Your Personal Micro Blog(s)

Ideas are fine but remember that statistics and research exists. Ideas should make you seek this. If you only believe your own ideas and thoughts, you will end up with a false reality.

Cars are getting more comfortable, but also safer. A lot less dying considering the amount of vehicles on the road and millage.
Source: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatality-trends/deaths-and-rates/

 

Today i realized that in 2 days' time i'll have a 4-year anniversary of being here. And still not having 100 messages.

 

makes me feel less bad about my utter lack of messaging is as much time (ish)

 

All the safety tech in the world isn't going to help you much if you drift across the centerline and hit somebody head on.

I live off a fairly boring road, and drive it most days for work. Lots of long straightaways, objectively simple corners. A couple of corners can be dangerous if there's ice, and moose are always a problem in the winter, but on a dry spring/summer day most modern (as in radial tires and front disc brakes) cars could cruise safely at 20+ over posted and possibly much more. Despite this, there are still crashes on that road; some are fatal, and can lead to tearful calls for lower speed limits and more radar traps. I have had at least one near miss myself, with a "jelly bean" F150 suddenly veering out of its lane towards me on an objectively simple stretch of road. The only conclusion I can come to is that some form of distraction has to be involved in these incidents.

Then, a few days ago, I borrowed a family member's car, a 2014 Dodge Journey, to go shopping on a day off (I think my harmonic balancer is pretty much done, so I'm trying not to drive my car unnecessarily until I get the new one in). The very first thing I noticed about it, after having almost a year to re-acclimate to my Veloster, is that the steering on that car is so disconcertingly light that it barely even feels connected to anything. The rack itself is probably precise enough, but requires so little effort that it doesn't really feel like it.

A few days later, it hit me. That, combined with distracted driving, is what is causing the crashes on that road. I could easily see anyone, given such a car, causing a horrible crash if they tried to send or receive even a short text message, or even dial a number. With eyes off the road and one hand off the wheel, it wouldn't be far-fetched at all to start turning the wheel, perhaps even quite suddenly, in the direction of the remaining hand (likely left, towards oncoming traffic) without making a conscious decision to do so or even being aware of it happening.

Now, granted, I have a pretty small sample size, and wasn't specifically paying attention to steering effort when I was test-driving cars a couple of years ago (I remember that the Chevy Cruze has some of the deadest steering I've ever felt, but not its required effort specifically). However, I also remember reading that one of the main faults of American "mainstream" car culture was to equate "easy steering" with "good handling", creating a tendency toward overboosted steering systems like the Journey's. I understand wanting some comfort in a car - I've enjoyed features in my Veloster like heated seats and a sunroof that I thought I would never want or like - but there should still be enough to driving it that you can't drag it completely off course, in a moment of distraction or otherwise, with nothing but the weight of one arm.

Unfortunately, the trend I see in cars today is toward more of this - more passivity, less involvement, more comfort, less effort. It's possible (given my close call with a late-1990s pickup truck mentioned above) that this is a common problem with large "light truck" type vehicles specifically; larger, heavier wheels and tires would both deaden steering feedback and make the steering itself much heavier, which a manufacturer, not having any sporting purpose in mind when designing the vehicle, might attempt to counteract by just cranking the power steering up to 11. If that's the case, then the current situation of crossovers running normal-size cars out of the market, performance and the appearance thereof becoming less of an object of desire (or at least less catered to), and pickup trucks becoming family/luxury sedans with beds doesn't bode well for much of anything either.

Unfortunately, the temper of our times seems to be to fall back on half-baked gadgets, mandatory safety features, and one-dimensional "slow = safe" thinking when faced with such a situation. The attitude seems to be "never do for yourself what you can get a computer to do for you". One of the many things car culture needs to mobilize against, at least to preserve itself if nothing else, is this destructive culture of low or no effort for everything.

 

...No? If, let's say, an '05 Escape and a brand-new Corolla get into a head-on crash at ~55MPH, I'd wager that the Corolla driver could literally open the door and walk away afterwards. Cars are crazy safe nowadays.

You vastly overestimate how good the average driver is.

Dude... I don't want to be a jerk, but come on. Do you have a stick that far up your rear end that you turn up your nose at basic creature comforts?

I don't understand why you think technology and safety are bad things in cars. I wanna go to the grocery store on a chilly day listening to my music, with a nice warm heated seat, and I don't want to die if I get T-boned on the way. I really don't get your logic at all as to why that's bad.

 

It's still a bad situation, and one that could potentially happen less often if mainstream cars weren't quite as easy to, effectively, accidentally mis-steer.

I was speaking mainly of the capabilities of the cars themselves, not the drivers, but the thing is, most of that road is objectively simple. I'm not talking about the kind of technical mountain pass where normies in pickup trucks cut the center without realizing they're doing it, I'm talking about a plain old A-to-B road built to cover distance as efficiently as possible.

To me, basic creature comforts mean a radio and a heater. Everything above that is just gravy. Not that I think the better things are necessarily bad, I just think people are spoiled when they start seeing nice-to-haves like navigation, cell phone connectivity, and heated/power stuff as necessities. Plus, all that stuff adds weight and complication, which can be problems when your daily driver and your weekend warrior are the same car.

Remember that the time I started forming my first "adult" (i.e. not informed entirely by video games and straight-line performance testing) opinions about cars was right about when the Chevrolet Cobalt had given way to the first-generation Cruze. The Cruze was at least 300 pounds heavier than the Cobalt, had less power than even a first-year base-model Cobalt (from a smaller, factory-turbocharged engine which I assumed would not take as well to modification as the previous NA powerplant), and I didn't really know much about its handling but I got the vague idea, from its weight and the lack of an SS variant, that it wouldn't be much good at that either. But yet, the "car enthusiasts" I was discussing with (at another racing game forum which I shall not name) insisted it was an upgrade over the Cobalt simply because the interior was nicer and it used less gas, and also that the Cobalt was one of the worst cars ever made because its interior wasn't very good.

And not just that, but the Cruze was not the only bloated, displacement-downsized "compact" from around that time that seemed designed specifically to not be tuner car base material. There was also the Dodge Dart, even more absurdly heavy and not much more powerful, though apparently Dodge really did try to sell it as a tuner - my local import shop tells me that marketing victims are still bringing them in with all kinds of pipe dreams about what they should be capable of and what it should cost. This trend in car design was meeting with very little resistance from exactly the type of people who should have been raging against the dying of the sport-compact category.

I did eventually drive a Cruze, by the way. It was almost exactly as horrible as I figured it would be. The only thing that surprised me is the engine actually being adequate... if you are in the lowest possible gear when you stomp on it. If you stab the gas in a higher gear - say, to exploit a gap in traffic - it lags and flutters around enough to cast doubt on the turbocharger's state of function.

When I go to the grocery store or anywhere, I'll go way out of my way to take a twisty road there if I have time. I was hitting one of the local roads pretty much every night on my way home from work until I realized what was causing my rough idle.

There are two core tenets of my driving philosophy in play here: first, that every car is a race car if you drive it like one, and second, that modification is an end in and of itself rather than a means to an end. The more mandatory stuff your car comes with, the harder it is to modify at home, and the harder it is to turn that stuff off, the harder it is to drive it like a race car.

 

It's easy to say anecdotally, but you cannot speak for the statistics.

So I pulled this right off of the IIHS website and you can clearly see that the trend of motor vehicle fatalities has been trending downwards ever since the late 70s/early 80s. If you hit somebody head on maybe say, 30 years ago, you probably would be killed in an instant. Modern car does not equate to 100% survivability rate in that event, but it certainly has improved.

I'm not even sure why you bring up the idea of steering feel. Most average drivers in any car are not going to understand how to correct for oversteer or a loss of control, and sometimes they end up overcorrecting and still crash. Not everybody is a race car driver man.

 

It's not even about feel, it's about the steering effort being so absurdly light that a distracted driver could start turning the wheel without even realizing it.

 

Technology that undermines user's right is bad.

 

Since when has that ever been an issue? Distracted drivers are already dangerous idiots to begin with.

 

And the overuse of infotainment is contributing to distractions.

 

Which is kinda funny, because I kinda figured a large percent would be infotainment but it's actually not. Out of the 3,000 fatal crashes, only about 22 were due to adjusting audio/climate controls.

 

And it's increasing.
Do you know that you cannot manually adjust the windshield wiper on a Tesla Model 3 during driving? In order to do that, you need to click on the infotainment screen to OPEN UP A MENU, THEN click the desired wiper speed. If a car in front of you hit a puddle and splat water all over your windshield, you need to manually max the wiper to clear your view. If you crash do to the delay of auto viper, your crash will NOT be documented as "due to adjusting audio/climate controls". The same apply with headlights. When going to a dark tunnel, you have to turn on headlight before your car is into the tunnel to light up the tunnel in advance, auto headlight will only turn on after you are in the dark. Thus, manual headlight control must be available and can be easily reached without distraction.

 

Somehow, despite everything including my own cynicism about modern cars in general, I always manage to be surprised by how idiotic and flatly dangerous Tesla's design decisions can be. Any other manufacturer would have been shut down long ago if they were guilty of that level of BS.

 

since alot of vehicles use integrated navigation systems and hands free calls, you can chalk 17-18% of all distracted driving crashes to technology present within vehicles the second you buy them
which is sort of horrifying

 

User's rights are also crucial in terms of safety. For example, you are escaping from a war zone, and your abs sensor gets shot. If you are in a vehicle that respects user's rights. Only the ABS will fail and you can drive away quickly and safely.
If you are in a vehicle that disregards user's rights

cripple ware will hamper your vehicle performance and this will get yourself killed.

 

The user's right to crash and burn because a part malfunctioned? 99% of the time, if your ABS module breaks, it's because of wear and tear. And since 99% of drivers don't know how to handle a car without antilock brakes (let alone know what ABS is in the first place), they're going to freak out and park themselves up a Chevy Express van the instant their brakes lock up.
We need to remember that we're all much more knowledgeable and interested in cars than the average person.

No doubt about it- and I agree with your points about steering feel. It's just another symptom of people who *NEED* their 38-row Honda Pilot or whatever but also *NEED* it to handle like a regular car.

If the soccer moms and flannel-wearing dads gave up their Silverados and Highlanders for something just as practical but also better in evey other way (Like a wagon or a hatchback) all of these problems could be avoided. You don't need to fake the steering feel in a hatchbakck like you do an SUV. It's ridiculous!
People whine about gas prices but drive massive trucks with useless beds, people haul their kids around in big "crossovers" ready to tip in the slightest breeze, and they're all egged on by idiotic notions of "big = safe and good"
Im envious of you Europeans and your stylish wagons and hatchbacks. That Toyota Corolla Touring Sports looks sharp and it's so PRACTICAL!!!!
Wagons are the only damn thing boomers got right! Give me my wagons!

 

Well then let's get to work fixing that! I'd be willing to bet the average normie in 1972 was more of a car enthusiast than the average internet "car enthusiast" in 2022. People used to see performance (or at least the appearance of it) as something desirable to aspire to, and used to really believe that knowing how to properly drive and fix a car was useful, even if their idea of proper driving didn't involve apexes or heel-and-toe. This culture of low/no effort for everything and not knowing anything about the machines you depend on is a self-perpetuating death spiral and is going to drag the car hobby down with it. Let's get car culture and DIY into the mainstream again!

Never, ever forget that the dumbing-down and mainstreaming of the SUV is at least partially a product of regulation. The people who buy SUVs for the space would, once upon a time, have bought full-size station wagons instead - these had about the same seating capacity, but otherwise drove like slightly heavier versions of the sedans they were based on. That was before CAFE made it hard for manufacturers to build full-size station wagons or even mass-market full-size cars in general. But there was a loophole that made the rules for light trucks much looser, since at the time most vehicles in that category were genuine work and off-road vehicles that could not simultaneously become more fuel-efficient and continue to fulfill their primary purpose. Since new rules couldn't just immediately remove the need for the things they'd soft-outlawed, the mass-market SUV came into being as a way for manufacturers to keep selling people what they needed and wanted.

Since the vast majority of people who bought these things (being exactly the type of person who once would have bought a plain old full-size car) never took them off-road, and many didn't tow heavy trailers either, the rise of the crossover (and the general dumbing-down of the SUV) was already inevitable at that point.

 

not everybody in the world has time for fixing up their vehicle or cares all that much about vehicles. not only that but cars are expensive as hell right now too. I highly doubt that era of DIY will ever make a comeback with the way things are.

 

Did you read the original post by Potato? The Passat rented by him has crippleware(a form of malware) that cuts the engine performance by more than 80% when a non-powertrain-related module is broken. If the manufacture respects user's rights, this won't happen in any circumstance.

99% percent of drivers(if what you said is true) will lockup the brakes in an emergency braking situation regardless of whether the vehicle manufacturer respects their right. However, 100% will fail to accelerate normally to avoid danger if the manufacturer has no respect to user's rights. This means, the more rights the users have, the less the problem when a given module fails, the more overall safety the user will have.

An ABS sensor fails:
Vehicle with user's rights: Wheels may lock up during heavy braking, when being driven by an average driver, braking performance will reduce about 10% and braking handling will reduce about 30%.
Vehicle without user's rights: Wheels may lock up during heavy braking, when being driven by an average driver, braking performance will reduce about 10% and braking handling will reduce about 30%. AND acceleration performance will reduce more than 80% percent regardless of driver.

In other words, if the vehicle manufacturer disregards user's right, the vehicle's performance & safety will be sabotaged.

Please don't disregard minority rights.