Readit NewsDesktop Metal are developing a sheet forming solution that requires no bespoke tooling, but it's a slow process with fairly poor surface finish.
What are the relative costs of the making die set, the press, and setting up and doing a run of stampings, and the facility and employees to actually house the whole kit?
As of right now, if you need to make a car and you don't have a NUMI or similar retired automotive plant sitting around, it's going to be expensive.
What about the hydroforming process?
I guess smaller car makers from the 60s that did make low volume sheet metal cars didn't need to pass crash tests.
Probably The Telo people should just team up with ineos....
- The body panels were composite but they want to go to stamped metal for production. - It's based off of the subaru ascent; at least most of the frame and suspension is. - NMC chemistry, didn't get an OEM name for the actual cell/pouch though. - Mostly off the shelf Bosch power-train components. Will be interesting to see a tear-down once they're for sale. - No commitment on how "open" the vehicle will be to modifications. They have designed in attachment points for upgrades but it didn't seem to be anywhere as extensive as what Slate is doing. This makes some sense; they have a more "finished" vision where Slate is intentionally taking the "our vision is for you to buy the canvas from us and then make it your own" approach.
On that last point, I don't think Slate has released anything substantial either w/r/t the CAN bus either. As far as I know, their plan is still a BYOD approach for the head-unit so here's hoping that it'll be relatively straight forward to interrogate the busses from an android or linux device. The Telo had a head-unit integrated so who knows how much control you'll have over the vehicle.
This is similar to what lotus did to help bootstrap tesla...
And hey, maybe tesla's going to have some spare capacity lying around so they could be that FAB... ?
I personally really want this truck to succeed. I'd happily trade in my 10 year old model S for this; it'd make dump runs and trips to the garden / home centers a lot easier than in the S...
I do wish they'd go full eccentric and use a citroen inspired oil suspension...
While Power is IRSC has a lot of legacy baggage that makes it significantly more complex that RISC-V (which is clean slate and purposely simplified.) It is also definitely not optimized for low power situations / embedded.
It is basically super computer chip.
Also unlike ARM and RISC-V it isn't designed to be extensible/customized by users. It is more monolithic.
I've read the definition of a supercomputer as "some computer that takes specific domain, compute-bound problems and turns them into IO bound problems." (Implicitly, in that statement is the second statement of "and they have a ton of IO too). They're not really general purpose computers, and likely you'd be able to use risc-v or anything else, with specialized hardware, as the basis of a "supercomputer".
The power platform, on the other-hand (I'll create a new word here) is a foundation for a "SuperEnterprise(tm)" computer.
Power has insane / awesome things like "oh, you can use the ECC bits for ECC and hardware memory tagging[1]." Eventually such things may trickle down to things like ARM or RISC-V, but they're pioneered at the top of the enterprise mountain and trickle down...
One can imagine a setup where you've got a hot water tank and a mixing valve that allows you to heat your water up to some very high temperature and then mix that down to "safe" hot water for the house. Have that run in "heat from grid if below this threshold, otherwise conditionally heat with surplus energy if the water's below this temperature"
You seem to have missed my point though, it was about switching tracks to become an expert in a new thing. A random physics PhD grad might not have a burning passion for fintech, for example but still becomes an expert after three months in the job because of the sheer amount of rigorous training.
Politeness is absolutely necessary, and I hate seeing callous impoliteness in wider society (e.g. towards service workers).
I suspect I would severely struggle in a deeply polite society (stereo-typically Asian?). I can relax the most around very direct people (Dutch?).
I am continually stressed when dealing with anyone that absolutely needs politeness. Example 1: a very close friend who can be triggered by anything reminding them of their abusive ex. Example 2: a self-centred acquaintance that needs pandering (however isn't polite in return).
There's a balance - but it's hard to find. Perhaps I'm confusing two different dimensions, politeness and honesty?
Edit: This is a wishy-washy comment. Difficult topic, straight-jacketed conflict, interpersonal stuff that is hard to understand and talk about.
It is possible to be direct, honest, and polite.
You should consider the possibility that you're mistaken in linking "rude" with "direct"
Interesting comparison. You’re right. The primary difference I can think of is the training to quickly become an expert in a different topic.
I know plenty of PhD students accepting jobs in unrelated fields and quickly becoming the local expert in that topic.
While possible, it’s far more difficult for a machinist to suddenly become an expert car mechanic like this.
Kids (kid being someone from 16 to 30 without children of their own, ideally also without substance abuse problem and a home they can sleep in without fear of being assaulted) have nearly infinite energy, capacity to absorb (physical) abuse, and often the focus to learn esoteric subjects, if they're interested in the subject.
So I would fully expect a large fraction of bored kids to potentially become expert car mechanics, or tree pruners, algebraic geometers, hadoop experts, air conditioning duct builders, etc, if given access, mentorship, opportunity, recognition, and compensation.
It's funny to refer to these as "dotless" since you still need a dot, on the end, to "canonize" the name and tell your DNS recursor 'hey, stop appending domains to see if you can find this.'
And, our recent history has "Canonized" a new pope, and you could (maybe?) look it up against one of the few dotless global DNS entries, but it's still going to need the trailing dot to tell your recursor that it's a canonical name...
I've actually worked a little on hydroforming, but unless you're thinking of a different kind, it was labor intensive, and prone to crinkling in bad spots. we basically concluded that we used less time and got a better result with an English. which would probably run at least $10k for a car body, if you could find someone willing to work for that low an hourly rate.
But places that make windshields keep forms around and make runs of windshields even for low volume cars; obviously there's less recurring need for fenders or floor pans... But there may be some way to financially engineer a "do a run we pay X per unit; hopefully that results in doing another run and paying X, and if we can get to 100X the per unit costs go down to some other target.
But I was thinking, and perhaps they should just make these cars out of ground up trabants or saturns. Tesla has demonstrated that some customers don't actually care about perfect finishes or gaps or whatnot; I certainly would be fine with a car made out of trabant, especially if it meant I didn't have to worry about dents...