Slashdot Mirror
NYC's 19th-Century Horse Carriages Spawn Weird, Truck-Size Electric Car
cartechboy (2660665) writes "Led by Tesla, electric cars are all the rage now. And the idea of a nine-passenger all-electric vehicle sounds good--until you learn that it maxes out at 30 mph, weighs almost four tons, and costs in the six figures. What is this monstrosity? It's the Frankenstein creation of a group of animal-rights advocates, who are proposing it as the replacement for New York City's fabled horse carriages--and who paid $450,000 to have a prototype built. Who's against it? Would you believe Liam Neeson and one of NYC's daily papers? The huge electric car--modeled after an early 1900s open touring car, complete with brass lanterns--is on display this week at the New York Auto Show, and it's certainly attracting its share of attention."
Its either pull a carriage or off to the dog food factory. Ask the horse for its preference.
Have gnu, will travel.
Pick up some Veal, lamb and Ribeyes on the way home tonight.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
OK, the car actually seems like a decent idea, and might work well. But their motivation seems a bit ridiculous.
I've ridden horses. Anyone claiming that riding horses is automatically animal cruelty is quite simply a moron. Fortunately, these people do not seem to be pushing that particular agenda - their claim is that NYC is inhospitable to horses.
I haven't been to NYC, other than driving through, so I can't personally claim either way. However, if NYC is inhospitable enough to qualify as cruelty to horses, then NYC ought to be abandoned as unsafe for human habitation as well. After all, homo sapiens is a species of animal, so shouldn't animal cruelty apply to us as well?
Someone's walking around with an extra $400,000 in their pocket.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
So what happens to the decommissioned horses, should this beast be put into production?
Wouldn't it be vastly cheaper just to modify a Tesla? While probably not as simple as stretching a car, would it be $300,000+ more expensive to just put the old-tymey touring car body on a stretched Tesla frame?
I'm not against the horse-drawn carriages, but I kind of like this car. It's charming. Can we have both?
The can get one of these cars to power an electric grill!
Led by Tesla, electric cars are all the rage now.
The EV market was far from "Led by Tesla."
It sounds like the fanboys who all say that Apple led the tablet market.
Disclosure: I've never been to NYC, and I don't know how these horses are treated. If they're generally treated poorly, then disregard my comments.
That said, it makes me wonder if the animal rights activists have ever met working horses. Working animals are bred for their jobs and they tend to enjoy them. My brother owned a draft horse and there was nothing he liked better than pulling. If pulling teams are animal cruelty, then so is playing fetch with your retriever.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Bunch of idiots. If they are going that route, why not use dog robot developed by Boston Dynamic? See www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2rq7rKgjJQ
All vying with one another until IC pulled ahead in the 1910s. I've seen the famous "steamer" at the Stanley Hotel in Colorado.
I've ridden an electric tour vehicle through the woods at Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge near the Baltimore-Washington Parkway in Maryland. It's a two-piece thing about the size of an 18-wheeler truck+semitrailer. It goes about 5mph, fairly quietly, and carries around 30 people. It was a surplus vehicle left over from some government project.
Captcha: forests
I could see this vehicle as being an alternative to the horse drawn carriages, particularly in the winter. This could also be started gradually as the existing stable of horses is retired.
If these vehicles become more popular than the horses, it's a good thing. Even if it doesn't fully replace the horse drawn carriages, it would be interesting to see which option tourists prefer.
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
Let the "activists" put up the money, buy a fleet of these things and sell rides through the park. We'll see if the tourists pay for the electrics or the real horses.
I'll take the horses.
OK, the car actually seems like a decent idea, and might work well.
A decent idea? They just spent half a million dollars to re-invent the electric golf cart!
There are a dozen of of these things driving around every airport in America.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I never even considered for a moment riding in those horse drawn carts. The idea of sitting close to their behinds was not very appealing and I assumed the animals would smell bad. I have ridden in horse drawn carts in India, but not as fancy tourist thing. They were the taxicabs, (called jatka) of rural India back then. They stank. Many a times I would opt to walk behind, ( a good distance behind), than to ride in those rickety carts, two wheels single axle, never load balanced correctly, with the cabbie calling for passengers to move forward and backward, while the neck of that poor animal provided the fulcrum. Horrible. These animal rights people would be well advised to save those animals first.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Not as bad as the stupid fake cable cars we have in San Francisco.
The fake ones are more dangerous than the real ones. The real ones are limited to 9.5MPH (the cable speed), but the fake ones, on truck chassis, can go at highway speeds. They have sideways facing seats, standees, and no seat belts, which is OK at 9.5MPH but not at 30.
we now live in a world where the car kills more children than anything else, and i don't know about you, but according to the real live property laws in the land where i live, the ONLY allotted space for pedestrians is a strip one and a half meters wide ALONGSIDE the edge of the highway.
there is literally no other legal way to get from one place to another, entirely everywhere else is property.
mad, quite mad - the whole plastic footed metal space bug lot of you.
Liam Neeson has been championing the horse/buggy drivers since Mayor DiBlasio made the elimination of them his first priority. The argument is animal cruelty, but others have shown that the Mayor's biggest supports are real estate developers who want the acreage that the stables currently occupy.
I'd like to see a few animatronic dinosaurs instead of cars. http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Lucky_the_Dinosaur
Jay leno has a large collection of working steam cars, He says they are some of his favorite https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
If we build an intelligent transport system, 30mph for autonomous vehicles is enough. You use it for the last-mile hop, and you use rail for longer distances.
To put it another way, we tend to walk about 3.1 mph, and it's not seen as a problem that our cars don't drive right into our living rooms. We're fine walking the last-hop at what seems like a snail's pace.
If they want to go all Steam Punk they should recreate the Dobles E20 which has a 4 piston steam engine and is nearly silent..http://www.virtualsteamcarmuseum.org/makers/stewart_h_h_steam_stewart_doble_material.html
http://www.hawknest.com/
Who cares what PETA and their ilk spout.
PETA has shown itself over and over to be far beyond any rational thinking so I, like most other people, disregard everything they say. Frankly, I am surprised they garner as much attention as they do.
I think the idea of still having a horses in the midst of a busy city is ridiculous.
That said, the proposed alternative is cheesy. I really struggle to understand the American fixation antique reproductions. It's ironic that in Europe, where cities are much older than NYC, a similar concept would look sleek and futuristic.
I'm also struggling to understand why this thing is so big and heavy. It's at a point where you might as well just take a double-decker tour bus. It's likely also the safer alternative.
I looked at the Pictured in the article ( I know...!! )
It looks like a car. They have just taken away the very thing that attracted people to the ride.
People pay to be taken around the city in a horse drawn carriage because its *not* a motor vehicle. Some would argue its quaint, romantic or just plain neat to experience something a bit different than the status quo of "motor vehicle".
The horse is not suffering. Leave it alone.
You go to some fancy airports. FYI: Electric vehicle doe snot equal golf cart. No more then Porsche = go cart.
This thing is no Porsche. Did you read the article? "a so-called 'geo-fence' would restrict it to 5 mph inside Central Park-- 'thus continuing the tradition of horse-drawn carriages causing traffic congestion in and around midtown,' as New York Intelligencer noted acerbically."
5 MPH? Calling it a golf cart is rather slandering golf carts. Of course, it can sprint at up to 30 MPH (outside Central Park, only)-- but so can golf carts. They're just not allowed to, because they don't have the safety features of a car. But neither does this.
It's a golf cart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You, uh, don't take the bus very often, do you? I haven't seen any public bus, in any city I've lived, with seatbelts, without sideways seats (at least in the back), without standing room, or that stays at less than 30 MPH.
...The Homer.
I have always considered that the substitution of the Internal Combustion Engine for the horse marked a very gloomy passage in the progress of mankind.
(Winston Churchill)
Let's have animal rights activists pull the carriages.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
This is 'merica! Your not going to 9 of us fat ass's in that thing.
From everything I've seen, no one is in actual opposition to the development of said vehicular monstrosity; they are only in opposition to outlawing the horse-drawn carriage. If the liberals were actually "pro-choice" in general, they would simply allow group to run its version to compete with the horses and see which one fairs better.
Getting rid of the carriage horses means getting rid of the horse stables, which are located on the West Side of Manhattan. Tear down the stables, and Mayor DeBlasio can build luxury condos for his rich cronies.
On the other hand, think of the employment opportunities for people operating the coconut shells.
Have gnu, will travel.
Lived in NYC for quite a while..saw the horses every day. A Carriage Ride isn't cheap, and the horses looked healthy...I don't think they were abused, and the load pulled was a cart of tourists on flat ground. I too used them a few times for dates and such. Nope, the real reason is some prime real estate is zoned "stables". Get rid of the horses and a few very, very valuable lots become "residential". Buy up a few bits of "air rights" and the 1% get another choice. Leave the horses...it is a bit of old NY and isn't hurting anyone, including the horses.
I mean only a couple months ago we were all in an uproar about those niggers who just happily sang and just loved to work dem fields. Thanks for your insight Uncle Cy, I'm sure those horses really do love nothing more than working their ass off all day just like dem niggers just can't think of a better time than a day of pickin cotton followed up by a big juicy watermelon and a fresh plucked chicken, fried of course.
Partly because of the uncanny valley.
But mostly because malfunctioning robots going on a rampage is a common scifi-horror trope.
Certain topics really bring the mouthbreathers out of the woodwork. So many here are extrapolating on the whole based on limited personal experiences or even conjecture of whatever they think is "reasonable."
Some people treat their animals well. Some mistreat them anywhere from slightly to egregiously. I could likewise share my own anecdotes of horses who were kept like royalty as well as others who got the tar beat out of them regularly for no fault of their own. How are the carriage horses typically treated in NYC or elsewhere? I guarantee the answer isn't in your ass waiting to be plucked out.
Animal labor isn't inherently cruel nor inherently benign. It's like saying all computer hacking is evil, or that no true hacker would ever use his skills for evil--it's very much dependent on the individual.
good info
thanks
The carriages drive along a crowded jogging paths where motorized vehicles are banned for safety reasons. Allowing this monstrosity where you can't ride a Vespa makes no sense. A reconstruction of a light early electric like a 1902 Wood's Phaeton would have some charm and would be much safer to everyone it encounters in the park.
Yes, but he also said that his Baker Electric is his absolute favorite. And it's an EV with similar-era styling to the POS discussed in this article.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The horse could always choose the glue factory!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I'm sure those 4 ton electric cars will be most dangerous, as most electric vehicles are.... you cannot hear them coming! Not sure why they would want to replaced those horse drawn carriage with those behemoth rides!
true indeed drinky. I just saw it as a good place to insert some leno
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
kids die getting hit, please get OUT from behind the windshield, step away from the weapon, space bug.