[on_and_off]

I am always stunned that many (most/all) of these high tech gadgets lack a LOT of safety features.

I would pay extra for a drone with such safeguards. just the prospect of less chances of ruining it would be enough.

Similarly, eskates often have a regenerative battery charging while braking which is a great idea. but it also cannot handle charging while already full. So if you go down a slope while the board is full, it can decide to shut down and let you bomb down that hill. Which sounds like an insane pitfall.

Or what happens if the board loses its connection to the remote ? I would hope that it brakes progressively but similarly it just does nothing .. so up to you to find a way to stop.

It is such a weird blind spot to have. I don't think a car manufacturer would ship a product with this kind of blind spot, is that a culture thing ? regulation ?

Anyway, fingers crossed that somebody seizes these opportunities.

[kingaillas]

>I am always stunned that many (most/all) of these high tech gadgets lack a LOT of safety features.

I’m not... no safety is what the free market will deliver in the absence of regulations or liability or both.

[enriquec]

then why were seatbelts and safety glass delivered by the free market? why are tesla's significantly safer than other manufacturers of their own free will? Why do they push updates that improve braking to customers that have already paid? Why does volvo specifically advertise their safety as a differentiator?

Do you really think if a company could prove it provides double the survivability of accidents compared to others, the free market wouldn't reward it?

Your claim simply doesn't match reality.

[bananabreakfast]

You're actually proving yourself wrong here.

Regulation and regulation alone provided us with seatbelts and safety glass. Car companies even ran a massive lobbying and advertising campaign to convince America seatbelts weren't necessary with slogans calling drivers in car accidents "the nut behind the wheel" https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/nut-behind-wheel/

[enriquec]

No, Volvo gave us seatbelts and the Tucker gave us safety glass. 9 years after the free market created seatbelts, the government mandated it. Mandates have never and will never manifest technological/scientific advancements out of nowhere.

[nswest23]

> Mandates have never and will never manifest technological/scientific advancements out of nowhere.

I don't think that anyone is arguing that. I think the point is that the free market doesn't deliver these kind of safety features w/o the "incentive" of government mandates. Whether that is b/c the market doesn't demand those safety features in the absence of a mandate is another issue.

[datalus]

The free market didn't deliver seat belts. Regulation had to step in and Ralph Nader lobbied the US govt to get it passed.

[raisedbyninjas]

Volvo sold the three point seatbelt for nine years before the US government required it.

[bobthepanda]

Most automakers had them, they were just optional and so people didn't spend extra money on them and kept getting flung out of their cars.

Volvo had them standard, but Volvo has also never been above 1% market share in the US [1]. If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

[1] https://knoema.com/infographics/floslle/top-vehicle-manufact...

[fakedang]

Volvo is European too.

The part we should be worried about is that it took 9 years for the govt to require it. 50 years from now, we'll be talking about how stupid it was that drones didn't have safety features.

[celim307]

That’s a little different, seatbelts save the lives of your customers

[vagrantJin]

> why are tesla's significantly safer than other manufacturers of their own free will?

Safer than who? Model T fords? How many Tesla's are on the road anyway? In which countries? What about Ferrari? Mercedes?

[fiddlerwoaroof]

Teslas turn off regenerative breaking if you charge too far, but the car tells you that pretty prominently: however, the car handles very differently without Regen brakes.

[xvector]

This was the dumbest thing I experienced with my Model 3. I was expecting my regen brakes to work after I pulled out and I had to brake super hard after.

Why can’t Tesla just give us an option to keep it consistent? I guess adding video games is more important.

[URSpider94]

Tesla has been religious about never blending regen and mechanical braking. The accelerator only controls the motors, the brake pedal only controls the brakes. They’ve broken that somewhat now with one-pedal driving mode. The only way they could make regen feel consistent with a cold or full battery would be to blend in friction braking to make up the difference, which is just not something Tesla is into doing.

My BMW i3 did this really well, FWIW.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

I mean, the solution is not to charge past 90%: for most practical purposes there’s no reason to go past 90% anyways.

[bananabreakfast]

Because that's not how batteries work.

Regen works because the batteries are being charged by the induction of the motors taking energy from the moving car. If the batteries are full they cannot take any more change and hence cannot draw power from the motion of the car.

What do you expect them to do? Dump the current on a giant resistor and hope it doesn't melt?

[10000truths]

> Dump the current on a giant resistor and hope it doesn't melt?

That's called an induction brake and it's already widely used in trains and semi trucks. That said, you still need a friction brake at low speeds, since the induction braking force is proportional to velocity.

[LadyCailin]

Simulate the same braking curve with the physical brakes as when regen is functioning?

[dodobirdlord]

I suppose that's one approach. Mechanical brakes work by converting the kinetic energy of the vehicle into heat via friction, it seems fitting that inductive brakes would dump energy to heat by running current over a resistor. Though under normal braking circumstances I don't know what percentage of the vehicle's energy is lost to the brakes themselves and what percentage is lost to the friction of the tire with the road.

[JohnJamesRambo]

Can anyone do the math and tell me how big that resistor would need to be? I’ve always wondered how many watts are being dissipated by my brake pads and rotors when I stop.

[saagarjha]

Assuming your Tesla is around 2000 kg and traveling at 30 meters/s, it's got about 900,000 J of kinetic energy. Stopping in 10s is some serious power that you'd need to throw off.

[fulafel]

All of yhe 90 kW doesn't need to be radiated in real time though as it's ok for the brake elements to heat up.

[vagrantJin]

> What do you expect them to do? Dump the current on a giant resistor and hope it doesn't melt?

You know...they could use it to boil water for a built in coffee/green tea maker.

Just a thought...

[sethdj]

Can’t you also set the car to never charge to actual max, giving regen breaking some leeway? (If this is somehow a problem you run into often)

[diebeforei485]

Yes, and that is the default. But people do charge to 100% occasionally for road trips (or for escaping a hurricane path, etc).

[saagarjha]

Annoyingly, newer Leafs don't let you limit how much you charge anymore, and the regenerative braking curve changes based on how much battery you have…

[ohazi]

I guess that's easier and cheaper than adding a circuit to keep regenerative braking on, but dump the energy into a big resistor...

[bigbubba]

Aka rheostatic braking. Trains do this, but they have pretty large radiators for it.

[leetcrew]

that would be an unnecessarily complicated way of reimplementing friction brakes.

[hansvm]

Most of the hardware is already there for the regenerative brakes, and it allows the driver's muscle memory with respect to braking pressure to still apply in that edge case. I'd be surprised if it were simpler to make the friction brake fallback behave identically to the regenerative system when the battery is full.

Maybe it's not worth the cost/complexity anyway, but the idea has merit somewhere in the design space.

[bigbubba]

If a Tesla would use rheostatic braking, I think it would require more cooling capacity than the cars are currently designed for. If the resistor couldn't be kept cool, then the car would have to revert back to friction brakes anyway. More cooling probably means bigger air intakes, which I think would run contrary to their aesthetic goals.

[hansvm]

Rheostatic and friction brakes both basically convert kinetic energy into heat. Is there some fundamental reason why a resistor would be harder to cool appropriately (low thermal conductivity comes to mind, though I'm pretty sure there are high performance ceramics used for both brakes and resistors -- my heuristics aren't really good enough to make a good guess for this one)?

[schoen]

Shouldn't the resistor having to end up dissipating exactly as much heat as the friction brakes do, by conservation of energy? Is there a reason that it's inherently mechanically harder for the resistor to dissipate that heat?

[steelbrain]

and then you need extra engineering and production costs to cool those resistors :)

[bobobob420]

I worked with a DJI matrice for some research projects so it is a larger one than most consumers but man those things are crazy dangerous. The propellors can cut off your fingers or cause serious damage if it hits someone. Not to mention a piece of metal falling out of the sky onto someone. I agree heavily they need more safety mechanisms

[dheera]

> I am always stunned that many (most/all) of these high tech gadgets lack a LOT of safety features.

Exactly. I would also expect a drone to have triple redundundancy of all sensors but they seem to have only one copy of each.

[labawi]

As long as they are carrying less people than 737-MAX, I think they will be fine with less redundancy.

They should be safe, so they don't fall on people etc, but that is a separate issue.

[dheera]

All it takes is for a single IMU failure to fall on people. Two IMUs doesn't help because you don't know which one is right. With three you can vote out the 1/3 failing IMU and issue a warning to land immediately.

Same for GPS and everything else.

[labawi]

Yet even MAX didn't have triple redundancy of all sensors, and I don't think it is customary to have triple redundancy for all sensors in pretty much any plane.

Some things are more or less important, and even insignificant for safe landing. Triple redundant sensors won't save you from programming errors, birds or cables in rotors, batteries bursting into flames which is still more likely to cause a crash than your only camera or microphone failing - probably even a GPS failure, as long as you have a working IMU.

[swiley]

Geese is shunting a resistor across the motor so hard?