When are you going fully electric?
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Soldato
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We really should just bite the bullet and switch to the other side of the road
I know the Brexit frothers would lose more of their tiny minds but it would not only bring some more niche vehicles to our shores (import yourself if manufacturer doesnt) but in general lower costs since its far easier to import the same car from elsewhere if the UK based markups are high.
I know the Brexit frothers would lose more of their tiny minds but it would not only bring some more niche vehicles to our shores (import yourself if manufacturer doesnt) but in general lower costs since its far easier to import the same car from elsewhere if the UK based markups are high.
yes we'll do the same as Biden and europeans, with subsidies to protect home manufacturers against the chinese, but who is left with a national BEV production plan,
jaguar/tata still trying to blackmail government for subsidy on battery factory, aussie buyout of british volt doesn't look promising since not bleeding edge tech collarobation with catl etc.
(as was said on newsnight last night labour/kier needs to say his manifesto will fix the brexit/eu trade deals)
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concerns on polestar too, like aforementioned lucid
jaguar/tata still trying to blackmail government for subsidy on battery factory, aussie buyout of british volt doesn't look promising since not bleeding edge tech collarobation with catl etc.
(as was said on newsnight last night labour/kier needs to say his manifesto will fix the brexit/eu trade deals)
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concerns on polestar too, like aforementioned lucid
It looks like you might be able to get one as a LHD but I can’t see anyone doing it other than a few Tesla die hards getting a plaid.
Why would anyone else bother with the agro and the obvious issues that come with spare parts, resale, insurance and well driving a LHD car in the U.K.?
Why would anyone else bother with the agro and the obvious issues that come with spare parts, resale, insurance and well driving a LHD car in the U.K.?
Soldato
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I am not against it in principle but it would be a decade or more of utter pain and increased accidents , not to mention the expense for the cross over period.
we have coped this long , I think we may as well wait now until the majority of cars are autonomous ......
how would roundabouts work tho. wouldn't they need to all be redesigned as well as on / off rams on the motorway (maybe not... I haven't really put much thought into it)
Soldato
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I wonder if it will make 2nd hand ones go up in value as more desirable as "rare" or if it will make the drop due to less supply of parts etc. as someone who tends to always assume the worse I am glad my deposit didn't go on a 2nd hand model S
Binning the S seems nuts. So y only?
Model 3 and Model Y for now.
Sales of Model S and X were pretty small fry in the U.K. and in my view, way too expensive.
A model S with similar performance to a long range Model 3 and a price tag starting at around £65k would have been a much better sell IMO.
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Soldato
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For sure would be some work.
I remember reading about the last nation to do it, was norway or sweden or somewhere like that
Was a short term spike in accidents etc then it settled down.
Roundabouts would generally be fine, some with particularly funky exits/entrances may need some work
Yet on off for single direction would be the biggest issue, but again only where its not "normal" if you have an on and off ramp at each exit then you still have an on and off ramp.
But the ones with only say an off would be an issue.
Your right though, really with autonomus as close as it is thats the point to do it. When we decide autonomous has right of way and the old manual drivers have to give way then do it then.
Much of the infrastructure and way we don things is to take account of humans with all their failings and that makes adoption harder.
Autonomus has its own issues of course but we make them harder by asking them to be able to deal with irrational and unpredictable humans.
Ah yeah I forgot about the 3. Those models are clear cut for the UK tbf.
I couldn't trust Tesla to be honest, they don't care about residuals etc for people who buy and are happy to screw you, so I can see them clearing LHD stock and introducing RHD later.
If they do a >50% discount I might reconsider of course, driving on the other side is not the end of the world, did it for a few years the other way when I lived in Sicily.
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Yep - I saw that delay on the Polestar 3 coming, hence why I cancelled my order in March for a BMW iX
Polestar are better placed than Lucid -
- They sell cars
- They don't forecast 100k sales of a car above £150k in 12 months
(which is more than Merc sell S-Class's). Which is what Lucid did around 2020 time.
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Possibly but the these makers first need to establish themselves.
This entire paragraph seems back to front to me! "When we decide autonomous has the right of way..." Why would that ever be adopted as a policy? Even if it was how would you know whether a car was driven by AI or not?
The world should be designed with us pesky humans in mind, failings et al. If the AI can't deal with that then it simply isn't ready yet.
Soldato
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Why is it back to front?
Eventually its likely the majority of cars will be self driving capable. At that point ditching all the stuff that is there to make it possible for humans to interact with the roads and make it so that we can optimise the self driving approach seems just logical.
Eg things like speed limits, joining roads can be far more optimised without dumb decision poor humans involved.
Take roundabouts how often have you ended up stuck on a large roundabout as someone blocks an exit by undertaking a maneuver they shouldn't, same for yellow boxes etc
Traffic lights can be sped up, no need to allow so much dumb human may attempt to jump the lights time.
In fact I have seen simulations that predict traffic lights would probably not even need to exist, the cars would in effect pre negotiate their passage in advance as they approach the junction and there would be cars constantly crossing narrowly in front of each other.
Seems some way off yet but with enough processing power not hard. No way we would be able to have that with humans though, look what happens when a set of lights fails, you always get that aggressive moron who can't wait whilst the majority are sensibly taking turns.
We can barely keep roads surfaced to an unacceptable level, never mind pay for roads to be adapted to self driving cars.
Self driving cars are never going to happen.
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What you are suggesting needs 100% shift to autonomous driving. You can't have 90% of the cars on the roads zooming through junctions criss-crossing with fractions of a second of gap while 10% of the cars are outside of the loop. The only way such a process might work is if said autonomous cars, through their communication with each other, identify a vehicle outside of the negotiated pattern (ie. human driven) and yield to said driver before recommencing their optimised travel. Hence why I think it is back to front to be talking about yielding to autonomous vehicles.
This is all theoretical anyway. The fact is the roads are as they are, "dumb" humans will be a part of the driver mix for a hell of a long time and "self driving" will be an ever improving AI effort to work alongside those factors.
Soldato
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It will yes which was why I said when we decide it should have "right of way". Thats maybe 20, maybe 40 years off yet. To me its the logical end point.
I would suggest when 90% are being held back by 10% then its probably the right time.
You can start with stuff like a lane for self driving on motorways. Where the Ev type trains can operate and its banned for a human to go. Eg say outer lane of motorways.
Over time you can slowly increase the areas where EV only operation or EV priority is implemented.
You don't have to, nor would you actually logically go to end state day one.
Stuff like the no traffic lights would be well down the list, its a potential significant improvement to traffic flow but is 100% incompatible with humans. They prove on just about every car journey ever they cannot follow rules.
I suspect a lot of the general public would adopt far faster if they can simply sit back in the outside lane of the motorway at 90mph whilst the car does the driving, rather than sitting in the other lanes at 70 max.
Time is needed to improve some stuff we just insist on being dumb with. Like road signs. Not adding a specific machine readable version alongside human readable versions means that when someone puts a sign limit for say 50mph on a 60mph road with a lorry sign underneath ( ie saying lorries 50mph max) it can fool the cars systems to detect limits. If it was a kind of simple bar code type thing then it could ignore the human versions and read one it would get correct.
Its that type of stuff thats holding it back more than anything.
Thats what I mean by yield, we move to optimising for the majority benefit rather than specifically a human trying to navigate a junction.
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Suspect your autonomous EV will be drivign at 50-60mph not 90 haha... the battery drain would be insane.
But as it's autonomous you could do stuff while driving so although it takes longer you might not care as much.