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The Future of the Car
Gandul writes "Radar, lasers, wireless radio networks and other embedded tech will enable our cars to sense faraway traffic and stop accidents before they happen. But who will be in the driver's seat?"
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What will they be fueled with?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Imagine having your own car that can drive you on its own, and you can sit in the back doing whatever you want, be it getting another hours rest on the way to work, watching a movie on the way home, fooling around, getting drunk, you name it.
The drinking aspect alone would make this a best seller. Can you say "Designated Driver comes standard with this model!"
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My new BMW was built in South Carolina using American and German parts. My Toyota was built in Ohio using American and Japanese parts.
Isn't there some saying about it being better to not say anything and avoid looking stupid than to open your mouth and remove all doubt?
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
. . . by humans at the wheel: acceptable risk. One death caused by a computer at the helm: lawsuit of Biblical proportions.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
This is the outrage/hazard formula. I forget whom developed it, but it basically states that if people become more outraged about something (than the hazard the thing presents) they will be willing to give up basic civil liberties.
Basically, if you fire enough people up about some 'thing', they will take action even if the the 'thing' doesn't pose a direct risk/hazard to them directly.
Kind of like the war in Iraq: scare enough people and they will do _anything_ to prevent it. In the USA for example, a country of 500 million people, the odds of being killed by a terrorist attack is infantesimal. Yet here we are, giving up our basic civil liberties in droves.
If you don't think our [US] society as become over-paranoid, try boarding a mass-transit vehicle while wearing a ski mask. You'll be stopped/searched/seized faster than you can say, "Land of the free".
They'll say they have 'probable cause'; you'll say 'it was cold out' or possibly 'I didn't want security cameras recording my every move'.
Welcome back to 1984!
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
The upper-middle-class (both those that have lots of money and those who have lots of education) will be buying hybrids and other smaller cars that get very good fuel economy.
As the price of gasoline continues to go up, people who are currently driving giant SUVs (here I'm talking about Mommy going a mile to the supermarket in a vehicle that is almost as big as a space shuttle) will sell them off to the lower middle class and working class people.
Then as they break and wear out, the working class people won't repair them. Instead they will strip out the non-functioning systems. Here's a scenario from 2008:
Some light on the dash goes on that says "Engine problem". You take it to the dealer who charges you $80 to plug in an OBD cable and find out what the problem is. They say that it's a bad Bi-Nitrogen Catalytic Emission sensor (don't tell me that this doesn't exist, I know it. This is a scenario). It has an 89 cent microcontroller and a $3 relay in a $2 little plastic box. It costs $369.87 and you have to replace all four if one goes out because there 'calibrated' to each other.
So is the working-class guy going to replace the dohickey? No way. He goes to his brother-in-law's cousin who knows this guy who can take care of these little SUV problems. Year after year the car works less and less. Finally it doesn't pass emissions testing and can't get a registration renewal. Joe Six-Pack just say's the hell with it and drives it anyway, maybe even with a fake license plate year sticker.
One day the cops stop him and run the VIN through the DMV computer. They confiscate the vehicle and tow it. It gets sold at a police auction to a wholesaler who sells it again to an illegal immigrant no questions asked, no papers. It's back out on the street.
This is the real future of the car. Millions and millions of loud, junky, polluting, giant stupid and ugly half-broken SUVs. All driven by guys with no money and serious attitude problems.
Thanks a lot, Detroit. It's nice to know that we can count on you for well-balanced long-term positive solutions to our tranportation needs! How's you stock ratings? Still as junky as the SUVs that you sell?
The future of the car is very bleak given that at the current rate of oil consumption we have enough reserves (optimistically) for 40 years. Even that is irrelevant because oil production will peak over the next few years when demand is soaring in Asia.
Forget about Hydrogen, it's only a means of energy storage not a source. There is no way we could biuld the infrastructure let alone produce enough hydrogen or hydrogen powered vehicles.
Forget about LNG, there's no way we can replace even 5 million barrels of oil equivalent given that natural gas will peak in the next 15 years and North America has peaked already.
Forget about biogas/biodiesel, most of it doesn't even have a positive net energy return.
I would hazard a guess that if we maxed out all the alternative liquid fuels that we could use for air/road transportation we might make up less than 5% of global oil demand. That's a guess, I would be interested in some real numbers.
Don't give me any of that "The markets will automatically react, adjust and allow alternatives to become economically viable" BS. The economic system that we live in depends on growing energy supplies to feed the system so that people can pay the interest on their loans. The energy supply is going to stop growing then start declining and the worlds economies will crash to various degrees: The larger they are, the harder they will fall.
Personally I think hardly anyone will be driving cars in 10 years time.
You must be talking about American cars, since you can still buy well made German cars and well made Asian cars.
You're quite wrong about new cars being worse than the old stuff. It was not so long ago that a car ran for 100,000 miles before it was at the end of its usable life. Well built modern cars are expected to go well over 200,000 miles before needing major repairs. Even Ford Exploders last longer than the old stuff. Not only that but modern cars use much less gas due to better engine design and electronic fuel injection and are many times safer. Perhaps you've heard of airbags and ABS?
Just because you don't know how to use simple modern diagnostic equipment doesn't mean it's useless or made the job any harder either. It's invaluable to be able to plug in and find out that the problem is the oxygen sensor in bank 2, or that there's an overheating condition in the transmission. I'd like to know when your carb lets you know that the power valve is stuck open and has been spewing gas all over for the last few weeks or that your 13.8 AFR isn't optimal for cruising.
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
Son of a bitches told me the transmission was blown and it was going to cost me $800 to have it fixed.
I told them to stick up their ass.
They put the transmission in the trunk and I called a tow truck to bring it home for me. My dad came out to help me with it. The repair cost $24 in parts and took one day.
Sorry to point this out. But the parent poster hasn't given us enough information for us to deduce to whether this repair was truly a huge ripoff.
The repair only cost him $24 in parts, but he didn't specify what the problem actually was. Transmission repairs can be very labor intensive. He didn't say how long the repair took in hours either (and keep in mind this is two people working together). On a front wheel drive, transverse mounted engine, you might find transmission removal to be a simple bolt-off affair, but on an older, rear wheel drive car removing a transmission may mean hoisting an engine or removing major suspension parts.
So to give a more accurate comparision between these two jobs consider:
* The shop is charging probably $60/hour in labor for the repair. The poster had "free" labor (I'm sure beer was involved).
* The shop has various environmental/shop fees it charges. Not to mention state taxes.
* The shop repair undoubtedly has a warranty of some sort (many shops give 1-3 yrs/12-36,000 mi depending on what they're doing).
* The tranny was already off the car by the time the poster started working on it. (I'm sure the shop wanted some reimbursement for the time they spent pulling it).
* The poster had to have his car towed home to work on it - that wasn't free.
Anyway, I was going 30 and she was going about 5mph. Was she a dangerous driver? Yes! Were either of us speeding? NO!
It seems to be the case that there are two types of dangerous drivers. First, the morons that drive recklessly, drink and drive, cut people up, etc. These people tend to *also* drive fast. The second type is a member of the "oblivious masses" that can only see things that are in front of them. To these people mirrors are odd devices that have limited use. Sometimes their motto seems to be "slow is safe!" regardless of the situation. They don't understand road rules, they make bad decisions (not deliberately - they're not reckless in a deliberate sense) and that causes accidents. The lady I hit falls into this second category. She probably thinks she's a "safe" driver because she never goes over the speed limit. Remember, "slow is safe!".
Likewise, we can split safe drivers into two different categories - ones that stick to the speed limit and ones that don't. 60mph at night in the pouring rain may be an appropriate limit at that point in time, but it bears no similarity with that same stretch of road on a Sunday afternoon in dry sunny conditions. The speed limit is a conservative limit, given that it is not practical to have a variable limit across large sections of freeway. Just because you drive the speed limit doesn't in itself make you a safe driver.
Finally, it will always be true that people that drive slower than me are morons, and people that drive faster than me are idiots. :)