2 Wheeler EV penetration is increasing in India. "2W EVs form the majority of EV sales today, accounting for 85%–90% of all EV units sold in India, followed by 4W EVs (7%–9% of sales) and 3W EVs (5%–7% of sales)." Source: https://www.bain.com/insights/india-electric-vehicle-report-....
EVs have crossed the 6% threshold of volume of all vehicles sold in India.
India's EV migration will start from 2 wheeler and 3 wheeler EVs. Public transport is already migrating to EV based. City buses have already migrated to EVs in cities like Pune and other cities are catching up.
I've never been to India, but I have seen (and heard, and smelled) the multitude of two-stroke-engine-powered vehicles in Southern European cities, so I can imagine having them replaced by electric versions would be a blessing...
> the multitude of two-stroke-engine-powered vehicles in Southern European cities, so I can imagine having them replaced by electric versions
In India, the 4-stroke came in big right around the time when leaded fuel got banned. The anti-knock stuff only really worked properly on a 4-stroke, so you'll notice that it took somewhere between 2000 and 2005 to really kill the new vehicle market for 2S.
However, the sound, that is what is completely different about these - you can actually talk on your phone sitting in the electric versions, while the petrol ones need you to shout over it when it goes up a hill.
The most interesting intersection for me was the mobile app and the EV charger combo the drivers use.
In my last visit to Kerala there were plug points under some street lights which could charge these 3-wheelers at 240v at 15amps off the pole.
These guys would just be parked right under one of those, with their mobile apps open & they'll unplug only once they get a pickup location, keeping their batteries perpetually topped up when idle.
Strange... even Vespa (which is by no means a cheap scooter) had a two-stroke engine in its base model until 2017, according to https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vespa_Primavera (German version, the English one has less details). Of course, if it's not commonly available at gas stations, preparing the gasoline/oil mixture for a two-stroke engine becomes a bit of a hassle...
California long ago banned 2 cycle golf carts. I used to until recently owned one. If you said they were a 100 times more polluting than a car with a catalytic converter I'd believe it. For a developing country better air quality, less noise and not needing to import oil seem like a win win win.
I am finding it hard to come to terms with the power and thermal figures. The CPU draws 320watts and likes to operate at 100 degrees Celsius. The CPU uses adaptive boost technology to pull more power to get to the 100C temperature mark. Again, from the review, most enthusiast motherboards default to limits near 4096W of power and 512A of current.
Compared to house hold appliances, with 4000watts of power, you can run 3 microwaves (at 1200 watts), more than 5 refrigerators (at 800 watts), a reasonably sized central air conditioning unit (though 5KW models aren't that rare), etc.
These power and thermal figures make me wonder why Intel is not moving towards Apple's design philosophy behind the M1, M2, M3 series of chips.
> Most enthusiast motherboards default to limits near 4096W of power and 512A of current.
No, that's just a way to set no upper limit. A very beefy desktop power supply is 1600W, and that's typically over-specced to handle brief surges of power.
Why are you comparing the absolutely most power hungry, performant chip meant for desktop use in workstations and gaming machines with a low powered ARM chip meant for laptops?
Intel makes laptop ships too and those don't use 100W.
Why does everyone these days hate consumer choice and market diversity so much?
>Why does everyone these days hate consumer choice and market diversity so much?
A lot of people got into CPU topics because Apple created their M1s and they think that ARM is some unparallelled thing that every1 must adopt and that Apple's design goals are most important (other market segments are irrelevant)
And? Those are still significantly slower than this chip on the benchmarks they can run.
Why do you need to pull in Apple so badly into this?
This bloviating is really getting tiring here - this is the most expensive, most highend chip that people put into gaming machines and their worstations. People who really want the maxiumum power no matter the cost or heat.
If you utter "laptop", "M", "ARM" in this context you're not the target market for this chip. That's OK. Not everything needs to be a medium powered laptop chip for browsing.
You can downvote me all you want, it does not matter. You can call all ARM chips "laptop" grade all you want. But this misrepresents how this arch is used in servers and desktop "PCs" right now. And thats the only point I want to make. ARM arch chips are not laptop only. Can they match the power of this new I9? No. But that wasn't my point.
You can get x86 chips designed for laptops in desktop form factors too.
It's not about Arm. All of Apple's M chips so far have been primarily designed for mobile use, and that strongly affects how the power usage scales. It makes a basic comparison of watts not very useful.
> All of Apple's M chips so far have been primarily designed for mobile use
There, you said it again. This is wrong - you hear Apple M chip and you think "laptop" primarily, but that is no longer true. Just as it would be to say ARM is primarily for smartphones. Now I don't want to talk about sales numbers, but the M chips in the Apple Studio and Mac Pro (and those used by other manufacturers in servers) are a different category than "laptop". For a quick shallow impression see: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i9-14900k-v...
(nevermind it's the i9-14900K)
Again, the I9 is more powerful, but that doesn't make all of ARM or M a "laptop".
> the M chips in the Apple Studio and Mac Pro (and those used by other manufacturers in servers) are a different category than "laptop".
The M2 ultra is basically two M2 Maxs stuck together. It's the same chip that's in laptops, and was designed around a laptop power budget.
In what way is it in a different category?
Designing for different power targets has a significant effect on power and performance metrics. When a chip is designed to be able to take tons of watts, that hurts its efficiency even when you're currently running at a low wattage. So comparing chips with different wattage philosophies gets tricky.
Manufacturers try to reuse as much as possible for efficiency's sake but one size does not fit all. If you try to have the same underlying blocks powering your super low-power ultra-portables, as well as the high power server chips, and everything in between (including the monstrosity in the article) the definition of efficiency starts to need a very subjective understanding.
Not sure whether it was AMD or Asus but a few months ago Asus pushed a firmware update to their recent AMD motherboards preventing users from undervolting their CPU in the motherboard because it would fry the motherboard. I can't find the article now but it happened last year.
Because of PC gaming crowd - marketing of the bigger plays to them - nobody cares or understand IPC or power efficiency.
Apple had it easier with the switch to ARM - they use vague metrics like over 2 times faster without actually getting into benchmarking or technical details like the PC crowd does.
> That's the amount of copium one has to inhale when stuck to the whims of a single vendor.
These are such weird things to add here. Your comment was a perfectly good criticism of the way Apple markets their M1/2/3 CPUs, but then you added that extra nonsense and just came off as someone who spent way too much time in a PC gaming culture war on Reddit that the rest of us don't really care about.
Please refrain from ad-hominem attacks as per HN guidelines.
As for Apple consumers being more susceptible to being deceived, it seems we'll have to agree to disagree on our opinions. At least I provided an example.
From the article "AMD Spartan UltraScale+ samples and evaluation kits are expected to be available for sampling and evaluation in the first half of 2025." For hardware products, what is the point of making these announcements a year in advance? Are they available for select partners before 2025?
When you need to decide on what FPGA line you are going to base your products on, you certainly want to know years in advance what new models will obsolete your FPGA products. However, you don't just want to know their specifications but also their price.
But the flip side is most of them tell you ahead of time whether something is recommended for new designs, and how long they will guarantee production for.
Which is much more important.
In this day and age with FPGA companies being merged and spun out left and right, i doubt anyone relies on the future line announcements this second.
In more normal times I agree you want to know if you are going down a dead end path.
If you know your product needs these features you can do early prototyping and development on similar or higher end platforms and then switch to this new platform when it becomes available.
Having knowledge of upcoming parts is important in hardware engineering for planning purposes.
Oh, yes. Hardware products and projects, specially those complex enough to need an FPGA, will usually have a long development pipeline and even one year seems pretty short.
And you can very often prototype with either an overpowered development board or you own prototype board with another FPGA, and then downsize appropriately as the project advances. Most importantly, if you know there will be a viable version in a year, you can postpone the final decision and Xilinx get to avoid having you choosing Altera now if it's possible that their new offering will match your project.
They don't have a choice. FPGA's aren't like vanilla logic chips: they are highly proprietary both in terms of their specific hardware functionality as well as software tool chains and you can't second source them. Some of the larger customers are using them for government contracts (think military and space applications) where they are signing up products they are contractually on the hook for from years to decades.
Yes I know. So any product being developed today or in the next year would be done on a well established option that will be produced for many more years. It still isn't clear to me why such a long runway on the announcement does for anyone. It shouldn't be changing anyone's plans.
duckduckgo. It is getting better. I rarely need to fall back to a Google search. ChatGPT 4 is good at getting to the specific information that I am looking for and I can get the source links.
It is better for shops to just sell jute or cloth bags at retail price for carrying goods instead of allowing users to buy any type of plastic bag. This is how it is done in India in places where plastic is banned. Of course, customers can bring their own carry bags and avoid buying bags.
While 28 tonnes appears to be a lot of material for generating 1.2MW of energy, it compares favourably when you look at wind turbines. How often does this need maintenance though?
The positive thing about this design is that maintenance is potentially much easier than on an seafloor mounted turbine: if the tether is long enough, you can just make the craft surface next to a maintenance vessel with a small crane. No divers necessary, and no giant crane platforms like for offshore wind turbines, either.
I still worry about some of the technical aspects. The craft is going to pull it's own tether through the water behind/"under" it while it "flies" loops in the current at a speed faster than the current itself. That must induce quite a bit of drag, right? Especially because that tether is delivering several megawatts of electric power do the anchor, while holding all the mechanical load of that power being generated. That has to be a beefy cable. And the joints where that cable meets the craft and the anchor are moving parts, for all intents and purposes.
I also wonder how much the craft actually resembles a full submarine. Are there ballast tanks and ballast pumps for altitude control? Full set of diving and directional rudders? What happens when any of those fail?
Potential complexity is certainly higher than for an offshore wind turbine.
One of the more annoying things with Windows for me is when when Windows Update fails stating that KBxyz failed to install. It is a nightmare to find the right version of the updater from Microsoft's website. In my case, the particular update didn't have a standalone updater. Instructions like the ones provided at https://www.windowscentral.com/how-download-and-install-wind... are a life saver, but how does an end user work their way through this?
I don't understand why you don't have companies like Tesla building fuel cell (hydrogen) solutions for commercial use cases. Here is an article that explains it - https://www.bmw.com/en/innovation/how-hydrogen-fuel-cell-car... If Tesla can build a super charger network, they can build a hydrogen refilling network.
A charging network just requires some wire and electronics, everything is well understood and easy to do for experts in that field.
Hydrogen on the other hand, is difficult to keep contained and cold enough to remain in liquid form. Even NASA who has worked with it for 50 years with massive budget and engineering expertise constantly has problems with it. For instance one of BMWs hydrogen cars you are not allowed to park in a garage! As hydrogen is expected to leak from it. And current hydrogen gas stations still suffer from this challenge.
So hydrogen fuel cells do offer the advantage of better energy density for more range, but you have the dual difficulties of 1. how do I make the hydrogen efficiently AND cleanly and then 2. the infrastructure build out is actually as hard ad EV doubter think wires are.
> Hydrogen on the other hand, is difficult to keep contained and cold enough to remain in liquid form... For instance one of BMWs hydrogen cars you are not allowed to park in a garage!
That particular BMW effectively one-of-a-kind in that it is 1) internal combustion rather than fuel cell, and 2) stores its fuel as a liquid rather than a compressed gas. The liquid storage is a consequence of being ICE because it is required to get even remotely reasonable range out of something as inefficient as ICE combustion of hydrogen.
fuel cell vehicles like the Mirai still have a number of problems, but they have actually done a very good job with fuel storage and range using compressed hydrogen and don't have any of the limitations of the BMW such as leaking hydrogen or losing massive internal volume to the fuel storage.
> I don't understand why you don't have companies like Tesla building fuel cell (hydrogen) solutions for commercial use cases.
Oh god, can that damn hydrogen hype please die out. Hydrogen has an incredible amount of conversion loss both at generation and in recombination (each step only has about 40-60% efficiency rate) compared to way over 90% for lithium based batteries. Additionally, it's fiendishly difficult to safely transport it because it's highly explosive, and it will slowly leak out wherever it can.
The only place where hydrogen really has its uses is in synth-fuel applications (e.g. for airplanes) to shift these away from fossil-origin fuels, in processes where the heat of a burning flame is required and as raw material in chemical processes. Hydrogen generation capacity is incredibly scarce, we should reserve it for those processes that literally cannot use any alternative.
The reason why hydrogen hype will not die, and in fact will massively increase going forward, because those claims are simply wrong. It is nearly as efficiency as the lithium-based solution, while being drastically less dependent on rare resources.
People are starting to realize that most of the criticisms are literally just made-up bullshit from EV fanatics and were never true. The most notable example is the safety issue. Hydrogen is straight-up safer to deal with than lithium in a car. EV fans were just lying about this subject the entire time, and in fact you want a hydrogen car because it is outright a safer type of car.
Setting aside Musk’s current plunge in credibility, his argument regarding hydrogen is predicated upon electrolysis. A vast network of transparent tubes and sunlight reflectors feeding genetically engineered microorganisms that release hydrogen would undermine that assumption, but transportation, storage, and energy density would indeed remain a problem.
My rear view camera regularly gets covered with dirt and grime after a highway run during the monsoons. The car has both camera and radar so that I can have reliable assistance while reversing. With this experience in mind I fail to see how Tesla’s camera-only move is reliable for the use cases that they have mentioned.
Tesla cameras have sizeable overlap, so if one is obstructed it tries to extract the information from the others. If it can't then it tells you to clean the cameras. It's not perfect but it's better for them (Tesla) and hopefully better long term for all Tesla owners
They have some overlap but not large enough to be reliable. My B pillar is regularly blinded due to their inefficient moisture sealing (called out in their manual instead of fixing it) and sunlight. It causes it to fail to see most things to our side
They are reliable enough to use for FSD: https://youtu.be/hx7BXih7zx8 so i think it's reliable enough for park assist, summon etc. Yeah you're def right about the moisture sealing... it's been hit or miss on production tolerances
I disagree. regular navigate on autopilot and the FSD Beta are still very flakey outside of pristine conditions for me.
At this point, I either am expecting Tesla to go ahead with a camera upgrade with an expensive retrofit in the future, or FSD will never fully realize.
This is something that comes to mind when I see "designed in California" for a product that can't handle snow. Guess the same thing applies to monsoons!
My VW hides the rear view camera under the emblem, so it isn't exposed to the elements and only flips out when in use. It's brilliant, at least as long as the motor that flips the emblem holds up.
EVs have crossed the 6% threshold of volume of all vehicles sold in India.
India's EV migration will start from 2 wheeler and 3 wheeler EVs. Public transport is already migrating to EV based. City buses have already migrated to EVs in cities like Pune and other cities are catching up.
Cars and long distance transport trucks will be last. You can read up on the EV statistics here - https://www.autocarpro.in/analysis-sales/over-34-million-evs...