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After VW was outed for falsifying environmental data in its cars hundreds of thousand of VW vehicles were taken off the road now sitting in storage sites. Hundreds of thousands of cars now lie in lots in the Mojave Desert, a shuttered suburban Detroit football stadium, and a former Minnesota paper mill in America alone. These vehicles are now in the open slowly breaking down with pollutants entering the environment. Is the the modern cost of corporate greed? What can we do to ensure this never happens again?
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Half a Million VW Vehicles Dumped in Graveyards
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Remember Darwin; building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 08 2018, @05:18PM (1 child)
I've also got 40+ years consulting experience to various car manufacturers. My take is that they cheated on emissions and fuel economy because it was cheaper that way. Which goes back to the first post about greed. When new stricter rules have been mandated, the car industry has had its day in court to fight the rules on technical grounds, and often there has been compromise.
Not sure when this started, but as early as 2009 I've seen a car with DRLs + a sensor. It turns on the normal headlights when it's dark, including the tail lights. This one happened to be a smaller Toyota.
And I'm 100% with you on ABS, around here we often have slush over ice. Locking the wheels (to build up a wedge in front of the tires) actually slows the car down. A relatively easy solution would be for the system to notice that the driver is pumping the brakes (pre-ABS technique) and conclude that the driver is competent to take over--then switch the ABS off for that braking event.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by toddestan on Sunday December 09 2018, @07:32AM
People don't understand ABS. The point of ABS is that it allows you to still steer the vehicle while it's slowing down. That's what it does. It's not intended to stop the car quicker, it's intended to allow the driver to still control the car. Because otherwise once you've locked the wheels on a car without ABS you have no steering control and the car is going to slide wherever it wants to - unless you are quick enough to realize whats happening and start pumping brakes to get some control back.
So yes, without ABS you can stop a car quicker by locking the wheels and letting it slide. That's fine I suppose if there's nothing in the path of where the car is sliding. But I'd much rather have the car with ABS, especially if something is in the way.