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[–] 58 points 4 weeks ago (15 children)

I so bad want this to work. I hate computers in cars (beyond the ecu for efi and abs, that is all a car needs)

Sucks that its bezos funded but hey. Take what we can.

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  • [–] 23 points 4 weeks ago (8 children)

    Battery management requires a lot of computer logic. The simple act of plugging in an EV to a charger involves a complex handshake for negotiating the amount of power to deliver, which the control unit figures out by reading the sensors in each battery cell, and routes the electric power to the appropriate cells. Same thing for discharging the battery to power the vehicle, and recharging the battery from regenerative braking while driving.

    No matter how you slice it, an EV requires much more computing functionality under the hood than an ICE vehicle, just for the basic powertrain management.

    I'm with you on user interfaces, though.

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  • [–] 18 points 4 weeks ago* (2 children)

    I'm not totally sure. Even an ICe car now is insane for all the modules. Sure I can see battery management in an ev being robust but I'm sure it could still be pretty simple. Look at just injectors and cam sensors in an ice vehicle and the engine harness, its insane. Not to mention the entertainment bullshit that needs all its own modules.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 weeks ago (1 child)

    Yeah, modern cars are basically engineering marvels. Even when a lot of this stuff was mechanically controlled it really was something amazing to see just how precisely every little moving part did its perfectly timed function, thousands of times per minute across all 4 (or 6 or 8 or more) cylinders, pushing power through the transmission and differential and wheels.

    That said, I still think that trying to understand the physical ground truth of the electrochemical energy stored in each of the 5000+ cells by reading sensor data on voltage, current, impedance, temperature, and a log of how many times each cell has been charged or discharged, does require greater electronic complexity and more sophisticated programs to manage, than an ICE control unit does.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

    No matter how you slice it, an EV requires much more computing functionality under the hood than an ICE vehicle, just for the basic powertrain management.

    I've got ECU reads with full DAMOS data (memory addresses of maps) for my two cars, one from 2001 (Bosch EDC15P) and one from 2007 (Bosch EDC16CP34). If you're willing to download the demo version of WinOLS, I can send you the WinOLS projects if you want to see how much was going on in there even back in 2001, let alone 2007. I unfortunately don't have an EDC17 ECU or any of the petrol ECUs physically available, but I believe can give you full bench reads of some of them since I downloaded a huge torrent that would extract into a few terabytes of data for different vehicles.

    Or if you don't want all that, let me just give you an example of one tiny sliver of functionality in an EDC 16 diesel ECU, the actual fuel being sprayed. We'll completely ignore even very closely related things like boost pressure.

    The car is running and in gear. The driver presses on the fun pedal. First off, there are multiple maps for each thing based on mode (Sport/comfort) and possibly the gear you're in (for torque limiters). The value of this pedal is translated into a "driver's wish" value in Newton-meters of torque based on current RPM (in different RPM ranges this is limited to a different number). Multiple things are now calculated based on RPM and driver's wish: Among the fuel ones are: injection quantity (mg/stroke), fuel rail pressure (controlled by a valve on the rail as well as a metering valve on the pump), start of injection, duration of injection - actually those latter two may have been based on iq rather than dw, but it doesn't matter much since those are very tightly related. You now have multiple different maps that limit either the driver's wish or injection quantity and the lowest limiter applies: Smoke limiter (limitation map by air flow and RPM), torque limiter (limit simply by RPM and pedal position), potentially gear-specific torque limiters, though these could also come from the TCU. I think there may have been one or two others.

    Now, before injection there's actually pre-injection, this warms up the cylinder to get a better burn for the main event. The main event is usually aimed such that start of combustion (not start of injection) occurs fairly close to top dead center of a piston. Working on older cars like the EDC15 I believe Bosch said the delay is one millisecond (which you need to calculate in degrees of crankshaft rotation), but I think for the EDC16 and 17 ones it might be less than one millisecond since the pre-ignition is there to help. If your start of combustion is too far before top dead center, you raise cylinder pressures and temperatures and create more noise. If your end of injection is too far after top dead center, you waste fuel (bad for wallet), increase exhaust gas temperatures (bad for turbo) and put out black smoke (bad for everyone). The only time having a late end of injection is sensible is if you're building a diesel for tractor pulls or drag racing and you want to get that last percent of power out of it. For how start of injection and duration are actually applied on the ECU: It takes the fuel quantity being asked after all the limiters and fuel or coolant temperature, then based on those it'll choose a start of injection map (or rather, it interpolates between different maps) and based on the start of injection it interpolates between different duration maps. Rail pressure itself is also consulted, though I'm not yet 100% sure how since my EDC16 car is stripped down to repair a leak and I haven't gotten into tuning it yet, I only started doing this this summer and I've only had time to work on my older EDC15 car which has unit injectors and thus no rail pressure to speak of.

    Oh and fuel temperature also needs to affect everything because we calculate in mg/str, but the actual sensors measure fuel volume and as you know, density changes with temperature.

    There's also post-injection, but that's irrelevant for everyday driving, that's used to raise exhaust temperatures to initiate a regen burn in the diesel particulate filter every 200-1000 km.

    Now, here are SOME of the other things that also get handled by this ECU and I won't go into detail on how any of these work because it would take a day to write out this comment: Starting and stopping the engine, asking for a certain boost pressure based on multiple maps, asking for a certain airflow based on multiple maps (those two are of course heavily interrelated), reporting fault codes, operating exhaust-gas recirculation, operating cooling for the aforementioned exhaust-gas recirculation, operating cooling for the engine itself, creating swirl in the intake manifold to improve burn at lower RPMs.

    And remember, this is just the engine controller, there's also a transmission controller that's also specific to ICE vehicles.

    To me this is all fairly simple and even at very high mileages I can keep these vehicles running well for cheap to the point that EVs are incredibly cost-prohibitive for me. Your average person, however, would have to take it to a shop if something goes wrong and if the mechanic is dishonest or just doesn't know how things work in a modern car, a simple 1 hour fix with a cheap part can turn into hours upon hours of troubleshooting along with playing parts darts with sensors and actuators and stuff. Because there are actual mechanics out there far less knowledgeable than myself, a hobbyist.

    which the control unit figures out by reading the sensors in each battery cell

    Tesla Model S battery has like 7000 cells. They're 18650s, same things that go in e-cigarettes. Trust me, there is NOT a sensor in each battery cell. There may be multiple per module, sure, but it's still at most a few hundred and likely a few dozen sensors per battery pack.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 weeks ago

    an EV requires much more computing functionality under the hood than an ICE vehicle

    Not true. Modern ICE vehicles need an ECU for fuel maps, they use throttle position mapping, sensor feedback for emissions, knock, fuel sensing. Far more subsystems and computer modules than EVs.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 weeks ago* (5 children)

    Don't forget about the tire pressure sensors hidden inside the tires that operate wirelessly and have been shown to be able to track the vehicle. Hopefully this van doesn't have those, but I think it's a federal law to use them?

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  • [–] 8 points 4 weeks ago*

    Yep thanks to ford (rollover lawsuit). Ford also patented vehicle tracking and cameras inside required to start the vehicle. . Probably one of the worst vehicle companies.

    Jokes on them my tire sensor batteries all died heh

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  • [–] 38 points 4 weeks ago (3 children)

    Bezos is not the major investor.

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    [–] 38 points 4 weeks ago

    and you can buy it!

    it's not for sale, how can i buy it?

    egregious degree of clickbait

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  • [–] 20 points 4 weeks ago (21 children)

    Bezos-backed Slate Auto...that's a offput.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 weeks ago* (16 children)

    The problem here is that unless you pull off the most insane kickstarter in history, these type s of developments cannot be funded by anyone else than billionaires and megacorps, with the exception of states, like Mexico's pickup.

    Designing a thing like this can probably be pulled off by a small team of engineers and designers, but the whole production, safety testing, distribution etc is just not doable.

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    [–] 15 points 4 weeks ago (5 children)

    I’m curious what those dimensions and range will be.

    I’d love to have a little campervan for adventures without paying 50k+ for a gas guzzler

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  • [–] 15 points 4 weeks ago (4 children)

    Default range is a little over 200 miles. Adding the weight of the camping stuff is likely to be what affects mileage more than the cargo shell, but I would guess it would still be over 150 miles in most conditions.

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  • [–] 10 points 4 weeks ago

    Electric mini-camper truck, neat. Might as well go ahead and put what few solar panels can be fit upon the roof for a little more power inside for accessories

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  • [–] 9 points 4 weeks ago (10 children)

    Can the next thing they come out with be 4 wheel drive plsssssss. I want one so bad, but don't really wana drive a rear wheel in snow

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  • [–] 6 points 4 weeks ago

    I too would love a 4x4 option, or at least all-wheel drive.

    Though having driven rear-wheel trucks in the winter, the Slate should be less terrible. The location of the battery and motor add weight over the drive tires. I expect it to not slide around as much as a rear-wheel truck with engine in the front.

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    [–] 7 points 4 weeks ago (11 children)

    Pretty interesting. I'd like to know the dimensions and how much it hurts the range.

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  • [–] [S] 12 points 4 weeks ago (10 children)

    I'm definitely curious about the range hit. Starting at 200 miles and raising the roof can't be great.

    After seeing tons of ID Buzz cargo vans in use in Europe, though, I think it could still thrive as a fleet truck in cities.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 weeks ago (3 children)

    I really want one of these myself but worried that it may contain some networking module that sends data back home about every little metric that the other advanced cars have today (not interested in being tracked). Gonna hold out until I get confirmation of that.

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  • [–] 11 points 4 weeks ago* (1 child)

    This is partially where I'm at on it, it sounds cool in theory, no head unit, speaker is just Bluetooth, but then tell me A. Why does Bezos love it so much, B. How does it connect to the phone app that their website mentions, and C. What data does that app collect. I wish the YouTubers who were doing interviews with Slate and Telo would've asked those questions, especially considering how many articles are out there now about the other car companies tracking you. If they weren't doing any, or at least significantly less, you'd think they'd want to publicize it more heavily.

    My other issue is I live in a very icy place 7 months out of the year, give me FWD or AWD options

    Edit: apparently the app works by physically plugging into the car, not cellular, so not much I can argue about there.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 weeks ago

    If by "icy place" you mean Canada, don't worry. We won't be able to buy one any time soon, and you can't import them under the current rules.

    Besides, I'll be fucked if I buy American again in my lifetime.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 weeks ago* (4 children)

    Image caption says

    High-roof Slate Auto cargo; made w/ AI

    Good god, please tell me they're not saying that this car was designed with AI?!?

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