Cars

[Charger]

^^
Very true indeed and the hourly rates have gone waaay up too...it's over 100€/h here already...and car electrical work is over 160€/h.

That's why I do everything myself.

[Vyn]

Nice work! Everything costs so much more now than it once did. Which is to be expected, of course. But still.

[Charger]

Yup.

Went for a drive today, everything seems to work.

We'll see if the oil leak stopped in few days...hope it did.

[Charger]

Still no leaks...looks like it did the trick.

Today new engine oil and filter done...

I think that's about it for now.

I wash is next.

[Zzzptm]

Still no leaks...looks like it did the trick.

*That* has to be a feeling of solid satisfaction.

[Typhon]

My Corvette has had a dead battery for the past 2 months, so today I spent the day changing it.  Why "spent the day", you ask?  Because unlike the great majority of cars that takes just 5 minutes to disconnect and lift the battery out, with this one I have to take apart the side panel of the driver's side and slide the battery out.  This process takes me more than an hour.  Then another hour to go and buy the new battery, and then a 3rd hour to install it and put the car back together again.  It is the only thing I do not like about this vehicle.  Thank goodness I only have to do it every 5 or 6 years. 

[Vyn]

Seems there was either no other way the engineers could house the battery or they really like the service tech industry out there. Imagine how many people owned that model and lacked mechanical skill or the space to do the needed work.

[Charger]

Wow...that is a pretty darn labour intensive battery change! I can imagine that the engine room is pretty full of stuff so there might not be enough room for the battery but why not put it in the trunk?

Every car (part from the first BMW (E34) that I had) the battery's been in the trunk. Really easy to change...

[Typhon]

@Vyn - Your right.  Before my dad's mechanic retired, I use to pay him 3 hours of labor charges to do the job.

@Charger - these Corvettes don't have a trunk.  The year after my car was produced, Chevy completely redesigned the engine placement.  For a number of years it was a mid-engine design which allowed a small trunk compartment under the front hood.  I don't know what today's Corvette engines look like.

[Charger]

I did not know that about those Corvettes. I knew the early ones didn't have a trunk but I somehow thought by the 80s they would have made one...but I can also understand why not as it does somewhat compromise the integrity of the fiber glass body shell.

[Typhon]

Machines now drive way better than humans, but politicians just make excuses.

[Vyn]

I envision a day when all cars will be auto-driven. The highway system will be transformed to better accomodate them, they'll go faster. No one will actualy own a car, there will just be a constant steam of autonomous vehicles ready for a trip anywhere.

---

Long after I'm gone from this planet!

[Typhon]

^^^^^^
I bet long distance truck driving for delivering goods will happen before that.

[Charger]

Those are scary as fuck those self driving cars.

I can imagine when things go routinely they're probably better drivers than people but when something unexpected happens they just can't cope with that well enough yet.

Which is why fully self driving cars aren't yet allowed in EU.

[Zzzptm]

I can imagine when things go routinely they're probably better drivers than people but when something unexpected happens they just can't cope with that well enough yet.

Quoting for emphasis.

Self-driving trucks are already a thing on long hauls because, statistically, nothing happens that's out of the ordinary. Lane closed? Shift lanes, go around, no worries. Simple stuff. The drivers turn up if there's a really odd thing going on. Otherwise, drivers get involved for the tricky business of backing up a trailer into a loading dock or pulling out with a new load. Once the big rig is on the interstate, it can go on autopilot, either with a driver present in the cab or one monitoring several vehicles remotely.

City street driving, however, is much more complicated. And the complications we think of aren't the ones that beset the autonomous vehicles, like when a fleet of cars decides that a certain cul-de-sac MUST be a part of every trip they make due to a glitch that the self-coding AI algorithms managed to include and couldn't algo their way out of. One mistakes commonly made is disembarking passengers in the middle turn lane of a 6-lane major road, good luck crossing the street! (My guess is that was done so the vehicle wouldn't have to make a costly U-turn.) There are cases of self-driving cars encroaching in clear zones around railroad tracks and construction sites.

The biggest concern for me is that the software driving the vehicles is not maintained local to the vehicle. It's maintained in a centralized location and then pushed out to multiple vehicles in a go. So that means a bad build of software will toggle a bit on all the cars of a given make in a location and hit everyone there with a Very Bad Day. Remember the Crowdstrike update glitch? Imagine that, but with self-driving vehicles.

And this isn't even considering efforts of bad actors trying to break things. This is just the stuff that happens when bad programming gets past QA.

*They just can't cope with that well enough yet.* True words, Charger, but I would drop the "yet", as I don't see it ever happening.