couldn't agree more
Please make a dumb car
51–60 of 671 posts
Re: Please make a dumb car
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh no you don't want them
I've had cars with electric and manual windows. I'm 27 (so you don't think I have been biased by a lifetime of manual) and I prefer manual crank in all but a single use case: the situation where I want to wind up or down the passenger side window.
the feature to have the window open itself fully after a long-pull of the button feels safer to me in certain situations - means I don't have to spend a few seconds with my dominant hand off the wheel
(and also more convenient in other situations where I need to quickly open the window and actively drive at the same time, e.g. toll booths, drive thru's)
Re: Please make a dumb car
#53I would kill for Ye Olde Manually Wound windows. Electric windows struggle in temperature extremes, and seem to break down far more often than my old hand-cranked windows ever did. Also, I had more precise control with the hand-crank.
Oh no you don't want them
Oh yes, I do. Like I want wipers working at a constant interval.
Re: Please make a dumb car
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had cars with electric and manual windows. I'm 27 (so you don't think I have been biased by a lifetime of manual) and I prefer manual crank in all but a single use case: the situation where I want to wind up or down the passenger side window.
the feature to have the window open itself fully after a long-pull of the button feels safer to me in certain situations - means I don't have to spend a few seconds with my dominant hand off the wheel (and also more convenient in other situations where I need to quickly open the window and actively drive at the same time, e.g. toll booths, drive thru's)
I wait until I'm stopped to wind up or down the passenger side window, having an electric equivalent would save me.. actually 0 time. You have to stop at a toll booth to pay the toll, you have to stop at a drive thru to pay and collect your order. It's purely a convenience mechanism to save perhaps 3 seconds of time in the event it's really super hyper critical it's rolled down before stopping (for whatever arbitrary reason).
Re: Please make a dumb car
#55One thing I was flabbergasted at recently was Tesla offering, and the government allowing, regular drivers to use a yoke steering wheel like F1 drivers. Not only is it harder for the average person to handle but their firmware hadn't accounted for the fact that if you steer fully left or right the yoke is upside down and if you try and indicate it ends up indicating on the wrong side. What is wrong with a wheel and f…
Elon is weirdly good at getting regulators to just let him do things. FSD beta. The yoke steering wheel. Like a quarter of everything SpaceX does. Does he just have really good lobbyists? Is his force of personality just that good? It’s kind of fascinating.
He does not have good lobbyists.
Have you seen Tesla being the only company not invited on electric car day in white house?
https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a37244461/elon-musk...
Do you know that Tesla will be excluded from tax credits for EVs?
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/29/energy-secretary-defends-tes...
Do you know that Texas where Tesla is building its next factory does not allow to sell Teslas?
https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/texas-law-keeps-teslas-made...
Re: Please make a dumb car
#56After years of driving a several Mercedes E-Class cars, I now drive a 2004 Jeep Cherokee (not the 'Grand Cherokee'... In the US my Jeep is called the Liberty).
It's very basic compared to my Mercs, but oddly I enjoy driving it more - and I'm not one of those 'love cars, love to drive' people.
I relate to the point in the article about fancy screens; In my Jeep I fitted a very cheap (£30) Chinese radio head unit. It has almost no display, or useful functions, but it does have Bluetooth, so my phone does all the heavy lifting - internet radio, music, GPS etc. I can upgrade my phone at any point, and my jeeps infotainment system gets a bump-up at the same time.
Re: Please make a dumb car
#57One thing I was flabbergasted at recently was Tesla offering, and the government allowing, regular drivers to use a yoke steering wheel like F1 drivers. Not only is it harder for the average person to handle but their firmware hadn't accounted for the fact that if you steer fully left or right the yoke is upside down and if you try and indicate it ends up indicating on the wrong side. What is wrong with a wheel and f…
Elon is weirdly good at getting regulators to just let him do things. FSD beta. The yoke steering wheel. Like a quarter of everything SpaceX does. Does he just have really good lobbyists? Is his force of personality just that good? It’s kind of fascinating.
> it's kind of fascinating.
For me I'd replace that with: scary. Full size A4 paper and bigger screens in cars you can stream movies on while driving (distraction leading to accidents); the Las Vegas Loop which is just a tunnel for only one type of car (waste of infrastructure space); pushing untested AI (crashing and killing people). These aren't fascinating things.
Re: Please make a dumb car
#58Same with TVs, please. I can't find a single OLED on the market that doesn't have Android or some shitty Samsung OS installed on it.
I went with WebOS, so far the best of them, meaning the less painfull one.
WebOS is by far the least painful, but by no means good. You can disable some of the crap, but still it occasionally injects ads and other crap on top of the broadcast.
Nothing a well-configured pihole can't handle, but when I found out a $1700 TV is that awful I was livid.
Re: Please make a dumb car
#59I'm sympathetic to the pleas here. But I'm a luddite. A real luddite, not, as this article is, a simple petty reactionary: the problem is not technology, it's who owns it[1], it's how we are puppet-ed along via technology (Ursala Franklin would call this example of the car a prescriptivist instead of a holistic technology[2]). Technology is good when it empowers folks broadly, when it is soft. But the car systems of today are all prebaked in a hard, demeaning way- unsoft in extreme- and their systems don't entirely align with the people's interest, & even more rarely align with the power-users interest. Ideally, to me, the car has some built-ins but is a tabula rasa, a blank slate: it presents a robust & thorough API for the car systems, including the main interfaces.
Basically I just want a Chrysler with the infamous "Jeep Cherokee" hack[3]. Those cars were a modern miracle of amazingly well designed, consistent API engineering. Users gaining access to those systems, remotely, was shunned as a horrible vile thing, but it was an act of beauty & amazingness, a revelation of wonderfully good engineering. The coverage focused on the malicious acts, & that FUD far out-shined the amazing limitless potential of letting the world try to enrich themselves, make better. Tragic miscarriage against potential: the press murdered any hope of possibility in it's cradle. These cars were/are amazing. QNX OS running DBus protocols to expose all the car's systems: an easy to interface with, exploratory inter-system API for the whole car. We could have built anything here, it feels like. Instead, we damned & cursed the makers for having left some portal open to this computer: we parroted out terror.
I guess my gravy-on-top nee-plus-ultra ask atop having access to a car via DBus- the FreeDesktop standard IPC system- would be for the buttons to be more software defined, independent of their subsystems, which I think still wasn't entirely the case. I'd love to have a phone or console app running which can read from the big giant volume knob, for example, as I adjust some windows or the sunroof or the temperature. Infinite flexibility, please. I've said this before[4].
It's disappeared quickly, but Webinos was a very very interesting decade old attempt to define a user-empowering IoT architecture, & had significant interest from BMW/Land Rover. It's basically bitrotted off the internet, last seen early 2021[5], but was a really interesting user-centric system, where devices were linked not to corporate cloud services but to systems of users choice, exposing their capabilities & offerings generally. We need more holistic potentials in the world. We need to stop consigning away possibility, choosing retro-minimalism because we can't imagine any other possibilities than the vice, than the authoritarian, restrained systems of control most technology imposes upon us. We need personal computing to be possible again, broadly in the world, across devices, we need choice, we need agency, we need to stop being damned by computers & start being served by them: this is only possible if we let the users back in, re-open the frontiers.
In the end, I think the Chromecast model is basically right. The car should have a pre-baked system, but present some HTML capable interfaces, which themselves expose a couple additional above-and-beyond Web IoT apis to adjust windows, sunroofs, hvac. There should be decoupling (which I think Webinos was an early & technically successful contendor for).
[1] https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1478387800542224392
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin#Holistic_and_p...
[3] https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27463898
[5] http://web.archive.org/web/20210115211241/http://webinos.org...
Re: Please make a dumb car
#60I would recommend checking out Dacia and Lada (coincidentally now both are now under Renault group) https://www.renaultgroup.com/en/our-company/our-brands/dacia... https://www.renaultgroup.com/en/our-company/our-brands/lada/
Lada is known for its low reliability. Dacia seems to be in a more gray area, sometimes scoring well above average, sometimes below.
I know someone who had a Lada Niva, and he got stranded because a low quality pipe joint blew. True, the repair was extremely cheap, and it could probably be temporarily repaired with a hose and two zippers. Are you a mechanic that can locate and fix those kind of failures? Then Ladas are for you. You can't tell apart the windscreen fluid from the blinker fluid? Your Lada will spend more time in the repairshop than on the road.