Category: Cars, including self-driving

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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Why don’t cars monitor 12V battery condition and suggest replacement before failure to start?

by philg

I’m not sure what caused our rented-from-Sixt Mercedes E 300de to fail and refuse to start even with a jump, but I am suspecting 12V battery health. The battery measured 12V on the tow truck guy’s multimeter, which sounds good for a 12V battery, but the chart below (source) says 12.4 is more of a practical resting minimum:

Today’s question is why cars don’t all come standard with battery health warnings, similar to the warnings regarding when it is time to change the oil.

  1. The car knows the battery voltage before start and after engine/generator shutdown.
  2. The car knows how long the last trip was (i.e., duration of most recent charge).
  3. The car knows how long it was sitting since the last trip (i.e., expected voltage drop from self-discharge).
  4. The car knows roughly how hot it has been (maybe use the temperature at startup for this and apply it to the sitting period and, if refinement is desired, tweak for the time of day).

If the car sees consistently lower-than-expected voltages, shouldn’t it flash a “replace battery ASAP” message to the owner?

Bosch seems to have a product that tries to do this, but I haven’t seen it in action:

I’m not sure why the Bosch hardware is needed when the car already has voltage and outside temperature sensors, plus a clock.

Our dead Mercedes displayed a “low battery” warning, but only after the total failure. It also said “towing not permitted” (what is the alternative if the car won’t start?) and “See Owner’s Manual” (we weren’t supplied with one):

Ford says that an owner should come to the dealership after he/she/ze/they “Constantly experience charging or electrical system problems” or “Experience trouble or difficulty getting your engine to start”. Why is this the best that modern electronics and software can do?

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Is this the month when Europeans stop speeding?

by philg

Loyal readers may remember my proposal to Save lives by limiting cars to 35 mph? (apply coronalogic to other situations in which human lives are at risk)

Maybe European readers can tell us if this is the month when Europeans begin to follow the Science. Back in 2022, Autoweek said “Anti-Speeding Tech Is Now Mandatory In European Union” and would apply to all new cars sold starting in July 2024:

The peasants still have some freedom, according to the article, but that could be fixed with an over-the-air software update:

The speed control function goes one step further by cutting power input from the pedal once the speed limit is reached. It’s important to note that drivers can override all four of these systems, either by acknowledging the audible or vibrating warnings or by pushing harder on the accelerator in the case of the haptic feedback or speed control function.

The same over-the-air update could impose my dream 35 mph (55 kph) limit and “save lives like a Fauci” (TM).

Separately, the speed nanny has supposedly already been in new-design cars in Europe for a year or two. Is there already statistical evidence that the hoped-for reductions in accidents/deaths have occurred? (Might be a little challenging to tease out of the data because newer cars in general might not have the same propensity to get into accidents compared to older cars (as with guns, it isn’t the driver who should be blamed, but the car).) If not, should we be skeptical about this new tech? A dramatic effect was predicted and shouldn’t be difficult to find if the prediction was true. (Though another confounder is that traffic gets worse in Europe every year and it is tough to be involved in a serious accident when you’re crawling along at 5 mph, working your way in between migrants’ tents and all of the pro-Hamas demonstrators.)

Our personal experience with the AI speed overlord wasn’t promising. Our almost-new rented Mercedes E 300de, which reliably started for two entire days (compare to 25 years for Toyota and Honda minivans), was consistently wrong when it came to determining a reasonable speed. When merging into traffic on the highway, for example, it would decide that a former limit of 50 or 60 kph applied and would issue frantic warnings about our 80-90 kph speed as we joined 120 kph traffic. It wasn’t smart enough to use front and rear cameras to see that the car was keeping up with traffic. When on scary narrow roads in little villages, the speed overlord would suggest blasting through at 90 kph. Most of the time, but not all of the time, the speed overlord’s displayed speed limit would be consistent with what Google Maps was showing. The audio warnings could be disabled by pressing and holding a mute button the steering wheel and we nearly always had to do that. The 10-year-old said “Let me get into the front seat so that I can give ‘Hey, Mercedes’ a piece of my mind.”

Related:

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Do Mercedes aluminum wheels have visible lug nuts or bolts?

by philg

Question for Europeans and Mercedes nerds: Can a new Mercedes have aluminum wheels without visible lug bolts (I’ve been told that Mercedes uses bolts rather than the conventional nuts)?

Sixt rented me a 2024 E 300de at the Lisbon airport with the exterior covered in dirt/grime. This was at the end of a 1.5-hour rental process (line at the office in the terminal then a second line at the office in the parking garage). They cleaned the windows so that it was safe to drive, but didn’t clean up the wheels or body. Maybe because it was so dirty, they didn’t notice a scratch on one of the wheel covers that Sixt Porto complained about on return (the car was clean due to having been driven through rain so any scratches were 10X more prominent). Sixt later emailed saying they were going to charge me for an “aluminum rim” (they never sent me a photo of the purported damage). I happened to take a photo of the car and the detail below shows a wheel with no visible lug bolts/nuts and what I think is shiny black plastic. Does a 2024 Mercedes have some kind of magic system for attaching aluminum wheels where lug bolts/nuts aren’t visible? (The car actually failed after two days of our rental and was replaced with a similar-looking one that definitely had plastic wheel covers. During the final return in Porto, I found some Mercedes cars in the Sixt parking lot that had aluminum wheels and the expected visible lug bolts.)

Detail from Car #1:

The original photo from which the above was taken:

A random Mercedes in the Sixt Porto lot with conventional aluminum wheels and standard visible lug nuts:

Is there some magic alternative Mercedes system for wheel attachment in which the first photo above can be of an aluminum rim and not a plastic wheel cover?

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