There is an old and tired cabal of manufacturers wanting to generate a moat and push prices up high.
There are politicians and activists that have been pushing for lower car ownership and they do it openly. Motivations for this vary.
> There is an old and tired cabal of manufacturers wanting to generate a moat and push prices up high.
Two things can be true at once.
It isn't unheard of that business will collude with government to "pull the ladder up behind them". I've worked in companies where that has been their stated strategy.
if i am a hardcore environmentalist, i throw regulations at homebuilding to make housebuilding excruciating. homeowner voters are thrilled by the ensuing valuations
see: california
I agree. It is also frustrating when people don't recognize or cry foul when their personal beliefs are restated within homotopy equivalence, perhaps (I speculate) because they think it weakens an already weak argument. Perhaps even moreso for those stating the equivalence because there is not argumentative advantage to be gained by expressing said frustration regarding said response.
Or at least it could be. I'm actually feeling indifferent on the topic.
> There are politicians and activists that have been pushing for lower car ownership and they do it openly.
Words are cheap, words and rallys and activist productions moreso, show the policy that impacts national and international production.
I do not agree with your point. I do understand it, don't agree.
In theory, we could use a dipstick in our fuel tank but most of us prefer an automated gage.
I had a rental Mercedes with a leak in a tire recently... a tire was at something like 15psi but looked visually the same as the other tires. I absolutely do a walk around on all of my rentals and take pictures, but I would have had no clue if it weren't for TPMS. I would have driven it until it failed.
A sensor you were paired to disappears. Now a new sensor is showing up, and it sticks with you for an entire hour.
Sounds pretty easy for a computer to figure that puzzle out.
Every time a TPMS battery dies in these circumstances, the vehicle shouldn't pair with random TPMS sensors around it. Especially when we're talking about logic of a regulated safety system. It's a little better that it is deterministic, and follows an explicit pairing process.
How big is the range on one of these?
> Every time a TPMS battery dies in these circumstances, the vehicle shouldn't pair with random TPMS sensors around it.
Random sensors around it that aren't already paired to their own car.
Also it could wait for you to complete an entire trip or two.
> Especially when we're talking about logic of a regulated safety system.
"Safety" in the sense that the little warning light usually gets you to do something about it eventually? Is this data going into anything where the correctness is a big deal?
As always with RF propagation, it depends. They're frequently in the 315Mhz band, so should be roughly similar to garage door openers, remote controls, etc.
> Random sensors around it that aren't already paired to their own car.
There's no handshake -- TPMS sensors are generally unencrypted broadcast devices. A car will see a lot of sensors. (and you can set up an antenna and track cars driving down your street) The "pairing" is simply the vehicle remembering which ones is theirs.
> Also it could wait for you to complete an entire trip or two.
It could. Now add the complication of: spare tires. And also, some but not all vehicles store the positionality of the sensor, so they can tell you which tire is low.
But if you're going to give the system so much hysteresis, you might as well just save the money and use the ABS-sensor based system that other vehicles use. These don't require any additional sensors or programming, but they are slower to react and don't provide pressure readings. The reason automakers use direct sensor systems is to provide a more direct and immediate reading.
> "Safety" in the sense that the little warning light usually gets you to do something about it eventually? Is this data going into anything where the correctness is a big deal?
It is a big enough deal that the reason many cars have them is to comply with the legal requirement that they have them. Before the light (and better cars have textual warnings), you'd have to manually check your tire pressure to identify an underinflated tire, leading to many people driving on them for extended periods of time and experiencing rapid unscheduled failures.
... Or you could just have the manufacturer spend $30 to embed this into the car's dash.
For similar reasons, your car also comes with a fuel gauge, and doesn't require hand-cranking to start.
If you really want car prices to come down, have the manufacturers fire most of their workers and replace them with robots (I'm not sure if the robots will make for a good consumer base, but that's someone else' problem.)
Look at a BYD car factory versus any one ran by the American auto dinosaurs, and that's where you'll find the price delta.
What does increase safety is better driver training. This has be ubiquitously proven BTW.
Where is the ubiquitously proven support for the assertion that backup cameras don't increase safety?
I've read several of your replies towards me and I can tell that you either unable or unwilling see my point of view. So there is no point in having a discussion with you.
I guess they shouldn't have assumed you were speaking from experience, but I don't think that's a big deal. That's not forcing you to accept any conclusion. If it happens "often" you should have examples and/or data. If you don't then maybe you should reconsider if it actually is "often".
And they directly asked for data that it doesn't increase safety.
That's not unwillingness to see your point of view. If you provide quality evidence, you can win them over.
Not being snarky, just pointing out we’re often guilty of picking and choosing rather than applying first principles.
I am specifically talking about things that take over control of the vehicle.
I've had lane assist fight me when trying to move lanes. I apparently wasn't turning the wheel enough and it thought I was drifting (I wasn't).
I've had another hire car refuse to move backwards without me putting it into reverse. It had anti-rollback measures. I didn't know what was going on. All my other cars would rollback (I drive manuals). Now I know technically you shouldn't coast backwards but it was maybe a foot.
Sure it does. You can tune it to get better performance or fuel economy. (Tbf, you can do the same by fuel mapping your injectors, but it would probably void any warranty).
What you seem to be alluding to is that the automated features give you different performance than what you were expecting and you have little recourse. The same could be said for your fuel injectors.
You're telling on yourself here. Use your turn signal and lane assist won't fight you.
How does this square with your theory that cars are becoming 'more disposable'? They seem to be running longer than ever before.
Repairability becomes somewhat less relevant when reliability is better out-of-the-box.
[1] A decade ago it was 11 years.
Also, unlike with money and wealth and other metrics where averages aren't very useful, the distribution of car ages does not have a tail of incredible outliers. There aren't a lot of billion-year-old cars driving that average away from the median.
Look, it's entirely possible that 'this time it'll be different', and we'll regress on this metric, but at the moment the data does not support it.
Oh, wait. That’s what regulators are for :-)
Do you blindly assume that regulators are right 100% of the time? If they aren't , then by virtue of regulation being never removed in the long run, you will end up with inflated regulation for which some of it is done for no good reason.
Is there a particular regulation you would prefer to remove? If you list something specific, let's talk about other alternatives to removing the regulation that could cause better outcomes without reducing supply in that market.
Save perhaps rarely if ever used seating positions (middle rear of the super stripped down V6 Mustang they make like 10 of so they can advertise a starting MSRP or some other comparable niche) I don't think seatbelts are going away anywhere they matter.
Ditto with headlights and tail lights, drivers find them useful. Perhaps we'd see a delete option used by fleet buyers who intend to equip the vehicles with alternative lighting.