My air conditioner runs even when I'm heating the car. By using the air conditioner to remove moisture from the air, fogged windows are no longer a problem. The air conditioner is not just for making the air cool. It's for conditioning the air (uh... duh?).
Well, I hope that the A/C is controlled by some sort of humidity sensor and doesn't run whenever the climate control is turned on. There's no sense in wasting energy trying to remove moisture from air that's already dry.
If we're going to have climate control, let's do it right:
* One knob for desired interior temperature, with an "OFF" position that blows in outside air that's unchanged in temperature
* Another knob for humidity. The A/C will run only when the interior needs to be cooled to achieve the temperature setpoint, or when the interior air is too humid. If the humidity knob is set to max. humidity, the A/C should only run to cool the car and not to dehumidify.
* The usual fan switch and air direction buttons
Of course, such a system would be too wierd for most proles, so no maker will build it.
If you did get a loan, you're in the same boat as everyone else, just paying lower payments for, well, a substandard car in comparison.
No loan, of course.
I wouldn't consider the car substandard, honestly. The interior and seats are extremely comfortable. It's very good in winter, and holds the road well due to some mild suspension upgrades that I've done. It gets about 30 mpg on long trips. It's big enough to fit 5 people and their skiing stuff comfortably - it can also carry a 4' x 8' sheet of plywood without difficulty. It's rear wheel driven, which makes it slightly more interesting to drive - you can deliberately make it drift on a wet road:)
I was looking for a car of that type at the time, and I got more than I expected out of this car. A "substandard" car for me would be an econobox like a Honda Civic or Satan^W Saturn:)
Afterall getting lost and ending up in a bad neighborhood can really ruin your day.
I've been lost in bad neighborhoods, not to mention driving through one regularly when I visit my sister down in DC. No one has ever bothered me - in fact, people have been much more helpful a.f.a. directions than suburbanites usually are. There's a sizable segment of suBURPanites that runs and cringes whenever someone in a car slows down and opens their window. BTW - I was carjacked once, in a suburban gas station:)
And lets face it, sitting in a car is boring, and a DVD player keeps the little brats quiet and entertained.
Would it be so bad if you talked to your "little brats" or had your spouse do so when he/she was in the car with you? The spouse could even read something to them or play games. Besides, what's wrong with just listening to music instead of having constant canned visual stimuli? Listening to music on the radio can be very worthwhile.
If I have kids, I'm raising them in a city or small town where they will be able to walk to interesting places rather than being stuck in a glass-and-steel rolling bubble.
BTW don't foget, WinCE shares absolutely zero code with other versions of Windows.
The one experience that I've had with WinCE was on a palmtop @work connected to a label printer. The thing kept crashing and/or not recognizing the printer. We finally connected the printer to an old laptop running Win2k, and all was good. Maybe my opinion is biased by a bad experience, though.
That being said, I think that cars' controls should be as simple as possible, with large buttons that can be easily found without staring at the dash. Only a few buttons are really needed on a radio - adjust volume, balance, equalizer presets, tuning, mode, and CD/MP3 control (skip +/-, album +/-, etc). Heater and A/C controls have become needlessly complex also - give me the controls on an older car any day (one lever for fan speed, one for temp, a third one or a couple buttons for air direction).
The one thing that I would appreciate is a computerized dashboard that could show readouts of various engine sensors in real time, and show diagnostic data, ideally in plain English. e.g. rather than Code P0014, it should say, "Left Cylinder Bank Oxygen Sensor Erroneous Reading". The dashboard should also be customizable. Certain things like speed and RPM should always show up, but you should have a choice of what other gauges appear there - temperature, outside temperature, trip computer, oil pressure, voltage, etc.. You should also have an easy interface to allow for changes to the car's behavior. For example, you should be able to turn automatic locking at 5mph on or off, according to what you prefer, and without paying a deale^W $tealer to do it for you. Settings to do with emissions should of course be hardcoded and not user-changable.
Ever try to get a car when you have no credit cards, and have the smallest spot on your credit rating? Well, if you get the car, you'll be paying out in that added interest because you didn't get the loan from the best loan officer.
Last year, I bought a Volvo 240 wagon with 145,000 miles on it on EBay for $1200. A year and 1/2 later it's still running with 172,000 miles on it. Some repairs were needed, like the rear suspension bearings, a new timing belt, having all of the fluids changed, and a new heater fan. Other than that, the car runs amazingly well - everything works except that A/C which I haven't bothered to fix because I don't really need it here in the Northeast.
For $2000-3000 I could have bought a car with lower mileage and none of those initial problems. This is in fact what I'll do in a few months, since I'm now looking for a Mazda Miata convertible. Oh, and I should be able to resell the Volvo on EBay for $1000 or so.
Having to pay $200/month towards a new car really sucks, and there are alternatives for those who can't (or don't want to) afford a new car. Did I mention that I don't have to keep full insurance coverage on the car and only need to pay for liability?
keeping your medical history on a chip could definately help in emergencys and such involving people with various conditions.
Personally, I'd take the 0.01% higher risk of dying from wrong medical treatment over giving people (government and big corps.) the ability to track me constantly.
I don't know if this is true but I have gotten the impresion that americans favor giving birth in hospital under sedation.
Less and less true, but in general, yeah. If we start tagging babies at birth, I'd suspect that mothers' attitudes would change very quickly.
EXCEPT THIS CAN'T BE REMOVED.
Wanna bet? It emits RF, which gives away its general location, and it's visible on an X-ray. It'd require invasive surgery to remove, but, hey, I'd deal with the pain if I had one of those things in me!
Keep in mind that we've had the technology to modify people's bodies to make them more easily identifiable for a few decades now. Just tattoo a small bar code on an easily readable place. That wouldn't have worked due to people's aversion to that sort of thing - it's unlikely that implantable RFID chips will be welcomed, either.
Let's see:
Christians = "mark of the beast!"
Jews = "too much like the camps!" and besides "we're made in the image of God, who are we to alter that!"
Muslims = "track us in the current political climate in the US? No thanks!"
Libertarians = "guns and rope are still legal, and there are many lampposts along Pennsylvania Ave."
Bill Clinton = "what! There'll be an electronic record of who enters my bedroom?!?"
it's pretty damn easy to say that hindsight isn't it?
Do you consider national governments cooperating to shut down your website a regular problem?
If I were Indymedia, I would worry quite a bit about having my servers shut down, since Indymedia tends to needle and expose the misdeeds of governments.
do you honestly think they are going to get new hosting providers every (6 months?) when forign relations with country X change?
No. I wasn't talking about redundent hosting, just backing data up.
Why did Indymedia place all of their eggs in one basket, so to speak, and store their data only at Rackspace? The data at Rackspace should have been backed up off site at least once every 24 hours - remote backups take only a small fraction of the bandwidth of actually hosting a site.
Take a look at the Smart Roadster
Pretty nice, by the look of it, although I'm not a big fan of sequential clutchless manual gearboxes - I prefer to do my own clutching. Yes, people will say, I good SMG will outperform a true manual, but I personally prefer the control of a true manual even if it isn't faster. Besides, even if the Roadster is imported into the US in the near future, it will still be at least $12,000 new, but a used 1992 Miata can be bought for $3000 or so, and I'm not prepared to spend over 10 grand on a car just yet - finance payments suck.
You do realize that you have reduced friction with the road surface when riding on the white painted divider lines, don't you?
Yep - the simple solution to that problem is to not ride on the lines. The lines are not more than a few inches wide, and you can usually ride slightly to one side or the other of them.
Be safer, ride on the sidewalks - that's what the "handicapped/wheelchair" ramps at the curb are really for
Heh.;-P
If cars like these were made affordable (perhaps in the 5-8k range) I could see them becoming very popular with students, and people who really don't need a car except on rare occasions.
Where I went to school, most people didn't have cars, since the college campus was small enough to be able to get around on foot or by bicycle, and there were supermarkets and other stores within walking/bikeing distance of campus. If you wanted to go to the city (Philly), there was a train line that ran every hour, and a tram line further away that ran more often and until later at night. On the amount that I was making as a student, I don't think that I could have afforded a $13,000 new car unless I had some very wealthy parents.
>> and can't be used to "split" between lanes of traffic.
> Which is patently unsafe and, at least in NYC, illegal.
Illegal, yes, but most cops look the other way. In fact, I've been waved along to follow a motor officer before when he was lane splitting (that was in NJ, though).
As far as lane splitting being patently unsafe, I disagree. If you split to the head of a line at a light, you're less likely to be rear-ended by someone who "didn't see you." If anything, lane splitting is safer. That being said, it should only be done as low speeds (
-b.
Too small, too silly, girly looking bright colors. Just not a macho car.
I've heard people spout off the same set of "issues" about two of the best-handling inexpensive sports cars that you can get in the US, namely the Toyota MR-2 and Mazda Miata. Just goes to show that some people are clueless, or that maybe I just don't get the "macho car" thing. That being said, I'd take an MR-2 or Miata over a Smart car any day of the week (both are more fun to drive).
Plenty of reasons to that one is that average age of vehicule is lower and that periodic mandatory inspection keeps moving piles of rust out of the roads.
Some states do have mandatory safety (as well as pollution) inspections. Probably not as strict as in Europe, but at least in NJ, they check the brakes, suspension, lights, horn, steering, tires, exhaust, etc.. They also can fail a car for structural rust.
We really do have cars, vans and trucks just as big as the US and in fact they regularly travel much faster than in the US (E.g. 70Mph national speed limit in the UK, 100Kph in most of mainland Europe,
You mean, more like 130kph on motorways in mainland Europe (at least in France and Austria, last time I was there)? US speeds are slower, but not that much slower - 55 mph is gone, all states have changed to 65 mph or more, and the 65 mph limits are routinely disregarded. Traffic on the NJ Turnpike seems to move at 80-90 mph in good weather.
States that are mostly rural have even higher speed limits - generally 75 mph. Until recently, Montana had no speed limit, and motorists were instructed to drive at a "reasonable and prudent" speed. Unfortunately, that law was struck down by a state court as being too vague, since the offense of speeding wasn't adequately defined, so Montana set a limit of 75 mph.
-b.
It's about time a very small 4 wheeled city vehicle for short distance commuting was released into the mainstream in the US . ..
A 3-wheeled vehicle might actually be better. Make it only 1 seat wide, and have the driver and passenger sit behind one another. The whole thing should be no more than 3' wide and 4' high, and should incorporate a tilting system (like a motorcycle) to increase stability when taking corners. Unlike the Smart car, these narrow vehicles could actually share lanes and be able to pass stopped vehicles easily, thus alleviating traffic congestion.
Best of all, in many US states, a 3-wheeled vehicle can be registered as a motorcycle. As long as the engine capacity is kept below 750cc or so, insurance might actually be cheaper than for a car.
-b.
Still safer than a motorcycle (yes, I ride one) and better weather protection, too. Listen: no one is putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to buy a Smart car. I'd like to think that people are smart enough to choose the balance of safety and utility that's right for them.
That being said, I wouldn't buy a Smart. Why? Because it's too wide, and can't be used to "split" between lanes of traffic. In NYC, 9 or 10 months out of the year, a motor cycle or bicycle makes a much better "city car."
Will people start yelling at me for coming only seconds late? Will the unspoken five-minute courtesy time ("the meeting starts at 2pm" really means "2:05pm") disappear? Will I become more stressful because of all this accuracy?
I'd vote that this won't change things much. After all, watches (& cell phones) that receive a time signal by radio already exist, and even if they only sync to the signal once per 24 hours, existing quartz clocks lose several orders of magnitude less than one second per day.
The "5-minute grace period" has more to do with other factors, like the subway train being 5 min. late, getting stuck in traffic (can't wait for aircars to become popular *grin*), or going to the wrong office in an unfamiliar building and having to ask for directions.
As people have already noted, this will permit GPS equipment to be cheaper and more accurate.[*] Likewise, scientific equipment which requires accurate timing will become smaller and less expensive.
-b.
[*]- which could be thought of as a deletorious effect, if you worry about the privacy implications of ubiquitous GPS devices that have the capability to transmit. However, existing GPS stuff is already pretty damn cheap, so I'm not sure if it'll matter, really.
First, it increases fuel efficiency. By turning off the fan when not needed more of the power from the engine is used to move the car down the road.
I have a Volvo that has an engine driven fan connected to the engine via a clutch controlled by a bimetallic spring. When the radiator gets hot, the clutch locks up and drives the fan. When the radiator is cold, the fan freewheels at a slow speed and consumes very little power.
The down side of this arrangement is that the clutches tend to fail occasionally and not spin the fan - mine did and a new one cost about $120 at dealers' prices (it was Saturday and I had to have the car for work on Monday, so I couldn't mail-order the part).
The electric radiator fan instead of the mechanical (to use your example) - electric fans only exist in front wheel drive vehicles. The reason for that is FWD vehicles have tranversally mouted engines so putting a mechanicly driven fan is actually more complicated and costly and less reliable than an electric fan.
Nope and nope. I had a FIAT Spider 2000 that had an electric fan (which either didn't work, or ran while the engine was off and drained the battery!) and was rear wheel driven. Mazda Miatas have a similar configuration.
It is possible to make a FWD vehicle with a longitudinally-mounted engine - my older SAAB turbo had the engine mounted along the car, with the belts in back and the clutch in front. The transmission was mounted under the engine with a large chain connecting the output of the clutch to the input of the tranny. This design made changing the drive belts a royal b*tch, but replacing the clutch was an hour-long job that could be done by an amateur without dropping the transmission. What finally killed the car was bad bearings in the transmission. Since the tranny was under the engine (and doubled as the engine oil pan), fixing the tranny would have been an engine-out job costing $2,500.
-b.
Most cars with electric fans still have a "fan belt." It drives the water pump and alternator, so if it breaks, you're still SOL, even with an electric fan (no water circulation = rapid overheating).
-b.
You know - some of the best and most creative writers of history didn't use perfect grammar or punctuation. Dare we discourage a new generation of potentially brilliant writers by having a computer slap them with a zero due to a,misplaced comma or a cApital Letta in the wr0ng place? At least many humans can recognize brilliance when they see it and forgive minor flaws as a result. I doubt that computers have that trait yet.
-b0s0z0ku
Re:There are some of these on my route to college
on
Road Marker Marks You
·
· Score: 1
In my state, California, you can't get a license if you have epilepsy or other similar seizure disorder.
Still, triggering seizures in passengers or people previously not known to have epilepsy wouldn't be a good thing.
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Well, I hope that the A/C is controlled by some sort of humidity sensor and doesn't run whenever the climate control is turned on. There's no sense in wasting energy trying to remove moisture from air that's already dry.
If we're going to have climate control, let's do it right:
* One knob for desired interior temperature, with an "OFF" position that blows in outside air that's unchanged in temperature * Another knob for humidity. The A/C will run only when the interior needs to be cooled to achieve the temperature setpoint, or when the interior air is too humid. If the humidity knob is set to max. humidity, the A/C should only run to cool the car and not to dehumidify.
* The usual fan switch and air direction buttons
Of course, such a system would be too wierd for most proles, so no maker will build it.
-b.
No loan, of course.
I wouldn't consider the car substandard, honestly. The interior and seats are extremely comfortable. It's very good in winter, and holds the road well due to some mild suspension upgrades that I've done. It gets about 30 mpg on long trips. It's big enough to fit 5 people and their skiing stuff comfortably - it can also carry a 4' x 8' sheet of plywood without difficulty. It's rear wheel driven, which makes it slightly more interesting to drive - you can deliberately make it drift on a wet road :)
I was looking for a car of that type at the time, and I got more than I expected out of this car. A "substandard" car for me would be an econobox like a Honda Civic or Satan^W Saturn :)
-b.
I've been lost in bad neighborhoods, not to mention driving through one regularly when I visit my sister down in DC. No one has ever bothered me - in fact, people have been much more helpful a.f.a. directions than suburbanites usually are. There's a sizable segment of suBURPanites that runs and cringes whenever someone in a car slows down and opens their window. BTW - I was carjacked once, in a suburban gas station
And lets face it, sitting in a car is boring, and a DVD player keeps the little brats quiet and entertained.
Would it be so bad if you talked to your "little brats" or had your spouse do so when he/she was in the car with you? The spouse could even read something to them or play games. Besides, what's wrong with just listening to music instead of having constant canned visual stimuli? Listening to music on the radio can be very worthwhile.
If I have kids, I'm raising them in a city or small town where they will be able to walk to interesting places rather than being stuck in a glass-and-steel rolling bubble.
BTW don't foget, WinCE shares absolutely zero code with other versions of Windows.
The one experience that I've had with WinCE was on a palmtop @work connected to a label printer. The thing kept crashing and/or not recognizing the printer. We finally connected the printer to an old laptop running Win2k, and all was good. Maybe my opinion is biased by a bad experience, though.
That being said, I think that cars' controls should be as simple as possible, with large buttons that can be easily found without staring at the dash. Only a few buttons are really needed on a radio - adjust volume, balance, equalizer presets, tuning, mode, and CD/MP3 control (skip +/-, album +/-, etc). Heater and A/C controls have become needlessly complex also - give me the controls on an older car any day (one lever for fan speed, one for temp, a third one or a couple buttons for air direction).
The one thing that I would appreciate is a computerized dashboard that could show readouts of various engine sensors in real time, and show diagnostic data, ideally in plain English. e.g. rather than Code P0014, it should say, "Left Cylinder Bank Oxygen Sensor Erroneous Reading". The dashboard should also be customizable. Certain things like speed and RPM should always show up, but you should have a choice of what other gauges appear there - temperature, outside temperature, trip computer, oil pressure, voltage, etc.. You should also have an easy interface to allow for changes to the car's behavior. For example, you should be able to turn automatic locking at 5mph on or off, according to what you prefer, and without paying a deale^W $tealer to do it for you. Settings to do with emissions should of course be hardcoded and not user-changable.
-b.
Last year, I bought a Volvo 240 wagon with 145,000 miles on it on EBay for $1200. A year and 1/2 later it's still running with 172,000 miles on it. Some repairs were needed, like the rear suspension bearings, a new timing belt, having all of the fluids changed, and a new heater fan. Other than that, the car runs amazingly well - everything works except that A/C which I haven't bothered to fix because I don't really need it here in the Northeast.
For $2000-3000 I could have bought a car with lower mileage and none of those initial problems. This is in fact what I'll do in a few months, since I'm now looking for a Mazda Miata convertible. Oh, and I should be able to resell the Volvo on EBay for $1000 or so.
Having to pay $200/month towards a new car really sucks, and there are alternatives for those who can't (or don't want to) afford a new car. Did I mention that I don't have to keep full insurance coverage on the car and only need to pay for liability?
-b.
Personally, I'd take the 0.01% higher risk of dying from wrong medical treatment over giving people (government and big corps.) the ability to track me constantly.
-b.
Less and less true, but in general, yeah. If we start tagging babies at birth, I'd suspect that mothers' attitudes would change very quickly.
EXCEPT THIS CAN'T BE REMOVED.
Wanna bet? It emits RF, which gives away its general location, and it's visible on an X-ray. It'd require invasive surgery to remove, but, hey, I'd deal with the pain if I had one of those things in me!
-b.
Let's see:
Christians = "mark of the beast!"
Jews = "too much like the camps!" and besides "we're made in the image of God, who are we to alter that!"
Muslims = "track us in the current political climate in the US? No thanks!"
Libertarians = "guns and rope are still legal, and there are many lampposts along Pennsylvania Ave."
Bill Clinton = "what! There'll be an electronic record of who enters my bedroom?!?"
You get the idea.
-b.
If I were Indymedia, I would worry quite a bit about having my servers shut down, since Indymedia tends to needle and expose the misdeeds of governments.
do you honestly think they are going to get new hosting providers every (6 months?) when forign relations with country X change?
No. I wasn't talking about redundent hosting, just backing data up.
-b.
Honestly, I'd rather have criminals running free throughout the world than unjust laws being enforced.
-b.
-b.
Pretty nice, by the look of it, although I'm not a big fan of sequential clutchless manual gearboxes - I prefer to do my own clutching. Yes, people will say, I good SMG will outperform a true manual, but I personally prefer the control of a true manual even if it isn't faster. Besides, even if the Roadster is imported into the US in the near future, it will still be at least $12,000 new, but a used 1992 Miata can be bought for $3000 or so, and I'm not prepared to spend over 10 grand on a car just yet - finance payments suck.
-b.
Yep - the simple solution to that problem is to not ride on the lines. The lines are not more than a few inches wide, and you can usually ride slightly to one side or the other of them.
Be safer, ride on the sidewalks - that's what the "handicapped/wheelchair" ramps at the curb are really for ;-P
Heh.
-b.
Where I went to school, most people didn't have cars, since the college campus was small enough to be able to get around on foot or by bicycle, and there were supermarkets and other stores within walking/bikeing distance of campus. If you wanted to go to the city (Philly), there was a train line that ran every hour, and a tram line further away that ran more often and until later at night. On the amount that I was making as a student, I don't think that I could have afforded a $13,000 new car unless I had some very wealthy parents.
-b.
> Which is patently unsafe and, at least in NYC, illegal.
Illegal, yes, but most cops look the other way. In fact, I've been waved along to follow a motor officer before when he was lane splitting (that was in NJ, though).
As far as lane splitting being patently unsafe, I disagree. If you split to the head of a line at a light, you're less likely to be rear-ended by someone who "didn't see you." If anything, lane splitting is safer. That being said, it should only be done as low speeds ( -b.
I've heard people spout off the same set of "issues" about two of the best-handling inexpensive sports cars that you can get in the US, namely the Toyota MR-2 and Mazda Miata. Just goes to show that some people are clueless, or that maybe I just don't get the "macho car" thing. That being said, I'd take an MR-2 or Miata over a Smart car any day of the week (both are more fun to drive).
-b.
Some states do have mandatory safety (as well as pollution) inspections. Probably not as strict as in Europe, but at least in NJ, they check the brakes, suspension, lights, horn, steering, tires, exhaust, etc.. They also can fail a car for structural rust.
-b.
We really do have cars, vans and trucks just as big as the US and in fact they regularly travel much faster than in the US (E.g. 70Mph national speed limit in the UK, 100Kph in most of mainland Europe,
You mean, more like 130kph on motorways in mainland Europe (at least in France and Austria, last time I was there)? US speeds are slower, but not that much slower - 55 mph is gone, all states have changed to 65 mph or more, and the 65 mph limits are routinely disregarded. Traffic on the NJ Turnpike seems to move at 80-90 mph in good weather.
States that are mostly rural have even higher speed limits - generally 75 mph. Until recently, Montana had no speed limit, and motorists were instructed to drive at a "reasonable and prudent" speed. Unfortunately, that law was struck down by a state court as being too vague, since the offense of speeding wasn't adequately defined, so Montana set a limit of 75 mph.
-b.
It's about time a very small 4 wheeled city vehicle for short distance commuting was released into the mainstream in the US . . .
A 3-wheeled vehicle might actually be better. Make it only 1 seat wide, and have the driver and passenger sit behind one another. The whole thing should be no more than 3' wide and 4' high, and should incorporate a tilting system (like a motorcycle) to increase stability when taking corners. Unlike the Smart car, these narrow vehicles could actually share lanes and be able to pass stopped vehicles easily, thus alleviating traffic congestion.
Best of all, in many US states, a 3-wheeled vehicle can be registered as a motorcycle. As long as the engine capacity is kept below 750cc or so, insurance might actually be cheaper than for a car.
-b.
Still safer than a motorcycle (yes, I ride one) and better weather protection, too. Listen: no one is putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to buy a Smart car. I'd like to think that people are smart enough to choose the balance of safety and utility that's right for them.
That being said, I wouldn't buy a Smart. Why? Because it's too wide, and can't be used to "split" between lanes of traffic. In NYC, 9 or 10 months out of the year, a motor cycle or bicycle makes a much better "city car."
-b.
I'd vote that this won't change things much. After all, watches (& cell phones) that receive a time signal by radio already exist, and even if they only sync to the signal once per 24 hours, existing quartz clocks lose several orders of magnitude less than one second per day.
The "5-minute grace period" has more to do with other factors, like the subway train being 5 min. late, getting stuck in traffic (can't wait for aircars to become popular *grin*), or going to the wrong office in an unfamiliar building and having to ask for directions.
As people have already noted, this will permit GPS equipment to be cheaper and more accurate.[*] Likewise, scientific equipment which requires accurate timing will become smaller and less expensive.
-b.
[*]- which could be thought of as a deletorious effect, if you worry about the privacy implications of ubiquitous GPS devices that have the capability to transmit. However, existing GPS stuff is already pretty damn cheap, so I'm not sure if it'll matter, really.
I have a Volvo that has an engine driven fan connected to the engine via a clutch controlled by a bimetallic spring. When the radiator gets hot, the clutch locks up and drives the fan. When the radiator is cold, the fan freewheels at a slow speed and consumes very little power.
The down side of this arrangement is that the clutches tend to fail occasionally and not spin the fan - mine did and a new one cost about $120 at dealers' prices (it was Saturday and I had to have the car for work on Monday, so I couldn't mail-order the part).
-b.
The electric radiator fan instead of the mechanical (to use your example) - electric fans only exist in front wheel drive vehicles. The reason for that is FWD vehicles have tranversally mouted engines so putting a mechanicly driven fan is actually more complicated and costly and less reliable than an electric fan.
Nope and nope. I had a FIAT Spider 2000 that had an electric fan (which either didn't work, or ran while the engine was off and drained the battery!) and was rear wheel driven. Mazda Miatas have a similar configuration.
It is possible to make a FWD vehicle with a longitudinally-mounted engine - my older SAAB turbo had the engine mounted along the car, with the belts in back and the clutch in front. The transmission was mounted under the engine with a large chain connecting the output of the clutch to the input of the tranny. This design made changing the drive belts a royal b*tch, but replacing the clutch was an hour-long job that could be done by an amateur without dropping the transmission. What finally killed the car was bad bearings in the transmission. Since the tranny was under the engine (and doubled as the engine oil pan), fixing the tranny would have been an engine-out job costing $2,500.
-b.
Most cars with electric fans still have a "fan belt." It drives the water pump and alternator, so if it breaks, you're still SOL, even with an electric fan (no water circulation = rapid overheating).
-b.
-b0s0z0ku
Still, triggering seizures in passengers or people previously not known to have epilepsy wouldn't be a good thing.
-b0s0z0ku