Drivers are prone to error, but so are coders.

I'm finding it difficult to understand why, in an era when so many people interact directly with software on a regular basis — and know first hand how temperamental and buggy it very often is — we are so uncritical of the idea of the driverless car.
People are fond of saying that most car accidents are the result of human error. Consider this : 100% of software defects are the result of human error. Untold thousands of person-hours have been spent building operating systems (both smartphone and desktop) and the programs that run on them: systems that have a prescribed set of machine-readable inputs. And still we get bugs, software updates that render our computers unusable, viruses and other malware, the Blue Screen Of Death, the Spinning Beachball Of Death, core dumps, system panics, and the rest of it. No one has shown us why we should believe that the software running driverless cars — where the set of possible inputs is much larger and much less predictable — would be any better.
A driver-augmentation system that helps with lanekeeping in a prepared environment? Sure. Heads-up displays to conserve and focus driver attention? You bet. Awareness-management systems that alert drivers to potential trouble? Absolutely — as long as that much-maligned but still miraculous human situational intelligence is there to quarterback the whole thing.
Here's a funny thing about driverless cars and safety: people talk about humans being inherently dangerous behind the wheel, but we know for a fact that not all humans are equally dangerous behind the wheel. Even better, we know which humans tend to be most dangerous behind the wheel — because insurance companies know it, and they convey that data to us in the form of the premiums they charge. By a significant margin, the most dangerous drivers — that is, the most expensive to insure — are young people in their 20's. Want safer roads? We could start by raising the minimum driving age or enforcing better driver training and stricter testing.
Software is written by humans that work for corporations. Delphi, Intel, Volvo, Google - it doesn't matter. Reality check: corporations are driven by the bottom line. I don't want to be sitting in a car knowing that the corporation behind the software hit some quarterly deadline by taking shortcuts to get something out the door to ensure the board got it's compensation and the shareholders got their dividends. This happens every day. That's the reality of driverless cars.
If my smart home thermostat has a bug in it, the house might be too cold or too hot, but it's has zero potential to kill me. That is simply not true when it comes to driverless cars.

Right of way is there for a reason

Right of way, or priority if you're American, is a basic driving concept that exists for a reason. For example when you're on a fast main road, you have right of way over people turning from side roads. You'd think it would be obvious but too many people today don't understand that.
Enter this Morgan 4/4 driver who, rather than wait in the central reservation for he traffic to pass, decided he had right of way instead and went on to cause a pretty substantial accident. The instant karma is so gratifying to watch.
Weirdly - and if you have any more info I'd like to know HOW this happened - the police apparently found the Peugeot driver to blame! Despite the Peugeot having right of way, despite the Morgan not looking, not giving way, not stopping in the designated area, despite the video evidence of it clearly being the Morgan's fault, somehow the police blamed the other driver.
This accident was 100% the Morgan driver's fault and the Peugeot driver should not be shouldering any of the blame or cost.

"Magic vision" wipers?

Sometimes car companies come out with stuff which is so bizarre you wonder if any common sense was involved at all. Mercedes are advertising their "Magic Vision" wiper system at the moment, which seems to have been designed by a committee of pedestrians rather than anyone who actually drives a car:

There's a couple of problems here.
The first, obviously, is that they only spray on the down-stroke, meaning the up-stroke will be a skipping, scratching, scraping bounce across a dry windshield.
The second is that there's now 50 nozzles to clog up with calcium instead of just two. The chances of all those sprayers working like they do in the video, in the real world, after a month of use, is zero.
Third, you're being locked into the MB parts chain. You can't go and replace your wiper blades with a better product from your local parts store. And blade/arm mechanisms with built-in sprayers? Yeah those will cost a bomb to replace.
But perhaps the biggest issue I have with this gimmick is that they think that the washer spray interrupts your view of the road, and that it's distracting. The wipers themselves are far more distracting than the washer spray. I hate driving in the rain with wipers going. Instead, I apply RainX to my windshield every couple of months. At any speed much above 20mph, the airflow across the windscreen clears the water off it. At motorway speeds, you barely even see the rain because it's blown up and off the screen so quickly as soon as it hits. On occasion I've been able to do 500 mile trips in the rain without ever once using my wipers.
So Mercedes - if you want to solve the distraction problem - figure out how to permanently treat a windshield with a water repellant what won't wear off. A bonded hydrophobic coating. THEN you'll solve this problem.

Automatic brakes and car washes.

Here's an interesting side effect of all the meddlesome technology finding its way into modern cars: many of them won't go through automatic car washes now without some considerable knowledge and planning by the driver.
The biggest issue is auto-hold parking brakes. Because people are idiots (google for how many people get run over by their own car every day), more and more manufacturers are adding this 'feature' to their cars. Basically, if the engine is running (or off) and the car is in neutral, the parking brake is automatically applied. This means for the conveyor-belt type car washes, where (you guessed it) the car needs to be in neutral with your foot off the brake (or you need to be out of the car with the engine off), the car won't move because it's decided the parking brake needs to be on.
Many vehicles have defeats and overrides for this but none of them are simple, none have these instructions readily published and easy-to-find in the owner's manual, and all are multi-step processes. Some cars - for example the full-size Range Rover Sport - don't have any published method to do this, so if you own one of those, you're not going through an automated car wash whether you want to or not.
The other big problem is all the automation that is creeping in. Pedestrian collision avoidance and low-speed auto-braking might work well when you're crawling in bumper-to-bumper traffic in the city, but when you're crawling along in a car wash tunnel, the brushes, water jets and sponge fins all register as obstructions and the car will automatically apply the brakes even if you're in neutral.
The end result of all this is that more and more vehicles are being damaged in automatic car wash tunnels because they're stopping dead in their tracks (or flat refusing to enter). The ones that stop dead in the tunnels can end up causing pile-up accidents because the conveyor systems might want to just keep pushing the cars behind through the tunnel. Newer systems can detect stalled vehicles and shut the tunnel down, but older ones can't.
If you're expecting the employees at the car wash to know what to do, think again. You're on your own here and almost every automatic car wash will have an iron-clad policy that they're not liable for any damage, and you accept that condition by purchasing a wash.
So be warned. If you drive any of the 33 cars on the (growing) list in the following link, you're in for an adventure (or an accident) if you go to an automatic car wash:
33 vehicles that need special help to drive through a car wash.

Spring motorcycling

If you’ve read my site, you might have come across the page on motorbikes. I ride less now than I used to but I’ve ridden bikes in one form or another since the mid 1980’s. They’re a lot of fun, and a lot of car drivers cold learn a thing or two about driving if they were to spend any time on a motorbike.
Spring is here, which means I want to get out riding again. Around here, the valleys are flat and uninteresting so it’s the mountain roads that see the most motorbike traffic, and when Wolf Creek opens, that’s when the riding really becomes great because it opens up a lot of fantastic roads. Sadly it’s still 5m deep in snow right now.
Nevertheless, knowing that that time is coming, time to get the bike out of hibernation and make sure it’s good for the year. I used to ride year-round, but commuting 120 miles a day in all weathers in all seasons took its toll. I’m firmly a fair-weather rider now – I don’t have to do 100-plus miles in pouring rain. I’ve been there and done that. Yes, you’re on a bike, but it’s a shitty experience all-around.
Inevitably stuff needs attention. Already I’ve found a minor oil leak on the sump – probably the sump gasket. I could go down to my local Triumph dealership and be given the runaround from them, or I could pick up the parts online. I’ve relied pretty heavily on bikebandit.com over the last few years for oddments like this. Odd screws and bolts, the occasional mechanical part, and two years ago a pair of sprockets and a new chain:

The tyres are good this year – they’re relatively new. I threw some Metzeler tires on last year and only put about 300 miles on them so they’re basically new. They’re one of my three go-to brands. I used to use Pirelli motorcycle tires a lot, but more recently I’ve tended to switch back and forth between Metzeler and Avon. I cleaned my bike too, which isn’t a vanity thing. When you spend time hand-cleaning a motorbike, you become re-acquainted with it if you’ve not ridden it for a while. It also helps you find leaks, broken fasteners, rust, sketchy brakes and any number of other things you might not normally be looking for. Yeah it looks nice once it’s cleaned, but the benefits of getting up close and personal with it are not to be scoffed at.
So now I just need the augers and plows to get rid of that last 5m of snow and I’m good to go.

Umm. Electric cars don't use petrol....

Ourisman Chevrolet of Rockville, Maryland claim that the Chevy Bolt's "precision tuned electric drive unit engine [...] will wring every last mile it can out of a drop of fuel":
I don't want to be Captain Obvious here, but an electric car doesn't use petrol.....