I drive a Ford Focus Electric. All of the non-drivetrain parts are standard focus stuff, and are fine. The same mostly-physical-controls UI that non-electric focus has. The usual wear parts wear out just like an ICE car, but the brakes need done a little less often.
And the car is responsive and fun to drive.
The new parts of the design have some rough edges; hopefully these are solved with the newer generation of EVs intended for mass production and making a profit:
- Just like a Tesla, there is a traditional 12V battery that runs accessories when the car is off. This can be drained by rogue modules not shutting down properly. See https://www.myfocuselectric.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4302 . I've had this happen several times. It's really annoying to need jump start when the main battery is at 100%.
- This year after 5 years and 50K miles something went wrong with the main battery. Replaced under warranty and apparently uncommon.
The federal tax incentive is a refundable tax credit. So it doesn't interact with deductions.
It's regressive in the sense that you need to be buying a new car to get it. But it passes to used car owners in the form of a lower residual value for the car. A one year old plug-in hybrid lease-return can be a great deal.
It is a credit, but it is not refundable and cannot be carried over into future years. However, it has led to some pretty good lease deals for people that can’t get the full credit themselves, since for leases the credit goes to the company providing the lease. Also good points about the value of the credit being effectively passed on for used car sales.
For flash devices, power consumption / thermal dissipation is usually a small constant for the control logic, plus a very small amount per read, plus a small amount per (page) write.
If you are limited to the write rate allowed by the SSD interface, then that will serve to limit the heat dissipation as well.
The last time I was looking for work, LinkedIn was useful. I heard of a company that sounded like a good match. LinkedIn found a 2nd-level connection working there, and an interview resulted.
At the lowest level, you don't need to double-up, you can use an error correcting code. If the memories and registers on a chip use a multiple-error correcting code, then the underlying error rate could be quite high without making any difference in the user-visible error rate.
Similarly you could use noisy-network protocols for on-chip wires, so that each signal path doesn't need to be perfect. Again you don't need to double-up. Instead you lose a small percent to overhead, and a delay in order to encode / decode.
How would the error correcting code work for something like a floating point multiplication? Correcting errors in storage is simple, but correcting errors in computation seems like a significantly harder problem.
The Netezza database appliance essentially works like this -- each disk is paired with an FPGA and a CPU core. The disk-local CPU takes care of caching directory information for the disk, decides what order to process disk pages in, and manages a disk cache with full awareness of the application. After a disk read the FPGA cuts away unwanted data before the CPU has to look at it. This has been shipping for several years.
To the extent that your problem is embarrassingly parallel and can be executed near the disk, you speed up linearly with the number of disks.
And the car is responsive and fun to drive.
The new parts of the design have some rough edges; hopefully these are solved with the newer generation of EVs intended for mass production and making a profit:
- Just like a Tesla, there is a traditional 12V battery that runs accessories when the car is off. This can be drained by rogue modules not shutting down properly. See https://www.myfocuselectric.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4302 . I've had this happen several times. It's really annoying to need jump start when the main battery is at 100%.
- This year after 5 years and 50K miles something went wrong with the main battery. Replaced under warranty and apparently uncommon.