[HN Gopher] Motorola's 1990s Corvette EV Project ___________________________________________________________________ Motorola's 1990s Corvette EV Project Author : mauvehaus Score : 53 points Date : 2023-05-05 11:44 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.thedrive.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.thedrive.com) | cyberax wrote: | Back in 90-s your only realistic choice for batteries was nickel- | metalhydride chemistry. And that's around 50 Wh/kg of energy | density for the assembled battery pack, compared to 150 Wh/kg for | Li-Ion. | | With a huge number of issues: you can't fast-charge NiMh | batteries, and the self-discharge rate is horrendous. | | Then there is the question of the control circuitry. The first | truly reliable high-voltage IGBTs started appearing only in mid | 90-s. Before that, you in practice had been limited to | synchronous permanent-magnet DC motors. | | So I think that EVs really started happening almost immediately | after all the enabling technology got there in the early 2000-s. | The first Tesla Roadster was released in 2008, so perhaps you | could have shaved 3-4 years from that, but not much more. | bjelkeman-again wrote: | Ok, twenty years may seem like a long time. But this, to me, is | an example of why it is really hard to push through inventions in | large companies. Management doesn't think like investors do. And | even when you talk to investors, you often have to talk to a lot | of them to get some traction. | | How would you run R&D and new business in a large company? | | Facebook has spent $10 billion on Metaberse. I think running an | internal accelerator, just like Y-Combinator, with internal | startups (with their own budget, own teams etc, just like any | startup) would have a bigger chance at getting a good result than | what they did. | toast0 wrote: | Internal accelerators don't tend to work that well anyway, but | you also need a different corporate structure than Facebook | has. You need something where there's a lot more of distinct | internal businesses, then it's easier to manage more of those. | More like Yahoo or Google where there's clear groups. You also | need to figure out how to let these internal startups use at | least some of the corporate resources, but make their product | public without mentioning the brand. | | Having a big brand on a new 'startup' makes a lot of | expectations and meeting those expectations reduces the | flexibility of being a startup. There needs to be three clear | paths for these things: shut it down, subsume it into the | brand, spin it off as independent. But only one of those has | clear value for the parent. | horeszko wrote: | Is anyone still running the old shunkworks departments to | launch new ideas/technologies? A small group off the side | left to do there own thing seems like it could work ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-05-06 23:00 UTC)