Update Speculation thread

Use the ETK 1300 mod to hold you up. It seems that the devs have really planned out the future updates for BeamNG and it seems to be map reworks, D-series and H-series revamps, and the Soliad Wendover.

 

It is true that the mining of battery materials is problematic. At the same time, the same is true for anything oil based.

Of course car industry wants to sell more and new cars.... but in reality they have been so busy selling their gas guzzlers that they have become complacent and stopped being particularly innovative. Yet the most important factor for car replacement is sitll rust and old age.... rust counter measures actually seem to have decreased over time. My friends drives an Audi 80.... it is over 20 years old yet has basically zero rust. Meanwhile my 2010 Focus shows first signs of corrosion although being less than half that age.

And then there is the block box ICE... an engine so complex and so expensive to properly check for defects that a lot of cars - although repairable in principle - are sent to the scrap yard because the owner is afraid of nasty engine related surprises coming up after another expensive repair. Meanwhile even basic low tech electric motors can go a million kilometes without any issue.

Few cars live longer than 15 years before they are scrapped. ICEs are partially responsible for that. Not only is it very expensive to do a full check up of the engine (due to required manual labour of dissassembly) but the exhaust cleaning burns morey money than fuel. A fact not helped by more and more integrated components. I mean the watercooled turbo of the ecoboost 1.0 liters is really a feat of engineering but god help you if it breaks down. The repair bill for that will probably net you a driveable used car. Did I mention that Ford was cheap on some thermal isolation for a while? If you are unlucky a water connector gets loose while driving starving both engine and turbo of badly needed coolant. Bonus points for the fact that the "smart" sensor placement and configuration neglects to inform you about this "minor" issue. Usually the first sign of trouble is a piston going trough the engine block one way. Efficient engines means high power output per ignition means very little time to shut down the engine when something goes wrong.

Bio fuels are an interesting concept but outside of niche applications they will never be competive to anything. For the energy and money required to get a litre of them you could easily drive your EV a few hundred kilometers. Environmentally friendly or not (which is dubios if you are honest), price will be their undoing just like hydrogen will most likely be dead on arrival, at least for cars.

Actually, the right to drive on private roads should be preserved. It is the same discussion as with the speed limit at the end of the day. It is fine if you want to endanger your own life but not the life of other people.

Public roads are for public transportation needs and not for your joy, especially not if that joy endangers other participants.

However, It seems safe to say that it will take at least several decades until manual driving is outlawed: For starters, it only makes sense when all cars can drive autonomousy. And since cars survive 15 years - with a rising tendency due to increased electrification and harsher competititon this would be the minimum time period where both types of "driving" exist. Also a lot of people do enjoy driviing and I dont see them becoming an irrelevant minority anytime soon. Finally, with increased automated driving software security issues are going to be pronounced... probably sadly leading to some death even. Once you are in a fully automated car, you are at the mercy of the computer and anyone who might control it. So is your environmet. Just like a driver running amok, a computer running amok can cause devastating damage, possible even more so due to being more crash resistant than the squishy human. This will lead to a slow down in market dominance and also lead to the development and deployment of some security features like emergency brakes and computer kill switches. So dont worry... you will be at the wheel for a long time to come.


Yet, in the very long term.... those issues will be sorted out and cold statistics will prove that far less people die due to the computer than due to human error. And this will be the time when a growing percentage of the population will demand that human error be outlawed outside of private streets.

I am sorry if I break anyones illusions here... but the computer IS a better driver. It is ludicrous fast and would consider the time it takes a single wheel to spin one single rotation at 300 km/h more than an aeon of eternity. Ample time to consider all possible options and beginning to execute the most prudent one. It has no human limits... it actually can look in all directions at the same time and as such never "flies" blind the way all human drivers do when the look left or right or behind.

Real time sensor data grant it unrivaled control over the vehicle. It knows everything.... every little detail.... every minor bump, the current traction value of the wheels, the weight distribution... and then it uses all that data end the enormous processing power to evade and steer with a precision well above anything humany possible. If it is physically possible, it it will evade any obstacle, pushing the car closer to the limits of the physics than any human would ever dare or even have time to consider. It might even trigger a temporarly - for the computer - loss of control for maximum evasion potential and then catch the car again with little effort. It will communicate with incoming traffic so that this incoming traffic steers grant sufficient "loss of control" space. Further away traffic will steer and brake less. It will automatically inform emergency services about a near or actual crash with accurate information about how many passengers and pedestrians where involved. It will inform central traffic control about the accident, causing all vehicles on the roadways to create an rescue lane. The automatic emergency vehicle will use this lane at best possible speed.

Later, sensor data will be evaluated to find out the cause of the almost accident. Guilty party will be punished, but all will be glad that nobody died today in what would have been an almost certainly fatal accident in a human driver world.


Lastly... even with less sophisticated software and hardware there is one undenieable advantage of a computer driver. It has no emotions. It cant be bullied. It obeys the traffic laws no matter what. If the speed limit is 80, it will drive 80. Not 79 and not 81. It will casually ignore the 10 km trail of drivers behind it. It will brake for a pedestrian even if a driver truck is right behind it. It will then use its pleasant computer voice to inform the driver of the truck that just scrapped your car that he should take a good look at his driving license, because he will never see it again, because an 3D 8K video of his misconduct is already on the way to the police.

Is that dystopian enough for you guys?

I think that if they make the electric cars in the game any quieter people with loud computer fans wont hear anything anymore.

Fun fact, hydrogen/fuel cell cars are electric cars. They have a relative large battery pack because the fuel cell cannot deliver a lot of power fast. In many ways, fuel cell vehicles are like an range extender for an EV. They slowly regenerate the battery over time but a battery you need as the fuel cell cannot handle the amount of power demand electric driving requires. This is one additional reason of why I dont believe in hydrogen cars.... you still require a battery and you need a fuel cell. It is very likely that in time more battery capacity will be both cheaper and more reliable than a fuel cell.


I still think that a fuel cell vehicle could be an interesting addition to the game.

• Longer ranger compared to equal technology level pure EV (as of today)
  
• Battery slowly regenerates over time.... full range at low to middle load conditions)
  
• Hard driving overloads the fuel cells capacity to regenerate the battery, so the battery drains.
  
• Once the battery is empty, driving stops, however regeneration can keep up again and the battery fills up slowly again.

What also could be an interesting addition to the game was an ICE to electric conversion done by the owner.

From the 3 different types of EV we right now only have one:

ICE car factory converted to EV (eSBR 4, medium range due to not enough space for more batteries)
ICE car owner converted to EV (basically replacing the ICE with an EV while keeping the gearbox and most of the car intact otherwise. Short range due to little space for the batteries availalable.
Newly built and designed EV: Meant from the ground up for electric driving, this car has maximum electric range and a full "skateboard" battery design maximizing range and keeping center of mass down.

Why it would be interesting?

The owner conversion would be playing with an electric motor and its quirks in an ICE tranmission car. EU version with manual, US version with classic automatic gearbox.

The pure from the ground up EV could be used to show the different driving physics of the common "battery skateboard" design. It also could show off the unique design opportunities of a completly different (and usually smaller) drive train.


Hybrids are also an interesting option although I think we already have the great mod for that. Personally I also think that Hybrids will increasingly die out in real life as the two engine system only ever was really interesting when one engine alone was not up to the job. (The ICE being to thirsty and the electric motor being having to little range due to poor batteries)

Why have the disadvantages of both when you can go with just one by now? A Hybrid has an electric drive system and an ICE. It still suffers from expensive exhaust repairs, regular oil change intervalls and still directly pollutes the neighbourhood. Modern downsized turbocharged non hybrid ICE also have melted away a good portion of their consumption advantage and while they will steal beat any ICE, the difference has become relative small. I think that Toyota has rally not done itself any favours ignoring pure EV for so long.... by know I know the third former Prius owner that now drives a full EV that is not from Toyota because Toyota doesnt have a compelling offer.

 

Fewer EVs live longer than 15 years before they are scrapped. Batteries are mostly responsible for that.

Driving manually =/= endanger

There's no such a thing like "cold statistics" because media can manipulate these data to make you believe they want you to believe. Corporate media bombard you with traffic accident news and they stress the human factor to make you believe humans are terrible drivers.
If every driver is responsive, the accident rate will be way lower than full autonomous driving. That's why airlines need pilots even with advanced autopilot that's already working decades ago.

Why live at all if AI computers can do everything better (in the future).

Why punish responsive drivers by outlawing human driving?

Not enough. To ensure maximum "safety" and minimum fatality we should stop moving and connect our brain to a supercomputer to emulate life in the ultimate form of VR, instead of living on our own.

--- Post updated ---

10.5/10

How about adjustable thermostat radiators. Currently the thermostat always fully opens at 1 degree higher than it's starts to open.

 

Stop this Garbage talking about what ever a HEV MKIV is suposed to function like and start taking about what w o u l d be in the Utah update an the new areas.

 

No

 

Tbh, while it is an interesting topic, I think it should be continued in the automotive section of the forums since the discussion about what is the future of automobiles is at best loosely related to the expected future of this game's content.

On topic: It's great that devs are making more rock crawling sections to Utah (unless there's some spot I've forgotten about). It'll be awesome to explore the place once again when it's released.

 

Yeah id love to jump in on the talk about manual driving, but can we have a different thread and keep this one on topic

 

The whole poinmt of an new cars and specificaly the propaganded jump to an ev is in short to buy new new new again again and again
for the excuse to be enviorment friendly and be more enviorment friendly but inn fact they isnt
the ICE can as well gain that in reality even more than the EV
your excuse of the BIO fuels ( they are to expensive) well they sad the same about solar energy and evs in general years ago.
it is all a question of investment and dont think the oil industry is out of the game and will stuck with foccil fuels in fact this is the bigges change that needs gona to happen anyways because oil is in everything even jn evs and a hell of a lot.
The adavantage of bio fuels is you can even create an negative co2 cycle with some oil tax so the natural recources would be refueled with exactly that we have stolen
the poluting is not the problem not in the slightes the point is to get it in a closed regulated circuit and this envolves far more than only cars...

And if i speak about ICEs then genaraly about the cars until 2010 without that downsizing nonsense wich is easily reversable with the mazda HCCI engines and with better fuel you almoust dont need exhaust cleaning devices for those (also ridiclious) theoretical healt riscs of modern cars i must died twice by standing next to an open camp fiere or an grill and taking cigarets on weekend partys.
buy the way you can drive an regular ice with hydrogene if you make a few smal adjustments if this argument dont drive you


Now let me put this in an other Perspective
without starting further argumenting against evs and the Aoutonomous driving that you are includet
were i need a complete new thread because i have a lot to say against as a learnded electrician and ongoing SPS Programmer
and i'm tired of this discuss.

So more of an personal Perspective
and ---->Highly Theoretical Future Perspective nonsense<-----

no one would die ?

i can easily denie that

I would rather kill myselve
and driving my bmw in free will
with over 200Km/h against some big rigid obsticle in the midle of nowhere
than living in such an hooror Dystophia

and this is no jocke

and i dont need any licence for doing this

+ i wont polute anything with my Breathing
including Farths and Burps out of even more dangerous methane.


this dystopia (EVS and AI driving only) would be the death of my soul and would put me and a lot of Car guys hobbyist or just car lovers in in very deep deprsion
and thise headlines could then drive 24/7 through their brains

everything is useles garbage without soul, without emoution, without stimulation, without exitement, without fun, without sense and nothing to fight for, u are useles should the computere better live vorever on, the live is worthles if you cant live even with a simple hobby or liking ice cars, they stole everything i liked, they destroyed everything i liked ec.ec

so heavy existence anxiety if they can bann this our over a century loved ICE car drived by our own for nothing but statistics Piking if they realy could do that what els can they bann from us?


The only spark for me then would be the 3d printers where i would build my caar by my own chosen desinge of the past and driving it in secret at night if the wort case of the worst case of you said dystopian would happen.

but its more as likely that i wont see this in any way
alsou died my uncle with 42 on pankrias cancer.
maby this is my future ?

Buy the way my Bmw 325ci is 18 jears old and is completly fine i have it since im 18 and it will stick with me until i gett (eventualy) an old man well i wish i was already at my 60s but with 24 i need too continue to overcome this future prayers with their ,,highly theoretical future where everything far worse can hapen´´

For me is fredoom and Lberty all and the most important thing what makes for me a great Future.
and if someone want to bann this
the result would be the said above

So thank you you ruined my week with a real live horror story i well know it but i dont even want tho think of in the same time
for nothing and nothing to gain for were i only want to keep my car and car nostalgia.

i just want a beatiful future with my car an i will have that
The future isnt written and no one can force me to anything and im not the only one.





if someone wants to live after the philosophy efficency and statistics congratulations you are almoust an computer in your own ecxistence nothing to live for than being alive.


Hell i dont want to lock in my account for a while now i realy regrett it
nothing to gain for...
What a waste of time...........

Who gives up freedom for security, will lose both.

And i take the liberty to end this discuss

The devs should feel free to remove this two non contibuting nonsense posts

 

How mutch paper do i even need to write this down? (I have messy handwriting)

 

Having read this post, I've got to say I agree with you just about 100%.
A "home-made" EV conversion would be absolutely brilliant in this game, though I have my doubts about how an automatic transmission would handle an electric motor. Manual "redneck EVs" would be awesome though, especially with older cars. An electric converted Piccolina or Burnside Special would be absolutely dope.
A full "dedicated" EV would be good too, for the same reasons you stated.

An electric converted Wendover would be hilarious, though it's unlikely

 

Alright then i give in to this Ev discussion, Evs are okay but Are quite bland. Electric motors have alot of torque and only have one gear, then why do electric manufactures not give electric cars gears to go even faster?

Also i see the future in Renewable Fuel made from plants n stuff.

 

It's not really practical. You'd be increasing complexity ($$$) for no real gain in efficiency or speed. I do believe some EVs use (or have used) two-speed transmissions, though I'm not sure exactly which ones, and when.

 

They slowly adding gears to EVs. I think new Porsche have now two gears. Also Formula E cars have 3-4 gears.

 

I certainly would like to see more variety in drive trains in game, especially some of the quirky old stuff. Some 1980/1990's EV, rotary/wankels, different ICE engines, different types of fuels, something like the 5 speed auto from John Fitch's Oldsmobile Phantom, etc...

It's a shame to have a physics sim car game and only have only basic types of engines.

 

An official car with a wankel cycle engine would be an incredible addition to this game. Imagine something along the lines of a first gen RX7 in BeamNG

 

An RX-8 would be even better, given how its depreciation has had it put to a variety of interesting uses, including banger racing.

Maybe even replace the rotary with a turbine engine.

 

Mate, do a favour to yourself and call on monday your doctor, you need treatment.
I had petrol cars, since I was 18, my first was a E36 325i coupe, wonderful car, great memories, but honestly, with the current gas prices and driving 20K km per year it would have no sense to have it now as my daily car.
In the future, the racetracks will still exist, and for sure with many more around the world, and humans will go "crazy" with our "stupid old machines" and have some fun for a few hours on a safe environment and we will go back home safe and clean on our autonomous vehicle. It NOT will be the end of the world. GET OVER IT!

 

Why do you keep trying to change the subject? Just stop, it's annoying.

 

No, I don't think I will.

 

Keep in mind that the statement of autonomous vehicles dominate streets and the obsolete of manual driving, is merely an opinion, NOT a fact. Just like in the 1970's lots of people belived that in 2050 many of us would be able to travel to another planets in a privately owned spaceship.

Electric cars are quite unstable given its weight. The eSBR final gearing ratio is to high that it'll wheelspin like crazy when flooring it at low to moderate speeds. If you change the final gearing that the eSBR just able to spin the wheel very slightly, you get 320+km/h top speed. However the car gets unstable over 250km/h
Formula E cars and other race cars are purpose built speed machines, and after a bunch of calculations and tests and concludes that more gearing is faster so they add more gears.