No. But my level of responsibility may result in my own death by execution...or, perhaps worse, the rest of my life incarcerated instead of enjoying the liberty that I so proudly speak of.
That said: Have you ever driven on a road where you are going 2 or 3 times faster than any normal traffic?
I once did so, every day, for my morning commute. I turned a 20 minute trip into an 8-minute trip, every morning of every workday, for several months....on rural, 2-lane roads.
There was one jog in the road that was a particular pain in the ass: At first, I'd slow down rather severely for it. Later, I braked to maybe 80 or 90 for it. By the end of that gig, I had a line nailed down that let me sail through that jog without even lifting the throttle.
Drama? None. Special skills required by other drivers encountered? None: In the pavement-colored car I had at that time, chances were good that they never even saw me coming...before I "passed them like they were standing still."
Reaction? They didn't have time to react: By the time they saw me, I was gone.
Please get out there and enjoy your liberty (and your responsibilities) before someone like you who has not ever done so takes it away from you.
In Ohio, I don't need a permit to own and bear a gun.
I need a permit to conceal a gun. Open-carry is, and has been, legal here: It's perfectly legal for me to wander around downtown with an old-Western style gunbelt and a couple of revolvers on my hips, as long as they're not concealed.
Wireless data is not universal with regard to police agencies.
Around here, it is necessary for them to speak into the radio to dispatch. A dispatcher then performs the LEADS request and relays back (again, using their own voice) whatever details seem pertinent.
(Disclaimer: I learned a lot more about how cops operate by working with and around them, than by watching them on TV.)
Thank you for summing up the state of affairs. You've done better than most.:)
Inertial guidance isn't so far-fetched. Ridiculously-small accelerometers are getting mighty good, as are tiny gyroscopes (both of which can be found in many modern smartphones, sipping very little power indeed). Combine both of them with sufficient resolution, and you've got inertial guidance.
Combine that with other signals (constant transmitters of any type, including local TV and radio stations... even Wifi AP broadcasts are well-mapped in populated areas, and such maps can be trivially augmented with accumulated data collected by other drones in-flight) and an altimeter (also included on many new phones) and the system will be quite secure enough to drop off a package of goods in the absence of GPS.
It will be computationally-expensive, but low-power CPUs are increasingly ridiculously fast, and software-defined radios ridiculously easy, and solid-state storage density keeps getting better. A drone could have its own map of how the RF landscape looks, and follow it to the target without any GPS at all, and the energy required to do so would be dwarfed by the energy required to simply keep the thing aloft.
With all of these data inputs and the energy required to survey, triangulate, and use, any intentional jamming ("DOS") will have to be tailored to the specific area of operation: This makes an out-of-the-box solution impossible.
And that jamming device (or devices) will be very easy to locate, given one or more clueful person, a suitable directional antenna, the most modest of spectrum analyzers, and drivers to ferry them about.
And since Amazon's drone proposal is not a wartime mechanism, the findings can be simply reported to LEO to take care of it. It's not the end of the world if someone's diaper delivery winds up on some miscreant's stoop instead, or if the service is down for a few hours while a bunch of jack-booted thugs ("police") find and disable the ridiculously well-honed jamming device.
In summation: Sensors are cheap enough and there is enough RF floating around in the populated areas of the US where drone delivery could ever be a viable option, that low-altitude drone navigation ought to be a very secure system by default, GPS availability or not. You'd have to jam everything at once (a spark gap can do that), but you'll be easy to find.
And detecting GPS falsing is easy, too: "Hmm. GPS says I'm here, but most of the other indications are that I'm way the hell over there. I'll trust the other sensors, since GPS is obviously not working." (The same works in the opposite direction, too.)
You're forgetting something important: Radio is traditionally used for broadcast and does not traditionally suffer the problems of long-range point-to-point Wifi links.
Who said Amazon's drones would be controlled with Wifi, anyway? There's a myriad of other ways of efficient, reliable, low-speed (and inefficient, less reliable, high-speed) wireless technologies.
Remember POCSAG? It's what is (still!) used for 1-way alphanumeric pagers. It's plenty fast enough to tell a swarm of drones where to go, and can have a high-power transmitter in a singular fixed location that can easily cover ten miles of range. A POCSAG receiver can run for weeks or months from a single AA battery: It is perhaps the most ideal solution.
Talking back to home base is a bit more challenging, but with the pervasiveness of cellular data should not be a big deal (and the cellular radio can be turned completely off once the communications are sent).
(Disclaimer: I install and maintain paging terminals. Everyone wants their smartphone to do everything, as well they should, and everyone is rightfully obsessed with Wifi...but there's no better alternative to a pager when lives are on the line (hospitals) or when production problems happen (factories) than a paging terminal with a real power amplifier and a gain antenna, with zero dependance on services provided by the outside world. 10 miles is -easy-. Trivial, even. Add a little bit of well-understood public-key encryption, and gosh: You've got a secure, low-speed wide-area control channel for your army of drones. It can be jammed with intentional interference, but control cannot be taken over without Hard Math.)
(Also: Although it doesn't seem like it these days, one can send an awful lot of Real Data in a short time at 9,600bps.)
Apartments are easy! Just drop it on the communal stoop, wait for someone to steal the package, and send an SMS alert about "successful delivery" some hours later.
Just like it works right now, with UPS, USPS, FedEx [...].
(Speaking of SMS delivery alerts: A decade or more ago, I was getting delivery alerts in near real-time to my (then) fancy-pants alphanumeric pager (via SMTP). I'd greet the driver at the door, and usually by the time I was unboxing the stuff my pager would go off.
What happened to the timeliness of this stuff? It's been terrible for the past few years.)
People often thumb-fuck their phone for a bit, and then hold it to their ear as if to listen to it (voice mail, a phone call, whatever). Their eyes thus freed from the burden of staring into the screen, they may tend to look around, often changing their entire posture and pivoting their whole head...including the phone.
Someone intent on recording/filming/photographing you need only act like any of these people. My own smartphone's camera can be activated screen-off, using the volume buttons on the side, which is the natural spot for my thumb to rest when holding the device to my right ear. To the casual observer, it will appear that I am on a phone call, or waiting on hold. If I want to make it extra obvious that I'm on a (fake) phone call, I can talk to myself while I do this.
High-quality video? Not necessarily, but it should be about as stable as any other head-mounted camera without a viewfinder. Accomplishing this is more about motivation than practice (and with motivation comes practice, so there's that).
Meanwhile, in all cases, post-process video stabilization will help. It is far from perfect, but -is- completely trivial. (Youtube offers this service for free.)
And finally, with Google Glass, I'd have to keep my head facing you the whole time: Folks are trained to ignore the casual and ubiquitous smart phone user, but I'm not sure that we're anywhere near the point where being actively stared at is so easily-overlooked.
(That said, I think you're right in that nobody really cares to film those around them. If I had Google Glass, I wouldn't spend much time filming my surroundings with it. Battery life, slowdowns, storage/network availability, video management, etc etc etc. But a motivated person is more worrisome to me than a casual person.)
...I've already demonstrated the existence of ASC (which is simply BMW's naming for their early "stability control" system) in 1993, not 1994. But you're keen on ignoring facts.
The rest of what you wrote exemplifies the point: With about 10 years of progress in the field and Moore's law at play, still the Carrera GT apparently did not include any such system.
This is not a technological problem, but a design problem: The Carrera GT already had ABS brakes. It is plain to me that they simply didn't want the extra mechanical complication that comes with such systems.
BMW, for instance, was fond of using an extra throttle body inline with the normal cable-operated throttle. This extra throttle existed only to reduce engine output in response to the ASC's decision of something being amiss. Such "extra parts" and intake restrictions may be frowned upon in an allegedly race-ready supercar, being easily trumped by simplicity, weight savings, and getting rid of any superfluous intake restrictions.
Fly-by-wire throttle gets rid of some of these issues. It is unclear to me if the Carerra GT had that, or conventional cable-operated throttle(s).
Furthermore, you understate the utility of even the early BMW system. Even in 1993, it worked rather miraculously. I've repeatably rounded bends on freshly frozen, sun-polished ice at speeds that would've left most other cars in a ditch (or indeed, even the same car with ASC disabled) without any drama other than a bit of grunt from the ABS pump and the odd sensation that the throttle was not entirely under my own control. The car tracked neatly around the corner with my foot on the throttle pedal.
Low speed example? Yes. Fast forward, add about a decade of computing improvements, and doing the same thing in a much lighter, 600HP car is not so daunting: The physics involved don't care what the maximum engine output is, only that it can be reduced.
BMW used DSC (a later version of ASC) in the E39 M5, which had ~400HP at the crank and eight fly-by-wire throttles. Production of this model was finished in 2003.
Later M5s offered more power, and still had stability control.
So, plainly, the opportunity was there for a higher-powered car to have stability control while the Carrera GT was still in the planning stage. Porsche themselves are no stranger to stability control: They call their own system "PSM."
In conclusion: Either Porsche is inept and, you know, just couldn't figure it out (which I doubt: It takes lots of very smart people and truckloads of cash to get a car like that onto the street), or it was a simple design decision to help foster the notion of the car being a stripped-down, race-ready package of awesome ridiculousness. (Please choose only one.)
And in most cases* yaw control can only operate by reducing engine output and selectively applying braking, even if the best answer to an impending slide is more engine output instead of less. (Think throttle lift-induced terminal oversteer: It's only preventable if the throttle is prevented from closing to begin with. This is do-able with electronic throttle, but AFAICT nobody is actually building systems that do it that way.)
It's not the be-all, end-all of computer-assisted driving aids.
*: There may be additional tricks on very high-end cars involving nearly-instantaneous suspension changes, but "most cars" don't have active suspensions.
Yes, there is a certain amount of parasitic loss whenever another pulley is encountered, even if it is accomplishing zero actual work...
But this only helps when the AC is off.
When the AC is running (which, for most people around my part, is "usually": It's either on because summer is hot and humid, or cold/wet enough that the defroster is on), I'm betting that the parasitic loss of the pulley and its clutch are dwarfed by the inherent inefficiencies of converting from mechanical energy to electrical energy and back.
Indeed, I'm going to speculate that the main advantage, on average, of electrically-operated air conditioning in a modified car is the ability to locate the compressor (and all associated plumbing) wherever it is most convenient, instead of it needing to be at the front of the engine.
I was driving a car once that had sudden loss of power steering fluid. It was a very sudden handful.
But then, I was driving at a reasonable speed at the time, so it was really NBD: Mostly, it was just shocking to have cold (~-10F) PS fluid all over my feet. I continued down the road and drove the car like that for a few weeks until I could get it fixed.
If I were being abusive to the car at that particular moment, my story could very well have been different.
That actually less so - there are aftermarket A/C units that use an electric pump instead of a belted one, which almost completely eliminates the engine drag from using it.
Because turning a compressor with an electric motor powered by a belt-driven alternator is always more efficient than turning a compressor with a belt.
Because everyone knows that generating electricity happens for free in a car.
Because when the CGT was developed, traction control/stability control was still in its infancy, and not widely used in vehicles at the time.
Stop making shit up: That's not the reason.
BMW had ASC in cars on the road at least 10 years before the Carrera GT was a thing that existed*. It wasn't an option: It was just a (defeatable) thing that the car came with.
*: I once owned an E36 325i built in 1993 that had ASC, and that car was ridiculously cheap compared to the Porsche in question...and a whole decade older.
Because I'm an American, and I have the right to do what I want without prior restraint AND the responsibility to be punished when I hurt someone else?
It doesn't matter if the car is "unstable" or not, if the driver can't control himself and his right foot.
Anecdotally, I've driven my share of twitchy, torquey, mid-engined, high gear-ratio, non-traction-control-assisted cars on snow and ice: The speeds are lower than a Carrera GT in warm weather, but the dynamics are the same.
It becomes an interesting exercise in self-preservation, and isn't always immediately intuitive: For instance, sometimes the most stable way 'round a banked turn is to be going faster instead of slower.
If way too fast, the car will drift up the banking and into the ditch. If way too slow, the car will drift down the banking and into the other ditch. If at the correct speed, the banking of the road combines with the centripetal force of the turn, and results in neutral handling.
This can mean driving at a reasonably slow speed on the Interstate (to avoid being blown off the road by wind), and accelerating before a curve (to achieve neutral balance), and then gently reducing speed again once the road straightens out (because cross-wind).
Yeah, it's touchy and it's delicate. With a ridiculous amount of torque and a limited-slip diff, it'll get away from you if you're not paying attention.
The answer, then, is to pay attention. It doesn't matter what kind of car it is, or what the speeds or conditions are: If operating the vehicle at the edge of grip, and you lose concentration, Bad Stuff is likely to be in your future.
Because it is designed to be a simple car, and traction control is != simple.
And a car of this caliber, if driven in a fashion typical of how most sane people drive, would be operating so far below its limits that traction control would be unnecessary.
Furthermore, in its purest form, traction control only helps grip on acceleration, and the only actions it can perform is reducing engine output and/or selectively applying braking. It does not help grip when in a four-wheel drift. It does not help grip when braking. It does not help when... [I could go on, but why?].
Naw, I don't think it is a publicity stunt (well, sort of it is: the timing is very suspect).
But honestly, the tech for quadcopters and such as been approaching finished for awhile now. And it seems clear that the FAA must adopt rules for commercial use of "drones" within the not-so-distant future.
So 5 years actually sounds conservative, IF they have an inexpensive method for getting the goods close enough to the recipient that they can do their thing on demand.
And: When in Manhattan, if I want my sandwich to be HOT, no expense spared, I guess I better order it by bike courier instead of the shop's free delivery. Right?
So what I gather from this discourse is that you're a pushover, and believe everything that you hear. Also that you've never heard of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975. And that you are at least as illiterate as you accuse me of being.
If you want to go through life thinking that the mere act of installing software onto hardware automatically and irrevocably voids any warranty on that hardware, without even any statement from the warranter that this is actually the case, then you've chosen your own path.
Slashdot Mirror
Please re-rant after you learn a few things to learn about transmission lines, heating effects, insulators, and common materials.
No. But my level of responsibility may result in my own death by execution...or, perhaps worse, the rest of my life incarcerated instead of enjoying the liberty that I so proudly speak of.
That said: Have you ever driven on a road where you are going 2 or 3 times faster than any normal traffic?
I once did so, every day, for my morning commute. I turned a 20 minute trip into an 8-minute trip, every morning of every workday, for several months....on rural, 2-lane roads.
There was one jog in the road that was a particular pain in the ass: At first, I'd slow down rather severely for it. Later, I braked to maybe 80 or 90 for it. By the end of that gig, I had a line nailed down that let me sail through that jog without even lifting the throttle.
Drama? None. Special skills required by other drivers encountered? None: In the pavement-colored car I had at that time, chances were good that they never even saw me coming...before I "passed them like they were standing still."
Reaction? They didn't have time to react: By the time they saw me, I was gone.
Please get out there and enjoy your liberty (and your responsibilities) before someone like you who has not ever done so takes it away from you.
So don't live in the US -- I'm sure there is a nanny-state that is more to your liking.
Problem solved!
In Ohio, I don't need a permit to own and bear a gun.
I need a permit to conceal a gun. Open-carry is, and has been, legal here: It's perfectly legal for me to wander around downtown with an old-Western style gunbelt and a couple of revolvers on my hips, as long as they're not concealed.
(Or an AR-15, or a shotgun, or......)
Wireless data is not universal with regard to police agencies.
Around here, it is necessary for them to speak into the radio to dispatch. A dispatcher then performs the LEADS request and relays back (again, using their own voice) whatever details seem pertinent.
(Disclaimer: I learned a lot more about how cops operate by working with and around them, than by watching them on TV.)
Thank you for summing up the state of affairs. You've done better than most. :)
Inertial guidance isn't so far-fetched. Ridiculously-small accelerometers are getting mighty good, as are tiny gyroscopes (both of which can be found in many modern smartphones, sipping very little power indeed). Combine both of them with sufficient resolution, and you've got inertial guidance.
Combine that with other signals (constant transmitters of any type, including local TV and radio stations... even Wifi AP broadcasts are well-mapped in populated areas, and such maps can be trivially augmented with accumulated data collected by other drones in-flight) and an altimeter (also included on many new phones) and the system will be quite secure enough to drop off a package of goods in the absence of GPS.
It will be computationally-expensive, but low-power CPUs are increasingly ridiculously fast, and software-defined radios ridiculously easy, and solid-state storage density keeps getting better. A drone could have its own map of how the RF landscape looks, and follow it to the target without any GPS at all, and the energy required to do so would be dwarfed by the energy required to simply keep the thing aloft.
With all of these data inputs and the energy required to survey, triangulate, and use, any intentional jamming ("DOS") will have to be tailored to the specific area of operation: This makes an out-of-the-box solution impossible.
And that jamming device (or devices) will be very easy to locate, given one or more clueful person, a suitable directional antenna, the most modest of spectrum analyzers, and drivers to ferry them about.
And since Amazon's drone proposal is not a wartime mechanism, the findings can be simply reported to LEO to take care of it. It's not the end of the world if someone's diaper delivery winds up on some miscreant's stoop instead, or if the service is down for a few hours while a bunch of jack-booted thugs ("police") find and disable the ridiculously well-honed jamming device.
In summation: Sensors are cheap enough and there is enough RF floating around in the populated areas of the US where drone delivery could ever be a viable option, that low-altitude drone navigation ought to be a very secure system by default, GPS availability or not. You'd have to jam everything at once (a spark gap can do that), but you'll be easy to find.
And detecting GPS falsing is easy, too: "Hmm. GPS says I'm here, but most of the other indications are that I'm way the hell over there. I'll trust the other sensors, since GPS is obviously not working." (The same works in the opposite direction, too.)
You're forgetting something important: Radio is traditionally used for broadcast and does not traditionally suffer the problems of long-range point-to-point Wifi links.
Who said Amazon's drones would be controlled with Wifi, anyway? There's a myriad of other ways of efficient, reliable, low-speed (and inefficient, less reliable, high-speed) wireless technologies.
Remember POCSAG? It's what is (still!) used for 1-way alphanumeric pagers. It's plenty fast enough to tell a swarm of drones where to go, and can have a high-power transmitter in a singular fixed location that can easily cover ten miles of range. A POCSAG receiver can run for weeks or months from a single AA battery: It is perhaps the most ideal solution.
Talking back to home base is a bit more challenging, but with the pervasiveness of cellular data should not be a big deal (and the cellular radio can be turned completely off once the communications are sent).
(Disclaimer: I install and maintain paging terminals. Everyone wants their smartphone to do everything, as well they should, and everyone is rightfully obsessed with Wifi...but there's no better alternative to a pager when lives are on the line (hospitals) or when production problems happen (factories) than a paging terminal with a real power amplifier and a gain antenna, with zero dependance on services provided by the outside world. 10 miles is -easy-. Trivial, even. Add a little bit of well-understood public-key encryption, and gosh: You've got a secure, low-speed wide-area control channel for your army of drones. It can be jammed with intentional interference, but control cannot be taken over without Hard Math.)
(Also: Although it doesn't seem like it these days, one can send an awful lot of Real Data in a short time at 9,600bps.)
Apartments are easy! Just drop it on the communal stoop, wait for someone to steal the package, and send an SMS alert about "successful delivery" some hours later.
Just like it works right now, with UPS, USPS, FedEx [...].
(Speaking of SMS delivery alerts: A decade or more ago, I was getting delivery alerts in near real-time to my (then) fancy-pants alphanumeric pager (via SMTP). I'd greet the driver at the door, and usually by the time I was unboxing the stuff my pager would go off.
What happened to the timeliness of this stuff? It's been terrible for the past few years.)
You're purposefully ignoring the obvious.
People often thumb-fuck their phone for a bit, and then hold it to their ear as if to listen to it (voice mail, a phone call, whatever). Their eyes thus freed from the burden of staring into the screen, they may tend to look around, often changing their entire posture and pivoting their whole head...including the phone.
Someone intent on recording/filming/photographing you need only act like any of these people. My own smartphone's camera can be activated screen-off, using the volume buttons on the side, which is the natural spot for my thumb to rest when holding the device to my right ear. To the casual observer, it will appear that I am on a phone call, or waiting on hold. If I want to make it extra obvious that I'm on a (fake) phone call, I can talk to myself while I do this.
High-quality video? Not necessarily, but it should be about as stable as any other head-mounted camera without a viewfinder. Accomplishing this is more about motivation than practice (and with motivation comes practice, so there's that).
Meanwhile, in all cases, post-process video stabilization will help. It is far from perfect, but -is- completely trivial. (Youtube offers this service for free.)
And finally, with Google Glass, I'd have to keep my head facing you the whole time: Folks are trained to ignore the casual and ubiquitous smart phone user, but I'm not sure that we're anywhere near the point where being actively stared at is so easily-overlooked.
(That said, I think you're right in that nobody really cares to film those around them. If I had Google Glass, I wouldn't spend much time filming my surroundings with it. Battery life, slowdowns, storage/network availability, video management, etc etc etc. But a motivated person is more worrisome to me than a casual person.)
...I've already demonstrated the existence of ASC (which is simply BMW's naming for their early "stability control" system) in 1993, not 1994. But you're keen on ignoring facts.
The rest of what you wrote exemplifies the point: With about 10 years of progress in the field and Moore's law at play, still the Carrera GT apparently did not include any such system.
This is not a technological problem, but a design problem: The Carrera GT already had ABS brakes. It is plain to me that they simply didn't want the extra mechanical complication that comes with such systems.
BMW, for instance, was fond of using an extra throttle body inline with the normal cable-operated throttle. This extra throttle existed only to reduce engine output in response to the ASC's decision of something being amiss. Such "extra parts" and intake restrictions may be frowned upon in an allegedly race-ready supercar, being easily trumped by simplicity, weight savings, and getting rid of any superfluous intake restrictions.
Fly-by-wire throttle gets rid of some of these issues. It is unclear to me if the Carerra GT had that, or conventional cable-operated throttle(s).
Furthermore, you understate the utility of even the early BMW system. Even in 1993, it worked rather miraculously. I've repeatably rounded bends on freshly frozen, sun-polished ice at speeds that would've left most other cars in a ditch (or indeed, even the same car with ASC disabled) without any drama other than a bit of grunt from the ABS pump and the odd sensation that the throttle was not entirely under my own control. The car tracked neatly around the corner with my foot on the throttle pedal.
Low speed example? Yes. Fast forward, add about a decade of computing improvements, and doing the same thing in a much lighter, 600HP car is not so daunting: The physics involved don't care what the maximum engine output is, only that it can be reduced.
BMW used DSC (a later version of ASC) in the E39 M5, which had ~400HP at the crank and eight fly-by-wire throttles. Production of this model was finished in 2003.
Later M5s offered more power, and still had stability control.
So, plainly, the opportunity was there for a higher-powered car to have stability control while the Carrera GT was still in the planning stage. Porsche themselves are no stranger to stability control: They call their own system "PSM."
In conclusion: Either Porsche is inept and, you know, just couldn't figure it out (which I doubt: It takes lots of very smart people and truckloads of cash to get a car like that onto the street), or it was a simple design decision to help foster the notion of the car being a stripped-down, race-ready package of awesome ridiculousness. (Please choose only one.)
So stay in Vancouver and smoke your real Cohibas.
*shrug*
So, uh. Suggestion: Don't live in America if you don't like the way we do things here.
Problem solved!
Then move to the nannystate of your choice and leave us freedom-lovers alone.
I don't want you telling me what to do, any more than you want me telling you what to do.
All very true.
And in most cases* yaw control can only operate by reducing engine output and selectively applying braking, even if the best answer to an impending slide is more engine output instead of less. (Think throttle lift-induced terminal oversteer: It's only preventable if the throttle is prevented from closing to begin with. This is do-able with electronic throttle, but AFAICT nobody is actually building systems that do it that way.)
It's not the be-all, end-all of computer-assisted driving aids.
*: There may be additional tricks on very high-end cars involving nearly-instantaneous suspension changes, but "most cars" don't have active suspensions.
Yes, there is a certain amount of parasitic loss whenever another pulley is encountered, even if it is accomplishing zero actual work...
But this only helps when the AC is off.
When the AC is running (which, for most people around my part, is "usually": It's either on because summer is hot and humid, or cold/wet enough that the defroster is on), I'm betting that the parasitic loss of the pulley and its clutch are dwarfed by the inherent inefficiencies of converting from mechanical energy to electrical energy and back.
Indeed, I'm going to speculate that the main advantage, on average, of electrically-operated air conditioning in a modified car is the ability to locate the compressor (and all associated plumbing) wherever it is most convenient, instead of it needing to be at the front of the engine.
Well, OK. I guess I can sort-of accept that.
I was driving a car once that had sudden loss of power steering fluid. It was a very sudden handful.
But then, I was driving at a reasonable speed at the time, so it was really NBD: Mostly, it was just shocking to have cold (~-10F) PS fluid all over my feet. I continued down the road and drove the car like that for a few weeks until I could get it fixed.
If I were being abusive to the car at that particular moment, my story could very well have been different.
Because turning a compressor with an electric motor powered by a belt-driven alternator is always more efficient than turning a compressor with a belt.
Because everyone knows that generating electricity happens for free in a car.
Right?
Stop making shit up: That's not the reason.
BMW had ASC in cars on the road at least 10 years before the Carrera GT was a thing that existed*. It wasn't an option: It was just a (defeatable) thing that the car came with.
*: I once owned an E36 325i built in 1993 that had ASC, and that car was ridiculously cheap compared to the Porsche in question...and a whole decade older.
Because I'm an American, and I have the right to do what I want without prior restraint AND the responsibility to be punished when I hurt someone else?
(Why don't you love your country?)
It doesn't matter if the car is "unstable" or not, if the driver can't control himself and his right foot.
Anecdotally, I've driven my share of twitchy, torquey, mid-engined, high gear-ratio, non-traction-control-assisted cars on snow and ice: The speeds are lower than a Carrera GT in warm weather, but the dynamics are the same.
It becomes an interesting exercise in self-preservation, and isn't always immediately intuitive: For instance, sometimes the most stable way 'round a banked turn is to be going faster instead of slower.
If way too fast, the car will drift up the banking and into the ditch. If way too slow, the car will drift down the banking and into the other ditch. If at the correct speed, the banking of the road combines with the centripetal force of the turn, and results in neutral handling.
This can mean driving at a reasonably slow speed on the Interstate (to avoid being blown off the road by wind), and accelerating before a curve (to achieve neutral balance), and then gently reducing speed again once the road straightens out (because cross-wind).
Yeah, it's touchy and it's delicate. With a ridiculous amount of torque and a limited-slip diff, it'll get away from you if you're not paying attention.
The answer, then, is to pay attention. It doesn't matter what kind of car it is, or what the speeds or conditions are: If operating the vehicle at the edge of grip, and you lose concentration, Bad Stuff is likely to be in your future.
Because it is designed to be a simple car, and traction control is != simple.
And a car of this caliber, if driven in a fashion typical of how most sane people drive, would be operating so far below its limits that traction control would be unnecessary.
Furthermore, in its purest form, traction control only helps grip on acceleration, and the only actions it can perform is reducing engine output and/or selectively applying braking. It does not help grip when in a four-wheel drift. It does not help grip when braking. It does not help when ... [I could go on, but why?].
No. The MMWA requires the manufacturer to prove, on an individual basis, that the fuzzy dice caused the problem.
You're an idiot. I'm sorry that you choose not to enjoy as many rights as you actually have.
Enjoy your fellow sheep.
Naw, I don't think it is a publicity stunt (well, sort of it is: the timing is very suspect).
But honestly, the tech for quadcopters and such as been approaching finished for awhile now. And it seems clear that the FAA must adopt rules for commercial use of "drones" within the not-so-distant future.
So 5 years actually sounds conservative, IF they have an inexpensive method for getting the goods close enough to the recipient that they can do their thing on demand.
And: When in Manhattan, if I want my sandwich to be HOT, no expense spared, I guess I better order it by bike courier instead of the shop's free delivery. Right?
Ok.
So what I gather from this discourse is that you're a pushover, and believe everything that you hear. Also that you've never heard of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975. And that you are at least as illiterate as you accuse me of being.
If you want to go through life thinking that the mere act of installing software onto hardware automatically and irrevocably voids any warranty on that hardware, without even any statement from the warranter that this is actually the case, then you've chosen your own path.
Good luck! (And get off my fucking lawn.)
Ok, smart guy: Show me the line that says that poking the software automatically voids the warranty.
Otherwise, get the fuck off of my lawn.