I’ll start: printers.
I bought an HP in March 2020 when my job went remote and HP bricked it remotely after only 100 pages because I wouldn’t sign up for their subscription program. Ended up trashing a perfectly good printer.
Luckily my library’s close by and I can print there remotely.
Cars. Basically every new model is always online, connected, and streaming who knows what data. Not to mention the awful UX of touchscreens.
Why should a car be connected to the internet? The infotainment is justified but should be controllable. And this includes EVs. Just because your wheels are moved by electric motors it doesn’t automatically mean the entire car is “tech” and must be connected to everything and anything.
If I had to get a car I would by an old clunker and pay someone to convert it to electric.
Yes I would like a fully electric 1957 Bel-Air please.
Old cars sound like fun, until you experience the safety features (seatbelts and crumble zones optional), missing rear visibility with tiny mirrors and the hassle to find matching spare part replicas.
And you think there is not much electronics or fancy extras in them to break, but the older cars where expected to last for 100.000km and maybe 10 years tops before the rust would eat everything up, so a lot of parts where designed cheaper and would fail sooner than today’s cars that are expected to last at least twice as long.
Visibility out of something like a '57 Bel Air is excellent. Back then visibility was something people cared about, and having the pillars be as thin as possible was highly desirable. In comparison, modern cars have horrible visibility with thick pillars, high belt lines, high hoods, and tiny rear windows. Of course, the whole thin pillar thing did come at the cost of a weaker roof, less crash protection, and basically no rollover protection so there does need to be some balance, but with modern cars I hate how I feel dependent on things like backup cameras and blind spot monitors because I can’t effectively see out the car.
The 1970s fastbacks had terrible rear visibility because they don’t have rear windows:
https://smclassiccars.com/uploads/postfotos/1972-dodge-charger-coupe-red-se-4.jpg
The driver is essentially blind in he 3-5 o’clock visibility range when you have to do a left turn, and the intersection is not at an 90 degrees angle, or you try to merge into the highway. All you can do is floor it and merge in behind some car in front of you that you can see.
Well in the 70’s you also have the AMC Pacer which is like driving a fishbowl.
As a styling thing it does go in cycles. Late 30’s-40’s cars also had high beltlines and small windows. Then the big airy greenhouses in the late 50’s-early 60’s. Many 80’s cars into the 90’s tended to have good visibility, though part of that also just came from the squared off styling. The poor visibility of today’s cars is partly from safety features, but a lot of is also just styling.
Sweet spot is Japanese cars from the '90s and '00s. They are more reliable, more fuel efficient, have safety features and spare parts are often still available. Rust remains a topic but not as much as with older cars.
Yeah. Find a Honda or Toyota from the latter half of the 00’s with a reliable service history and they’ll last another 10-20 years if you take them to a decent imports mechanic.
Rust is always a problem in some places hahaha
Yeah, if I had a choice for an electric conversion, I think my ideal pick would be a newish car that somehow had its engine ruined way before its time. Like, maybe it was owned by some idiot that never got the oil changed until it burned out completely.
And while newer cars have the annoying tracking crap, that’s solvable. If you’re paying a mechanic enough money to completely convert a vehicle to electric, it won’t be much more work to rip out the tracking tech while they’re retrofitting it. You might need to just completely throw out the existing infotainment system, but that would still be a rounding error on a project that large.
Ideally you just look for a Honda or Toyota from like 20 years ago, assuming you want gas powered. Look for only like 1-3 owners, regular service history. Those things will last into 600k+ miles if they received regular service and parts are dirt cheap.
If I did that I would just be another selfish, ignorant asshole complicit in the destruction and collapse of the natural systems that allow me to breath and eat. No, it would have to be electric. Even then I wouldn’t really want it because of the tires and the raw materials needed to create it in the first place.
Alright well I’m going to continue surviving. You have fun doing whatever I guess.
good luck lol. ur gunna need it (literally like fkin miracle). o7
Touch grass, dude.
Open your fucking eyes, dude. Everything’s dying. There won’t be any grass to touch, in our lifetimes.
Touch grass.
Get off the fucking Internet, stop immersing yourself in anxiety and misery, and exist in the real world for a while.
Shit’s okay.
OK, convert a 20 year old Toyota or Honda. Way easier to find one than thinking you have to go pre-fuel injection era to avoid wireless connectivity. Either way, you’re probably going to instantly trash a working engine apparently.
Yep, that’s the plan. Maybe soon, more people will realize those engines are one of the main reasons millions of people have already died from catastrophic climate change. I doubt it though… most are too focused on themselves, their own comfort and “survival” to realize or even care how much of an impact their actions have and even then can easily blame some rich asshole so they can keep being just as selfish as said rich asshole.
That sounds sick as fuck. Makes me wonder if that will become a service in the future? Instead of everyone buying new electric cars, just replace the engine* with a bigger battery and electric motor. Any car-ologists able to chime in if this is viable?
There are services like this already.
https://ev-works.com/
https://www.fuel2electric.com/
https://amprevolt.com/
No idea if these companies are any good. They’re just the top results that popped up. But it looks like there are a fair number of companies already doing this. It looks like the cost is from $10k to $90k.
Certainly is: there was a group of people doing just that at the University of Calgary(?), but it was years ago and they have almost certainly graduated by now. If others are still doing so, I am not certain.
afaicr the most difficult part was the infotainment system. Installing the motors and stuff was easy, to engineering students at least haha.
I kind of hate infotainment systems anyway. I just want a mounted screen to cast Apple Drive Mode or whatever it’s called. The default GUI they put there is fucking awful. I tried to use the inbuilt GPS once and actually gave up and just went on a spiritual journey instead. Surely it can’t be that complicated just to have essentially a mounted iPad?
Great to hear that cars can be saved though. I was worried I’d have to sell my perfectly good car because I want an electric motor… I was thinking like, the rest of the car is fine it doesn’t need to be trashed at all
Same, they are always useless to me because I just use my phone anyway. All I would need is an audio jack and a usb port for charging. I imagine a simple sort of shelf with a ‘seat belt’ where the screen would be.
ijmuawn
Iirc is a thing, why not use that instead of making people spend time figuring out what afaicr means? I assume I figured it out, yes, but I’ve never seen that before.
It’s been in fairly wide usage for a long time, and it’s literally only two characters off from an extremely well known acronym that has also basically been around as long as the internet (afaik). IIRC was also just made up by somebody too, not that that’s even what OP was doing.
Don’t worry, I understood what you meant
:)Wait a minute… you’re not OC! (Original Commenter)
I have seen iirc thousands of times, don’t recall ever seeing this one before. Yeah they get made up, yet it’s silly to make a new one up that means almost the exact same thing as an established one.
That would be gorgeous.
Convertible in Tropical Turquoise and India Ivory?
Most definitely.
I only saw it in tropical turquoise.
An acquaintance from NHTSA says the cars save audio from the interior of the vehicle in a type of black box that can be accessed by investigators after wrecks. They frequently analyze this audio, but it’s SUPPOSED TO BE A SECRET.
Infotainment ain’t justified, at least not up front. Put all that shit in the back if you gotta have it, but the driver should have as few distractions as possible. A simple radio, climate control, and the instrument panel. That’s it.
Utterly insane that we ever allowed glorified tablets to become standard equipment in dashboards.
My recent purchase was a Mazda specifically because the infotainment was not a touchscreen, but instead controlled by a rotating knob joystick.
Nothing quite like the twist of a good knob.
Honestly that seems a bit worse
It’s really quite nice. I was just in a rental car with a touchscreen and hated how hard it was to hit buttons while driving because your finger is bouncing from the road. With the knob you stay leaned back in the seat and rotate the knob and slap it down to activate things. Don’t have to worry about missing the target. The only thing it’s not great for is scrolling a map.
At least it’s a physical interface
How many cars were you buying
Like most people who drive, they probably would be buying a new car every 5-10 years. Is that far fetched? I’ve know several people who spend half their money on cars, buying/trading them every year or so. Most fediverse people would be saavier than that, but still.
Well there was period where I changed cars every 2 years. For a total of 3 cars, and then I didn’t need one any more. Not the most egregious example but I did like changing them. It’s like any other toy, it’s easy to get hooked on upgrades and trying out new models.
Yeah, that’s pretty normal I think. I tend to keep my cars a long time but I’ve still had 4 so far, which may surprise the OC here.
I drive them until the cost of fixing them significantly exceeds the cost of getting a new used car. Accounting for it being a pain in the ass to shop for cars etc.
But yeah every 3-5 years sounds about right for typical middle/upper class families. My parents did pretty well when I was little and I remember them doing 2 or 3 year leases.
I don’t buy cars anymore. I didn’t used to buy them either.