Self-driving petrol car – A horse driven by a carrot on a stick?

July 13, 2019 by Chanan Bos

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Elon Musk said that buying a car today that will not be scalable to allow full autonomy equals buying a horse. This implies that it means you have to buy a Tesla because we do not know of any other cars on the market that can be upgraded to achieve autonomous driving capability. But a little topic is that of autonomous electric cars or gasoline. Will people be able to buy self-driving gas cars? Well, I imagine that Elon would call a self-powered gas car a horse with a carrot on a stick in front of her. Let's see why.

This article is a non-technical derivative article from the Tesla self-driving computer analysis that I recently published. Elon Musk said that complete self-driving could only work in an electric car. Even today, this sentence really baffles some people because it has not been explained so thoroughly. The general point is that developing a standalone technology for a gas car would be a huge waste of resources because it is a financial and practical stalemate, and there are two or three good reasons to do it, other than obvious "electric car". the future "one.

Gasoline cars are like electric cars with a lot of delay (Gamer Term for latency issues)

A computer can react much faster than a person. A gasoline car can do only two things quickly: brake suddenly and turn the steering wheel. Humans must adapt by adapting their plans to the latency of the car's gas pedal. They must get used to the notion that their action will not result in an immediate reaction. With an automated mechanical transmission, much remains to be done: vectorization of the mechanical torque with the differential gearbox; change the engine speed each time another transmission is selected; adjust the speed by pumping more or less fuel into the engine. None of this is instantaneous. As I said, it's like playing late.

Regardless of the potential power of an autonomous computer in the event of a big discrepancy between its control, its action, its observation and its evaluation, its decision-making process and its implementation. The gas car is the weakest link in the chain – or, more precisely, the bottleneck in terms of responsiveness. With the vectorization of the electrically controlled torque, an electric power train can react faster than a driver, which brings me to the next point.

Safety on slippery and icy roads

Elon has already touched on this subject, but it is a rather complicated subject to explain. There is no simple, straightforward and absolute metric (at least unpublished for the public) to compare the difference in safety between a gas car. and an electric car on slippery and icy roads.

First of all, it is important to understand that, if the rotation of a car wheel can be considered as an output, a reaction, it is also a sensor capable of determining the rotational speed of each wheel and the level of traction that you have on the road. Now, what can you do with this data? When it is a petrol car, it can only change the general parameters of traction control in case of slippery road conditions, inform the driver of the change of circumstances and hope that everything goes smoothly. OK, because at the moment the gas car detects something, It's too late to react well because the reaction time of the car would be too long to be very useful. On the other hand, besides alerting the driver and adjusting the general settings, when a wheel is about to lose traction, an electric car can immediately change the speed at which that wheel turns or adjust the 3 others to compensate. The time between observation and reaction is short enough to really make a difference. (This should not be confused with a system such as the "Active Brake System" (ABS) trying to stop a car when it has already clearly lost control for more than one second.)

What we know for sure, despite the lack of data, is that the electric car makes the difference. The only question is the magnitude of the difference? Does this mean that an electric rear-drive car is as efficient as a non-electric front-drive car in slippery conditions? Or a non-electric AWD car? In addition to explaining the theoretical reasons why electric cars are much better in this area, all we can say is that people have felt the difference and feel more confident to drive a Tesla in winter, even a rear-drive Tesla. .

Elon's remarks on horses and why security is a simple chess game

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, Elon said that if you buy a car that is neither electric nor scalable, you are practically buying a horse. His arsenal is limited in his avoidance of accidents. In chess, it is closer to the movement of a horse, while that of a Tesla is closer to a queen.

An electric car has an instant torque, which means that if a car must take drastic avoidance measures to avoid an accident, it may also consider options requiring instant acceleration, such as a gas powered car can not do. This could also apply to branch lines when traffic in parallel tracks may require instant acceleration to reach another lane, which may be the only option to avoid the accident and will only be if the car does it very well. quickly. In such a case, your horse headed by a carrot on a stick can not help becoming a croupier.

Aerodynamic drag, motor efficiency and energy efficiency

Compared to gasoline cars, the autonomy is a bit of an Achilles heel for electric cars (for the moment). The gap is shrinking very quickly, but in any case, efficiency is one of the keys to success. It means efficient engines, good aerodynamics and not wasting too much electricity for other functions, such as a stand-alone, energy-intensive computer technology.

In March 2018, it was announced that the Jaguar I-PACE would join Waymo's fleet of autonomous vehicles. However, more than a year later, not a single Waymo I-PACE vehicle has been put into service, and there is probably a very good reason for that.

The actual range of the Jaguar I-PACE seems to be slightly less than 320 km (200 km), even though its battery is larger than that of a standard model X vehicle, which has a range of 255 km. Add to that the aerodynamic drag that Waymo's equipment adds to the equation and the processing power needed to run its system. For a Tesla with hardware version 3 (HW3), the power required is about 100 watts, but Waymo's equipment can use a lot more. During the presentation of Tesla's Day of Independence, it was said that in circumstances other than the highway, the autopilot could account for 20% of the power used. If this is also the case for I-PACE, its range will be 260 km – but it will actually be worse since this 20% does not include the additional aerodynamic drag of the Waymo craft. This brings us to the next point.

To what extent do others prioritize energy efficiency?

It seems that Tesla is the only company to design self-driving systems in a very direct way for specific models. Other companies and teams seem to be more disjointed, mainly because the main work has been done or is being done by non-automotive startups, rather than by automakers whose design teams and Automotive development companies work closely with the team of autonomous technologies. . The question remains open to what extent the autonomous technical teams have given priority to the efficiency of their systems or understood how it differs according to the vehicle models.

As this has been largely covered in our deep dive on the HW3 chip, a processor needs to be very powerful, but also very energy efficient. In the case of the HW3, this means drawing 100 watts, or even 20% of the energy consumption of a vehicle. In the case of Waymo, we do not know how much energy his computer consumes, which might actually beat Tesla, but since Waymo did not share material details, there is no way to find out.

One thing is certain: the products manufactured by NVIDIA are extremely energy intensive. Its latest hardware consumes 500 watts for 320 TOPS (which, if properly understood NVIDIA from his blog post, can be reduced to 250 watts for 160 TOPS). Tesla can reach 144 tops with 100 watts. By and large, where NVIDIA provides 0.64 TOPS per watt, Tesla provides 1.66 TOPS per watt. Just for fun, remember that 100 watts in some situations can account for 20% of the power used in the vehicle. If it were 500 watts, the DSE would almost double the energy consumption of a vehicle (compared to the total absence of EHR technology). Now, I have to give a credit to NVIDIA – its current product line is a more versatile versatile product more designed to develop and test the product, and NVIDIA promises to have a better chip.

Nevertheless, the bottom line is that, with regard to autonomous driving technology, energy efficiency may be the second most important parameter after safety, and we have no idea how far other manufacturers automobiles or chip manufacturers grant it.

conclusions

Electric vehicles can react much more quickly than gasoline vehicles in different ways, making them better suited to autonomous driving technologies. They can take advantage of the fast response time of computers. The optimal optimal combination of steering, braking, power of each wheel and suspension coordinated by the computer is out of proportion with everything that is possible with a power train with internal combustion engine.

The precision control of electric motors also allows each wheel to adapt to slippery road conditions, making a rear-wheel drive vehicle almost as safe (or perhaps even more so) on icy roads that make it difficult for people to get on the road. a petrol or front wheel drive car.

The combination of a computer driver with an electric car is so much more versatile and can react so much faster to traffic that it makes no sense to continue producing (or buying) gasoline cars.

However, it is essential to design efficient and autonomous technologies, as well as to design them to integrate as efficiently as possible.

It was fun. I hope you agree we do not even open the box of Pandora possibilities that the Roadster 2 opens up possibly being able to do a turbo-boost of a few meters in the air to avoid an accident. ?

Keywords: Elon Musk, robotaxis, Tesla, Tesla autopilot, Tesla Full Self-Driving, Tesla robotaxis