[HN Gopher] Motorola's 1990s Corvette EV Project
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       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
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-06 23:00 UTC)