New research about 16th Century America has this important insight
…we see individuals fleeing slavery who are able to hold the Spanish Empire at bay and fight them to a standstill for almost five decades — and then negotiate for their freedom and right to govern their communities…
Edmunds’ scientists apparently made Tesla very angry when the car maker failed a simple test of real-world range:
Some electric vehicles dramatically exceeded the EPA’s range estimates, while others fell short. Most notably, all five Tesla vehicles we tested missed those estimates.
Edmunds said they received an unpleasant response from Tesla as the car maker demanded a retest using special considerations and adjustments (that a zero range doesn’t actually mean zero and should be tested as a completely opaque not-zero amount).
Needless to say, Tesla was not happy with our test results, and we received a phone call. Tesla’s engineers disputed our figures.
Tesla cars, now overtly described by their engineers as based on lies (zero doesn’t mean zero) then failed the tests again.
Even allowing for the additional miles recorded after an indicated zero, only two of the six Teslas we tested would hit their EPA figures in our real-world conditions.
If that debate outcome wasn’t bad enough already (with Tesla arguing that it lies in an attempt to prove that it doesn’t lie)…
Edmunds on September 7 gave an honest and clear negative review of the Tesla “yoke” option for steering control:
…it actually feels dangerous… don’t let anybody tell you this is a good idea, I can’t believe it’s legal.
To be clear, this is a qualified review by a man with experience in a F1 car with a yoke.
He’s an expert telling us the Tesla yoke is a terrible idea, and he ends up guessing it was made only for “Twitter” noise/marketing instead of benefiting actual retail drivers.
Race cars in loops obviously aren’t turned more than slight rotation (it would be disaster at high speeds to turn too far) yet any real world driver has constant arcs over 180 degrees. The F1 has direct steering, whereas indirect steer is more functional for real-world driving.
It kind of begs the question why Tesla didn’t launch their latest attempt to stoke its base with some other fraudulent innovation like installing a “tiller” to steer it like a boat.
Come on Tesla, where’s your tiller upgrade option?
As predicted by the reviewer, despite his very careful explanations and evidence, virulent information warfare tactics over Twitter were unleashed in a stream of personal attacks with attempts to kill him as messenger.
Consumer Reports then echoed Edmunds’ findings:
Tesla’s New Steering Yoke Shows Little Benefit and Potential Safety Pitfalls
It reminds me of a disastrous flaw in Ford Mustang engineering where they built a rear beam suspension (linked instead of independent) useful only in drag racing, which ended up throwing a lot of owners into a very dangerous spin and crash.
Ford tends to make some pretty big mistakes, yet you don’t see any evidence today of the company organizing social media into highly-targeted warfare against safety advocates.
Edmunds also criticized Tesla’s engineering safety generally in the “Plaid” model calling the car a “marketing exercise to draw attention to an aging car”. And that seems true.
Tesla social media activists then pushed out a petulant “joke” about a new special safety acceleration mode being 60mph in 15 seconds, which honestly doesn’t sound like a bad idea.
Tesla is basically engaging in these information warfare tactics, engaging from a position of insecurity, to have a fan base inflame tension and disruption that discredits experts and science.
To clarify where that “joke” image comes from, JeffTutorials is an obvious Tesla disinformation account:
It all reads to me as very similar to that time Edison created an electric chair to kill people and tried to have it called “Westinghoused” (to denigrate a man far superior to him in every way).
How very odd to think that Tesla, a brilliant man who worked for the generous Westinghouse after suffering from Edison’s abusive and inhumane cheats… has his name completely hijacked by a business being run like a modern-day Edison scam.
I’ve mentioned on this blog before the 1947 Nissan Tama.
It has several important historical characteristics that make it look like something very modern even today.
I bring it up again as people lately have been saying they wish they had a quick way to replace their electric car batteries instead of using a gasoline-pump like attachment for slow (complicated and dangerous) charging.
That is what Tama offered in its “bomb bay” like doors and energy swap cases:
Well I guess that means look at 1947 for the answers from war-time aircraft engineers who understood the significance of rapid replacement, refuel turnaround and similar efficiencies.
Of course it wouldn’t happen today for cars without someone over-hyping automation. The Japanese in fact tried outsourcing battery swap to a 2009 Silicon Valley startup, but it arguably died due to massive fraud (*cough* Tesla *cough*) polluting the market.
The Japanese Ministry of Environment has invited Better Place to build a battery exchange station in Japan and engage with the country’s carmakers.
The Chinese notably refer to the brilliant 1940s Japanese model of drive-through EV battery-swapping as being “killed by Tesla years ago”.
That makes it even more tempting to get excited by a Taiwanese company GoGoro as they have slick marketing calling their products “reimagined”.
It’s basically the most distributed and modern take yet on what came so long before the ill-conceived centralized (and often fraudulent — Tesla chargers were dirty diesel engines) “plug-in” market that’s slow, dangerous and bad for batteries.
We’re essentially going back to the beginning, which is good for modern electric vehicles. What would a Tama look like today? Here’s the latest Nissan concept.
The most exciting thing about Japanese innovation in stop-and-swap transit models is that any home anywhere could be a supplier. It’s much more attractive and sensible to have someone grab a power pack to go than to hook up to any charger.
If I really think outside the box, literally, then the Nissan car full of batteries can be the swappable battery for a house (like Russian nesting doll batteries). Roll your battery tray into the car and power your car off plugin. Then roll the battery car into the garage and power your house off grid.
Fun fact, since 2013 the Nissan LEAF was engineered to send power (Bidirectional EV as specified in UL 9741), like a giant house battery on wheels.
And even that model goes back centuries.
Imagine hanging a small sign outside your home that says “power cell available”, like the hanging red lamp of the Japanese Izakaya.
…many opted to simply make rice at home and purchase side dishes from outside vendors called niuriya (“simmered foods shops.”). Around the year 1750, “seated sake shops” and “simmered foods shops” combined into a new business model, the “simmered foods seated sake shop” (niuri izakaya). The cumbersome term would soon be shortened to “izakaya.”
That’s a hint at the universal services and interoperability/pluggable sharing markets that have led everyone for centuries towards putting trust in any modern transport (car), storage (hotel), or processing (restaurant).
Interesting to historians may be how battery replacement goes back even further to an ancient system of caravanserais spaced 20 miles apart on Persian highways, where a tired horse or camel could be quickly refueled or exchanged with a fresh one.
…Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa would have been much more difficult if not for the caravanserais… centers for the exchange of goods and culture…
Thinking of transit engineering problems as new just because some minor aspect of it is new, prevents us from seeing the millennia of knowledge right in front of our eyes. And on that note, information security concepts all are basically derived from transit technology safety practices (transport, store, process).
Special Forces are orienting around the amazing performance characteristics of light bicycles with electric motors — motor-cycles, also known as eBikes.
One of the curious problems with gasoline motorcycles is they grew too big and unwieldy at several hundred pounds, not to mention they ran on gasoline (not ideal for a military running on diesel). And since light-weight diesel motorcycles (as I wrote about here 15 years ago) never really seemed to take off, electric makes perfect sense.
Now iNews claims an exclusive story by reporting that Colorado is supplying commercial-sector mountain bicycles with electric motors to the military for testing.
In a reverse of the convention of defence technology finding its way to the civilian market, the vogue for military bicycles follows the global boom in e-bikes used by commuters and leisure cyclists. The value of the this market is predicted to reach £34bn by 2026.
But the new breed of special forces bike is a different beast.
With five-inch-wide tyres more likely to be found on a motorbike, a range of nearly 60 miles and silent 1,000w motors, the Jeep/QuietKat bike, made in Colorado, has been tailored for the needs of cycling special forces.
There are multiple problems with this story, although I have to commend it for making history front and center to the narrative.
First, it’s not a one-way convention. The civilian market also has a convention of making its way into defense technology. Special Forces often pull civilian companies like Patagonia, North Face, and Arcteryx into their equipment kits (as I’ve written about here before).
Second, the boom in e-bikes has been very pronounced in mountain bike racing, where training now is pedal-assist power to improve range in order to improve handling. In other words if you ride a technical pump track 50 times on an electric motor for training, then you likely get 40 times more experience in a session to prepare for non-electric racing than if you didn’t have the motor.
In other words, the “new breed of special forces bike” is NOT different from civilian bikes. A range of 60 miles on silent 1,000w motors is par for course, as well as extra fat tires commonly used for snow and sand trails.
Here’s a typical tweet from me in 2015.
And here’s another tweet from me in 2016.
Third, the history in this story has a GIANT gaping omission. This is not fair retelling.
Ever since the advent of the mass-produced bicycle in the late 1800s, armies have looked to harness the potential of soldiers on two wheels.
By the end of the 19th century most European militaries had formed bicycle units to replace horses for the delivery of messages and scouting and surveillance missions.
During the First World War, the British Army had two Cyclist Divisions, largely devoted to home guard duties. Prior to the war becoming bogged down in trenches, all sides sought to use fast-moving cyclist units, with the Belgian military using early folding bikes.
However, it was the Japanese who became most closely identified with the mass deployment of cycling soldiers. When Tokyo invaded China in 1937, it did so with a 50,000-strong “bicycle infantry”.
The ability to rapidly move large numbers of troops through jungle terrain without motorised transport proved vital to Japan’s early victories in the Second World War. During the invasion of Malaya in 1941, Japan was able to repeatedly outflank and overrun a retreating British Army by using bicycles along minor routes, ultimately resulting in the humiliating loss of Singapore.
During the Vietnam War the Viet Cong used bicycles to ferry supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The Swiss Army maintained its Bicycle Regiment until 2001.
That covers a few bases, obviously (no pun intended). What is missing? Lots. In fact by the late 1800s Black Americans in the US Army invented mountain biking. The Buffalo Soldiers deserve credit, as I’ve written about here before, for riding bikes from the Rocky Mountains all the way to Missouri.
A story about mountain bikes being developed in the Rocky Mountains for military use, which makes no mention of 1896 bikes in the Rocky Mountains for military use… begs the question why leave out the most obvious comparison of all?
And the article claims the Japanese “became most closely identified with mass deployment of cycling soldiers” in 1937, based on a usual retelling about bicycles of WWI being primarily messengers and home guard.
Bicycles were lighter, quieter and logistically easier to manage than horses making them ideal for reconnaissance and communications work and had first been used in this way during the Second Boer War (1899-1902). The Haldane Reforms of 1908 reorganised the Volunteers, Yeomanry and the Militia Regiments into a Territorial Force following the Territorial and Reserve Forces Act 1907. As part of this nine initial Cyclist Battalions were formed… on the eve of the First World War, the Territorial Force had a strength of fourteen cyclist battalions.
Yet historians also make note of two-wheeled soldiers being in WWI fighting units, as I will write about more in a future post; for example, in the Canadian archives:
May 1916, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Canadian Divisional Cyclist Companies were amalgamated to form the Canadian Corps Cyclist Battalion. The newly formed Canadian Corps Cyclist Battalion began performing tunneling duties and operating rail lines, with their most famous tunnels being those near Neuville-Saint-Vaast. Integral to the assault on Vimy ridge in April 1917, the Battalion came together for the first time as a proper fighting force.
Also, as I suggested at the start, a bicycle with a motor is in fact a motorcycle so this history really should include motorcycles when considering usage and modifications to carry heavy loads.
Just look at how comfort for passengers has evolved over time, for example.
