521–530 of 671 posts
The main problem is that the car manufacturer has a monopoly on selling you features and updates after you have bought the car.
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The steering wheel in an F1 car only goes about 220 degrees in either direction (drivers have to keep their hands on the wheel and their arms aren't made of rubber). The steering in a regular car goes about 540 degrees in either direction (one and a half times around). When parallel parking you often have to turn the wheel three whole revolutions. F1 steering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVz6IW_wegs&t=45s Tesla st…
how is that Tesla even legal?
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Just like everything done by Tesla: they have absolutely no experience in making cars, and it shows really badly. Terrible construction quality that I don't even experience on a 10k € Dacia, touch screens everywhere (it's already bad enough when it's just the radio or Android Auto, but a bunch of critical features are on the touch screen), the yoke having no physical feedback and clearly no thought other than "wow fu…
Tesla should really stick to making electric drivetrains and branding and let someone else design and build the rest if the car.
It should be illegal to make cars with high latency UIs. It routinely takes 1+ seconds for touchscreen button presses to be registered on my 2015 and 2018 Toyotas. This leads to erroneous actions being performed, which is not safe. If I were a software engineer on these teams I would quit if these systems were released on my watch.
I went car shopping this year in the new market and found that that if you want more a "dumb" car (UX occurs primarily outside of a touchscreen, no internet, no geolocation) you lose all potential for any nice non-smart features. So no heated/powered seats, no power windows, the material of the interior is refurbished from a spirit airlines airplane, etc. I think manufacturers are hoping that certain aspects of the m…
> I wonder how well my car will age when miscellaneous sensor all over the car start failing. I predict that 50 years from now there will be more functioning cars from the 1960s than from the 2020s. With the combination of quickly obsoleting technology that won't be fixable and overly interconnected electronics that become impossible to diagnose after a while, there's not much hope for current and future cars to be a…
Sure there are one-offs and some drop-ins available, but they'll never get dialed in the way cars do after a year or two of mass production.
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What's wrong with riding a bike in 0 °C weather? When dressed for the weather riding in the cold weather can be quite enjoyable as long as the roads are clear or your bike has appropriate tires.
You need some pretty thick gloves at 0°C. Also, if you're traveling by bike in freezing weather, you have to be dressed for freezing weather, and you'll be stuck with that during the entire time you spend at your destination.
Gloves needed at 0°C are reasonable. Sure, don't take gloves that let the wind go through.
I used to bike without gloves and a hat when freezing. Because I always lose them. The hands hurt, you end up being very cold. With appropriate clothes it's night and day, biking becomes enjoyable in winter.
Strongly agree with this article. The car I love is my 1980 Datsun, but it just isn't good in the rain. My daily car is a Fiat 124 Spider. Reason I bought it was it was the least complicated, most direct driver-to-pavement, latest, fastest ride I could get for $20k with a stick shift. I won't buy an automatic. To Fiat's credit, I think they're the last manufacturer selling cars in America whose standard price is for…
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Pretty much everyone who clogged up the left lane in the '00s in their Prius is still doing the same thing today but in a Tacoma or 4Runner. The specific model of blind adoration may have changed but the fanboys still line the same pockets. If that is any indication Tesla will do just fine.
Toyota are doing fine because of their reliability. Can the same be said about Tesla?
Tesla has established a brand image based around a different set of attributes and they design, market and sell to it.
I went car shopping this year in the new market and found that that if you want more a "dumb" car (UX occurs primarily outside of a touchscreen, no internet, no geolocation) you lose all potential for any nice non-smart features. So no heated/powered seats, no power windows, the material of the interior is refurbished from a spirit airlines airplane, etc. I think manufacturers are hoping that certain aspects of the m…
> I think manufacturers are hoping that certain aspects of the modern auto become "can't live withouts", e.g. bluetooth, which helps them smuggle all the other more marginally useful, security and ux intrusive features into your model. I think that implies nefariousness that probably isn't there. It's more likely a combination of: 1. Marketing/sales wanting whiz-bang features to use in their pitches. 2. Copycatting c…
There's a very slow, very week feedback loop that may be too weak at the moment to fight against this trend: the customers who are dealing with and worry about perpetual sensor failures and computer issues at 150,000 miles are not the same customers who are buying the car off the dealership lot. Meanwhile, the people with brand new vehicles are not worried about those problems, they're only slightly (and only long after it's too late) worried about the eventual resale value. I trust that my old Toyota and Subaru will still be dependable and repairable for many years, but I won't buy an old BMW or Mercedes because my family and coworkers have too many horror stories of expensive, exotic gadgets that have gone bad in mysterious ways.
But we're 40 years removed from the bad old days of the 80s and 90s when those imports were decimating the lethargic Big 3 in quality and cost, which is more like the time scale on which consumer attitudes like that began to be formed. 2018 laws regarding rearview cameras are really new in comparison to a cultural thing like that.
I drive a 20 year old car. It's perfect. It has a CD player and you can use one of those 12 volt bluetooth / aux bongles if you want more.
Eventually my local area will probably ban them because they're obsessed with health metrics (cars a few years older are now effectively taxed out of existence). Then I'll have to make do with the log burner.
Until one of my neighbours dob me in for that, then I guess I move to the countryside or Eastern Europe or something and leave my house to a VR headset wonk.