They kept mentioning performance relative to intel Macs which makes me think there is a large cohort of people sticking to their x86 rigs due to compatibility. Being able to run an x86 linux or windows VM is still a requirement for me.
It's only been 3 years since the M1, most people aren't buying new computers that frequently.
Windows for ARM runs well on Apple Silicon, and has its own translation layer for x86 software. It should be fine unless you need specific x86-only drivers.
I got a new Mac at work maybe 6 to 9 months after the M1 generation came out.
I would’ve loved one, but some of the tools I needed did not work without real Intel hardware yet and there were no workarounds.
Today there are. But because of that I had to get a new Intel machine. And that’s going to be my machine until it reaches the standard replacement cycle. So I’ll still have it for a few more years probably.
By the same token a family member bought a new (to them, refurb) iMac maybe six months before the M1 iMac came out. Again I think that would’ve been a better computer, but it didn’t exist. And the old computer was on its last legs and needed replacing.
That computer does not get heavy use and will last a long time. It will probably get used until Apple stops updating Intel OSes and it starts becoming a real problem for the user.
I'm still using mine. Parallels can only MDM enroll the mac VM on the intel device. Apple silicon doesn't support the feature of changing the serial number. So for testing mdm profiles I have to use it or carry two devices around.
Mine runs warm a lot. I was looking through M1s on eBay today, I might pull the trigger. I just have a hard time spending 4 grand on a new laptop when the one I have does everything I need it to.
I had an M1 at work for a while, it was amazing and I loved it.
Who knows but my guess is that the x86 requirement is probably for a minority of users.
Lots of people are probably sticking to Intel Macs simply because the averege user doesn't care about performance and will keep using a computer until it dies.
I think this is a problem because a lot of what people use to shop an EV is the headline range number, which you are declaring is not accurate. This is false advertising.
If the EPA rating is consistent in it's overestimation, it would still be a perfectly functional system to comparison shop range. Putting that KNOWN overestimating number as the headline "range" estimation is wrong. My ICE car does not use the EPA combined estimate for my range because that would be inaccurate and make the number useless. The knowledge on how to build a useful "Range" value in a car has been constant since at least 2000, and yet Tesla, and ONLY tesla, seems to have it wrong. Meanwhile, as others tell, the navigation display shows a very accurate estimation, so why the disconnect? There's no requirement for a battery display showing the EPA range, they CHOSE to do that.
Okay, we will just ignore the 50-70% of customers who do not want an EV now - We don't want their money. Batteries are getting better every day but a lot of people:
1. Don't live in a house with a charger.
2. Don't want to drive to a DC charger and sit there once a week.
3. Can't afford a $60K SUV for their family.
4. Want lifestyle vehicles like jeeps, trucks, vans etc. that require much larger and more expensive batteries.
I don't think the suggestion here is to throw out all the ICE cars currently in production — just to focus all new development efforts on EVs. Everyone would still be able to buy ICE cars if they need them, but the suggestion is for EVs to be the default and ICE to be the "oh, you don't have a garage? We can accommodate that" option.
The article says that any new ICE designs that have been started should be completed. Given that's a 7 year cycle, that means that manufacturers who follow the advice will be introducing new combustion vehicles for the rest of the decade.
Those designs can then be sold for at least another decade. I hope by 2040 there is little demand for combustion vehicles...
Even then CA and a lot of other places said they’re going to stop allowing sales of new gas cars by 2035 and considering the auto industry could lobby that bill out of existence if they really wanted to that means the major auto players are planning on phasing out EV sales by 2035.
> we will just ignore the 50-70% of customers who do not want an EV now
Most of them do not want an EV because of the charging+range situation. I agree fast chargers need to be more universally available like gas stations are today. Range concerns are relieved when fast charging is everywhere.
Really what I think we need is for gas stations to just put in 2-4 charging stalls. Maybe replace one of their gas pumps with a charger. Electricity is already everywhere, including at gas stations. Our infrastructure will need to upgrade just as much as our vehicles.
> Batteries are getting better every day
More like every decade, but yes. They are trending better!
> 1. Don't live in a house with a charger.
(US) Standard 120v plugs can charge a car. Not much, but can usually recover a daily commute overnight, which is, I dunno, the vast majority of vehicle usage? Even then, a dryer plug can recharge that use in just a couple hours.
That said, apartment complexes and parking garages MUST take action for this to work. But I think consumers will demand it more and more and the pressure will be unavoidable at some point.
> 2. Don't want to drive to a DC charger and sit there once a week.
They're already doing this with gas stations. But you can charge at home or at work or while shopping! Only use fast DC chargers when you're traveling or already out running errands. It's in businesses' best interest to put a couple DC fast chargers in their parking lot anyway.
> 3. Can't afford a $60K SUV for their family.
Not everyone needs an SUV, let alone a $60K one. Besides, as manufacturers commit to making more EVs, they will become more affordable and people WILL buy them.
> 4. Want lifestyle vehicles like jeeps, trucks, vans etc. that require much larger and more expensive batteries.
I don't think gas cars are going entirely away soon, but we should at least flip the ratio so that there are only as many gas cars as there are EVs right now. For the most part, gas cars should be the lifestyle toys; not the other way around.
--
PS. I don't think EV prices will ever stay as low as gas cars (scaled with inflation) since, at least so far, their overall reliability is higher and maintenance costs much lower. So few moving parts. No engine, no transmission, no oil, no explosions (hopefully), and almost no use of brakes! Worst-case scenarios I've seen (rarely) so far include swapping out the battery or replacing the computer. With regular tire and glass care, along with occasional HVAC service, they should last quite a long time. So the higher cost is an investment that yields much longer returns.
> Really what I think we need is for gas stations to just put in 2-4 charging stalls. Maybe replace one of their gas pumps with a charger.
You can't just replace one thing with another. Replacing gas pumps with fast charger alone has a ton of problems. The most obvious is even the fastest charging EV charges slower than even a land whale SUV can fill its tank.
I've seen few gas stations with a layout such that someone parked at a pump for 20 minutes wouldn't cause a huge traffic problem both at the station and spilling into the street.
Then you've got to route a high voltage power line right by gas pumps and tanks. Typically at a gas station you want to minimize ignition sources.
Then there's getting enough power to the station itself. If the station doesn't have the right power running to it, say it's only on a single phase power. Tesla doesn't just plop super charger stations just anywhere.
Because charging takes a while charging stations tend to be sited near actual destinations while gas stations are sites at intersections and freeway off ramps. No one will want to use a charger at a gas station and be stuck with only a couple vending machines for food and drink.
It's a better investment to put EV charger at locations a car would reasonably sit for a half hour or more like a parking garage/lot.
The infrastructure will catch up as sales increase. A lot of people who say they don't want them can be convinced pretty quickly. Anyone who wants vehicles that will never be electric can just deal with it and pay exorbitant markups to make us deal with their frivolous emissions.
Just so we're clear: a charger can plug into a normal wall plug, so if you have a garage with a wall plug then you're set. If not, you're talking about paying <$500 (and probably less than half that) for an electricial to fix that.
Sure, and there are about 100,000,000 gas powered cars in the US. Even if every company stopped producing gas cars immediately, there still would be no shortage of gas cars for decades.
Many garages are not attached or people park on the street! Also level 1 charge is reeeeally slow. It works fine with my PHEV (only a 14 kWh battery) but would not be able to charge a fully used EV battery overnight
And, many apartment dwellers either have easier access to public transit and walkable tasks, and so make fewer car trips than single family home folk, and they make shorter car trips since they live in a denser environments where everything is closer.
No, not sacrifice. Even if all ICE car production ended tomorrow, there are 100M cars in the US.
And my point wasn't that apartment dwellers won't get to have cars any more, just that they would rely on destination charging, or hopping over to a supercharger-esque place for 15 minutes/week. I wouldn't want to use public chargers only with my EV, but that is because I live in a rural area and therefore need to drive a lot. If all of my trips were 1/3rd the distance I don't think I would mind using a public charger to stay charged.
Then go drive your car to a charging station sometimes and make a phone call or eat a sandwich. Is it really so dramatically different than filling up gas at the gas station? The only dramatic difference is EV charging is vastly cheaper for the consumer.
It takes only a few minutes to fill a tank with gas. It takes so little time you have maybe just enough time to get a drink out of a vending machine or fridge. No one goes to a gas station to eat lunch. Most gas stations aren't staffed or set up to serve food even if people wanted to.
Obviously the infrastructure will evolve. People will adapt. The world will keep spinning. I honestly don't understand how most people survive in a constantly changing world when even the slightest deviation from their repetitive norm results in throwing their hands in the air and giving up!
Have a look at Europe. Many many people there live in apartment buildings. Some not even a garage. Others can't install chargers because the owner and the local government all have to agree.
It's just not that easy...
I myself know people who would happily pay. But the town didn't allow them to have a charger cus then theyd have to allow it for everyone and then the grid around their apartment complex couldn't handle it.
> Just so we're clear: a charger can plug into a normal wall plug, so if you have a garage with a wall plug then you're set. If not, you're talking about paying <$500 (and probably less than half that) for an electricial to fix that.
About 2/3 of US housing units have either a garage or carport; about 1/3 do not, and some carports (especially for units that aren’t detached single-family homes) are detached overhead shelters without electrical infrastructure not convenient to connect to the panel for the home.
Yeah and a normal wall plug will run at 20 amps, which will take almost 10x longer to charge a car than a Supercharger. Meanwhile, a ton of people rent and can't arbitrarily add chargers to their home. Even if they own, it's common for many cars to need to park on the street far from access to a plug.
My option for charging my car would be dropping an extension cable from the fifth floor where I live, down to street level and then to wherever within 1.5km I found a parking space.
So Ukraine is moving closer to NATO due to a fear of offensive actions from Russia, and that is your justification for actually attacking them and invading their country? Ukraine was obviously justified in seeking a military alliance to protect itself against illegal invasions.
This argument is essentially denying Ukraine's right to sovereignty. It's a bad and disingenous justification for a wholly illegal and unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country.
They have made many very public statements to the effects that they do want to expand, also for example questioning the legitimacy of the Baltic states, and sending many planes on defense-probing paths in the overall Zapad (Western) direction. So you are going to have to work a bit harder at convincing us that they don't want to be doing what they say they want to do, and also atrociously attempt to do.
That is laughable. They annexed Crimea in 2014, and now claim Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia. Very strange behavior for a country that is just 'protecting itself from NATO'.
Not the poster but probably. There were significant NATO policy decisions immediately preceding the 2014 invasion with respect to Ukraine. Further decisions were taken immediately proceeding the 2022 build up and subsequent invasion.
The first was in 2008 when NATO decided Ukraine could start the NATO membership process.
This came to a head at the start of 2014 when Euromaidan revolution lead to a change of government.
In 2014, the Ukrainian parliament renounced Ukraine's non-aligned status.
In 2016, Ukraine was granted a NATO Comprehensive Assistance Package (CAP), comprising the advisory mission at the NATO Representation to Ukraine as well as 16 capacity-building programs and Trust Funds.
In 2018, Ukraine was officially given an aspiring member status.
2021 NATO reaffirmed that Ukraine will become a member.
Here is some basic information from the right wing conspiratorial outlet NPR:
Ukraine turned to NATO because Russia had already invaded them, occupying Crimea and eastern parts of the country. That invasion was completely unjustified as well. It started with Russia getting a big mad Ukraine was acting like a sovereign nation and wanted to sign a free trade agreement with a functional economy instead of them.
Russia's problems are all of their own making. They had no need to invade Ukraine. They did so because Ukraine didn't want to be their puppet state like Belarus. The Russian government wants to treat former SSRs like they're still economic tributaries to Moscow.
Russia (Putin) got mad because Ukraine threatened to turn into a functioning democracy. That was a massive threat to Putin because people at home might get ideas - ideas like "maybe that could work here, too".
A system that protects 400 people but kills 1 is not a system that I want on public roads because I don't want to be in the 1 - Elon and the children of Elon are basically making the assumption that everyone is okay with this.
The probability of an accident for any driver assistance system will ALWAYS be lower than a human driver - but that doesn't mean the system is safe for use with the general public!
People like me are not advocating for "killing people" because we aren't looking at data - it's that no company has the right to make these tradeoffs without the permission and consent of the public.
Also if this was about safety and not just a bunch of dudes who think they are cool because their Tesla can kinda drive itself, why does "FSD" cost $16,000?
> A system that protects 400 people but kills 1 is not a system that I want on public roads because I don't want to be in the 1 - Elon and the children of Elon are basically making the assumption that everyone is okay with this.
>
> The probability of an accident for any driver assistance system will ALWAYS be lower than a human driver - but that doesn't mean the system is safe for use with the general public!
Totally we should be wary of a system that protects 400 and kills 1. Thank you for providing the numbers. It helps me show my point more clearly.
If you are driving on a road you encounter cars. Each car is a potential accident risk. You probably encounter a few hundred cars after ten or so miles. Not every car crash kills, but lets just assume they all do to make this simpler. For the stat you propose, you are talking about feeling uncomfortable with an accident per mile of something around the ballpark of ten miles.
Now lets look at the data. The data suggests the actual miles per accident is closer to 6,000,000 miles per accident. This is six orders of magnitude diverged from the number of miles per accident that you imply would make you feel uncomfortable.
Lets try shifting that around to a context people are more familiar with: a one dollar purchase would be a soft drink and a six million dollar purchase would be something like buying a house in the bay area. This is a pretty big difference I think. I feel very differently about buying a soft drink versus buying a house in the Bay Area. If someone told me they felt that buying a house was cheap, then gave a proposed price for the house that was more comparable to the cost of buying a soft drink, I might suspect they should check the dataset to get a better estimate of the housing prices, because it might give them a more reasonable estimate.
So I very strongly feel we should cite the numbers we use. For example, I feel like you should really try and back up the use of the 400 to 1 number so I understand why you feel that is a reasonable number, because I do not feel that it is a reasonable number.
> Also if this was about safety and not just a bunch of dudes who think they are cool because their Tesla can kinda drive itself, why does "FSD" cost $16,000?
Uh, we are a on venture capitalist adjacent forum. You obviously know. But... well, the price of FSD is tuned to ensure the company is profitable despite the expense of creating it as is common in capitalist economies with healthy companies seeking to make a profit in exchange for providing value. It is actually pretty common for high effort value creation, like creation of a self-driving car or the performance of surgery, for the prices to be higher.
Regulators dont care about the perception of a recall, they care about the safety of the consumers and more importantly the general public who have not signed up for Teslas beta program.
Is this recession going to be like the commercial production of fusion energy? Always around the corner despite nothing indicating we are anywhere near a recession.
Keep in mind it's hard to have a recession when unemployment is in the 3s, and there is still high demand for products and services across the economy. But I guess if we really want to have a recession we can.
The transitional period when the current next big thing you previously invested in is not delivering and has been replaced by a new and shiny next big thing with higher predicted returns.
Probably, though I doubt absolutely everyone is going to stop wanting to buy new ponzi schemes, so sentiment will probably bounce around near the bottom for a while.
All the layoffs aren't an indication we're nearing a recession? Yes unemployment is currently low but I see that turning around in a big way imminently
Layoffs in tech. Not hearing much about other parts of the economy. Totally possible I haven't seen the reporting but I'd argue that tech/growth industries suffering layoffs don't really indicate a recession by itself even if they are large.
You're not missing anything. The Fed is on record that the economy is doing great, unemployment in the economy as a whole is non-existent, so it's going to continue raising interest rates. When your CEO tells you that we're in a tough economic climate, what she's actually saying is that we're in a tough monetary policy climate. The economy is (currently) fine.
Expect the pain in tech to get worse, much worse, before it gets better.
> All the layoffs aren't an indication we're nearing a recession?
No. The layoffs are really just in tech, and a fairly specific subset of tech companies at that. They are happening as a result of poor hiring decisions those companies made (hiring too many people).
The layoffs too date are much smaller than the Covid-era hiring. Certainly a bit of a correction. But otherwise spending and jobs overall are still strong. So... which way will it go?
I'm sure some would like to replace domestic workers with H1Bs they weren't allowed to bring in for two years. Manufacture a skilled worker shortage and it all works out in their favor.
I work at Toyota, and they credit him on day one of training on the Toyota philosophy. Toyota's success is just a function of them listening to western consultants after the war when western companies would not.
There are also some broader macroeconomic reasons that these philosophies took root in post-war Japan. The combination of a weakened currency and strong New Deal style labor laws (that were proposed but thwarted by Detroit) was unique. Labor was cheap but politically dominant and materials were in short supply (I believe Shoichiro took power in the wake of a nearly catastrophic strike that gave him very few options beyond innovating on process).
Or maybe it is the result of filling hollow, generic advice with some meaning. I'd really love to hear the original advice given by western consultants.
Deming had some genuinely counterintuitive stuff to say. The focus on reducing variance was obvious in retrospect, once you do the math, but important at the time.
What the FAA has done to this guy is disgusting, they don't respond to requests and treat him like a little guy despite the impressive engineering here. I'm not a republican but this is a great example of government destroying innovation and progress through bureaucratic nonsense.
My heart wants to agree with you but all those regulations must have something to do with how few people die in airplane crashes. It's like the textbook case of when regulations work, and I don't think the FAA has a department of special exceptions. We can wishfor it, but it's not easy to handle someone who wants to do something different.
>must have something to do with how few people die in airplane crashes
Yes, at least somewhat:
1) The safety record of flying is often cited but that safety record pertains to commercial aircraft, not private aircraft. For hours of travel, private aircraft are significantly more lethal commercial flight and even more than driving [1]
2) The article mentions having to jump through regulatory hoops in the same sentence as literally putting out engine fires. Maybe the two are unrelated but I can see a strong public to regulatory hoops on something that, if done wrong, amounts to a small homemade fuel air bomb with 1,000lb+ of cessna debris added in to the mix if things go wrong.
a fuel-air bomb is very much more difficult to build than you think it is
it isn't going to happen by accident
right now lots of people are getting exposed to fumes from both leaded gasoline itself and the combustion products from the engines, which probably kills more people than faulty civil aviation engines ever will
Yes sure, it's not literally a military-grade thermobaric explosion. It's a few hundred lbs of fuel strapped to a 1,000lb+ airframe and I don't mind regulations and oversight of such things when people want to propel them through the air.
As for the rest, I agree...? I'm not sure how that was related. I think a dislike for leaded fuel is not incompatible with my comments indicating that some regulatory hoops are reasonable when creating customized aircraft.
surely the optimal level of regulation is not zero but in this case probably the status quo (including wrongful death torts, etc.) has killed and brain-damaged more people than zero regulation would have, by halting progress 50 years ago
compare progress in aviation from 01923 to 01973 with progress from 01973 to today. we could have ultra-efficient ornithopters, mass-produced gossamer condors (maybe electric), mars-pathfinder-style airbags, ejection seats in coach class, suborbital commuter rockets to anywhere in the world in 45 minutes, and things we can't even imagine yet or don't know to be feasible
instead we have slight variations on the 50-year-old 747 and the 85-year-old piper cub (still running grossly inefficiently on leaded avgas), dramatic regression in crewed spaceflight capabilities, plus interesting experiments in hang gliders, jetpacks, hoverboards, and more conventional ultralights that have been unable to reach mass adoption
oh and uncrewed quadcopters and stealth bombers because those were unregulated
They are trying to eliminate the leaded gas too though. No idea why they didn't just subsidize new planes that didn't need leaded gas, rather than spend decades looking for substitutes.
The crash/death rate for piston general aviation is staggeringly high and a lot of it has to do with how unreliable ancient systems in the planes are, and task saturation from pilots still expected to manage stuff like fuel mixture settings by hand.
It's almost entirely about protectionism of a massive industry of rebuilding and servicing companies for ancient engines and electromechanical systems, not safety or reliability.
Compare a modern electronic gyro to its electromechanical cousin. The electromechanical version is unreliable, power-hungry, and extremely expensive to service.
The modern electronic equivalent is ultra-reliable, can self-test, needs no servicing or repair, can contain its own battery to self-power in an emergency, and be networked with other devices in the cockpit.
Want to put the electronic version in your plane? Ooooo, sorry, no can do, Mr. Airplane Owner, says the FAA. Can't hurt the profits of an entire industry dedicated to emptying your wallet of thousands of dollars every time your gyro needs to be rebuilt.
A modern fuel-injected, water-cooled airplane engine can run constant self-diagnostics and logging, and provide highly useful, actionable information to both the pilot and mechanic. It's single-lever, increasing reliability and reducing task loading during the most critical phases of flight, and reducing emissions substantially, too. It doesn't have special considerations in terms of flight profiles; air-cooled piston airplane engines require a gentle descent profile or they will be "shock cooled" and undergo high wear or outright seize. There are no issues with carb freeze. Starting is a breeze, instead of a chore. The list goes on.
We should be encouraging the hell out of EFI conversions and EFI engine options...but instead the FAA buries them all under mountains of paperwork and regulations to protect Lycoming and the like.
What drives me nuts about those auto engines loaded with sensors is that all that info gets hidden behind the "check engine" light in cars, even in modern cars with big LCD displays.
No, I don't want to plug something into an OBD-2 and bluetooth to a phone/laptop. Put the FUCKING INFO ON THE SCREEN. Speaking of protectionism, don't want your customers knowing what is actually wrong with the car...
Adding insult to injury, the standard OBD2 protocol provides parameters like engine rpm etc., and thus with the usual ELM323 OBD-bluetooth adapters you can get for cheap on aliexpress and the usual bunch of phone apps you don't get to see the error codes, or what the actually mean. Those error codes are manufacturer specific and the manufacturers don't tell the world what they mean, preferring you to go to their brand shop in order to read and decode them.
For VAG (Volkswagen, Audi etc.) there's a software shops can use called VAG-COM that sells officially for a few $thousands, but you can get it very cheap from aliexpress (I'm quite sure it's pirated, so..). I guess something similar exists for other brands too.
Commercial aviation, sure. General aviation, e.g. a private pilot flying a Cessna 172 as in the article, is about as deadly per-mile as riding a motorcycle: far more dangerous than driving a car the same distance.
> Commercial aviation, sure. General aviation, e.g. a private pilot flying a Cessna 172 as in the article, is about as deadly per-mile as riding a motorcycle: far more dangerous than driving a car the same distance.
Others have touched on the probability thing.
The issue with motorcycles is that a some of it is under your control (driving safely, protective gear, bike maintenance) but there's a lot that isn't: potholes, other drivers, animals and so on.
Flying, almost everything is under the pilot's control. That includes most plane failures. Good preflight and maintenance takes care of most issues. The rest is taken care of by the flight planning – for example, engine failures. You should always have a place to put down the plane at any moment if you lose an engine - and general aviation aircraft land pretty slow.
Newer advancements have made it even safer (see also, whole frame parachutes).
That basically leaves freak accidents; they are a minority. Go spelunk the NTSB database, you'll find most accidents were preventable.
In a nutshell, you are probably going to find the risk is very skewed by complacent or otherwise irresponsible pilots.
This is exactly how it is in the rock climbing community. People still die, including very experienced people. You only need to mess up a rappel weight transfer once, but you have to execute it successfully thousands of times over the course of your life. People cope by saying they're careful and it's the irresponsible people who die. It isn't true. No reasonable safety system can rely on you acting perfectly every time. A low-probability-lethal-failure activity that you many many times can get you eventually, no matter how careful you are.
I don't say all this to disparage GA, or rock climbing. I rock climb and intend to do so well into the future. But saying these sorts of things mean you aren't treating your hobby with the seriousness it deserves imo. It could happen to you; thinking otherwise is self-deception.
The usage of 'per-mile' stats for aircraft safety irks me a little bit. It's certainly not how I think of safety when I hop on a plane - my internal comparison is more based on time - like, I'm about to spend 30 minutes on a plane, how much safer/less safe is that vs 30 minutes in a car?
The distance comparison also doesn't make sense because it's not like you could drive across the ocean even if you tried.
I guess it makes sense in terms of aggregate safety for a population for transport planning, but on an individual level it just doesn't communicate what I want to know.
Edit: for an analogy - imagine if someone invented faster than light space travel, but 25% of passengers don't survive the trip. The deaths per 100 miles statistic would be amazing compared to both car and air travel, but would you sign up for a ticket?
The distance comparison does make sense, because the point of getting on a plane/car is to travel. People don't say "I'm going to drive for 30 mins", they say "I'm going to drive from Los Angeles to NYC". Comparing how dangerous that is on a plane requires comparing by distance, not time.
Agreed.. Though it's an often used metric: fatalities per billion kilometers (f/bnkm).
Someone told me that risk per unit distance was higher when walking than riding a motorcycle, which I thought sounded like it could be possible. Sadly it seems its not true [1].
Interesting how f/bnkm is so low for driving vs walking though.
Eh, not really. Distance travelled !== quality of destination.
I can travel X minutes on a plane for Y cost to one set of destinations, or I can travel A minutes in a car for B cost to a different set of destinations. The actual distance between my current location and my destination means nothing to me, although the potential destinations do, which certainly are more varied with plane travel.
But I live in a pretty nice place, so travelling locally is pretty good too.
We're comparing safety, not "quality of destination".
If you were to travel from point A to point B, and wanted to know whether driving or flying was safer, then the correct metric to look at is the "per distance" one.
Yeah but most travel isn't to a fixed, "necessary" destination. About the only place like that for me is work, and I certainly can't fly there.
Or to put it another way - comparing two different modes of travel to one specific destination doesn't make much sense when the destination is partially fungible. I want to know what the safest way to get to (any sufficiently nice place) is, not to (one specific nice place).
Being a lazy hobby pilot is dangerous. The majority of GA crashes are pretty basic pilot error/"gotta-get-there-itis".
Motorcycles are the same way, actually. An overwhelming amount of fatal motorcycle accidents involve alcohol at night, usually in combination with not wearing proper gear.
Bikers frequently get killed by other forms of traffic (at least as a major contributing factor), pilots typically kill themselves (usually unintentionally, of course), with rare exceptions.
Assuming all hours were flown at Cessna 172 cruise speed of 140mph, that gives about 2e7 * 140 = 2.8e9, divided by 332 gives about 8.4 million miles per fatality.
Compared to 85 million miles travelled per fatality on the roads in general, and about 4 million miles travelled per fatality on motorcycles.
2X better than motorcycles, 10X worse than road fatalities in general.
And that's being quite generous about the mileage.
I don't think miles travelled per fatality is a useful point of comparison for general aviation. This puts it about on par with pedestrian deaths per mile travelled, and I don't think most people would call walking "extremely dangerous."
Very similar to how dangerous motorcycle riding is. Work out approx. hours of operation from miles driven (say avg. 30-50mph) and from there use annual fatalities. [1] Given that, death-per-hour for 332 deaths/19M in flight hours is roughly comparable to the 6000 deaths seen in motorcycle accidents. Much higher than automobiles, much higher than commercial flight.
Ok, so per hour it is comparable to motorcycles. But consider also that the average private pilot only flies 100-150 hours per year.
I don't disagree that it is more dangerous than automobiles or commercial flight. But I wouldn't characterize it as "extremely dangerous." Nor would I characterize motorcycles as such.
I guess we disagree on motorcycle danger then. I consider motorcycles to be extremely dangerous (mostly to their drivers). A friend of mine died about 1.5 years ago on one. I'd had two other people (not as close) in my life die in motorcycle accidents so I used to cringe inside every time he told me he was going riding over the weekend, though I would just wish him well & to be safe. Riding made him happy, was a stress reliever for him. And as far as that goes there are probably worse habits like smoking & drinking to excess, but that doesn't make any of them non-dangerous.
Google says "motorcycles are usually ridden for around 3,000 miles per year on average" so that's less than a hundred hours. Another result says the median is 1000 and 90th percentile is around 5000.
Neither one is "extremely" dangerous but it's a far cry from "all these strict regulations make it extremely safe" like with commercial flight.
Have you even looked into the history of aviation and why we have the FAA? Thes homebrew airplanes were falling out of the sky all over the place. A lot of people were dying.
> all those regulations must have something to do with how few people die in airplane crashes
Many of them do, but that certainly doesn't mean all of them do.
It's really hard to see how using decades old engine designs with leaded gas is necessary to prevent crashes, or how updating a proven airframe to newer engine designs that have a lot of operating time in cars needs to be an extremely onerous process to avoid crashes.
> Car engines are designed to provide quick bursts of relatively high power output for acceleration, and then only modest power output for steady-state cruising. It’s unusual for an auto engine to operate anywhere near its redline rpm or max-rated power output. Airplanes, on the other hand, usually take off and climb near 100 percent power output, followed by steady-state cruise often at 75 percent power. Aircraft engines are designed to sustain this punishment reliably over a typical 2,000-hour service life. Try running your car’s engine at or near redline rpm all the time and see what happens. Of course, we don’t know what will happen, and in an airplane we can’t pull over to the side of the road when it does.
The story suggests they used a marine engine, which in turn is an automotive engine modified to run under marine conditions, which among other things includes "run at full load for hours" or "run at partial load for hours".
Typically, of course, you're not seeing a lot of elevation changes in a marine application, but with modern fuel injection that's probably not such a big deal.
So de-rate and conservatively tune the engine to a peak HP that can be sustained indefinitely. This is SOP when putting automotive engines in industrial uses. Just because you don't know of it doesn't mean it's not dirt common and well practiced in industry.
2000hr equates to, generously, like really generously, a 150-200k service life. It really drives me up the wall to see you acting like this is a big number when in any other context you'd be happy to pop in and tell us about how your you're so smart because you bought a Toyota and it's guaranteed to make it that far.
> So de-rate and conservatively tune the engine to a peak HP that can be sustained indefinitely. This is SOP when putting automotive engines in industrial uses.
Those industrial uses don't crash into a random person's house if they fail, and "conservatively tune" means you've changed the engine's behavior. The FAA likes you to demonstrate safety when you change safety-critical things.
> 2000hr equates to, generously, a 150-200k service life.
At a much higher cruising RPM, which is the entire point of the article.
> Those industrial uses don't crash into a random person's house if they fail,
It is highly unlikely to crash into a random person’s home due to engine failure. Planes don’t drop out of the sky like stones when their engines fail. You can still fly them and pick a spot to attempt emergency landing or controlled crash.
For comparison, cars crash into people’s homes all the time, but i don’t believe it is ever a result of car engine failure. No reason to expect plane engine failures to cause these.
Considerable amount of plane crashes, including deadly ones, involve engine failure - often due to things that aren't present at all in automotive (or marine or industrial) use.
Sure, but this doesn’t mean that private pilots need or want FAA to “helpfully” force them to use older tech.
The argument I responded to was about negative externalities of potentially less safe new levels plane engines for third parties. I claim that these are negligible, because the risk of the worse engines is entirely internalized among the plane occupants: with less safe engines, more people will die, but these will almost certainly be plane occupants, not third parties. Third parties do die in plane crashes sometimes, but this is either caused by pilot error, or technical failure causing the plane to be uncontrollable, not failure of the engine. On piston GA planes, control is entirely independent of the engine.
Ability to safely bring down a plane does depend on availability of engine power, however, as lack of it can greatly cut off possible options not to mention engine can fail in such a way that you won't be able to recover before stalling.
FAA doesn't force them to use older tech, anyway. It's just that a lot of smaller planes coast on grandfathering of older engines. Believe me, a lot of CAAs would simply love it if they could force removal of carburator-based engines outside of museum planes, because carburators are one of the core causes for engine-related crashes in GA, and requiring injection based systems would reduce a whole subcategory of accidents.
Thing is, FAA and other CAA are only requiring that you do follow through sometimes ornerous but generally sane testing requirements if you want to bring a new design. This causes considerable up front issues for new designs, but there's a reason why there's much less complaint about it than one would imagine - the ornerous rules are for when you want full certification for the plane, not any of the lower classes. TFA author was trying for full certification, so that the resulting plane would be fully usable without special allowances for flight training for PPL(A), not any of the lower-category licenses. For just flying once you have a license, the requirements are less steep. [1]
[1] My father is currently rebuilding a crashed Cessna 152, question of how deeply tested the engine will be (and thus whether the resulting type certificate would allow PPL(A) training) were discussed a lot
But that’s the entire point: the planes are using those museum piece engines purely because these are certified, and certifying new engines is an extremely hard, close to impossible proposition from business perspective. Sure, there is a way to work around the overly onerous (the mere fact that almost no new piston engines are getting certified is a clear proof that the requirements are excessive), but what would be great is if we simply could innovate in GA like we can in cars or boats or electric scooters.
Car engines, scooters, or marine engines don't have a tendency to kill user if they fail for any reason.
Also, the real reason there's almost no new piston engines is that there's no real demand. Especially since you need to certify the plane with the engine as well. Thus we face mostly incremental changes, because any single development won't bring enough demand to justify the changes. Meanwhile there's not enough money in the market to actually try banning the old engines unless you want to cripple a whole sector.
This is often achieve by simply derating the engine. You redefine redline to be 75% of what the engine was designed to produce. Then your takeoff becomes 75% power and cruise is more like 56%.
the 24 hours of Le Mans, and tens of thousands of runabout marine applications with automotive engines disagree with you. The real question is would you prefer a 1950s Lycoming engine with a mechanical fueling system, or a modern car engine that has been proven in millions of vehicles?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Hours_of_Le_Mans says "Racing teams must balance the demands of speed with the cars' ability to run for 24 hours without mechanical failure", which implies a slightly shorter lifespan than you'd want in a plane.
Its a little more complex than that. Vehicles (cars, trucks) can rely on the engine power being transferred to a high friction surface (the road) with help from gravity with immediate effect. Where as boats and aircraft are transferring engine power to a low friction medium (air and water) where gravity is important for aircraft otherwise you die when you hit the ground unless you can auto rotate in a helicopter or glide in a plane, but where gravity is not so important in the scheme of things, if those extreme risk situations are catered for.
I bet they could have got the costs down more if they had used a Toroidal Propeller.
Here (already cued for you) https://youtu.be/s_J1OYcCPms?t=23 the footage shows less vortices generated with the Toroidal propeller seen in the top half of the frame of the two boat propeller underwater.
Its these vortices in water which generate cavitation on a traditional style propeller, which leave little pits on the surface of the propeller eventually leading to its replacement as its surface contributes to more friction and thus less fuel economy.
If the friction from the pitted surface is ignored, then it can lead to parts of a blade becoming more like swiss cheese with holes that results in parts of the blade breaking off.
Wind Turbines could generate more electricity if they used toroidal blades, but currently the engineering skill does not exists to scale these blades up in size, and have the ability to "detune" a blade in gale force/storm force winds to minimise damage to the generators and the unit itself.
However the use of these wind turbines also means, the state have a stealth population control mechanism as these wind turbine blades can also be altered to generate plenty of infrasound which can be used to make large parts of the population in the vicinity feel anxious, something that's documented in the Disney sound engineering labs in the 40's/50's when the sound engineers inadvertently made themselves all feel very ill for a few days. Ergo you will probably see less people striking in future!
The problem is that regulations are often a knee-jerk reaction without consideration to the second order effects.
When a crash happens, add a rule to prevent it from happening again.
Eventually however you have so many onerous rules that it becomes incredibly expensive to design a new aircraft engine and thus are suck with decades old tech that lacks modern innovation and safety features.
It's very rare to do a pass over regulations to try to simplify them. From a regulatory POV, there is little glory in that and lots of risk.
Exactly. This is similar to medical context, where it is found that decreasing regulations typically improves safety, both because it is easier to innovate and bring better products to market, but also because it increases liability of manufacturers: in a highly regulated market, they can say “sure, our device have caused you harm, but it operated exactly as FDA (or FAA) required, so take it up with them”.
FAA overall has done a lot of good for the safety of the flyers (and I respect it much more than other regulatory agencies tasked with protecting us). The problem is that very often there is a trade off between safety and other things, and regulatory framework prohibits the people it is meant to serve from deciding on their own where exactly they want to be in terms of this trade off. For example, if motorcycles were invented today, they would almost certainly be banned as way too unsafe to operate. That would suck, because I love riding motorcycles.
Almost all of the innovation that's going on in light, piston airplanes today is happening in the experimental category. I've got newer, better, and safer avionics, sensors, lighting, and engine systems in the E/A-B category airplane I built in my garage than I would on a 1970's Cessna. The richness of inputs I have in the cabin, including a big moving map GPS, ADS-B traffic, satellite weather, carbon monoxide detection, a vast array of engine monitoring signals, AOA, and so on provide so much more in terms of safety and situational awareness. Pilots in the USA are truly lucky that we have this option.
Ha! Classic Theory of Constraints: most constraints come from rules that used to accomodate for some limitations. Most of those limitations are long gone, but we’ve come to not question the rules; we mistake them with reality.
I had an engine failure the other day. Fortunately I managed to land safely. Turns out that the problem had been brewing for a while. A modern engine design would have told me about the failure before it happened. The 1970's engine design did not. Nor did the retrofitted modern engine monitor that was certified and bought at great expense.
The current certification regime makes aircraft more dangerous by preventing modern technology from reaching or replacing the current fleet.
GA is extremely dangerous, piloting runs through part of my family and single-engine aircraft are for the post-midlife/retirement crisis that many pilots go through. It also is their deathbed.
One family member was at breakfast that morning with several other pilots, all of whom had private aircraft except him (he is a voracious pilot, though). Every single one of them apparently had some extremely harrowing stories about engine failure, etc. Every one of them.
It's not a game, and the FAA is really sleeping on the private sector as far as I understand. Its dying under bureaucracy.
To respond to the parent comment as well -- I don't think this is a 'Republican', 'Democrat', or even a 'Libertarian' issue. All three of those parties have weaknesses that tend to screw over this kind of organization -- the first two with extremely bloated processes, and the second with perhaps far-too-little regulation.
This is the kind of org that just needs good leadership with integrity and funding that focuses on getting the little guys up and out there, as well as promoting development and having _very strict_ best practices for safety. It's a very hard blend to do right, I think. Sorta a combination of reducing bloat and inferred/accidental corruption, etc, I think.
(not to get terribly political, I do not like politics at all personally. Just talking through the technical points of the matter as much as I can. Much love! <3 <3 <3 <3 :)))))) :D :D :)))))) )
Mechanical engine failure is not a major factor in GA fatalities, mind you running out of gas is a big chunk of engine failure accidents.
Weather exceeding pilot and/or airframe capability is the big killer. That includes black hole takeoffs where failure to use the instruments kills quickly.
There's a bunch of fatal loss of control accidents where the pilot stall/spins out of a low level turn to the runway - which can happen when the engine quits on takeoff. With urban development crowding runways, you might just have to land on a roof.
I have been fortunate in not needing to use such airports. Flying gliders I don't always make it back. I keep landable areas in reach. In one case a dark cloud over the hills blocked my way back and I had to retreat 30 km to an airport.
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My heart wants to agree with you but all those regulations must have something to do with how few people die in airplane crashes.
Very few people die in large commercial aviation crashes, but the hobbyist pilot space is a graveyard. ~400 deaths/year in the US, ~13 deaths/100M miles traveled. Meanwhile, commercial aviation is closer to 0.002 deaths/100M miles traveled.
Incidentally, the FAA rules around general aviation are a lot more relaxed than they are around commercial aviation. As a landlubber who occasionally spends a week geeking out about planes, but would never own one, their rules don't really seem to be ridiculous.
This is such a dumb analysis - Lithium batteries are used in everything - tools, consumer electronics, medical devices, home and grid storage and all of the sectors that will be using it soon. Not to mention if you want to push larger transport sectors and grid de-carbonization you will need massive GwH batteries with 100kg+ of lithium. We clearly need more solutions, stop pushing lithium batteries like they can solve all the world's energy problems.
