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Inspired by the aerospace innovation of building airplane wings as fuel tanks instead of building the fuel tanks inside the wings, Tesla decided to build a battery pack that acts as a body structure, linking the front and rear underbody parts.
Currently, Tesla builds battery packs by combining cells into modules, which when put together form a battery pack. That battery pack is installed into the vehicle platform.
The difference with this new concept is that Tesla is not using modules and instead builds the entire battery pack as the structural platform of the vehicle, with the battery cells helping solidifying the platform as one big unit.
Using its expertise in giant casting parts, Tesla can connect a big single-piece rear and front underbody to this structural battery pack.
This new design reduces the number of parts, the total mass of the battery pack, and therefore enables Tesla to improve efficiency and ultimately the range of its electric vehicles.
The structural battery pack is expected to be first used in the Model Y that is going to be built at Gigafactory Berlin and in the new Model S Plaid.
The move is seen as bold in the industry since most electric car makers are trying to protect the battery pack while Tesla is planning to use it as an integral structural part of its electric vehicles.
First picture of the Tesla structural battery pack with honeycomb design
Electrek obtained the first picture of one of the very first structural battery packs ever produced by Tesla.
The image shows the battery pack without the new 4680 cells in them – showcasing the honeycomb design of the pack:
Without the cells, we can better appreciate the structural aspects of the honeycomb structure, which is known for its strength while also being lightweight.
It has already been used in aerospace and in the automotive industry – although not for the same use as Tesla.
On the picture of Tesla’s new battery pack, we can also see that Tesla built the coolant loops on the sides around the pack:
To complete the battery pack, Tesla would drop the 4680 battery cells into the holes and bound them to the pack to contribute to the structural integrity and power the electric vehicles.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk commented on the contribution of the cells to the structure:
Battery pack will be a bonded structure with cells providing shear transfer between steel upper & lower face sheets, eliminating most of the center body parts while providing better torsional rigidity & improved polar moment or inertia. This is a major breakthrough.
Some pointed out that while the benefits of this design are becoming obvious, it also complicates repairs in case of a crash.
However, Musk claims that Tesla designed crash absorption rails that can be cut off and repaired to preserve the packs.
Mobileye is a company based in Israel that was acquired by Intel back in 2017 for $15-billion. It was and still is doing self-driving vehicle tech research and it is currently one of the industry’s largest supplier of advanced driver assistance systems, whose customers include Hyundai, Kia, GM, Ford, BMW, Nissan, Audi, Volvo and Volkswagen.
It even supplied its EyeQ3 complete self-driving solution to Tesla, and this hardware was used in the Model S and Model X from 2009 until 2016. Now its EyeQ4 can be found powering the self-driving system in the NIO ES6 and ES8, Nissan’s ProPilot 2.0, VW’s Travel Assistant in the Passat and Golf, the Ford Mustang Mach-E, as well as the F-150 truck.
As this lengthy article on Ars Technica points out, there are many similarities between the self-driving tech development strategies at Mobileye and Tesla. For instance, both companies are on a quest to incrementally improve their driver-assistance systems to eventually evolve them into fully self-driving solutions.
However, during a recent presentation at CES 2021, the CEO of Mobileye, Amnon Shashua, said he considered Tesla’s approach to gradually developing self driving tech wrong. He argued that a company can
deploy a crappy system, call it beta,
And then just try to
improve and improve and improve.
He went on to say that this
sounds reasonable, but actually it's a brute-force way of going about things.
And there is a risk that it could
get into a glass ceiling.
He then explained how he believes Mobileye’s approach is better than Tesla’s. For instance, Mobileye does rely on lidar sensors, whereas Tesla is actively striving to avoid using them. Another area which has seen investment and development from Mobileye are high-definition maps, another means to achieve self-driving, but one which Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, considers a mere ‘ crutch,’ and not really a viable solution.
Shashua went on to explain that in his view, the idea of recording footage while driving, storing that footage and then analyzing it (only when the car is near a WiFi hotspot) is not the right approach. He says what Tesla is doing with this program is essentially recording ‘ the wrong part ‘ of the self-driving process, especially since having a neural network learn to distinguish between objects, road markings, people and other vehicles is not really that hard a task nowadays.
He believes the main point of focus through recording all this footage and data is to comprehend the ‘ semantics of the road. ‘ By this he means the more subtle aspects of driving a car, such as the behavior of other cars and how they react in relation to the shape and geometry of the road. What Mobileye does is not collect the each and every piece of footage during a test run, but instead just a summary or a report which can be translated into a 3D map once it is uploaded into the company’s servers.
Mobileye has been building detailed maps of many cities around the world, having racked up over 5 million miles-worth of data over the past five years. In the long term, the company’s CEO believes this will give it an edge over competing systems (Tesla’s included), since they won’t have access to such a rich database.
It now wants to expand its testing to Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai and New York in 2021, after it did testing in Israel, Detroit and Germany in 2020. At the same time, it is worth noting that Mobileye seems willing to change its approach to developing autonomous driving tech, whereas Tesla’s CEO is far more firmly rooted in his beliefs about what would work in this context and what wouldn’t and, as more breakthroughs are made in coming years, this flexibility may grant it an edge over Tesla and others.
I've been watching a lot of this small youtube channel "Dr. Know it all knows it all", yeah not a great name, intro music is meh, but the content is good. He's got a lot of knowledge about AI and neural networks and does a good job explaining the tech/science behind AI and autonomous driving and he's been focusing on Tesla. He recently bought a Model Y so he's been experiencing autopilot and I liked what he mentioned here about seeing how good Tesla's system is by what it doesn't show you
So I'll just a do a little dump of some good AI, Tesla FSD videos he's made if you want to learn more about the subject. In it he explains why Tesla's AI model is more scalable than Waymo and discusses the local maximum vs global maximum "glass ceiling" issue that the Mobileye CEO was referring to in the article above
He's got more videos that go into more detail explaining how neural networks work, I think I'm going to have to watch them a few times for a to fully sink in so I'll spare you all that
no reason to assume that, given that they haven’t even finished with what can be accomplished with existing hardware and software.
Other than the physical limitation of cameras in adverse conditions.
In bad weather, the cameras are obstructed often. If it can't see, it can't drive itself. As of now, the cheap, substandard radar and high quality cameras aren't enough.
I'll say it again, it's not FSD until I can take a nap in the back seat while it drives. Until then it's just a glorified cruise control. Claiming it's FSD is dangerous at this point.
Other than the physical limitation of cameras in adverse conditions.
In bad weather, the cameras are obstructed often. If it can't see, it can't drive itself. As of now, the cheap, substandard radar and high quality cameras aren't enough.
In bad weather Lidar is no better than camera as has been mentioned by Elon multiple times. You really need something that isn’t in the bandwidth of visual spectrum (which is where radar comes in). That’s why lidar is a waste of resource for vehicles.
Lidar is perfectly suited for space purposes since there isn’t a weather related issue, but pitch darkness when you are in shadow of earth (therefore you need active photon generation).
It is besides the point of how do we drive in adverse weather. We use only our available eyes and ears and reduce speed, These cars can add a camera cleaner mechanism may be.
And people are trying even stupid things like placing masking tape over one or two cameras to test it’s functioning. I believe it has some redundancies built in, to account for these circumstances.
In bad weather Lidar is no better than camera as has been mentioned by Elon multiple times. You really need something that isn’t in the bandwidth of visual spectrum (which is where radar comes in). That’s why lidar is a waste of resource for vehicles.
Lidar is perfectly suited for space purposes since there isn’t a weather related issue, but pitch darkness when you are in shadow of earth (therefore you need active photon generation).
It is besides the point of how do we drive in adverse weather. We use only our available eyes and ears and reduce speed, These cars can add a camera cleaner mechanism may be.
And people are trying even stupid things like placing masking tape over one or two cameras to test it’s functioning. I believe it has some redundancies built in, to account for these circumstances.
That depends. LIDAR generates a point cloud of data that a computer interprets as the vehicle's surroundings. That computer can, will, and does filter out erroneous data points regardless of weather conditions. Your comment about rain screwing with it would be the same for radar, visual, ultrasonic, etc as well as they all send out a signal and look for a return, they all work just fine in the rain. At the end of the day, LIDAR is a more accurate technology than visual cameras, there's really no argument that can refute that. In fact, LIDAR is more accurate in the rain/snow than visual cameras will ever be.
I've seen some videos of FSD beta trying to drive in the snow and it's definitely got some work to do there and in general it needs to learn when to slow down below the speed limit when road conditions warrant it. If it's raining really hard and the speed limit is 50 maybe you should only go 35-40 in that case, or the speed limit is 35mph but the road is really crappy and there's bumps and pot holes everywhere. I've seen videos of the radar sensors getting blocked because of snow buildup on the front bumper which will disable autopilot. That could be fixed with putting little heating coils around the sensors and cameras to melt any snow that builds up. They do that with charge port, and at SpaceX on their Starlink satellite dish it has the ability to melt any snow that accumulates on it so it can keep working. In fact Starlink is only working in the northern latitudes of Canada and the upper parts of America. IDK if that's something they can fix with a software update or not, there were a few tricks they had to warm up the charge port for older models before including a heating element around the charge port which was more effective.
Sandy Munro as I've said many times hated the body design of the Model 3 compared it to a 90s Kia but said the tech inside was way ahead of everyone else. He recommended hundreds of design fixes for the body and overtime Tesla has made many of those changes (not necessarily because of him AFAIK), sometimes going above and beyond Munro's expectations. Sandy is a big fan of the heat pump and single piece casting in the Y. Elon was initially wasn't very receptive to Sandy's criticisms but has changed his tune and likes what Sandy has to say and really respects Sandy's manufacturing knowledge
Elon mentions that they finally got rid of the 12v lead acid battery in the new S/X and are using 12v lithiun ion battery that should last as long as the main battery pack aka a decade or more. Long term he wants to drop 12v all together since it's too low and switch to 48v which is what's common for Power over ethernet devices. Once they combine the data and power wires into one and increase the voltage they'll be able to use much thinner wires and less wires all together which is a big cost and weight savings
Tesla wants to add the ability to detect if you fell asleep while driving and the car will drive you back home if it does, or to detect if you're having a medical issue and to drive you to the hospital
Apple and Samsung have been quietly contributing to a new technology to find and seamlessly unlock your car with your phone, without even pulling it out of your pocket — and Tesla may be one of the first with the tech. Tesla is actively working on building UWB into its cars, according to documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission.
On September 9th, the company submitted six new “products” for the FCC’s consideration, including two key fobs, a security controller, and a number of “endpoints” that would be installed inside the frame and cabin of a vehicle:
According to the FCC documents, at least three of those items explicitly support UWB communication.
What is UWB?
Ultra-wideband just means high-frequency radio communications above 500MHz, but it now refers to two specific ideas:
UWB is a standard where devices broadcast short, low-power pulses to reveal and securely verify their location. It’s useful for item trackers, digital car keys, and to keep robots from bumping into each other.
5G UWB is a marketing term for short-range, high-speed cellular internet connections that operate at millimeter-wave frequencies.
What’s more, Tesla’s FCC filing is unusual in that it includes a complete operational description of the technology, something that’s usually redacted. The highlights: it’s a standards-based implementation of UWB, which means UWB phones from Apple and Samsung should theoretically be compatible, and it’s designed to let you know how far away you are from the car.
That "ranging" is helpful to avoid replay attacks that try to trick your car into thinking its key fob is closer than it actually is. But it also theoretically unlocks the ability to find your car in a crowded parking lot using your phone, something Samsung is already planning to release an app for later this year.
A selection from Tesla’s operational description of the tech.When I spoke to UWB chip supplier NXP last year, company CTO Lars Reger told me that future cars would likely need several of these UWB endpoints inside the car, possibly at the door handles, to properly triangulate your location and know whether you’re inside or outside so, say, your kids won’t be able to turn on the engine if you’re not actually in the cabin. Apparently, Tesla thinks the B-pillars (located between the front and rear side windows of a car) and a piece of fascia might be good places to put those antennas, too.
A drawing of the inside of one of the UWB key fobs.None of this means that Tesla will necessarily add the tech to its cars, but FCC documents are usually a pretty good sign that it’s not just an experiment. FCC filings are typically one of the last waypoints before a product comes to market, as they’re only required if you’re going to import, sell, or do widespread testing of a radio product in the US.
Cheap $25,000 Tesla Could Look Like This Slick Hatchback
Rendering artist is curious to see what Elon Musk thinks about his idea for European hatchback.As much as automakers would love to have the same cars for sale worldwide, different markets have peculiarities. Europe loves hatchbacks, while China loves sedans. Although the world seems to love SUVs, they are not one-size-fits-all. This is why Tesla will develop a $25,000 car for China and one for Europe, as Elon Musk already confirmed. With that in mind, the rendering artist @Theottle sent InsideEVs his idea for such a car.
Since its target is to be more affordable than the EVs Tesla currently sells, it will use many components that are already in Tesla’s vehicles. The door handles and the rearview side mirrors are the same ones used in the Model 3 and Model Y. The taillights also seem to be borrowed from the Model 3. Considering the refreshed Model S and Model X dumped the MCU in favor of the ICE, we’d bet the interior of the $25,000 will be very similar to that on the Model 3 and Model Y, even if probably even simpler than the cabin in those cars.
Hatchbacks are not properly known for their aerodynamic qualities. To improve that, Tesla could bet on a less truncated rear than the one presented in these renderings, in a coupe-like fashion, but that would hurt roominess. As the $25,000 Tesla should be shorter than the Model 3, it will be interesting to see which compromise the company prefers to take.
What @Theottle wants more with these renderings is to learn is what Elon Musk thinks about them. You can find his work on Instagram. In case you are close to the Tesla honcho, help our rendering artist by showing him these drawings and tell @Theottle what Musk said about them. If you manage to learn what the real deal is, remember to share it with us.
I don’t understand the point. Aren’t currently key fobs able to do that? I mean able to unlock door by not pulling it out of pocket. So what are they innovating here?
It's more secure than the normal key fob and UWB is built into newer phones. The iPhones of the last couple years have had the tech with little use besides homepod handoff, and targeted airdrop. but it has some cool potential
What's UWB good for?
Satellite-based GPS is useful for finding yourself on a map but struggles with anything much more precise and indoors. UWB doesn't have those handicaps.
UWB could switch your TV from your child's Netflix profile to yours. Your smart speaker could give calendar alerts only for the people in the room. Your laptop could wake up when you enter the home office.
Imagine this scenario: You leave the office and as you near your car, receivers in its doors recognize your phone and unlock the vehicle for you. When you get out of the car at home, the receivers recognize you're no longer in the vehicle and lock the doors.
With UWB, your home could recognize that you're returning at night and illuminate your walkway. The technology could then automatically unlock your front door and turn on your home sound system, which follows you from room to room. "I'm walking in a sound and light cocoon in my house," said Lars Reger, chief technology officer of NXP Semiconductors, a UWB proponent whose chips are widely used in cars.
Bluetooth-based location sensing takes at least two seconds to get an accurate fix on your location, but UWB is a thousand times faster, Reger said.
UWB will add more than convenience, supporters say. Conventional key fobs have security problems in regard to remotely unlocking cars: criminals can use relay attacks that mimic car and key communications to steal a vehicle. UWB has cryptographic protections against that sort of problem.
This same ability to track your movements has downsides, particularly if you don't like the idea of the government following your movements or coffee shops flooding your phone with coupons as you walk by. But with today's privacy push, it's likely phone makers won't let devices track your phone without your permission.
01-20-2021, 02:49 PM
The taillights also seem to be borrowed from the Model 3. Considering the refreshed Model S and Model X dumped the MCU in favor of the ICE, we’d bet the interior of the $25,000 will be very similar to that on the Model 3 and Model Y, even if probably even simpler than the cabin in those cars.
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