rootusrootus
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The technology required to make it possible for you to send a remote HVAC command to your car without Ford necessarily being able to tell that you did that is complex enough that I expect most FAANG companies wouldn't pull it off successfully.
Well, didn't GM just lose a 9-digit lawsuit? That sounds like punishment.
A 9-digit payout is a lot of incentive. I imagine the pennies they get from selling your data surreptitiously just is not worth the hassle. It costs way less than $220M to write up a privacy policy and provide working toggles in the user interface. And they may even generate goodwill.
They only tried to crowd it out with the word "No." however.
So the right answer is to provide an option for you to do that. Which hopefully this policy is saying that they do. But if what they are asserting is correct (and I think it is plausibly so), the majority of customers want features that can only function with the data.
> do you provide the data to insurance companies? This website is opaque enough that I can't even find the answer to that question.
It is literally one of the few specific questions they address:
"Does Ford sell customer data about your personal vehicle's driving behavior to data brokers or insurance companies?" And their answer was one word.
Because a lot of people like the ability to remotely access certain features on their car, and this requires telemetry.
That sent me down a rabbit hole. Seems like having rules on what you can name your own kid are in place in several European countries. From an American perspective, I find this simultaneously off-putting (you are going to tell ME what I can name MY OWN child?!!) and also probably a net positive. I've often thought that a lot of tragedeighs could be averted if hospital registrars ran the names through a checker and pushed back on the parents to verify they really wanted that. But that's based on an assumption that it's often not intentional.
They are claiming 200+ wpm on a prototype. Half that speed would put you in the top tier of typists, and the number of people that get anywhere close to 200 is vanishingly small.
> Seems unlikely to happen since the battery is part of a space optimization problem.
I agree, in general, but the Lightning is a counter example. It uses modules, which do not maximize usage of available space, but do make it way easier to replace just one part and not the whole pack. And it is way more plausible that replacements could economically be made in the future that fit the same footprint. Maybe using entirely different battery chemistry.
Here is a picture:
https://www.rdforum.org/attachments/222074/
The F150 production was halted because Ford had a constraint on aluminum that capped how many F150s (of any variety) they could produce, and the Lightning had the tightest margins. It was the best selling electric truck when they pulled the plug. And Farley could see the writing on the wall -- we were headed into a (minimum) four year period where the federal government was going to actively punish anybody making technology perceived to be 'green'. Easier to switch over to something less of a political target and give over the future of cars to the Chinese. Farley drove a Chinese EV for some time as his daily driver and he knew the US manufacturers were cooked. Take a look at Australia now, that is where we are headed.
> chevy volt
Yes, GM screwed you over on that. Best case is it failing under warranty and them buying back the car. The nice thing about the battery in the Lightning is that it isn't really a bespoke pack. It's a big sealed case with 9 battery modules wired together inside. So they don't have to spin up a custom production line to make more, they just need to build boxes of the same dimensions and compatible voltages, or update the BMS calibration. This is a way easier lift than making a custom one-off battery pack for a Volt.
> if you look at something at aptera
I see a tricycle, not a car, with a small number of die-hard enthusiasts who are slowly recognizing that it is DOA. Best I can tell, it's just a grift at this point. They've been making big promises since 2006, been liquidated once already, and still haven't delivered anything. They've narrowed their definition of success to "up to 40 cars for the most enthusiastic customers", maybe in early 2027 ... if they get the funding. Riiiiight.
That's weird, the reason EVs have been so easy to total is that the residual value of the battery pack is high and therefore it takes less damage to reach the breakeven point than it does with an ICEV.
But an important difference is that LFP is available today. Expecting a dramatic shift to sodium ion anytime soon is wishful thinking. Battery tech evolves steadily but slowly.
I can go most of a week on the Lightning's battery, and it will shut down the 240V 30A outlet well before leaving me stranded. Thankfully the longest outage we've had in my lifetime (and I'm not a young man) is 3 days, for an extremely rare severe ice storm.
And then some of us scratch both itches at the same time. I daily a Tesla M3P but I also bought an F150 Lightning. Which, ironically perhaps, my wife daily drives. I don't know that it qualifies for it's own zip code, but it has all the upsides of a truck with all the upsides of an EV.
Quibble - an RS3 is probably never going to beat an M3P. Not quite enough power.
I kinda wonder if politics is what has killed Facebook. Between my choice to block anybody who posts the boring team politics soundbyte of the day, and my unwillingness to post something that might invite that same kind of response ... I don't see much in my feed. And I bet that's true for a lot of other people.
But ... I do notice a lot number of people who just sit there watching reels. So FB is probably doing just fine.
> Before jaywalking was a thing
... jay driving was a thing first.
I would suspect safety had more to do with it than anything else. The closest I've ever personally come to hitting someone was because they jaywalked directly in front of my car, after walking between two parked vans so they were not visible until they strode right out in front of me. It was a near thing, but my reaction time is good and I am pretty attentive to what is in front of me. But physics is a harsh mistress, it is a dumb game to play.
We're not going to get rid of cars, much as some people think that would be a net improvement, so the sensible thing to do is make pedestrian crossings plentiful, obvious, and respected by both drivers and walkers. Public space is shared.
I'm reminded of how the head of Oregon's DMV once described the legalities of merging onto the highway. "Yielding is the law, merging is what we do." Technically the merging traffic has to yield to the traffic already on the highway, but this does not mean traffic on the highway can block them. In fact, in Oregon we have a law that would make that likely to count as speed racing, a class A infraction. I.e. something you do not want your insurance company to get wind of.
What about the recipient of the food, where do they factor in?
Did he tell her to move off the sidewalk? Or did he tell her to stay where she was and let the robot navigate around her?
> Personally, I don't think a bubble burst will be much fun, but hey.
Agreed, but if there is a bubble, then bursting sooner rather than later is probably the better outcome.
> Many people are tired of watching the world slowly getting worse
It does seem like in the past 10-15 years the timeline has gone pretty dark.
It sucked at first, I definitely got some wild responses from the AI helper at Google Search, but they seem to have bumped up the model capability over the last couple months. It's surprisingly pretty good now. Sometimes I'll use Claude instead, but for little things I've been pretty happy with the quick result from Googling.
I just want it to pop because I'm like six years out from my intended retirement date and sequence of returns risk will be high for me (retiring early). There are ways to mitigate that risk, obviously, but I'd feel better not sliding into retirement right at the moment the stock market is riding a pretty obvious bubble if I can avoid it.
> AI drastically reducing the barrier to game dev -> less users on Roblox
Is that really a thing? AI can make mediocre games for your own amusement, but Roblox is a social experience.
Stocks going up has been so normal for so long that it doesn't get much press. Any significant drop is way more newsworthy.
> Give it a few days and we'll be back where we were
Perhaps, though I think today is the lowest in 6 weeks.