The Law is for Little People

Elon Musk just tweeted that if his workers vote to unionize, they will lose their stock options.

I'm really not sure how much value the stock options would be to the shop floor workers, they will be locked up well past when they are worthless, much as it happened in the Dot Com bust, but still his threat is a direct violation of the NLRA, which prohibits penalizing workers for exercising their labor organizing rights:

The United Auto Workers has been Elon Musk’s target for days of derision on Twitter, and his posts may open Tesla Inc. up to trouble with U.S. labor regulators.

………

The UAW, which is actively trying to organize Tesla’s California assembly plant, has fired back with tweets of its own. But the more consequential outcome from the spat on the social-networking service may come in the form of unfair labor practice allegations made to the National Labor Relations Board, according to Wilma Liebman, who led the agency during the early years of the Obama administration.

Musk posted earlier this week that nothing was stopping Tesla employees in Fremont, California, from voting to join a union. But, he wrote, “Why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?” Liebman read this as a warning that the company would take away workers’ stock options if they succeeded in organizing the factory.

Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted. But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 21, 2018

“If you threaten to take away benefits because people unionize, that’s an out-and-out violation of the labor law,” Liebman, who’s done legal work for the UAW in the past, said in an interview.

This, is, as the saying goes, black letter law, and, if the expected complaint is filed, I would expect the NLRB to take some sort of action.

Ironically enough Trump's NLRB might be more likely to take action than the Obama's, because the Trump administration is less enamored with Silicon Valley than was the Obama administration, though I would not expect much beyond a stern warning.

They Have Made this Error Before

Repeating the short-sighted decisions made by US auto makers the last time gas prices were Ford has decided the future is trucks and SUVs, and so will be abandoning conventional passenger cars.

Sounds like the, "Small cars equal small profits," mentality that nearly destroyed auto makers in the 1970s and again in the 1990s, after oil prices spiked:

Ford Motor Co. said Wednesday it will stop investing in sedans in North America, bowing to U.S. drivers’ seemingly never-ending zest for crossovers and pickup trucks.

Ford  shifted focus on “building a winning portfolio” of vehicles, by which it meant no more of its slow-selling sedans at least for North America.

U.S. drivers have gravitated to SUVs and pickup trucks for years, thanks in part to these vehicles’ relative fuel economy improvements and price drops. Many car buyers also report enjoying the high-riding seating position of an SUV or pickup truck.

“Ford realized it can’t be everything to everyone, and in today’s market that could be OK,” said Jessica Caldwell, an analyst with Edmunds. “The key to success is focusing on where your customers are and where your strengths lie, and for Ford doubling down on trucks and SUVs could be just what the brand needs.”

The move isn’t without risk, however. Ford is willingly alienating some of its car owners and conceding market share in segments that, while declining, are still relevant to some buyers, she said.

When, and it's always when, gasoline prices spike again, those people trading in Ford trucks and SUVs for more efficient vehicles will not be able to find those new vehicles at their Ford dealer, and so loyal customers will go somewhere else.

They are repeat their historical mistakes, over, and over, and over, and over again.

Silicon Valley Meets Real World, Part Gazillion

In a rare move, the NTSB has removed Tesla from the fatal crash investigation because they could not shut the f%$# up:

The National Transportation Safety Board told Tesla Inc. on Wednesday that the carmaker was being removed from the investigation of a fatal accident, prior to the company announcing it had withdrawn from it, according to a person familiar with the discussion.

NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt relayed the decision in a call to Tesla’s Elon Musk that was described as tense by the person because the chief executive officer was unhappy with the safety board’s action. NTSB is expected to make a formal announcement in a release later Thursday, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The unusual move followed public statements by the company blaming the driver of a Tesla Model X who died in a March collision, in apparent violation of agency protocols. The NTSB guards the integrity of its investigations closely, demanding that participants adhere to rules about what information they can release and their expected cooperation. These so-called parties to investigations must sign legal agreements laying out their responsibilities.

………

Companies that no longer have formal status as a party to an NTSB investigation can lose access to information uncovered in the probe and the ability to shape the official record of the incident, said Peter Goelz, a former managing director at the NTSB who is now senior vice president at O’Neill & Associates, a Washington lobbying and public relations firm.

………

The safety board has in some cases thrown airlines, aircraft manufacturers and unions off of investigations in cases where they were either making unauthorized statements or not producing information the NTSB expected of them.

………

NTSB rules don’t in fact prohibit participants in investigations from releasing general information about their products. The agency’s oft-repeated rule of thumb is that factual information that could have been released before an accident can be put out afterward as well.

What the NTSB prohibits is the release of information related to the accident itself.

In December 2010, the safety board removed American Airlines, now part of American Airlines Group Inc., from an investigation into a runway accident in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. American had taken one of the plane’s two crash-proof recorders and downloaded its contents prior to turning the device over to the agency.

In 2014, it kicked United Parcel Service Inc. and its pilots’ union off of a probe into a cargo-jet crash that killed two people in Alabama. The safety board said then that the company and union "took actions prejudicial to the investigation by issuing comments and analyzing findings before the NTSB had met to determine a cause."

This is no surprise.

Tesla, despite the fact that it makes cars, is still a dotcom company at its core, and ignoring regulators, and ignoring basic common decency, is at the core of its ethos.

It's why I have no interest in owning a Tesla, to quote Richard Feynman, "Nature cannot be fooled."

Applying Software Ethos to the Real Word

I am referring, of course to Elon Musk and Tesla Motors.

The author draws analogies to the bad old days of the US auto industry, where shipping was more important than shipping it right:

The idea that Silicon Valley could reinvent the auto sector the way Apple reinvented mobile phones is an appealing one, and by some metrics Tesla has done just that. The Silicon Valley automaker's distinctive product features -- blistering performance, long-range batteries and slick touchscreen interfaces --have beguiled legions of fans and investors, giving the impression that the future of the auto industry had suddenly arrived.

But recent reports call that glowing future into question. After 15 years, it's increasingly clear that Tesla has nothing to offer in the area that, as the tech analyst Horace Dediu puts it, is where "almost all meaningful innovation occurs": the production system.

Throughout its history, Tesla has been plagued by poor manufacturing quality and missed production deadlines. And now, CNBC's Lora Kolodny has the scoop on Tesla operations tasked with "reworking" and "remanufacturing" poor quality cars and parts, illustrating a deeper problem than the poor quality itself. By reworking vehicles after they come off the line at its Fremont, California, assembly plant at a dedicated remanufacturing facility in nearby Lathrop -- and even reportedly in its service centers -- Tesla is taking automotive manufacturing back to dark ages.

Once upon a time, this was the standard practice for Detroit's automakers. Driven by logic derived from Henry Ford's manufacturing system, U.S. automakers kept production cranking in order to maximize efficiencies of scale, and then repaired defective cars after they rolled off the line. Though many factors contributed to the decline of the Big Three in the 1970s and 80s, the inefficiency and apathy entrenched in company culture by this approach to quality was one of the most important.

In contrast, Toyota's cars may not have had the dramatic, chrome-draped designs or V8 performance of American competitors, but the legendary Toyota Production System (also known as TPS, or "lean") did away with rework, and its dependable, high-quality cars eviscerated Detroit's market share. By systematically eliminating all forms of waste -- "muda" -- from its manufacturing, Toyota found that both capital efficiency and quality benefited enormously from building cars right the first time.

………

Tesla seems either uninterested in or oblivious to the historical lesson here. On last quarter's earnings call, chief executive Elon Musk told analysts that Tesla doesn't see TPS as a model for his company, even as he reiterated his goal of "productizing" Tesla's factories.

Manufacturers have learned that it's better to get it right the first time over the past few decades, computer programmers, not so much.

Hence we see the bloated software that is as full of bugs as it is full of new features that no one really needs.

Rinse, lather, and repeat, and we have Elon Musk's Tesla.

File Under, "Dystopian"

It appears that the car of the future have all the respect for your privacy that Mark Zuckerberg does, so expect hemorrhoid ads on your multi-function display:

Picture this: You’re driving home from work, contemplating what to make for dinner, and as you idle at a red light near your neighborhood pizzeria, an ad offering $5 off a pepperoni pie pops up on your dashboard screen.

Are you annoyed that your car’s trying to sell you something, or pleasantly persuaded? Telenav Inc., a company developing in-car advertising software, is betting you won’t mind much. Car companies—looking to earn some extra money—hope so, too.

Automakers have been installing wireless connections in vehicles and collecting data for decades. But the sheer volume of software and sensors in new vehicles, combined with artificial intelligence that can sift through data at ever-quickening speeds, means new services and revenue streams are quickly emerging. The big question for automakers now is whether they can profit off all the driver data they’re capable of collecting without alienating consumers or risking backlash from Washington.

“Carmakers recognize they’re fighting a war over customer data,” said Roger Lanctot, who works with automakers on data monetization as a consultant for Strategy Analytics. “Your driving behavior, location, has monetary value, not unlike your search activity.”

I just want an off switch for the car's connectivity features, because, in addition to eschewing the aforementioned advertisements, I don't want some script kiddie turning off my anti-lock brakes.

This is Ingenious

Comparison of various cycles


SPCCI Cycle


Pressure Profiles

Diesel engines have been getting a lot of bad news recently, but there is a another form of compression ignition that has been lurking in the laboratory for years.

A diesel compresses the air, and then squirts in fuel, which ignites in the hot air.

The other form of compression ignition compresses a fuel air mixture until it all ignites simultaneously.

Theoretically, this could result in superior fuel economy and low levels of pollution.

This is a tremendously difficult thing to do since things like this, since the line between ignition and nothing is a very fine line, and things like ambient temperature, barometric pressure, etc. can cause premature ignition, i.e. pinging, which hits the inside of an engine like a hammer.

Nissan has come up with an innovative way to fix the timing, they have added a spark assist so that they can control the timing.

As opposed to a conventional spark ignited engine, where the flame front progresses from the spark, in their "Skyactive X®" technology, and the initial local ignition kicks up the pressure and temperature enough for the compression ignition to kick in.

Mazda is now has a car with this technology on the road:

Despite rumors to the contrary, the internal combustion engine is far from dead. Recently we've seen several technological advances that will significantly boost the efficiency of gasoline-powered engines. One of these, first reported back in August 2017, is Mazda's breakthrough with compression ignition. On Tuesday, Mazda invited us to its R&D facility in California to learn more about this clever new Skyactiv-X engine, but more importantly we actually got to drive it on the road.

The idea behind Skyactiv-X is to be able to run the engine with as lean a fuel-air mixture (known as λ) as possible. Because very lean combustion is cooler than a stoichiometric reaction (where λ=1 and there is exactly enough air to completely burn each molecule of fuel but no more), less energy is wasted as heat. What's more, the exhaust gases contain fewer nasty nitrogen oxides, and the unused air gets put to work. It absorbs the combustion heat and then expands and pushes down on the piston. The result is a cleaner, more efficient, and more powerful engine. And Skyactiv-X uses a very lean mix: a λ up to 2.5.

………

This is known as homogeneous charge compression ignition, or HCCI, an idea that Kyle Niemeyer covered in depth for us back in 2012. HCCI has some other advantages, too. On top of burning cooler and with fewer pollutants, the combustion event happens faster, with a higher pressure peak, so you get more work out of the same energy. All of that sounds pretty wonderful, so you're probably asking yourself why every gasoline engine on the road doesn't just use HCCI.

Unfortunately, it has been one of those ideas that worked in the lab but couldn't ever quite be translated into a production engine. The biggest problem has always been controlling exactly when during the engine cycle compression ignition occurred, something that you want as close to top-dead center as possible.

………

Obviously, this wasn't without challenges. The fuel:air mix needs to be a little richer near the spark for it to ignite than you want it to be throughout the rest of the cylinder. These need to be distinct regions to avoid λ dropping to 2 or below (which won't undergo compression ignition). That's achieved by swirling the air inside the cylinder and generating a vortex effect, where the calm center has a low enough λ to ignite by spark, surrounded by a high λ region that then undergoes compression ignition.

Mazda's next challenge was to prevent pre-ignition, or knock. Higher compression ratios increase the potential for knock, which is why higher compression ratio engines usually also require more expensive, higher octane fuel that is knock-resistant. Now, technically, compression ignition is knock, but if it occurs before you want it to—at top dead center—bad things can happen, because a combustion event will exert downward pressure on the piston as it's moving up on a compression stroke.

The solution here was to use less time to heat the fuel:air mix. There's a small initial injection of fuel at first, then the bulk of the fuel is introduced into the cylinder as late as possible during the compression stroke. This is done using multiple orifice injectors to increase atomization and mixing of fuel and air.

If all that wasn't enough, there's the added problem of keeping track of compression ignition. In the past, this has been one of the hardest problems for HCCI engines to solve. Ideally you want combustion to happen at the same point in the engine cycle each time—about four degrees after top dead center. But as ambient conditions change—a cold day in Denver versus a hot one in Houston—the time needed for the fireball to reach sufficient pressure also changes. So the engine ought to be able to change spark timing to keep the peak pressure at the right spot.

It's basically an ingenious use of the stratified charge engine to create an HCCI engine.

Neat.

Tweet of the Day

I was not prepared for this. I legit yelled out when I got it. pic.twitter.com/9HMm97yQZJ

— azninsect 🐞 (@azninsect) January 5, 2017

I don't even play the game, and I get this.

Prank Turned Research Project

Not the test, just a a prank in the vid

At the Virginia Tech, researchers have dressed up a card seat to evaluate public responses to unmanned cars:

Tech blogs went crazy over the weekend after a new self-driving car was seen rolling around Arlington, Virginia.

Unlike vehicles from Google Waymo, Uber and others, the car didn’t have any obvious signs of a Lidar array, the chunky imaging technology most autonomous vehicles use to gauge the state of the road ahead. Instead, it had just a small bar mounted on the dashboard, which blinked red when it was at a stop light and green once the cost was clear.

Even more intriguingly, the car appeared to be genuinely autonomous: there was no-one sitting in the driver’s seat. Typically, a human overseer is required in the testing phase to make sure that the car doesn’t go wild and run over a marching band, but somehow this car had managed to find a loophole.

………

But still a question remained. Who was behind this breakthrough new technology? How were they solving the problems that had stymied even the mighty Alphabet/Google/Waymo megacorp?

You’ve read the headline. You know the answer: it was a bloke dressed up as a car seat.

………

But one aspect of the rumour mill was correct: the guy really was associated with Virginia Tech. According to the university’s transportation institute, he was engaged in research about autonomous vehicles, likely gathering data about the reaction of normal drivers to sharing road space with a self-driving car.

I'm not sure if this was a real study, or just an excuse for some researcher to f%$# with fellow drivers.

My money on the latter.

Where I Endorse a Company That I Try to Avoid

It's an auto body shop, and so it's not a place where you want to go unless you have to.

Who wants to be rear-ended by some inattentive bloke in a Ford, but if you do I highly recommend Iggy's Auto Body.

He is competent, timely, and above all, honest.

(on edit)

Contact information:
Iggy's Auto Body
2929 Industrial Park Dr., # N
Finksburg, Maryland 21048

Phone    (410) 526-2900

Crap!

I was driving to pick up the kids from a graduation party, and I got rear ended on the Outer Loop of the Baltimore Beltway.

I could drive home, and the EMTs took a look at me and took vitals, but this is a royal pain in the ass.

The rear bumper and lower rear window (It's a Prius) is trashed, and I was pushed into the truck in front of me.

On the bright side, the car was driveable, and I took it home over local streets.

Right now, I have a sore neck, a headache, and a bruise on my arm, and I am on hold with the insurance company.  (The last one is most painful).

I will need to stay awake for the next few hours just to be safe.

This Business Will Get out of Control. It Will Get out of Control and We'll Be Lucky to Live through It.

It appears that a woman may have attempted to run her Congressman off the road over his vote for Trumpcare:

A Tennessee woman hated that her congressman voted for the controversial Republican health-care bill in the House of Representatives, authorities said.

So Wendi L. Wright tried to run Rep. David Kustoff (R-Tenn.) off the road after he visited the University of Tennessee at Martin, they said.

The Weakley County Sheriff’s Department said Wright tailed the car carrying Kustoff. At some point, the congressman and his aide became afraid and worried that Wright wanted to force them off the road.

They then turned into a driveway and stopped. That’s where Wright got out, screamed at the congressman and struck the windows of his vehicle, even reaching inside the car, the sheriff’s department said.

Authorities said Wright then stood in front of the vehicle to try to keep Kustoff from leaving. At some point, someone called 911, but Wright left before authorities arrived.

The incident happened on May 8, four days after House Republicans narrowly passed a bill to overhaul the country’s health-care system.

Wright, 35, has been charged with felony reckless endangerment and was released after posting a $1,000 bond. Authorities say they found her after she posted details of the encounter with Kustoff on Facebook.

I think that characterizing this as an attempt to run the Congressman off the road is a bit much. It's more of a stalking and a rant.

Still, this is major league crazy sh%$, and it is a profoundly unproductive course of action.

Good News in Florids ……… Wait ……… What? Florida?

Actually it is good news, not another Florida Man story.

A court in Florida has ruled that, unlike a physical examination of brakes and tires of a vehicle, authorities need a warrant to extract data from vehicle black boxes:

An interesting decision has been reached by the Florida Appeals Court as to Fourth Amendment protections for vehicle "black boxes." The black boxes -- which are a mandatory requirement in new vehicles -- record a variety of data in the event of a crash. (h/t FourthAmendment.com)

Charles Worsham Jr. was the driver in a crash in which his passenger was killed. His vehicle was seized and impounded by police. Twelve days later, police accessed the data in the black box without obtaining a warrant. Worsham challenged the lawfulness of the warrantless search. The police maintained the black box was full of third-party records which required no warrant or consent from the vehicle's owner.

The court sees the issue differently. In a relative rarity, the state Appeals Court decides [PDF] to get out ahead of the issue, rather than wait for precedential decisions to trickle down from the federal courts. It looks at the data harvested by the black box and suggests the amount gathered will only increase in the coming years. Rather than wait until then to make a call on the Fourth Amendment merits, it draws the line now.

Citing the Supreme Court's Riley decision (which introduced a warrant requirement for cell phone searches), the court concludes the crash data contained in the black box has an expectation of privacy.

A car’s black box is analogous to other electronic storage devices for which courts have recognized a reasonable expectation of privacy. Modern technology facilitates the storage of large quantities of information on small, portable devices. The emerging trend is to require a warrant to search these devices.
[...]
Although electronic data recorders do not yet store the same quantity of information as a cell phone, nor is it of the same personal nature, the rationale for requiring a warrant to search a cell phone is informative in determining whether a warrant is necessary to search an immobilized vehicle’s data recorder. These recorders document more than what is voluntarily conveyed to the public and the information is inherently different from the tangible “mechanical” parts of a vehicle. Just as cell phones evolved to contain more and more personal information, as the electronic systems in cars have gotten more complex, the data recorders are able to record more information.

Also of importance is the difficulty of extracting the information from the black boxes.

Extracting and interpreting the information from a car’s black box is not like putting a car on a lift and examining the brakes or tires. Because the recorded data is not exposed to the public, and because the stored data is so difficult to extract and interpret, we hold there is a reasonable expectation of privacy in that information, protected by the Fourth Amendment, which required law enforcement in the absence of exigent circumstances to obtain a warrant before extracting the information from an impounded vehicle.

Not only that, but recent legislation (the Driver Privacy Act of 2015) specifically states that the contents of data recorders belong to the vehicle's owner, not the manufacturer or any other third party.

Outstanding.

Our IP System in One Profoundly Dysfunctional Nutshell

It turns out that American farmers are being forced to use software from Ukrainian hackers to repair their own tractors:

To avoid the draconian locks that John Deere puts on the tractors they buy, farmers throughout America's heartland have started hacking their equipment with firmware that's cracked in Eastern Europe and traded on invite-only, paid online forums.

Tractor hacking is growing increasingly popular because John Deere and other manufacturers have made it impossible to perform "unauthorized" repair on farm equipment, which farmers see as an attack on their sovereignty and quite possibly an existential threat to their livelihood if their tractor breaks at an inopportune time.

"When crunch time comes and we break down, chances are we don't have time to wait for a dealership employee to show up and fix it," Danny Kluthe, a hog farmer in Nebraska, told his state legislature earlier this month. "Most all the new equipment [requires] a download [to fix]."

The nightmare scenario, and a fear I heard expressed over and over again in talking with farmers, is that John Deere could remotely shut down a tractor and there wouldn't be anything a farmer could do about it.

A license agreement John Deere required farmers to sign in October forbids nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and prevents farmers from suing for "crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software." The agreement applies to anyone who turns the key or otherwise uses a John Deere tractor with embedded software. It means that only John Deere dealerships and "authorized" repair shops can work on newer tractors.

"If a farmer bought the tractor, he should be able to do whatever he wants with it," Kevin Kenney, a farmer and right-to-repair advocate in Nebraska, told me. "You want to replace a transmission and you take it to an independent mechanic—he can put in the new transmission but the tractor can't drive out of the shop. Deere charges $230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize the part."

"What you've got is technicians running around here with cracked Ukrainian John Deere software that they bought off the black market," he added.

The affection we have in our society for rent seeking through things like the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), and it serves no one but parasites.

In fact, it creates a society based on this parasitism, which crowds out productive activities, and leads to inequality,

We have created a society of Martin Shkrelis, and this is not a good way to be.

Scary Tweet of the Day

DJI did a firmware update on a drone... while mid-flight 😬 pic.twitter.com/YDexjEViFc

— Internet of 💩 (@internetofshit) February 8, 2017

Of course, who cares about a lightweight relatively cheap drone.

Then again, what if this was a self driving car, or even the car that you are driving now? While you are driving it?

Tesla has already done over the air (OTA) updates on their cars, and while you may trust them, (I don't) would you trust the creators of the Chevy Vega?

H/t Naked Capitalism

This is F%$#ing Inspired

Self-driving cars are all the rage right now, though I really don't see the tech taking off for a very long time.

The problem is how to make an AI play nice with people on the road, who are inattentive, stupid, violent, vindictive, and frequently malicious.

And once you do, how do you test it?

Rolling it out on the road, with an operator in the drivers seat, is expensive.

Just the liability insurance would be insane.

Obviously, one solution, for the software at least, is to test it in a virtual environment, but this raises an important question: Where can one find a virtual reality that even comes close to mimicking the insanity that is humans driving cars?

Three Words: Grand Theft Auto:

Developers building self-driving cars can now take their AI agents for a spin in the simulated open world of Grand Theft Auto V – via OpenAI’s machine-learning playground, Universe.

The open-source MIT-licensed code gluing GTA V to Universe is maintained by Craig Quiter, who works for Otto – the Uber-owned startup that delivered 51,744 cans of Budweiser over 193km (120 miles) using a self-driving truck.

The software comes with a trained driving agent; all developers need is a copy of the game to get cracking. After that, programmers can swap out the demo AI model with their own agents to test their code and neural networks. Universe and Quiter's integration code takes care of the fiddly interfacing with the game.

Video games new and old provide great training grounds for developing reinforcement learning agents, which learn through trial and error – or rather, trial and reward when things go right. OpenAI's Universe was released in December, and is a wedge of open-source middleware that connects game controls and video displays to machine-learning agents so they can be trained in the virtual arenas.

Admittedly, GTA, with its hot rods, weapons, and rampant crime is only a pale shadow of commuting in Boston,^* but putting self driving automobile software through its paces in the fictional burg of San Andreas, is a truly inspired reuse of code.

^*No joke: I knew that it was time for me to leave New England when I screamed at someone for NOT cutting me off in a parking lot.

My Life is Effectively Over

Such is the nature of my doing contract work that I need to find a new job on a fairly regular basis.

My new position is not transit accessible, so I had to get a car for commuting.

It's a used Prius, so now we own both a minivan and a Prius.

I am now suffering from terminal automotive dullness.

As an aside, the Prius is a pleasant car to drive, though I find it disconcertingly quiet, and the animated displays take some getting used to.

The outside visibility is excellent, which is a surprise given the spoiler midway up the rear windows.

Also, I am not sure why, but it feels huge, more like a full size car than the midsize that it is technically listed as.

This is not a handling thing, it's just the sense I get sitting in it.  It feels really big.

It's handling is rather crisp though.

Snark of the Day

We are spared an iCar which will stop in the middle of the highway so you can verify your iCloud password despite having no network connection. The Genius mechanics would have told you, "That's how it's supposed to work!

—Duncan "Atrios" Black, on the news that Apple was getting out of the self driving car business.

Panglossian Bullsh%$

I just love the techno-utopians who seem to think that your car spying on your driving habits and phoning home will create a travel paradise,

The author thinks that Tesla invading your privacy is the bee's knees:

………

The majority of cars sold in the U.S. now have event data recorders—sometimes described as black boxes—that log data to be examined in the event of an accident.

Most of those devices don’t record as much detail as Tesla does, or send it out over the Internet. But Internet connectivity in cars is becoming more common, and carmakers are keen to make use of whatever data they can get from our vehicles.

Only about a quarter of new cars have the necessary technology today, but that's expected to reach over 90 percent by 2020. Companies such as GM are open about their interest in expanding the range of data they collect on driver actions to open up new business opportunities.

One big motivation for car companies is to get into the insurance business. Some insurance companies already offer discounts if you install a device in your car with sensors that monitor your driving habits, and GM has partnerships with several that tap into its OnStar system. But insurance companies could have much to gain by getting more detailed data as Tesla does, so they can see not only the car’s motion but every action of the driver.

The word for this is dystopian.

Big Brother, Big Auto, whatever.

Flies in 2018. Bankruptcy in 2019

Terrafugia has announced that its flying car will take flight by 2018.

There is a long history of flying cars (or roadable planes), and it never makes it to the mass market:

When will we finally pilot our own flying cars? It’s a question that’s haunted anyone who grew up watching sci-fi classics, and one American company claims they’re coming sooner than you’d think. Terrafugia is building the first-ever unmanned prototype of its TF-X flying car. They claim the vehicle will be ready for testing in 2018 and available for purchase by 2025.

The TF-X hybrid electric flying car looks mostly like a high-tech 4-seat sedan, except it’s equipped with fold-out wings that have twin electric motors on each side. These motors, powered by a 300 horsepower engine, can assume a horizontal position for flight and a vertical position for takeoff and landing. After using propellers to rise into the air (eliminating the need for any kind of runway), the vehicle would be capable of cruising at 200 mph for up to 500 miles.

There would be no need for a driver to have a pilot’s license, given that the car will be semi-autonomous. The driver can simply input the destination and allow the car to steer itself. The vehicle operator will, of course, have final say over whether the car should land in a particular area, and can abort landing at any time if the area seems unsafe.

This has been in the works for a long time, and I am sure that the most of the tech will work as promised.

After all there have been a dozen or so flying cars over the years.

They've just never made the leap from prototype to product.

The Car for My Midlife Crisis Has Returned

1980s Version


New Version

For some reason, the styling of the original always appealed to me, and if I were to get a car with just two seats and a tiny trunk, that would be it.

And now, it's back:

Fiat unveiled a "new" two-seat sports car at the Los Angeles Auto Show Thursday -- the reborn version of the the Fiat 124 Spider.

It marks the return of a model name that hasn't been available in the United States since 1985.

The original Fiat 124 Spider was a small, fun-to-drive sportscar that had adoring fans, but also a reputation for mechanical troubles boiled down to the memorable joke "Fix It Again, Tony."

That bit is not quite fair.

The 80s Spider was a simple, and, at least by the standard of 1980s vintage Fiats,^* fairly reliable.

I've not had my midlife crisis yet, but if I do, I will get the model with manual transmission, because if you are going to have a midlife crisis, and buy a 2 seat convertible, it's lame to use an automatic transmission.

I think that I'd get the model with the manual roof too, because ……… well ……… midlife crisis.

There are two ways to go with a midlife crisis car, super car, or something that you would have driven as a kid.

I swing the latter way.
^*Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?