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Car companies, starting with Volvo last summer, have laid out plans to electrify entire lineups of vehicles. But the fine print makes it clear that the coming decade and beyond will focus not just on massive battery packs powering electric motors, but also on adding a little extra juice to the venerable internal combustion engine.
Increasingly, that juice will arrive in the form of new electrical systems built to a 48-volt standard, instead of the 12-volt systems that have dominated since the 1950s. Simpler than Prius-type drivetrains and less expensive than Tesla-scale battery power, the new electrical architecture both satisfies the demands of cars made more power hungry by their gadget load and enables the use of lower-cost hybrid drive systems.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/electric-cars-48-volts.html
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday February 26 2018, @10:02PM (10 children)
And then there's the equivalent in small ocean going yachts that have all that plus 120/240 60/50 Hz systems capable of jacking in to any dock plug in the world. Conversion would be straight forward but apparently these people need to be able to buy electric toys in the local market and power them too with a minium of adapters.
I was on a cruise ship once and it had several outlets in the room, so that you could plug in any household device from anywhere in the world, 120/60 or 240/50, North American, European, British, etc. With a passenger ship, you never know what someone is going to bring on board, and you don't want to piss off paying customers by not having an outlet for their laptop or whatever (or worse, only having outlets that work for American passengers' stuff and no one else's).
It sure would be nice if they could decide on a single worldwide household standard for voltage and plug/outlet. They could start by getting rid of the ridiculous and clunky British standard plug (seriously, the fuse is in the plug? Whose stupid idea was that?).
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday February 27 2018, @11:52AM (9 children)
BS1363:1947 [wikipedia.org]
Putting the fuse in the plug allows the use of a 'ring main' that is capable of carrying a larger current safely than the flex connecting the appliance to the socket. The protective fuse disconnects the flex from the supply if a fault current flows. The 'ring main' itself is protected by a higher-rated disconnection device (which can be a fuse or circuit breaker) at the consumer unit (aka 'fuse box'). The ring main neatly divides the current flow from the socket to the consumer unit between two paths and thereby allows the use of thinner conductors to carry a particular current than a single (possibly branched) spur. The fuse is not there to protect the appliance: it is assumed that the appliance will have protective devices if necessary - the fuse is there to protect the flex from sustained over-current and thereby becoming a fire risk. Branched-spur systems use more conductor to deliver the same power, and often require more circuits, as the protective device at the consumer unit has to have a lower current-rating than on a ring-main in order to protect appliance flex connectors in the same manner.
For a 70-year old standard, it has stood the test of time pretty well. The main update was to sleeve the live and neutral pins of the plug to prevent access to the energised conductors of partially inserted plugs. A great deal of well-informed thought was put into its design, and the design of the corresponding sockets.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday February 27 2018, @05:03PM (8 children)
The fuse is not there to protect the appliance: it is assumed that the appliance will have protective devices if necessary - the fuse is there to protect the flex from sustained over-current and thereby becoming a fire risk.
So basically you're trusting manufacturers who all make their stuff as cheaply as possible in China to use proper fuses where necessary, instead of assuming that random appliances may in fact be faulty and providing proper protection from them. These seems naive in the extreme. To make an analogy with operating systems, it's like assuming that all the application software by various 3rd-party vendors can be completely trusted to be written well and behave properly, and so using cooperative multitasking and giving them all direct kernel access.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday February 27 2018, @07:16PM (7 children)
You are quite correct - you are trusting the manufacturer to do things correctly.
This is a reason why it might not be wise to buy the cheapest item, and, if you buy from a manufacturer based in your own country, there's a good chance you can use the legal system to get recompense (assuming you survive) if the device fails dangerously.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday February 27 2018, @07:25PM (6 children)
Relying on the legal system rather than doing good engineering to handle faults is a stupid idea. In engineering, that kind of approach only works well when you have a single vendor that controls the entire system, and can ensure quality across all the components.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday February 27 2018, @09:15PM (5 children)
I would choose engineering over lawyers every time. The point was, if you find yourself in a situation where you need to resort to lawyers, it is helpful to you if the adversary is operating under the same legal system.
From the point of view of buying items, it is advisable to ensure the vendor can demonstrate an adequate quality control system, with standards that meet or exceed yours. This might not be easy for a random vendor on Alibaba.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday February 27 2018, @10:13PM (4 children)
From the point of view of buying items, it is advisable to ensure the vendor can demonstrate an adequate quality control system, with standards that meet or exceed yours.
You can't seriously expect in a country with 100 million people for every consumer to do this, or even have the capacity to determine which products are safe or not. This isn't the early 1900s where you had to get a licensed, competent electrician to install every little electrical appliance in your home.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday February 28 2018, @01:14PM (3 children)
By the same argument, you can't expect consumers to be electrical engineers: so how would you assure safety? If you argue for some form of government regulation, there's a few regulars on here who would argue strongly that market forces are all that is needed. Personal imports of cheap electrical items pretty much fly under the radar at the moment. For commercial importers of such stuff, the rules are very different, which accounts for some of the price difference you see between what is available on Alibaba and what might be available from a local (to you) intermediary. Branding (market forces) plays a a part: people trust major brands, but even then you can slip up: SanDisk have a continual problem with fake memory appearing in its supply chain because it is a trusted brand, as well as third parties selling SanDisk branded fake memory. The same is true for small electrical items, such as Apple branded USB power supplies. Personally, I buy from large vendors with in-jurisdiction presence who have a strong incentive not to sell me faulty devices that could kill me. The prices in online marketplaces for some items are very tempting, until you see some of the periodic teardowns of kit obtained that way.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 28 2018, @03:57PM (2 children)
By the same argument, you can't expect consumers to be electrical engineers: so how would you assure safety?
Simple: you design and build the building so that the electrical system can handle people plugging in junk appliances without burning down. The UK system fails here, because it assumes too much of the appliances and the users. The US system may use more wire, but it's safer; you can plug in pretty much any junk you want to and it's extremely unlikely to cause a fire. Honestly, I'm shocked you're even asking this question because this is the crux of our argument here. The whole issue here is whether the system should be designed to assume the best of appliances plugged in, or the worst. (Obviously, you can't completely prevent an appliance from causing a fire, but I hope you get the point.)
It's just like operating systems like I said before: should you assume that all applications can be assumed to be trustworthy and written to give up their timeslice and not hog the CPU, or should you assume the worst? MacOS (<= 9) was naive like this, and badly-behaved applications wreaked havoc. Modern OSes take the opposite approach (though they don't go so far as to sandbox them usually), assuming applications will hog the CPU as much as possible, and preempt them.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday February 28 2018, @05:26PM (1 child)
Domestic fires caused by electrical faults in UK - approximately 12000 in three years or about 4,000 per year (Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-33124925 [bbc.com] )
Domestic fires caused by electrical faults in the USA (estimated) - 51,000 per year (Source: http://www.esfi.org/resource/home-electrical-fires-184 [esfi.org] )
Population of UK - approx 66 million (Source: http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population/ [worldometers.info] )
Population of USA - approx 326 million (Source: http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population/ [worldometers.info] )
Per capita annual domestic electrical fire rate, UK: 6 x 10e-5
Per capita annual domestic electrical fire rate, USA: 1.5 x 10e-4 that is, roughly 2.5 times higher.
In what way is the US system safer?
If you can find different statistics that show the opposite relationship, please share them.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 28 2018, @05:53PM
I wonder how much of this is due to extremely old wiring. The UK is generally better about regulation; are you allowed to keep houses with knob-and-post wiring as-is there? Or with 60-year-old wiring where the insulation is falling off? Over here, you are. How about inspections? I currently live in a rental house where the wiring is absolutely not up to code, and was probably done by an amateur. There's absolutely no enforcement of this kind of thing over here.