The Toecutter
100 kW
- Joined
- Feb 8, 2015
- Messages
- 1,478
As much as I despise the auto industry for its refusal to give up planned obsolescence and deliberately building inefficient/overpriced/maintenance-hungry products, banning cars is a stupid idea.
What needs to change is how cars are designed and built. Design by committee needs to be replaced by engineers with a vision or goal in mind. Form should follow function, not the other way around. The air that is disturbed by a car moving down the road doesn't care what is in the car, what the car is composed of, or what function the car is being used for. Everything on the mass market is designed totally backwards if the goal is having an inexpensive, efficient, practical machine, and the vast majority of new vehicle buyers don't know any better nor care. Even something as useless as a corporation's brand-identity is emphasized in a car's design to the detriment of criteria such as efficiency, reliability, cost, performance, and other factors(just note the massive grilles on modern BMWs or Lexuses as an example).
I'd like to see everything collapse so government and various entrenched companies can finally be out of the way, and we can see a large number of small companies take its place, which may soon become technologically viable at scale as 3D printing takes off. Unless government comes in and regulates/bans it at the behest of lobbyists after the day comes. Then we could see some actual experimentation among real-world products, instead of the same old cookie-cutter designs intentionally made to part people with their money and waste resources.
There is no technical reason our cars can't get nearly double the current efficiency using conventional production methods, without much in the way of compromising anything or increasing cost. Performance in fact would go up. But a lot of rich executives' sacred cows would get gored in the process and the industry would have to actually start trying new things on a regular basis instead of being so overly conservative that they're scared to do something that concept designers had proposed and even successfully demonstrated as technically viable driven-on-road one-off cars many decades ago. And having seen the advancements in electric vehicle tech play out in the 1990s, it is clear to me that the only thing that will make the mainstream automakers change is if they have no choice. If we didn't have Tesla, odds are great that none of the major automakers would be making any EVs at all today, as the technology was viable for well more than a decade before Tesla even existed. It may not have been as good, but it was "good enough" that 150-200 mile range sedans were demonstrated in real-world conditions, and repeated studies within the industry itself suggested they could have been affordable in mass production AND that consumers would buy them if they were competitively priced with ICE cars. Yet the foot dragging continued, for well over a decade.
Tesla kinda sorta got halfway towards building a car emphasizing function leading form with its Model S and Model 3, but even in both of those there is massive room for improvement due to all sorts of design concessions that have more to do with style than substance. And none of the other automakers have come close to the efficiency of Tesla's platforms with any mass produced offerings, inspite of demonstrating they were more than capable of offering cars even more efficient than Tesla's platforms 50+ years ago.
And unlike the claims oft repeated by industry execs along the lines of "no one will buy the world's most aerodynamic car", Tesla's platforms are selling so fast that Tesla can't keep up with demand. Their cars have roughly two-thirds the drag of what is typical, yet they still look quite conventional, and thus were not dedicated streamliners from the start. No automaker has ever dared to try to sell the public a dedicated streamliner, yet wants to claim no one will ever buy one. I beg to differ, especially when you consider it could have opened the door to 40+ mpg full-sized V8 musclecars during the 70s fuel crisis using antiquated carbeurated engines, while consumers were flocking to a 14 mpg Ford Pinto that was already widely considered ugly as a replacement for their 10 mpg V8 lump of Detroit iron.
What needs to change is how cars are designed and built. Design by committee needs to be replaced by engineers with a vision or goal in mind. Form should follow function, not the other way around. The air that is disturbed by a car moving down the road doesn't care what is in the car, what the car is composed of, or what function the car is being used for. Everything on the mass market is designed totally backwards if the goal is having an inexpensive, efficient, practical machine, and the vast majority of new vehicle buyers don't know any better nor care. Even something as useless as a corporation's brand-identity is emphasized in a car's design to the detriment of criteria such as efficiency, reliability, cost, performance, and other factors(just note the massive grilles on modern BMWs or Lexuses as an example).
I'd like to see everything collapse so government and various entrenched companies can finally be out of the way, and we can see a large number of small companies take its place, which may soon become technologically viable at scale as 3D printing takes off. Unless government comes in and regulates/bans it at the behest of lobbyists after the day comes. Then we could see some actual experimentation among real-world products, instead of the same old cookie-cutter designs intentionally made to part people with their money and waste resources.
There is no technical reason our cars can't get nearly double the current efficiency using conventional production methods, without much in the way of compromising anything or increasing cost. Performance in fact would go up. But a lot of rich executives' sacred cows would get gored in the process and the industry would have to actually start trying new things on a regular basis instead of being so overly conservative that they're scared to do something that concept designers had proposed and even successfully demonstrated as technically viable driven-on-road one-off cars many decades ago. And having seen the advancements in electric vehicle tech play out in the 1990s, it is clear to me that the only thing that will make the mainstream automakers change is if they have no choice. If we didn't have Tesla, odds are great that none of the major automakers would be making any EVs at all today, as the technology was viable for well more than a decade before Tesla even existed. It may not have been as good, but it was "good enough" that 150-200 mile range sedans were demonstrated in real-world conditions, and repeated studies within the industry itself suggested they could have been affordable in mass production AND that consumers would buy them if they were competitively priced with ICE cars. Yet the foot dragging continued, for well over a decade.
Tesla kinda sorta got halfway towards building a car emphasizing function leading form with its Model S and Model 3, but even in both of those there is massive room for improvement due to all sorts of design concessions that have more to do with style than substance. And none of the other automakers have come close to the efficiency of Tesla's platforms with any mass produced offerings, inspite of demonstrating they were more than capable of offering cars even more efficient than Tesla's platforms 50+ years ago.
And unlike the claims oft repeated by industry execs along the lines of "no one will buy the world's most aerodynamic car", Tesla's platforms are selling so fast that Tesla can't keep up with demand. Their cars have roughly two-thirds the drag of what is typical, yet they still look quite conventional, and thus were not dedicated streamliners from the start. No automaker has ever dared to try to sell the public a dedicated streamliner, yet wants to claim no one will ever buy one. I beg to differ, especially when you consider it could have opened the door to 40+ mpg full-sized V8 musclecars during the 70s fuel crisis using antiquated carbeurated engines, while consumers were flocking to a 14 mpg Ford Pinto that was already widely considered ugly as a replacement for their 10 mpg V8 lump of Detroit iron.
:lol: 
