751–760 of 919 posts
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CAFE regs made USian hugecars relatively profitable, and car makers got USians to demand them via savvy marketing. That's what I reckon anyway.
The word "American" already unambiguously describes people of the USA. You don't need to make up a new word.
So much for unambiguous.
In Shenzhen for a tech meeting. The streetscape is quieter, despite high traffic levels and I hear not only MORE birdsong, but the birds do more complex songlines. The air is clean. For sure some of this is because it's a coastal city and has fresh sea breezes, but I've been in other Chinese coastal cities in times past and the air was significantly less clean. There are social upsides for an almost-all-EV city. This…
What about the increased pollution from road dust? In Norway this has led to higher pollution levels that are directly dangerous to people and animals than back when we were all combustion vehicles. The heavier EV's are causing genuinely harmful particles simply by driving on the roads themselves.
But that's completely ignoring tailpipe emission, and the fact that in an urban setting it's still vastly more advantageous to drive an EV.
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Cars with 20yo computers do work tho.
The older modules were more durable, but even those start to fail after that much use. In the past, you could go to a junkyard and pull a new module, but now everything is vin-locked to the car, so you need to buy a new module from the manufacturer, but oops, they are no longer selling them. Now what do you do? It's a real problem. Some shops try to reverse engineer the modules and create clones, and that works a lit…
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Do you have a car now? A phone? If you are wearing pants you are being tracked right now!
So why all this hysteria about cars tracking us if we already carrying phones with us that has been tracking us for almost 2 decades now? I'm being a bit sarcastic but also not. I understand the sentiment of people here but also the 2 standards applied.
It is true that we don't need cars sending telemetry to track us since there is a conveniently placed identification number on the front and rear of the car, the number plate (used by government), but this is physically broadcasted and that limits its reach.
So why should the manufacturer of my car have access (and the right to sell) a lot of my personal data like location, weight, age indefinitely just because I own a product manufactured by them?
It is an unnecessary overreach on very sensitive data and I can't really opt out (if buying a modern car) since all manufacturers are doing it.
Yes I also carried a phone everywhere the last 20years, but that doesn't make the tracking right (also on phone I think we should be tracked less).
Honda is setting itself up for failure on the second disruption sweeping the automotive industry: the software-defined vehicle (SDV), which has core capabilities that can be upgraded and improved over time. No thank you. Not sure why the author frames this as a good thing. They've been bamboozled by the automakers and have got it backwards - you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled,…
In Shenzhen for a tech meeting. The streetscape is quieter, despite high traffic levels and I hear not only MORE birdsong, but the birds do more complex songlines. The air is clean. For sure some of this is because it's a coastal city and has fresh sea breezes, but I've been in other Chinese coastal cities in times past and the air was significantly less clean. There are social upsides for an almost-all-EV city. This…
What about the increased pollution from road dust? In Norway this has led to higher pollution levels that are directly dangerous to people and animals than back when we were all combustion vehicles. The heavier EV's are causing genuinely harmful particles simply by driving on the roads themselves.
EVs generate next to no brake dust due to regenerative braking, most EVs have mechanisms to forcefully use the friction brakes at some points to stop surface rust for this reason.
It's true they're generally heavier than the equivalent ICE vehicle, but this is usually around 200-300KG heavier - it causes a small increase in tyre wear and associated particulates but these are heavy large particles - the majority larger than pm10. That's a problem for water courses and micro plastics but nothing that'll get in your lungs or bloodstream. Anecdotally, my EV tyres (a particularly heavy model too) have lasted fine - my last set did 53k miles.
ICE cars produce plenty of pm10s, pm2.5s and smaller particles as well as nitrogen oxide, carbon dioxide and plenty of other harmful pollutants that EVs inherently don't. Even the power generated for them is usually produced away from the majority of the population.
I'm convinced that the Japanese government is terrified of EVs because all the small and medium-sized businesses which support the Japanese auto industry will be absolutely gutted when vehicles contain drastically fewer parts. That, and Japan is deeply screwed if they go all-in on EVs and then China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths.
EVs have lots of the same parts as an ICEV - the differences are engine and power systems, fuel tank, transmission... Most of the car is still there. There is a lot of churn - lead-acid is out, fuel injection, sensors are different and sense different things, and so on, but it's still a car.
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> China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths This is a common misunderstanding. There are plenty of alternative locations to mine rare earth minerals, particularly Australia. China cornered the market because it's a high pollution low margin business. If geopolitical concerns cut off access to Chinese sources, alternatives will be developed.
Mining isn't the only bottleneck with rare earths. There also the processing, which is an industry China has monopolized through sustained investments over decades. They have also improved processing efficiency through investments in technology. It's going to take a while for anyone else to catch up.
Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of everyone's own inaction...
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can you share what vehicle that is? i don't know why you wouldn't just name it in the post...
Looks like it's the F-150 Lightning. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47421383 I chalk it up to poorly designed software from a company where software isn't the core competency, rather than blaming the basic concept of putting software in a vehicle. "Bad software is bad" doesn't have the same ring though...
Its similar to how bad brakes or a roof prone to leaking makes the whole car a bad car. The "weakest link" undermines the whole system.
> software isn't the core competency
Software is a essential part of modern cars, remove the software and they don't function (or in some cases are not allowed on the road). The car manufacturers "core competency" is making cars so I would argue that software is definitely a "core competency" of a modern car manufacturer.
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>you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on. This is very much not what "software-defined vehicle" means which itself is very much not the same thing as EVs. It's possible to criticize the explotative business practices you mentioned (or bad UI practices like moving everything to a touchscreen instead of physical buttons) without linking th…
> At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced. Experience with boxed versus updatable software, particularly video games, says otherwise. When it costs a lot for the manufacturer to fix defects, they put more emphasis on not having them in the f…