It was speeding. Bill is well-known for his love to fast cars. Later, in Seattle, he held the record of fastest Microsoft -> SEA airport drive, for a very long time. The legend says it was only beaten by someone illegally using HOV lanes, but Bill very justifiably refused to recognize that time.
This is simply unkind to the competition (and to the poles alike): "Tesla achieved this outcome by nesting multiple deep aluminum extrusions in the side rail of the car that absorb the impact energy (a similar approach was used by the Apollo Lunar Lander) and transfer load to the rest of the vehicle. This causes the pole to be either sheared off or to stop the car before the pole hits an occupant."
There's winning and there's crushing the opponents. One shouldn't gloat in the latter case, but this case deserves an exception.
Congratulations Elon and the team on tremendously nice engineering!
Anyone else notice Tesla's flying rear view mirror that nearly hit the dummy in the face? Maybe they forgot to apply the little alcohol wipe before gluing it on the windshield :).
If Tesla can bring this maintain this level of vehicle safety to its lower priced vehicles (gen iii vehicles: http://insideevs.com/tesla-gen-iii-to-eliminate-price-premiu...), then their dedication to quality, and not just economics, will be even more applaudable.
The lights wouldn't appear to be flashing, they are blinking at a faster rate than the human eye can see and thus just to a person appear dimmer than they would if they were on full power.
The goal of a crash test is not to keep the car intact, it is to keep the driver intact. On "keep the car intact", today's cars do way more badly than those of the 1950's.
Nice video, deserves my upvote, but I am going to call it just anecdata ;-), so that I can add some partial counterarguments.
The video is a commercial, so they will have chosen an impact angle and speed that makes the newer car look best). For example, you can see that the newer car is heavier than the old one from the video; its front wheels still move forward when the wheels of the old one already go back. Because of that, the new car has a much longer braking distance than the old one. Things would have looked relatively better for the old car if they had chosen a collision with a concrete wall.
If its crumple zone is bad or absent, chances are that the older car would have survived way better in a frontal collision, where the beam carrying the engine would be elastically compressed without deforming permanently.
That would be just the car, though; those old cars could be lethal at incredibly low speeds, for example by impaling them on their non-collapsible steering column.
Great video. Pretty clear that both occupant and vehicle fared worse in the 1950s. (Although after a serious collision I doubt many people care much how the car looks.)
You also have to factor in a lot cars in those days didn't have, and weren't required to have seat belts. This safety feature alone has saved thousands of lives regardless of how safe the car is.
Another interesting crash test is the Smart car. Youtube some videos of it. Due to its small size it hardly has any deformation zones and has to be built as a hard cage. It looks quite intact after a crash but i don't think the passengers inside would be.
I believe one of the tests is crashing into a wall that yields very little, so the tungsten dumptruck would fare poorly, exciting as it would be to drive.
The wall at left in that video is, at most, four dump trucks in volume and perhaps constructed of reinforced concrete (density ~2,500 kg/m^3)?
A single solid tungsten dump truck would have almost twice the mass of the wall. Even with a completely inelastic collision, the wall's going to shatter and move. For a 35 mph collision, I think you're right, that wall would ultimately bring the truck to a halt from friction with the ground. At higher speeds, I think the truck might make it through.
Tungsten is quite dense (19,300 kg/m^3). Such a truck would have a mass of >400 metric tons (2 x 3 x 4 m x 19 tons/m^3), or >247 Toyota Tacomas (2013 extended cab, curb weight 3560 lb --> 1618 kg).
The truck would be terrifying to drive, once you got it going. I don't know how you'd turn.
Alas, Youtube is short on tungsten dumptrucks, but this may suffice. In a demonstration, a truck uses its brakes to stop after obliterating a few cars. The truck is driven by a real person.
Is it too far fetched to say he benefited from SpaceX research ? if so, this kind of gene transfer reminds me of Apple years when the iPhone benefited from iPod and Mac hard and software knowledge to leapfrog the competition, and then later helped the MBA do it again.
I would imagine this is less the case than Subaru and Saab benefiting from their own aeronautical research. Unlike Subaru and Saab, SpaceX is a different company with different engineers than Tesla.
Rather, I think this speaks more to Elon Musk's uncanny ability to attract and hire good engineers.
It's really unfair to compare offset and frontal crash tests. You can't draw any conclusions by comparing the two. For years, auto manufacturers were able to perform competently in the frontal crash test, but when the offset test was introduced, the failure rate went through the roof.
I don't mean to diminish the performance of the Tesla Model S. It is, without qualification, an incredible car. I just don't think comparing it to the offset video of a BMW are relevant.
It sounds like it's a special band running around the car, made of multiple layers of aluminum with space in between each layer. The layers crumple and transfer impact across the side of the car like a ski resting on soft snow.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. A little factoid: out of ~4000 space launches that have happened so far, about 1500 (~40%) were done using delivery vehicles derived from an ICBM. This includes about 40% of the human spaceflights as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-7_%28rocket_family%29
ICBM:s do have obvious synergy for space launch, they are _ballistic_ after all - that is an acceleration mission. Hypersonic air breathing propulsion is for _cruise_ in the atmosphere. Totally different. High dry mass, bad thrust. What good have cruise missiles done for space launches?
(Actually, if you look at Navaho, rocket engines and navigation at least, but that's a whole another story...)
How about the following schema for adding a new key to the list of Authorized Keys when NO AUTHORIZED KEY IS PRESENT:
* the procedure requires a module produced and sold by the manufacturer() to any garage that can verify its identity and satisfy manufacturer's specified security requirements (e.g. owning a safe and having no history with local police);
each such module is unique. It contains unique public/private keys and its public key is singed by the manufacturer;
* the procedure of adding the key to the list of Authorized Keys requires the car (actually, its ECU) to only accept incoming requests signed by such modules whose public keys are signed by the manufacturer. When the key is added, the ECU stores:
the key info;
the module's unique ID (IMPORTANT);
timestamp + lat/long;
* if there are no old authorized keys present (very rare scenario, since most of the time the owners want to replace just one lost/stolen key, but not both), the ECU requires 15 minute grace period with the module attached at all times, during which the car is flashing its hazard lights and honks. It makes a small nuisance in the garage once in a while, but attracts enough attention in the middle of the night if somebody is stealing it.
Now, if the car is stolen and then recovered, the police would dump the list of authorization requests and identify the module used. If this module was stolen or copied, the garage who owned the module becomes responsible for the damage to the car's owner. The ID of the module is placed on the revocation list. The revocation list is broadcasted via Sirius/XM/FM/BMW Assist/OnStar/Intelsat/etc.
This allows independent garages working on the cars, but places enough responsibility on them for keeping the system secure, with the override mechanism in form of revocation lists.
This method would NOT prevent all types of thefts (thugs can put the car on the flatbed and do the swap in the middle of the desert, or they can swap the ECU unit completely, or do some manipulations with the stolen "good" key), but it makes it significantly more difficult to authorize a new key and drive away.
(*) in case the manufacturer ceases to exist, some other company (another car manufacturer, perhaps) inherits the master key and will be responsible for authorizing garages to do key management.
> the procedure requires a module produced and sold by the manufacturer
So now the manufacturer has yet another method of extorting would-be mechanics. You'd have to regulate pricing or aggressively prosecute attempts at anticompetitive tactics.
> in case the manufacturer ceases to exist...
And who goes to jail when the company folds and, in the fire sale, the master key is on a system that gets wiped when being transferred to the new owner? Key escrow sounds like a better idea to me. Perhaps legislation should specify the creation of a public agency, or maybe we could leave it to private competition.
As for the remainder of your points, I believe you're thinking in the right direction.
Why? Like it or not, FB is the bellwether for the current technology/economic climate. It's one of the biggest IPOs ever, not just in size, but in renown. There was a mainstream movie made about it before it was even public. It's a huge story.
It's important to gauge these things as they happen, so the next time around you get to be the one saying, "I've seen this before." These stories may all turn out to be moot, and in 10 years Facebook could be a huge brand, in which case you can look back and remember how Bloomberg labelled it the worst performing IPO of the decade. Or, it could go south....
You're right, it's important to gauge these things, and there's been a lot of things going on this past week, and people tend to assume because the facebook IPO didn't behave the exact same way as the linkedIn IPO that it has somehow failed... but it's the stock market. It's unpredictable, and so many things affect the price of a stock. There were trading glitches, largely affecting daytraders and companies who had no desire to hold the stock long term in the first place. And there's also been a lot of back and forth on the European debt crisis this past week and general volatility over all tech stocks, not just facebook, but facebook is in the spotlight right now.
I don't think facebook's IPO has any real bearing on the industry at hand. Other recent tech IPOs like LinkedIn and Jive have varied by more than 10% in the past week.
