2·
12 hours agoGreater than the sum of their parts, love it.
KayLeadfoot
- 4 Posts
- 24 Comments
Joined 23 days ago
Cake day: February 19th, 2025
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Whether it is a feature or a bug depends on how their sales numbers look for Q1 2025.
Call it Schroedinger’s bug.
The Muse’s cleavage knows what’s up.
Yeah, that’s how I read it :)
… Thanks for the downvote, boss XD
Have a great day.
This is the company that saw their North American sales dipping and responded, “let’s discontinue the Challenger and Charger, our 2 recognizable nameplates that give the rest of our lineup a halo effect with our largest buying segment, that’ll fix it!”
Then they brought back the Charger as an EV, which is exactly what that particular fanbase did not want to buy, at a starting price that’ll make your eyes water. Now they’ve announced that they’re doubling back and releasing a gasoline Charger, but by surprise and with no specs available in advance, as though they’re panic-releasing it. It’s a perfect shit show. Corporate idiocy on parade.
The folk with the random alphanumeric username, asking the real questions
Is your Challenger using the dealer installed SiriusXM? That would be for new and CPO vehicles. That seems to be what it is linked to.
Y’all are… surprisingly hard to persuade! I thought sharing a literal image of popup ads in the car would be the proof y’all needed to believe it was happening.
I mean, there are… more images of it happening…? Like, damn. Here’s an instance of it happening in a Challenger.
Reported by drivers as recently as Tuesday.
One of dozens of such reports, confirming make, model, and frequency of the ads (at every stop): https://www.reddit.com/r/Dodge/comments/1j838k8/why_tf_am_i_getting_ads_in_my_car/
I’m the world’s worst journalist, but I do try! When possible, I confirm facts with multiple sources. The “news” aspect here is that they were previously on a different Stellantis brand (Jeep), and now they have expanded to another Stellantis brand (Dodge).
If you have evidence that contradicts, feel free to share.
DON’T GIVE THEM IDEAS!
2·2 days agoWatch these Tesla’s eat shit in “Full” Self-Driving mode because there’s fog, it’s sort of darkly hilarious that human needed to intervene to avoid hitting a fucking freight train:
4 months is “almost” half a year, I guess.
Point of the post is that this popup ad thing has expanded from Jeep (small brand) into Dodge (large brand) from the parent company (Stellantis). What has happened in the meantime is that a bunch of other Dodge drivers has confirmed the issue is widespread and difficult to disable.
(Ope: I got fact-checked, turns out Jeep sells more vehicles per year than Dodge. I’m old, and apparently Dodge has lost a ton of market share since last I checked!
If y’all are concerned about recency, I updated the article to include more images of the popup ads, including one from as recently as 3 days ago.)
Dodge dropped 29% in sales in the USA last year, and something tells me, this isn’t going to have folks lining up to buy Chargers in 2025. Watch the free market* take care of this one.
*Unless you’re Tesla, in which case the market costs $277 million to purchase.
I’m personally skeptical, probably won’t enjoy for myself (at least not til I’m REAL old), but hey, I love this for folks who can’t or don’t like to drive!
Fewer car accidents is good for everybody.
That sensor array is fuckin sweet. If I’m going to trust a car to drive me, I want it to have laser beam eyes that see through pitch blackness and blizzard conditions.
You’re the engineer, I’m just a pickup truck driving comedian, so I’m assuming that I’ve just accurately described a commercial-grade LiDAR array.
The LiDAR arrays are dropping very quickly in price - they’re now low six figures. I anticipate they’ll eventually make production, probably with fewer sensors, but sensors of equal quality. Probably sooner than most folks realize.
This comment section is surprising me with both thoughtful and dark observations about the article. Well, that’s rad! I was expecting a more “good news” crowd on the Uplifting News board, but if y’all want Dark Futurism, I can hang.
You’re 100% correct. Non ADAS vehicles will be a luxury good. There will probably be social pressures, similar to seatbelt adoption, pressuring folks to not drive themselves. 2050 feels like a reasonable time horizon for that to start.
The article covers an academic-style research paper. You might find that section of the full research paper interesting! You spotted something important, but I think you think that city driving is safer, when the opposite is true:
Here’s the part you might find interesting, the “12x safer than human” claim likely greatly understates the safety advantage, just due to the methodology of the study:
“The garaging zip code of the insured vehicle was used as a proxy for the city (Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin) in which the vehicle drives. Waymo also almost exclusively operated on surface streets (non access-controlled freeways) with a unique distribution of driving that is representative of a ride-hailing fleet. In contrast, the benchmark represents the privately insured driver population that resides in these geographic regions. The associated benchmark mileage has more freeway driving than the Waymo ADS. There are several considerations when examining these results with respect to this limitation. First, freeway driving has a lower crash rate (Scanlon et al., 2024a). Including freeway driving makes this benchmark crash rate artificially lower, so, by including freeways in this study’s benchmark, the benchmark crash rate underestimates the true driving risk of where the Waymo ADS operates. Second, driving outside of these denser urban areas that the Waymo ADS operates would likely represent a reduction in overall relative crash risk. For example, commuters from the city would likely experience a reduced crash risk as they travel to less densely populated areas (Chen et al., 2024). Previous studies have shown that most injury collisions occur within a small radius from residency, and that American drivers rarely travel far from their place of residence, with approximately 80% of one-way household trips being less than 10 miles (DOE, 2022). Third, the benchmark drivers garaged in the Waymo deployment area are not operating with the same distribution of mileage within the geographical limits as the Waymo ADS. Chen et al. (2024) explored the effect of Waymo’s driving distribution on benchmark crash risk and found that - should the benchmark driving distribution match Waymo’s in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles - the benchmark police-reported crash rates would have been between 14% and 38% higher. Due to all three of these limitations being expected to artificially suppress the benchmark crash rate (underestimation), the benchmarking results in this study are considered to be conservative. Surely, there is an opportunity in future work to leverage new data, such as insurance telematics, to more precisely define and leverage the benchmark driving exposure data to better account for this potential confounder.”
I hear you! That’s very interesting to know about RFP, that term is 100% new to me. Makes a lot of sense.
Point taken. Article amended with a thank you for your more specific terminology.
Have a good one.
As a muscle car driver in the past, oddly, the sound is a big deal. The sound scratches some primal itch. A muscle car sounds like mechanical power. It’s hard to explain, it vibrates through the pedal, so I guess it’s sort of a human-machine interface feature. But also emotional. A lot going on there, I actually find that dimension of the design real interesting, most potential buyers hate what they attempted.
I can see how the corporate suits and engineers wouldn’t get it. But surely at least some of their engineers are gearheads? They tried to replicate it, and just widely missed the mark to most folks. It sounds really shitty in the videos I’ve seen.
You’re right, tho, the simple answer… it’s fake. It’s much more expensive than it used to be, and it’s clearly imitation. Nobody likes being a sucker, and a bad deal like that makes the buyer a sucker.