211–220 of 283 posts
Very cool, still dont understand why electric cars got to be ugly ... The design is more like Prius than S-class.. Sorry for being off topic.
Is it the Googlefication of cars? I remember when Google and later Material became the lodestone of interfaces, arguably moving most online graphics towards infantile colors and curves.
Very cool, still dont understand why electric cars got to be ugly ... The design is more like Prius than S-class.. Sorry for being off topic.
There was never a reason, aerodynamic or not, to make the design look so ridiculous except if you’re the GM of the 3 Series or S class you don’t want someone else eating into your sales with a different product line.
Why's everyone being so negative? This is cool!
- "Self-driving cars are a suspect and dangerous technology which is unlikely to perform as well as the companies promoting it claim, and may not become broadly useful for decades, if ever" (I broadly fall into this camp) - These people don't like it because it's a 'self-driving' car, FSVO self-driving.
- "Self-driving cars are coming any day now, and will be a transition straight to robo-taxis lead by visionary super-genius Elon Musk" (This has probably become less common as the promises from that camp haven't materialised over the last decade) - These people don't like it because it is insufficiently robo-taxi-y or musky.
There's possibly an argument that the first camp has become too cynical in response to the second, but as it stands there just isn't that much mindshare for this sort of cautious progress.
Very cool, still dont understand why electric cars got to be ugly ... The design is more like Prius than S-class.. Sorry for being off topic.
There's a lot of visual conflict between the two motifs, as shapes that normally have boxy, sculptural depth get squashed down into basically 2D features on the surface of the smoothed out, mouse-like volume of the overall package.
The designers seem to have been stuck with the assignment of putting a Mercedes mask onto a wide, flattened jellybean. The result is mostly successful from the side views, but seems pinched and overwrought from the front.
Additionally, some of the grille shapes on the front are likely vestigal, as EVs don't require the same ventilated cooling as combustion engines. Much to the frustration of car designers, one of the key identifying features of any brand has historically been the design of the now obsolete front grille; the functional purpose that served as an aesthetic starting point is now gone. (You can trace the gradual acceptence of grille obsolescence in the evolution of Tesla's designs.)
I drive a lot and I don't know if I'm crazy or not but instead of a car which can "mostly self drive but which I must watch at all times for something could wrong", I want instead a car that watches me while I drive and which prevents me from making most dangerous things. Rephrasing it: I don't want to be the one preventing the car from doing stupid things. I want the car to be preventing me from doing stupid things.…
Very cool, still dont understand why electric cars got to be ugly ... The design is more like Prius than S-class.. Sorry for being off topic.
I kind of like it, it's moving away from the overly aggressive looking style of most modern cars. Maybe we can have cars for adults again instead of these Transformers-style designs. A shape that is fit for purpose (aerodynamic) is part of that. BMW and Mercedes switch places periodically in technical and design leadership, and I think it's Mercedes's time. BMW has been going off the rails recently...
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There's such an (exciting!) opportunity for us to create automated people mover systems that connect small and large systems to get people from very close to A to very close to B. The design and engineering activities involved in solving this would be very enjoyable work, and the human benefits when (eventually) operational would be huge. Every solution would need to be custom for its city/region, but one of the comm…
So, Europe?
The usual challenge is that the cities are old and organically structured. So the possible paths for public transport are limited; and there's very little space for big interchanges.
But what exists is way, way better than nothing. With trains, metros, trams, and buses (and walking), you can get around quite well. It just can take a long time due to timing mismatches between modes.
When the tram comes only once every 15 min, and your metro drops you without enough time to walk (or run!) to the tram, it means you now wait 15min for the next one. When I was commuting to work in Amsterdam via tram+metro, it took me at minimum 30 minutes with walk+tram+metro+walk. If I rode my bike, it was the same. But if timings didn't work out well, the public transport option could be +25 min longer... so 55min. And on cold sh*tty rainy days (half of winter), the metro would be jammed with people such that you might need to stand and wait for the next one. The bike option was always possible, but it's no fun to ride in cold rain with wind.
In summary, it was better than 60 minutes of bumper to bumper driving commute in Dallas/Fort Worth, but it had much room for better alternatives... if one could go greenfield.
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Then why does the article claim Mercedes is the first automaker to offer L3 driving?
The difference is the confidence level. The required level of supervision. Other cars, like Teslas, can “do” this task, but not with enough certainty that they are safe to do it while not being actively monitored by a driver.
Later, they add the nag. 2018 I think.
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There's such an (exciting!) opportunity for us to create automated people mover systems that connect small and large systems to get people from very close to A to very close to B. The design and engineering activities involved in solving this would be very enjoyable work, and the human benefits when (eventually) operational would be huge. Every solution would need to be custom for its city/region, but one of the comm…
So, basically this: https://classicsofsciencefiction.com/2022/11/27/the-roads-mu... (Or https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780739410516 if you want to actually read it.)
> It’s much saner to have one car break down and allow 999,999 people to keep on schedule.
Obviously that's very wrong, as we know that one car breaking down on the freeway has a major negative effect on everything behind it. And if it's something bigger than one car... I recall one evening in Dallas when a chemical tanker turned over and created a situation which required all traffic on a major freeway to take an exit, use the access road, and then eventually return to the freeway. Even though it was after evening rush out, the ripple effect eventually spanned to two sequentially related freeways. Basically long road travel in the city stopped for hours.
In my mental fantasy, I see two vertical levels. One is for passengers and operates with more connections and stops, and one is for cargo (where transfers can be fully automated like with a successful airport luggage routing system... or probably some kind of system which Amazon has already perfected at scale).
They two improvements I see over today's public transport realities are:
1. If greenfield is possible, which unfortunately it really is not (unless we are planning a whole new urban environment), there is a physical network design which balances maximum travel time from any point to any point. This would be something elevator designers have already managed for big towers, I would think. But this time, it's in two dimensions.
2. There are novel temporary linkings of different vehicles to allow passengers to transfer from one to another without stopping either vehicle. I suppose in the extreme case, each passenger could be in a small sit/stand capsule, and some plucking and moving of capsules could be done by robotic systems which are aware of everything (including route/dest.)
Really, these are just lame solutions based on our current understanding of nature. Teleportation is the best answer ;).
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I mean, there are a bunch of long form videos on Youtube from people who rode Waymo's service in Phoenix in particular. How long do you want to watch a car drive around ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPZH2PlmzFs is at least in San Francisco which is maybe more interesting than a Phoenix suburb
We are talking about how long back in time we can go and still find a Youtube video of a car driving itself as well as they do now. The video you posted is two weeks old.
But I believe the video with the blind guy does have a long form version somewhere, so if you consider that (different vehicle, much older technology) to be "as well as they do now" in the sense you meant then that's still roughly in the six year mark.
xracy talked about autonomous vehicles which will include at least trains. London's Victoria Line underground service build in the 1960s was always ATO, which is closer to L4 in this scheme than L3, under normal operation the original Victoria Line trains basically require the driver to push a button, closing the doors and then once the train concludes all of its doors are safely closed it will leave, drive to the next station, stop and open the doors, then we just rinse and repeat.
Now, trains don't actually use the car terminology, in trains we'd call this GoA2, Grade of Automation 2, with the next steps being GoA3 in which there's a human who knows how to operate the train manually in principle, and they are on the train, but they aren't up front "driving it" unless something went wrong; and then GoA4 in which the train doesn't have anything resembling a human driver it just has passengers, in an emergency some central authority will set out to rescue the passengers from their disabled train. There are a handful of GoA4 train systems, but they're probably only 5-10 years old.