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Cars for Tinkerers?
Lots of interesting things on the automotive front. First off, jotap starts us off with this question: "The 'smart' with its auto/semi-auto sequential gearbox, traction control, electronic managed turbo engine, electronic accelerator and clutch control, G force sensors, and more. Some companies sell chips to upgrade the engine power and change the (slow) original gear shifting timings. It would be nice to have a custom control panel on board and change the settings with a click. I think there's no other car with a better price/technology/size ratio then the 'smart', or is there?" The more modifiable they are, the better!
While we are on the subject, let me relate some of the other interesting car news that happened to be lying in the bin. io333 notes: "These direct quotes from this CNN article are self explanatory:
You may not know it, but there's an interesting relationship between VisiCalc and cars! index72 explains: "Ever wonder what happened to Bob Frankston, the inventor of VisiCalc? Ever the computer pioneer, he proposes the creation of a generic programming interface for automobile data displays."
So it sounds like car enthusiasts and tinkerers might be in for some interesting times in the upcoming months. If you guys do manage to come up with something cool, please do share some pictures?
'Since 1996, all new cars sold in the United States have been required to have an emissions-control system called OBD-II...'There are two versions and they really don't cost very much. Unfortunately my car is one of the few listed that this won't work with, but I thought some of you might find it useful." ThatTallGuy sent in the Business 2.0 version of the story, which you can read here.
'...One company, Davis Instruments, has a new device that probes and records what our OBD systems see, and is trying to find a broad market for it....'
'...Called the CarChip, the product is a small recording plug (about the size of a 9-volt battery) that you attach to your car's OBD-II port, which is usually hidden under the dash but easily reachable from the driver's seat. Once installed, the plug records and time-stamps a selection of OBD data (speed, braking events, coolant temperature, and several other, more technical data points) every five seconds. When you remove the CarChip and plug it into your PC, you can download the information and see graphs of what your car's been doing.'
You may not know it, but there's an interesting relationship between VisiCalc and cars! index72 explains: "Ever wonder what happened to Bob Frankston, the inventor of VisiCalc? Ever the computer pioneer, he proposes the creation of a generic programming interface for automobile data displays."
So it sounds like car enthusiasts and tinkerers might be in for some interesting times in the upcoming months. If you guys do manage to come up with something cool, please do share some pictures?
If you can't afford to modify a real car, you can always play with these.
I have to say... there's quite a few of these cars around here (Switzerland), they're the ugliest cars I've ever seen. And I wouldn't want to get driven into by another car while driving one of these... there wouldn't even be pancakes left of the occupier. Might as well drive in a papier maché car...
Daniel
Carpe Diem
1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart,in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Only one person at a time could use the car unless you bought "CarNT," but then you would have to buy more seats.
6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive - but it would only run on five percent of the roads.
7. The oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "general protection fault" warning light.
8. New seats would force everyone to have the same sized butt.
9. The airbag system would ask "are you sure?" before deploying.
10. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, you car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the antenna.
11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the cars performance to diminish by 50 percent or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.
12. Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
13. You'd have to press the "start" button to turn the engine off.
5000$ this guy's a virgin back there too.