501–510 of 549 posts
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And we all need to pray for HP not to get into the automotive industry,or we are all screwed.
We'd probably get notices that our fuel has expired and must be replaced with new genuine HP fuel.
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> mechanical door lock Push button, engage solenoid, who needs a microcontroller? > manual windows Push button, turn on motor, limit switch to turn off the motor when you get to the end. Microcontrollers make pinch detection and calibration nicer though. > no car stereo Tons of examples here, a stereo built today would most likely have electronics and/or a microcontroller because it's cheaper than an analog FM radio,…
You can save a lot of cabling when you have central message bus shared by different components where a microcontroller decides whether a particular message is meant for this solenoid or that motor.
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Since when is power steering a "smart" feature? Power locks and windows are mechanical devices, solenoids powered by the car battery. The only computerized feature you listed is cruise control and we've had that for years and years. I don't think that this is an "either / or" proposition where we have either a car running off bloated software or a car limited to 1950's features. As far as I'm concerned, cars from the…
> The only computerized feature you listed is cruise control Cruise control doesn't have to have any electronics at all either, earlier cars had vacuum actuated cruise control.
Short answer to the lede: no, the industry cannot cope. Or rather, it will limp along with bloatware, bugs, and malware exactly the same way we see desktop OSes bloat, or the way we see routers and set-top boxes hacked to become botnets. In my 40+ years in the industry I've yet to see code get SMALLER. With the exception of Linux kernel 1.0 in the 90's which was a step backwards into smaller, more compact code, code…
Yeah, I like the tech behind Tesla but am turned off by. 1) The large, distracting screen in the front of the car. 2) The subscription model of the car's firmware. If electric cars ever become widespread I hope I can find a used one engineered without that stuff. Otherwise I may have to stop buying cars.
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They're not objectively better. They're more suited to what they want: a device with fewer features but more direct control. Lots of people want a car with more features, and don't wish to control it directly. They would rather have a solid-state device that can't be repaired, but doesn't need to be. They don't want to upgrade it themselves; ideally, they don't want it to need upgrades until they buy another one. But…
Some people want their cars to be like iPhones, but is that really what's behind this? I mean, take TVs. Pretty much every TV has "smart TV" features embedded, to the point where it's hard to find one that doesn't. I suspect this is because the manufacturer gets some kind of kickback from streaming services to include their app and to show ads and to gather data about what people are watching and in the end it's actu…
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Car guy here. Yeah, I’m with you. My favorite car was a ‘96 Tercel with mechanical steering and a 4-speed manual. It even had manual roll-up windows. It had less than 100 HP, but it was simple as hell to operate, very fun to drive, cheap to maintain, and extremely reliable up until I sold it with nearly 400k miles on the odo. I put an aftermarket stereo and speakers in it and I was set. Only reason I sold it was beca…
> "Modern cars are absolutely terrible in the UX department, but they are a hell of a lot safer, so there’s that." tangentially, "safety" is highly cargo-culted. things that seem so obviously safer are taken without question as better, but in many cases, such features really only provide a false sense of security along with substantive unintended consequences. most safety features in cars (e.g., lane-keeping) allow p…
If I had a nickle for every social media user who's screeching about how airbags are all that's good in the world but who doesn't understand the inherent tradeoffs to a bag of dense air occupying the space in front of the driver or how a crumple zone is basically a single use spring I would use the money to hire people to beat the first group of people over the head with highshcool physics textbooks.
I wish we'd regress to '50s attitudes about safety simply so that the people who care about safety no longer have to be held back by the people who crap all over everything by wanting to be seen caring about safety.
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> rather than lowering crash/injury/death rates. Motor vehicle deaths per 100,000 have been on a consistent downward trend since the 70s (1.53 per 100,000 in 2000, 1.11 per 100,000 in 2019), so, no, death rates have in fact been lowered.
How much of that is due to faster ambulance/helicopter service, improved emergency room practices?
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Those are liability releases, not agreements over software licensing. In fact those features actually are sold legally as "parts" on the car you bought, there's no licensing scheme from Tesla yet. Though there is noise being made about offering a monthly license for FSD given that it's at $10k now and lots of people who would want to try it are priced out.
The definition of a EULA agreement is a legal contract that is executed by clicking a button. They often contain liability releases. What software license doesn’t? > A EULA specifies in detail the rights and restrictions which apply to the use of the software. > Many EULAs assert extensive liability limitations. Most commonly, an EULA will attempt to hold harmless the software licensor in the event that the software…
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> "Modern cars are absolutely terrible in the UX department, but they are a hell of a lot safer, so there’s that." tangentially, "safety" is highly cargo-culted. things that seem so obviously safer are taken without question as better, but in many cases, such features really only provide a false sense of security along with substantive unintended consequences. most safety features in cars (e.g., lane-keeping) allow p…
For anyone wondering what progress in terms of safety looks like, give this 77 second video a view: https://youtu.be/xtxd27jlZ_g
There's a reason nobody is going to do a crash test of a 1980s Ford cop car into a 2010s Ford cop car. It would be a massive nothingburger.
Frontal airbags do little for seatbelted passengers at crash test speeds (texting into the back of a semi at 70mph is a different story). In fact in many cases they are worse than no airbag at low/medium speeds because you injure your face hitting airbag or are injured in its deployment in situations where you would have otherwise hit nothing. They are intended as damage control for unbelted passengers (which is where do you think the first S in SRS comes from).
Crumple zones are highly overrated. Imagine an old cartoon where someone gets thrown off a building and happens to land on a guy carrying mattresses. That's basically how crumple zones work. Too high of a jump or too soft of a mattress and you blow right through with negligible deceleration. Too hard of a mattress and the mattress decelerates you basically as hard a the sidewalk. Crumple zones provide time for the airbag to deploy, yes but they only really mitigate the forces on the passenger cabin (and its occupants) at a narrow speed range (they shoot for the speed of the relevant crash tests).
For people who were doing things right and wearing their seatbelt the safety of crashing a car changed negligibly from the advent of the 3pt belt to the time of the side curtain airbag. (I'm ignoring rollover safety here, that's been a basically linear improvement since the 1960s but it's not technically interesting because it's a simple case of throwing more and more steel at the problem)
Side curtain airbags have been a major improvement because there's not much restraint nor space for deceleration in that direction. They do a great job keeping people's heads from hitting stuff.
AEB is another good modern one. Knocking 5-20mph off the speed of a collision helps a lot no matter how you cut it.
All that said, everyone who worships safety tech uncritically as though they're all big improvements you can stack on top of each other and get the sum of them all needs to take a long walk off a short pier. Professing your love for airbags and crumple zones might get you fake internet points on Reddit or HN but that's just not how it works and those people pollute and/or prevent legitimate discussion.
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Two months ago I sold a dead-simple Toyota truck I'd driven for 14 years and bought a new, loaded Honda. The difference in the complexity is of course astonishing. The yota didn't even have usb. You could climb into the engine compartment and sit there. The Honda has pretty much everything a modern car can have, and you can't even see empty space in the engine compartment. I _could_ get on your "just give me simple"…
> high beams all activate when needed without input from me. Not a hard trick since high beams are almost never needed. Only to tell people it's their turn to go at the 4-way. They're only marginally more useful than fog lights.