461–470 of 493 posts
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My Peugeot has these lights, cost me £16800 new. The lights last the lifetime of the car.
You probably could take them out after the car dies and use for another decade or two, if you found a good use for them ;)
>after the car dies
I see what you did there :D
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CarPlay is silly. CarPlay was made for legacy manufacturers who can’t make a decent UI. The UI on Tesla is generally ahead of CarPlay. Not even sure how you would do CarPlay.. a small pop-up window? It couldn’t take over the whole nav or you lose Energy display and a host of other good stuff.
CarPlay's UI is far better than any manufacturer I've seen so far. Using the same UI/UX as your smart phone is way more intuitive - and it'll keep pace with OS updates. I wouldn't buy a car _without_ CarPlay at this point.
I quite enjoyed CarPlay in my Honda, it solved a huge hole. But I really don't find that same hole. The only apps I really used was maps, and podcast app. I have both in the tesla info-tainment section.
Would be cool if they opened the market for third party apps, could be handy for some stuff... perhaps someday?
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How so?
Where I live we have countless boy racers with farty exhausts obnoxiously informing everyone at all hours of their amazingly unique and original ideas about how to modify cars. I pin the blame in no small part on Top Gear for spreading a dumbed down car culture to the masses. That's not to say I didn't enjoy watching it. I just don't enjoy what it contributed to bringing about.
If anything, they get their inspiration from across the pond. TG is an older man's comedy show.
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Most of the European Audi and BMW range is equipped with adaptive LED or laser headlights that selectively dip for oncoming traffic; self-levelling headlights are mandatory on new cars in the EU.
Nobody tows with an Audi or BMW in the US. People here tow with an F150, which is equipped with an incandescent bulb in front of a chrome-plated plastic reflector.
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>every subsystem is DRM'd and only licensed professionals were allowed to touch it Kind of like how smartphones are right now.
BMW is doing it right now - some of their US cars will come with features locked behind a subscription model. Want heated seats? They are $99 a year, you get a free 14 day trial to see if you like the feature. Same with adaptive cruise, with more advanced media features etc etc. Their argument is that vast majority of new BMWs in US are leased, so it's "better" for customers to lease a basic model for less, and then…
I don't mind soft-locked features too much since it can be cheaper for the manufacturer to just install it on everything than to build two separate models; plus it can be nice as a consumer to still have those additional features available if you change your mind later.
So, basically the same reason we have bad everything . Our institutions and regulations are outdated relative to the rest of the world, so we get stuck with shitty stuff.
For instance: payments. Europe and Asia got chip cards and tap-to-pay decades before we did, even though Mastercard and Visa took part in their invention. America had credit card infrastructure first, so our payment networks were stuck with it, while other countries could start off with better stuff. Without the consumer demand that Google/Apple Pay (and later coronavirus) created, we still probably wouldn't have wid…
Apparently they pay with their phone. They scan a QR code and get the bill on their phone... or something. I've never experienced it myself.
Even more idiotic is my truck. I put a camper on it. I can't drive it at night because the weight of the camper tilts the entire truck back just a bit so that the head lights are aimed right at driver's eyes even on the lowbeams. Everyone flashes me and gets pissed off. Hopefully Adaptive headlights account for things like this.
Does your truck not have self-leveling headlights? Or is the change outside their ability to handle?
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Jail is much more short term than prison. It can easily be a smaller punishment than having to buy a replacement car. Especially if it's something like this, where you might only spend a day or two there and have community service on top.
You can have your car back if you fix the headlights. Make it be a mandatory appointment to show up at after e.g. a week and get your car checked for having fixed your headlighs. Also, have a choice of getting your car booted with some electronic boot that you can unlock after sunrise, or getting your car towed. You'll have to show up for the checkup anyways, so that's when you can drop the boot off. Either way, impr…
Okay, so now we're talking about a completely different scenario that isn't confiscation.
Why am I getting downvoted for that? Jeez.
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> I also assume a system like that would probably be very expensive.... Couldn't that also have been said about anti-lock braking systems (ABS), if you go far enough back in automotive history?
Yes. I just wanted to know if this was a ubiquitous feature in Europe or just a new tech that hasn't yet left the luxury market. The article title implies that the US is significantly behind the times here and I wanted more info to gauge how true that is.