The Lamp Room

Ah that would explain it then. Still nonsense of course, building in electronics like into something that by it's very nature gets hot, is a asking for trouble. I suppose for personal use there's nothing to stop you bypassing them when they do fail though?

This whole microprocessor electronics era wants banishing to the history books!
Yesterday we had a SEAT Leon returned as a buy back, customer didn’t want it, and for good reason!
It had a gearbox issue, it was automatic, but everything was push button!, electronic push button handbrake, electronic push button gear selection, electronic push button park gear engage, electronic push button start!
It was dumbed in front of security and in security guard, Den’s way, he tried to move it, didn’t get far, I had a go next, and then discovered the real extent of the problem!

It kept shifting itself into park! , you would press the park button, (to get it off), then select drive and as it started to move, it would de-select drive and put you back into park, immediately firing the locking pawls in the gearbox and locking the front wheels solid!

To then add insult to injury, as the cars electronic brain scened a problem, it, ‘puts the handbrake on for you’ and the car refuses to start, giving you the red engine management spanner light!
What an absolute piece of shit!

Now imagine this happening on a motorway, as you take your family on holiday!, you’re doing a steady 60, park is selected out of nowhere, locking you into an uncontrolled spin, then wherever you end up, you then can’t start the car, or even push it out of the way thanks to the handbrake application!
Total worthless, microchip, unworkable, unliveable, dangerous electronic dog egg, piece of crap!
RANT OVER!

This is why I’ve now ditched the car and commute back and forth to work on my trusty Bronx road pedal bike!
Good old hundred year old, purely mechanical transport!
And although we have a Hyundai i20, which are good cars, I leave that to Jo to move about in!

I doubt there are any "simple" cars left on sale now as legislation is forcing manufacturers to implement technology such as speed limit recognition and lane departure systems, etc.

Working in the motor retail industry has really opened my eyes to how much of a bin fire modern cars are today!, I grew up with points and distributor caps, manual wind up windows and cable controlled handbrakes!
We have whats called a master tech at work, Chris, and Chris doesn’t have a toolbox, he has a bank of laptops!, as thats what you need to fix the bloody things now!

This is why when I got a 'new' car last year (a 2013 Volvo) I wanted a proper cable operated handbrake with a lever in the car and a manual gearbox with a clutch, that way if things do go wrong the handbrake can be release and the gearbox put in neutral so it can be pushed or towed.
A few years ago I got stuck in a jam on the M6, when we started moving the cause turned out to be a Land Rover Discovery that had bricked itself in the outside lane of the 4 lane carriageway, there were 4 big skid marks going across to the hard shoulder where Highways had dragged it with their Shogun, to the hard shoulder on skid plates, with all four wheels locked.

and Chris doesn’t have a toolbox, he has a bank of laptops!, as thats what you need to fix the bloody things now!

And it's gotta be a bank of, due to conflicting system requirements and licensing quirks of all the software packages used



My car is a 2015 Fiat. It is as great as a modern car goes - Technologically it is an early 00s car like most all Fiats of recent years (maybe not the very latest) are

Mechanical hand brake, manual gear, electronic features go as far as some basic ESP and tire pressure sensors. Nothing else

And economy wise, with 1.4l petrol engine it is damn efficient

Absolutely epic car, but can't say for sure if something even remotely as good is still made new nowadays

I had to laugh a few days ago at a Facebook advert that came up in my feed. It was for a smart shower and it's advertised highlight was that you could activate it from your bed so that it would be at the desired temperature when you came to use it!?

Now I work as a software developer and think that technology and microprocessors and microcontrollers are an incredible innovation of the 1970s, but technology should be seen as a tool that can help and serve us. But we need to always be in control of tech, not the other way round where people depend on it to the point that it is in control of use

Just because technology can do something doesn't mean that it should.

Agreed, increasingly, technology seems to be used to solve problems that don't exist anywhere than in the minds of people looking to make a fast buck.

There are few levels of this which have significantly different implications

At the low level is this shower - It's a toy, other than the e-waste and little spent energy, it have no large effect on the world

At the high level is AI and places it is getting pushed into - To date i have not seen any use for it which makes our world better. Some uses it is getting into, make our world specifically worse - in areas like altering economical opportunity, breaking social equality, taking away civil and technological liberties, degrading driver competence, and so on