711–720 of 875 posts
Meanwhile, outside the US in some European countries it's almost impossible to buy an automatic car.
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Because they're not classified as passenger vehicles, so they don't have to meet the same standards.
Exactly. The technocrats thought they'd be clever, and they basically outlawed reasonably sized cars for very small marginal efficiency gains. People bought light truck instead. People don't want to drive around in dinky death traps. The CAFE standards for cars are too restrictive. The fleet averages look great, but the percentage of cars as vehicles on the road is low. Cars such as station wagons don't exist any mor…
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Indeed, it should be the actual use that governs this. If you use it as a passenger vehicle, it's a passenger vehicle. If you use it on a farm then it's a farm vehicle.
It’s pretty difficult to require a manufacturer to design a car today based on how someone will use it in the future.
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Forget about the government, I’m more afraid of insurance companies or the manufacturers themselves imposing such limits. Fortunately shielding against one shields against both.
exactly. I like how its the government thats always the boogieman despite Tesla and BMW already and clearly abusing thier ability to control a car remotely. Corporates have clear motivation to control you and squeese you.
I always found it strange how people in the UK prefer driving manual transmissions, there's always talk of liking the "feeling" and "control" when driving, this is coming from people who are not enthusiasts and don't even like driving sometimes. 90% of driving tests in the UK are done in manual transmission cars[1]. Taking your driving test in an automatic means that you are not allowed to drive a manual[2]. After li…
Automatic cars were expensive, only posh audis, Mercs and top end "british" cars had them, all the way up till the mid 2000s. they still feel expensive to buy (even though electric cars are all autos now) and there is a fear that they are unreliable and expensive to fix (not sure if that's still the case)
Here in the UK if you only plan to use automatic, you can take an automatic driving license, but you can't drive manuals. So its a bit pointless really. Although one of my mates did it.
Unless I'm going to do track driving, I don't really want a manual (actually if its track I'd rather semi auto)
However, when driving automatic car, I still get the panic "ARGHH CLUTCH OTHERWISE YOU'LL STALL" reflex when I am coming to a halt.
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There’s nothing misleading about it. Shift paddles are pretty standard on cars with automatic gearboxes. The only difference is that outside of sports cars “consumer” gearboxes will usually restrict the range they’ll let you use with semi-automatic shifting and will override that if you redline or bottom out.
F1 cars will not automatically shift gears though. That's the defining feature of automatic transmission.
When manuals are discussed on the internet, it’s the manual clutch which is the central difference, not what’s essentially a firmware feature or lack thereof. That’s what’s mentioned in pretty much every comment other than your nitpicks.
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Can I add a request? A car that doesn't phone home. That is, one that the government is utterly unable to remotely turn off, monitor, or impose distance quotas. One that cannot be hacked through a poorly secured server in a car maker's server farm or government server with the username/pass admin/admin.
It seems like it should be straightforward to pull out any cell radios, no? I've removed them from cell phones with ease, and I have to think the larger size of a car would lend itself to this being easy.
The same thing will happen for all current vehicles when cellular providers eventually start shutting down 4G networks.
That's why fortunately for now, all vehicles can still function properly without a network connection. I do suspect that someday that will change tho.
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It seems like it should be straightforward to pull out any cell radios, no? I've removed them from cell phones with ease, and I have to think the larger size of a car would lend itself to this being easy.
On newer cars most every component from your tires to your rear window defroster phones home about your activity.
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As someone who hates how ugly modern cars have become, I can also acknowledge the extraordinary leap in safety they've achieved since then. Many of the rules are designed around safety. Although a counterpoint to this is the giant A pillars limit visibility so much as to be dangerous themselves.
I almost got t-bones a few weeks ago due to my pillars. It was a rural intersection that’s at an angle and I looked both ways. I didn’t notice the road was at an angle where an approaching car would be hidden. I pulled out, and if I had been .2 seconds faster I might’ve been dead. A van zoomed by going 60 and I braked all of a few inches from getting hit. Stupid of me, of course. But it’s easy to miss a bad combinati…
OTOH there's also a fairly simply fix invented by an 8th grader... [2]
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exactly. I like how its the government thats always the boogieman despite Tesla and BMW already and clearly abusing thier ability to control a car remotely. Corporates have clear motivation to control you and squeese you.
That's because the consumer has the ability to choose (at least currently in the automotive market) a different manufacturer that won't control and squeeze them like Tesla or BMW would. If the big bad government is doing it instead, it means they are mandating the controlling and squeezing with the full might of the government behind it. Of course they're the boogieman.