Category: Cars, including self-driving

Ayn Rand’s Antique Car Museum in Fairbanks

by philg

Last month, I spent 1.5 hours at Alaska ComiCon in Fairbanks, which isn’t quite the jam-packed experience of the San Diego Comic-Con, but included the world’s largest balloon costume (Godzilla, of course!):

My friends picked me up for the short drive to the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum, which seems to be indirectly named for Ayn Rand, ironically famous for not having learned to drive despite living for a time in Los Angeles. (The connection seems to be that Tim Cerny, a real estate developer, liked Rand’s novel The Fountainhead and named his company after her and then the museum is named for the company.)

Despite the founder’s apparent free market orientation, the museum has an Elizabeth Warren section:

My favorite car was the Owen Magnetic, spiritual heir to the Chevrolet Volt, in which the internal combustion engine is a generator. It even had regen braking:

Here’s a 1932 Cadillac…

After 90 years of evolution, the ugly duckling 1932 Cadillac was transformed into the beautiful Escalade:

Americans 110 years ago hadn’t discovered the joys of helicopter parenting and, therefore, brothers aged 10 and 6 were able to ride on horses from Oklahoma to the East Coast, buy a car and learn to drive in NYC, and then drive back to Oklahoma (the horses went home by train). They met two presidents and both Wright brothers:

State-sponsored PBS did a show about them (I recently learned about this from a Facebook friend; it aired in April 2020, just as coronapanic was in full swing, but it is tough to imagine a lockdown strict enough that I would have the patience to watch PBS).

The museum covers the challenge of building a practical snowmobile, which didn’t happen until airplanes were into their second generation (most of the invention seems to have occurred first in Russia; Wokipedia).

I knew that Carl Fisher, the creator of Miami Beach and the Indy 500, had developed a gas-based “Prest-O-Lite” headlight, but didn’t realize that it involved a tank of acetylene right next to the driver!

For fans of the old Bell 47 and Hiller helicopters… the Franklin company that made their engines was produced cars with air-cooled engines back in 1905:

After the museum, we went downtown to Soba for Moldovan food.

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Given how quickly Tesla and BYD were built, how could a Honda-Nissan merger ever make sense?

by philg

Honda is in talks to merge with or purchase Nissan. I can’t figure out the rationale. In the old days maybe you’d say that it takes a long time to build factories, establish dealer networks, etc. and, therefore, Nissan’s assets might be valuable. But Tesla and BYD started from nothing and quickly built factories, company-owned stores (better than dealers), engineering, and everything else necessary for being in the car business. In any case, Honda doesn’t have to start from scratch in the car business because it is already well-established in the car business. If Nissan has some good people, Honda could try to hire them away and set them up within their proven-to-be-profitable structure.

What do we see below that Honda doesn’t make or couldn’t make?

The $120,000+ Nissan GT-R is kind of fun, but only about 1,000 are built each year.

More generally, given what Tesla and BYD have accomplished why would a car company ever want to buy another car company?

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My love that dare not speak its name for the Chevrolet Tahoe’s isolation from Florida highway texture noise

by philg

Loyal readers know me as someone who rejected the SUV religion almost as early and often as I rejected Faucism (saliva-soaked cloth face rags, lockdowns except for liquor and marijuana stores, and school closure as a way of slowing down SARS-CoV-2). Today I have a shameful admission to make… I’m almost in love with the Chevrolet Tahoe.

Our affair began at the Kissimmee, Florida airport. I dropped off the 20-year-old Cirrus SR20 so that it could get a new parachute and rocket at the factory-owned service center there (see Parachute and rocket replacement option for Cirrus owners who love Disney and Harry Potter). I reserved a “car” from Enterprise for the trip back to Stuart, Florida and was dismayed when they gave me what looked like two huge bricks:

By the time I was done with the two-hour trip, though, I marveled at the isolation from road noise. It seemed even quieter than our beloved 2021 Honda Odyssey (not to be confused with the 2025 Honda Odyssey that, thanks to continuous reinvestment and diligent engineering work, is exactly the same as our car). On smooth pavement, the noise level might be similar, but Florida highways have a tremendous amount of texture in the concrete. This is presumably to prevent hydroplaning during the Biblical rains that are common here. The interior noise level of almost every car that I’ve been in goes up dramatically when entering an interstate highway or turnpike from an untextured ramp. Not the Tahoe’s.

The car also drove well and the software design seems slightly better overall than for the typical Japanese car and dramatically better than for the typical European car.

Readers: Who else loves this absurdly oversized/overweight GM vehicle?

(One answer: a neighbor here in Abacoa! Below is a photo of the monster Tahoe in front of an efficiently sized minivan (visitor to the neighborhood? We’re one of the few families that has resisted the SUV craze).)

In other news, “Tested: 2025 Honda Odyssey Still Carries the VTEC Torch” (Car and Driver, December 18, 2024):

The Odyssey is also extraordinarily quiet at speed, which is especially impressive with this much frontal area. We measured 66 decibels at a steady 70-mph cruise, which not only bests all the other minivans—including the ID. Buzz by a wide, four-decibel margin—but also beats some luxury juggernauts, such as the Mercedes-Benz E-class. While the Odyssey is the quietest minivan, put your foot down and it becomes the loudest, with 80 decibels of VTEC fury at wide-open throttle.

The Car and Driver numbers are consistent with what I was able to measure in Maskachusetts, but I’m pretty sure that they’re a lot lower than what we experience when we take the Odyssey out on the textured Florida highways. The Tahoe tested at the same 66 dBA back in 2021, but I think it does a better job of keeping that 66 dBA when the road surface isn’t smooth.

Maybe we could find the perfect tire for the Odyssey and that would help? Car and Driver tested purported noise-killing tires back in 2016 and the results were weak:

If the effect appears small by our sound-meter measurements, it seemed even smaller when measured with our eardrums. We struggled to discern any significant improvement, although it probably didn’t help that our back-to-back drives were sepa­rated by a half-hour tire swap.

Continental confusingly claims a 9 dBA reduction in noise, but only at certain frequencies. I thought that the whole point of A weighting was to give a summary that matches human perception. Their ContiSilent tires aren’t available in sizes to fit the Odyssey, unfortunately.

Is it time to get a new vehicle? Our Odyssey is getting a little shabby after 4 years, but it is tough to summon the energy to push through all of the dealer paperwork in order to trade it for a minivan that is identical in all significant respects. It probably wouldn’t be a huge financial hit to buy the new minivan because our existing minivan will start depreciating like a rock soon enough. I don’t feel sufficiently high and mighty to switch allegiance to the Tahoe. Readers: Have you noticed any other car that is especially quiet over textured concrete?

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Do self-driving cars work better in states with modern road networks, such as Florida?

by philg

I’m hoping that the Tesla Full Self Driving experts will weigh in on a question… does FSD work better on the newest roads with the clearest markings and most logical designs? In Maskachusetts, for example, there are a lot of ambiguous situations due to heavy traffic combined with old roads, worn-away markings, and a lack of dedicated lanes for left and right turns. Here in Florida, by contrast, the typical road is fairly new and the markings are in pristine condition. There is less need for a driver to exercise judgment. Here’s an intersection near our house, for example, and the purpose of each lane is clearly marked even when viewed from an aircraft (or would this “satellite view” actually be from a satellite?):

Maybe it is from a satellite because the Google “satellite” view in far-more-important Miami Beach is higher resolution:

For comparison, here’s an intersection in Brighton, Maskachusetts:

To my eye, the markings aren’t as distinct and there are fewer single-purpose lanes. Here’s one from Malden, MA:

If you wanted to make a right turn from Ferry St. onto Salem St. do you sneak past all of the cars going straight? (because there are two lanes in the NW direction) Or do you wait behind all of the cars going straight because it is just one lane in the NW direction?

(H-1B fans will be cheered to see that there is an “Immigrant Learning Center” just north of the “India Bazaar”)

Getting a little fuzzier again, here’s a five-way intersection in Lincoln, Maskachusetts (significant backups at this one prior to the coronapanic lockdowns). Is it obvious from the markings how to get through this or how many lanes there are?

Most of our drives are on literally perfect roads in terms of design, surface condition, markings, and marking condition. Does that mean FSD would be smoother, safer, and less likely to panic and disengage than in the Northeast? Also, what happens to FSD in an epic Florida thunderstorm when a human can’t see and the car is prone to hydroplaning?

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Should a self-driving car have a camera pole that extends to 13′ above the ground after startup?

by philg

Who here has experienced Tesla Full Service Driving 13.2? A friend who is very tech-savvy and skeptical says that it was awesome on a couple of trips that he did in a sister’s car in Los Angeles. As a joke I asked a venture capitalist/Bitcoin bro friend in Miami when he’d be getting a Cybertruck and, of course, it turned out that he already had one. He says that FSD 13.2 does not work reliably in Miami and also that he isn’t surprised that it works great in Los Angeles: “The software works best in places where there are a lot of Teslas because it needs a huge amount of training data.”

If the goal of self-driving is to beat humans at their own incompetent game, what about a pole that can extend from the roof of the car up to a maximum of about 13′ in height as soon as the car is on the road? With cameras mounted at roof level and above, the self-driving car will be able to do what human drivers can’t, e.g., see over plants in the median (a Florida problem), over monster SUVs (a problem everywhere in the U.S.), etc. Waymo gets part of the way there with a non-extendable roof-mounted camera (photo from San Francisco with homeless encampment in background):

Why not take it up to 13′ when the situation calls for a bird’s eye view (“drone’s eye view”?)? (have a map of low-clearance areas, of course, and the pole won’t get stripped off the car by a bridge)

Aside from stupidity, what’s the problem with this idea? When the car is moving, the pole can’t be sufficiently stabilized to yield high-quality camera images? If so, the pole would still be useful when waiting to make a left turn and it is otherwise difficult to see oncoming traffic. NHTSA says that left turn accidents account for 22 percent of total accidents.

What to name this device? Tesla likes aviation analogies (“autopilot”) so how about “The Lindbergh”? Charles Lindbergh had a retractable periscope that enabled him to see forward during his famous NY-Paris flight in 1927. Or, if it is only practical to use when the car is stopped at an intersection… “The Selfie Stick”.

(Although often portrayed as an admirer of Nazi Germany, Lindbergh might have been pro-Israel, at least in concept (source). On the other hand, he lived until 1974 and even AI can’t find any statement by him regarding the modern state of Israel. Maybe he was too busy with his three secret girlfriends and seven secret European children? (Wikipedia) These additional kids should make Elon/Tesla like Lindbergh even more!)

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Working class taxpayers buy a laptop class Coloradan a free electric car

by philg

“How I Leased a New EV for $0 Down and $0 per Month” (Car and Driver, December 2024):

During my morning scroll, I came upon news of a Denver dealer offering a Fiat 500e lease for $0 down and $0 a month. The minimal fine print said lessees had to be Colorado residents, which I am, and just had to cover the tax on this wee EV. I had to check it out.

The magic of this deal comes down to incentives. Because it’s a leased EV with an MSRP below $55,000, the car qualifies for the full $7500 federal tax credit regardless of battery mineral content or origin. Or rather, the leasing company qualifies for that credit, so the lessee’s personal income is irrelevant. This is the so-called leasing loophole. Colorado adds its own spiffs in the form of $5000 for a new EV, plug-in, or hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicle, plus $600 if the vehicle is being financed or leased and an additional $2500 for cars with a sub-$35,000 MSRP. (The model eligible for this deal limbos under that bar at $34,095.) The $5000 state tax break ratchets down to $3500 on January 1, which is why the deal has a deadline of December 31, 2024. Uncertainty about the next administration’s stance on (non-Tesla) EVs provides a push, too.

All together, that’s $16,100 in credits, knocking the capitalized cost of the lease down to $17,995. I’d be on the hook for 4.5 percent tax on the original $34,095, but additional dealer-side coupons from Stellantis brought that down to $1205.50. If I choose to buy the car at the end of the term, it will cost me $17,388.45. I don’t expect that to happen.

Our family is in the laptop class. Could we get the working class to buy us a free car for use in Florida? No.

Because of Colorado’s unique tax-credit situation, the store rounded up as many unsold 2024s as it could find from across the country and slapped the deal on them. The car I ended up with was, coincidentally, originally delivered to the Fiat dealer down the road from C/D HQ in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I used to live.

Maybe a working class person behind on his/her/zir/their rent could get this deal too? No. It’s restricted to the “reasonably elite”:

A funny formality: They still had to run a credit check to confirm my ability to (not) pay.

Was that the end of the river of cash for the happy journalist?

I get my choice between a free Level 2 home charging station or $600 in charging credits, either of which will offset about half of my initial outlay. I opted for the hardware since I don’t plan to stray too far from home with this little Italian job. There’s also the incremental cost of adding a car to insurance as well as registration and plates, but you can’t get around those. So all in all, I’m paying less than $50 per month in taxes. Not bad.

(The “taxes” described might be more properly considered a user fee for the roads on which the car will be driven.)

What about your range anxiety? Load up on Xanax! From the Fiat USA web site:

I.e., the taxpayer-funded deal makes sense only for those rich enough to already own a long-range electric or gasoline-powered car. It transfers money from people who can barely afford one car to those who can afford to keep at least two. Merry Christmas to the elites, indeed!

Donald Trump, 2014: “I hope we never find life on another planet because if we do there’s no doubt that the United States will start sending them money!”

Related:

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How does the “Ferrari for sale” scam work?

by philg

Here’s a recent text message:

How does the scam then work? I respond with “Sorry, but we ran out of SF90s last Wednesday” and… then what? How does this person (or robot?) end up with my not-very-hard-earned-and-certainly-undeserved Bidies?

Or maybe this SF90 shopper is legit. I took some pictures of a Ferrari SF90 (fewer than 2,000 produced?) in Fort Worth, Texas back in May 2024:

I can’t remember if I posted any on Twitter or Facebook.

Perhaps the sender assumed that because I’m committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion that, naturally, I would own a car made by a company that is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. (But, then, why would I want to sell a car that will remind me of DEI with every trip to Publix?)

From the Ferrari web site:

The photo of an all-white team seems to have been purged from the Ferrari site, but it was up long enough for X to capture when Ferrari proudly posted about their plan to discriminate by race, gender ID, etc.:

Meanwhile, let’s check on the rare collectible vehicle that we actually do own. Its value seems to be increasing. Received November 24, 2024:

Speaking of scams, here’s a recent invitation for me to become friends on Facebook. The account is owned by someone with the Arabic male name “Kareem” and the pictures are of a blonde:

And a Facebook comment exchange (original post is about San Francisco)….

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Will Tesla turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to Harley-Davidson? (self-driving cars and motorcycle safety)

by philg

A lot of motorcycle accidents are caused by human automobile drivers failing to see the motorcycle and, e.g., initiating a left turn. (It’s tough to find statistics on this, actually, except from trial lawyers who say that nearly all motorcycle accidents are caused by someone other than the rider.)

What if the typical car has a Tesla-style superhuman robot at the controls? The robot won’t fail to see a motorcycle, right? Could self-driving cars usher in a new era of motorcycle safety?

Also, while we wait for this glorious era perhaps cars could use their existing cameras and computers to highlight motorcyclists to the slow-minded humans behind the (legacy?) steering wheels. If a car already has a front-facing camera, a computer vision system, and a heads-up display why not project an “M” on the windshield when a motorcycle is noticed? (do this more aggressively when the car is stopped and the driver has activated the left turn signal or if the camera has noticed a left turn lane arrow painted in the lane via the camera)

On the third hand, maybe motorcycling will simply become illegal once most vehicles are self-driving. The residual injury and death will still be high enough that public health bureaucrats will be able to say, truthfully, “Banning motorcycles will save way more lives than we saved via closing schools and forcing people to wear cloth masks.”

Related:

see also… the hunting cap that Tim Walz wore in one of the videos featuring him engaging in manly activities…

… and a rare photo of Doug Emhoff leaving an A-lister event:

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Lowriders in Fort Worth

by philg

The leisure hours of a software expert witness at trial are few. I did find time to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month by walking out of the war room and into Fort Worth’s Sundance Square for a September 21st event “Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month with a vibrant showcase of lowriders and culture.” Here are some photos.

If you thought that the hydraulics on an Airbus A380 were complex…

Medium format never dies…

Elizabeth Warren’s family made it down to the event:

It would be nice if gold wheels were a factory option for the Honda Odyssey:

If a minivan isn’t sufficiently stylish, even with gold wheels, here’s what I think is an early 1950s Chevrolet Suburban (it seems smaller than today’s behemoths):

I reminded the person carrying this bag that “The Latinx do it better” was the correct modern form:

Some elegance:

Ideas for next time we have the Honda Odyssey repainted:

ChatGPT says that the correct expression for the situation below is “Mejor tu hermana en un prostíbulo que tu hermano en una Honda.”

Sundance Square during the event:

Later that night…

There’s an It’s Sugar store half a block away for dancers who get tired. They feature some Tim Walz gummi candies:

And some Kamala Harris/Joe Biden/Whoever Is Running the Country Peace for Our Time gummi candies for sharing with Iranian, Lebanese, and Palestinian friends:

Circling back to the subject of lowriders, is there another car culture that has been created by an ethnic group? We could perhaps say that minivans are the apotheosis of white American culture. Now that a substantial percentage of Haiti’s former population lives here in the U.S. has a distinctive Haitian car culture developed? How about an Arab-American car culture in Dearborn, Michigan?

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Tesla CyberTruck as the perfect substrate for an art car?

by philg

I’ve seen a few wrapped Tesla CyberTrucks lately. Apparently folks aren’t in love with the stock look and in the vinyl age don’t need to be. For the first time in the history of cars we have tons of people who are happy to pay $100,000 for a vehicle and then happy to pay some more money to radically alter the appearance. For the most fashion-forward CyberTruck owners, why not offer art car packages? Sadly, the Houston Art Car Museum closed in April 2024, but there are photos of its collection that can be used for inspiration.

Here’s one that looks like it would be simple to do as a wrap:

Here’s something that might require a bit of engineering to make sure that everything stayed attached under Tesla-level acceleration:

This would be magnificent, but probably wouldn’t fit in the garage:

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