I'm not disputing that bicyclists technically "have a right" to use the road as, sadly, they do. I do not, however, believe it is possible to actually use this right without becoming, by default, both a selfish mobile obstacle and the reason car culture can't have nice things anymore. Besides this, it's pretty rich to call them even a "moderately large" group anywhere outside of a hypercongested urban center. "Moderately large" would be in the neighborhood of 10-30% at the very least, not 1% if that. With cars, meanwhile, there is room for variety. My desire for a tuneable, naturally-aspirated, non-hatchback sport compact in the 140-180 horsepower range does not impinge on anyone else's ability to choose the vehicle that they believe suits their needs and desires the best, just as the current existence of dedicated enthusiast cars already doesn't - it's simply another fully-compatible way to move in roughly the same way at roughly the same speed. What bothers me is that there is no choice anymore, and you seem to think this is how it should be. Frankly, I don't even believe that the current raft of bloated, overcomplicated cars is really what people would choose if they had a choice. As I said before, you're not allowed to build a car with less than 7 airbags or without a rearview camera anymore, you're not allowed to build a car without stability control anymore, and while eco-turbos and throttle-by-wire aren't technically mandatory yet, emissions and fuel-economy diktats are getting so absurd that they might as well be. Over in England you're not allowed to advertise a car based on performance at all, even if you show it on what is obviously a permanent closed course, not even to show your technology saving someone from a skid, because the skid itself might be sporty and we can't have that! Of course car design is going to become a Rube Goldberg contest when gadgets, comfort, and fuel economy are the only kinds of product differentiation still allowed! So you have it backwards. On the road, you go with the flow and keep "out of norm" use out of everyone else's way, the way most car enthusiasts have already done for decades (see 7/10ths rule, never-cross-the-center rule, plain old going out late at night when everyone else is asleep, etc.) - which is exactly what bicyclists don't do, pretty much by definition. In terms of car selection, something "out of norm" is more acceptable as it does not, by default, cause inconvenience to other road users (except for really stupid things like "super poke" wire wheels) - which is exactly what you fail to acknowledge with your insistence that every single car which is not a dedicated enthusiast car must be exactly the same as every other car but with a slightly different wrapper and list of useless "features", and that cars which do not live up to this ideal are automatically objectively bad even though they were built before anyone had thought to build cars that way.
If there was demand for cars that were not like this, and political demand for lower regulation, they would have been a thing. But as of now, the support is overwhelming (https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/press_release/2016-fuel-economy-survey/), safety sells, safety and electronic features are very popular (https://www.cars.com/articles/most-popular-cars-for-women-vs-men-412828/). You basically want to hold a tsunami back with a piece of plywood. And for the roads - there already are things that you need to be alert of, and if bicycles are so troublesome to you, you might not be alert enough to drive on public roads.
There is demand for lower regulation across all walks of life - I mean, come on, how do you think things like Trump and Brexit happen? Do you really believe it's all a matter of racism? No way. People have bigger fish to fry - like, say, trying to run a business without getting harassed into bankruptcy by overpaid, underworked "inspectors" who proudly measure their success by how much time and paper they can waste, or being able to drive to work without getting nailed by a greed scamera for going 2 MPH over the limit, or being able to drive to work at all under punitive "green" taxes that push the price of a unit of fuel miles beyond where it should be even in a country that cannot have petroleum independence. But politicians and initiatives that dare to think outside the uni-party box, to take the focus off the capital city nexus and its major metropolitan satellites where it has been and put it back on people's homes, towns, and small businesses where it belongs, are always fought tooth and nail from the top down. Some politicians and bureaucrats are afraid of losing their power or their cushy useless jobs, others genuinely believe that they know best and us little people are incompetent to handle our own affairs without their help, but in the end, the practical effect is the same. They drag their feet, they sabotage the clearly and properly expressed will of the people, they marshal armies of activists to accuse their enemies of being "hateful" or just make an outsized amount of noise, they throw up a smokescreen of canned sound bites, emotive rhetoric, and authoritative-sounding statistics that they know most people will have neither the time nor the inclination to properly investigate for themselves, and in the end, they get exactly what they want while pretending it's what everyone wanted. There may occasionally be a temporary or partial pullback in the face of public outcry, assuming of course that they could not successfully shame/train people away from critical attitudes beforehand, but the bureaucracy always wins in the end. And that's the thing - if so many people want more safety or technology, then why do they need to be mandatory? People are obviously capable of being concerned for their own safety. Let things like touchscreen navitainment and 50 million airbags be available, and then let the chips fall where they may. Besides, it's easy to say that cars should have more safety or technology when you're not paying for it immediately, or are taking out a 6-7 year loan to pay for it. Because that's how long car loans are becoming now, when it used to be 3-4 at worst. But car design as it now is is dictated by an ad-hoc unoffficial alliance - a coincidence, really - of Naderite busybodies who want to force safety devices and reduced consumption on everyone regardless of individual needs or desires, and crony-capitalist megacorps who have figured out that they can use mandates to pad their profit margins without anyone noticing while padding their image with Woke Points at the same time. Once again, this is pure irrelevant whataboutism.
Because people wanted more regulation, this time on immigration. Either way, they shouldn't be mandatory, but a world in which "we made them built safer cars! " is good political ammo is the world we live in, and we gotta get used to it.
New candidate for worst car ever made: I drove a 1st-gen Acura MDX today. Steering like undercooked pizza, ride like overcooked scallops, handling like watery risotto. Its only saving grace is the powertrain, which is good... enough. Not to mention the front end is trying to be an Aztek.
Thanks for calling me an idiot. If id bought the used version of my car i would have paid more than when buying new.
Modern cars are neutered by regulations. It's how it is. Stability control, especially, neuters driving dynamics of modern cars. I wouldn't mind it if it were easily, entirely defeatable. But it isn't, short of pulling a fuse. Unless you own a VW and the fuses aren't labelled anywhere in the car or owners manual.
See, that's the kind of stuff I object to. A self-contained nanny is one thing. The current practice of "everything integration", wherein every function of the car from the fuel injection to ABS to the freakin' radio and gauges is controlled by the same computer and all tied into each other so that you can't use a standalone racing ECU without disabling pretty much everything else in the car, is quite another. Electronic wastegates, ABS/TC/ESC, throttle-by-wire, pretty much every other OEM advancement other than hot-V turbos built into the engine block have already been successfully tamed by the aftermarket, but when all of this and more is tied into a single inscrutable black box full of proprietary code, so fantastically "intelligent" that there is no longer any reliable connection between how far the gas pedal is depressed and how far the throttle valve opens, that pretty much requires the time, money, and equipment of a professional-level speed shop to figure out - and that's assuming that the manufacturer didn't give it wireless update capability (because obviously cars need that now) or deliberately try to make things difficult for any tuner that isn't a factory-connected skunkworks. Maybe, for more popular models and trims, you might be able to get something off the shelf, but if you're trying to tune an engine for which there is no pre-existing data or research, you're pretty much hosed. What this means to me is that eventually, 5 or 10 or 15 years down the road, assuming the stupid things last that long, some kid is going to get stuck with a Cruze or a four-cylinder Silverado as their first car, and will have no way to soup it up other than extremely basic, off-the-shelf intake & exhaust upgrades - assuming the computer doesn't detect and nullify all power gains from that somehow, the way a certain sports car's did. Considering how little normal people these days seem to care about cars, the quantity of implicit and explicit anti-car sentiment thrown about within earshot of the young (intentionally or otherwise), and how aware even car enthusiasts tend to be of car culture history, they may not even realize that such things were ever possible. Hey presto, a perfect recipe for the quiet death of car culture, already baking to golden-brown perfection with the enthusiastic support of existing car hobbyists.
These vehicles are simply undrivable. The ECU has its own mind and make the car betray its driver. All the driver input are "flitered" by the ECU, making the vehicle dynamics unpredictable, thus making the driver unable to determine the vehicle motion accurately. This is often felt like "fog" or "dizziness" because the physical connection between the driver and the vehicle is blurred and unsynchronized. --- Post updated --- One problem is the fake ESC-OFF button. ESC itself may improve safety, but the fake ESC-OFF is actually decrease safety, because if the ESC is on but the driver believe that the ESC is off, the driver and the ESC may work against each other, leads to terrible handling and higher accident rate. If the ESC-OFF button is true, then the vehicle handing is direct and responsible, the driver control is unaffected. The black box full of proprietary code is a bigger problem. It takes away the right to repair, if both the driver and any third-party are unable to repair, the factory skunk-works can skyrocket their price to make the driver empty wallet. The quiet death. This is the biggest problem, it's 2019, the integrated ECU is in mass use and the ESC is mandated, idk whether fake ESC-OFF is mandated but don't expect a better future. However you are still fully in control of yourself. In 2099 there might be a law that mandate a chip to be installed to every individual right after birth. The chip manufacture claimed that if anyone have any thought to commit a crime, the chip can disable their mind remotely. However the chip itself will make the manufacture to enslave every other beings, which leads to the death of human civilization.
I don't think that electronic throttle is that bad, some implementations can make it have a bad name, but on the whole its not that bad.. yes my car is a lowly 1.3 Honda fit(jazz), the throttle mapping changes on how fast you apply the throttle, and this is a system on a cheap car from 2005.. thus you can drive round very economically, as the ECU relaxes the throttle map (allowing finer control of fractional throttle changes with a larger throttle pedal movement), but then when you hammer it, it'll be pretty damn responsive (makes you almost a bit surprised what an eco 1.3 can do!).. This is something you can't have with a cable throttle, it's the same always..
I've yet to come across a stability control system that couldn't be defeated by pulling any ABS-related fuse such as valves, pump, module, etc. Theoretically if you can't find a fuse to pull you could also disable it by disconnecting any ABS-related plug such as a wheel speed sensor or the connector on the module. When a fault is detected the whole ABS/ESC system is disabled. I've never resorted to that though. The only time I've encountered what you describe was a 2019 Ford Fusion, in which the ABS module and PCM shared a fuse, but I was still able to disable the ABS by pulling the fuse for the valves, despite Ford hiding it on the underside of the engine compartment fuse box. Yesterday I had a Mini Countryman pull me within a foot of an obstacle I was trying to avoid because ESC was needlessly correcting a small and very controllable amount of oversteer. Meanwhile the gauge cluster displayed "DSC OFF". Clearly not.
On a more unusual note, I may just have helped a complete stranger sell his car. There was a recent ad by one guy on OLX selling a junky 1975 Scirocco for a paltry 575 PLN (€134/$149), and I posted it on a Facebook group about beat-up cars. After some time, commenters from Poland started writing about how they would like to buy the car. I didn't take it seriously, but two hours or so later, and the ad for such a hard-to-sell thing was flagged as out-of-date - probably due to me having played a part in the car's sale. The ad: https://www.olx.pl/oferta/vw-scirocco-mk1-CID5-IDCPAaQ.html --- Post updated --- You keep writing these tirades, but tell me one thing - how would you make the carmakers change, and why would the average car buyer want to support you?
Also, after looking it up on the internet for .06 seconds you could easily figure out how to bypass the car's computer and keep it from "nullifying" the power gain.
This video sucks. I wish I had a camera man. I would ask someone I work with but I don't trust them enough to let them witness these activities. I also should have pulled the ABS fuse.
http://www.vectormotors.com/wx8-specs.html Oof. Methinks ol' Wiegert hath lost his marbles. How about a Vector W8 electric conversion? I wish I were good friends with an oil sheikh or something so I could afford one, lol
