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For me it's about control. I'm fine with having whiz-bang features on my equipment, so long as I am the final authority on anything and everything about them.

For me it's about control. I'm fine with having whiz-bang features on my equipment, so long as I am the final authority on anything and everything about them. About a year ago I took my fancy EV on a ferry. I kept it on and ran the air conditioner because it was hot outside. Partway through the crossing I guess the suspension sensors interpreted the boat rocking as "something is seriously screwed up," and it locked the brakes and wouldn't release them when it was time to disembark. I had to sit there in my fancy EV looking like an idiot while everyone filtered around me and I took another trip across the water with cones around the car. When I frantically called the dealership in the middle of all that, they said, "Sorry, your car has decided that it isn't safe to drive. You'll have to get it towed in so we can take a look at it. Oh, and since you're on a ferry, our roadside assistance won't help you. Good luck!" When I asked the ferry staff what I should do, they replied, "Uh, usually we just ask the owner to shift into neutral, and we push the car off." Only the car decided for me that this wasn't a possibility, and the brakes remained engaged with no way for me to disengage them. The next thing I did after I finally got back home was research which cars I could still buy today with manual transmission and an emergency brake attached to a lever and a cable. It's not at all about holding onto my youth. It's about being the final authority over my own goddamned property.

maxdo 5y ago
it's a problem of your car brand, not the EV's. My EV still has neutral. Let me guess, you probably choose a legacy brand EV car, that has no culture on how to buy electronics, because you know I can trust this brand better since they are so long on the market. The same automatic problem could be on the car with manual transmission nowadays. Since they all required emergency braking and many other items are mandatory e.g nothing to do with EV itself.
- steelframe 5y ago
  > it's a problem of your car brand, not the EV's. My EV still has neutral. True that I bought a brand that doesn't have a long history of EV tech. However it does indeed have a neutral button. It's just that after throwing itself into some exception state, "shifting" into it by hitting the button on the console would highlight the "N" letter as if it acknowledged my "request," but some logic in the car simply refused to actually fully execute my "request" to shift into neutral. There was no "STFU and do what I say; I don't care what your logic thinks about the situation" because the product managers and/or engineers who built it had the hubris to believe they had thought of everything and there would never be any need for that mode of operation. If I can physically pull a manual transmission stick into the neutral position and release a brake cable, my car will roll. After my experience on the ferry, I no longer want any software logic at all being able to prevent my car from moving when I want it to move. "Just find a car brand that has better logic that you can probably rely on" isn't the solution I'm looking for. Software systems in cars are way too complicated, and there will always be corner cases. I demand a failsafe manual override. I am the one driving the vehicle, and I make the ultimate judgement call on what it does and doesn't do. One car I found that has manual transmission and a pull-lever emergency brake is the 2021 Subaru Crosstrek. The manual transmission Crosstrek reportedly doesn't have EyeSight, and hence there's no automatic emergency braking (AEB). https://www.subaru.ca/content/7907/media/General/download/C105625-5_Crosstrek_ModelPage.pdf https://www.subaru.ca/content/7907/media/General/download/C1...

maxdo 5y ago

it's a problem of your car brand, not the EV's. My EV still has neutral. Let me guess, you probably choose a legacy brand EV car, that has no culture on how to buy electronics, because you know I can trust this brand better since they are so long on the market. The same automatic problem could be on the car with manual transmission nowadays. Since they all required emergency braking and many other items are mandatory e.g nothing to do with EV itself.

steelframe 5y ago
> it's a problem of your car brand, not the EV's. My EV still has neutral. True that I bought a brand that doesn't have a long history of EV tech. However it does indeed have a neutral button. It's just that after throwing itself into some exception state, "shifting" into it by hitting the button on the console would highlight the "N" letter as if it acknowledged my "request," but some logic in the car simply refused to actually fully execute my "request" to shift into neutral. There was no "STFU and do what I say; I don't care what your logic thinks about the situation" because the product managers and/or engineers who built it had the hubris to believe they had thought of everything and there would never be any need for that mode of operation. If I can physically pull a manual transmission stick into the neutral position and release a brake cable, my car will roll. After my experience on the ferry, I no longer want any software logic at all being able to prevent my car from moving when I want it to move. "Just find a car brand that has better logic that you can probably rely on" isn't the solution I'm looking for. Software systems in cars are way too complicated, and there will always be corner cases. I demand a failsafe manual override. I am the one driving the vehicle, and I make the ultimate judgement call on what it does and doesn't do. One car I found that has manual transmission and a pull-lever emergency brake is the 2021 Subaru Crosstrek. The manual transmission Crosstrek reportedly doesn't have EyeSight, and hence there's no automatic emergency braking (AEB). https://www.subaru.ca/content/7907/media/General/download/C105625-5_Crosstrek_ModelPage.pdf https://www.subaru.ca/content/7907/media/General/download/C1...