The problem is the world is transitioning to EVs, and burying your head in the sand won’t change that. Legacy manufacturers could be trying to find their place in the new world while they can, or they can stick with technology of the past, let someone else come to dominate the new technologies, and be left with a ever shrinking market until they disappear

As an American I’m still not convinced.

Apple successfully sold themselves as a better choice, the “in”thing - to adults. Most adults I know have iPhones and the ones who don’t seem self-conscious about it. It might have partly to do with Android phones originally sold as the budget alternative. We’re the shallow ones.

Kids can take their cues from adults: they see iPhones as the “better”, more desired choice. But also take it to the next level, with teasing and bullying.

I find it hard to believe anyone cares about the color of text bubbles, especially since kids don’t use iMessage, despite all the media making that claim. It’s just an excuse, but the social stigma is real

The specific request is kind of interesting - when I was a kid, everyone had to wear Nikes or get teased. However for my kids, Nikes were always out.

Fads always come in cycles

That makes sense. Thanks for helping clarify

Maybe I read this differently than you. I don’t see this as volunteering personal time, but asking people during their work time to help iwith a different job. Not that the article says either way, but volunteering personal time seems unlikely

But the question is deaths by car and you don’t need to entirely get rid of cars to make a huge difference.

• inspections. It boggles the mind that some places don’t have them

Traffic calming really can work. I’m not talking about speed bumps, but things like curb bumps to narrow the road at intersection while increasing pedestrian visibility, traffic islands, roundabouts. Even repainting lines can make a difference. My town’s master plan is driven by accident stats, so every road rework is a noticeable improvement

A couple years ago my town repainted a two lane road into one lane plus turn lanes. Now traffic is slower and calmer yet you get through that area more quickly. Most importantly it’s no longer one of the most dangerous roads in town

Most recently they built a median. This was a dangerous intersection because it always backed up so impatient people would blast straight through in the turn lanes, causing accidents. Now they can’t

And yes, because of Florida Man, my town built medians at every railroad crossing so idiots can’t go around the gates. We never had that problem, but idiocy is contagious.

Every city and town can make a difference. Now. Relatively cheaply. Just by collecting accident data and prioritizing by that. Just by making small changes a little at a time

We can only hope that emergency declaration decisions are applied consistently in the future, regardless of where a states citizens tend to vote

Lidar has strengths that complement where video has weaknesses. That seems like a good thing. However it is bulky and expensive, and not yet produced at scale. Those are bad things. Whether it really makes a difference in simplifying the machine learning, only those developers know. You have to balance the pluses and minuses, and just because one company came up with something different, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

Maybe it won’t work without lidar but maybe it will - in the meantime Tesla has saved like $1,000/car times however many million they produce. If they succeed, then they have a solid cost and scalability advantage

The deciding point is if someone does develop general self-driving. Will those who are behind be able to swallow their pride and modify their approach?

And what? Police them more aggressively? The problem is too many people just see that as a way to focus policing. We have ample real life proof that’s just a cycle of oppression making things worse. You can’t say things like this without being explicit like: address those underlying conditions

No. Window retracting on door opening is no different than other cars with frameless windows. Most lowering the window may damage the weatherstripping but is no impediment to door opening.

True that the door latch itself is just a solenoid. I actually forgot the the outside handles don’t do anything but give you something to pull on.

The worst part of the manual door release is that it’s different on each model. For mine, the front door manual release is easily accessible to the point I have to tell people not to use it. Back door is a problem though

Or just a snow covered road

They don’t though. Waymo runs a few pilots in a few specific geolocked locations with essentially hand built cars at a huge loss. They also have human remote supervisions. They do seem fairly successful and maybe their slow careful rollout will eventually be at scale in the areas that need it most. Hopefully it will work.

While it’s easy to argue Tesla hasn’t had those successes yet, they do have the “at scale” part down and are already profitable on the vehicles. They are close enough to self-driving them at they’re willing to try their own pilots with human intervention. If they succeed, they already have the scaling up done and are profitable on hardware so will quickly surpass other competitors.

I like that different companies are taking different approaches, so we have competition. May the best technology succeed!

Sure but if you make that argument, even relatively dumb cars have that as well. At least antilock brakes have been mandatory for a few years (in the US) and traction control might be as well. Both lead to immediate adjustments in driving, more quickly than any human can react.

More automated cars must have some equivalent feedback on balance, sharpness of turns. I don’t know what it is, but they generally execute smooth comfortable turns.

Do people really get these false alerts? I don’t recall ever getting one that wasn’t local

I mean it’s all true:

• humans drive based on vision alone
• moving to one type of sensor simplifies the ai
• lidar has been much bulkier, much more expensive than other sensors.

Most importantly, since no one has self driving yet, it’s premature to talk about that as a mistake. Let it fail or succeed on its merits. Let other self-driving attempts fail or succeed on their merits.

In this crash, part of the blame was on retracting handles on the outside, not the interior locks. If the handle is retracted, it’s tough to open the door from the outside.

• model s has electrically presented handles. The car has to be somewhat functional for the handles to extend …. I haven’t heard of extend on emergency or extend on power lost, or any other failsafe
• model 3/y door handles are not electrical. You have to press on one end to extend the other. You may or may not like them, but at least they don’t have that failure case of what happens when the car loses power

Home Depot doesn’t employ them. It’s just a convenient parking lot to hang out on looking for day jobs.

My ex’s uncle, conservative asshole had a Russian mail order bride and was staunchly against immigrants. However that didn’t stop him from going down to the Home Depot and hiring a couple to do things like clear brush and move hillsides (although karma came around and he was put on some kind of blacklist where they refused to work for him because of the work he had them do)

I hope you’re right, but I’ve been getting more and more pessimistic due to Regressive’s continuing ability to twist words around and make too many people believe the opposite of reality.

I’d put money on someone discovering the mRNA technology connection and somehow make half the US believe AIDs was caused by COViD vaccines

Somehow he seems to have gotten all too many people to believe things that fly in the face of reality, just by repeating it

Who can we drop a bomb on next?