Sometimes What's Normal is Pretty Absurd. | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes What's Normal is Pretty Absurd.

blog.transloc.com

35 pointsaspirant48 comments

>Actually, now the other cars on the road looked strange. Why were they so large? Why did cars stick out six feet in front of the driver? Why did they drag around another eight feet of metal behind? It was an epidemic of automotive obesity.

Smarts aren't actually that efficient. The small body means that the car has to be very strong, and therefore very heavy in order to withstand collisions. I was looking at a Smart on display, and I was surprised to see that it got poorer mileage than my Hyundai Elantra, despite the fact that my Elantra is about twice as large.

I bought an Elantra in 2001 for less than what a Smart car costs now, and I'll bet that I've spent less on maintenance over the 160,000 miles I've put on that car than I'd end up spending on a Smart.

My wife and I were curious about the Smart until we drove one - it seems to pause for about a second while the transmission changes gears. It was such an absurd lurch that I felt a little bit worried about being on the road, even within my own neighborhood. Given that, and the unimpressive mileage, the prime advantage to driving a Smart car is that you have many more parking options, which can be really nice when you're in a city.

Having said all that, I get what this guy's saying in a way. We recently bought a Dodge Magnum (For a roadtrip across the US next year). All my life I've driven compact cars. The Elantra always seemed like plenty of car to me. I could sit four comfortably (five less so), I can fit a drum kit, a guitar amp and cab, and still have someone in the passenger seat, and it was still larger on the inside than a Civic or a Jetta.

After driving the Magnum for a month or two, I had to switch it up and drive the Elantra, and I was struck by how claustrophobic the car felt. It never seemed like a compact car to me, but after driving around in a car whose title is Latin for "big", the Elantra definitely felt compact now. My idea of what 'normal' was very definitely shifted. (It's still a great car, ten years on.)

He's not arguing that the Smart gets better mileage than the Elantra. He's arguing that the size of the Elantra is unnecessary, and that the Smart's microcar size is better.

From the article:

Actually, now the other cars on the road looked strange. Why were they so large? Why did cars stick out six feet in front of the driver? Why did they drag around another eight feet of metal behind? It was an epidemic of automotive obesity.

Granted, with vague language like that, its hard to perceive exactly what the author is arguing. His use of the word "obesity", however, implies heaviness as well as bigness. I was pointing out that the Smart is probably nearly as heavy as my Elantra, despite being smaller.

In fact, from a strict efficiency perspective, an Elantra is much more efficient than a Smart. For the same mileage, you gain the ability to carry a substantial amount of extra passengers and cargo. The increased size of the Elantra is quite useful, and goes directly against the inefficiency argument the author makes.

The Smart Fortwo wasn't designed for efficiency or cheapness; it was intended to be a tiny car for dense European cities where the ability to park in very tight spaces would allow you to find a space quickly. Parking on curbs and in odd spaces may be relatively common in Europe, but it's generally a good way to get ticketed or towed in the US, so the main selling point for the car is moot.

As I understand it, the European Smarts are much lighter and thus more fuel efficient; the US government (perhaps in a move of trade protectionism) required a lot of extra body reinforcement for Smart cars before they would allow their import to the US. At least the last time I checked, their fuel economy was on par with other four-seaters (hybrids, 3-cyls) I looked at.

> (perhaps in a move of trade protectionism)

I find it far more likely that the extra strength was required for the impact collisions. The other cars on the road in the US are just far larger and massive than those elsewhere, so a stronger heavier car is needed to stay safe.

It creates a bit of a Catch 22 when trying to bring down the average size / weight of a vehicle.

It took me a while to realize that the author meant Smart (as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_%28automobile%29). Using the marketing typography made it seem generic, which I find amusing in some ironic way.

Also, speaking of typography, what's the deal with the bar over the 'o' in TransLoc? Is it like röck döts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_dots)?

Thanks for clarification. I missed that completely at first. Even if the marketing dept. wants the logo in small caps, human-readable text has proper names capitalized. That's the way it should be.

> human-readable text has proper names capitalized

Apple products excluded, presumably...

The bar over the 'o' is a pronunciation hint. It means you should pronounce it with a "long o" sound. Therefore TransLōc is pronounced more like "Trans loak" and less like "Trans lock"

When I was a kid, that's how they showed a 'long' vowel as opposed to a short one. So it would be pronounced 'trans-loke' instead of 'trans-lock'.

I don't know the company, but that's my assumption for the logo.

The bar over the ō is a macron. It is a diacritic marking a long vowel. Hence you should pronounce 'loc' like 'location.'

I was always taught to capitalize names regardless of their branding. In other words, even though the logo is lowercase like Adidas, you don't spell it 'adidas' unless you're writing copy for the company and that's what it says to do in the branding guidelines. Similarly, you don't add an exclamation point to Yahoo when writing about the company.

When my son was six we were walking around downtown and saw a Smart car and his first impression was that he could pick up the car and turn it over. He thought it was a "dumb."

The industrial food system can definitely be criticized in many ways: it produces so many calories that obesity is becoming a global problem, and fertilizer runoff has created a huge dead spot at the mouth of the Mississippi.

You certainly can't say it's stupid, though. People like Pimental will cherry pick numbers to make it look bad, but Vaclav Smil's energy analysis convincingly demonstrates the obvious: the industrial food system makes a huge amount of food at very low cost... In much of human history people have lived on the edge of famine and things are much better today than they've ever been.

While the car example is decent enough in explaining how preferences can be absurd, "distant food" is a pretty poor example. It is not driven by customer preferences, but by economics.

Then again, very often what seems absurd is a pretty sensible engineering tradeoff.

I have an oven that's about four feet wide that I hardly ever use for anything larger than a 12 inch cake.

And I have more than one bathroom even though it's really rare that more than one person has to use the bathroom at the same time.

I have a mountain bike that I only occasionally take up a mountain.

My car can brake in a ridiculously short distance, even though I've only used that feature to save my life once.

I wear a seatbelt all the time, even though I've never been in an accident where it would have made a difference.

Edge cases matter. A lot. The Smart car covers the "every possible travel condition that a college student can think of" case very well, but it's not versatile enough for most people.

Edge cases can also be served by rentals though. If you could rent an oven or a bathroom as easily as you could rent a car, your home may be designed differently.

I think "right-sized" cars are still pretty absurd compared to public transportation.

You must live in a city with a public transportation system that doesn't take 2 hours to get you to a destination only 5 to 7 miles away and doesn't require huge taxpayer subsidaries to exist. I would gladly use public transportation if it didn't suck so hard in my city.

No, I live in a city with woefully inadequate public transportation, and I drive everywhere I go.

But, I lived in Germany for 5 months and only rode in a car 2 or 3 times, and Germany doesn't even have the best public transportation in the world.

Public transportation will require a lot of tax money, but roads require a lot of tax money too.

Public transport plus a bike covers you pretty well there, if you live in a city.

On the other hand, cars raise a lot of tax revenue. There's a 400% tax on petrol in the UK. 80p out of every pound spent on petrol is pure revenue for the govt. And people hate the oil companies if the price of a gallon goes up by 1p...

That alone doesn't tell us anything though.

Public transportation tends to be much cheaper for riders than private transportation is for drivers. A year-long ticket for Munich is around $1000. At current prices, that won't even buy you 10k miles worth of gas in a compact car, to say nothing of the price of the car itself, insurance and repairs.

I say that to say this, if people have more money in their pocket, they will tend to spend more money, so the difference could easily be made up in sales tax on all the newly-freed-up disposable income.

Annually my train season ticket costs just over half what my mortgage costs! And I'm talking repayment not endowment here. So while public transport may be convenient, it's certainly not cheap here in England.

The Atlantic has a post somewhat on this, slowing how transit-centric behavior can lead to more disposable income:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/the-fina...

> Public transportation will require a lot of tax money, but roads require a lot of tax money too.

On a cost basis, public transportation is more expensive and less versatile than roadways.

// no bus stop within 90 miles of where I am and the flooding is seriously problematic for rail

You don't think driving requires huge taxpayer subsidies to exist?

A "smart" car is just another icon of consumerism, like an iPhone, or a "snuggie".

If you want to spend money on stuff that is marketed to a self proclaimed "smart" niche audience of people who think that buying cute stuff makes them better or "smarter" for their purchased possessions, fine, do so, but don't expect the public to be enthused about your overconfidence in how much better material things make you and your life.

P.S. lets hope you're not in a "smart car" when and SUV forgets to stop behind you "too late" at a major intersection.

> P.S. lets hope you're not in a "smart car" when and SUV forgets to stop behind you "too late" at a major intersection.

Maybe that means we need to question that large SUV with a single occupant and an always empty cargo hold. Or perhaps why as a society we do not find it acceptable to "risk our lives" in small, light cars yet we find it perfectly ok to "risk the lives of others" in our large, heavy "car-trucks."

Questioning your own behavior can lead to positive changes in your behavior. Questioning the behavior of somebody else who chose to buy an SUV can lead to angry ranting and even less safe driving.

Your first two paragraphs are reactionary garbage, but the postscript is actually a good point - while the Smart tested well in gov't and insurance tests, those tests involve vehicles of similar size. According to the link below, when tested against a Benz C-Class, the Smart got wrecked something fierce.

http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/Smart_ForTw...

I was having a discussion with someone about how much of our transportation issues would be solved if we were content traveling at <20mph. Electric vehicles could be much simpler because they didn't have to move at highway speeds. Travel would be significantly safer as well.

Think about it, how much of your everyday needs around within 5 miles of you? Unless you live in a rural area, I'd suspect 100% of your needs are within 5 miles of you. At that speed, you could get to anywhere in ~15 minutes inside of that 5 mile radius.

Lots of American cities are very spread out so you don't have to be in a rural area in order to have to travel more than five miles to satisfy your every day needs.

This is the major problem with transit in a lot of places. Development spread outward to cheaply priced land, creating large distances between residential areas and commercial areas. Major cities that didn't have the land or prices to allow outward development instead developed upward (and download, with buildings and transit systems below ground). The end result is that a lot of places are simply not sustainable without tremendous investment in their transit systems and city planning. As gas more and more expensive, a lot of people will end up having to abandon these areas because it will simply be too expensive to live there.

Work: 20 miles northeast. Girlfriend: 40 miles south. Not rural.

I do try to cruise under the speeds where aerodynamic drag outweighs other factors, when I can. I wish the aftermarket for aerodynamic improvements to passenger vehicles were much larger (as in, existed at all--cosmetic facades that slightly increase downforce are about all you can buy).

Nitrogen in fertilizer is extracted from the air (not from petroleum as stated). The hydrogen can be gotten from electrolysis of water, or from methane.

"In the USA in 2004, 317 billion cubic feet of natural gas were consumed in the industrial production of ammonia... A 2002 report suggested that the production of ammonia consumes about 5% of global natural gas consumption...

Natural gas is overwhelmingly used for the production of ammonia..." — Wikipedia

Yes, but I read the article to imply that we were spreading petroleum on our fields, versus the alternative: rotting garbage. If the argument was an energy argument, I would have expected some mention of energy costs associated with composting (orders of magnitude worse than large-scale energy infrastructure)? The comparison wasn't apples-to-apples, and I wanted to clear up the implication.

So, sure, we use energy to create fertilizer. Instead of mining it and shipping it, or going without. Again, if it wasn't the cheaper alternative we wouldn't be doing it.

And extracting nitrogen from the air is a very energy intensive process. Energy which comes from petroleum and natural gas.

Those who would like a very small, efficient car that actually has back seats and suchlike, might like to check out the Renault Twingo.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Twingo

Doubt you can get it in the US though.

This can go in line with questioning the status quo: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663429/big-innovations-question...

Having eight feet of steel behind you makes a lot more sense when you get rear-ended by a drunk driver going 45 mph while you're sitting at a red light.

>The industrial food system is another. Our food, which could be grown from local sunshine and local compost, is instead grown in distant places with pesticides and fertilizers made from petroleum and natural gas. Meanwhile the sun beats down on our cities only to fall on ornamental grass and concrete. Food waste is hauled off to putrefy in landfills. Normal and absurd.

This has more to do with humanity's insistence on living in places which cannot reasonably produce enough food to sustain the local population. The Phoenix metropolitan area, located in an Arizona desert, holds over 4 million people; Moscow, just shy of the Arctic Circle, is home to 11 million.

I guess Americans look at distances in a different way than us Europeans, but Moscow isn't `just shy of the Arctic Circle'.

There was also a major heat wave in Moscow last summer. See e.g. "Heat probably killed thousands in Moscow" (http://in.reuters.com/article/2010/08/17/us-russia-heat-deat...).

>I guess Americans look at distances in a different way than us Europeans, but Moscow isn't `just shy of the Arctic Circle'.

You're quite correct (these scaled-out world maps can be misleading), though it is not really situated on fertile ground either. A city where the weather has historically been a major force preventing invasion does not bode well for agriculture!

A city where the weather has historically been a major force preventing invasion does not bode well for agriculture!

Oh my God, you are wrong on the INTERNET! I must attempt to help you!

There's PLENTY of agriculture on the same latitude as Moscow, in fact there's plenty of agriculture in and around Moscow. There's no oranges or bananas but wheat and potatoes do just fine in the surprisingly long and hot summers. Just because the winter is also long and bitterly cold, does not automatically imply summer must be short and cold.

Climates are not that simple.

The industrial food system is efficient use of land and keeps those smells city folks don't like far away. There are other advantages that people have looked at other than food to decide where to put a city.

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