Just opened up the '98 TVR Cerbera Speed 12 on that freeway at the southeast of the map. I got it up to 380-something KM/H.
I have seen the face of god
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Because of a real-life music festival in my town my rental car options for a work trip on Friday were Full-Sized Pickup and Luxury. I chose Luxury and got a Chrysler 300, the McMansion Hell of cars.
(with that paint and those wheels)
I love the face plagiarized from Bentley combined with the GUN METAL GREY wheels that are surely reused from a Challenger trim package. The seats are mysteriously bad with lumbar “support” that adjusts in two dimensions to push you out of the bolstering. There is a quartz analog clock on the dashboard.
Report on the state of whiz-bang technology in cars:
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Adaptive cruise control - great. Saves your knee a lot of work on the road. Also seemed to brake for me over ~40mph, which I wasn’t sure if was the brakes or transmission which caused me some consternation, anxiety, confusion, and acceptance re: “NO ENGINE BRAKE BY CITY ORDINANCE” signs - how are they going to know? Why do they care?
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Lane keep assist - at first I thought the car was broken, then thought “wow it’s like when I forget to turn off assists in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.” It keeps you going straight in your lane like bumpers in a bowling alley technically keep your ball going forward. But as I was barreling through Big Sandy late at night it was nice to just keep my hands on the wheel as a formality.
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Transmissions that you operate with something other than a lever to the right of the wheel - Chekov’s dial. RIP Anton ;_;
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Steering wheels with controls on the opposite side of the wheel - obvious in hindsight, but when combined with paddle shifters means you might slip and turn up the volume on your engine instead.
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CarPlay is a revelation in triaging the demands on your attention, but it is useless if you’re off the interstate and don’t have a cell signal, which is pretty common for driving-for-work in the US.
I think based just on the lane keep assist I will probably not be comfortable with a fully autonomous car unless they’re windowless pods, but I can see the future of US transit through converting roads into rails with cameras and computers.
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I think this is for semi trucks, which make that loud BLATTT noise if they engine brake. It’d be pretty funny to hear a sedan doing that sound, though
My understanding is that driver assist and autonomous driving are on fairly different tracks; the sophistication of the sensors and analysis in the autonomous cars is miles ahead and not something that can be worked up to by, say, improving the program in a Tesla. That’s why the take they steering wheel away in the Waymo cars; you can’t realistically ask a human to not drive but ‘be ready to respond within 60ms if anything goes wrong’, so don’t pretend to do so. By contrast the driver assist will have an upper bound of automation before they can’t count on driver attention, and they’re starting to do things like disengage if they track the driver’s face not looking at the road.
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I don’t recall if it was posted here, but one of my favorite Mazda oddities was a patent application for a system that would detect driver inattention and respond by rerouting the GPS to a more interesting road.
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The engine brakes they mean are also known as compression brakes or jake brakes. They work by leaving the engine connected to the wheels while cutting the fuel supply and use the moving pistons to compress air in the cylinders. The BRATT noise is the high pressure air in the cylinders being vented before the pistons move back down so that the energy in the air isn’t returned to the wheels and the brake actually slows the truck down.
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yeah but when can I get my car to tell me whether the reactor is online and/or all systems are nominal when I start it
This can be done now, actually.
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Honestly tho, if kids are learning about/are able to discern at a very young age how Toyota is reading the rules for the width of the rear spoiler and comes up with a solution that, in effect, is cheating, I am so looking forward to what they will come up with in 2035 or so.
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Oh yeah, I wanted to post this sick drift video itt
It features some great aerial photography thanks to drones. I’ve never seen that before. Maybe some of you already have. It’s still super impressive!
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utterly in love with horizon 4, this 2 week game pass demo is an exceptional value
I have like 15 cars and every single one of them has a unique personality to me and I love upgrading them the way I love tweaking armored core stats and the countryside races are all incredible and the various seasons are all gorgeous
no competition for my favourite big expensive game of the year
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hit a lot of bucket list type stuff with this game today:
- first time racing against a friend
- finished all of the horizon events
- got my first car over >999 rating
I think that was in the neighbourhood of 10 hours over 6 days?
and it’s all gravy from here
so so good
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also there are so many cars in this! And they all behave faithfully! I’m not much of a car person but when I find out I just got a Renault Clio and an old Jaguar within minutes of each other after a race that goes rapidly uphill and down around a little English village it really hits the dopamine pretty hard!!
Seriously like playing gran turismo for the first time
OKAY FINE I’M DOWNLOADING IT NOW
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oh my god this game is so pretty
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this may be the biggest coup d’etat by MS for a while - Forza has its fanbase, as does GT. They kept at it and tweaked/adapted the formula from the first game onwards, and managed to make people give this series a shot - successfully, as we can see.
it’s always great to have some feedback from people that aren’t long time players of a series, or even the genre, so be sure to share more impressions of what you like or dislike, or what may feel odd to you.
And i can wholeheartedly second the notion of this game looking good - the weather and seasons give each moment that air of being unique and never coming back, thus making it significant if you pay attention to it - and if you don’t since you are racing , drifting, cruising, chatting or collecting things, it just looks pretty while being perfectly entertaining.
It’s hard not to love it, and that’s a rare thing for a number-title, I think…
it’s very special. I played the mainline Forza 6 that was free on Windows because it was free and I hadn’t touched a proper racing sim in ages at that point, and I enjoyed how complete and expensive it was – I think I mentioned how it struck me as like, a successor to flight simulator – but this is so much more as a game; it makes the cars themselves more interesting while being less singlemindedly focused on high end machinery, the downtime and the curve are lovely without feeling heavy handed (especially if you turn off and ignore the skill system), and the world is wonderful. just an unabashedly good expensive videogame. and this one was also effectively free.
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I saw a blog post from the creative director at Turn 10 recently (Chris Esaki replaced Dan Greenwalt as Greenwalt is now director of a small team overseeing the franchise as a whole) saying that because Playground Games has been acquired by MS. They are now fully free to focus on their own game and no longer supporting Playground (Who are staffing up huge on their Horizon and “We’re not saying its Fable, but it’s totally Fable” teams so they won’t really need a large amount of support). So the Motorsport team is doing a complete re-work of FM7 between handling physics, online multiplayer and lighting. There’s been rumors for a while FM8 will skip 2019 for 2020. So they are kinda getting into a good position. to re-vitalise the franchise a bit with the extended support and then launching with a better FM8 around the time the next gen consoles come out
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following up on re: NASCAR
so, by chance, the PS4 youtube application decided to recommend 15 minutes of the Charlotte Roval, provided by the official nascar Channel.
well, i started catching up on the whole 2018 season, since it’s quite convenient to do so during breakfast or when cooking.
Harvick and Bush/Bush Jr. winning every other race makes me feel like nothing changed between 2011 and now, except for the odd Kyle Larson or Stenhouse Jr turning up every now and then.
Except for Johnson, who seems to have used up the luck of seven years/championships, huh!