The 2022 aero ruleset is largely about improving the car’s ability to follow and pass each other, so that should be helped.  DRS will remain, but hopefully will be less necessary.

There’s lots of ways to generate downforce that are effective and low-drag, but also not so safe. Vacuum cars or poorly-designed ground effects can have the tendency to very suddenly lose suction and you go from 5G of grip to 1G of grip mid-corner. Then you fly into the barriers and die.

It remains a engineering competition: You have to be a better engineer to win when you have cost constraints. It’s far easier for a RB/Merc/Ferrari engineer to defeat 7 other teams because they simply have more money, more testing resources, etc.

Don’t know about the “there’s no reason for it” - being able to go directly to a city center or even the building I want to go to rather than a huge airport 45 minutes from the center would be very useful. Less sprawl, less travel time, more convenient.

So as a few-hours-later follow-up, it’s worth giving Trump credit: at least for now, it sounds like the stimulus has changed and might end up being direct cash transfers.

It’s ok! The Trump admin is apparently about to pass $850B of tax cuts as their stimulus. Lost your job and thus aren’t affect by payroll taxes? Then you’re a poor, and being poor is a moral failing so you don’t deserve any relief. Try not to cough on your betters on your way to the gutter.

My guess is even simulator training would be tough. Pilot comes in, spends 2 expensive hours in the simulator with version 0.99 of the training program and flight software, but then the FAA says “oops, we missed this one task you gotta learn” or Boeing says “oops, we changed the way this button works” and you have to…

Basically all of the more modern jets are designed for a lower cruising speed to lower fuel burn. The 747 was not (or at least, not to the same degree).

It’s telling that they have a bank of lithium batteries for sunless/cloudless days.

They can’t train pilots on a training program that hasn’t been certified.

If it’s an end-of-season test, I imagine they’ll just grab a spare chassis (even Williams probably has at least one spare) that they won’t need anymore given the season is over. They’ll have the 2021 cars in heavy development at that point anyway, so they’d probably have a couple big-wheel suspension prototypes to…

Yep - replace the marginal garbage truck first where it makes the most sense, and then as the tech gets better replace the longer-haul ones that go to the dump fully-loaded.

The engine in a hybrid can be optimized for steady-state output, since the battery can fill holes where sudden acceleration or low-RPM grunt is needed, which leads to better overall efficiency. A pure ICE needs an engine tune that can handle starts, stops, steady-state, sudden accelerations, which might hurt its…

An EV, even charged by coal, still emits less CO2 per mile than an ICE. It’s not much less, but it’s still better. And when that coal plant is converted to burn natural gas (as most coal plants eventually will), then every EV in the county instantly becomes better.

So we if we take these as true:
1) The Taycan actually scored 280 miles in the 2-cycle test, then was downgraded to 200ish miles.
2) That Porsche was allowed to choose which test it was going to use.
3) That Porsche’s engineers are even mildly competent, and had pre-tested the car to find out whether it would score…

Patent it (~$40k), then wait until they use your idea anyway. Then, since they almost certainly won’t license it until a court tells them to, go after them in court ($500k-$1M). Once you’re victorious, you’ll be rolling in the $0.50/car royalties. In a couple decades maybe you’ll be able to pay off your lawyers.

Detecting a certain pattern of blinking lights is going to be one of the easiest things for a computer to do. And it’s not like the code would be “detect blinking lights -> slam on brakes”, it’d be “detect blinking lights -> slow down gradually so as to not cause another accident”.

There’s a really good article on Ars Technica about why cars keep hitting stopped objects: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/06/why-emergency-braking-systems-sometimes-hit-parked-cars-and-lane-dividers/

Summary:
1) Radar CAN detect stopped objects at highway speeds, but is extremely low-res, so you can’t trust a signal…

A driver that has to use all their capabilities to drive the car would’ve stopped in this scenario, as I’m sure hundreds managed to during the time the trooper was stopped.

A private company owns the spot - if you hate what they’re doing, don’t shop there. They’ve apparently made the decision that it at the very least doesn’t harm them. Pregnant moms probably spend a lot of dollars on diapers, groceries, and baby stuff.