How about things to NOT make standard. I am referring of course to passenger seats.
If like me you don’t much care for passengers, you are wasting fuel lugging these things around. All I really want is a driver seat – the rest of the car can be carpeted over for all I care – or just make the car a yard shorter and kill the back seat compartment.
I’m not sure you want to be stuck behind a burning car … how about a forklift adapter that flips the car overhead and behind you?
Dents should be not only standard, but required!
No motor vehicle should be permitted to have any smooth exterior surface (with glass being a possible exception). When the anal new-car owners got their first parking lot dent, they then might not be able to notice that it occurred and no one would have to listen to their whining threats.
I’m sold on my Honda Pilot with ABS and automatic 4WD. I drove it up to Yellowstone in the ice and rain and that thing was as steady as a couch in the living room. The mileage was bad with ethanol laced gas, but when I could find good gas, it was better. I agree about the plastic headlight covers, they gotta go!
P.S., when I lived in upstate Michigan, I thought cars should come with a APU option to keep things going while the main engine was off. Just dreaming, I guess.
CVTs should get rid of “shift points.” If you’re creeped out by not feeling the gears ratio change, maybe you’re too skittish to drive at all.
In their place, I would like a knob or a slider or something to have total control (at least within a set range of ratios that won’t damage the transmission) over the transmission at all times. It would be like having a manual transmission with an infinite number of gears.
You know they do make cars like that.
Someone may have posted this but car seats and seat belts. They should be able to engineer a seat with a booster that can flip down and a five point harness option so we “soccer moms” can do carpool without having to send a booster seat or car seat to school. With carseat/booster laws constantly increasing the age that kids have to use them and seats too wide to fit three across in the back row of a minivan this is getting rather inconvenient.
Obviously, you also have a brother. Thanks for the love. Terry
Then you like me are waiting for Kubota or John Deere to start making diesel cars with hydrostatic trans. They work as you stated.
Not a bad idea-Kevin
Metric system! One-time changeover costs of course would be passed along to consumers of those car mfrs that haven’t already gone metric, but think of the lifetime savings.
Recent CarTalk column “Rounding up slightly …” letter was from a reader who complained about the “annoying” 29 psi tire spec for his two Toyota rides. That’s a nice even 200 kPa in metric system. U.S. is the only industrialized country left that hasn’t standardized on metric.
I just checked my tires. 35 in front and 33 in rear. How does that work out? The other one is 30 all around. Dang, foiled again. I’m not even going to bother figuring out what that is in metric. I will say though my Buicks had a button to push to go into metric. Most cars now you can choose one or the other. I like the idea of forcing everyone to wear a helmet though. You know it’s coming, the trial balloon has already been floated.
You don’t have to. People get confused with two systems when trying to convert them. You work within the system of measurement. No need to cross.
Metric is a LOT easier to work with. Everything’s a factor of 10. Every high-school and college Physics class I took were all metric. All my college level math classes were mostly metric.
US car makers went that route over 40 years ago. As each new model or new component was tooled, they were switched to metric.
Yes, mine, too. Working in English is a royal pain… (pun intended)
Math? What is the metric equivalent of Pi?
Do you recall the old joke about Pi?
Teacher: Johnny, what do you recall learning about Pi r squared?
Johnny: Teacher, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Pie are round!
Cornbread are square!
Pi is always the same number no matter what system of measurement you use.
I had a 7th grade student when I did student teaching many years ago that wanted to abolish the decimal (base 10) system and go to the duodecimal (base 12) system. We had been studying different bases and this kid reasoned that fractions such as 1/3 could be written as a terminating sequence in duodecimal as opposed to being expressed as .333… . in decimal. He said that duodecimal was much better than decimal because there are more numbers that divide twelve evenly (2,3,4,6) as opposed to decimal (2,5). This kid even went all over the school putting up posters that read “UP WITH DUODECIMAL, DOWN WITH DECIMAL”.
Computer science people use hexadecimal (base sixteen) because binary bits can be grouped by four digits at a time and easily expressed in hexadecimal.
When I taught math content courses to elementary education majors, I would ask them why we use the decimal system. If I didn’t get a response, I would give them this hint:. Suppose the rotary power mower was developed before the numeration system was developed. We would probably be using a base 9 system instead of the decimal (base ten) system.
That is why the government made it mandatory to have a dead man control to stop the blade when one releases the handle. I suppose too many people were sticking their fingers under the mower to see if it was running, thus driving up health care costs.
Heh heh. Buttons pushed. Heads explode. Usual suspects.
Point was 29# equaled 200 in metric which is a nice round number for Toyota owners. But not so for those of us that use 35, 33, and 30#. I guess just put 29 in instead. Math is hard. Psychology is easy, and it’s only Monday.