Carbon Chemist

Tag: transportation

  • Tesla Has Lost Its Range Crown to a Chinese EV You’ve Never Heard Of

    Tesla Has Lost Its Range Crown to a Chinese EV You’ve Never Heard Of

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    There were a good few other poor results for car brands independently tested at the winter El Prix 2024. Let’s look at the losses in terms of percentage. This way, we can see more clearly how a car has fallen short of its WLTP range, and not be distracted by the EVs with the biggest batteries going furthest.

    It’s also worth remembering that every car in the Norwegian Automobile Association test had its cabin set to 21°C (69.8°F). What’s more, to ensure fairness, the temperature was set using a thermometer, not the vehicle’s own climate control system, since two cars may have differing ideas of what 21°C actually is.

    The HiPhi Z fell short of its WLTP range by just 5.9 percent, making it the winner by this metric, too. The Tesla Model 3, meanwhile, missed its advertised range by just shy of 30 percent, putting it in 19th place.

    Polestar, VW and Volvo Were Surprise Losers

    Interestingly, the four cars that performed even worse than Tesla were the Polestar 2 Long Range (30 percent, a 115-mile deficit on the WLTP figure), Volvo C40 (30.9 percent, 110 miles), Toyota bZ4X (31.8 percent, 91 miles) and the Volkswagen ID.7 (31.9 percent, 121 miles). Put simply, the range of these cars fell by almost a third compared to their WLTP-backed manufacturer claim.

    The WLTP stands for Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicle Test Procedure. Brought in as a global standard in 2017, it is intended to mimic how cars are driven in the real world. The test cycle includes four parts, each with a different average speed, and all featuring a variety of acceleration and braking phases, plus stops and starts.

    The El Prix winter range test also scrutinizes energy efficiency, in this case using the European metric of kWh per 100 km (62 miles). The highest efficiency was achieved by the MG4 Trophy Long Range (17.9 kWH per 100 km), but because this test focuses on how cars perform compared to their manufacturer claims, the winner is the Nio EL6, which hit 20 kWh per 100 km—a 9.5 percent improvement on the manufacturer claim. Although undeniably efficient, the MG fell 8.5 percent short of its maker’s range claim.

    The Model 3 returned 18 kWh per 100km, but since Tesla doesn’t publish a claimed efficiency this is tricky to contextualize. The HiPhi Z recorded energy consumption of 23.5 kWh per 100km, 15.2 percent higher than claimed.

    Drawing conclusions from this test is, to say the least, a nuanced process. How much range an EV loses in cold weather is of little value to drivers in consistently warmer climes, and a car with a bigger battery (like the HiPhi Z and its massive 120 kWh pack) is almost always at an advantage. Similarly, a car that doesn’t go as far but charges more quickly is also beneficial, providing the local charge network is up to the job.

    But the positive and negative outliers are still worthy of your attention. The Polestar 2, Tesla Model 3, Volkswagen ID.7 and Volvo C40 all missed their WLTP range claims by more than 100 miles, and the Hyundai Ioniq 6—a car praised for its impressive 800-volt system architecture and a a drag coefficient of just 0.21—also struggled, with a 91-mile deficit. Whichever way you slice it, a car falling 100 miles short of its claimed range is far from ideal, and, as this test shows, not a universal phenomenon.

    Estimated Range Winners: HiPhi, BMW, Kia and Lotus

    At the other end of the scale, praise should be given not only to the HiPhi Z (its real-world range just 21 miles short of WLTP), but also the BMW i5 (38 miles short, or a 12.2 percent deviation), Kia EV9 (39 miles or 12.5 percent), Lotus Eletre (40 miles or 12.3 percent) and fellow Chinese newcomer, the XPeng G9 (42 miles or 13.1 percent).

    The next step is to surely question whether tests like the WLTP—plus the generally stricter EPA in North America and rather more generous CLTC in China—are up to the job. Nils Sødal from the Norwegian Automobile Association told WIRED: “The test results show us that we need a winter WLTP for EVs. We have suggested an official WLTP in -7°C [19.4°F]. Unfortunately, the EU is not following this up in the negotiations on Euro 7.” Euro 7 is a collection of regulations that set a new emissions standard for new cars and vehicles sold in Europe.

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  • How to Guarantee the Safety of Autonomous Vehicles

    How to Guarantee the Safety of Autonomous Vehicles

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    The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

    Driverless cars and planes are no longer the stuff of the future. In the city of San Francisco alone, two taxi companies have collectively logged 8 million miles of autonomous driving through August 2023. And more than 850,000 autonomous aerial vehicles, or drones, are registered in the United States—not counting those owned by the military.

    But there are legitimate concerns about safety. For example, in a 10-month period that ended in May 2022, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported nearly 400 crashes involving automobiles using some form of autonomous control. Six people died as a result of these accidents, and five were seriously injured.

    The usual way of addressing this issue—sometimes called “testing by exhaustion”—involves testing these systems until you’re satisfied they’re safe. But you can never be sure that this process will uncover all potential flaws. “People carry out tests until they’ve exhausted their resources and patience,” said Sayan Mitra, a computer scientist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Testing alone, however, cannot provide guarantees.

    Mitra and his colleagues can. His team has managed to prove the safety of lane-tracking capabilities for cars and landing systems for autonomous aircraft. Their strategy is now being used to help land drones on aircraft carriers, and Boeing plans to test it on an experimental aircraft this year. “Their method of providing end-to-end safety guarantees is very important,” said Corina Pasareanu, a research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and NASA’s Ames Research Center.

    Their work involves guaranteeing the results of the machine-learning algorithms that are used to inform autonomous vehicles. At a high level, many autonomous vehicles have two components: a perceptual system and a control system. The perception system tells you, for instance, how far your car is from the center of the lane, or what direction a plane is heading in and what its angle is with respect to the horizon. The system operates by feeding raw data from cameras and other sensory tools to machine-learning algorithms based on neural networks, which re-create the environment outside the vehicle.

    These assessments are then sent to a separate system, the control module, which decides what to do. If there’s an upcoming obstacle, for instance, it decides whether to apply the brakes or steer around it. According to Luca Carlone, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while the control module relies on well-established technology, “it is making decisions based on the perception results, and there’s no guarantee that those results are correct.”

    To provide a safety guarantee, Mitra’s team worked on ensuring the reliability of the vehicle’s perception system. They first assumed that it’s possible to guarantee safety when a perfect rendering of the outside world is available. They then determined how much error the perception system introduces into its re-creation of the vehicle’s surroundings.

    The key to this strategy is to quantify the uncertainties involved, known as the error band—or the “known unknowns,” as Mitra put it. That calculation comes from what he and his team call a perception contract. In software engineering, a contract is a commitment that, for a given input to a computer program, the output will fall within a specified range. Figuring out this range isn’t easy. How accurate are the car’s sensors? How much fog, rain, or solar glare can a drone tolerate? But if you can keep the vehicle within a specified range of uncertainty, and if the determination of that range is sufficiently accurate, Mitra’s team proved that you can ensure its safety.

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  • Ford Is Giving Away Free Tesla Charger Converters That Will Unlock a New World of EV Power

    Ford Is Giving Away Free Tesla Charger Converters That Will Unlock a New World of EV Power

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    Ford CEO Jim Farley hopped on Elon Musk’s X today to make an announcement relevant to Elon Musk’s Tesla: Ford will be giving away adapters so that its electric vehicles can easily charge on Tesla’s charging network. “We want to make charging more convenient for our Ford EV owners,” Farley wrote.

    The announcement underscored the importance of charging to the Detroit automaker’s electric vehicle strategy—and the degree to which Tesla has dominated public charging in the United States.

    Ford’s public North American charging network is made up of some 106,000 chargers. Drivers of Ford’s Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning pickup will now have access to double the number of fast charge points, Ford says. US and Canadian owners of Mustangs and Lightnings from model year 2021 through 2024 will be able to reserve their adapters this spring. (The automaker said it had no news to share about adapters for customers outside of the US and Canada.)

    Ford announced last year that its electric vehicles would come with Tesla-compatible charging ports by 2025. With almost 6,000 charging stations globally, Tesla’s network is one of the most developed and reliable in the world. A survey from the analytics and research firm JD Power found that 21 percent of US electric vehicle owners who attempted to charge at a public station in the beginning of last year were unable to complete their charging session. However, the same statistic for Tesla owners was just 4 percent.

    The announcement means greater convenience for electric vehicle owners. Car buyers often cite “range anxiety” as the number one reason they haven’t gone electric. More public chargers could help ease the transition for drivers accustomed to seeing gas stations every few blocks.

    It’s also vindication for Tesla’s charging strategy. For years, most global automakers defaulted to the Combined Charging Standard, a connector-and-port design created by a committee of professionals. Tesla and its charging network was the outlier. But in 2022, the electric carmaker opened up the design and specifications for its charging ports, and in a fortuitous bit of marketing renamed it the North American Charging Standard. By the next year, Ford became the first automaker to announce it would switch to Tesla’s charger design. Almost every other car manufacturer—including BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Rivian, and Toyota—has followed.

    Tesla said last year it would install CCS ports on at least 7,500 of its chargers by the end of 2024, opening its network up to even those electric drivers without Tesla-compatible cars or adapters.

    Last week, on a call with investors, Tesla executives warned that the electric carmaker’s explosive growth would slow in 2024 as it gears up for the launch of a cheaper “next generation” car in 2025. (The Chinese automaker BYD overtook Tesla as the top seller of battery electric vehicles late last year.) But charging was a possible bright spot. Pay-per-use charging, especially for fleets, could become a “meaningful driver of profit generation” in the years to come, the company wrote in financial filing.



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