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In many jurisdictions, wearing headsets while driving is illegal (and has been for many years, even before cell phones).

The RCMP Reminds Canadians That You Can Be Fined For Wearing Earphones While Driving

AAA Driving Laws: Headsets

SF is one of the most expensive places in the country for gas. The current national average is $2.25/gallon (Or 0.779 CDN $/Litre), with some parts of the country as low as $1.80/gallon.

Don't you think it's ironic that we expect freeways to be free for anyone wealthy enough to afford a car, but we expect transit for the poor to pay for itself with no subsidies?

Gasoline generates about 8.89 kg of CO2 per gallon. So producing 1 ton of CO2 would require burning (1000 kg)/(8.89 kg/gallon) = 112.5 gallons of gasoline. The current average price of gasoline is $2.934/gallon, so 112.5 gallons of gas would cost (112.5 gal)*($2.934/gal) = $330.

A $100-$200 surcharge per ton of CO2 would thus raise the price of gasoline by just 30%-61%.

Using the same EIA chart, coal generates roughly 2 tons of CO2 per ton of coal. One ton of coal contains roughly 24 Gigajoules of thermal energy, which is 6.67 MWh. If the coal plant is 40% efficient, that means that one ton of coal generates 2.67 MWh of electricity. Since that one ton of coal also emits 2 tons of CO2, we end up with (2 tons CO2) / (2.67 MWh) = 0.75 tons per MWh.

Natural gas generates roughly 53.12 kg of CO2 per thousand cubic feet. A thousand cubic feet of methane contains 1.037 million BTUs of thermal energy = 303.9 kWh. If the gas plant is 60% efficient, this means 53.12 kg of CO2 are emitted per 182.3 kWh, or (0.053 tons CO2) / (0.1823 MWh) = 0.29 tons per MWh.

Coal accounts for 30.1% of U.S. electricity. Natural gas accounts for 31.7%. So the fractional CO2 contribution of these fossil fuels to electricity is (0.75 tons/MWh)*(0.301)+(0.29 tons/MWh)*(0.317) = 0.318 tons of CO2 per MWh. A $100-$200 surcharge per ton of CO2 then ends up costing $31.80-$63.60 per MWh, or 3.2 cents - 6.4 cents per kWh.

Average electricity price in the U.S. is 12 cents/kWh. So a $100-$200 surcharge per ton of CO2 would raise the price of electricity by 27%-53%. Almost exactly the same percentage as gasoline.

Like I keep trying to explain to people: Electric vehicles aren't cheap to operate because they're more energy efficient. They use nearly as much energy as ICE vehicles. They're just cheaper to operate because the coal and natural gas used to generate electricity are roughly an order of magnitude cheaper per MJ than gasoline. If you want to reduce CO2 emissions, buying an EV presently doesn't help. When you replace an ICE vehicleswith an EV without changing the makeup of your electricity sources, all you've done is shift your CO2 emissions from the car's tailpipe to a fossil fuel power plant's smokestack. That's why the claim that EVs are "zero emissions" is BS at present. You need to replace fossil fuel power plants with nuclear and renewable plants to cause a reduction in CO2 emissions.

That area looks MUCH more well-lit in videos that third parties have taken.

Depends on camera settings, other traffic in the area, and functionality of the headlights in use. Also depends on the exact location, as some parts are more illuminated than others.

AZ law requires the headlights to illuminate people from 500 feet away.

I have been unsuccessful in locating the exact text of the law, but what I could find from a 3rd party website says headlights must be in use when visibility is below 500 feet:

"Headlights are required from sunset to sunrise and when visibility is less than 500 feet."

So cost per mile:
ICE: $3/gallon * (1 gallon / 25 miles) = $0.120/mile
Tesla: $0.24/kWh * (35kWh/100miles) = $0.084/mile

Not quite.

Average gas price for the U.S. is $2.53 per gallon. And on top of that, 49.4 cents is fuel taxes (again, average for the country). Basically, EVs are driving on our roads for free, without having to pay to help maintain the roads (currently paid for by fuel taxes). If you imagine a future where all cars are EVs, then they're going to have to pay for road maintenance somehow. So to correct for this and do an apples to apples comparison, you have to subtract fuel taxes. That gives you:

ICE: $2..03 * (1 gallon/25 miles) = 8.12 cents/mile
Tesla (100 kWh battery): $0.24/kWh * (35 kWh/100 miles) = 8.4 cents/mile
Tesla (60 kWh battery): $0.24/kWh * (32 kWh/100 miles) = 7.5 cents/mile

If you look at the AAA cost breakdown you can see where the money goes. That turns out to be reasonable cost of ownership of a new car over its lifetime. People who are considering this issue don't necessarily even count the cost of their insurance. There's also a significant cost to the credit in buying a new car. Don't know where your money is going from week to week? Probably a good deal of it is going to your automobile.

Use this URL. For some reason Slashdot's mobile HTML is not presenting a preview button.

Uber/Lyft is roughly $15 for a 5 mile ride. Figure you live 5 miles from work. That's $30/day, 250 workdays/year, or $7500/yr.

That's squarely in-line with the cost to own a new car. $6354/yr for a small car, $8171/yr for a medium sedan. Except that ownership cost assumes 15k miles/yr driven. The Uber/Lyft cost above is for only 2.5k miles/yr. So if you own, you're paying the same as two 5 mile rides per workday, plus you get to drive 12,500 miles anywhere you want each year for free.

Basically, when you use Uber/Lyft, you're paying for use of a car plus the time and services of a driver. When you own or lease your own car, you're eliminating the cost of having a personal chauffeur.

Meanwhile. a lot of ordinary people, especially those in minimum wage jobs, have extreme difficulty paying for basic necessities. Is there an inflation index for necessities, i.e. food/shelter/clothing and transportation?

Sounds like a difficult figure to calculate, but you can look at percentage of spending. The lowest quartile spend ~35% of their income on food and that's relatively stable. In 1992 the AAA's driving cost gave a composite index of 38.8 cents/mile for 15k miles, which put into an inflation calculator is 67.9 cents in 2017 dollars while for 2017 it's 56.6 cents. Basic clothing I didn't really find any great statistics for and is hard to separate from design and fashion clothes but labor costs have been pretty flat from the 80s to 2010 which indicates prices on basic clothing wouldn't really get much better either. Price per square feet for a new home is also pretty flat in real dollars, even though the number of square feet per home and per person is growing.

In summary, living on minimum wage wasn't easy a few decades ago, it's still not easy now. It's hard to find some figure that's significantly worse though, though increasing disparity may in itself be a problem if you feel "everybody else" can afford to drink their coffee at Starbucks except you. That's what drives most people into financial disaster, if you accept the social stigma of being poor and just blatantly say you can't afford it you'll probably do okay. It's those who have to try pretending they have money when they don't who bury themselves in credit card debt and end up in a quagmire they never get out of. I have one buddy that is like that, he's made some life choices which has left him quite far behind us financially. And nobody's pushing him to spend, but he's constantly overextending himself.

Meanwhile. a lot of ordinary people, especially those in minimum wage jobs, have extreme difficulty paying for basic necessities. Is there an inflation index for necessities, i.e. food/shelter/clothing and transportation?

Sounds like a difficult figure to calculate, but you can look at percentage of spending. The lowest quartile spend ~35% of their income on food and that's relatively stable. In 1992 the AAA's driving cost gave a composite index of 38.8 cents/mile for 15k miles, which put into an inflation calculator is 67.9 cents in 2017 dollars while for 2017 it's 56.6 cents. Basic clothing I didn't really find any great statistics for and is hard to separate from design and fashion clothes but labor costs have been pretty flat from the 80s to 2010 which indicates prices on basic clothing wouldn't really get much better either. Price per square feet for a new home is also pretty flat in real dollars, even though the number of square feet per home and per person is growing.

In summary, living on minimum wage wasn't easy a few decades ago, it's still not easy now. It's hard to find some figure that's significantly worse though, though increasing disparity may in itself be a problem if you feel "everybody else" can afford to drink their coffee at Starbucks except you. That's what drives most people into financial disaster, if you accept the social stigma of being poor and just blatantly say you can't afford it you'll probably do okay. It's those who have to try pretending they have money when they don't who bury themselves in credit card debt and end up in a quagmire they never get out of. I have one buddy that is like that, he's made some life choices which has left him quite far behind us financially. And nobody's pushing him to spend, but he's constantly overextending himself.

TripTiks are now available online and downloadable to a mobile app. Which makes a lot more sense than printing it on a half-ream of paper. You can still print it at home if you really want.

A lot of the detail maps are still available if you tell them in advance where you're going. They don't stock every map in every branch anymore, and need some time to ship the appropriate maps to your branch. And their travel guide books are still an incredibly handy resource to have (lists interesting places to see, restaurants, hotels) if you know you'll mostly be hanging around one or a few areas. Kind of an offline version of Yelp or TripAdvisor. Alas the mobile version of the travel guides is a very poor port to a PDF or eBook (when I checked earlier this year). So you have to stick with the paper ones for now.

They charge for their DMV services, but it's pretty small (about $5-$15 added on to the regular DMV fees in my experience). Whether that beats having to wait 3 hours at the DMV depends on how much you make and how much you value your time (and how long the DMV waits are in your state - California sucks but it was near nonexistent in Massachusetts). In addition, I've actually found them more helpful and more knowledgeable than the average DMV staffer. When you ask a question, it seems like half the DMV staffers will tell you an outright wrong answer just to get rid of you. I have had to make multiple trips to the DMV (wasting even more hours of my time and days off) because of that. I'm beginning to wonder if one of their performance review metrics is how many customers per day they service, encouraging them to tell wrong info to make people with complex requests which will take more time go away.

The roadside assistance is actually the one thing I don't think is worth it anymore at AAA. Too many credit cards and insurance companies provide the same thing.

And if they have it in stock, FREE instantaneous shipping. Even if Bezos invents a transporter, he still can't beat that.

Its only free if you live in the walmart, otherwise, it costs you gas and wear and tear on your vehicle. For the typical American, a trip to Walmart costs them $9 and they are too stupid to realize it (Average of at least 46.2 cents per mile times an average of 10 miles). In most cases, ground shipping is cheaper from almost anywhere in the US to almost anywhere in the US.

It also requires that you spend an hour (give or take) round trip to Walmart and back, plus the aggravation of dealing with walmarts long lines and absolutely shitty customer service). So at minimum wage, you can add another $10 to that cost. On top of that, even if amazon isn't cheaper than walmart for any given item, there is someone out there that is.

Good luck using your "spacious" car anywhere reasonably populated.

...my Yukon XL is an $80K truck...

So the price of a new EV comes between $20k for a Leaf (after incentives, etc) to $35k for the Model 3. Your truck is between 2 & 4(!!!) times the price of these vehicles - $45k to $65k more!

According to this site, your truck ranges between 12 & 16 miles to the gallon, so lets take the middle range & say you pay ($2.13/14) $0.15/mile. Engine maintenance seems to hover around $0.10/mile & depreciation reportedly averages 20% per year, or 60% of its total value after 5 years.

EV's maintenance costs are so low that manufacturers are basically giving them guarantees that are so long term I'm not going to even bother trying to calculate their per mile maintenance costs.
An EV typically consumes 20kWh per 100 miles, which with an average US price of $0.12/kWh, runs at $0.02/mile - if you even pay!

You sound like a big driver, so you probably do more, however let's use energy.gov's annual average of 11,244miles/car.

Your Yukon XL costs (11,244*0.25)+(80k*.2) = $18,811 per year, or $62,055 over 5 years - plus the additional $45k-$65k you paid up front. I'll let you do the sums for your real mileage.
The EVs cost $4k-$7k/year in depreciation, plus $225 if you recharge at home.

At 56k miles over 5 years, you're totalling...
Yukon: $107,055-$127,055
EVs: $12,000-$21,000 + up to $1,125 'leccy

And that's the point. You might be prepared to pay half the price of the median US home to finance your car, but I highly doubt you align with that quoted 90% of your fellow Americans.

£90/day is not "cheap", rent that for a week vacation and you've made a monthly car payment...

*sigh*

Would you happier with this argument? That is, that downgrading your car expectations by one notch allows you to buy two $1000 computers per year, except that that one should be enough for you for something like, say, three year just fine? Or are these figures also way off?

The problem with side mirrors is about 80% of drivers are idiots and aim both side mirrors to show you the view behind the car, which is already covered by the rearview mirror.

Given that /. has lots of engineers and scientists among the userbase, I'll be generous and guess that about 50% of slashdotters get it right, and the other 50% are imbeciles who have all three mirrors looking directly behind the car.

When mirrors are properly adjusted, there are no blind spots.

http://www.caranddriver.com/fe...
http://seniordriving.aaa.com/i...
http://www.cheatsheet.com/auto...
http://www.wikihow.com/Set-Rea...

84% of statistics are made up; however, GP is not 100% wrong, just wrong about what cost should not exceed 20% of your income.

According to AAA, an organization more reputable than Bankrate.com, the cost to own and drive a vehicle in the USA today is $8,558 per year. That's a number with a lot of precision but without a lot of accuracy. They have an article up on the web that talks through their assumptions and calculations, though. Fun fact: they note that the cost of owning and driving a car has fallen to a six-year low, so TFA's author can go peddle their papers someplace else.

Back to GP! 5 x $8,558 is $42,790, which is not so far off what actual people actually working actually make. If you're making less you should consider a small sedan, which AAA estimates costs only $6,579 annually. You can do a little better if you buy a good used car. You can't do much better, though, and there is an element of luck around whether you buy a car from a careful owner or a doofus.

Turning on your hazard lights while driving is illegal in most states, and for good reason.

False. Hazard light use is regulated while in motion in many states, but it's only completely banned in rouighly 10 states. (And even in many of them, funeral processions are an exception.)

Some states don't put any regulations on hazard light use (about 1/3), and most of the rest require an "emergency" situation or a "traffic hazard."

Did you know that many makes and models use the exact same lights for your hazard lights as the turn and/or brake lights? And guess which behavior wins out? The hazard lights, of course.

Brake lights on many cars do in fact override the hazard lights.

Do you know when the hazard lights are supposed to be used? When you're stuck on the side of the road or stalled in traffic. Not for "Oh no it's raining hard I want to make sure the people behind me notice the bad weather" or "hey it's really foggy and no one can see me" or even "Hey I know I should be trying to stop right now but I am going to fumble for the hazard lights while I hit the brakes." So please don't teach driverless cars to do the unsafe things that you do.

I agree that those are all bad reasons to use hazard lights. However, most truckers (and a lot of other people) use hazard lights on highways to indicate something different: low speed (often below the posted minimum), which would count as a "traffic hazard" in most states.

I think you may be misunderstanding many people's use of hazard lights in bad weather. You should NOT turn on your hazard lights because you're afraid other cars can't see you. (If that's the case, conditions are bad enough that you probably should pull off the road.) But when weather conditions get bad, often it's unsafe to drive above the minimum posted speed on a highway -- in most states, it's acceptable to use hazards to warn other drivers around you that you are traveling slowly. (Truckers do this all the time when ascending hills and going slow.) If you don't warn other drivers who may be traveling at full highway speed -- even though such a speed is totally unsafe for conditions -- they may not realize how slow you are going until they are too close to brake.

Some states explicitly specify that hazard lights are to be used when traveling at unexpected low speeds. And the Uniform Vehicle Code states clearly:

The driver of any vehicle equipped with vehicular hazard warning lights may activate such lights whenever necessary to warn the operators of following vehicles of the presence of a traffic hazard ahead of the signaling vehicle, or to warn the operators of other vehicles that the signaling vehicle may itself constitute a traffic hazard.

Anyhow, the quoted section of the Uniform Vehicle Code could be interpreted in such a way as to allow behavior in the form GP suggested, i.e., to warn others that a vehicle is coming abruptly to a stop. That will frequently constitute a traffic hazard.

http://exchange.aaa.com/wp-con...

I used AAA which seems like a reasonable source and only calculated based on operating costs while not factor in operating costs. Their operating costs for a medium sedan were $0.1087/mile (gas), $0.052/mile (maintenance), and $0.0111/mile (tires) for a total operating cost of $0.1718/mile multiplied out by 3400 miles is $584.12.

You can also incorporate the fixed annual costs into your per mile figure by estimating the total number of miles you drive year.

Another source I could reference is the IRS and their use their 2016 standard mileage rate of $0.54/mile which incorporates fixed as well as operating costs. By that figure a 3400 mile trip costs $1,836. https://www.irs.gov/uac/newsro...

Only in the SF area would someone be able to afford this... and be dumb enough to leave their gas door open.

Filld charges a delivery fee of up to $5 and then asks the same price per gallon for gas as the least expensive nearby gas station.

For most cars $5 worth of gas will get you atleast 40-60miles. If you're truly out of gas and you need this in an emergency then you should have thought about filling up before you go to the office.

If you joined AAAwith a basic membership you get free emergency fuel delivery as part of your membership. Some levels of membership even include the fuel itself for free and not just the delivery. The basic membership is about $50/year and includes towing, roadside assistance, car battery jumping etc..

Most Auto-Insurance companies also include this emergency roadside service.

That includes everything.

Why do people like you insist on substituting their own prejudices and superstitions for facts?

Gas isn't the biggest cost of the trip.

Take a look at AAA's cost per mile figures. It's $0.45-$0.71 per mile. That makes the trip to LA from SF about $200 by car.

The biggest cost, though, is a human cost. Lives lost, time wasted, increased stress, etc.

$2500 is way low. I don't think that would even cover insurance for many drivers.

I generally use the AAA's research when filing my taxes. They say $8698/year. Their Your Driving Costs brochure is useful, and here's their press release discussing vehicle cost for 2015.

I'm in California where gas is finally getting down to the $3.06/gal range for regular unleaded. Diesel though is still hovering around almost $.60 more per gal.

What burns me is that it isn't just the $.24/gal tax that's the difference but that you can find two Diesel providing stations that have wildly different prices, they could be different by $.20-.30...

Some states provide 85 octane gas/petrol as their regular unleaded (apparently due to outdated studies of the effects of altitude on the combustion of fuel. US octane numbers are measured in AKI (Anti-Knock Index), though. Europe uses RON, which is a different scale. Add 4 or 5 to the US AKI numbers, and you've got an approximate value of how the gas would be rated in Europe.

Car rentals are as low as $30 a day. [Lower even.]

A simple road trip (Long Beach to Las Vegas) is about 280 miles. Easily 300 miles from driveway to hotel valet.

A small sedan is, on average, 30 cents a mile to operate before gas. That includes maintenance, tire, insurance, depreciation - everything. Removing the insurance still leaves you at 23 cents a mile.

A $30 rental that drives 300 miles is 10 cents a mile. Even a $60/day rental is cheaper than driving your own car, on average, even for a short road trip.

http://newsroom.aaa.com/tag/av...

simmer down, internet. I got this one. from AAA website:

so it's not the san diego PD being google haters or anti-technology, they're just enforcing existing laws about monitors viewable to the driver. nothing to see here.

Pah! You must be new here.

simmer down, internet. I got this one. from AAA website:

California It is unlawful to drive a motor vehicle equipped with a television receiver, a video monitor, or a television or video screen, or any other similar means of usually displaying a television broadcast if the receiver is located in the vehicle at any point forward of the back of the driver’s seat.

so it's not the san diego PD being google haters or anti-technology, they're just enforcing existing laws about monitors viewable to the driver. nothing to see here.

There are plenty references in other threads and I have to ask here, is it illegal to have a GPS with a display that tells you where you are going?

simmer down, internet. I got this one. from AAA website:

California
It is unlawful to drive a motor vehicle equipped with a television receiver, a video monitor, or a television or video screen, or any other similar means of usually displaying a television broadcast if the receiver is located in the vehicle at any point forward of the back of the driver’s seat.

so it's not the san diego PD being google haters or anti-technology, they're just enforcing existing laws about monitors viewable to the driver. nothing to see here.

Of course you can choose whether to pay rent. Many people choose the alternative of paying a mortgage. Others live in their parent's basement, or they lower their rent by renting just a room.

You can also choose whether to have children.

You can also choose to live in an area with a lot of employers or with only a few employers. It might cost more to live close to employment centers, but if that lets you get rid of an extra car, you would have an extra $9,122 per year that you could pay towards rent or a mortgage.

There's no such thing as a perfectly free market, but that shouldn't stop us from trying to make the market as efficient and equitable as possible.

Rethink that after informing yourself: http://newsroom.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/YourDrivingCosts2013.pdf

CC.

You have a good point about the IBEW, electrical codes and standards. The code and standards publishing bodies guard their products jealously. And they do chase down people who violate their copyrights aggressively. Sometimes too aggressively, if one assumes 'fair use' and quotes too extensively from their publications.

The NFPA, the publisher of various electrical, safety and fire codes also provides training and (at one time, maybe not anymore) offered a code interpretation service (which may have come dangerously close to providing engineering services without a license). As such, they are in direct competition with other training and engineering service providers. Armed with SOPA, they could pretty much shut down any competing services. Or at least drive them off the 'Net. The IEEE holds a similar position in that many ordinances simply cite their standards in statutes or regulations and expect anyone having to comply with said regulations to cough up $$$ to obtain a copy.

Obligatory bad car analogy: Think of a world where traffic laws just referred to some AAA driving handbook, available only to paying members.

I'm sure that there are many analogous examples in different professions where one quasi-official publisher could effectively control their industry given sufficient ammunition.

AAA Electric Vehicle Roadside Assistance! - I thought this was a much better solution for range anxiety. Although I guess if you know for a fact you're going to exceed your range limit on a long trip, a planned stop somewhere is better than an emergency call.

Dear Canada,

      Please stop ending acronyms with an A. It's confusing. We don't know whether you're saying CMRReh, or whether its real name is CMRRA.

And no, saying CMRRAeh doesn't help. There might, for all we know (not that we care - Ed) be a CMRRAA.

Put it another way, how can you distinguish these guys from these guys?

Some people confuse two of the A's in AAA.

Oh yeah, I get Americans and Automobiles mixed up all the time.

What the hell does the American Automobile Association have to do with this?

Freelancer does work (in fact its installed on my system complete with mods for Starwars ships etc)
Spybot search and destroy also works (Again installed and running on my system)

The Gimp has always been flakey at best under windows. It was unstable on windows XP, or I always had some odd crashes with it..

I have yet to see a game work becuase of the lack of Directplay implementation..

and lets be honest here, how many AAA titles use(d) Directplay

• monthly newsletter, featuring tests of new car models, info about new freeway construction, holiday destinations, "safe driving" tips, and yes, the occasional article about vintage cars.
• free maps and custom-calculated routes (this is quickly becoming redundant due to easy availability of online mapping services and GPS navigators)
• sale of foreign motorway vignettes (so you don't need to queue up at the border to buy them)
• pre-travel checkup
• price-evaluation of used cars
• various car-related knickknacks such as vignette-holders, ice-scrapers, etc.
• ...

How can you say that they hold up well to city driving when you have said in your previous posts that they don't last?

As far as Honda's holding up to the "Average Joe" I think that it has been pretty well proven that at a BARE MINIMUM Hondas can last as long as any domestic auto. I also think that if you have succeeded in going through 3 Hondas with around 100K on each of them it is safe to say that you are no "Average Joe" my friend, city driving or not.

I am fairly skeptical of the outcome of your automobiles. It almost sounds to me like you got tired of Honda taking care of your warranty issues and you traded them in. Yet you keep getting more Hondas because "They hold up well in city driving."

Dude just stick with the F350, oh and by the way... F350 is not short for F350,000 miles. Better join AAA.

And get sued by the American Automobile Association?

Any company ending in AA is evil. Especially if it doesn't want you distributing its works without paying for it. Somehow, this mindset is supposed to make sense.

That's harsh, man! I have nothing against the AAA. Why, just last week they came and changed my tire when I had a flat and was without a spare.

Anyway... did you say anything else, or was that pretty much it? Oh, yeah! Almost forgot:

Slashdot is dead.

Wow! That's pretty big news. But has Netcraft confirmed this???

Don't worry, I'm laughing with you, not at you. No... no, really.

Or is anyone else coming to the conclusion that any organisation named *IA or *AA is, in fact, corrupt and evil?

AAA? MAA?

AAA Internet TripTik is very good and works in Firefox. I think you have to be a member of AAA, though. It allows multiple destinations, etc.

AAA website

I see what GTA:SA has to do with AAA, and maybe Sims 2, but Doom 3 and Unreal Tournament 2004?

Come on now. The RIAA and MPAA sure, but what's the AAA ever done to you? They've always helped me out if my car battery died or if I had a flat tire!

You have to boost another car and get the wires mixed up?
We shouldn't have to. There are ways to keep your battery charged when your car is off. Heres one way to do it. For those with disabilities (including incompetence), there is AAA roadside assistance.

Some guy like me comes along with a localized EMP generator?
Probably die. Pacemaker.

They are only using one of the most widely used bug tracking systems, especially for open source projects.

If I can get a large organization of mostly non-technical people (the National Office, that is, not the entire association -- yet!) to learn and use Bugzilla with little to no pain, then I have faith that a well-dispositioned and patient Slashdot user can certainly figure it out in a few minutes.

Robots that will attend the AAA
(American Automobile Association)...
If robots will really do that - they'll be really social robots!

From AAA Plus Member Benefits, which includes Emergency Roadside Assistance:

Plus Extended Towing up to 100 Miles: When your vehicle cannot be started or driven safely, free towing is provided up to 100 miles from the point where your vehicle is disabled to the destination of your choice. This extended benefit includes one tow per disablement using appropriate equipment to safely transport your vehicle.

Plus Lock & Key Services: This service provides up to $100 in parts and labor coverage for lock and key service needed to gain access to your vehicle and make it operable.

Plus Free Fuel Delivery: A sufficient amount of fuel will be delivered free of charge to enable you to reach the nearest open service station.

Plus Alternative Service Reimbursement: Extends your benefits to include full reimbursement for covered services based on the prevailing commercial rate for the region where the vehicle was disabled, if AAA services was requested by unavailable. Lock and key services will be reimbursed up to $100. To apply for reimbursement, submit an itemized receipt for service to the Member Relations Dept., 2040 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103 within 30 days.

Plus Legal Defense Reimbursement: If you are charged with a motor vehicle violation which you believe is unjust and require an attorney, AAA Plus will reimburse you for your attorney's fees in accordance with the following schedule:

Manslaughter by Automobile
Representation in Primary Court $800
Representation in any Higher Court (an additional) $1,200
Maximum Benefit $2,000

Assault & Battery by Automobile
Representation in Primary Court $200
Representation in any Higher Court (an additional) $300
Maximum Benefit $500

Moving Traffic Violation
Representation in Primary Court $100
Representation in any Higher Court (an additional) $150
Maximum Benefit $250

Plus Free International Guides: AAA Plus Members can obtain our renowned international guidebooks and maps absolutely free. Certain restrictions may apply.

Plus Crime Prevention Reward Plus Free International Guides: AAA Plus offers a reward up to $2,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone who steals your vehicle.

Plus Auto Travel Accident Reimbursement Service: If the vehicle you are driving is disabled in a traffic accident 100 or more miles from home, you will receive up to $700 for car rental, commercial transportation, meals and lodging expense occurring within 72 hours of your accident or within the time it takes for you to return home or to arrive at your final destination, whichever is less.

Plus Extended Extrication Service: This services extends Basic benefits to include a second truck and operator for one hour at the scene of disablement.

---

I believe AAA also sells an emergency cellphone which can contact police/911/AAA.