Nah i knew things were too good to be true: The fuel tank is leaking. aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
At this point I'm convinced that half the local population never took a driving test. Or maybe they did, it wasn't that long that I took mine and it honestly was a complete joke. My one way commute is 50 miles, all highway driving. Every single one way trip I see at least 2 accidents, multiple people nearly merge into me and I see multiple people run stop signs/lights... At least once a month I have a pedestrian step in front of my car (it's not like my Mustang is a quiet car...), at least once a month I witness a hit and run, I see road rage and (I assume) impaired driving regularly. Seeing near misses from cars driving like maniacs in parking lots nearly hitting pedestrians is commonplace. Who thought giving humans access to cars was a good idea? I'm at the point where I refuse to so much as drive a car without at least a front facing dash cam and am looking into getting a rear facing one on the Mustang. Then there's the lack of car maintenance. I took a look around the parking lot at work and nearly 1/3 of cars had bald front tires. Is it really that difficult to drive on tires that have tread left?.. Is it like this everywhere or is there something about NY specifically that attracts this behavior?.. And don't even get me started on all the pot holes. /rant
The written test to get a permit was 10 questions including "which of these 4 images is a stop sign" The road test gets made easier every so often because a lot of people fail it. Most people I know did not pass on the first time. What is this difficult road test you ask? One block around a semi-abandoned industrial area, a 3-point turn, and parallel park. Aside from other test takers and the car to parallel park behind (only 1 car around when parallel parking), I didn't see a single other vehicle during the test. If it was up to me, the road test would be made significantly more difficult and retested every 5 years for the general population, more often for the elderly. Dangerous driving laws would have much stricter pubishments and enforecement. Unfortunately without better public transportation and/or autonomous vehicles, this would result in a lot of people unable to go anywhere... Not that people don't drive without a license already though (when I took the defensive driving class, all but 3 in the room admited to driving without a license in the past 6 months when the instructor asked) The bad driving around here is made worse by the outdated infastructure. A lot of artery roads have little to no on ramp and flow of traffic is 80mph, they just weren't designed for modern speed or volume. Yes, I see my town on r/idiotsincars once in awhile.
So the EU just announced that they will stop allowing new ICE cars after 2035 wich really sucks since i kinda dont want to drive a electric car or something like that. What i now am thinking about is how to make my own e85 fuel and how to store old cars in a way that i can drive em a while or i could move into another country outside the EU.
Almost all government traffic laws are stupid, but there's nothing you can do I'm also sure that the official speed limit on that 80 mph road is like 65, but the government will leave it that way so they can pull people over meaninglessly. A road I've heard of has a speed limit of about 60 and people regularly go over 90. There's nothing unsafe about it, it's just the speed traffic goes, but it's actually easier to get pulled over alone, because then you can't as easily defend yourself by saying you were going the speed of surrounding traffic. (This isn't a problem with police, it's a problem with whoever decides what the speed limits are) See, what you have to remember is that your government has lots of better things to spend your tax money on compared to something that might actually help you If people keep buying gas and using gas cars, you've got a fighting chance at still having gas stations. Of course, there is always America - it ain't great right now, but it's better than everything else, so you can always try getting in.
Seing that a lot of issues are character issues, no amount of training will fix that. Cars are going to become increasingly autonomous and - overall - this is a good thing. There is no shame in admitting that computers have vastly superior reaction speed and precision compared to any human driver. Yes, they introduce new ways of failure but they also fix a lot of human shortcomings like limited attention span, an certain inability to see 360 degree and a reaction speed measured in significant parts of a second. Accidents are going down besides vast increases in traffic. @skodakenner Assuming a 15 year car lifespan, you could in theory drive arround with an ICE until arround 2050. Changes are however, that long before 2035 ICE car will be very unpopular in the mainstream due to EVs offering superior comfort, security and driving joy features in comparsion. Never forget that the majority of the car market is not performance or sound oriented - turbo diesels would never have taken off in that case - but more comfort and economics oriented. While an EV still has some comfort drawbacks today, those are increasingly fixed while EV allow some things that ICE cannot do without very expensive modifications. For example pre heating the vehicle in winter conditions.... there is this fun video of a tesla owner starting the car at minus 30 something degree Celsius..... 2 minutes or so and the car has nice warm 25 degrees inside, the glass is clear and you can start driving right away. No ICE can do that..... it probably needs help starting in fact and you are not going to get any significant heat for a long time. Same for cooling in hot summers. Since there is no need to run an ICE, you can much more safely do this from afar as there is no risk of poisoning people with the exhaust. Imho first EVs will replace ICE cars in mainstream taste... and only then with a certain delay will the change in mainstream taste (and tolerance for exhaust fumes) lead to politicial majorities for banning ICE cars. People are tolerating exhaust fumes because for the longest time, there was no working alternative. With that alternative being there, tolerance for getting air poisoned is going to get down. In 10 years, the only thing mainsteam ICE cars will have going for them is "vroom vroom." That is almost certainly not going to be enough to make them survive. Like it, dont care about it... hate it. It doesnt matter... mainstream is where the money is and where design choices are decided.
Sub-60mph speed limit around here actually. Speeding tickets are really rare, you really won't get pulled over during rush hour for speeding on an arterial road. Definitely on a secondary road or off-peak hours though. I studied traffic engineering for one of my minors in uni. I assure you, these speeds are not safe on these roads. Yes we have some leeway when we decide speedlimits, but we don't pull it out of our ass either. Going that fast around these curves simply does not allow sufficient reaction time, and as I mentioned in my last post many entrances have little to no on ramp. Unless everyone starts daily driving Tesla Roadsters or Rimac Concept Two's there is physically no way to accelerate fast enough to safely merge under those conditions. I would say I appreciate the roads they built for us, but considering the pothole situation I don't think I will. Also, mandatory "to hell with Robert Moses". As for all this stuff about electric/ICE cars... A lot of places (EU, UK, California) are introducing legislation that will effectively ban new ICE passenger car sales. But here's the thing people seem to forget... Even if we didn't have this legislation, would automobile manufactures really continue ICE R&D on any appreciable scale?.. As commuter cars electrics are great. As much as I love daily driving a Mustang GT with the 5 speed, I have to admit I would love it if I didn't have to stop at the gas station every other day. For the volume market, electric cars are increasingly competitive and by 2035 they will only be that much more so. Which limits ICE sales to enthusiasts. But what kind of profit-prioritizing business would put that much money into R&D and production facilities for what will then be an extremely specialized product? Remember, if all the volume cars are electric then there isn't even a real reason to keep an additional production facility around for petrol engines. I really don't see why a business would want to continue ICE sales at that point regardless of this legislation. Although I admit enthusiasts often end up as collateral for laws (I mean in general, not just automotive), I'm not all that worried about the ability to continue enjoying my V8s as a hobby. Even in California vintage cars are exempt from smog testing. Even if volume cars are all electric it sure seems there will be enough of an enthusiast market to keep it around in some way or another, even if gasoline becomes more of a luxury good than a mainstream commodity. At the MPG of most boats/muscle cars/etc... it's already a luxury good for enthusiasts anyway...
I'm honestly not convinced it's possible to make an autonomous car truly "safe" - and that's coming from somone who's done some dumb stuff behind the wheel. Think of all the idiocy video game AIs are still guilty of to this day, then move that to the real world where the number of variables is infinitely greater and the consequences for failure are much worse. Now suddenly it's not "lol, look at these braindead bots swerving into the wall because they think that's where the track goes! I'm gonna send this to FailRace!" Now it's barreling down the road in a car you have no control over, trying desperately to reboot Super Duper Autopilot V0.9 (hope you haven't forgotten how!) before it causes a mass casualty incident. And how is this a good thing? I don't doubt this, only because I've seen how terrible "mainstream taste" can get. We live in a world, right now, where mainstream manufacturers are abandoning regular passenger cars entirely because people would rather have them be worse in nearly every objective and several subjective ways just so they can sit up higher. This problem mainly applies to the biggest and densest cities, but I nearly got banned from r/cars for calling that out so apparently it's PoLiTiCaL to notice or care. The problem with EVs and AVs is that a lot of their flaws, such as complete dependence on the power grid (and, with AVs, the internet/cell phone service) for mobility, will be invisible to the average EV supporter/adopter until it's too late to go back. Remember that people will also line up to buy "smart home" junk without knowing or caring about the privacy and security implications of connecting your whole house to the internet. Maybe in the city you can just walk everywhere until the power comes back online, but where I live it's pretty uncommon to get through the fall/winter without at least one major power outage, and when this happens during the coldest, windiest part of the year, it's going to be painful for a lot of people.
