A couple of weeks ago an Audi RS7 did a "piloted" lap of the Hockenheimring with no driver. And once again the media were blinded by the shiny pretty thing and didn't bother to report the real story. I heard people talking about how "driverless cars are finally here" and other such comments. Even the commentary on the day kept making a huge point of how the car was "choosing" a great line in every corner, and how it never put a foot wrong.
Well d'uh. The car was running a software program, nothing more. A clear, dry day, on a grippy post-race track with no other vehicles on the circuit. The car had a millimeter-accurate map of the track in it's software and was using differential GPS to ensure it was at the right place at every millisecond. Braking points, acceleration points, kerbing, apexes - these were all planned in advance. Watching that RS7 lap the circuit without a driver was - in reality - no different to watching a computer animation of the same thing. The car wasn't "choosing" to do anything - it was merely running code. Millions of lines of software doing their thing, backed up by a pair of cameras to look for anything out of the ordinary.
Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm as excited to see driverless cars as I am to die a fiery death falling off a skyscraper mid root-canal. Yes I understand the day will come when all the joy is taken out of driving because of this technology. Yes I know there are people who just can't wait for this day to come, but I'm not one of them. I do however have some excellent news for everyone in the former camp though. The technology does exist right now to have you be able to get into a car and have it drive to wherever you want it to go while you relax and update your facebook status. It's called a taxi.
If you want to see the whole Hockenheim event, Audi Media TV should still have it available: audimedia.tv/en
Monday, November 3, 2014
Monday, October 27, 2014
Top Gear political correctness gone mad.
The recent incident with the Top Gear crew being attacked and having to flee from Argentina highlights how stupid political correctness has become. Clarkson was in a 1991 Porsche that has had the license plate "H982FKL" since the day it was first registered. There are photos of the original car back in the 90's wearing that plate. To suggest that Top Gear, or Clarkson, somehow either made up that plate, or went out of their way to find a numberplate that was - and this is a highly tenuous suggestion - designed to irk the Argentinians, is just stupid. To say that H982FKL resembled "1982 Falklands" is a real stretch, and I think I smell the foul stench of the Daily Mail in this story.
That paper has it in for Clarkson. They're the ones who dug up the deleted clip on the edit suite and used it to claim Clarkson was a racist because he used the 'n' word. Bear in mind that was a deleted clip - it never made it into the final edit. Yet somehow that paper managed to generate outrage about something that never aired. Something that nobody would have known about had they not gone looking for dirt.
Similarly his comment in the Burma special about the bridge having a slope on it was also taken and used to cause outrage. Watch the clip - the bridge is warped, bent, tilted, sloped - call it what you will. But again - to rake up dirt and further their bizarre campaign against Clarkson, the Daily Mail suggested that "slope" was referring to a racist term used to describe one of the locals who happened to be walking across the bridge. Again - a highly tenuous link if you ask me.
And that's the problem today - too many people are too ready to be offended by everything. It used to take a few days for the outrage to appear because people would have to write letters. But in this day and age of instant-everything 24-7 with all the social networks and always-online connections, people can spread fake outrage instantly - before a show has even finished airing.
Which brings me to my final point : if you watch Top Gear in the nature in which it's intended (three dickheads arsing around with cars) then it's a great TV show and it's funny (unless it's the US version in which case it's a seriously unfunny train wreck). If you watch it wanting to be offended, then yes - you're going to be offended. I don't think there's a race, country, manufacturer, celebrity, political group or religion that Top Gear has left alone across all its series.
That paper has it in for Clarkson. They're the ones who dug up the deleted clip on the edit suite and used it to claim Clarkson was a racist because he used the 'n' word. Bear in mind that was a deleted clip - it never made it into the final edit. Yet somehow that paper managed to generate outrage about something that never aired. Something that nobody would have known about had they not gone looking for dirt.
Similarly his comment in the Burma special about the bridge having a slope on it was also taken and used to cause outrage. Watch the clip - the bridge is warped, bent, tilted, sloped - call it what you will. But again - to rake up dirt and further their bizarre campaign against Clarkson, the Daily Mail suggested that "slope" was referring to a racist term used to describe one of the locals who happened to be walking across the bridge. Again - a highly tenuous link if you ask me.
And that's the problem today - too many people are too ready to be offended by everything. It used to take a few days for the outrage to appear because people would have to write letters. But in this day and age of instant-everything 24-7 with all the social networks and always-online connections, people can spread fake outrage instantly - before a show has even finished airing.
Which brings me to my final point : if you watch Top Gear in the nature in which it's intended (three dickheads arsing around with cars) then it's a great TV show and it's funny (unless it's the US version in which case it's a seriously unfunny train wreck). If you watch it wanting to be offended, then yes - you're going to be offended. I don't think there's a race, country, manufacturer, celebrity, political group or religion that Top Gear has left alone across all its series.
Monday, October 20, 2014
Has Formula 1 become complacent about safety?
After Jules Bianchi's awful crash in the Japanese Grand Prix a few weeks ago, I saw the headline I used as the title of this post - "Has Formula 1 become complacent about safety?". I found this to be a knee-jerk comment by an uninformed journalist. F1 doesn't like accidents. The governing body and the drivers association work hand in hand to ensure that F1 is as safe as possible but it is, in the final analysis, a motorsport, and motorsports are by their very nature, dangerous.
There hasn't been a death in F1 since Imola in 1994 - when Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna were both killed in separate accidents. Jules Bianchi's crash was the result of a series of unfortunate coincidences that happened to line up badly. The change in weather, the wear rate of the tyres, the locations of the cars on the track, the puddles, the prior accident, the presence of the recovery vehicle - nobody would ever predict that series of events aligning unless we'd seen it happen first-hand.
You can't make an F1 car capable of surviving the sort of crash he had because it's so rare - in fact it's the first time it's ever happened. How do you make a super lightweight F1 car capable of plowing into a 5 ton tractor without injury to the driver? You can't. You can attempt to mitigate the chances of it happening with new recovery vehicle rules, and modifications to the recovery vehicles themselves - for example adding skirts to the sides of the recovery vehicles so that the F1 cars can't submarine "under" them.
But to look at what happened to Bianchi and then come up with that headline, I thought that was irresponsible - flippant almost. That headline implied that something the driver's association, the FIA and Formula One Management did contributed to the accident and injury. Clearly it didn't - none of those three groups were involved in any decision that affected the outcome. It's not like they decided on some design decision of the vehicles that caused the accident, or contributed to it. It was a tragic accident - nothing more. Steps will be taken to try to ensure it doesn't happen again but nobody can predict every eventuality, and the simple truth of the matter is that F1, today, is as safe as it's ever been given the nature of the sport.
There hasn't been a death in F1 since Imola in 1994 - when Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna were both killed in separate accidents. Jules Bianchi's crash was the result of a series of unfortunate coincidences that happened to line up badly. The change in weather, the wear rate of the tyres, the locations of the cars on the track, the puddles, the prior accident, the presence of the recovery vehicle - nobody would ever predict that series of events aligning unless we'd seen it happen first-hand.
You can't make an F1 car capable of surviving the sort of crash he had because it's so rare - in fact it's the first time it's ever happened. How do you make a super lightweight F1 car capable of plowing into a 5 ton tractor without injury to the driver? You can't. You can attempt to mitigate the chances of it happening with new recovery vehicle rules, and modifications to the recovery vehicles themselves - for example adding skirts to the sides of the recovery vehicles so that the F1 cars can't submarine "under" them.
But to look at what happened to Bianchi and then come up with that headline, I thought that was irresponsible - flippant almost. That headline implied that something the driver's association, the FIA and Formula One Management did contributed to the accident and injury. Clearly it didn't - none of those three groups were involved in any decision that affected the outcome. It's not like they decided on some design decision of the vehicles that caused the accident, or contributed to it. It was a tragic accident - nothing more. Steps will be taken to try to ensure it doesn't happen again but nobody can predict every eventuality, and the simple truth of the matter is that F1, today, is as safe as it's ever been given the nature of the sport.
Monday, October 13, 2014
Oh the irony.
A couple of weeks ago, a colleague of mine was reading an article about Tesla's new gigafactory that they're going to build to manufacture batteries. It was mentioned that the entire roof of the facility would be covered in solar panels to offset the running cost. One hapless commentator then posted this :
"D'uh - solar panels only work in the day time - what's the point of that?"
To which the first, only, and best reply was: "I know. Wouldn't it be amazing if there was some way to store all that power generated in the daytime so it could be re-used at night?"
Well - I thought it was funny.
But it did raise an interesting point about internet trolls - how can you tell nowadays if the commenters are trolling, or if they really don't know the answer to the question they're posing?
"D'uh - solar panels only work in the day time - what's the point of that?"
To which the first, only, and best reply was: "I know. Wouldn't it be amazing if there was some way to store all that power generated in the daytime so it could be re-used at night?"
Well - I thought it was funny.
But it did raise an interesting point about internet trolls - how can you tell nowadays if the commenters are trolling, or if they really don't know the answer to the question they're posing?
Monday, October 6, 2014
What would you do with $2.5bn?
The developer of Minecraft recently sold out to Microsoft to the tune of $2.5bn (yes, with a 'b'). Naturally the topic of conversation in our office turned to 'what would you do with that sort of money?'. The obvious items came up and when we started talking about cars, I said I'd buy an Aston Martin Vanquish. We played with the calculator a bit and figured out that if you walked into a dealer at 9am and kept them talking until 1pm, you'd have made enough interest in that 4 hours to pay for the car with cash. At which point someone mentioned that I could just buy Aston Martin outright and still have a huge chunk of change left over. That's a sobering thought : if I came into $2.5bn, I could by an entire luxury car company and still have $1.9bn left over. Meaning I could pretty much just have any of their vehicles I wanted, in any colour (not monochrome) with any options I wanted, without really having to think about it. Heck - I could buy an F1 racing team and have money left over. I could buy a huge tract of land somewhere and have Hermann Tilke design me a race track that I could race all my Aston Martins on, with friends.
So what would you do with that sort of money, apart from paying off your house, and hiring a great bodyguard and a lawyer?
So what would you do with that sort of money, apart from paying off your house, and hiring a great bodyguard and a lawyer?
Monday, September 29, 2014
How soon is too soon?
Nobody is ever going to accuse Formula One of being a cheap spectator sport. Everything about it is expensive from the tickets to the concessions and everything in between. In 2010 my wife and I went to the Singapore Grand Prix for our 10th anniversary, and as we were flying home, we decided we needed to go back. We both love F1 and Singapore, so it seemed like a natural fit. We decided 2015 would be the year to do it again - then we stood some chance of being able to pay off the first trip before doing it all over again.
So a couple of weeks ago, the Singapore GP facebook page posted "super early bird" tickets for the 2015 race - two weeks before the 2014 race had taken place. Essentially, the day that the 2015 calendar was announced, the tickets went on sale.
Normally I don't pay much attention to these sorts of things, but knowing that 2015 is when we are planning to go again, I figured it was worth a look. The executive summary is this : I saved $640 by booking the tickets two weeks ago. If I were to buy them right now - today - they cost more. And if I wait until almost any time after January 1 2015, the cost goes up again.
So when is it "too soon" for things like this? I would argue 'never'. If you know you're going to want to do something, and an offer or opportunity comes up, take it. Like oil changes. You know you're going to be changing the oil in your car this year at some point (hopefully twice). If you see a coupon for money off, use it - get the oil now, and use it when the time comes.
Same for almost any sort of maintenance. So you're supposed to take your car in in November for it's annual checkup and lookover. If the dealer you use is having a promotion this week, then do it this week.
When you save a little bit of money here and there, it all adds up. Being smart about when and where you save the money - that's the key. And if you want to do anything to do with F1 as a spectator, snap up the bargains as soon as you see them because they don't happen often.
So a couple of weeks ago, the Singapore GP facebook page posted "super early bird" tickets for the 2015 race - two weeks before the 2014 race had taken place. Essentially, the day that the 2015 calendar was announced, the tickets went on sale.
Normally I don't pay much attention to these sorts of things, but knowing that 2015 is when we are planning to go again, I figured it was worth a look. The executive summary is this : I saved $640 by booking the tickets two weeks ago. If I were to buy them right now - today - they cost more. And if I wait until almost any time after January 1 2015, the cost goes up again.
So when is it "too soon" for things like this? I would argue 'never'. If you know you're going to want to do something, and an offer or opportunity comes up, take it. Like oil changes. You know you're going to be changing the oil in your car this year at some point (hopefully twice). If you see a coupon for money off, use it - get the oil now, and use it when the time comes.
Same for almost any sort of maintenance. So you're supposed to take your car in in November for it's annual checkup and lookover. If the dealer you use is having a promotion this week, then do it this week.
When you save a little bit of money here and there, it all adds up. Being smart about when and where you save the money - that's the key. And if you want to do anything to do with F1 as a spectator, snap up the bargains as soon as you see them because they don't happen often.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)