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Comment by Mountain_Skies | Hacker News Reader

Someday real soon, kids being shown episodes of 'Knight Rider' by their grandparents won't understand why a talking car was so futuristic.

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Like James Bond's Aston Martin with a satnav/tracking device in 1964's Goldfinger. Kids would know what that was but they might not understand why Bond had to continually shift some sort of stick to change the car's gear.

Gear shifting it's still a thing in Europe, and mandatory if you want to get your driver's license.

you can get a driver license with an automatic. But it just means you can only drive automatics.

It would have been a huge deal not being able to drive manuals 20y ago but hybrid and ev all being automatic it is not that much of a downside nowadays unless you want to buy old cars or borrow friend's car. Most renting fleets have autos available nowadays.

Our family owns a Ford Focus hybrid in Europe, I can tell you they are not all automatic.

At this point, it is a historical artefact that will cease to exist soon enough.

Electric vehicles do not have gearboxes as there are no converters, so there is nothing to shift up or down. A few performance EV's that have been announced (and maybe even have released) with a gear stick, do so for nostalgic reasons and the gear shift + the accompanying experience is simulated entirely in the software.

The Porsche Taycan has two forward gears, but it's apparently the only EV that does: https://www.wired.com/story/electric-car-two-speed-transmiss...

New Mercedes CLA has that too

At the rate EV are being sold in Europe, that soon enough is a couple of decades away.

I certainly don't plan to buy anything but hybrids, until EV prices and ranges are at comparable levels.

Our current hybrid has a six gear box.

It’s impossible to explain to kids now why it was funny on Seinfeld when Kramer pretended to be MoviePhone and says “why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie you selected!”

> Someday real soon, kids being shown episodes of 'Knight Rider' by their grandparents won't understand why a talking car was so futuristic.

Maybe in 100 years. The talking car was more intelligent than Siri, Alexa or Hey Google.

It is not that we are not able to "talk" to computers, it is that we "talk" with computers only so that they can collect more data about us. Their "intelligence" is limited to simple text underestanding.

I think maybe you missed the last three years. We're not talking about Alexa or Hey Google level.

We're talking about Google Gemini or ChatGPT.

I grew up watching Kitt and when I watched it again a few days ago, I didn't feel anything. Much less my kids.

Tried explaining what a Tamagotchi was to someone recently. Looks of utter bewilderment

Really? Tamagotchis seem to be one of those things that have charm beyond straight up nostalgia :o

That is a natural reaction.

Kitt was funny though. (For its time)

For the time yes, but if I bought a car tomorrow and it had Kitt's sass I would cut his speakers in a week.

I don't need my car to constantly whine, needle, harass, demean, and insult me.

Had the same thing happen when standalone GPS units were introduced to the mass market, I got one - and one of my tech friends suggested replacing the stock voice with a sarcastic/whiny one (maybe ... C3PO)...

My response was: "you obviously haven't used one yet"...

They were already bossy enough... 'MAKE A LEGAL U-TURN NOW!'"

Was that point not almost a decade ago?

Not really. My 1983 Datsun would talk, but it couldn't converse. Alexa and Siri couldn't hold a conversation anywhere near the level KITT did. There's a big difference. With LLMs, we're getting close.

Commodore 64 had text to speech in late 80s.

Also, my friend's father in the 80s was the driver of a French Consulate's member in Turkey. His car (a Renault) had speech functionality.

Early 80s (1982), according to Wikipedia:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth

That brings back some memories. My friend and I messed around with S.A.M. on his Atari 800 a lot when we were kids. We would crank call the parents of other kids we knew and have SAM tell them their kids had skipped school and might get suspended. It was funny to some twelve year olds anyway.

SAM had a basic mode where you just type English, but it also had an advanced phonetic input mode where you could control the sound and stress on every syllable. My favorite thing to do was try to give SAM a British accent.

> Commodore 64 had text to speech in late 80s.

Yes, and Windows had Narrator. And that's all. Since 20 years.

Test to speech it's trivial with Dr. Sbaitso or Flite in ARMv5/Pentium 90 machines.

Your car had a tiny record player.

https://www.autoweek.com/car-life/but-wait-theres-more/a1875...

The self driving aspect, amazingly, is already here and considered mundane.

Oh really? What vehicle can I buy today, drive home, get twice the legal limit drunk, flop in the back alone to take a nap while my car drives me two hours away to a relative's house?

I'd really like to buy that car so I await your response.

A Tesla is pretty close. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RZfkU1QgTI

Tesla is in no way close.

They're "cold-fusion" close. Which means a perpetual "few years".

They’ve been “close” for over a decade now.

That's a jurisdiction problem, not a technology problem. No tech is foolproof, but even with the current technology someone would be much safer (for others, too) in the back seat than trying to drive tired, borderline DUI at night in unfamiliar town. Which many folks regularly do, for example on business travel.

The reason I cannot do this today is laws, not technology. My 2c.

The claim is that self driving is mundane - something everyone can have if they want. A standard feature, so entwined in the background of life that it is unremarkable.

Given that there is no system out there that I can own, jump in the back of in no condition to drive, and get to my destination safely defeats that claim. It's not even so mundane that everyone has the anemic Tesla self-driving feature that runs over kids and slams into highway barriers.

It may also be a matter of laws, but the underlying tech is also still not there given all the warnings any current "self driving car" systems give about having to pay attention to the road and keep your hands on the wheel even if the laws weren't there.

Could I get behind the wheel of my self driving car, drunk, and make it there safely? No, I definitely couldn't, and I understand why those laws exist with all of the existing failure modes of self driving cars.

People have called the current state of LLMs "sparkling AutoComplete". The current state of "self-driving cars" is "sparkling lane assist" with a chaser of adaptive cruise control.

The only thing stopping a Waymo from doing that is laws.

You can do all that in a Waymo except for the “buy” part. When asked about that Sergey said “why do you want to own a car? You have to maintain it, insure it, park it at home and at work. Don’t you really just want to get where you’re going and have someone else figure out the rest?” This was back before google ate the evil pill. Now their philosophy is more like “don’t fall asleep, we can get a good deal on your kidneys, after that we’ll sell your mom’s kidneys too”

I can't buy a Waymo

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