Just because I don’t agree does not mean I’m not writing this down for later.

No, please thing this thru. Do you remember when custom ringtone became all the rage? Do you remember how people would set them to their 5 seconds of their favorite song, which would play over and over as they texted someone?

That was not a deserted public road. That was a school zone.

It doesn’t matter if the wheels have the same ground speed. If the front wheels leave the ground first, they start decelerating upward first, and then accelerating downward first, so you’ll have forward rotation.

Dedicated employees do much better QC than dedicated inspectors. My experience with dedicated QC departments is that they never catch problems that affect production, but tend to catch documentation problems (part measures x, has always measured x. documentation says it should measure x+1, because somewhere down the…

One really interesting difference between Japanese and American manufacturing (decades ago, not now) was how they differed in quality control. American manufacturers favored checking parts to spec, while Japanese favored checking assemblies. Both approached has their pros and cons, neither is clearly right or wrong.

Just in time becomes a different story when you are more vertically integrated. Then the question becomes: Do I make a years worth of parts in a single run, and have them stay in inventory (risking oversupply should sales drop, or obsolescence should a design change become necessary) or do I make only a month (or…

The biggest problem with lean manufacturing is that it buys efficiency at the cost of reliability. It can be a trade off worth making, but it is a trade off.

If you want a car that starts to self destruct after 75k miles, you can always get a BMW. 

Yep. Heck cars let you fuck up more without it resulting in any kind of crash (you can’t just spin out a motorcycle).

I keep being amazed how much cheaper track time is on 2 wheels.

How much more track time is  the optional session, and how much does it cost?

No, I’m describing a possible situation, that is on the positive end of probable outcomes toward AV’s. You don’t have to replace all vehicles, or even a majority, but you do have to have enough of them to constitute a sizable minority. If there are 10 vehicles in a scene, and 2 of them are autonomous, then each of…

Yep, that is certainly possible.

I never said anything about timelines.

I think that’s a problem that will lessen in scope as more and more people will choose to be in the autonomous cars. Once a certain critical mass is reached, someone will decide that bullying autonomous cars is reckless driving (and enough people will agree to pass legislation) and then autonomous will start making…

Consider the advantage AI would have once they are more of them on the road. For one, the trash truck will likely be automated. It could probably survey the road ahead and transmit that information to the cars behind it. Incoming cars will also broadcast their intention, even if there are a mix of manual and…

It’s a dick move even if it is turning the tables. Just because others out there are jerks, doesn’t make being a jerk ok.

sh*t boxes compete with used cars. They could offer better reliability at the expense of features. As car reliability improves, it makes less sense to get a cheap, new, but terrible car, and more sense to get a 5-10 year used model. So, cheap new cars are dying off.

Are you referring to the silver colored lines at the back end of the engine? They look, at first glance, to be a tad small for the job. Unless they engine is intended to produce full power in short bursts, that is.