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While I like driving. I hate all the shit modern car manufacturers put in modern cars. Sure they’re more efficient on fuel than older ones. But we should be able to have that without needing the car to be tracked and data collected, we have in the past.
I feel like all these driver aids are also making people worse at driving. They need to do less, so they pay attention less.
On top of that, can we ban touchscreens in cars? Physical buttons give physical feed back, you can feel for the button you want and press it without taking your eyes off the road. A touchscreen gives you none of that, and means you have to look away. It’s somewhat mitigated when they put buttons on the steering wheel, but not all buttons can fit in that spot.
Sure some cars have google assistant, Siri or Alexa. But I actually get so frustrated when trying to tell my phone to navigate somewhere or just simply change the song. And that’s just the phone! The amount of times I have to pull over because it glitches out, or just fails to interpret some or all of what I’ve just said (sure it’s better than voice assistants used to be, but it still breaks regularly) is still too high. The amount of times I regularly tell it to do something, only to find it was still processing the activation voice command, and therefore was initialising the VA screen, and not listening to a word I said after the initial activation is infuriating.
I love technology, but the technology has no place in cars if it detracts or distracts from the act and safety of actually driving the car.
/Rant.
On top of that, can we ban touchscreens in cars? Physical buttons give physical feed back, you can feel for the button you want and press it without taking your eyes off the road. A touchscreen gives you none of that, and means you have to look away. It’s somewhat mitigated when they put buttons on the steering wheel, but not all buttons can fit in that spot.
That’s, a damn good point.
A touchscreen gives you none of that, and means you have to look away
That’s the reason why I don’t like listening to music on smart phones. Want to skip a track? Fish the phone out of your pocket, turn the screen back on, find the skip button, tap it, wait a second until the garbage app acknowledges that you’ve pressed it, turn off screen, put it back.
While on my 2000’s phone it’s just pressing one of the physical buttons.
Want to skip a track? Fish the phone out of your pocket, turn the screen back on, find the skip button, tap it, wait a second until the garbage app acknowledges that you’ve pressed it, turn off screen, put it back.
I had a HTC Touch Pro smartphone 15 years ago, and it had an optional headphone cable with buttons on it. You could use the buttons for pause/play, next track, and previous track, without having to get the phone out of your pocket.
I never really saw something like that again for wired headphones. I did sometimes see headphones with buttons on the headphones themselves, but often they just have play/pause.
I really REALLY hope someone at some point starts a gasoline to electric car conversion company at some point.
I love my car because it has just the right amount of technology: Bluetooth connectivity for calls and music. That’s it. That’s all I need.
Yup. Unfortunately, since most people seem to prefer the dystopian futuretech, all auto manufacturers are going to employ it. Just like with cell phones. The last phone I know of with 16:9 aspect ratio and no blighted hole punch or notch was in 2018. There’s a market full of us luddites who prefer the old ways, but we’re invisible to manufacturers because it’s more profitable to make something that more people want to buy, and we’re forced to buy that garbage as well anyway.
You forgot about the programmed obsolescence.
Yeah, it goes further than just designing the hardware to only last a few years, all of these electronics ensure that the car is fucked as soon as the necessary online services go down. Meanwhile a well-maintained '93 Geo Metro, driven in the south where they don’t salt the roads every year, can last decades.
I’ve had my 2010 Mazda 3 for 13 years now and I’m taking every precaution to keep it as long as I can.
hi, I’m looking to buy my first car and have my eyes on the 2015 Mazda 3 but it is a little bit over my budget. Would you recommend getting the 2010-2013 Mazda 3 in 2023? Or just downgrade to a 2015 Mazda 2?
The 2010-2013 ones have a few problems because they’re the first of a new series. And it was when the company was breaking off with Ford and still had crap American parts.
There was a 2012 update where they added the skyactiv engine and made a few improvements to the body and a new facelift. I recommend you get that one. It has better gas consumption and has better handling while maintaining the same interior. Although I think the interior dash lighting is blue instead of red.
You can see what I mean in the Wikipedia page here.
There are some positives and negatives to the desire for old form factors. Secondhand phones from 2018 cost much less than new ones but lack some of the new features like… I can’t think of any.
New features, like the absolute gutting of Tasker’s capabilities
I LOVE HAVING CAR DEPENDENCY. I LOVE PAYING FOR LESS EFFICIENT TRANSPORT AND ALL OF MY OWN MAINTENANCE AND FOR THE PRIVILEGE OF HAVING MY DATA SOLD. I SPEND EVERY MOMENT NOT DRIVING WISHING I COULD BE BEHIND THE WHEEL AND DOING NOTHING ELSE BUT FOCUSING ON DRIVING WHILE ON MY WAY TO [CONSUME] AND MAKE DATA FOR [BRAND]. PLEASE, NO PUBLIC TRANSIT, I LIKE MY FREEDOM THANKS.
Sometimes the updates aren’t even worth it.
Toyota said my prius needed an update so I installed the app for it. All the update did was remove fucking features that were usable in the car. Used to have the option to use Pandora from the console but it got removed randomly by an update.
Then they installed an Alexa search page that glitches my console if I every select it.
Basically I’m saying FUCK TOYOTA
You can’t download a car, but you sure can brick it.
I’m waiting for the day we have linux cars
It’s not Linux, but there’s an open source project available where you can build your own engine ECU with an Arduino https://hackaday.io/project/4413-speeduino
Oh man, i’ve never been able to get over the: “i really want to play a game now that i have 30 minutes to spare and some energy left” ah fuck, 60gb update…fine i’m off to bed then.
Can’t imagine what i would do if a car update would come with the worst possible timing like having to take your partner to the hospital for an emergency.
“Please do not turn off the engine during installation”
Tell that to my empty gas tank.
Why the fuck would the engine be on?
To ensure that the update process finishes without interruption due to weak battery - if that happens it can brick your car. Tbf you can also just connect the battery to a power source and keep the engine off. Depending on update and car updates that take a few hours are not unheard of
This is such extremely poor engineering that it throws me into a rage. There is nothing to prevent them from installing the update in the background progressively while driving and then just switching to the new version in one swift atomic operation (like changing the name of a directory) when it’s ready
That’s additional work. Easier to tell people to run the engines.
To be clear - they’ve been doing this for years, but you used to have to take your car into a dealership for THEM to apply a patch, this is actually MUCH EASIER.
This might be “unpopular opinion” territory - but I kinda like that my car is better now than it was when I bought it. 🙃
(Due to over the air updates.)
Depends on your definition of “better”.
Lots of OTA updates remove features only to replace tem with something less user friendly.
