AMD talks up car chips it hopes will join you for a ride some time soon Just in time for CES, which has become just as much a car show as an electronics event in recent years, AMD has revealed its newest chips for the automotive market: a processor powered by a nearly five-year-old core architecture, and a 2.5-year-old FPGA with some Arm cores and AI accelerators baked in. Of course, the key …
Too much of the ADAS and infotainment crap is crap. I see it as mostly a way to increase car prices by fluffing up the window sticker with loads of useless "features". I use cruise control often and would love it if my car had the feature to vary speed/distance but it's not a deal breaker. I can keep the car in my own lane. If I find I can't, maybe it's time for a break or at some point, time to stop driving. For entertainment, I plug my iPod into the car's audio system. No added monthly cost, no ads and the audiobooks/music installed are what I enjoy.
All of the added tech these days is so intertwined that one thing breaking pulls the whole house down in some cases. It certainly makes getting something fixed very expensive. If the LCD screen blanks out, how much of a new car is unusable? With some, they're dead in the water as you can't do much at all without the screen working.
I am with many people here who don't want this lane keeping etc stuff but I and my family love plugging the phone into the ApplePlay (others are available) and it just working for music, satnav, hand free phone, plus automatic lights and wipers are great.
However I don't need any more than Cruise control, would like it has already been mentioned to adapt to slower traffic and going downhill, but that is about it. You can keep the rest of the self driving stuff thank you!
plus automatic lights and wipers are great.
For some, I suppose; personally I find them both disturbing to use, and quite often wrong. I see many modern cars - presumably with auto lights since the light switch doesn't appear to have an 'off' position any more - driving in poor visibility but bright conditions and no headlights. I can only assume that the automatics have decided it's bright enough not to need lights...
And - this is purely a personal thing, I suspect - I find the can't-make-it's-mind-up aspect of intermittent auto wipers extremely distracting. I much prefer a constant beat, or a constant delay between sweeps, to the automatics idea of nah, not raining enough yet, oooh, let's go double speed, sweep, pause, sweep, pause, sweep, pause-and-a-half, sweep. It does my head in.
For lights, though, I don't know why they bother fitting a switch at all; there is never an occasion while the car is moving when if sidelights are required, dipped beams are also required. And few good reasons not to have the lights on in the daytime; just leave the damn things on all the time. (Fiat have arranged for years that when the ignition is off, the lights are off, so they can be left switched on all the time; my current Renault does the same and a recent rental Citroen (horrible in almost every respect until the automatics were turned off) did the same.)
I always drive with dipped headlights in daytime when driving down narrow country roads (and I do a lot of that round here). For a start, it gives approaching traffic an extra bit of warning, and also tends to make the (many) potholes and tree-root humps more visible.
"I and my family love plugging the phone into the ApplePlay"
Are you entirely sure what sort of data and how much is being shared with the car's manufacturer when you use Apple Car Play? I've got a nice handsfree headset that has very good audio quality (LG). When I talk to somebody that has handsfree via their car, it often sucks and that's down to the nature of trying to make that work. It's not a good acoustic environment and the mic is too far from the person speaking (and omni directional).
I've had an idea of coming up with a way to pull data from new cars that connect to people's phones and offering that as a 'toolkit' for red teams and law enforcement. I've also thought about mucking about with systems to selectively delete data from modern cars for ViPs and government agencies.
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