Cars, Man

[StarHalo]

Porsche West Broward has a selection of over 300 Porsches, so what to do when a hurricane is coming - park them all in the building. Just put the GT3s next to the desks, that's fine..

 

[BloodLust]

So looking forward to this with the ecodiesel.

http://www.trucktrend.com/future-trucks/1609-spied-2017-ram-1500-mega-cab/

 

[StarHalo]

Texas Speedway, where the flooded cars are being dumped:

 

[StarHalo]

A brief article by Malcolm Gladwell for Car and Driver on the future of the autonomous car; more era-defining writing that shows why C&D still exists despite it being the anti-magazine era..

 

[Burgess]

Tell me, please --


Would a " Self-Driving car " (or whatever you wish to call it)
be able to function in the setting of:


" Go pick up my kids from School " ?


Because * THAT *
would REALLY be a game-changer !


Just curious . . . .

 

[StarHalo]

Would a " Self-Driving car " (or whatever you wish to call it)
be able to function in the setting of:


" Go pick up my kids from School " ?

The most likely/likely to be successful application will be city transit, so as long as they're willing to walk to the stop, that's a yes.

 

[idleprocess]

A brief article by Malcolm Gladwell for Car and Driver on the future of the autonomous car; more era-defining writing that shows why C&D still exists despite it being the anti-magazine era..

An interesting article that's aware of the limits of its perspective. But I think it misses a few things.

As recently as perhaps 10 years ago, one could still plausibly speak of "self-driving cars" as being network devices controlled - or heavily coordinated - by a centralized control system with the trust issues the article touches on. But short of using GPS/GLONASS for coarse navigation, all the successful demonstrations of self-driving cars in the last decade or so have been under the control of their own local hardware and sensors with networked data providing secondary / non-critical functionality. If GPS drops, most prototype autonomous vehicles can use inertial nav, fine navigation guidance from LIDAR/RADAR/ultrasonic sensors, and dead reckoning from the speedometer to manage until it returns; if the internet connection goes down then clever Waze routing isn't going to get you around traffic jams. It's surprisingly similar to how humans operate cars, really - sensors to provide guidance (eyes for humans, cameras and other sensors for autonomous cars), network information to provide navigation (maps for humans, GPS/GLONASS for autonomous cars).

I feel that the view on driving as leisure vs utility isn't as simple nor as strongly generational as implied in the piece.

The baby boomers were the first generation to grow up with cars from birth, during an era of incredible prosperity, and also during a time when it suddenly became possible to conveniently drive almost anywhere in the CONUS. Naturally they took to cars - particularly in an era when used cars were easily within reach of a high school kid. X'ers repeated this ... kind of ... growing up under similar conditions but unlike boomers' parents they weren't experiencing this for the first time. Then the economy soured circa 2000 and X'ers growing up with local eyewitness TV news lived in fear for their children, resulting in a Millenial generation less likely to be able to afford cars and helicopter parents that won't let their kids out of sight to learn some of life's important lessons - but they do have smartphones.

Insofar as the love of driving the editors of C&D and the producers of Top Gear passionately attempt to keep alive ... we all need mobility, but only a slice of us have a deep-seated need to enjoy driving.

In the past 10 years I've owned 5 vehicles - '95/'03 Ford Ranger, '96 Ford F150, '08 Mazda 3, '18 Subaru WRX. Of those, only the Mazda 3 and Subaru WRX were routinely fun to drive, but damned pedestrian relative to what the denizens of this thread lust over. 90+ minutes of commuting with 2 reasonable routes to work leaves me dealing with a lot of traffic; the precious few interesting bits are also generally occupied with other drivers whom have no interest in moving through a turn at decent speed nor accelerating onto the highway at a pace that pleases me, often limiting the 'joy' of my commute to an occasional roll on the throttle to make a nice pass. If I could recover that commute time doing almost anything other than avoiding collision with my fellow commuters and passively listening to the radio, it would be worth a longer commute.

When one looks at the vehicles that sell and what needs they address, it appears that the market is by and large interested in mobility rather than driving. FWD econoboxes of all shapes and sizes predominate - be it sedans, wagons, crossovers, minivans - and the sort of vehicle that excites C&D - RWD, large-displacement V8, manual everything - is hard to find outside of performance and luxury marquees. Driving convenience seems to be the thing, with automatic-everything and a cushiony ride being valued most.

As such, I feel the market is more ripe for autonomy than C&D cares to admit. They're likely spot-on that figuring out how to use the technology will be a longer challenge than implementing it. But I suspect that industry has an idea where this is going already - namely that mobility will transition towards becoming a service rather than a product:

• No longer a status symbol : First and foremost, when the self-driving car can simply appear when needed then disappear when no longer needed, why should the average person own it? You can get into and exit from the vehicle at points most convenient for you, letting the vehicle mind the details of parking. The opportunity to impress one's peers will be reduced to that of the valet desk at a fancy restaurant or hotel - only less since people of ordinary means will be using these things in growing numbers. Timeliness of availability and the overall pleasantness of the ride are likely to be what matters, much like how one likely doesn't much care what model of taxi or airliner one rides on if it's clean, pleasant, and otherwise an efficient journey.
• Markedly greater cost to produce/own : These vehicles are also likely to be expensive for the first iterations due to the numerous sensors and computing platforms needed. Prices are coming down, but they're still a non-trivial additional cost in addition to the massive R&D burdens to be recouped for the integration and software. Initial customers are taxi and ride-sharing companies, who can manage higher costs since they produce revenue with them and use them at far higher duty rates than commuters. With this business model in mind, there's a clear pathway to building these vehicles for operator's TCO calculations - more expensive than private passenger vehicles, but more durable and maintainable in exchange. Insurance might also be troublesome for individuals to manage as well.
• Far more regulation : It's not hard to imagine regulators treating autonomous vehicles less like automobiles, more like aircraft. I can envision a more aviation-style production process with chain-of-custody and tight process-control documentation requirements. Vehicles may well be certified off the line then re-certified periodically. Maintenance will likely be far more regimented than today's automobiles. Entire categories of components and systems will be effectively off-limits for upgrade/modification lest it interfere with safe autonomy.

I foresee big changes in how we live and work once we start to transition to autonomous vehicles in the future. Garages, parking lots, and even the structure of our presently-sprawling cities - all intended to deal with mass ownership of personal vehicles - will adapt over time to more and more of us using nearly on-demand transportation. Heck, using autonomous cars for the last-mile between endpoints and more traditional mass transit points might alter the infrastructure calculus in unusual ways.

 

[StarHalo]

An interesting article that's aware of the limits of its perspective. But I think it misses a few things.

That article is only the first in a lengthy series of them covering the topic exhaustively in the new issue, I'd link you to the set but they don't have it on the site yet. But the new issue also reviews the new Jeep Trackhawk, and the old 2002 Lamborghini Murcielago that has 250,000 miles on it..

And your commute time is determined by the stoplights, not cruising speed unless it's abnormally below the average for that route.

 

[idleprocess]

And your commute time is determined by the stoplights, not cruising speed unless it's abnormally below the average for that route.

My commute is about 95% highway, so it's far more a matter of ~30 mile distance and congestion than the 4 stoplights one way and the 7 stoplights the other way (different highways morning and afternoon because glorious DFW traffic patterns and some "fun" geography at the edge of my town forcing a few extra miles/lights on surface streets on the return leg). Smashing the gas and passing with assertiveness in the afternoon can make a marked difference due to less volume of traffic than the morning leg where construction and stupid human tricks combined with volume make it slower.

 

[StarHalo]

Have you used Waze?

 

[FroggyTaco]

Not interested in being tracked that overtly

 

[idleprocess]

Have you used Waze?

I've used the adaptive routing on my phone before and found it kind of useless saving me little if any time with untimely changes and the usual pitfalls of GPS: using the least-prominent name for a road and emphasizing trivial routing information over critical information (keep right at the highway fork but then tells me afterwards that I needed to be in the right lane to exit).

 

[StarHalo]

I've used the adaptive routing on my phone before and found it kind of useless saving me little if any time

But how do you know how much time was saved if you don't know how long your default route took in that moment

Waze is not-optional in Cali, there's at least a half dozen ways for me to get to/from work and choosing wrong means the difference between a 30 min drive and an hour's drive. On any trip that takes more than one highway, even if I know the straightest route, I will always have Waze on.

 

[Chauncey Gardiner]

Track me, smack me. If it cuts 30 minutes of me being stuck in stop - n - go traffic.... count me in. :twothumbs

~ Chance

 

[BloodLust]

It depends on the area. Waze learns the more people use it. It plugs in data from current users. For example, a few users took the route I'm about to take, it bases the info relayed to me on their travel. Speed, traffic, etc.

Since commercial GPS has been around developed countries for several years already (Magellan, TomTom, Garmin, etc.), a lot still use them which is why it took a while for Waze to be adopted. Since there are less users too, especially for those away from large metropolitan areas, Waze hasn't learned as much as some places.
Also, Google in developed countries is quite complete and people would use Maps since it's already built in rather than download another app.

Google where I'm from can't even give a bus number or a train schedule, and most users are in the city just trying to look for a shorter route.

I started with Waze and Nokia Maps when they 1st came out. They didn't even have a map overlay. It was just showing a car over a blank area. I'm an early adopter.) Often they would only suggest 1 route because that's the only one the app has learned or in their database.

 

[StarHalo]

That article is only the first in a lengthy series of them covering the topic exhaustively in the new issue, I'd link you to the set but they don't have it on the site yet.

The entire suite of articles on the autonomous car from the November issue.

 

[StarHalo]

Hm, well that's a new one; glad I stopped for gas tonight:

 

[StarHalo]

Johnny Bohmer's street-legal BADD GT; this Ford GT40 makes 2,700 emissions-compliant horsepower and has air conditioning/license plates/insurance, but here it loses boost at 292.9 MPH. Then the parachute rips. Then the rear rotors shatter. But this is how close we are to a 300 MPH street-legal car (it's tuned for a realistic ~310.)

 

[StarHalo]

The cockpit view of 284 mph in a street-legal production car on a [closed] public road; skip to ~4:00 and cackle evilly as the driver applies more throttle through each gear so the car accelerates harder from 175 mph:

 

[StarHalo]

This thread turns 8 years old later this week, and we just crossed half a million views, well played gents..

In other news: From the cars-I-forgot-about file, the 1991-92 Dodge Spirit R/T: A K-car with a 224hp Lotus-Chrysler turbo engine (1hp less than the Ford Mustang GT of the time,) 5-speed Getrag manual transmission (auto not available,) disc brakes all around with optional ABS, 0-60 in ~6 seconds, 14.5 sec quarter mile (on par with same-year Mustang/Camaro/Firebird,) top speed 141mph. 1,400 sold total.