Category: Cars, including self-driving

Our recent trip through the charred American economic landscape involved three rental cars and five Uber/Lyft rides. Nobody in Detroit wants to work, apparently, so it was tough to get rides. We ended up having to pay over $100 for a 20-minute trip in a “luxury SUV” because nobody was available at 5 pm in any of the other options. One out of five Uber/Lyft drivers wore a mask correctly and consistently.

Our National Ford Fusion in Cleveland smelled like it had been owned and driven for all of its previous 50,000 miles by a chain smoker. Hertz in Niagara Falls didn’t deliver the car to the airport as promised (“we don’t have enough staff”), but then “upgraded” us to a BMW X3. The ride was harsh, the electronics were confusing, and the kids gave the prestige SUV a thumbs down. As an example of how bad the user interface on the car is, here’s the key fob. Unlock is an unlock symbol. To lock the car, press the BMW logo:

Note that they still had to put a subtle lock symbol next to the logo, as a guide for the bewildered. That the interface had to be patched like this did not prompt any second thoughts!

In Oshkosh (Appleton, actually, since we wimped out on the KOSH VFR arrival), Enterprise gave us a new BMW 530i, offering some dual instruction on how to change gears “because nobody can ever figure it out.” I was prepared to love this expensive machine, but the suspension interacted horribly with slight waves in the Interstate 41 pavement. The BMW bucked for every highway mile and let us feel every pothole. Maybe it was the suspension configuration? We found a “Comfort setting” next to the gear selector, which didn’t seem to help, but led to a fun exchange with the kids. “Put in on Comfort” they shouted when we entered the highway. “I don’t have any comfort!” said the 7-year-old after a minute or two. Thumbs down on this one too!

Maybe the answer is that BMWs offer race car-like performance and therefore we shouldn’t expect the suspension to be compliant? The 530i didn’t seem to corner especially well or handle nimbly. The thing weighs as much as our Honda Odyssey minivan and seemed to have almost as much body roll in corners, a poor showing considering that it is 2X the price and 1/2 the interior volume.

Can someone explain why BMWs are good?

Bonus: Niagara Falls…

Related:

• Car and Driver on the 5-series (a mediocre rating)
• Car and Driver on the top-of-the-line 3-series (beaten by an Alfa Romeo sedan)
• Department of Minimal Inflation: The $70,000 Tesla S is now $91,000+.
• Department of Automotive Karenhood: “New York Auto Show Officially Canceled for 2021” (“The show had been rescheduled to August but is now off due to the COVID-19 Delta variant and increasingly stringent restrictions in New York City.”)

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“Comparison Test: 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E vs. 2020 Tesla Model Y” (Car and Driver) has Ford crushing Tesla in every area except straight-line acceleration (useful in a country of 330+ million people using a road network designed for 150 million?) and charging network (#BidenWillFixByTaxingTheRich). The Ford Mach-E is built better, has a better user interface, offers more comfortable seats, is cheaper, and is quieter. The Ford accelerates 0-60 mph in 4.9 seconds, which should be more than fast enough for street driving.

A comment on the C&D article:

I can’t get over how bad Tesla interiors are. Take away the giant tablet in the middle and it’s completely empty inside. A $60k car with the interior quality of a Mitsubishi. The Mach E is cheaper and has better quality. If Ford is killing you in the quality department you have issues.

Loyal readers will recall my obsession with Dog Mode, going back to 2003 (see Car/Kennel). The legacy car companies seem to be refusing to add these 10 lines of code, perhaps because they don’t want to be held responsible if the feature is used improperly and a dog is baked to death? I wonder if therefore this will become Tesla’s only long-term competitive advantage vs. Ford, VW, Hyundai/Kia, Toyota, Honda, et al.

Also from Car and Driver: “Every Electric Vehicle That’s Expected in the Next Five Years”. It seems that there isn’t much interest in building the Toyota Camry of electric cars, i.e., a car that doesn’t purport to drive itself, that doesn’t accelerate faster than a C5 Corvette, that doesn’t have a huge touchscreen stuck in the middle of the dashboard, and that therefore doesn’t cost more than necessary.

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Every time there is an interaction between an American subject and an American police officer or officers there is a chance that the police will shoot and kill or cripple the subject. In addition to the loss of life, other subjects may lose tens of millions of dollars per incident when the city has to pay civil damages to the survivors of the person who was killed.

Our beloved 2021 Honda Odyssey (“like a Tesla, but spacious, quiet, and smooth over bumps; lacks Dog Mode”), at least when a phone is plugged in (haven’t checked, but maybe it is getting it from Google Maps?), displays the current speed limit. The engine is controlled electronically. If I mash down the accelerator, it could certainly say “I’m afraid I can’t do that Dave” and accelerate only to, e.g., 55 mph. If nobody can speed, nobody can be pulled over for speeding. This wouldn’t eliminate potentially deadly interactions between the police and the general public, but it certainly would reduce them.

Maybe have a single exception: passing another car that is going more than 10 mph slower than the speed limit on a two-lane road. The Odyssey already has all of the hardware and 99 percent of the software necessary to detect this situation (the adaptive cruise control has a radar to see how fast cars in front are going and the lane-departure and lane-keeping systems (the latter adds some steering inputs) use a camera to see if you’re staying in your lane.

Readers: Stupid or Clever?

Related:

• Save lives by limiting cars to 35 mph? (if we look at what we’ve done out of coronapanic, it is irrational not to eliminate most driving-related deaths, which kill far younger people (more life-years lost) and which are far easier to prevent)

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Only 10 percent of the USPS’s new delivery vehicles will be election (Green Car Reports):

U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy confirmed to lawmakers Wednesday that electric versions of the trucks will make up only 10% of the next-generation fleet and claimed that a fully electric contract would have cost up to $4 billion more for the whole contract.

They won’t even be delivered until 2023. Given the generally short routes, slow speeds, and guaranteed overnight idle time for recharging, how is it possible that electric can’t be more cost-effective than gasoline-powered?

See also “Oshkosh’s NGDV Mail Van Looks Incredibly Dorky for a Reason” (Automobile):

If electric isn’t the smart choice for USPS local delivery, how could it ever be the smart choice for a family that wants to take some evening/nighttime trips, some intercity trips, etc.?

Loosely related:

• a comment on a Tesla article: Every time I ask a Tesla owner to list the tech that makes some kind of difference they can’t come up with anything meaningful. What is it? Dog mode? Cheetah mode? Flush-mount door handles? A big tablet stuck to the dash looking like a high school shop project?

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A friend is shopping for a new car. He happens to have been working for the past five years on various Silicon Valley self-driving car efforts. What’s he looking at for a new car for himself? A C8 Corvette! (Why not the product of the finest minds of Silicon Valley? “Can any expensive car have a worse interior than Tesla? Seems impossible. They shaved every possible penny there.”)

What color? “Anything but black,” he replied. “The Zeus Bronze Metallic also might be too close to black.” What’s wrong with black? “It will be invisible to Lidar. The cameras might see it during the daytime, but it will be dangerous to drive at night because self-driving cars won’t see it.”

Readers: What do you think of the C8 in Zeus Bronze?

Compare to the Red Mist Metallic, which is the most popular color:

Some additional thoughts from our deeply embedded source…

When can we expect the promised age of self-driving cars?

Hard to answer as depends on legislation and business. Let’s go backwards and try to guess. What is the long-term future? Is it (a) autonomous cars try to mix into traffic with humans, or (b) human driving is illegal?

To get to (a), are the steps (1) start selling autonomous to fleet operators, (2) start selling autonomous to citizens, (3) stop making new human-driven cars, hence no wheel, and grandfather some human driven cars

For (1) to happen the cars have to get good enough, for (2) to happen the cars have to get cheap enough, for (3) to happen Biden/Harris will need the power to repurpose the roads for the greatest public good/safety (also nice because now the government will know where all of the citizens are going and when)

My guess is that the industry wants (a) for now but the government will want (b), which makes more efficient use of roads, simplifies the software, and also facilitates tracking everyone.

Right now (2021) self-driving car is expensive and dangerous. Reducing expense is possible once more money goes into the ecosystem, but it remains to be seen how safely they operate. Horse/car analogy does not make sense: man-driven flesh vehicle to man-driven ICE vehicle. Self driving is from man-driven vehicle to software-driven.

Why is this challenge so tough for software?

The problem with mixing software-driven and human-driven vehicles is exemplified by “is that guy watching Netflix while driving going to yield to my left turn?” Hard to get that right.

When will a family be able to buy a self-driving car, then, without a steering wheel and mix it up with human-driven contraptions?

Pure guess 25 years

A Tesla 3-owning friend:

Tesla owners think by 2017. Then by 2019. Then by 2020. Now by 2021. They pay $10,000 for “full self driving” software. Tucker Auto was shut down for less of a scam.

An immigrant from Eastern Europe participating in this discussion:

My father had a self-driving car for a decade in the 80s. It was called a company chauffeur. He couldn’t do much in the car because it is still less convenient. If it is a short drive, you won’t accomplish much. Read the news perhaps, or write a few emails. Phone calls you can make now.

The self-driving software engineer saw the biggest competition as coming from Uber and similar human-driven services. As long as low-skill labor in the U.S. remains cheap due to mass immigration, self-driving tech would have to be both inexpensive and nearly perfect to be competitive.

Shifting gears, so to speak, for a moment… what about the fact that cameras are being driven around 24/7 in vehicles that can stream footage up to the cloud? The government can already get footage from doorbell and house-attached cameras (see “Amazon Ring is creating the surveillance complex” by Mark Hurst). Will a police officer in 10 years be able to say “I want to see what was happening at the intersection of 8th and Main at 10:32 pm” and get footage from all of the self-driving cars that happened to be passing that location at the time?

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On a recent Cirrus SR20 trip to Florida and back, I let the FBOs pick rental cars for me. The result was typically a base-model Toyota Camry from Go Rentals (awesome service!), which is a near-great car at $25,000. The worst feature is the infotainment system software, which is slow to boot up and slow to recognize that an iPhone has been plugged in for Apple CarPlay. The CarPlay feature does not work via BlueTooth, so a quick stop becomes cumbersome due to unplugging the phone, plugging the phone back in, acknowledging some legalese, trying to get CarPlay reestablished on the screen, etc. Nit: the engine roars a bit and sounds strained under hard acceleration (not a problem if my 35 mph limit proposal is adopted).

Verdict: A better car than a Tesla for practical driving performance and comfort.

Florida was jammed with visitors. The ramp at Naples had jets packed on the ramp as if they were in a hangar, with every square foot of ramp space used as efficiently as possible (more typical: optimize outdoor parking so that it is possible to start up and drive out without another aircraft having to be moved). At Palm Beach, the ramp looked like someone had robbed a Gulfstream store (a friend: “In Palm Beach, people don’t ask if you have a jet. They ask ‘What color is your Gulfstream?'”). Here’s the kind of inequality that upsets me most and that I hope President Harris will address:

(1960 Beech Debonair (still worth an astonishing $50,000!) and a Gulfstream so new that N332DX couldn’t be found in the FAA database)

As I walked out of the FBO, the transportation choices were Bentley or Rolls-Royce:

Due to a Camry shortage, I was fated, however, to drive a Toyota Corolla ($20,000). This has all of the bad infotainment software of the Camry and none of the over-the-road comfort and quiet. It was so much noisier inside than the Camry that it was tough to believe it had been made by the same company. Maybe it would be okay for around-town driving, but it is definitely not suitable for the highway.

Just for fun… the Trump International Golf Club right next to Palm Beach International:

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A classic car museum in Sarasota:

(A whole row of Ferraris that people bought and hardly ever drove.)

And, right next the museum, a store where you could buy the Sultan of Brunei’s armored Mercedes limo, perfect for driving to mostly peaceful protests:

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Or a wood-sided station wagon for $170,000:

A classic truck…

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