Electric road in Detroit

[PlainName]

24/7 cost 3x the single shift operation for flesh & blood. Why would they not go 24/7 if they don't have that cost?

[Wallace Gasiewicz]

AVG has a point. The small robotic delivery vehicles can return to charging station when they need to. Like  Rumba. This requires some spare units though. They kind of rotate.I think this is the way it is done today, at least it used to be. This way you can support three shifts with deliveries, although three shifts are not as common as in the past since it does not allow time for regular maintenance on some machines.The RF charging or direct powering of robotic vehicles would be nice and I just wondered if it was practical. I would think that if it was such a good idea, someone would have implemented it in production plants....

[daqq]

Soooo, is the US different in this than we are with copper thieves? We've got people who'll do thousands of EUR worth of damage to get a few EUR worth of copper piping from a building in construction. Just saying, juicy copper coils would be ripped out within half a year.

[PlainName]

Dodging traffic while digging up a road is a little bit different to pulling cables or pipes out of a wall. But no doubt someone would try it

[mendip_discovery]

Plain name, have you not heard tales of people taking copper from the power lines on train lines....live ones. A few have been fried.

[PlainName]

I suspect those would still be easier than digging up the road. At least for most perps. I could imagine a group kitting out in hi-vis and with (probably nicked) traffic signals, looking like pukka road crew.

[AVGresponding]

I suspect those would still be easier than digging up the road. At least for most perps. I could imagine a group kitting out in hi-vis and with (probably nicked) traffic signals, looking like pukka road crew.

They do exactly this to steal York stone flags (hence Councils now taking the step to mark them with SmartWater), no reason to think it wouldn't be a method used to steal any number of things out in plain sight.

[tszaboo]

Dodging traffic while digging up a road is a little bit different to pulling cables or pipes out of a wall. But no doubt someone would try it

I've seen pictures of copper thieves arriving with a truck, traffic cones, yellow vest and hard hat, and they stole live wires for a tram line in broad day light, while the tram was on the other end of the line. If you are somewhere with a hard hat and yellow vest you can do whatever you want.

[SeanB]

Dodging traffic while digging up a road is a little bit different to pulling cables or pipes out of a wall. But no doubt someone would try it

I've seen pictures of copper thieves arriving with a truck, traffic cones, yellow vest and hard hat, and they stole live wires for a tram line in broad day light, while the tram was on the other end of the line. If you are somewhere with a hard hat and yellow vest you can do whatever you want.

Approx 90% of the rail infrastructure was stolen by me during lockdown, often organised crews, with all the vehicles, and such, stealing thousands of kilometres of copper overhead wiring, brass overhead lines, and even track, all removed, cut up into lengths, and put into containers and moved out as scrap. Not only remote lines, even the ones right into the city, and even in front of police stations as well, with nobody doing anything about it. When you have a railway that had to go to court, to get people who decided to squat in the railway reserves, across the lines even, and who stripped the local stations down to bare ground, stealing the bricks, and even the rail, sleepers and concrete platforms to build with. Court case won, they simply refused to move, and government will do nothing ahead of elections to lose votes of the people.

Minister of hats was too busy chasing people sunbathing 10m apart on the Clifton beaches to care, even when there was mass looting, he took 3 days to actually find the right fedora to wear, before showing his face.