Fuck Cars
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I saw a video recently by a car enthusiast who hates the idea of self driving cars for a novel reason.
Even if self-driving cars are safer than people it won’t stop bad owners. People who drive with unsafe mechanical issues they can’t or won’t get fixed are still going to exist, and bald tires and worn brakes would eliminate any potential safety benefits of self driving.
And by further removing people from the operation of a car, you’re making them worse owners. They won’t know what a worn tie rod bushing would feel like because they never steer. Making cars into appliances just makes them less safe.
He also made a point that I agree with: If we get people who don’t want to drive off the road, the roads would be nicer for people who do want to drive.
I somewhat disagree with this. If you can feel worn tires, brakes, or suspension bushings, it's easy to imagine the car feeling them and raising a service alert, and locking out if not appropriately serviced.
Vendor lock-in and enshittification, baby.
Certain things are fairly easy to detect like wheel imbalance vibration or a bad muffler sounds. but there’s so many “vibes plus experience” things that I don’t think software will catch. The human brain is exceptionally good at picking signal out of noise, and “feeling” a bad set of tires or an old timer being able to “hear” how healthy your motor is, aren’t really things you can teach an algorithm.
I’m sure somebody will try to predict failures, but it might not go well. Surely it will be used to gouge consumers, and of course the owners of self-driving cars won’t know any better.
Could we stop saying that computers "could never do" things? It always gets proven wrong. Anything we can detect as humans has some physical reason that we can detect it. Sensors can detect it more effectively. To suggest that you can't program a computer to know what those sensors are supposed to be reading is just absurd.
Airliner engines are getting to ludicrous reliability numbers (the latest generation appears to be closing in on 10M hours between inflight shutdowns) largely through predictive maintenance performed far in advance. We're well past 'most pilots never see an engine failure' and approaching 'most airlines don't see an engine failure'.
And there are few locations more abusive to sensors than the hot section of a turbine engine.
Imagine getting in your car and it refusing to drive you anywhere because the wear sensor on the brake pads is bad, but everything else is fine.
It'll be like MS windows. "Service needed " message will pop up as soon as you get in, then it'll drive straight to the nearest service centre , however many 100's of km away, and keep you hostage inside 'til you pay the bill.
That seems relatively easy (and cars already have it with the little bit of metal that makes the brakes squeal when worn):
From the sensor being triggered, you have say 1-2000km to get the sensor or brake pad (whatever the issue is) fixed.
Worn tire is almost impossible to detect if without any physical inspection, and sensor just can't cut it. Sometime it worn on the side because of bad alignment, sometime it's the middle, sometime it's uneven for whatever reason. Unless you want your car to be all sensor, which is the reason recent car is such a nightmare to maintain, you wouldn't want a tyre wear sensor that you have to clean the sensor once in a while, which that time could be used to physically inspect your tire.
Imagine having sensor all over your suspension, tierod, tire, and one fault is detected mean it's towing time. That would be a nightmare of a nightmare.
And yet people can feel the difference between a worn tire and a new tire. Accelerometers and the torque feedback on the motor drives (both of which are already widespread in cars out of necessity for other equipment) can feel when the tires are on the edge of losing traction.
One of the changes in automation over the last decade or two is a move away from having many specific 'sensor for monitoring X', towards interpreting a smaller number of better sensors in novel ways to provide the same data.
I've been in the industry for 15 years and i've never heard of anyone that can feel if their tire are worn or not, most can tell the difference between a worn and new right after they changed(mostly psychological, as they asked it to be change and know it's new), but never feel it in their daily commute. They will only know when they check. Same as machine, if the change is gradual and slowly over a long period of time, they will only interpret that as something normal and calibrate it accordingly. It's the same reason your car won't bitch about throttle body service because the parameter is "off", or bitch about alignment because your steering is slight off center, because they deem it as "normal" and calibrate as such. They only throw up signal if the change is sudden.
Secondly, said tech already been used as a way to tell you about tyre, yet more car use tps anyway, because it's more precise and accurate.
Thirdly, people already and should rotate their tire regularly, at that time you should know how much thread the tire still have left, having an extra and unreliable "warning" would totally piss people off.
It's a feature that doesn't benefits from redundancy.
Yeah, I'm always a little skeptical about the 'feel it' claims. But computers don't have to adapt to progressive wear; I'm sure you could configure the ABS/traction control to indicate that in dry conditions consistently slipping below say 0.3g (number pulled out of ass) of applied traction implies an excessively worn tire.
Once you get below a certain level of performance, all the braking/steering assumptions involved in self driving start breaking down too.