261–270 of 525 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless your idea of "diverse world" is confined to (suburban) North America, the need to own a car is the exception , not the rule.
That's not true. Most of the world (by land area) exists outside cities, and outside a city you will usually need to own a car.
> Unlike the Peugeot, the Opel has gadgets - quite a few of them. It is funny because that Opel IS a Peugeot. Same group (Stellantis), and same mechanicals as the contemporary Peugeot 208 with only minor aesthetics and branding modifications.
Thankfully Toyota did most of the engineering, which I think is the main reason ours is still running after minimal maintenance with > 100,000 miles on it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless your idea of "diverse world" is confined to (suburban) North America, the need to own a car is the exception , not the rule.
Rural southern England here. Public transport is non existant where I live. You need a car if you want a life. I lost my driving license for medical reasons and have spent two years without driving. I am really conscious of what a car means in terms of having a social life, working, etc. If I was younger, I would have had to relocate
Car dependency is something that we've learned, not the natural state of things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Problem with gathering data off cars is that it's really not that effective vs your phone. A car realistically just sits around doing nothing 80% of the time, while a phone is with you 24/7, likely powered 24/7, and already has telemetry mechanisms built in. An old car with someone using a phone probably still collects the same data as you assert. And an EV without smarts is legitimately just a golf cart.
On the other hand, cars are much less limited in terms of sensor size (allowing you to determine location and acceleration more precisely, for example), power and permissions. In theory, root permission on your phone would be better, but a normal app won't have this amount of far-reaching permissions, but the manufacturerers have full control over hardware and software on your car.
The scary part is not the GPS installed by the fleet company that previously owned the car, which in all likelihood was just forgotten there, but the GPS and eSIM that comes with most (all?) new cars and that in most (all?) new cars cannot be disabled. Apart from privacy concerns of your data being used or sold by the car vendor, government outreach is also a concern. There was a bill announced in the US for all new…
Complete with non-replaceable batteries.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Problem with gathering data off cars is that it's really not that effective vs your phone. A car realistically just sits around doing nothing 80% of the time, while a phone is with you 24/7, likely powered 24/7, and already has telemetry mechanisms built in. An old car with someone using a phone probably still collects the same data as you assert. And an EV without smarts is legitimately just a golf cart.
> A car realistically just sits around doing nothing 80% of the time A bit besides the point, but isn't it wild how inherently wasteful personal cars are? Every time the thought crosses my mind to get another one, if I don't stop at the cost, I stop at the fact that I'll have this giant chunk of metal sitting idle on the street or somewhere else nearly all the time. It'd be useful in an extreme minority of cases (for…
I keep my cars for a long time. 200k miles is the usual, and that has held true buying used a little ways north of 100k miles already on the board.
If we designed for very long car life, the waste equation would look different.
Toyota does, and there are a small number of people planning on half a million miles. Recently there is evidence Toyota is either struggling on this metric. Quality problems or deliberate design intent change?
But it was mine and my wife’s first car and we have a lot of happy memories of places that car has taken us to. Aside from the odd flat tyre and a new clutch and timing belt over the last 8 years, it’s never let us down (it was largely engineered by Toyota which certainly helps there). We got a new car at the start of this year so it doesn’t see much use now, but we’ve kept it as a second car because it’s so damn cheap to run and maintain.
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They’re not black boxes, you’re just not an electrical engineer. They’re actually way simpler than ICE in a bunch of ways that really improve reliability. We just need to develop a collective understanding of how electric drivetrains work, the kind of understanding that we had developed in previous generations for ICE cars
Unless you have the complete source code available to you, this is a patently false statement.
Expensive too. Your test harness is likely the car!
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The longevity of our car not only on how good you drive, but how bad others drive.
While not false, careful defensive driving makes a big difference. But most people hate someone cutting in front of them and so won't maintain large follow ng distances
I try, and often succeed and generally see risks all around.
Too close, and often with few or no escape paths means maintaining best case attention and response times for the whole drive. That is tiring and usually just not enough.
Too far back means people dropping into the gap non-stop! This too is tiring.
I really hate how this aspect of driving.
The scary part is not the GPS installed by the fleet company that previously owned the car, which in all likelihood was just forgotten there, but the GPS and eSIM that comes with most (all?) new cars and that in most (all?) new cars cannot be disabled. Apart from privacy concerns of your data being used or sold by the car vendor, government outreach is also a concern. There was a bill announced in the US for all new…
It's a vehicle that can easily kill other people. It often does. It's reasonable to require drivers to be in good enough shape before trusting them with lives of random innocent people.