YouTube’s Loaded With EV Disinformation::When it comes to articles on a website like CleanTechnica, there are two kinds of articles. First, there are the … [continued]
I don’t like or understand it therefore it is stupid.
My wife played some Fallout Shelter while we were in the carwash one time. I played some arcade game while in the waiting with my daugher while the wife was inside the store getting some groceries. It’s pretty neat. And when we go on a roadtrip next summer it might be nice to play a game of chess while charging.
My car is. It’s also one of the fastest family sedan on the road, it has almost zero maintenance cost. The future is now old man, sorry if you can not keep up.
That has nothing to do with what I’m talking about. Also… It must be nice to be rich, but bragging about it is not especially civil.
It’s completely out of your way if you don’t go looking for it. For those that enjoy it it is great. Too bad you are so close minded and simple you can not see other people’s point of view. How limiting it must be for you.
I worry about features in cars.
For example, our Mazda has headlights that turn with the steering wheel (ala Tucker Torpedo’s center light). Neat idea and it is a useful feature while driving at night on the rural roads by our house. But what will happen when it fails, and how much will they cost to replace? (I’ve been told they “fail straight ahead”, but who really knows for sure. I’m hoping we get rid of the car before that happens.)
I saw a pickup with automatic folding mirrors having an issue with them folding and unfolding while the guy was driving. I followed him through several traffic lights and watched it happen a few times. Automatic folding mirrors would be a nice feature on my pickup, but I’d rather not have them fail especially when I’m towing a trailer and be completely blind to the rear-right.
I’ve seen pickups with the running bar that folds out. I’m not sure there’s much value in that other than “oooh shiny” but if it fails to open while I’m getting out, it could hurt.
Our Mazda again has several software bugs in the infotainment system. None of these are critical, but it does make me wonder how much testing they did on the software that controls the brakes, for example. Are the brakes going to fail to release someday? I already know the computer has some control of them, because of the auto-hold feature that I usually keep turned off, and because I sometimes notice a slight delay in releasing the brakes when I take my foot off the pedal.
The FCA Uconnect 8.4 infotainment systems allowed an attacker to remotely take over throttle, brakes, etc. until they were patched. That’s an obvious safety issue.
And that crash at the Peace Bridge last week, it seems very likely it was caused by an issue with the car, rather than the driver (there is evidence the driver was alert and trying to stop, and he swerved around another car that turned in front of him before the crash). Turns out the right-hand drive version of that car had a recall of an issue with the accelerator…which supposedly did not effect left-hand drive vehicles. But here we are with two people dead and a third injured from a vehicle that may have been accelerating out of control through no fault of the driver.
The point is that including additional features, even if only software, increases the complexity of the system and makes errors more likely. It increases the chances of some unexpected interaction or failure. It increases the surface of a software attack for a potential safety issue. It makes the code that much harder to test for bugs in general and security in particular.
