What model year was the CVT car? 150k miles is probably 10 years' worth of use unless you drive a ridiculous amount per year. CVT tech has improved in the last 10-20 years I'm sure, especially if Honda is adopting it.
It's not just that. When you're cruising on the highway, you're not shifting, so that part is taken out of the equation. But automatics all have higher highway fuel economy figures than manuals in the same vehicle/engine. It's because of gearing: they make the gears taller for automatics than for manuals, so at highway speeds the manual driver's engine is buzzing at 1000rpm higher. With an auto, you can afford to have the engine speed lower because it's so fast and easy to downshift when needed. They probably don't offer a really tall 6th gear for manual drivers because they'd complain about having to constantly downshift it on hills or for passing, or they'd be lugging their engines.
An "autostick" transmission is just an automatic that lets you override the computer for gear changes. My Mazda3 has one of these. They're extremely common these days. They do shift smoothly, as you'd expect of an automatic.
What you're talking about is a "DSG" transmission. That's really different, and you're right, they do shift extremely quickly but more jerkily than a normal auto. Theoretically, they have better performance and fuel economy than normal autos, since there's no torque converter. They're also pretty rare: only VW-group cars and some Fords have them to my knowledge. There's been a lot of reliability complaints about the Ford ones.
At $236.40, it's still less than half of that mythical $500 Hakko. Hakkos have never been highly expensive. I got my first Hakko (a 936 IIRC) over a decade ago for less than $100 at Fry's.
You need at least 2 temp settings for two dif solder types, you need quick and intuitive airflow manipulation for rework.
There's no "airflow manipulation" on a soldering station. You're thinking of a "SMT rework station", which is something else altogether. A "soldering station" is a soldering iron that's temperature-controlled, and usually has a handy stand with sponge and/or brass mesh for tip cleaning.
Yes, the ~$200 rework stations are indeed Chinese and not terribly high-quality. However, they actually work just fine for hot-air rework in my experience. (The soldering iron side, on the other hand, is complete junk.)
New cars don't even have keys to start, they have keyless push-button starting systems that are integrated with the ECU. I'd like to see you try to start one with push-starting. A 2000 Neon is seriously old; that's 16 years old now, things have changed a lot. I'm not saying it's impossible because I'm not one of the engineers who's worked on these things, but I'm seriously doubting it'd work because of the way these things are tied together now: I'm betting the ECU would simply not continue to run the engine because it never got a signal from the push-button start module directing it to start the engine.
Yes, it's not steer-by-wire, it's just an electric motor bolted onto the steering shaft to provide assist. Otherwise it's a totally standard rack-and-pinion steering system. Remember the old days when small cars didn't even have hydraulic assist, and had completely manual rack-and-pinion steering? Now slap an electric motor onto the steering shaft close to where it connects by U-joint to the rack, and you have a modern EPS system. The whole idea is that you really don't need much (if any) assist at highway speeds, so it doesn't bother wasting power at those times, only at low speeds. Mechanically, the system is pretty simple; I'm sure the only reason they didn't do this before is because the motor control aspect was too difficult and expensive to do before; now with modern power electronics and microcontrollers it's not. Being able to electronically drive a motor in either direction in a very exact manner to precise angular positions, and for a price reasonable for a mass-market car, is actually a pretty new thing. It just wasn't possible 25 years ago, unless you were willing to spend a ton of money and have a huge box full of electronics.
As for feedback, that's probably due to design; they might have provided a bit too much assist or overcompensated for resistance from the wheels or something. Every car's is different of course. A lot of the early EPS systems were criticized for being too numb. The one in my Mazda seems to work really well, but I can see how a Chrysler probably isn't as driver-oriented given the target market.
I'm not saying the differential between the automatic and the manual is all that much these days, it's not, but if you are on the highway the manual is going to be better.
You're 100% wrong, for new cars. Go look at *any* 2015-16 car offered in both manual and automatic and compare the highway fuel economy (and the city economy too, while you're at it). The automatic will *always* beat the manual.
There's a simple reason for this: modern automatics have at least as many speeds as manuals, and their tallest gears are taller than those on the manuals. The manual simply cannot get equivalent fuel economy when it's running the engine 1000rpm higher in 6th gear. And there's a simple reason for this: automatics are close to lugging the engine, but they don't dip low enough to cause problems because they just downshift when they need to, since they can do it in milliseconds. Manual drivers can't, so they make the gear ratios lower so a driver stomping on the gas in 6th when passing on the highway actually gets some throttle response instead of lugging the engine. Also, I think there's an assumption that manual drivers just don't care about fuel economy so they intentionally pick lower ratios (and final-drive ratio) for better performance.
* I own one of these vehicles, and I can attest that the shifter design is awkward and confusing.
* The shifter paddles are another gripe...
* And the design fails are not limited to the shifter.
* All the controls in this vehicle are a user interface disaster.
* After owning mine for more than a year, I still find it awkward
*...the touch screen interface for the infotainment and climate control still befuddles me at some times and infuriates me at others.
* And just to add an extra special touch of irritation,...
* The utter failure of the Jeep's user interface was really pounded home to me when I was loaned a Tesla Model S for a week and a half.
So why exactly did you buy this vehicle? Did you even test-drive it first? Please tell me that at least you were forced into the purchase by your overbearing wife or something (trust me, I know how that is...:-( ).
For emissions purposes cars in Japan can't be driven past around 30,000 miles or so unless you give them a major overhaul, engine rebuild, etc.
I seriously doubt that's the reason. From what I've read, the reason they ship used cars out of Japan is because of the taxation scheme: unlike here in America where you're taxed based on the car's assessed (blue-book) value, making it really cheap to keep an old car if you ignore repair costs, in Japan the tax gets much higher as the car gets older, so it doesn't make financial sense to keep an older car. They might claim that's for emissions purposes, but that's probably a lie; it's probably just to stimulate the economy by getting car-owners to continually buy new cars.
Modern Japanese-made cars easily last well over 100k miles, and pretty easily 200k and up, at least the ones they sell here in the US. 30k is barely broken in: the car is probably making **more** emissions in the first 5k miles than it is at 30k. Modern cars don't even need any real service for the first 100k miles aside from tire rotations and oil changes (and even those are being stretched to 10k-15k miles). It's not like the Japanese carmakers are going to make their engines completely different for the JDM market, so it's not amazing at all that they're still going at 100k miles. They do that here in the US all the time.
I like a manual because they're fun to drive, have better gas-mileage
This is incorrect on modern cars. Automatics, invariably, get better fuel economy than manual-transmission cars.
Before about 10 years ago, you were correct, but not any more.
Also, I seriously doubt you can roll-start a modern manual-transmission-equipped car. Old ones you certainly could, but with modern engine controllers, it's doubtful that's allowed.
or the electrically-assisted power steering (which, contrary to popular belief, works just like traditional power-steering, just with a electric motor-driven pump instead of a belt-driven pump).
Nope, you're thinking of EHPS (electro-hydraulic power steering), which is an electric motor driving a hydraulic pump with otherwise regular hydraulic-assist power steering. These were popular in the 00s to improve fuel economy, but they're mostly gone now I think.
Now they just have electric motors directly driving the steering shaft (EPS: electric power steering) to provide assist. They didn't do this before because the motor drive electronics and control algorithms are a lot more complicated than EHPS, but with modern power electronics and microcontrollers it's not so hard. As a bonus, it's lighter and simpler than EHPS; you don't have to worry about hydraulic leaks, hoses, etc. Also much easier assembly since there's no hoses, just a motor bolted onto the side of the steering shaft.
That's even worse than my Boxster, where they've locked the battery under a trunk lid that requires battery power to open...
I'm sure that's not a big problem. There's probably some terminals where you can attach a battery charger or jumper cables to power the car, which then lets you open the trunk lid.
If your battery is dead, that's not a problem: you just have the car towed to your Porsche dealership and let them apply this procedure to open the trunk lid and then replace the battery with a Genuine Porsche battery.
If you want to be able to just replace the dead battery in a parking lot with one you got at a local Autozone after being driven there by your buddy, you shouldn't have bought a Porsche.
Push-button start isn't so clear-cut. It has real benefits: it keeps you from running the starter for too long, and it keeps you from screwing up and trying to start the engine when it's already running. That last one is easier to do these days because engines have gotten so quiet; someone with poor hearing (like anyone over 50) can easily not hear the engine running and try to re-start it, causing gear grinding. (It doesn't help that a lot of cars with ATs don't have tachometers any more, but you also can't really expect some granny driver to be that astute.)
The push-button start eliminates these problems, with the drawback that it's hard to turn off the engine in an emergency. And also, they're a bit of a pain if you want to just turn on the radio (in my car, you have to keep your foot off the brake when you press the start button to do this; you cycle between stereo-only, and power-to-everything-but-the-engine). In newer cars, they've tried to alleviate the emergency-off problem by making it so that either pressing-and-holding the start button turns it off, or pressing it repeatedly (as someone in a panic would).
What I'd like to see is a switch and a pushbutton: a rotary switch should let you select between "O", "I", and "II", with "O" being off, "I" being radio/infotainment-only, and "II" being full-power and ready to start the engine. Then have a separate momentary pushbutton for starting the engine. When you want to turn off the engine, you turn the rotary knob to "I" or "O". You would want to make the rotary switch hard to accidently bump though, so you don't wind up with a fiasco like what happened to GM. The rotary switch would make it easy to switch off your engine while leaving the stereo on. In my car, doing this requires pressing the start button while leaving the transmission in "drive", which isn't exactly intuitive.
See, that's the way to do it: if you're going to change the operation of something that people are used to and is highly standardized, make it a big change so no one is confused by it, thinking it's like the old way. By making it totally different, the operator is forced to pay attention and learn the new method.
Leave it to Toyota to figure this out, and leave it to stupid Chrysler not to.
They're not exactly "removing mechanical operation", I'm sure they did it to save money because a shift mechanism with multiple points (P, R, N, D) is more expensive to make than this thing which is really just a glorified rocker switch. It probably just uses standard microswitches (one on each side of the center neutral position), the same as in your mouse, and costs a fraction as much as the multi-position shifters.
As for electric steering, that's a BIG improvement. That's not to save money, it's to save fuel. Hydraulic steering was a major gas waster on cars because the engine had to drive the hydraulic pump constantly, even if you weren't steering and were just cruising on the highway and didn't need any assist at all (you don't need assist at higher speeds, only at low speeds). First they went to electro-hydraulic steering, with an electric motor running the hydro pump so you could turn if off or down at higher speeds, and now they've gone full electric with a motor driving the steering shaft directly to give you assist. It's not drive-by-wire: you're still turning the shaft that links to the rack and pinion and turns the wheel, you're just getting an assist from an electric motor bolted to the shaft. It'll probably be a long time before they change to full drive-by-wire for steering because of safety concerns.
As for hand brakes, I can only guess that's some kind of cost-cutting move (probably simpler factory assembly), or maybe to free up space in the cabin. It seems like a bad idea to me because the parking brake doubles as an emergency brake, and keeping it fully mechanical is a good backup mechanism, even if the rear brakes aren't all that powerful.
My 2015 Mazda has electric steering and it's excellent: it has great road feedback, and fuel economy is excellent. However it also has a traditional mechanical parking brake, and also the standard 4-position automatic shifter (not this stupid Chrysler rocker switch thing) with manual override and paddle shifters. Mazda's generally known for their driving dynamics and making drivers' cars, so they'll probably be the last to jump on some of these dumb ideas, if ever.
WTF? I have one of the new Hakko soldering stations, and its UI is admittedly wonky, with only two buttons. You have to keep the instructions handy for setting anything because it's so non-intuitive.
However, if you paid over $500 for one of these things, you're a complete idiot. You can get them for under $100 on Amazon and from various other tool vendors. They're not expensive. It's the Metcals that are expensive, and those don't let you adjust the temperature at all; they just have an on/off button.
The Hakko works well once it's set up. You shouldn't have to adjust temperature in normal operation; the whole point of a temperature-controlled soldering station is to set the tip temperature and leave it, and it adjusts the power as necessary to maintain the temperature.
No, it's completely impossible. The standard layout has been used for decades. They went to widespread usage of having the shifter on the floor in the center console area back in the 80s, and that was just moving the standard layout from the steering wheel where it used to be. You can't sue someone for look-and-feel for something that everyone's been doing for decades.
The reason they did this is likely to save money: the standard AT layout requires a shift lever in the center console that can be shifted, upon pressing a release button, into one of several positions: P, R, N, D (and 1 and 2 and maybe 3 on older cars). On older cars, the lever was connected by cable to the transmission and the position set some hydraulic valves or something (the transmissions used hydraulic "computers" to decide when to shift); on new cars, it's just an input to the transmission control computer. But because it has 4 different positions, lever-actuated, and maybe a couple more (+ and - for manumatics), Chrysler probably figured out they could save money by changing to what's basically just a fancy rocker switch, with a center neutral position and one momentary-actuation position on each side. The momentary positions are probably sensed with simple industry-standard microswitches. This is simpler and cheaper, hardware-wise, than the 4-position shifter, but it's less functional since you can't just change directly into the position you want, you have to go sequentially. But hey, if they can save $2 per car, that's worth it, right?
Maybe, but there are B&M stores that are doing just fine despite Amazon. Home Depot and Lowe's come to mind: no one buys lumber, drywall, etc. on Amazon. A lot of stuff is just as cheap, if not cheaper, at local stores like this, because the local store doesn't have to pay for shipping (or charge the customer extra for it; Amazon builds it into their prices usually).
Electronics has been a big loser for a while for local stores, because electronic items are usually have a very high value-per-weight ratio, but this isn't true of a lot of other things, such as food and Home Depot stuff. I can go to HD and buy some electrical outlets and boxes for dirt cheap; I'm not going to get it cheaper at Amazon. Appliances is probably another thing that makes no sense to buy on the internet: they're somewhat expensive, but they're also bulky and hard to ship (Fedex doesn't deliver refrigerators). You can get that stuff pretty cheap if you buy it locally and ship it yourself.
Clothing is the other thing that doesn't seem to be dying out in B&M stores. People like being able to try things on, feel them, browse through racks, etc. Buying clothes online just sucks IMO. Some people like it, but not that many, and whenever I've looked, the prices are always higher online. It's easy to get clearance deals and coupons in regular stores.
I think there's a good reason that malls are still full of clothing stores like H&M, crappy fast-food restaurants, and cellphone repair shops, while Sears and Radio Shack are going out of business.
But they still run in to reliability issues long before manuals and cost a hell of a lot more to maintain and repair.
Oh bullshit, autos don't need any more maintenance than manuals. You change the fluid once in a blue moon and that's it. Repair costs, sure, *if* there's a problem. On any decent car, the auto lasts the life of the car.
Also, electrics will never render transmissions obsolete.
No, the actual example is how all grocery stores right now lease shelf space to vendors for shit like candy and potato chips and share the information about who buys them. It's using up your precious brain power to filter out what's a bag of doritos from what's a block of cheese, apparently.
Whoosh!
What you're forgetting is that some of the candy and potato chips are laced with poison. That's the critical part of this analogy: did you completely forget the whole debacle about Forbes insisting that viewers turn off their ad-blockers, and then serving up ads with malware?
The new Mazda3 gets that fuel economy and does it with a larger engine, far better performance, and a whole lot more weight, and it won't kill you in a crash unlike your old Tercel. The new Honda Civic also gets over 40mpg. Lots of smaller, cheaper cars do just as well.
You can't compare old cars and new cars anyway; the requirements have changed. New cars are larger and heavier because of crash protection and consumer expectations.
Slashdot Mirror
What model year was the CVT car? 150k miles is probably 10 years' worth of use unless you drive a ridiculous amount per year. CVT tech has improved in the last 10-20 years I'm sure, especially if Honda is adopting it.
I think you meant to say "higher".
And, citation needed.
It's not just that. When you're cruising on the highway, you're not shifting, so that part is taken out of the equation. But automatics all have higher highway fuel economy figures than manuals in the same vehicle/engine. It's because of gearing: they make the gears taller for automatics than for manuals, so at highway speeds the manual driver's engine is buzzing at 1000rpm higher. With an auto, you can afford to have the engine speed lower because it's so fast and easy to downshift when needed. They probably don't offer a really tall 6th gear for manual drivers because they'd complain about having to constantly downshift it on hills or for passing, or they'd be lugging their engines.
An "autostick" transmission is just an automatic that lets you override the computer for gear changes. My Mazda3 has one of these. They're extremely common these days. They do shift smoothly, as you'd expect of an automatic.
What you're talking about is a "DSG" transmission. That's really different, and you're right, they do shift extremely quickly but more jerkily than a normal auto. Theoretically, they have better performance and fuel economy than normal autos, since there's no torque converter. They're also pretty rare: only VW-group cars and some Fords have them to my knowledge. There's been a lot of reliability complaints about the Ford ones.
Oh for fuck's sake, are you really this stupid? Here's a fucking link:
http://www.amazon.com/Hakko-FX...
$96.72. No, it's probably not the most expensive Hakko station. There's also this one:
http://www.amazon.com/AMERICAN...
At $236.40, it's still less than half of that mythical $500 Hakko. Hakkos have never been highly expensive. I got my first Hakko (a 936 IIRC) over a decade ago for less than $100 at Fry's.
You need at least 2 temp settings for two dif solder types, you need quick and intuitive airflow manipulation for rework.
There's no "airflow manipulation" on a soldering station. You're thinking of a "SMT rework station", which is something else altogether. A "soldering station" is a soldering iron that's temperature-controlled, and usually has a handy stand with sponge and/or brass mesh for tip cleaning.
Yes, the ~$200 rework stations are indeed Chinese and not terribly high-quality. However, they actually work just fine for hot-air rework in my experience. (The soldering iron side, on the other hand, is complete junk.)
New cars don't even have keys to start, they have keyless push-button starting systems that are integrated with the ECU. I'd like to see you try to start one with push-starting. A 2000 Neon is seriously old; that's 16 years old now, things have changed a lot. I'm not saying it's impossible because I'm not one of the engineers who's worked on these things, but I'm seriously doubting it'd work because of the way these things are tied together now: I'm betting the ECU would simply not continue to run the engine because it never got a signal from the push-button start module directing it to start the engine.
Yes, it's not steer-by-wire, it's just an electric motor bolted onto the steering shaft to provide assist. Otherwise it's a totally standard rack-and-pinion steering system. Remember the old days when small cars didn't even have hydraulic assist, and had completely manual rack-and-pinion steering? Now slap an electric motor onto the steering shaft close to where it connects by U-joint to the rack, and you have a modern EPS system. The whole idea is that you really don't need much (if any) assist at highway speeds, so it doesn't bother wasting power at those times, only at low speeds. Mechanically, the system is pretty simple; I'm sure the only reason they didn't do this before is because the motor control aspect was too difficult and expensive to do before; now with modern power electronics and microcontrollers it's not. Being able to electronically drive a motor in either direction in a very exact manner to precise angular positions, and for a price reasonable for a mass-market car, is actually a pretty new thing. It just wasn't possible 25 years ago, unless you were willing to spend a ton of money and have a huge box full of electronics.
As for feedback, that's probably due to design; they might have provided a bit too much assist or overcompensated for resistance from the wheels or something. Every car's is different of course. A lot of the early EPS systems were criticized for being too numb. The one in my Mazda seems to work really well, but I can see how a Chrysler probably isn't as driver-oriented given the target market.
I'm not saying the differential between the automatic and the manual is all that much these days, it's not, but if you are on the highway the manual is going to be better.
You're 100% wrong, for new cars. Go look at *any* 2015-16 car offered in both manual and automatic and compare the highway fuel economy (and the city economy too, while you're at it). The automatic will *always* beat the manual.
There's a simple reason for this: modern automatics have at least as many speeds as manuals, and their tallest gears are taller than those on the manuals. The manual simply cannot get equivalent fuel economy when it's running the engine 1000rpm higher in 6th gear. And there's a simple reason for this: automatics are close to lugging the engine, but they don't dip low enough to cause problems because they just downshift when they need to, since they can do it in milliseconds. Manual drivers can't, so they make the gear ratios lower so a driver stomping on the gas in 6th when passing on the highway actually gets some throttle response instead of lugging the engine. Also, I think there's an assumption that manual drivers just don't care about fuel economy so they intentionally pick lower ratios (and final-drive ratio) for better performance.
* I own one of these vehicles, and I can attest that the shifter design is awkward and confusing.
* The shifter paddles are another gripe...
* And the design fails are not limited to the shifter.
* All the controls in this vehicle are a user interface disaster.
* After owning mine for more than a year, I still find it awkward
* ...the touch screen interface for the infotainment and climate control still befuddles me at some times and infuriates me at others.
* And just to add an extra special touch of irritation,...
* The utter failure of the Jeep's user interface was really pounded home to me when I was loaned a Tesla Model S for a week and a half.
So why exactly did you buy this vehicle? Did you even test-drive it first? Please tell me that at least you were forced into the purchase by your overbearing wife or something (trust me, I know how that is... :-( ).
For emissions purposes cars in Japan can't be driven past around 30,000 miles or so unless you give them a major overhaul, engine rebuild, etc.
I seriously doubt that's the reason. From what I've read, the reason they ship used cars out of Japan is because of the taxation scheme: unlike here in America where you're taxed based on the car's assessed (blue-book) value, making it really cheap to keep an old car if you ignore repair costs, in Japan the tax gets much higher as the car gets older, so it doesn't make financial sense to keep an older car. They might claim that's for emissions purposes, but that's probably a lie; it's probably just to stimulate the economy by getting car-owners to continually buy new cars.
Modern Japanese-made cars easily last well over 100k miles, and pretty easily 200k and up, at least the ones they sell here in the US. 30k is barely broken in: the car is probably making **more** emissions in the first 5k miles than it is at 30k. Modern cars don't even need any real service for the first 100k miles aside from tire rotations and oil changes (and even those are being stretched to 10k-15k miles). It's not like the Japanese carmakers are going to make their engines completely different for the JDM market, so it's not amazing at all that they're still going at 100k miles. They do that here in the US all the time.
I like a manual because they're fun to drive, have better gas-mileage
This is incorrect on modern cars. Automatics, invariably, get better fuel economy than manual-transmission cars.
Before about 10 years ago, you were correct, but not any more.
Also, I seriously doubt you can roll-start a modern manual-transmission-equipped car. Old ones you certainly could, but with modern engine controllers, it's doubtful that's allowed.
or the electrically-assisted power steering (which, contrary to popular belief, works just like traditional power-steering, just with a electric motor-driven pump instead of a belt-driven pump).
Nope, you're thinking of EHPS (electro-hydraulic power steering), which is an electric motor driving a hydraulic pump with otherwise regular hydraulic-assist power steering. These were popular in the 00s to improve fuel economy, but they're mostly gone now I think.
Now they just have electric motors directly driving the steering shaft (EPS: electric power steering) to provide assist. They didn't do this before because the motor drive electronics and control algorithms are a lot more complicated than EHPS, but with modern power electronics and microcontrollers it's not so hard. As a bonus, it's lighter and simpler than EHPS; you don't have to worry about hydraulic leaks, hoses, etc. Also much easier assembly since there's no hoses, just a motor bolted onto the side of the steering shaft.
That's even worse than my Boxster, where they've locked the battery under a trunk lid that requires battery power to open...
I'm sure that's not a big problem. There's probably some terminals where you can attach a battery charger or jumper cables to power the car, which then lets you open the trunk lid.
If your battery is dead, that's not a problem: you just have the car towed to your Porsche dealership and let them apply this procedure to open the trunk lid and then replace the battery with a Genuine Porsche battery.
If you want to be able to just replace the dead battery in a parking lot with one you got at a local Autozone after being driven there by your buddy, you shouldn't have bought a Porsche.
Push-button start isn't so clear-cut. It has real benefits: it keeps you from running the starter for too long, and it keeps you from screwing up and trying to start the engine when it's already running. That last one is easier to do these days because engines have gotten so quiet; someone with poor hearing (like anyone over 50) can easily not hear the engine running and try to re-start it, causing gear grinding. (It doesn't help that a lot of cars with ATs don't have tachometers any more, but you also can't really expect some granny driver to be that astute.)
The push-button start eliminates these problems, with the drawback that it's hard to turn off the engine in an emergency. And also, they're a bit of a pain if you want to just turn on the radio (in my car, you have to keep your foot off the brake when you press the start button to do this; you cycle between stereo-only, and power-to-everything-but-the-engine). In newer cars, they've tried to alleviate the emergency-off problem by making it so that either pressing-and-holding the start button turns it off, or pressing it repeatedly (as someone in a panic would).
What I'd like to see is a switch and a pushbutton: a rotary switch should let you select between "O", "I", and "II", with "O" being off, "I" being radio/infotainment-only, and "II" being full-power and ready to start the engine. Then have a separate momentary pushbutton for starting the engine. When you want to turn off the engine, you turn the rotary knob to "I" or "O". You would want to make the rotary switch hard to accidently bump though, so you don't wind up with a fiasco like what happened to GM. The rotary switch would make it easy to switch off your engine while leaving the stereo on. In my car, doing this requires pressing the start button while leaving the transmission in "drive", which isn't exactly intuitive.
See, that's the way to do it: if you're going to change the operation of something that people are used to and is highly standardized, make it a big change so no one is confused by it, thinking it's like the old way. By making it totally different, the operator is forced to pay attention and learn the new method.
Leave it to Toyota to figure this out, and leave it to stupid Chrysler not to.
They're not exactly "removing mechanical operation", I'm sure they did it to save money because a shift mechanism with multiple points (P, R, N, D) is more expensive to make than this thing which is really just a glorified rocker switch. It probably just uses standard microswitches (one on each side of the center neutral position), the same as in your mouse, and costs a fraction as much as the multi-position shifters.
As for electric steering, that's a BIG improvement. That's not to save money, it's to save fuel. Hydraulic steering was a major gas waster on cars because the engine had to drive the hydraulic pump constantly, even if you weren't steering and were just cruising on the highway and didn't need any assist at all (you don't need assist at higher speeds, only at low speeds). First they went to electro-hydraulic steering, with an electric motor running the hydro pump so you could turn if off or down at higher speeds, and now they've gone full electric with a motor driving the steering shaft directly to give you assist. It's not drive-by-wire: you're still turning the shaft that links to the rack and pinion and turns the wheel, you're just getting an assist from an electric motor bolted to the shaft. It'll probably be a long time before they change to full drive-by-wire for steering because of safety concerns.
As for hand brakes, I can only guess that's some kind of cost-cutting move (probably simpler factory assembly), or maybe to free up space in the cabin. It seems like a bad idea to me because the parking brake doubles as an emergency brake, and keeping it fully mechanical is a good backup mechanism, even if the rear brakes aren't all that powerful.
My 2015 Mazda has electric steering and it's excellent: it has great road feedback, and fuel economy is excellent. However it also has a traditional mechanical parking brake, and also the standard 4-position automatic shifter (not this stupid Chrysler rocker switch thing) with manual override and paddle shifters. Mazda's generally known for their driving dynamics and making drivers' cars, so they'll probably be the last to jump on some of these dumb ideas, if ever.
WTF? I have one of the new Hakko soldering stations, and its UI is admittedly wonky, with only two buttons. You have to keep the instructions handy for setting anything because it's so non-intuitive.
However, if you paid over $500 for one of these things, you're a complete idiot. You can get them for under $100 on Amazon and from various other tool vendors. They're not expensive. It's the Metcals that are expensive, and those don't let you adjust the temperature at all; they just have an on/off button.
The Hakko works well once it's set up. You shouldn't have to adjust temperature in normal operation; the whole point of a temperature-controlled soldering station is to set the tip temperature and leave it, and it adjusts the power as necessary to maintain the temperature.
No, it's completely impossible. The standard layout has been used for decades. They went to widespread usage of having the shifter on the floor in the center console area back in the 80s, and that was just moving the standard layout from the steering wheel where it used to be. You can't sue someone for look-and-feel for something that everyone's been doing for decades.
The reason they did this is likely to save money: the standard AT layout requires a shift lever in the center console that can be shifted, upon pressing a release button, into one of several positions: P, R, N, D (and 1 and 2 and maybe 3 on older cars). On older cars, the lever was connected by cable to the transmission and the position set some hydraulic valves or something (the transmissions used hydraulic "computers" to decide when to shift); on new cars, it's just an input to the transmission control computer. But because it has 4 different positions, lever-actuated, and maybe a couple more (+ and - for manumatics), Chrysler probably figured out they could save money by changing to what's basically just a fancy rocker switch, with a center neutral position and one momentary-actuation position on each side. The momentary positions are probably sensed with simple industry-standard microswitches. This is simpler and cheaper, hardware-wise, than the 4-position shifter, but it's less functional since you can't just change directly into the position you want, you have to go sequentially. But hey, if they can save $2 per car, that's worth it, right?
So, you think it's OK for sites to serve malware, and we should just accept our systems being infected with malware?
Nope - they have fundamental problems with reliability.
Honda and Subaru disagree with you. Even the new Civic has a CVT now. Subaru's been using them for years.
Maybe, but there are B&M stores that are doing just fine despite Amazon. Home Depot and Lowe's come to mind: no one buys lumber, drywall, etc. on Amazon. A lot of stuff is just as cheap, if not cheaper, at local stores like this, because the local store doesn't have to pay for shipping (or charge the customer extra for it; Amazon builds it into their prices usually).
Electronics has been a big loser for a while for local stores, because electronic items are usually have a very high value-per-weight ratio, but this isn't true of a lot of other things, such as food and Home Depot stuff. I can go to HD and buy some electrical outlets and boxes for dirt cheap; I'm not going to get it cheaper at Amazon. Appliances is probably another thing that makes no sense to buy on the internet: they're somewhat expensive, but they're also bulky and hard to ship (Fedex doesn't deliver refrigerators). You can get that stuff pretty cheap if you buy it locally and ship it yourself.
Clothing is the other thing that doesn't seem to be dying out in B&M stores. People like being able to try things on, feel them, browse through racks, etc. Buying clothes online just sucks IMO. Some people like it, but not that many, and whenever I've looked, the prices are always higher online. It's easy to get clearance deals and coupons in regular stores.
I think there's a good reason that malls are still full of clothing stores like H&M, crappy fast-food restaurants, and cellphone repair shops, while Sears and Radio Shack are going out of business.
But they still run in to reliability issues long before manuals and cost a hell of a lot more to maintain and repair.
Oh bullshit, autos don't need any more maintenance than manuals. You change the fluid once in a blue moon and that's it. Repair costs, sure, *if* there's a problem. On any decent car, the auto lasts the life of the car.
Also, electrics will never render transmissions obsolete.
Tesla has proven you wrong.
No, the actual example is how all grocery stores right now lease shelf space to vendors for shit like candy and potato chips and share the information about who buys them. It's using up your precious brain power to filter out what's a bag of doritos from what's a block of cheese, apparently.
Whoosh!
What you're forgetting is that some of the candy and potato chips are laced with poison. That's the critical part of this analogy: did you completely forget the whole debacle about Forbes insisting that viewers turn off their ad-blockers, and then serving up ads with malware?
The new Mazda3 gets that fuel economy and does it with a larger engine, far better performance, and a whole lot more weight, and it won't kill you in a crash unlike your old Tercel. The new Honda Civic also gets over 40mpg. Lots of smaller, cheaper cars do just as well.
You can't compare old cars and new cars anyway; the requirements have changed. New cars are larger and heavier because of crash protection and consumer expectations.
They always get better fuel economy. And the good ones have paddle shifters so you can override them when necessary.