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If you made cars
My father and I were discussing how the "check engine" lights on the dashboard is about as descriptive as "Windows has encountered an error and must close." I then came up with the idea that the dashboard could have a display to tell you exactly, if not very closely, what the problem is.
So, if you were a car designer/maker, what features would you have in your autos?
So, if you were a car designer/maker, what features would you have in your autos?
Comments
1) Open hardware and software specs
2) Concerted effort to standardize all parts across all lines, if possible.
3) No more bullshit yearly cycles.
Why the fuck can't they just build those into the car?
Seriously, if you raked it in as much as they do when servicing a car, would you make it so any shlep could know whats wrong?
The bad reason is that they want you to go to a mechanic, hopefully the dealer, to fix your car. They also want to make a ton of money selling service manuals and diagnostic computers. Therefore, they make sure you can not get the detailed information without some proprietary hardware and software. The correct solution to this problem is to just make all the car's data available in a standard format over regular old USB to any computer.
Now for a bunch of good reasons that a check engine light is all that is needed on the dash board to warn you of trouble in the car.
1) You are driving the car. You don't have time to read even a sentence. You can't be distracted. The dash board needs to have information that can be processed instantly with minimal distraction. In recent experiments they put MPG meters on cars to see how it changed people's driving. It worked, people started trying to maximize MPG. However, when they made the meter too big, people were distracted so much that they had a statistically significant rise in accidents. They had to stop that study and shrink the size of the meter again because people were having too many accidents.
2) Most people don't know how a car works beyond gas is go, brake is stop, turn the wheel. Most in the US can't even drive stick. What makes you think they are going to understand an actual explanation of what is wrong with a car? If given an actual explanation, it will result in great stupidity. Some people already ignore check engine lights. Even more people will be ignoring serious and dangerous problems because they don't understand a diagnostic readout or even a simple one sentence explanation. I don't even want to think about what could happen if a moron tried to fix their own car.
3) It's just really bad design. Try to imagine Apple designing a car. Despite being evil, they are arguably the greatest industrial designers in the world. Think about that dash board. What do you think it's going to look like. Yeah, I'm thinking something more along the lines of as few lights and as little information as is possible. Detailed technical readouts, not so much.
If you are mechanically inclined, and you want to fix it yourself when the check engine light comes on, you can go and buy your own automotive diagnostic setup to get the data out of the car the same way the mechanics do. You can also be sure to get something that is compatible with your particular car. Alternatively, you can get a fancy car, such as the Skyline GT-R, which has a built-in computer with detailed technical readouts and visualizations.
Except for the one where I omit the picture of "The Homer".