211–220 of 352 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Imagine the water heater company didn't know they were gaming the test. We don't have to. In this case we have clear admission of intent. The intent to deceive is what makes it fraud and not just being wrong.
My point isn't that what the water heater designer did was perfectly ethical, just that it's clearly distinct from what VW did.
The whole car safety topic is very confusing. Car accidents is top1-top2 death reason in US for people in 20-40 age group [1]. Probably less in Europe but still one of the leading ones. I was thinking about how I can make myself safer. Which car brand/model is better? Which seat is better for passenger? How much riskier it is to drive during the night? In the rain? How dangerous is it to overtake on road with 1 lane…
Drive the largest vehicle you can. When in a collision the momentum is converted to crushing force, you want to be in the less-crushable vehicle. Hey this may be an unpopular choice, but it is the one with the biggest safety impact! And that was the question.
So if you really want to reign supreme on the road you ought to get a semi truck, with a sleep cab you convert it to seating for the kids too.
Is this the end game of suburban families race to owning the biggest hunks of steel on the road?
The whole car safety topic is very confusing. Car accidents is top1-top2 death reason in US for people in 20-40 age group [1]. Probably less in Europe but still one of the leading ones. I was thinking about how I can make myself safer. Which car brand/model is better? Which seat is better for passenger? How much riskier it is to drive during the night? In the rain? How dangerous is it to overtake on road with 1 lane…
> Car accidents is top1-top2 death reason in US for people in 20-40 age group [1] Car crashes where the top 1-2. I am willing to bet most of those involved DUI, and therefore negligence, and shouldn't be classed as "accidents" #CrashNotAccident.
The usual counter-argument is that the use of the word "accident" is a statement of intent, and outside of extreme road rage scenarios, nobody intends to cause a crash. However, the creation of an unsafe situation, such as texting while driving, is often absolutely deliberate.
Didn't check your blind spot before making a lane change? That's not an accident, that's negligence.
TBH, I'm not even sure if any crashes could really qualify as an "accident".
The article reminds me of a story from a friend that was an engineer at a major water heater company. Modern electric water heaters are already fairly efficient, but every model gets tested by the government to be given an efficiency rating. The test consists of replacing the anode with a rod that has a series of temperature probes to measure the water at different levels in the water heater. Since water would form l…
There was a scandal a few years back when a Kaggle team did something simar with ML. They were treating the competition as a black box and optimising for the unknown dataset instead of actually building better AI algorithms.
The whole car safety topic is very confusing. Car accidents is top1-top2 death reason in US for people in 20-40 age group [1]. Probably less in Europe but still one of the leading ones. I was thinking about how I can make myself safer. Which car brand/model is better? Which seat is better for passenger? How much riskier it is to drive during the night? In the rain? How dangerous is it to overtake on road with 1 lane…
Riding motorcycles means I'm often playing the percentages game. When we turn we're sacrificing our finite amount of traction for either more speed or a more aggressive turn. If I lean off the bike, I get some traction back. So how much am I willing to sacrifice in the name of fun, while still leaving wiggle room for suddenly encountering a tar snake or something in the middle of my turn? Little things. Motorcyclists…
This is the most confusing article I've seen from danluu. What data was used? The glaring incongruity for me arose from the details on Tesla. "For example, on the driver-side small overlap test, Tesla had one model with a relevant score and it scored Acceptable (below Good, but above Poor and Marginal) " Note the words "above poor." But in the bullet points danluu uses a different scale that doesn't match this prose,…
Almost all the cars mentioned in the article have likely improved since then, but the issue isn't so much how safe specific models are, but rather what approaches the manufacturers are using to improve safety. What the test results indicate is that rather than actually designing for safety, manufacturers are designing to meet a very specific set of benchmarks; there isn't much reason to believe that has changed since then.
The most obvious example of this (which the article briefly mentions) is the difference between driver-side and passenger-side performance: https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/small-overlap-gap-vehicles-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
VW actively detected if the car was on a treadmill testing setup and electronically changed the engine parameters to make it run cleaner. The water heater was designed with the test in mind but functions the same regardless. VW was clearly cheating whereas the water heater is taking advantage of known deficiencies in the test (is that cheating?).
I'm not sure that's an accurate description of VW's cheat. VW knew the parameters of the test (stationary car, no steering input, prescribed throttle inputs, etc). And they configured the car to pass the test. Water-heater engineer knew the parameters of the test (number and location of probes). And he configure the water-heater to pass the test. Same-same. In both cases, an engineering team willfully committed fraud…
Apparently it is common for cars to have a "test mode" bit, because they run on a dyno (only one set of wheels spin), and the car may disable certain traction control systems, etc.
VW changed the way other systems (the engine itself) function in this mode. So even if everything is exactly the same on the road (e.g. 30mph in a straight line for hours), the car will perform differently and have different emissions. You don't drive around on a dyno.
Optimizing for the test may go up to the line, but VW crossed it.
The whole car safety topic is very confusing. Car accidents is top1-top2 death reason in US for people in 20-40 age group [1]. Probably less in Europe but still one of the leading ones. I was thinking about how I can make myself safer. Which car brand/model is better? Which seat is better for passenger? How much riskier it is to drive during the night? In the rain? How dangerous is it to overtake on road with 1 lane…
Drive the largest vehicle you can. When in a collision the momentum is converted to crushing force, you want to be in the less-crushable vehicle. Hey this may be an unpopular choice, but it is the one with the biggest safety impact! And that was the question.
Start including the effect on other cars in crash tests.
In other words, yeah, if I drove a frickin' monster truck, yes, it's going to be extremely safe for me, but it's absolutely deadly to anybody in a sedan. So that monster truck should get low crash test scores.
Your answer merely creates an arms race of larger and heavier cars.
The article reminds me of a story from a friend that was an engineer at a major water heater company. Modern electric water heaters are already fairly efficient, but every model gets tested by the government to be given an efficiency rating. The test consists of replacing the anode with a rod that has a series of temperature probes to measure the water at different levels in the water heater. Since water would form l…