RememberTheApollo_

“I’m Spartacus!”

This article is 2/3 fluff. The majority is about convenience features, not safety.

That said, I recently moved from a ~15 year old car to a modern one, and have driven several newer models with the features described.

Adaptive cruise: it‘s often poorly designed. It brakes far too rapidly and abruptly should traffic or a car ahead slow, and there‘s absolutely no reason to apply as much throttle as it does should it decide acceleration is appropriate. Also for uphill driving the cruise control often drops into far too low a gear in order to maintain speed. It‘s more of a nuisance than an aid, and it‘s even worse if traffic increases or you‘re in a lane with jackasses that can‘t maintain a steady speed. Adaptive cruise attracts idiots, too. The new versions will stay engaged and slow to a complete stop. If the driver has set the following distance to maximum the car will stop with a 4-5 car distance from the car ahead. They‘re treating it like some kind of autopilot that will run the car for them.

Lanekeeping: there‘s a huge span of quality here. Some are shit, some are far too aggressive, some are “jerky” following a segmented plotted line rather than a smoother curve. They can overcorrect and really make for an unstable drive attempting to counter intentional driver input. Some “give up” and disengage with little warning, the audible alerts are often weak. Some briefly follow merge, exit, or widening lines for an additional lane pointing you off the road before they get confused and disengage with the car pointed in an unsafe direction.

Auto braking: in my experience it has engaged every time when I was already braking, or engaged when there was no need to brake. The few times I thought it should have engaged, it didn’t. It’s a nuisance at best, ineffective at worst.

Reverse cameras don’t provide a full picture and are awful in developing driver proprioception about the dimensions of their car. They’re fine for what’s immediately behind you, but use of mirrors and looking around is far better for backing out and looking for approaching people or cars. That said, I love the “360°” view ones. Those are great for centering oneself in a parking space.

So I completely understand why drivers don’t use them. They’re often low-quality, inappropriate overcorrections for the situation, and make for a worse ride and potentially even detrimental to safety. That’s saying a lot considering the quality of a lot drivers on the road today.

I run 80% of the time with adaptive cruise and lanekeeping off. I can’t disable the autobrake, if I could I would.

Fuck these clowns. Their “compromise” is finding some way to quiet the bad press while continuing to do what they’ve been doing.

“We’ll stop putting our cameras where people don’t want them and just put then where our clients want them.”

Yeah who the hell is buying creeper glasses for kids to wear at schools. This is messed up.

Then the spin should have reduced gravitational effect, created a “lean” toward the equator of the spin, created a bulge at the equator where the water would be slung outward due to the spin…

There’s all kinds of problems with this planet assuming a slingshot effect to help reach escape velocity based on the fuel requirement differential in this hypothetical.

Damn. Truth.

Cool. If they allow views while using ad-blockers I’m in.

We can make all the rules we want, but the rules don’t matter.

Lack of spines in people we expected to enforce our rights got us here. It’s no good making more rules when the ones we have are ignored.

I tried watching a how-to video on YT today.

It say “playback not supported on this device”.

Probably thanks to my ad-blocking efforts.

Fuck youtube. Can’t get views if the video never plays.

The internet isn’t the internet anymore. It’s walled off, corporatized, and exclusionary.

The internet used to be for people.

Now it’s for profit.

“Show me how the conclusion I’m starting with is correct.”