7 ms·

In this discussion I very rarely see mentioned how heavy are cars. Since when do we need multi tons machine to move a being that is usually below 100kg from a t

by gbog 12y ago

In this discussion I very rarely see mentioned how heavy are cars. Since when do we need multi tons machine to move a being that is usually below 100kg from a to b? Here in northern China, many people have very small egg-cars, which are nothing more than an electric bike with a thin shell for the cold, and this is much less likely to kill someone by accident. I think we have been under a very strong brain washing so that we all believe a nice car is big and has this and that. Maybe these car ads will be seen in 20 years the same way we see cigarette ads right now: dangerous brain washing by a lobby gone crazy. (Edited slightly to avoid unfortunate pun)

mindslight 12y ago
Don't get your hopes up, that brainwashing is still alive and well with the first word of Google's post being "Jaywalking".
- mc32 12y ago
  Underscoring your sentiment is the origin of the term jaywalking http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-invention-of-jaywalking-was-a-massive-shaming-campa-858926923 http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-invention-of-jaywalking-w... Although, to be sure, with the speeds of modern vehicles, it makes sense that people's paths be predictable since vehicles are much less able to be nimble and swerve out of someone's path.
  - mindslight 12y ago
    Predictability and not jumping in front of cars is unrelated to not being in a crosswalk. Crosswalks actually worsen these aspects, as they make drivers more prone to needlessly slamming on their brakes to wave people out while also fostering a sense of pedestrian entitlement instead of respectful temporal negotiation. It's really not hard to look at traffic (all types), spot the existing gaps, and navigate within them. On some roads this is impractical due to traffic levels, but in most areas these type of roads are the exception. (I suppose it's not surprising to be downvoted for saying this, as California has some of the worst drivers I've seen. It's rare that I am able to start walking and successfully pass behind a moving car, without having the driver needlessly stop while looking annoyed and acting like they're doing me a favor - even in parking lots! But frankly, anyone thinking of themselves as a hacker should surely understand and respect the value of down-to-earth informal negotiation and the peril of overformalized systems).
    - jhenkens 12y ago
      Perhaps it could be due to the fact that you are legally required to yield to pedestrians in a crosswalk? Not to say that people do yield often, but once a pedestrian is in a crosswalk, not yielding is a great way to get a quick ticket.
      - mindslight 12y ago
        Yes of course that's what it's due to. But those laws are made for people who need/want traffic to stop so they can take their time, which is understandable. But when you're willing to wait three seconds on the curb for the one last car before a large gap, but you have to turn your entire body away and pretend to daydream just so that it won't needlessly stop, sensibilities have gone too far in the other direction.
rthomas6 12y ago
I agree with you, but I think I can explain some of the rationale behind wanting big cars. Part of the reason is fear. "If I have a very small egg-car and everyone else has a heavy car, I'll be the one that is killed."
- munificent 12y ago
  > Part of the reason is fear. "If I have a very small egg-car and everyone else has a heavy car, I'll be the one that is killed." That isn't fear, it's entirely rational behavior. This is one of those many cases where a group of people behaving individually in their self-interest results in a situation that's worse for all participants. It would be better for everyone if we moved in aggregate to smaller, lighter cars, but no one can take that step unless we all do.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    It's not a zero sum game. All else being equal, larger cars for everyone results in more safety for everyone. Imagine two extremes. 1) You smack into another person at 70MPH while you're both in a cardboard box. Don't ask me how you got a cardboard box up to that speed, but you probably do not survive. 2) You manage to get a Maersk E class up to 70MPH and crash it into another Maersk E class. Assuming you're not at the front, you and the other guy probably both walk away from the crash unscathed. Now, that doesn't mean that it's best for everyone to have huge cars. There are other factors beyond simply safety. Small cars can be much safer than large cars when designed and built well. My point is just that the shift to larger vehicles is not the sort of game-theoretic tragedy of the commons that one might imagine.
    - shabble 12y ago
      > * Don't ask me how you got a cardboard box up to that speed, but you probably do not survive. 2) You manage to get a Maersk E class up to 70MPH and crash it into another Maersk E class* I'd be more impressed if you got the Maersk up to 70mph, since it's 100k horsepower engines can manage less than half that. And I suspect the collision would be pretty terrifying, given it would be dumping a kinetic energy load of 81GJ if I did the maths right (70mph ~= 31m/s, Emma Maersk ~= 170kton, E=1/2mv^2), which is somewhere around 20kton of TNT equiv. The 300+ metre "crumple zone" might save you, but I wouldn't bet my life on it.
pinaceae 12y ago
because it is a multi-purpose vehicle. i drive a car to work, single passenger. i drive the car to buy stuff, with my wife, 2 passengers, plus hauling stuff in the trunk. i drive the car to various places on the weekend, wife plus kid plus shit in the trunk. i bought it to cover multiple transportation scenarios I encounter on a weekly basis. it also has a certain size to protect me in an accident. bumping into something at 30mph needs a certain amount of crumple zone to make it survivable. physics are hard to beat. and I haven't killed anyone so far with my car - and I've driven on multiple continents, on and offroad. no lobby needed.
- bertil 12y ago
  Actually, with self-driving cars, it’s likely that those four activity could be handled by different vehicles that you would only rent for the time you need them. If the law allows them to drive empty, they could go to the next user on their own, and reduce both waste parking, and inefficiencies like the ones you describe. Such plans are however more likely to happen in areas where those issues are more dire (concentrated living) and where non-ownership is already commonly accepted: bike-sharing already exists in NY. Not sure where you are, but I’m assuming you don’t have city-car-sharing there. This discrepancy can come off as a result of lobbying: car companies typically appear hostile to selling a lot less cars to sharing platform operators. I know for a fact there was a lot of lobbying involved in some cases, but I doubt that was the key issues in most places where ‘transportation alternatives’ isn’t used.
  - pinaceae 12y ago
    sure, but this why ownership as a concept is actually quite nice - i can decide right now to do something with my car. i don't need to plan ahead. i am not dependent on anybody else. i gladly pay for that luxury.
    - alwaysdoit 12y ago
      Isn't buying a car that is able to handle a bunch of different hypothetical future scenarios planning ahead?
rictic 12y ago
Are there any studies that back up your claims that small cars would reduce the death toll? I follow the intuition, but China has over twice as many deaths per car on the road as the United States: (36 per 100k vs 15) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re... There are of course other factors going on than just the weight of the cars, e.g. traffic laws, enforcement, community norms around driving, ratio of scooters and motorcycles, car safety ratings, etc etc etc. but there are difficult tradeoffs here too. An egg-car will cause less damage in a low velocity impact with a pedestrian, but at highway speeds it will also do less to protect its passengers.
- jsmthrowaway 12y ago
  I actually don't follow the intuition. The thought of putting a smart fortwo into a barrier at speed terrifies me, whereas I've done it in a Toyota Camry (pedestrian on freeway over blind crest, nowhere to go), gotten out unharmed, and driven a rental to work the next day. Also if I hit a pedestrian at 25mph I don't think it matters which I'm driving. The ads don't help. They show the car's frame holding up a pickup truck and so forth; yeah, that's great and all, but how about crumple zones?
  - Theodores 12y ago
    Crumple zones and needing a 'big car' is old fashioned safety. Probably the best cars to study are the big brothers of the Smart Car - the Mercedes A and B series. The original A series had a problem with the elk test, that was fixed and is a side issue to the main safety advances. The passenger cell is the key part, ideally you want the engine to go under it rather than land in the passengers laps. That is a key innovation for whether you can walk out afterwards. Next is the steel the passenger cell is made of. It doesn't crumple, things bounce off it. Then the real big innovations for survival are inside the passenger cell. Those airbags, the way the seat belt tensions, the way the steering column collapses. These are big things. There is a 'Fifth Gear' episode on Youtube that you can watch to see how all of this works. They crash a big Volvo that happens to be a decade old and built when the crumple one was king into a modern Renault hatchback. In the hatchback the passenger compartment stays as is, all of the airbags go off, the crash test dummies walk off with not so much as a scratch. Even the doors open. Meanwhile, the Volvo is a scene of carnage. The firemen have to cut the crash test dummies out, leaving their amputated legs behind. Personally I would want a full rally-car style roll cage inside whatever car I had if I had to have one, however, I gave up driving after crashing into an on-coming car :-) That was a turning point for me, I no longer derived pleasure from speed or sitting in traffic. I cycle now, or get the train. The accidents I am particularly keen to avoid are the rapid decelerations where, regardless of airbaggage, the brain crashes into the inside of one's skull to result in the same sort of complications Shumaker is having now (wish him well). His incident was skiing, not driving, but the same principle applies. Speaking of F1, I would like to see a Google car do the new Electric Formula E series, lapping every driver on the grid like some mad Scalextric car, taking the most optimal lines through the bends and learning the track to go quicker and quicker... In F1 would be cool too, like an automotive version of IBM's chess playing adventures, taking on World Champions and just beating them hands down. That would be cool.
john_b 12y ago
> "Since when do we need multi tons machine to move a being that is usually below 100kg from a to b" You don't always need them. Short intra-city drives don't require a large vehicle. But most public transportation in the US is rather poor, so people buy a car that will cover their worst case usage: driving multiple people and their luggage between cities, possibly hundreds of miles. An electric egg car isn't safe or efficient for that. There is a car lobby in the U.S. and it does have influence, but you have ignored Occam's Razor here. People buy large cars in the U.S. simply because they are useful. Creating competing services so large, individually owned cars are less useful is what projects like this and Uber are working on.
- gbog 12y ago
  > People buy large cars in the U.S. simply because they are useful. You surely know that this cannot be true. In China, again, many rich people buy expensive luxury cars, and really have no need for them, except if you include "social status" in "needs". I have a simple litmus test for detecting unneeded goods that people are trying to force into our minds: ads. We need normal food (neither fast nor organic), normal shoes (not Nikes), a door on our house with keys, etc. Except if it is very different in the US, I think no big ads campain are selling these. However, each product that require a heavy handed ad campaigns is certainly lacking in desirability or usefulness. And it also means these industries are spending a lot of money selling you goods, instead of spending money making these goods better or cheaper. Anyways, my bet is that the car industry is rotten to the bones, selling worldwide dangerous and superfluous multi-tons machines that could be replaced by many other, more useful, safe and scalable transportation means. And I hope Google and others will break this industry apart as soon as possible.
  - gedrap 12y ago
    I am living in Beijing at the moment (Haidian), spent most of my life in Europe. I get what you mean and understand the efficiency of Chinese transport vehicles. But one huge thing you are missing is the cultural differences. They are pretty big. >>>normal food (neither fast nor organic), normal shoes (not Nikes), a door on our house with keys, etc I get what you mean. I spent a little time in the north-east Beijing villages and I know what you mean by minimality. But again, 'not normal' shoes will last longer. The house with a bit more than just doors will make you feel safer (or is just me a paranoid Westerner?). Yes, there might be some lobbying and brain washing, as you call it. But as you can see, the culture is totally different. It's neither good nor bad. It's just the way it is.
tomkarlo 12y ago
Great and all (and I'm a big fan of smaller, lighter passenger cars) but it only works to a point - a tiny car might not kill a pedestrian or someone else in a tiny car, but it's unlikely to do well in an accident with a semi truck, or a large fixed barrier. (And people buy cars based on how well they protect the passengers, not others.) We should have smaller cars, but with reasonable safety features.
neolefty 12y ago
Also in China, and presumably in much of the rest of the world, cars are expensive compared to average income. Car use would open up to a new class of people who wouldn't need to own it. Actually, that's already kind of the case -- in China (some parts anyway) it's easy to find a "black taxi" willing to carry your mattress across town when you move. Maybe because labor is cheap in China. However, I have a hard time seeing automated driving working out in China's traffic. (Maybe I'm just unaware of the sate of the art!)
- rahimnathwani 12y ago
  Beijing also has: - inexpensive (relative to the West) taxis - great taxi-hailing apps - good private hire apps (and Uber launched a limited service here last week, although I have yet to try it.) Re: automated driving, the main roads here are pretty wide compared to those in European cities, so perhaps it wouldn't be so bad. I don't know how a computer would deal with a physical confrontation after a minor accident, though.
rahimnathwani 12y ago
I agree with the sentiment (and you've seen how small and light my scooter is) but I can totally understand why people buy larger/stronger vehicles for safety. Unfortunately, it becomes an arms race: I'd feel perfectly safe in one of those egg cars if _everyone_ had one. As it is, though, I'd be really worried about driving one because I would be more vulnerable than in a traditional car, but much less able to take evasive action to avoid collisions (vs. my scooter). Having said that, I'm writing this on the bus, which can take me to most places in Beijing if I'm not in a hurry.

by gbog 12y ago

mindslight 12y ago

Don't get your hopes up, that brainwashing is still alive and well with the first word of Google's post being "Jaywalking".

mc32 12y ago
Underscoring your sentiment is the origin of the term jaywalking http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-invention-of-jaywalking-was-a-massive-shaming-campa-858926923 http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-invention-of-jaywalking-w... Although, to be sure, with the speeds of modern vehicles, it makes sense that people's paths be predictable since vehicles are much less able to be nimble and swerve out of someone's path.
- mindslight 12y ago
  Predictability and not jumping in front of cars is unrelated to not being in a crosswalk. Crosswalks actually worsen these aspects, as they make drivers more prone to needlessly slamming on their brakes to wave people out while also fostering a sense of pedestrian entitlement instead of respectful temporal negotiation. It's really not hard to look at traffic (all types), spot the existing gaps, and navigate within them. On some roads this is impractical due to traffic levels, but in most areas these type of roads are the exception. (I suppose it's not surprising to be downvoted for saying this, as California has some of the worst drivers I've seen. It's rare that I am able to start walking and successfully pass behind a moving car, without having the driver needlessly stop while looking annoyed and acting like they're doing me a favor - even in parking lots! But frankly, anyone thinking of themselves as a hacker should surely understand and respect the value of down-to-earth informal negotiation and the peril of overformalized systems).
  - jhenkens 12y ago
    Perhaps it could be due to the fact that you are legally required to yield to pedestrians in a crosswalk? Not to say that people do yield often, but once a pedestrian is in a crosswalk, not yielding is a great way to get a quick ticket.
    - mindslight 12y ago
      Yes of course that's what it's due to. But those laws are made for people who need/want traffic to stop so they can take their time, which is understandable. But when you're willing to wait three seconds on the curb for the one last car before a large gap, but you have to turn your entire body away and pretend to daydream just so that it won't needlessly stop, sensibilities have gone too far in the other direction.

rthomas6 12y ago

I agree with you, but I think I can explain some of the rationale behind wanting big cars. Part of the reason is fear. "If I have a very small egg-car and everyone else has a heavy car, I'll be the one that is killed."

munificent 12y ago
> Part of the reason is fear. "If I have a very small egg-car and everyone else has a heavy car, I'll be the one that is killed." That isn't fear, it's entirely rational behavior. This is one of those many cases where a group of people behaving individually in their self-interest results in a situation that's worse for all participants. It would be better for everyone if we moved in aggregate to smaller, lighter cars, but no one can take that step unless we all do.
- mikeash 12y ago
  It's not a zero sum game. All else being equal, larger cars for everyone results in more safety for everyone. Imagine two extremes. 1) You smack into another person at 70MPH while you're both in a cardboard box. Don't ask me how you got a cardboard box up to that speed, but you probably do not survive. 2) You manage to get a Maersk E class up to 70MPH and crash it into another Maersk E class. Assuming you're not at the front, you and the other guy probably both walk away from the crash unscathed. Now, that doesn't mean that it's best for everyone to have huge cars. There are other factors beyond simply safety. Small cars can be much safer than large cars when designed and built well. My point is just that the shift to larger vehicles is not the sort of game-theoretic tragedy of the commons that one might imagine.
  - shabble 12y ago
    > * Don't ask me how you got a cardboard box up to that speed, but you probably do not survive. 2) You manage to get a Maersk E class up to 70MPH and crash it into another Maersk E class* I'd be more impressed if you got the Maersk up to 70mph, since it's 100k horsepower engines can manage less than half that. And I suspect the collision would be pretty terrifying, given it would be dumping a kinetic energy load of 81GJ if I did the maths right (70mph ~= 31m/s, Emma Maersk ~= 170kton, E=1/2mv^2), which is somewhere around 20kton of TNT equiv. The 300+ metre "crumple zone" might save you, but I wouldn't bet my life on it.

pinaceae 12y ago

because it is a multi-purpose vehicle. i drive a car to work, single passenger. i drive the car to buy stuff, with my wife, 2 passengers, plus hauling stuff in the trunk. i drive the car to various places on the weekend, wife plus kid plus shit in the trunk. i bought it to cover multiple transportation scenarios I encounter on a weekly basis. it also has a certain size to protect me in an accident. bumping into something at 30mph needs a certain amount of crumple zone to make it survivable. physics are hard to beat. and I haven't killed anyone so far with my car - and I've driven on multiple continents, on and offroad. no lobby needed.

bertil 12y ago
Actually, with self-driving cars, it’s likely that those four activity could be handled by different vehicles that you would only rent for the time you need them. If the law allows them to drive empty, they could go to the next user on their own, and reduce both waste parking, and inefficiencies like the ones you describe. Such plans are however more likely to happen in areas where those issues are more dire (concentrated living) and where non-ownership is already commonly accepted: bike-sharing already exists in NY. Not sure where you are, but I’m assuming you don’t have city-car-sharing there. This discrepancy can come off as a result of lobbying: car companies typically appear hostile to selling a lot less cars to sharing platform operators. I know for a fact there was a lot of lobbying involved in some cases, but I doubt that was the key issues in most places where ‘transportation alternatives’ isn’t used.
- pinaceae 12y ago
  sure, but this why ownership as a concept is actually quite nice - i can decide right now to do something with my car. i don't need to plan ahead. i am not dependent on anybody else. i gladly pay for that luxury.
  - alwaysdoit 12y ago
    Isn't buying a car that is able to handle a bunch of different hypothetical future scenarios planning ahead?

rictic 12y ago

Are there any studies that back up your claims that small cars would reduce the death toll? I follow the intuition, but China has over twice as many deaths per car on the road as the United States: (36 per 100k vs 15) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re... There are of course other factors going on than just the weight of the cars, e.g. traffic laws, enforcement, community norms around driving, ratio of scooters and motorcycles, car safety ratings, etc etc etc. but there are difficult tradeoffs here too. An egg-car will cause less damage in a low velocity impact with a pedestrian, but at highway speeds it will also do less to protect its passengers.

jsmthrowaway 12y ago
I actually don't follow the intuition. The thought of putting a smart fortwo into a barrier at speed terrifies me, whereas I've done it in a Toyota Camry (pedestrian on freeway over blind crest, nowhere to go), gotten out unharmed, and driven a rental to work the next day. Also if I hit a pedestrian at 25mph I don't think it matters which I'm driving. The ads don't help. They show the car's frame holding up a pickup truck and so forth; yeah, that's great and all, but how about crumple zones?
- Theodores 12y ago
  Crumple zones and needing a 'big car' is old fashioned safety. Probably the best cars to study are the big brothers of the Smart Car - the Mercedes A and B series. The original A series had a problem with the elk test, that was fixed and is a side issue to the main safety advances. The passenger cell is the key part, ideally you want the engine to go under it rather than land in the passengers laps. That is a key innovation for whether you can walk out afterwards. Next is the steel the passenger cell is made of. It doesn't crumple, things bounce off it. Then the real big innovations for survival are inside the passenger cell. Those airbags, the way the seat belt tensions, the way the steering column collapses. These are big things. There is a 'Fifth Gear' episode on Youtube that you can watch to see how all of this works. They crash a big Volvo that happens to be a decade old and built when the crumple one was king into a modern Renault hatchback. In the hatchback the passenger compartment stays as is, all of the airbags go off, the crash test dummies walk off with not so much as a scratch. Even the doors open. Meanwhile, the Volvo is a scene of carnage. The firemen have to cut the crash test dummies out, leaving their amputated legs behind. Personally I would want a full rally-car style roll cage inside whatever car I had if I had to have one, however, I gave up driving after crashing into an on-coming car :-) That was a turning point for me, I no longer derived pleasure from speed or sitting in traffic. I cycle now, or get the train. The accidents I am particularly keen to avoid are the rapid decelerations where, regardless of airbaggage, the brain crashes into the inside of one's skull to result in the same sort of complications Shumaker is having now (wish him well). His incident was skiing, not driving, but the same principle applies. Speaking of F1, I would like to see a Google car do the new Electric Formula E series, lapping every driver on the grid like some mad Scalextric car, taking the most optimal lines through the bends and learning the track to go quicker and quicker... In F1 would be cool too, like an automotive version of IBM's chess playing adventures, taking on World Champions and just beating them hands down. That would be cool.

john_b 12y ago

> "Since when do we need multi tons machine to move a being that is usually below 100kg from a to b" You don't always need them. Short intra-city drives don't require a large vehicle. But most public transportation in the US is rather poor, so people buy a car that will cover their worst case usage: driving multiple people and their luggage between cities, possibly hundreds of miles. An electric egg car isn't safe or efficient for that. There is a car lobby in the U.S. and it does have influence, but you have ignored Occam's Razor here. People buy large cars in the U.S. simply because they are useful. Creating competing services so large, individually owned cars are less useful is what projects like this and Uber are working on.

gbog 12y ago
> People buy large cars in the U.S. simply because they are useful. You surely know that this cannot be true. In China, again, many rich people buy expensive luxury cars, and really have no need for them, except if you include "social status" in "needs". I have a simple litmus test for detecting unneeded goods that people are trying to force into our minds: ads. We need normal food (neither fast nor organic), normal shoes (not Nikes), a door on our house with keys, etc. Except if it is very different in the US, I think no big ads campain are selling these. However, each product that require a heavy handed ad campaigns is certainly lacking in desirability or usefulness. And it also means these industries are spending a lot of money selling you goods, instead of spending money making these goods better or cheaper. Anyways, my bet is that the car industry is rotten to the bones, selling worldwide dangerous and superfluous multi-tons machines that could be replaced by many other, more useful, safe and scalable transportation means. And I hope Google and others will break this industry apart as soon as possible.
- gedrap 12y ago
  I am living in Beijing at the moment (Haidian), spent most of my life in Europe. I get what you mean and understand the efficiency of Chinese transport vehicles. But one huge thing you are missing is the cultural differences. They are pretty big. >>>normal food (neither fast nor organic), normal shoes (not Nikes), a door on our house with keys, etc I get what you mean. I spent a little time in the north-east Beijing villages and I know what you mean by minimality. But again, 'not normal' shoes will last longer. The house with a bit more than just doors will make you feel safer (or is just me a paranoid Westerner?). Yes, there might be some lobbying and brain washing, as you call it. But as you can see, the culture is totally different. It's neither good nor bad. It's just the way it is.

tomkarlo 12y ago

Great and all (and I'm a big fan of smaller, lighter passenger cars) but it only works to a point - a tiny car might not kill a pedestrian or someone else in a tiny car, but it's unlikely to do well in an accident with a semi truck, or a large fixed barrier. (And people buy cars based on how well they protect the passengers, not others.) We should have smaller cars, but with reasonable safety features.

neolefty 12y ago

Also in China, and presumably in much of the rest of the world, cars are expensive compared to average income. Car use would open up to a new class of people who wouldn't need to own it. Actually, that's already kind of the case -- in China (some parts anyway) it's easy to find a "black taxi" willing to carry your mattress across town when you move. Maybe because labor is cheap in China. However, I have a hard time seeing automated driving working out in China's traffic. (Maybe I'm just unaware of the sate of the art!)

rahimnathwani 12y ago
Beijing also has: - inexpensive (relative to the West) taxis - great taxi-hailing apps - good private hire apps (and Uber launched a limited service here last week, although I have yet to try it.) Re: automated driving, the main roads here are pretty wide compared to those in European cities, so perhaps it wouldn't be so bad. I don't know how a computer would deal with a physical confrontation after a minor accident, though.

rahimnathwani 12y ago

I agree with the sentiment (and you've seen how small and light my scooter is) but I can totally understand why people buy larger/stronger vehicles for safety. Unfortunately, it becomes an arms race: I'd feel perfectly safe in one of those egg cars if _everyone_ had one. As it is, though, I'd be really worried about driving one because I would be more vulnerable than in a traditional car, but much less able to take evasive action to avoid collisions (vs. my scooter). Having said that, I'm writing this on the bus, which can take me to most places in Beijing if I'm not in a hurry.