I don't know about anyone else but I know I'll gladly give up both for the ability to predict what the car is going to do when I step on the gas. My own experiences with drive-by-wire have not been fun, especially as they usually include a dim-witted automatic transmission as well. Is it barely going to respond at all, or is it going to drop 2 gears and lurch forward like some kind of soccer mom Devil Z? Nobody knows, because it's all in the hands of the computer and the computer only sees raw data devoid of context. When you just need a little more power, it suddenly wakes up and leaps forward, because you're going up a steep hill and so already pretty hard on the throttle to begin with. When you need full power right away because you're jumping out into close traffic, you get delays because you're starting from no throttle and so your input (stomping on the gas) has to be approved by all the computers before it can be acted on, and by then you have to really stand on it to avoid getting run over. The latter situation has come close to getting me hit, because the stupid DBW lag turns a moment's hesitation into a dangerous half-second of delay. The power delivery isn't even especially refined once it arrives, it just takes forever to actually do so. Not a Toyota, but it will probably do for the purposes of example: that Dodge Journey, if the flashing TC light under hard acceleration is to be believed, has enough power to burn all four tires at once, and you can definitely feel it once it starts to go, but you can practically boil a pot of coffee in the time between asking for acceleration and getting it. Also likely because of the DBW, its engine braking is unbelievably weak, so that thing you could do in older cars where you could just let off the gas and drop speed fairly quickly without having to brake? Not happening. Somehow I doubt that new Toyotas are any better, because this is not the only car I've seen that had this problem. At this point I'm actually going to say yes. But then, some of that may be due to my influences coming from older generations. Just as an example: my grandfather, sensible family man, 3 kids, tool-and-die maker for Boeing, once had glasspacks on his family sedan, the very name of which - "Sport Fury" was intended to sound fast and aggressive. Once upon a time, people aspired to drive powerful cars. Since my mother is old enough to have missed the worst of the whole "public school as indoctrination center" thing, those influences passed undiluted down to me. So no, I don't understand that, nor do I particularly want to. The concept of deliberately wanting a car to be and look boring is utterly alien to me. This article was not written by me, but explains a lot of my mindset when it comes to cars: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/04/environmentalists-cars-fast-ones-targeted/ I can sort of see why they wouldn't want a certain similar image (i.e. that of backwards-hat-wearing teenagers going 80 MPH through your neighborhood) but frankly, that's long ago and far away anyway. Most of the old legends aren't commonly driven by those kinds of people due to rarity, expense, of the fact that most of them have long since been spoken for by serious drivers, and the ones that aren't legends are just sort of... there, or are in such poor shape from abuse and neglect that they aren't fit for any kind of racing. Maybe it's different in places where there were ever more than 50 simultaneously extant ricers, but still. Also, the people who would be turned off by this image tend not to play racing games, and the people who play racing games won't be turned off by this image. Who knows, maybe it's a home-market thing, but they haven't specifically said that. Other manufacturers, including other Japanese manufacturers, survive and will continue to survive at home and abroad despite having tuning legends in past. Occasionally they'll withdraw from specific games for specific reasons (and most of them appear to have long since dropped these objections), but they don't pull out video gaming altogether. And yet, they just keep existing. If any of them are going down, it's for reasons unrelated to any supposed car-culture connection. Like, in Mitsubishi's case, a product line devoid of cars which are, in any way or from any perspective, desirable. So, either way, I'm really not sure what Toyota's problem is. All they have is rallies and high-speed raid-style events, which kind of lose their specialness when Lamborghinis can be driven like that too (and frequently are, because apparently staying on the road is boring). True four-wheeling is almost never found in video games. I'm talking deep mud, big rocks, that kind of stuff, not just "Wheeee! We're just gonna flatten this entire crop at 150 MPH because we're the Horizon Festival and we can get away with whatever we want!" Only from the "just want an easy dopamine high" perspective. It's entirely possible to respect the region you portray without locking players into one specific vehicle type. For better or for worse, most regional car cultures now have large quantities of devotees well outside their home region, so for a game like this, players can still be given plenty of choices without necessarily presenting an inaccurate depiction of the host region. How those choices are presented, and their quantity relative to the more "homegrown" ones, are important. See, the problem with Forza Horizon car lists isn't just that they have too many regionally-inappropriate cars, it's that they just take the same old cars that have already been in 50 games so far, dribble a few local highlights and forced memes on top, and release the game knowing that 10-year-olds with rich parents will flock to it anyway. The non-local cars are too common, too easy to get, and sometimes seem to border on random, while the local cars are too few. The result is that even if every single car on the list is technically street-legal, it still feels out of balance because you're constantly seeing and owning cars which should be rare and expensive in the host country, while others that should be common there are just sort of... missing due to not being glamorous enough. Besides, sometimes depth is better than breadth anyway. Again, only from the "easy dopamine" perspective. Not what I said at all. There are plenty of those cars that I do actually like, and like I said - they have and deserve their place in car culture. The problem comes when that's all there is. Eventually you reach a point where it looks like you assembled your car list by asking a bunch of grade-school kids and JDM fanboys to name their favorite cars. Like I said. It's more than OK, it's what made it attractive. Honestly, I can see how FH games could be considered a lot of fun. I really can. But after a while, especially given the way people tend to play them (i.e. yoloing across open ground in whatever car they happen to be driving), they just start to seem shallow, surface-level, casualized, and just designed to addict as many people (especially kids) as possible without providing any real value. I mean, come on. Now that FH4 videos are starting to drop, we can see that within the first hour of the game (and mostly within the first half-hour), you'll thrash McLaren's latest and greatest flavor-of-the-month hypercar, be given two expensive and potentially rare cars for free (pre-modified, no less), be fawned over by multiple NPCs even if you don't win, and jump a Bugatti Chiron for a movie scene where pretty much any developer would just use a replica and/or CGI. It's like each installment just tries to one-up the previous in terms of cheesy, no-effort insta-grat.
Nobody climbs into wagons through the rear hatch, yet we count it for a door. It used to puzzle me, too. When I was a child, I couldn't understand why do we call something a door if nobody enters through it. The author of the article complains about new electric cars being slow. Ever heard of Tesla? It's as fast as the new Citroens mentioned a few posts above are ugly.
I've not been sure of it either, my best guess has been that its for marketing. "Do you want the 4 door or 5 door model?" to differentiate between sedans and estates. But when there are cars for sale that legitimately have 3 actual doors, it really doesn't make sense to use this terminology*. It is trying to combine two metrics into a single value, which rarely works out well, since different combinations of those metrics can lead to the same output despite being totally different things. If you get a dent in the boot lid, no one states that a door has been dented. More to the point, no one ever, refers to the boot lid (or hatch if you prefer) as being a door. *Does the car have 4 actual doors, or 3 doors with a hatch. Its impossible to tell, making the whole thing pointless.
Judging by the guy's absolute lack of knowledge about Ecoboost and spending most time ranting about names and speed, I'd say he's as qualified to write about cars as I am to write about rocket science.
The article is hilarious tbh, mostly because its almost entirely strawman, the rest is pulling claims out of his own arse that he has absolutely no evidence to backup. Its all feelings with no substance to back them up. Sure, it is an opinion piece, but its always nice when the opinions are grounded within reality. I also really don't understand his point. If he wants a fast car, he can buy one, he even has the choice of ICE, Hybrid, or electric. There are fast options available for all of them. All with different pro's and con's. His Degree is in English, which shows from his writing style, because he writes well, and tells a good story. However, like many stories, the accuracy of the content leaves much to be desired. His conversation with one salesman does not represent the world around him, no matter how much he wants to read into it. And his opinions on fossil fuels... well, there is literally nothing to back them up, they are entirely unfounded.
Rocket science is fairly easy to understand, on the contrary. It's simply calculations of thrust, weight distribution, speed, and aerodynamics. Sure, there are some variables such as wind speed and trajectory among a few others, but it's pretty easy.
In the same vein as I could learn a bunch of things about rockets and the physics involved, he can learn something about cars, but would never understand as much as an insider.
It's not like he even tried to. He's the type of guy you can show an alternator and say it's what changes gears in your car, and he will believe it.
Orbital mechanics in an n-body space, not to mention lagrangian points and delta-v, upto scratch on your hoffman transfers?
Hence "among a few others," like only the most important ones. At the end of the day, if you can make it go fast enough and straight enough, you can get something into orbit. Whether or not it'll actually do what you want when you get it there is a whole different ball game, though.
Well, you need to do a gravity turn first. Which requires calculating the exact timings required in order to reach your desired altitude of orbit. But even then you aren't done, because you will need to find the most fuel efficient way to do it, in order to minimise cost or maximise distance, since every kg of additional fuel, requires extra power and fuel to launch. And that's just the stuff that needs to be done to reach orbit in Kerbal Space Program, there are way more things to consider irl. Not to mention of course the engineering side of it, building an efficient thruster is not exactly simple, nor is the rest of a space craft. If it were easy, sending stuff to space wouldn't be anywhere near as risky as it is.
Besides, know why a rocket thruster is designed the way it is? Why stages exist (hint: its not for deadweight reasons)?
Weight distribution? So the thruster is closer to the centre of mass? Or are you going for solid rocket fuel vs liquid fuel? Dense powerful propulsion vs Controlled propulsion Or thermal reasons? So that boosters don't overheat? So if one fails they can more safely abort? So they can be reclaimed more easily? Or perhaps burn up better as they re-enter? Or perhaps to make re-entry possible? I guess there is probably a lot of really good reasons
What it's about is more along the lines of an overall opinion shift. Once upon a time, people aspired to drive more powerful cars. A fairly ordinary sedan would be called something like "Sport Fury" to give it an image of power and aggression, and then otherwise sensible people would buy them and put Cherry Bombs on them, becuase why not right? Manufacturers that used turbocharging, meanwhile, would shout it from the rooftops because at the time, turbo meant speed. Now it's a different story. Now, there are more fast cars to choose from than ever before - even as dedicated sports models die off, midsize and full-size sedans are gaining power - but now it's treated as something to be downplayed or to be ashamed of. A car that, in the olden days, would have been called something like "High Output Special" or "Turbo GTS" now hides behind a pious moniker like "EcoBoost" instead, as if to say "yeah, I guess it's fast, but the important thing is that it's all efficient and green-friendly, see!" To reconnect this to Toyota... the current V6 Camry in particular is a genuinely fast car, with 0-60 in the mid 6-second range and a theoretical top speed of I-don't-know-because-Automobile-Catalog-hasn't-got-there-yet-but-I'm-guessing-it's-over-150-MPH, but Toyota themselves will never advertise any of this, and would apparently prefer it if no one else does either because it would give them a "boy-racer image". It's like they read too much of the old Car Talk website and decided that they needed to apologize for building fast cars even while continuing to do it. That's what neither I nor the writer of that article understand - the mindset of someone who actively wants their car to feel and appear boring. I mean, I suppose there's a really cliquey corporate environment somewhere where getting promoted requires driving a boring gray sedan (probably somewhere in New England if everything I've heard about that place is true), but I have to wonder if those places would accept a Toyota anyway (or whether the decision to pull out of video games will have any effect at all, given that their pedestrian models haven't actually had a boy-racer image in many years if ever).
Pressure and matching the shape of the bell to the shape of combusting gases at different atmospheric pressures
