If you want to get even more enjoyment out of this, open your network tab. Hundreds of requests are made.
Also, I was treated to this message after it was finally done:
"This page transmits information using https protocol. Some vendors cannot receive opt-out requests via https protocols so the processing of your opt-out request is incomplete. To complete the opt-out process, please click here to resubmit your preferences."
I can't find the quote, but reportedly either Hewlett or Packard said: "We have to put ourselves out of business every six months, or somebody else will". People on HN have probably heard something like that before, and readers of autonews probably haven't, so it might be understood differently.
Every SV CxO that hates seeing 220 other Teslas like theirs upon entrance to their parking garage needs this to be redeemed.
Only there will be 220 new Taycan owners to redeem themselves as soon as orders go through and everyone unilaterally upgrades to the most expensive save the planet car like their iphone the same day.
Back to same old dirty stares in the facilities gym.
From a design perspective, I couldn’t be more excited about the Taycan. Teslas leave me cold, especially in the cabin. The Model S is particularly homely and uninspired in that department.
With the Taycan, I feel that Porsche has achieved something magnificent. They’ve proved that cars can be filled with screens and be art also. I don’t think I’ve seen any other cabin integrate digital displays in such a purposeful, elegant way.
I am staunchly against the screens, but I will concede it still looks excellent. It is a very nice interior. The majority of the exterior is just a modern porsche which is exactly what I think electric cars should be as they enter the market.
The headlights though, look like some kind of light based disease has begun eating away the front of the car. My partner has trypophobia and I would be hesitant to show her that photograph!
Wow, I’d never heard of that phobia. I’d keep her away from the hideous new BMW 3 series too. The speaker grille on the dash is so vibrating and irregular, it’s hard to keep your eyes on the road!
I agree, it looks amazing, but I still do not understand why EV always means many/huge displays and no hardware buttons. Maybe we just have to get used to the future with no buttons and touch screens everywhere
Oh yes, I personally don’t like the everything-a-touchscreen trend at all. But it seems unstoppable, so I’m glad at least that it hasn’t killed cockpit design.
A $150,000 electric car isn’t going to disrupt anything outside of Porsche’s internal way of doing things, which while interesting isn’t anything to be excited about. On the other hand, were the Volkswagen group to announce a 25,000 euro electric Golf or a 17,000 euro electric Polo with a 400-500 km range then the excitement would be through the roof and that would really be a world-changing event.
The new Porsche is interesting for the same reason that an S-Klasse Mercedes is interesting: it showcases cutting-edge tech (such as the 800V battery that allows extra-fast charging) that will eventually trickle down to lower classes of electric cars.
The only place where VW is really trailing Tesla (once the ID3 will be released) are the chargers, let's hope this situation improves in the coming years.
Very interesting, I wonder why this announcement didn’t make the front page of HN instead of a car that can only be purchased by those that win the start-up lottery or by the FANG employees.
Still a little bit pricey, 30,000 euros is already Tiguan (i.e. CUV) territory while ID3 is just a hatchback, I’m curious how the market will respond.
This is the real story. The Porsche might be exciting for the small group of people who care about such things but the VW ID3 has the potential to make a significant change in world's driving habits.
I wouldn't underestimate the importance of the Taycan.
It's the first EV that has shown it is possible to make an uncompromising track car with an electric drivetrain. Tesla proved you could make a fast car but not a reliably fast one.
Porsche isn't a mass market brand. It's target audience are mostly people who either (a) take their cars to the track, (b) want to one day take it to the track or (c) are attracted to the company's lineage in track racing.
And so the Taycan is unquestionably targeted at their audience and is designed to be disruptive to their core business. Not to anyone elses.
Which is exactly what I said, that is that this is interesting news for Porsche aficionados not for the general HN audience. As people pointed out to me in different comments, VW Group has also announced the launch of a electric Golf-like model they call the ID3, at 400km and costing 30,000 euros this should be a market changer.
If they were to do that we'd have armchair commentators on HN complaining that it doesn't mean anything because a $15k Ford Fiesta is still way cheaper. That we have Volkswagen selling a pure EV via a flagship luxury brand is a major milestone.
VW just announced a 30.000 euro electric Golf called the I.D 3.
The Taycan, and upcomming electric Porsches are a great sign that Porsche is going fully electric sooner rather than later. If on the premiere performance brands goes fully electric, others will follow.
• Noise is wasted energy, so the quieter a modern vehicle, the better as far as I'm concerned (I have Iain M Bank's descriptions of the efficiencies of some of the ships in his books to thank for this line of reasoning)
• Good! If the transition to electric makes the future streets of London quieter because micro-genitalled cretins parading up and down the streets in their over-powered cars (that are only allowed to do <30mph on the streets anyway), then I'm all for it.
You can work it out from first principles. The loud noise is a form of energy - therefore all of the sound reaching your ears is energy which was produced by the engine but did not contribute towards propelling the car.
> If it was true race cars would be a lot quieter
only if there was some way to recover the energy from sound or prevent it from being emitted in the first place
since race cars are loud we have to assume that losses from noise are an unavoidable side-effect of the workings of internal combustion engines
We can see here an article from 2017 celebrating a Formula 1 racing engine reaching >50% efficiency for the first time:
https://www.britishgas.co.uk/business/blog/mercedes-formula-...
"The F1 cars are now closing in on levels of thermal efficiency reached by diesel engines used in large container ships..."
so half the energy from combustion is lost as heat, noise etc
Most of that would be heat, didn't find any sources but noise is probably rounding errors. Think how many watts you need in a stereo to get the same noise level as a car, compared to how many kilowatts the engine has
I don't have a source for that, no - it's common sense. I imagine the reasons race cars are loud is simply that it's not worth the extra weight or complexity to ensure the system doesn't waste so much energy as noise.
The sci-fi angle I alluded to relied on hyper-science as the solution for ensuring that all energy within the system was used beneficially.
Internal Combustion engines work by harnessing explosions. Each explosion pushes a piston, which is then harnessed to do useful work rotating the wheels.
The Exhaust note is caused by agressive expansion of gasses rushing into the exhaust. That expansion _could_ have been used to push the piston more (in practise you'd need a secondary expansion unit, which isn't all that practical .)
2)
The exhaust system is there to reduce (and modulate) noise levels (and emissions). It weighs a not insignificant sum, causes back pressure, which affects the efficiency of the overall system. (although now that heavily mitigated, even more so with a turbo.)
Granted, most of the energy is wasted through heat, but thats a different matter.
That logic doesn't hold. It is not a given that current engine technology makes it practical to reduce the noise in a way that saves energy. That does not imply the energy is not wasted, just that our technology is still crude.
> I never understood why CPUs were not running at max clockspeed by default.
Pretty sure the machines were usually shipped in "turbo" configuration.
> Was it because some applications were clock dependant?
Lots.
The original PC CPU (8088?) ran at 4.7MHz or something. Lots of early games (not only games but that was very obvious for them) were developed with a "fixed hardware" mindset and would rely on busy loop and CPU clock for the "game clock". So when you got a faster CPU the entire game would speed up.
Things got funky on an 8MHz 268 and outright screwy on a 386 or 486 (whose latter models reached 100MHz).
One of the crimes propagated from that issue was, Intel deliberately crippled the data-move instruction because folks who shipped lots of software (OK Microsoft) used it for timing. So as CPUs increased by an order of magnitude, the one-byte ultra-fast data move opcodes become the slowest way to move data. A crime against humanity.
For this reason I'd asked Intel (as a senior programmer at one of Intel's largest CPU chip consumers) for a fixed-rate timer register when they made the 386 e.g. 1MHz free-running counter regardless of CPU speed. While they did implement other requested features (breakpoint registers) somebody screwed up the timer feature and made it full-clock-speed and accessible only thru a privileged instruction. Thus useless for applications.
It depends on the main board jumper if the clockrate was set to high on open then it slowed it down if not then it increased the speed when the turbo switch was enabled (closed).
It basically gave you anywhere from 50% to 100% increase in CPU speed at the time.
That said for most people it would probably have done nothing since the turbo button was available on cases till the mid 90’s where it did nothing and often wasn’t even connected.
I had one on my MMX pentium PC but it did absolutely squat.
https://i.imgur.com/Tv7PXL1.png
https://i.imgur.com/Mb2YYLK.png