Lumber transport

[Minnesota Steve]

I see today Ford announced they're going to be making a hybrid and all-electric version of the F150.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/17/business/electric-ford-f-150/index.html

[Bankstick]

My first question for Ford- what is the load capacity? Towing capacity?

As for mirrors, I detest my electric mirrors on my truck and SUV. Why? I had a Ford, can't remember the year and model, that had two toggle levers to adjust the mirror. I traveled every road and cow-path in NC and SC from 1971-1973. I could get on or off an expressway, change lanes and quickly angle the mirrors. I could go from looking at the door handle to the side of the road. Electric mirrors are to slow. JMHO.

Edit- Self-driving car? Ever had a computer crash? What if someone hacks the system?

[Chestnut]

53 minutes ago, Bankstick said:

Edit- Self-driving car? Ever had a computer crash? What if someone hacks the system?

People don't care about that they just want to get in a box and go from A to B and let someone else worry about that. I don't think it's ever going to happen. The problem is the accident avoidance systems are going to bring liability on a company instead of a person and they aren't going to want to accept that liability. If there is a law that passes that states that liability is on the driver and the insurance companies would probably have a hard time accepting that. Maybe i'm wrong. I'd love to see it though that way the cars out there for drivers can go back to being catered to drivers and not A to B commuters.

[wtnhighlander]

Automotive electronics systems already get hacked. The have been multiple reports of wireless hacks that caused ignition shutdown. GPS records can be retrieved to tell folks where you have been. And that is on today's relatively low-tech vehicles.

Nut is right, I believe. If liability goes to the mfg, at the very least we will no longer "own" the vehicle. They will require ALL service be done by an authorized shop. No more hot-rodding, either. And if liabilty falls to the operator (primary passenger?) of an autonomous car, insurance companies will rate-hike them off the market.

I hope. Knowing what I do about electronics failures and hacking, I would feel safer walking across the straight-away in the middle of the Daytona 500 (with drivers) that a school crossing on  a street full of autonomous autos.

[treeslayer]

3 hours ago, Minnesota Steve said:

I see today Ford announced they're going to be making a hybrid and all-electric version of the F150.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/17/business/electric-ford-f-150/index.html

Great, just what i need is to get stuck behind another slow moving vehicle because the owner is afraid to step on the go pedal and start their fossil fuel burning engine, electric vehicles should come free with a sign that says "I'm going slow to save the planet" probably full of environmental friendly bamboo flooring. My motto is deplete the resources on this planet then move on to the other planets and deplete theirs. sorry, rant over, not enough woodworking lately

[RichardA]

Ditto, but you and I old man, ain't gonna see the next planet... So while we can, let's screw this one up.

[Chestnut]

8 minutes ago, treeslayer said:

Great, just what i need is to get stuck behind another slow moving vehicle because the owner is afraid to step on the go pedal and start their fossil fuel burning engine, electric vehicles should come free with a sign that says "I'm going slow to save the planet" probably full of environmental friendly bamboo flooring. My motto is deplete the resources on this planet then move on to the other planets and deplete theirs. sorry, rant over, not enough woodworking lately

Yeah that's a good point. My motto was let the people that care drive their electric cars just leaves more Dino juice for me and my turbo fun cart. I think fuel mileage is overrated, i want to make a sign that says "This car gets 15 MPG" and hold it up every time i pass a Prius.

[wtnhighlander]

It kills me how many eco-drivers think that driving their prius actually produces less pollution. All it really does is shift the fossil fuel emmissions from their tail pipe to the coal-fired power plant down the road.

I heard about a research paper done soon after the Prius hit the market. It documented how, over the entire life cycle of each vehicle, the Prius is actually less 'green' than a Hummer H1, when you account for manufacturing and disposal of the raw materials. Those batteries are nasty things to get rid of.

[wdwerker]

An old girlfriend had a Prius and it just captures energy that would be wasted braking plus kills the engine at traffic lights. Newer ones might plug in but most of them just use technology to avoid wasting any energy. When you first hit the brakes it switches the motor into a generator and slows the car like downshifting would. When you press harder on the brakes the friction /discs/drums/whatever come into play.

[Chestnut]

9 hours ago, wtnhighlander said:

I heard about a research paper done soon after the Prius hit the market. It documented how, over the entire life cycle of each vehicle, the Prius is actually less 'green' than a Hummer H1, when you account for manufacturing and disposal of the raw materials. Those batteries are nasty things to get rid of.

This was the case in the beginning, more recently research has found that with the economics of scale they are less of an impact than they once were. They will have a gain over a a gass guzzler but if you can get a non-hybrid car to get 40-50 mpg the hybrid technology will always be more damaging. 40-50 mph in a gas car ins't impossible,

9 hours ago, wtnhighlander said:

It kills me how many eco-drivers think that driving their prius actually produces less pollution. All it really does is shift the fossil fuel emmissions from their tail pipe to the coal-fired power plant down the road.

I think the point is for those 5 areas (NYC, LA, DC, ect.) were the tailpipe emissions lead to smog and poor air quality in cities. Everywhere else i agree to an extent. A lot of the power generated up here is Hydro, or natural gas. I know your neck of the woods is still heavy in coal but it has decreased.

If i had an electric car i'd have solar panels on my roof and it would get charged by those. When there wasn't enough solar to charge them i'd just take my gasser.

[Isaac]

I'd be OK with autonomous vehicles. I think once the technology matures, it will prove to be safer, on average than human drivers. Lets not forget many drivers on the road are distracted, tired, etc. It doesn't have to be perfect, just needs to out perform human drivers. Once that happens, you may see the opposite, with higher insurance costs if you want to drive yourself vs. using an autonomous. 

The challenge is the the autonomous technology right now is pretty good, but it still requires that a person be paying attention and ready to take over the wheel at a moments notice. I think that is a tough ask. If the car is driving safely down the highway for 3 hours, you can't ask the driver to suddenly grab the wheel and take over. They will be asleep or distracted for sure when the critical moment comes. That is the barrier they are butting up against right now. They need it to be robust enough to be truly autonomous, door to door.

I drive a lot for work, with a lot of longer drives, and it would be awesome to dial in a location and sit back to read a book, sleep, or watch a show, just like you would on a flight. I believe that is where we are heading. 

[Chestnut]

17 minutes ago, Isaac said:

I'd be OK with autonomous vehicles. I think once the technology matures, it will prove to be safer, on average than human drivers. Lets not forget many drivers on the road are distracted, tired, etc. It doesn't have to be perfect, just needs to out perform human drivers. Once that happens, you may see the opposite, with higher insurance costs if you want to drive yourself vs. using an autonomous. 

The challenge is the the autonomous technology right now is pretty good, but it still requires that a person be paying attention and ready to take over the wheel at a moments notice. I think that is a tough ask. If the car is driving safely down the highway for 3 hours, you can't ask the driver to suddenly grab the wheel and take over. They will be asleep or distracted for sure when the critical moment comes. That is the barrier they are butting up against right now. They need it to be robust enough to be truly autonomous, door to door. 

I drive a lot for work, with a lot of longer drives, and it would be awesome to dial in a location and sit back to read a book, sleep, or watch a show, just like you would on a flight. I believe that is where we are heading. 

Man i'd love for it to work but I just don't see the accident avoidance systems ever becoming advanced enough. In neighborhoods i wouldn't trust them period. I don't care their track record, one kid following a ball into the street... It doesn't matter the driver the family would have a nice large target to go after with a lawsuit and i wouldn't blame them. Also the systems are going to have to function assuming that the drivers around them are human. So basically the best i see them ever being is freeway only. Which i think is good enough. Also it'd help to have dedicated autonomous lanes, to stop people like me from herding sheep on the freeway.

I agree with safer than humans i can't count how many times I've seen someone using video chat on their phone while driving down the road...

[wtnhighlander]

Well, there were plenty of Japanese and German vehicles (diesel) capable of 40+ mpg, back in the early 1980s.

I tend to feel that improving efficiency of ICEs is more effective than battery-supplied electrics.

 

[Mark J]

As an owner I'll make a "plug" for electric cars.  My wife's i3 has turned out to be a totally practical second car.  As far as performance it has great low end torque so it's fast off the line and it performs well at speed, too.  All of that will depend on how the manufacturer tunes the design.  As a load and distance hauling vehicle, i.e. pickup, I have some doubts, but not total disbelief.  You absolutely need 220v charging at home.  

I had a 2006 Highlander Hybrid, now passed on to one of the adult children.  That car is 12 1/2 years old with 200k miles and still running fine on the original battery pack.  

As far as where the electricity comes from I'm interested in solar at home, but I want to move first.  Meantime a lot of the juice around here comes from "environmentally friendly" nu-kah-lur plants.  And we're getting our money out of those, too, as some of these are a couple of decades past their original design life expectancy  (maybe we should move sooner than we were planning).

[Bankstick]

Back in the early 50s, Popular Science had an article about the Texaco Combustion Process (TCP) that was demonstrated by a Plymouth with this system pulling into a gas station, putting diesel fuel, oil, and gas into the tank. When the car pulled out, there was no cloud, no engine knocking, etc. Remember the Chrysler turbine that would run on peanut oil. I worked with a guy who retired from Chrysler. The turbines were used in military tanks. Also, someone invented a carburetor system that got 200 miles to the gallon. What happened to it? To end this, I have a close friend who retired from the US Forestry Service. An employee of the DOI told him there was enough natural gas and oil to last the USA for 500 years. The problem is getting Greenies to allow drilling for it. Have good day!

[Chestnut]

2 hours ago, Mark J said:

And we're getting our money out of those, too, as some of these are a couple of decades past their original design life expectancy

Want to talk about how far past design life expectancy most of the US infrastructure is? Nuclear power plants aren't so bad in comparison to some things....

 

2 hours ago, Bankstick said:

To end this, I have a close friend who retired from the US Forestry Service. An employee of the DOI told him there was enough natural gas and oil to last the USA for 500 years. The problem is getting Greenies to allow drilling for it. Have good day!

I think at peak drilling rates western ND had enough oil reserves to last 200+ years. I also know of some interesting tech that was goign to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere and inject it back into the shale formations the oil came out of, not sure if i'm supposed to talk about that one though.... if i disappear suddenly just know some secret gov agency has taken me.

[legenddc]

So no hybrid cars, only hybrid woodworking? 

[Bankstick]

Quote

if i disappear suddenly just know some secret gov agency has taken me.

Chestnut, if that happens, can I have your WWing stuff?

[Tom King]

I hope my 7300 lb. diesel truck, that averages 18.8 mpg no matter what I pull behind it, lasts at least another 18 years.

[Pondhockey]

On 1/18/2019 at 9:46 AM, Chestnut said:

 I also know of some interesting tech that was goign to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere and inject it back into the shale formations the oil came out of, not sure if i'm supposed to talk about that one though.... if i disappear suddenly just know some secret gov agency has taken me.

Carbon capture isn't secret - it's still being worked on; it's just not practical or cost effective at scale so far.  So far as I know it's primarily targeted at coal.

[Chestnut]

16 minutes ago, Pondhockey said:

Carbon capture isn't secret - it's still being worked on; it's just not practical or cost effective at scale so far.  So far as I know it's primarily targeted at coal.

What i didn't know if it's know or not is injecting it back deep underground. I don't really follow the stuff just what the guys i know mention that they are working on. They have research positions so they see a lot of the cool stuff.

[Pondhockey]

2 minutes ago, Chestnut said:

What i didn't know if it's know or not is injecting it back deep underground. I don't really follow the stuff just what the guys i know mention that they are working on. They have research positions so they see a lot of the cool stuff.

Got it.

Yes, reinjecting CO2 is the primary (though not only) option being considered.  Obvious problems, of course.