Reinventing the wheel, with AI

Reinventing the wheel, with AI

I'm just busy banging my head against the nearest wall, after I came across this article. You may perhaps know KYMCO, the big Taiwanese scooter/bike manufacturer. Like their counterparts in the four-wheel tin can industry, they overslept electrification and are now trying hard to find ways to deal with Gogoro, the company most popular when it comes to moving batteries on two wheels.

To distinguish themselves from the in their eyes inexperienced competitor, they are now teaming up with ITRI, the institute for technological research in the industry, to solve a problem they discovered: Apparently, the display of remaining mileage and battery capacity on electric vehicles is unreliable, especially with older batteries, leading to people being afraid to ride their electric scooters out of fear they may end up in the middle of a trip with dead batteries.

The solution? AI! (I'm surprised they didn't include block chain.) And their plan is so ingenious: First they will display the remaining mileage based on the rider's riding custom. (Hmm, does that mean they will calculate based on current consumption? Sounds so.) Second they will display battery capacity in percent. (Really!) And third they will incorporate environmental and battery temperature. Wow! All of which can easily be done even with an 8bit MCU...

To give you an orientation on the severity of this "problem", at least here in Taiwan: I live in a village (OK, the official term is "township".) near one of the smaller cities. The closest Gogoro battery swap station is 800m from me, at a 7-11. I usually walk there. They also have regular chargers. In the other direction the next battery swap station is 3.2km away, the next charger 1.7km. I live a bit away from the main road, so the distance between the two chargers is 1.7km, between the swap stations 3.2km. In the countryside.

Plus: All the above mentioned functionality already exists. If it's not reliable, it's because of a poor implementation. So let's throw some AI at the problem, because it makes for such nice press releases...


https://udn.com/news/story/7240/3605971
https://udn.com/news/story/7240/3605971