then we won't need to train them to know how to operate in traffic. Perhaps we can give them a name in honour of that fact?
untrains!
Maybe we can do away with the expensive battery if we feed power to these cars using overhead cables.
At this point overhead cables are likely many orders more expensive.
Buses in Paris run with IIRC 60kWh battery and pantograph charger at every other station. Packs (not cells) recently dropped to below $100 kWh. At $6k thats probably what city pays for couple of replacement seats (gold plating et all).
In the original Sim City, having your city entirely use tracks instead of roads was superior because there was no traffic congestion from tracks
And less pollution from cars.
If you're happy to put those tracks on every road, sure. I wonder why no-one's bothered with that before.
Sorry if you're playing in to the joke, I can't tell. Streetcars / trams were widely deployed before they were ripped out for the car, driven by lobbyists interested in selling cars. Wondering why no one has bothered with that is starting from a false premise, because people have bothered with that.
I'm well aware that there are multiple options for public transport, but none of them are actually as flexible or as far reaching as cars/taxis. To me this 'but why not trains' on every article about self-driving cars is a tired meme that fails to address that these are not equivalent options. I might as well say "Well, why don't we get rid of these expensive rails and fixed timetables and just lay down some cheap concrete and let people navigate how they want" in just as condescending a tone and be equally as unconvincing.
There are car lobbyists of course but the streetcars in LA at least were put there by housing developments to sell suburban homes before most people owned cars. Once the homes were sold the corporation that built the rails had no incentive to maintain them, and eventually they were spun off and went bankrupt (of course competing with cars didn't help)
Nor did the fixed price controls they were often saddled with. It seems that politicians are congenitally completely incapable of considering inflation indexing as a concept when they are writing laws.
Street cars are a red herring anyway. Because street cars don't maintain anywhere near the same number of routes as free-form roads. It is a routing problem still, and railed vehicles perform much, much worse at it, which is why they need to be time multiplexed with rail schedules.
Fast forward to blackjack and hookers.
It's tedious to see these same sarcastic comments on every self driving car story. Yes. Buses and trains exist.
When you link the cars together, they usually switch to a hub that's a 10-15 minute walk from your destination instead of your destination and the compartments are occasionally shared with unstable and violent people, which while possibly "efficient" in some metrics, are downsides that many people would rather avoid. Personal compartments are a real differentiating advantage.
violent unstable people aren't inherent to cities.. they're inherent to places that refuse to spend any money on social work/housing/and enjoy punishing people
Slot cars at the grown-up level.
Maybe even put them on steel wheels on steel tracks, to make them more efficient.
Have something like metro (maglev trains) too as they are more efficient than steel wheels on steel tracks.
Public transport for things like metro/trains/trams/buses are honestly underrated.
Rugged American Individualism and Capitalism doesn't allow us to have things like that. We must always be in our individual bubbles away from the filthy poors.