I wonder what you would think of a car that you could control with a tablet, iPod, or iPhone. Thanks for the information MisterKenneth =) By the way, It's quite interesting that you say that the Nano makes the Yugo look like a masterpiece, because I remember you trash talking the Yugo on the thread "Which do you like more, old cars or new cars?". Also, I wonder what you think the worst car in the world is. Maybe 80, I'm not sure to be honest.
Well, I'm not surprised that you feel the way you do about the iPod/Tablet/iPhone controlled car thing. About the response you made to the "Maybe 80, I'm not sure" statement I made. Thanks for the information about that Shotgun Chuck =)
Your points are valid, but I doubt they're enough to convince Chuck. He would rather have terrible drivers on the road instead of autonomous vehicles, +1,000,000 extra points if said autonomous car is electric. That's one reason I can get behind autonomous vehicles, regardless of what their source of power is, is how they can get bad drivers off the road, and how that can potentially make the roads safer for everyone else, because honestly, autonomous vehicles can be way better drivers than some people can. And like I've said multiple times, they can also help people who can't drive at all. Pretty obvious he would despise it with a passion like he does with everything that's post 1990's. Annnnd I rest my case. Honestly, with how advanced technology is getting, what you're putting forward here isn't all that far fetched. I know, in a way, I can be somewhat forgiving of the Yugo. However, some of the decisions made with the Tata Nano is absolutely outrageous, and I can't be as forgiving of it because it entered production in 2008. 2008. Again, like the example I mentioned with the rear hatch and how the car is rear engined, the Yugo, while front engined, at least had the generosity of having easy access to the engine by having a hood that opens from the very start, while with the Nano, it didn't have an opening rear hatch until 2015, meaning that before 2015, you'd have to access the engine from inside the car. Like WTF? Imagine what the Yugo would be like if the hood didn't open at all, and that in order to access the engine, you'd have to jack up the front of the car and access the engine that way, or heck, remove the entire front end of the car, like the fenders, bumper, grille, etc. I feel like I can get a headache just thinking about that. I'm also positive that flat front buses with engines in the front have easier access to their engines than pre-2015 Nanos do. Like I said over there on your thread, its something I struggle with. So much is said for just about every car, that it's very difficult to come to a final conclusion. Plus, that is something that can change over time.
In theory robocars should be far less annoying than bicycles/pedestrians, but there's two big problems with them. The first is "the powers that be". Even if you assume (as many people inexplicably do) that their constant attacks on car/enthusiast culture among many other manifestations of freedom are motivated by nothing but the purest of intentions, you can't deny that there is a tendency to push one-size-fits-all solutions that don't and to force technologies before they're ready. I'm seeing a future where, within a year of someone managing to sell a fully-self-driving car for consumer or even fleet use, and not being the subject of a class-action lawsuit during that time, the malicious idiots that run things will already be clamoring to legislate non-self-driving cars off the road, with plenty of outraged moralizing directed at those who still choose to control their own cars. That's just the way things happen now - a cause appears from nowhere, and overnight becomes an inevitability. It happened with plastic bag bans and raising the smoking age, why should cars be immune? And once again, how many modern so-called "car enthusiasts" would support this idea not just enthusiastically but reflexively once the current crop of trigger words like "safety" and "environment" were attached to it? The second problem is the capriciousness of the market. Currently, there is no demand for robocars because people don't see them as adequately safe and functional yet. But what if that were to change? Then the robocars might take over the more "mainstream" market segments entirely or almost entirely - make it extremely difficult to find, say, a compact hatchback or a family sedan which is set up to accept human control as the dominant source of input. In a perfect world, I could see robocars being a positive thing in some ways as long as they couldn't manage to push human-controlled cars entirely out of any given market segment. But we don't live in a perfect world. In the world we live in, robocars would be the ultimate victory of systems logic - of the regimentation and roboticization of life - over humanity. But even then, I think, letting cars drive themselves would erase a significant body of life-enhancing experience. At least one company is even planning how to integrate VR headsets into the stupid things for those who want to tune out entirely and not even see where they are or where they're going. The future is a prison of comfort and convenience, for those who will accept it. A lot of people have this idea that a perfect world looks like an intellectual's paradise where everyone just sits around quoting Kant and Hegel and Nietzsche from memory while robots serve their every need, everything works exactly as it's supposed to, and no one is taking risks or pushing the limits or getting away with anything. An existence so coddled, so perfectly managed, and so eventless as to be nearly pointless. A system such as this, under the control of human rulers or perhaps some kind of "benevolent" all-seeing AI overlord, is the best possible recipe for a suffocating beige hell capable of driving a man mad with sheer ennui, and I reject it utterly. If car culture (oops, sorry, car enthusiast culture) or really anything in this world worth saving is to survive, this idea, the Chautauqua ideal, has to die. Completely. Oh come on, I understand liking technology, but controlling a full-size car with a phone is just stupid. What even is the point of such a device?
Like I said, I don't see autonomous cars pushing manually driven cars out entirely. When you consider how some people reacts to, let's say, how they perceive the safety of airplanes, logic would say that much like people fearing to fly because they fear the plane might crash, people will also fear the possibility that something can and will go wrong with the car's AI system, whether it be general system failure, hacking, viruses, etc. So basically, somebody could slap on an Oculus Rift and do things like talk to other people in VR Chat, watch 360 videos on YouTube, or play VR games, all while riding in an autonomous car? I can see why people would love that, especially in autonomous buses and taxis, where they're not the driver. That would probably be amazing to have in a scenario like this. Like I've said before, I don't see that fully going away. While autonomous cars may one day become a decent portion of the market, there should be a demand for vehicles that can be manually operated. Some people will feel safer controlling the car themselves. Like I've said before, which I've already said "like I've said before" a lot, one thing I see autonomous vehicles fitting right into is public transport. Buses, taxis, etc. Pretty close to what we saw in Total Recall with the Johnny Cab, though I don't know if whether or not we'll actually get an autonomous taxi with a talking robot that looks like a ventriloquist dummy you can interact with while the autonomous taxi takes you to your destination. While there's plenty of possibilities, here's one that has come to my mind, and that is summoning the car. Let's say your in a huge parking lot full of cars and you can't find your car. Press a button on your device and boom, the car comes to you. Of course, the car would have to be capable of driving itself in order for this to work. Something like this probably already exists. If I'm not mistaken, I think I have heard of Tesla Autopilot systems being capable of doing this, where you can basically make the Tesla come to you. I'm also thinking that a device can be used to control things like the engine (turning it on and off), door locks, climate control (like remotely heating the car up on a cold day, or cooling it down a hot day), etc. Of course, that would mean replacing those little remotes you attach to your key chain that can lock/unlock the car, open the trunk/hatch, trigger the panic alarm, etc. Again, this probably already exists. I can also see where this can be used maliciously. Like you said, we don't live in a perfect world. Unfortunately, there will be people who will exploit tech like this. GWMan will have to elaborate what he was thinking about with controlling cars with devices, because these are really the only ideas that came to my mind when it comes to controlling a car with a device like a phone or a tablet. I don't know if he meant actually using a device to steer and make a car drive, controlling the features I listed above, or a little bit of both.
I like cars. You know what I like even more? Having a non-destroyed environment and living. And you know what I don't like? People behaving like cars and their development were the end goal of everything, no matter the effects. I am one of these people. I think that what is making my life filled is learning about new stuff, especially automobile history. I'd say my interest in cars is more theoretical than practical. On a sidenote, things like this make me think that it would be nice to live in a world where people would live and form societies among their own kind - intellectuals among intellectuals, rednecks among rednecks, businessmen among businessmen... Yes, I know it sounds like the plot of Divergent. I also don't think I am one with most car guys. When they laugh at communist cars, I think about how the cheapening made them affordable enough for the middle class. When they talk about 50s V8 cars, I think about the amazing feat of fullsize cars with pretty big I6s being sold for economy car prices - with yearly styling changes to boot. And when they only think about cars, I have considerations for the environment and society.
So there is something that has had a lot of research performed on it and interests me highly. Hydrogen combustion. It is technically less efficient than having a hydrogen fuel cell acting as the substitute for a battery pack in an EV, but, hydrogen burns cleanly. Some experiments were done before and basically found converting an existing engine to hydrogen and burning that hydrogen at a stoichiometric AFR results in 85% to 115% of the engines original horsepower depending on a few factors, most critically for reasons I don't understand yet/haven't looked into: direct injection lead to huge gains. This does have a problem as combustion temperatures were high enough that the same nitrogen oxides diesels spew out were also formed. There was further research done into lean burning, you can get to about 70% of the original horsepower of the direct injected engine without forming nitrogen oxides. And the knock threshold is sky high so these motors, you can Chuck a ton of boost at them, limits are going to be mechanical. So. There are downsides (Loss of power when clean burning, accountable through either displacement or boost, low range). But upside. You have a clean burning engine, with a traditional manual gearbox, clutch etc. It can drive much like the cars of the last few decades, yet be environmentally clean. Extra upside, no exotic metals for batteries/fuel cells
Well, he does. Thanks for the informative post =) I did actually mean using a device like an iPod or an iPhone to make a car steer, brake, drive, etc. I was pretty sure that Shotgun Chuck would hate something like that, but I asked him just to make sure. Fair enough, then. It can be really difficult sometimes to come up with the choice on what the worst of something is. I don't even know what the worst car is. I was just curious if you knew and now, I am now completely aware that you don't know what the worst car is. I don't mind eco cars as long as they aren't ugly and they can get you from point A to point B without breaking down. I know right, I think Shotgun Chuck and SuperAusten64 should both become writers.
Chuck I think you need to stop worrying so much. I don't see a ban on human-controlled cars happening for a long time. Besides the large amount of enthusiasts including myself that would protest that, there are so many situations that a self driving car currently can't and maybe won't ever be able to deal with. Maybe in large urban areas it would make sense to ban or discourage people being in control of their cars, but most of the county roads around here don't even have lane markings. I'd never trust a self driving car to get me down my driveway in the winter, and I'm not even sure how it would deal with a big blanket of white snow and no way to tell where the road is. I don't think you need to worry about "the powers that be" taking away you sunbird or sunfire or whatever it is unless you plan on moving to Commiefornia.
Exactly, I don't think a ban on human controlled cars will happen anytime soon, especially with people like Shotgun Chuck voting against the ban.
Exactly, you make a very good point. Also, there are people that like driving cars, trucks, etc. So, I don't think manually driven cars will go away anytime soon. I think having your car come to you in a big parking lot with an iPhone because you can't find it doesn't sound like a bad idea at all. Sadly though, there are plenty of malicious people in the world. Some nasty jerk could hack into the controls and hijack your car. Plus, for people like Shotgun Chuck, controlling a car with an iPhone probably sounds weird to them. Once I learn how to drive and I manage to get my drivers license. I could see myself driving to places that are 45 minutes or longer away from me. Also, what if you want to see a family member or a friend that is an hour or so from where you live. You would probably want to drive to see them, wouldn't you? Also Shotgun Chuck, what do you think of the body style of modern cars? Also, I know this thread is called "General Car Discussion", but does anyone here have any thoughts whatsoever about the 1961 Ford F-100 Unibody pickup truck?
True, but once again this ignores the very high probability of government involvement. Whether out of a misguided desire to keep people "safe" from themselves or just a desire for more control, the governments of the world probably will try to force these things at some point. When it comes to damage potential, even nuclear weapons pale before the terror of an idiot in a position of power. It just seems to me that this is a continuation of the disturbing trend of people not being aware of their surroundings while they're out and about. In your own home, sure, whack on the VR headset and pretend you're driving an AE86 on Mt. Akina. But doing the same thing when out and about, especially if it's just a passive gawking-at-the-fake-scenery as I believe the device I refer to was intended to be, just seems creepily dissociative, maybe even childish, to me. And enough people will feel safer in the hands of a computer (which they have been trained to see as infallible), or more precisely unsafe in the presence of human drivers, or will feel some busybodying need to keep other people "safe" whether they want to be kept safe or not, that they will support any plan to take away the rights of the ones who feel safer driving themselves. Oh good grief, I sure hope not. It also does not work correctly and sometimes drives on the wrong side of the road or bumps into things. Tesla's Autopilot in general is an engineering disaster which attempts to dress up yesterday's tech as tomorrow's for the consumption of fanbois and chronic early adopters. That's exactly the problem; there are already keyfobs and remotes that can do these things and they too are vulnerabilities - a laptop with a yagi antenna can get you in the door of a keyless-entry car. Running these systems over the cellular phone network will not make them less vulnerable, it will just put them within the wheelhouse of more traditional computer hackers, while removing the need to get physical access to the car in order to bypass the engine immobilizer. Finally, just try making any of this work with a manual transmission. All you're really doing is proving my point. All someone has to do is scribble a hockey stick or a car crash on a sticky note and wave it in front of your face, and suddenly you're unable to question anything they're saying. Well, at least you're honest enough to admit it, and to know that other people might not feel the same way. But the people who run things, they don't do either one of those things. There are several types of people driving the dystopian-utopia train forward, but all of them share one common trait which is that they want to force other people, rather than themselves, into their adventure-free, managed-to-death future. Whether they think this is necessary to avoid planetary doom, or think they're "helping" people by doing so, or simply see this as a means to a goal, hardly matters in the end; we all end up being forced to live how they want regardless. I can't say for sure since I wasn't alive then, but to the best of my knowledge the crazy American cars of the 1950s and 1960s were affordable to the middle class too - without so much cheapening. Communism making cars affordable to "middle class" people who would be considered poor anywhere else means nothing when Communism is the reason they'd be considered poor anywhere else in the first place. The GAZ-13 "Chaika", made starting 1958 in extremely limited numbers, with availability tightly controlled under the law (only the Soviet government was allowed to buy them, and usually did so only for its enforcers and high-level personnel; "normal" people could only rent them and only for weddings, though a movie studio did manage to get some as well), was effectively a really bad ripoff of 1955-56 American cars which had been available available in much larger numbers to anyone who could come up with a down payment - which itself was a much longer list than it would have been in the USSR. It's the same reason I laugh when people call the GAZ-23 a "Soviet muscle car", when in fact it was the exact opposite of a muscle car. Muscle cars were machines of liberation, built so that any rando could experience Ferrari-level performance at a much lower cost (at least in a straight line). The Volga - at least the V8 version known as M23 - was a machine of oppression, built for the system's goons to do their work with. Even its doofy handling, which on the surface could be seen as a muscle car trait, was a result of its government-oriented purpose; apparently, the suspension setup had been developed with the expectation that the car would be carrying a few hundred pounds of radio equipment in the trunk, but in practice it was often used without this equipment, resulting in the rear suspension being too hard and skittish for the relatively soft front end to keep up with. There is a difference between "considerations for the environment and society" and trying to destroy everything beautiful in the world. Most of the "environmental" improvements being made with cars are way past the point of diminishing returns - minuscule gains being made at great cost in terms of both the price and "car cultureability". Consider that roadside "sniff traps" set up by some jurisdictions to catch emissions violators, using the most sophisticated equipment currently available, never flagged any of the "cheating" diesel Volkswagens. The difference between what they were putting out and what they were "allowed" to put out was literally indistinguishable from background noise in the field. As for "considerations for society", I have those too. They're why I don't ride a bicycle on the road. (Though from what I remember, you're not actually old enough to drive, so I can't judge you for that at this point.) I don't think the government, even here in the US let alone anywhere else, will care about any this. As I've said before, they love to shove one-size-fits-all solutions that don't and keep people "safe" from themselves whether they want to be kept safe or not - and this is when they aren't just trying to get more control of the rest of us by any means possible. There are also a large number of people who will side with them in this because authoritarianism is the only way they know how to make things work. Bold of you to assume there will even be a vote. Even more bold of you to assume that any vote wouldn't be overrun by highly motivated authoritarians out to force humanity into some new golden age of safety or sustainability. I know Tesla fans like to rationalize away the car's faults, but come on. When you have to use a crowbar to open your own glovebox due to the failure of a mechanically unrelated part, that's just faulty engineering. With a few exceptions (almost all of which are sports cars), it's utterly atrocious - bland and busy at the same time, in exactly the right proportion to be as wrong as possible.
joke /jōk/ Learn to pronounce noun a thing that someone says to cause amusement or laughter, especially a story with a funny punchline.
A bigger problem is the doors are software controlled. Ever heard of Model X gull wing doors open themselves at highway speeds due to software errors. In a "conventional" car you pull the handle, it's mechanism transfer the force from you hand to the unlocking pin and the spring opens the door. In a Tesla you pull the handle the force sensor picks up the single and send this to the computer, the conputer controls the servo to open the door. If you fall into water, you have to use a hammer to break the window, and if your hammer is in the glovebox you are done.
