Slashdot Mirror

You could design the most perfect self driving car, but it might not be the right time in the market for it, or it could be too expensive at the time. Kodak designed the first digital camera, but it was also at least 5 years too early. Just because someone can do something doesn't mean it's the right time to do it.

If the solution was strictly technological, like somebody just needs to come up with a better sensor or a computer with enough GFLOPs I might agree. But every indication is that learning to drive is full of unspoken rules and subtleties, where the only way is to iron out poor behavior bit by bit. Google is still massively in the lead on disengagements and they keep simulating and tweaking it, I don't think a competitor can just come in from the sidelines and overtake that. Yes Tesla can pretend they can do it with optical instead of LIDAR because that's how humans do it, but the wetware processing that is extremely complex and fuzzy. I'm thinking we could have a lot of car brands still but I expect there'll be no more than 2-3 companies building the actual driving logic when the dust settles. And if Waymo is first, they'll be one of them.

.... As basically every other car maker with diesel cars (except for the the Japanese, it seems) had this fraud-device in their diesel cars ...

The Japanese have been cheating on emissions too:

https://www.nextgreencar.com/news/8471/which-tests-show-almost-80-of-diesels-exceed-emissions-limits/

'The average NOx figure from Which?'s diesel tests is 0.27 g/km, more than three times the official limit, and the worst results from its testing programme come from the Subaru Forester. This produces 2.0 g/km NOx when subjected to cycles based on real-world testing according to Which?, 25 times the official limit.'

Subaru has admitted to it:

https://www.caradvice.com.au/643962/subaru-manipulating-fuel-and-emissions-data/

'Subaru has confirmed around 900 vehicles produced between December 2012 and November 2017 have had "certain measurements" like fuel economy and emissions data "inappropriately altered" following an internal investigation.

In December last year, the company was ordered by the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) to conduct an investigation after it identified nonconforming final vehicle inspections at the company's Gunma and Yajima manufacturing facilities.'

BAIC EC 180 is not just the best selling EV in China, it is in the world. And it has an NEDC range rating of 160 km. Of course, that's without AC or heat running. Try that for 10 months out of the year in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, or Shenzhen. Real world? Expect 50 to 80 km before recharge time. And that's for a vehicle about the size of a Chevy Spark, with a top speed of 100 kph. This is from experience, having actually driven them (yes, I have a Chinese driver's license, earned whilst living there in the 2008 to 2012 timeframe) and used one regularly over the last year (factory car).

The abundant test drive reviews disagree with you.

Motor Trend - Exclusive: Tesla Model 3 First Drive Review - Motor Trend

Top Gear- Tesla Model 3 review: first drive of Elon Musk's affordable EV

The Verge - A closer look at Tesla Model 3's spartan interior

The Verge - Tesla Model 3 first drive: this is the car that Elon Musk promised

Bloomberg - Tesla’s Model 3 Arrives With a Surprise 310-Mile Range

Bloomberg[/COLOR] - Driving Tesla’s Model 3 Changes Everything

Car and Driver - 2018 Tesla Model 3: Everything We Know | Feature | Car and Driver

CNET - Tesla Model 3 is well worth the hype

Car Advice - Tesla Model 3 quick drive review | CarAdvice

Fortune - Here’s What Reviewers Think About Tesla’s Model 3 So Far

Ars Technica - All the things the Internet hates about the Tesla Model 3 have me excited

Mashable - Driving a Tesla Model 3 is pretty damn awesome

TechCrunch - Your smartphone is the key for the Tesla Model 3

But hey, feel free to live in your own little world and deny reality to your heart's content.

Coming from the automotive industry, this is a bit of a cop-out. We have razor thin margins and enormous complexity. And, while modern automobile electronics like infotainment and navigation systems are somewhat poorly designed from a UI/UX perspective (a problem the industry seems to be working on from my time in Ford's research division), the vehicle as a whole cannot suffer massive problems on launch.

Just because cars are expensive, don't think that automakers make a lot on each car. You need volume to make real money, just like computer games. This article suggests that VW only makes about $500 Australian on each car and this quora answer estimates a similar figure for Toyota. Car margins are very small, much smaller than computer games, even indie games.

So, just like video games, automobiles have tremendous complexity, tremendous software complexity (even in the vital and semi-vital control systems in the vehicle), thin margins (much thinner than computer games), high volumes with enormous amounts of in-field hours upon launch (this adds to the likelihood that rare bugs are encountered) and high pressure from competitors. Relatively rare bugs, which are the bane of the auto industry are not the issue here. The issue is widespread malfunctioning. It is a total cop out to say that game studios cannot deliver a better experience on average on launch, especially big ones (I know we're talking about an indie dev game, but your comment is about all AAA games). The game studios deliver a shit experience on launch because they know people will still buy it. If the consumers didn't accept this, AAA games would not launch this way. Because the whole industry sees that consumers still buy buggy products from their competitors and time (to launch) is money, everyone has to deliver a buggy product prematurely to compete. Everyone working in software deals with many orders of magnitude more complexity than 25+ years ago. It's because consumers accept this "move fast and break things" crap that it keeps happening. For garbage like Facebook, I really couldn't care less, so "move fast and break things" does have it's place, but I think most of us would agree that it's place is not in video game launches.

Video games could and should deliver a smoother launch experience, even the most complex AAA, online games. They deliver a terrible launch experience because the consumers tolerate it.

You turn the car off and leave it in gear.

unless the car has an automatic transmission.

Yep. Last I looked over a decade ago, only 40% of cars sold in the USA were even offered with a manual gearbox; Today, that number is even less. It's not just the USA that isn't buying them, either. Now that DSGs are so phenomenally good, there's really no reason for anything else to exist except in the very cheapest of cars — and they're "all" getting CVTs — nearly all, anyhow. But loads of cars still have traditional slush boxes, because they're the cheapest way to get a lot of torque to the wheels, and we love torque.

And of course, once they see the pedestrians they can turn their high beams down. You know, not turn off the headlights. Not drive with just their parking lights, simply dim the high beams. It's all perfectly safe. It is how the car was designed to be operated. And as a bonus it is courteous to your neighbors. I recommend trying it some day.

Or you could leave all the work to your car: http://www.caradvice.com.au/257871/audi-matrix-led-headlights/

While Audi introduced it on concept cars, BMW are busy with the series production

Of course DIN is still the standard, but there's few cars which have a DIN dashboard.

Not sure of many British brands, but tell me where the DIN cage is in the following dashboards:

Vauxhall Astra
Range Rover
Mini Cooper
MG MG6

And that's an exhaustive list of my British car manufacturers knowledge. None of them have DIN mounted radios in their current dashboards. Adding a square radio to those dashes would really ruin the car without some major dash redesign.

Expected replacement? What are you smoking?

I'll grant you this: I expect *somebody* will need to replace their hybrid battery at 10 to 12 years. Is that an average time? Certainly not. For examples to the contrary, how about 350,000 and 500,000 km before battery replacement on some Australian taxis (the only two battery replacements in the country as of the date of the article)? And of course, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", so here's some statistics: The first-generation Prius had a failure rate of about 1% post-warranty; they were sold in the US from 2001-2003. The second-gen Prius had a failure rate of 0.003%, probably helped by improved design after Toyota's experience on the 1st gen, and it being a newer car. Similarly, Honda reports a failure rate of 0.2%.

My hybrid has a 10-year/150,000-mile warranty on the battery. You can bet that if the failure rate were above a couple percent by 10 years, they wouldn't be able to provide that warranty economically.

The battery is not like your electric razor or computer, where the battery dies after a few years. They put huge amounts of engineering and testing into these things; for example, the Prius only uses about 40% of its total battery capacity - when it says "full" on the gauge, the battery is 80% charged. When it says "empty", the battery is 40% charged. By doing this, they get hundreds of thousands or millions of cycles on the battery during its lifetime. And most of the time, a "charge cycle" is just a few percent of the battery's full capacity (e.g., accelerating from a stoplight discharges it a percent or two, then stopping several blocks later puts a percent or two back in).

Yes, a few unlucky people will have to replace their battery. But the total maintenance cost is about the same as any other vehicle. In fact, my regular maintenance is quite a bit lower than most; I change my oil once a year/10k miles. Every three years/30k, I replace the air filter. And at 10 years/100k, the coolant needs to be replaced. That's pretty much it; everything else is just the "visually inspect" or "adjust fluid levels if necessary" type stuff.

I warned about this previously. For some reason the big study I submitted that blasted electric cars as being unsustainable and economically nonviable never made it into the main slashdot news. Some people even suggested an agenda behind it on the part of me or the publishers of the study. Let me assure you I am a environment hugging hippy and if electric cars had a real potential for saving the planet I would be right behind them. But the facts are that electric cars will only be viable when we have an excess of electrical power generation. Currently we have the opposite, and the opposition to nuclear power plants (which I also agree with) is yet another giant nail in the coffin of electric cars. The idea that we simply stop spending the trillions of kwh of energy that we currently get from petrol and diesel and fill the gap with electricity generation or corn ethanol is a fantasy. No amount of funding will produce an EV which defies physics.

Hands free is not good enough. The major problem is not that you're holding the phone, it's that your mind is on the call instead of the road - you're not distracted because you're holding something with your hand, you're distracted because you're concentrating on the call, and for a lot of reasons it's more distracting than merely having someone in the car that you're talking to.

Source: Study: More Dangerous to Drive on Cell Phone than Chat with Passenger

Before you say you're capable of multi-tasking, see what's currently the first post (scores of 1+): Here come the "But not special *ME*!" posts.

Source: Hands-free phones no safer than hand-held: US study

Honesly, what's worse - holding a beverage cup in your hand and taking the occasional sip, or talking to someone on the phone, hands free or not? It's the mental distraction, not the physical one... you need to pay attention to the road, and hands free doesn't help you do that.

More stuff on Prius battery ranges here.

The only two recorded Prius battery changes in Australia (at the time of the article) where at 350,000km (220,000mi) and 500,000km (310,000mi). That's pretty good mileage and they're thrashing these things about in Taxis clocking up around 200,000km (125,000mi) per annum.