Tag: government mandates

One Size Fits Slow

Guest Post by Eric Peters

We’re told automated cars will make the roads “safer.”

Well, they just might – in the same way that filling in the deep end of every swimming pool in the country with concrete would reduce drowning deaths. Better to teach people to swim – and keep those who can’t out of the pool.

It’s not a very high standard.

Automated cars certainly won’t make driving safer for those who can.

What they will do, of course, is make the roads slower – and trips take longer.

For everyone.

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The Car Biz Goes Full Clover

 Guest Post by Eric Peters

Well, that didn’t take long.auto brake lead

The car companies have decided – on their own – to install automated braking in all the cars they make by the 2022 model year, just six years from now.

They have come to love Big Brother.

No, they have become Big Brother.

Anticipating a federal mandate, they have decided to pre-empt NHTSA – the federal bureaucracy that has somehow found authority in the Constitution to “keep us safe” (I’ve looked, could not find the clause) by making us pay for new, expensive technologies most of us neither need nor want.

Like automated braking.

It appeared a few years ago as a gewgaw in high-end cars – which nowadays justify their high prices mostly by touting electronic gewgaws such as this, because meaningful amenities such as power windows and locks, AC, cruise control and a great stereo are standard equipment in nearly every new car made, down to the humblest “economy” car.auto brake schematic

Seemingly overnight, automated braking – which is typically marketed as “collision avoidance” technology – is almost everywhere, available optionally (which is ok) in probably 50 percent of current-year new cars.

But optional is never enough.

Everyone must have automated braking. Just as they must have six air bags, ABS, TCS, seatbelt buzzers, tire pressure monitors and back-up monitors.

NHTSA will make the official announcement this week.

The systems use radar or laser (which is always on, and makes radar detectors practically useless) to scan the area around the car for objects in the vehicle’s path. If the driver doesn’t step on the brakes when the computer thinks he ought to – which is typically a football field’s length away from the object – the computer steps in and applies the brakes for him.

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Crippling Technology

Guest Post by Eric Peters

So much would be possible – if it weren’t for the government.'85 Civic

Government, remember, is not composed of experts in much of anything – except control and manipulation. Politicians and bureaucrats are not people who do things.

They force others to do things.

In the car world, you have the ridiculous spectacle of non-engineer mechanical imbeciles dictating functional parameters of engine design to people who actually do know how a four-stroke engine works, the meaning of stoichiometry; who understand that there is an inherent conflict between fuel economy and “safety.” That the more a car is designed to meet the first objective, the less it will meet the second.

And the reverse.

Result?

The engineers are told to deliver both in equal measure – and we end up with cars that are heavy and thirsty.

It’s a tragedy – a comic one, when you put it in context.'15 Civic

Here we are – almost 2016 – and the typical new car is about as economical to drive as the typical car of 1985. This is hard to believe, but you should believe it because it’s true. The typical car of the early-mid-1980s was averaging mid-high 20s – just like today. There were numerous models available that approached or even exceeded 40 MPG on the highway. A few (like the diesel-powered VW Rabbit) got into the 50s.

They did this without direct-injection or even port fuel-injection. Many still had carburetors. Eight and nine-speed transmissions (with the top three gears being overdrives) were unheard of. Most automatics of this era had four speeds. Some still had just three.

But the one thing the cars of that era did have was less weight – about 500-800 pounds less of it, on average, than comparable cars have today. And the sole and only reason for all this additional weight is the increased demand for “safety” eructing from the solons in Washington. Well, so we must presume. Because the people who actually buy the cars were never offered the free choice. It would be interesting to find out what they’d choose if they did have that choice.

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