Category: Cars, including self-driving

46:1 ratio of car repair cost to failed part cost

by philg

Happy National Odometer Day to those who celebrate…

By taking a car to the dealer three times, I learned how white women with Long COVID feel. After every visit, the dealer said “Your AC is working perfectly.” On the fourth visit, the diagnosis was “There is no refrigerant in your system. It all leaked out from a failed receiver drier.” Because of Climate Change, I had no idea what a receiver drier was. From the Interweb:

1.They act as a temporary storage container for oil and refrigerant when neither are needed for system operation (such as during periods of low cooling demand). This is the “receiver” function of the receiver drier.
2.Most receiver driers contain a filter that can trap debris that may be inside the A/C system.
3.Receiver driers contain a material called desiccant. The desiccant is used to absorb moisture that may have gotten inside the A/C system during manufacture, assembly, or service. Moisture can get into the A/C components from humidity in the air. This is the “drier” function of the receiver drier.

It turns out that this is a $28.44 authentic General Motors part, including dealer markup. The total repair bill was nearly 46X this amount, however, at $1,297.34. I have to believe that this is some kind of record.

(Fortunately, the entire cost was covered by a $2,600 GM Protection Plan that I had purchased after hearing frightening tales of $25,000+ transmission replacements. The 2022 Chevrolet has only about 7,000 miles on it and will be covered by this extended warranty until it is 11 years old.)

It is a little tough to understand how the labor added up to $1,057.50. The shop’s nominal rate is $225/hr so that would be 4.7 hours of labor happening between the 7:45 am dropoff and 10:53 am “your car is washed and ready” pickup. Perhaps, though, this also includes some diagnosis time from Service Visit #4? Friends who’ve been getting Toyota and Audi repairs in Maskachusetts and Florida have reported some huge labor estimates/charges relative to the flat rate labor hours found with a Google search and/or the actual time the car spent in the shop. Dealers seem to be quoting and getting fixed prices that work out to $300-400/hr. for their labor. I wonder if car care has become like human care: you’ll pay a way higher price if you don’t have insurance and, therefore, it makes sense to buy “insurance” even when you don’t need the insurance part of the insurance (i.e., to shift the risk). Or just buy a high-quality Georgia-built Kia with its 5-year bumper-to-bumper warranty and 10-year powertrain warranty (Kia achieves its superb quality without the benefit of union workers).

Separately, let’s raise a glass of DOT 3 brake fluid to our 2021 Honda Odyssey (built in Alabama by non-union workers who rejected a UAW organization effort). After 4.5 years and 50,000 miles it has suffered exactly 0 failures of any kind. (The only expenses have been for maintenance items, such as oil changes, wiper blades, battery, tires, and brakes.) Due to the miracle of Bidenflation, the minivan is currently selling, in nominal dollars, for almost exactly what we paid for it (survey of similar-mileage Odysseys offered by dealers).

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Should a DUI conviction result in a license limited to operating a self-driving car?

by philg

Loyal readers know me as a neo-Prohibitionist (see Reintroduce Prohibition for the U.S.? (2016) and Use testing and tracing infrastructure to enforce alcohol Prohibition? (2020) and Coronaplague, experts, and Prohibition (2020)).

Courts are reluctant to take away convicted drunk drivers’ driving privileges because in many parts of the U.S. it is very difficult to function without a self-driven car (less true now than in 2005 due to Uber/Lyft).

How about an intermediate restriction on a convicted DUI American: a license limited to operating a full-self driving car? In an ideal world, of course, the supervisor of Tesla FSD wouldn’t be drunk. But if an alcoholic is going to be out on the road, and we know that alcoholics will be out on the road, wouldn’t all of us be far safer if the drunk driver’s job were limited to supervising an AI? The car itself could be tweaked to recognize that the driver was too impaired by alcohol for even the supervision function and then shut itself down.

We shouldn’t condone either drunk driving or drunk supervision of driving, of course, but on the other hand the U.S. is jammed with behavior that nobody condones. So maybe it is best to be realistic about our fellow Americans’ capabilities. Some people cannot lay off the booze (I actually don’t blame them. I was offered alcohol at 6:45 am by JetBlue a few months ago and nearly every restaurant in Florida seems to make various kinds of alcohol available with breakfast). If we accept that, maybe we can mitigate with a license restriction.

Jalopnik:

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Tesla hatred and thinking literally

by philg

A friend’s sister lives in a rich all-white all-Democrat suburb of Chicago. Her Tesla was parked at the top of her driveway and she found the following note on it:

A dispute among white Democrats regarding 50 shades of righteousness was, of course, gold from my point of view and I immediately deployed it on X and Facebook. I assumed that a quiet claim of authorship would be understood as ironic given (1) the expressed desire of the author to remain anonymous (“signed, your neighbor”), (2) the legible and, therefore, likely feminine handwriting, (3) the inconsistency with viewpoint-diverse Florida, and (4) the inconsistency with the rest of my social media and Web output. Of course, I was wrong!

Here’s part of a post from a university professor turned Facebook executive turned venture capitalist:

Concerning an example of a Tesla being “keyed” as an act of protest, and the owner understandably complaining about it:
I’m sorry this happened to you. It’s regrettable. I think it’s immoral and antisocial, in the ways you do.
But I do think the issue here is whether the conditions obtain to make it justified, rather than merely the structural claim that it’s wrong because it’s property destruction.
If the KKK were active in town and terrorizing and killing people with impunity, symbolic property rights infringement as a social retaliation would be regarded as understandable by many people.
There are of course many reasons to object to even that. It’s unlawful. It’s vigilante justice. It can be seen as socially destabilizing. So there are people who will say it’s never ok.
But many people think that unlawful civil disobedience is OK when the injustice issue is sufficient to warrant what they regard as a proportional response.  There’s a strong history of this in America. We like “law and order” but if we think the law is unjustly favoring the wrong order, we sometimes accept the moral appropriateness of unlawful behavior.
So I think if you want to object to this, it needs to be met at that level. And I must say that folks who own these vehicles who are upset about these events, do not seem to be acknowledging that and engaging with it as such. At least not that I’ve seen on social media.

When someone puts this much thought into the nuance of keying a Tesla (“civil disobedience” for Democrat A to damage Democrat B’s car), it is time to spring into action.

On the theory that the most believable lies contain some element of truth, much of my reply is true. There is a board-certified emergency medicine doc who shares an alley with us (access to garages in our neighborhood is via alley so that houses don’t have ugly garage doors in front). He is married (being divorced in our part of Florida, due to a feminism deficit, lacks prestige). He does have a Model Y from a couple of years ago and, in fact, recently said that the car made it from Gainesville to our neighborhood via self-driving without a single intervention (3.5 hours).

Despite the elements of truth, it didn’t occur to me that the thoughtful Facebooker wouldn’t see the attempt at humor. He has some familiarity with my failure to conform to righteous political dogma, for one thing. His response:

I think what you did is exactly the right kind of response. You aren’t trying to upset someone or retaliate against them with violence or property destruction, or some other sort of harm, lawful or not. Your interpreting their car is potentially problematic and you’re explaining to them why and mentioning the broader context. I think that even somebody who disagrees with your views should find that admirable.
Maybe somebody should create flyers with different interesting points on them and master distribute them to protesters and encourage them to leave them on cars instead do destruction.

The flyers could have a URL where the specific issue is being discussed and requested the person who owns the car participate.

A female Deplorable attacked me in the same thread and I admitted that the note was authentic, but my authorship wasn’t. That prompted the thoughtful original author to ask

So you didn’t write this note? But you left it for your neighbor? Or not even that?

When I confirmed that I was not the heroine behind the note, he added

Many of the things that I’ve seen you post on make you seem not just like somebody who disagrees with me politically but like a very mean spirited or unkind person. I was pleasantly surprised by this, but I can see now that actually you think that graciousness is worth mocking.

So… he is a kind person willing to look at the positive aspects of keying someone’s Tesla while I am an unkind person for mocking anti-Tesla hysteria among those who, just months ago, were saying that everyone should drive a Tesla in order to stave off a climate emergency.

Much the same thing happened on X. In response to a Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (99% as progressive as Queers for Palestine?)…

Some responses…

Sad that a professor at MIT and Harvard is so blissfully unaware as to think this is the first time an election has been bought. The naïveté is stunning.

(The guy clicked through to my profile, upgraded me from humble “teacher” to august “professor”, and didn’t learn enough from the context of my other posts to realize that this was a joke.)

From a “data scientist”:

You’re actually a retard aren’t you?

60,000 views and seemingly hardly anyone cottoned on to the claim of authorship being a joke.

Let me close this out with a photo from Sun ‘n Fun (Lakeland, Florida), in which a Tesla uses camouflage to hide from visiting progressives.

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In-dash exercise equipment for self-driving cars?

by philg

Traffic in the U.S. is going to get slower every year as the population continues to expand via immigration and children of immigrants (Pew, 2015). Self-driving systems are going to get better every year, but perhaps not good enough that they can be completely unsupervised. What are people going to do on multi-hour car trips where they still have to sit in the driver’s seat and look at the road? How about exercise? With more time lost to traffic jams Americans will have less time to hit the gym or walk in the neighborhood so we’ll get yet fatter and weaker unless the car itself becomes a gym.

Suppose that resistance bands were built into the dashboard, floor, doors, and ceiling of the car. I asked ChatGPT to generate an image of this, but the request fried our future overlord’s brain.

It could look something like this image from Amazon, but with the band attached to the door or the dash instead of to the wall:

I know that there’s a fine line between stupid and clever. Which side of the line is this idea on?

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Car price predictions in view of tariffs?

by philg

Democrat-run media says car prices will go up 25% due to Trump’s new tariffs. My prediction: average transaction price goes up 3% and if we hold the car model and trim level constant, up 5%. What’s the basis of my prediction? Americans spend every penny they can earn, borrow, win in family court, inherit, or steal. There simply isn’t any way for people to spend more on cars. (Prices did go up during coronapanic, but interest rates were low and the government was handing out $trillions in free money.)

Readers: who wants to take the other side of this?

(I’m personally in favor of free trade (zero tariffs) based on standard Econ 101 arguments. I believe that the classical Econ belief is that the U.S. is best off with zero tariffs even if other countries erect tariff barriers to our exports. In other words, we would be better off exporting nothing if it came to that so long as we could get cheap imports. However, if other countries blink first in the trade war that Donald Trump has started we might be better off than we were a few months ago.)

What happened to out family so far? The imported bicycles that we wanted to purchase have gone down by nearly 17 percent compared to a week ago:

REI (expanding in Florida, while closing stores in Portland, Oregon and Cambridge, Maskachusetts) and some independent bike shops all wanted to sell us XS adult bikes, which have enormous 700C wheels and weigh about 7 lbs. more than this Trek 26″ bike. Supposedly the kids won’t outgrow the XS adult bike as fast. My position is that road bike nerds will pay $thousands to shave 7 lbs. off a road bike so we should be happy to buy these with the expectation of reselling them in 2 years.

Loosely related…

And from today at Sun ‘n Fun, a Nash Metropolitan (it actually made economic sense to build cars in England back then!):

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Should cars be able to signal a U-turn?

by philg

Compared to Maskachusetts, Florida is the land of the divided thoroughfare, dedicated left turn lane, and legal U-turn. It’s a little tough for people making a right turn on red on the cross street, though, to determine if a driver is making a left turn (no conflict) or a U-turn (conflict).

Now that all of the exterior lights of a car are LED, why not a mechanism for signaling a U-turn to other drivers? The rear left turn signal could add an extra color and a “U” symbol that lights up in between flashes (there’s already an array of LEDs that make up the “taillight”, right?) The front turn signal, seen by the right-turning driver (above), could add the same standard extra color.

Perhaps the toughest part is the gesture to activate the U-turn signal. The stalk is already heavily overloaded with user interface (pull back for temporary bright headlights; push forward for persistent bright headlights). Maybe a steering wheel button?

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More Tesla Full Self-Driving reports

by philg

Our neighbor has a Model Y that is one generation behind the recently introduced one. He reports having made a 4-hour trip from Gainesville (home of University of Florida, which needs to branch out!) without once touching the steering wheel. I wonder if this supports a “yes” answer to Do self-driving cars work better in states with modern road networks, such as Florida?

A friend who is rich enough to pay $900/month to garage his Tesla X in Manhattan reports regular 3-hour trips to what he refers to as “Long Island” (fake humble; I suspect “the Hamptons” is more accurate) and intervening on average less than once per trip. The FSD feature was one of the reasons he was willing to purchase a second home that is so far away.

This CyberTruck in our neighborhood the other day is beginning to look better with every report like the above that I hear.

In other car news, Waymo is coming to Miami (this does not support my theory that Florida is easy because they say that the intermittent heavy rain in Florida interferes with their self-driving system (LIDAR?), though maybe a vision-based system such as Tesla’s is just as degraded and nobody cares because there is always a backup human available in the “supervised” FSD).

The Breakers hotel in Palm Beach has a fleet of EVs for ferrying guests around. They apparently didn’t want cars with a Nazi affiliation so, instead of Tesla, they’re using Maybach/Mercedes EQS 680s:

Also from The Breakers, a photo showing how much more beautiful cars have become over the years as humanity has advanced in aesthetic capability. In front we see a hideous old car and in the background the beautiful Chevrolet Suburban and the sinuous Mercedes G-Wagen (also Nazi-free):

The jalopy in the photo is, according to ChatGPT, “a 1963–1966 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud III”.

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How is it safe for consumers to handle a megawatt of power for electric car charging?

by philg

“BYD confirms new 1,000V ‘Super E-Platform’ capable of fast charging 400km in 5 minutes” (electrek):

Chinese auto conglomerate BYD has introduced a new 1,000-volt EV platform that can enable charging rates as fast (or perhaps faster) than a trip to the gas station. We’re talking five minutes. … offers 1,000V and charge rates up to 1,000 kW.

How can this be made safe? If everything is new and everything functions as designed, the car and the charger communicate before the cable is fully energized. A GFCI will trip if a portion of the 1000 amps starts leaking out to ground (via the human holding it?).

Let’s assume that there aren’t any mostly peaceful Massachusetts climate change warriors to vandalize the charging station:

Both car and charger still face the relentless enemies of time and corrosion. GFCI outlets in home situations are known to fail after 10-20 years. Consumers aren’t going to wear heavy rubber gloves the way that trained utility workers do. How long will it be before the foolproof failsafe systems fail either due to unforeseen foolishness or age/corrosion? That leaves the EV owner (wearing a MAGA hat since Democrat climate change alarmists have gone back to pavement-melting SUVs?) with his/her/zir/their hands on a failed cable carrying enough power to run 800 houses.

Maybe the argument is that people will be killed by these 1000V charging systems as they age and get maintained by the same Americans who can’t make public WiFi work, but it won’t be a higher number than are killed in freak gasoline fight accidents.

Loosely related… a carefully engineered high-voltage power system with full redundancy (CNN) …

Even more loosely related…

Here’s ChatGPT’s response to “Create an image of a nonbinary Tesla owner next to his/her/zir/their car” with the refinement prompt “The shirt should more clearly indicate that the person identifies as a member of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community”:

Grok seems to think that “nonbinary” is the same as “nonwhite”:

I asked ChatGPT “Redo the above image to look like a hand-drawn pen and ink sketch.” For some reason, it made a lot of other changes as well, including mirroring the orientation.

I wonder if someone could get an A in an online art class via the use of ChatGPT (the failure to spell “2SLGBTQQIA+” could be considered artistic license).

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A drag show in Ocala, Florida

by philg

The Righteous accuse Florida of being deficient in drag shows, especially drag story time for toddlers at the public libraries. Ocala, Florida, however, is home to a permanent drag show: the pet-friendly Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing.

Here’s Wile E. Coyote’s dragster, which used “a rocket system from the NASA lunar program” and accelerated from 0-140 mph in one second. Four seconds and 352 mph in the quarter mile.

It seems that Don Garlits got his start in the 1950s in Tampa, Florida and was successful in 1957 with Swamp Rat I (8.23 seconds in the quarter mile):

Nerds will appreciate the engine room, which includes some cutaways:

For aviation enthusiasts, one of the best engines in the museum is a 2000 hp Allison V-12 from a P-40 fighter plane, purchased after WWII for $50.

The turbine engine in this 1993 Pontiac might be from an aircraft, but unfortunately few details are provided:

An adjacent building houses antique cars. Here’s an interesting example of how durable automotive paint is: a 1936 Ford with 72,000 miles (driven only during summers on Cape Cod; maybe for 25-35 years?) that has never needed repainting.

Adolf Hitler’s legacy is honored with a 1950 VW bug and a 1974 Karman Ghia:

We’re informed that our economy is inflation-free, so take $375 down to the local car dealer and ask to drive away in a new car:

After the museum, take a walk or bike ride on the 110-mile Cross Florida Greenway, built on the corpse of a Spanish canal idea from 1567 that was finally killed by Richard Nixon in 1971 partly due to efforts by Marjorie Harris Carr. To traverse the entire 110-mile trail requires a mountain bike, I think, because only about 35 miles is paved. The Florida Coast-to-Coast Trail (250 miles and 88 percent complete) is better-suited to a hybrid or road bike. It is about 50 miles south of the Greenway.

Downtown Ocala is small, but fun, and was the home of an important 1890 political movement (Ocala Demands). Unfortunately, like in most of the U.S., suburban sprawl with strip malls is how the once-walkable city grew. On the other hand, one can’t beat this vape shop’s name: Smocala.

Of course, Ocala is better-known for horse power (below) than horsepower, but I think the Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing is worth a visit if you’re checking out The Villages.

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12 Hours of Sebring 2025

by philg

A follow-up to 12 Hours of Sebring, a perfect Florida fly-in destination…

This year, we arrived early to the race, scheduled for International Day to Combat Islamophobia. We traveled by Cirrus, an example of the kind of technology that has enabled all of the world’s religions and cultures to mix on a regular basis. Here’s the old mule at 8:10 am:

I purchased tickets in advance (12 and under free) and we caught a ride from the FBO to within a few steps of the entry gate at the Seven Sebring Hotel, thus giving us plenty of time to catch the 8:50 am grid walk (outdoors, but so crowded that it was sometimes tough to make headway). Computers and telemetry are critical, apparently:

Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing is the safety car:

It would be fun to get one of these just to remind young people that they will never learn how to drive a manual transmission (unfortunately, not available on the cheaper CT5-V, which still has way more than enough horsepower for street driving).

Here’s a different style of Cadillac:

For working class Republicans who appreciate the world’s finest screwdrivers, a car sponsored by Wiha:

For Democrats, TDS Racing (also great for pilots: “Fear the TAF” (terminal area forecast)):

Crowdstrike, the DEI-committed company that is famous for having reduced the U.S. economy to a crawl, sponsors a 180+ mph LMP2 car:

The Iron Dames Porsche was branded this year as “Women Driven by Dreams” and the car, to be driven only by people identifying as “women”, was covered in painted-on Post-It-style notes.

“Break Barriers and Spread” is perhaps a truncation?

Check out “I want to get a car” at the top of the tire below:

Also note the “To never change for anyone” dream. Wouldn’t most humans be improved with at least some amount of change?

Here’s my favorite dream:

Ford had a pavilion right next to the grid and anyone who registered got a free baseball hat (confiscated by my 15-year-old daughter) and the right to use their top deck:

Here’s the view from the top deck, just as the race was getting underway. I was still recovering from my disappointment that nobody nearby agreed to take a knee with me during the National Anthem (sung beautifully by a Sebring local whose name I didn’t catch).

iPhone 5X works pretty well from this deck:

There are no drinks or bathrooms on the Ford viewing deck so we departed after 45 minutes. A small museum is next door and displays a 26 horsepower Crosley Hot Shot that won the first race at the track, in 1951, because of engine size-adjusted scoring.

The Corvette pavilion featured a cutaway ZR1 (1064 horsepower to get you to Publix at 233 mph, but you lose the front trunk so there is no place to put the groceries as there would be on a regular Corvette (194 mph) or Z06 (195 mph)) and cutaway twin-turbo ZR1 engine:

A 1/5th the price of previous title holders, this is the fastest production car around some of the world’s racetracks (example), but I still wouldn’t want a ZR1 due to the lack of storage space. A street car needs to serve a transportation function, in my opinion. (The ZR1 can’t function as a Sebring competitor; it has twice as much horsepower as allowed in the GT Daytona classes.)

Here are a couple of Corvettes going underneath the Corvette bridge:

Some folks doing the race right…

A potential clue as to why nobody would kneel with me during “The Star-Spangled Banner”: a Deplorable flies a custom “DOGE” flag:

The fan guide distributed at the entrance suggests turn 13 for pictures with the airport in the background, but that would work only if you were on top of an RV or a top of some kind. The grandstands at Turn 3 have a pretty good view:

One of the best views is from a bridge near Turn 5. The non-sidewalk side faces the track. You’re not supposed to stand there because you’re at the edge of a somewhat busy road, but people do anyway. The Iron Dames perhaps forgot to include a dream of “stay on the track” and, therefore, the proudly all-female-driven Porsche made an off-track excursion. This was the only off-track driving that I personally saw. The Iron Dames finished #11 in their class, more or less in the middle (still an occasion for celebration, though, under Are women the new children?):

Another photo from this bridge, with an Oshkosh-sponsored Corvette in the lead:

(Sponsored by the U.S. government contractor, Oshkosh Corporation, selected despite an apparent lack of experience to build the next generation USPS delivery truck ($6 billion project, started in 2015, that has thus far yielded 93 trucks)).

We left before the 10:10 pm end of the race, but it seems that the Corvette team isn’t doing well compared to previous years. Porsche won 1st place in the GTD Pro race, while the Corvette factory team finished 7th and 9th (some electrical system problems were apparently to blame). The independent teams racing Corvettes didn’t finish higher than 8 in the GTD class (won by a Mercedes-AMG car). Porsche won the GTP (fastest purpose-built race car class), both 1 and 2 spots, while Cadillac managed 4.

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