Your Car Knows When You Gain Weight
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The article makes it sound like there is accurate weight sensors in the vehicle, which is ridiculous. One might be able to derive some number from vehicle performance information, but I'd like to see an actual study showing that it's (a) possible and (b) accurate for any sort of use.
> Modern cars collect as much as 25 gigabytes of data per hour
Sure, add up all the bits in the CAN messages being sent around constantly and you might get that number. That amount of data is neither being stored nor sent off-vehicle.
What a dishonest article.
The citation for the "collect" claim actually says that vehicles process that much data in an hour. As if cars have terabyte hard drives in them, or that manufacturers are paying cellular carriers for 18TB of traffic per vehicle per month...
However, this is FUD, because Honda didn’t do squat with that data beyond the airbag system. It wasn’t collected or transmitted. It was simply used at the moment of airbag deployment to determine if it should deploy the airbag in fast or slow mode.
So you’re right to call the articles claim BS, but you’re wrong if you think there isn’t an accurate weight sensor in the car.
I can’t remember if the passenger seat had one too. I don’t think it did. The dual-stage airbags are really only relevant for the driver side because of the steering wheel.
That doesn't mean that they won't in the future.
That is extremely surprising to me. I've worked (and do work) in the auto industry and didn't think that anyone would pay for such an accurate weight measurement.
It loads so slowly you can get half way through the article before it finally loads and then decides you need to subscribe!