The logical conclusion of replacing human skill with technology is to take out the useless human completely. As passenger planes in fact do.
I think you are completely wrong. Cars on a given race track driven by computers are a relatively simple problem. And unlike humans, computers are exact, allowing the maximum speed to be driven.
Sorry. From the discussion, it is however obvious that this is
*your* measure. Which is sad.
And robot operators, as logical conclusion.
Apparently in Greece you operated your carburetor manually every intake cycle in the past. I am impressed.
Passenger planes have Pilots and co pilots Leon, they do have auto pilot which assists the pilot on long haul flights and this is extremely useful, as it can do more or less everything, but it still needs to pilot to input the correct coordinates and settings, and believe me if you knew how often problems occurred with these systems you would never fly again, plus there are many back systems to override the computer in case of failure, plus every calculation done by the onboard computer is double checked by the pilot and co pilot, The pilot is also monitoring everything manually, and has a analog back up of almost every single digital instrument. The aircraft is also monitored by various ground controls all the time it airborne. For each hour the plane spends airborne you are probably talking an investment of upwards of 100 man hours spent, not exactly computer controlled is it?
A plane is a relatively easy vehicle to control via computer as the 3 dimensional area around which a plane travels is pretty much consistent, defined by the laws of physics, the amount of variables are mainly weather and height which affects the density of the air on which the plane rides. Once a plane has reached its designated cruising altitude if it drifts up, down, left or right by 10m there is no problem, as long as it knows it has drifted and makes allowances. This is far more consistent than the surface a car drives upon which can and does change considerably, if a car drifts off the track by even 2m someone is probably dead, obstacles like stalled cars on the start line, oil spillage from blown turbos, varying amount of rubber left off the racing line. A tracks adhesion will change dramatically throughout the course of an hour, braking points and turn in points will change.
I have heard there was a car that was developed by an American university that drove across America, which was a fantastic achievement, but it is not motorsport, if you look at a good racer he is not only processing an monumental amount of information extremely quickly, he is also pre-empting the car, the track and the other drivers, he also using emotion. If you look at Donnington 1993 with Senna, Hill and Prost battling it out, those guys were driving beyond the limit of the car near on every turn, it is that emotion and passion, forgetting the cold calculations of physics, and saying sod this I am going to win, that makes great racing drivers.
In my opinion it will not be in our lifetime that we will see solely computer driven cars beating human drivers, it is that lack of exactness that makes senna, Prost Schumacher etc that good, these guys do not drive at maximum speed, it is a cliché but they drive at 102% not 100%.
I do not measure my MX-5 sport car ability by speed while its on the road, I care more about how I feel driving it, On the track I care more about lap times and speed than the overall feel, although feeling what the car is doing and feeling comfortable with the car close to its limit are a major thing, I cannot see what is sad about wanting to get lower lap times Leon, I will enjoy myself if I do a 2 minute lap or a
1.50 lap, but its nice to know you are making advances.
I did not adjust my carbs per intake cycle Leon, that would be crazy, there is no way you can make adjustments fast enough, or monitor all the connected components quick enough, Whoops sorry yes there is its called fuel injection controlled by a ECU.
Just for the record though, the old type carburettors were always a compromise, the parameters in which a carburettor can run as efficiently as possible are fairly small, A carburettor can only be set to run optimally within a certain band of humidity and temperature, if the ambient is outside these settings then, ideally the carbonator will need tuning again, in most cases the gains or losses were comparatively low, so we did not notice, (did you ever notice how the air filter intake was commonly connected to the exhaust manifold?) but in a race situation, you get any free of charge power increase you can. On my 2 stroke race bikes I would do a plug chop and if needed rejet the bike every time out of the pits.
ABS doesn't keep you from hitting things - ABS helps you maintain control while stopping. So if you'd attempted to steer around that deer while braking, you might have had a chance.
Which is really silly, because ABS - "anti-lock braking system" - isn't intended to decrease stopping distance. It's distressing how many people I've met that think they can follow more closely on the freeway because they have ABS.
Precisely. Keeping the car from spinning or the front-end from pushing... that's what ABS does.
I understand about ABS, but unfortunately there was also no steering avoidance possible with this accident. I was going approximately 55 to
60 mph, saw a flash of brown in front of me and felt the impact at the same time. There was no time to turn the steering wheel and my foot hadn't even lifted off of the accelerator until immediately after the impact. I wasn't even positive that it was a deer until I saw it dead on the road. We have a lot of deer in my area and I am used to watching out for them, but this one made that perfect leap at just the wrong time.
In this case, the results probably would have been the same even if I had no brakes at all, I would have just rolled further down the road after hitting the animal.
Right - that's what I thought. It sure sounded like an "out of nowhere" incident. There's not a lot of defensive driving you can do to avoid something like that...
Carbs are very tunable. The way to get most power out of 1960's muscle cars was (is) to keep a selection of needles to tweak your carburaton as needed, and the performance change of the vehicle is noticeable.
Some 1950's cars allowed you to manually set the spark advance so that you could optimize engine performance as the track coditions changed. This was particuarly advantageous during lond distance racing.
More recently, at least one NHRA tean hooked up a GPS receiver to their a data acquistion setup in a Funny Car. This was quickly banned as this is the type of racing that is most ammenable to driving replacement.
Ferrari also has done GPS work to feed their stabiltiy control and braking setups in their car. F1 is the closest that has come to eliminating the driver and their races are boring. Anyone who witnessed the Daytona 500 can attest to the fact that obsolete technoloty (carburators, no abs, no stability control) can and does make for very extiing racing.
As far as self driving vehicles are concerned, they are still a long ways off. Last year, the US Army conducted a cross country competition for autonomous (not remotely guided) vehicles. They took all comers, a One million prize, for a vehicle to comple an off-road cours in the Nevada desert. Car and Driver magazine had an article on it, and the results were hilarious.
There has been at least one documented case that everyone in the cockpit was asleep. One woke up just before the landing.
You got it all backwards. *Speed* is not a problem for a computer, unpredictability is. The problems on a given track is *much* easier to programs, including oil slicks, other cars, etc, than a trip around an unknown block with unpredictable vehicles and pedestrians. And a computer can *compute* the temperature and condition of the tire thread, it does not have to guess.
Speak for yourself. I am not that old. I see myself as a young man on the threshold of life.
Incorrect. I have a graph showing performance achieved by actual race car drivers versus friction circle. There are within 20% of it, but *not* over it. A computer could do it better.
Of course, if you believed the issue is the demonstration of skill, like I do, so what? But you have told us that for you the issue is *speed*, using any technical means to achieve it. You might want to face reality about the power of the technical means available to achieve your objective.
Well, your earlier statements implied you did. You now back off from that claim, huh?
Yeah, I'm not sure that even a computer/robot driver could have avoided that one. :-) The deer was the first thing larger than a small bird that I have ever hit at high speed. It sucks, but at least there were no injuries other than the deceased deer. Most of the impact was on the passenger side and I had my child in the car, so I was especially thankful that it didn't come through the windshield.
FACT: Pilots do fly planes, there is not 1 fully automated passenger plane in the world that operates. FACT: The pilot will do a visual and physical check of the plane before anything else, the pilot will then run through a check list, before even moving from the dock, the ATC (air traffic controller) gives a plane a designated take off spot and position, the Pilots Taxi the plane to that position, the pilot then takes off, they throttle back to cruising speed, the pilot then programs the auto pilot, they SHOULD monitor the instruments during the whole flight, and they talk with various ATC stations as they continue on their flight path, the pilot then lands, the pilot then taxis to his designated parking spot. FACT: There are many devices that ASSIST pilots during their flight, but they are set by a humans, they are monitored by a human, and then there are analogue back ups for everything. If you have a documented case of a irresponsible flight crew, that are hopefully now unemployed then great, but even if they were all asleep, they twirled the dials and switches with their human hands, to a flight path designated and chosen by the human sitting in the ATC station, before nodding off.
But back to the initial point of technology in cars, FACT: Cars cannot (at this time) drive completely by themselves, if speed is a problem, or not, is not really relevant, as human interaction is needed throughout the journey. FACT: Even with all our computers, electronics and resources we still cannot automate something which most drivers feel is a fairly simple task. DRIVING. My view and hope is, we will never have a fully automated car on the public roads, assistance is always helpful but not total control, electronics and software are never going to be that reliable for me to trust the whole driving operation to them. I do not believe that we will see a fully automated car challenge and beat a top racing driver on a track within the next 60 years if that, helps work out the age equation,
FYI.
I never said speed was a problem for computers. my statement was: "if you look at a good racer he is not only processing an monumental amount of information extremely quickly, he is also pre-empting the car, the track and the other drivers"
There is driving around a track, and there is racing around a track, this discussion was with regard to racing, not driving around a track, In which case I would say it is actually more difficult to get a car to race at a competitive pace with other cars on the track than it is drive on the road.
I would be extremely cautious about the friction circle data, how was the
100% point goal calculated and arrived at? Since we are talking of only driver inputs here, how did they differentiate between driver error and mechanical, dynamic errors, wear and tear, slippage? If 100% was the complete limit of the mechanics and dynamics of the car, then I would say 20% is extremely low, maybe the driver was having a bad day. If a computer can do better then why hasn't it? (because it cannot).
I asked.
You said
Again maybe its the translation, but its a pretty big jump from the statement above, to implying I adjust my carbs per intake cycle, for a start I did mention the words INTAKE or CYCLE. I did not even mention Greece as I was living in the UK then, so maybe you have the word implying mixed up with imaginative reading?
As I have said before I am very much for technological advances in automotive design, what I am against is snobbish and ill informed attitudes, and I am not having a go at anyone here, I mean mostly the various forms of international media. Its like statements in magazines that say, "this car are not for enthusiasts as it has an automatic gearbox" etc that get my goat. We are all individuals who make our own choices, gives us the information, and we will eagerly take it in, but spare the judgements.
The 95 R I had had AC. My wife would not have let me buy the car if it had not had AC. During the really hot summer months when I was stuck in slow moving traffic I was glad I had it. All other times it was just dead weight.
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