I am unnerved by modern vehicles.

[Nizam al-Mulk]

The interesting question is who will retain the corporate knowledge on how to make actual cars that are not computers on 4 wheels.

Will military vehicles be bare bones engine + wheels?

How much computer tech is in Ladas? I know the Nivas are basically still 70s cars and they just ended.

At some point less wealthy car buyers might have to say heck with it and give up buying a computers on wheels for a first car and we might see an emergence of some bare bones models. We have no idea what will happen as far as regulations that mandating things but American cars or foreign ones brought over might get road legal with less fancy tech.

 

[Long Dark Blues]

I miss mechanical cars.

I just picked an '87 Dodge Ram Van from a junkyard, turning it into a camper van.

 

[Stoic1]

1979 international Scout is what we need.

 

[650lb Sumo]

Intro

I was just thinking you could have quite a mod-con vehicle with most auxiliary systems, without electrics.

Of course in a post-apocalyptic scenario you could just do without windscreen wipers and headlights etc. but I gave it some thought.


Starting

Apparently you could hand-crank start an over 11-litre tank in WW2, as a backup system for if the electric starter didn't work. Which if you were in total war in Russia in -40 it probably often wouldn't, and you could warm up a bit too as a bonus. As discussed above you gradually accelerate a heavy flywheel, then when it's spinning fast enough engage it with the crankshaft.



So you could use an old-school diesel engine which doesn't need electrics, and start it by hand cranking, or a pony engine perhaps, for instance if a small woman or elderly person had to be able to do it.

Example of pony engine:

The crank connects below and left of the exclamation mark. These cost $136 when you buy from 10-277 boxes, and weigh ~150lbs.

Edit:




Auxiliary Systems

Fuel pumps, vacuum pumps, cooling fans, heater fan etc. would be powered from the engine by belt and pulley (they are mostly electric now).

Locks, windows and mirrors could go back to being hand-operated.

For external lights you would have to burn something, preferably paraffin I suppose, and you could put mirrors behind the flames.

Internal lights: Do without, or candle or paraffin lamp.

No radio obviously

Cigarette lighter: Use a pocket one.

Rear windscreen heater: Do without, heat the inside of the car intensely or wipe it with a cloth. It wouldn't be worth making a separate heater.

Horn: Clown horn

Odometers, tachometers, speedometers etc. used to be turned by cables rotated by the transmission/camshaft.

You could have physical thermometers in the necessary internal places, with tubes containing a liquid with the appropriate boiling point connected to analogue dashboard gauges.

Apparently fuel gauges went electric much earlier than a lot of things, but you could measure liquid levels with floats and levers connected to mechanical gauges. Like ball cocks.

It seems you have to go back to before WW2 to get back to vehicles generally without electricity but this is how it was done.

It occurred to me you might have to learn to double-clutch as well, if using old vehicles without synchromesh. When I learnt to drive buses my instructors had learnt double-clutching when they were young, but there can't be too many people who know how to these days.

Windscreen wipers and the relevant pumps could be powered by hydraulics/vacuum/compressed air. Apparently some used to be powered by rotating cables as well.

More fancy systems like electric predictive suspension and engine management system and so on you just wouldn't have. So when you think it through analogue/manual vehicles with no electrics wouldn't be too difficult. We're not yet that far removed from them. It's pretty obvious what will follow if/when they get everything electrically-operated and continuously connected to wifi.

 

[650lb Sumo]

The Horses

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
‘They’ll moulder away and be like other loam.’
We make our oxen drag our rusty ploughs,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers’ land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers’ time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half-a-dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our ploughs and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

(Edwin Muir, 1952)

 

[650lb Sumo]

ITT we discovered Piecraftian Dieselpunk.

Interesting that the simulations in Dark City and The Thirteenth Floor are set in the '30s and '40s.

 

[650lb Sumo]

I tried to set up a recent model all-in-one printer/scanner/copier, and gave up before succeeding. Connect to the WiFi, sign up for an HP account, download and install the software, all your data are recorded, the device is crippled to unusability without connecting it to the WiFi and HP server, navigate through the maze software, deselect every privacy and automation option possible, of which there are many, it will only work with new, approved cartridges etc. etc. and then the fucking program would just crash when I told it to scan.

I know HP has become an awful company and their printers in particular are renowned for this kind of thing. Crippleware, ransomware, bloatware, spyware, vendor lock-in etc. It was a present from someone else to someone else.

So I went rummaging through the dusty storage boxes and produced a 2008 HP all-in-one device, covered in thick dust, dirty and bleached by the sun, cleaned it and plugged it into the PC with a cord. It's been at least eight years since it was used; maybe significantly more. There was a brief pause for its capacitors to charge, then it switched on and worked immediately (had to install new ink cartridges to print). You don't need the software, which will have come on a CD, or to operate the little screen and buttons on it, you can just print from Notepad or scan from Paint etc.

/

I had similar considerations with my e-reader. I ordered an obsolete no-name model from China which just displays the files. It doesn't have WiFi or Bluetooth and can't connect to the internet. It's not restricted to any source or format of files. There is no online software interjected between you and the device.

 

[ssBaldy]

If you haven't read The Machine Stops (1909) by E. M. Forster, please go and do so (it's short) before continuing.

As I was coming up cars, and any vehicle I controlled for that matter (dumper, tractor, boat, plane) had no computers/electrics. Before someone jumps in with an acshully, yes obviously they had starter motors, spark plugs if petrol, radios and lights etc. but that was it. Small cars didn't even have power steering. And yes there were probably some cars with electric windows in the 30s and so on. I'm referring to the everyman's experience.

Actually the dumper had no electrics at all and was crank started, and the tractor would run with the ignition key removed. For a while I drove it with no battery and a broken alternator, you just had to jump start it.

I don't have a car just now, but my most recent one was built in 2014. Now I have had some unpleasant surprises when renting vehicles.

Things I already knew about:

Windows are raised or lowered by electric motor.
Vehicles have ABS, and while on older vehicles you could switch if off, on newer ones you can't.
Ditto for traction control.
Vehicles have power steering, and in fact it is now electric. Fair enough you need power steering on larger vehicles.

Surprises

They have computers on board, and touch screen computer systems, and they can not be switched off by normal methods.
This includes GPS trackers, which show you where you are on a map. The map shows speed limits, which are sometimes wrong.
There is no key, only a fob. Doors are locked or unlocked through the Machine. When I get a vehicle, it locks or unlocks its doors as the fob goes further from or comes closer to it. This can still be disabled.
The vehicle is started or stopped either automatically, or by pressing a button and requesting the Machine to do so. Unless you deliberately stall it I suppose, which you can't do with an automatic. But that wouldn't switch off the electrics. I've heard of vehicles having 'stall assist', but thank goodness haven't driven one yet.

Windscreen wipers are automatic, although you can still disable this in vehicles I have driven.
Side/headlights are automatic and you seem to be unable to disable this.
The handbrake is also automatic. There is a button you can push to ask the Machine to engage or disengage it, but it seems to be irrelevant.
All the rental place's small cars are hybrid or electric. Possibly not across the whole country, but where I've looked.
Not that you would notice, but the engines are all electronic fuel injection now.

The wing mirrors are adjusted automatically, although you can still disable this. However the 'manual' controls are still buttons and electric motors.
Vehicles monitor your tyre pressure, although you can still disable this. Presumably, as in other contexts, 'disable' simply means it continues to monitor them, but doesn't tell you about it.
A camera on the back of the car switches on when you engage reverse gear, and the display shows what it sees, even if you have switched the display off, which you may not be able to do. I suppose who knows if the camera isn't switched on the whole time.
There are various beeps or verbal warnings, but you can disable them. For now. You can not however disable the 'leaving lane' visual warning.
All the gauges are digital.

Even where you don't notice the difference, no doubt things like switching on the windscreen wipers now send a request to the computer to do so, rather than completing a circuit.
The brakes are about the only manual/analogue thing in a modern vehicle. In case anyone didn't know, the accelerator and clutch are also now simply buttons sending electronic requests to the computer.
Some vehicles now play fake engine noise through the speakers, although not those I've driven. Maybe they had that option and the mechanics disabled it.

No doubt I've missed some things.

Many people in many contexts have discussed how technology is rising above us. I find these technological developments quite unsettling.

Having a car is one thing. I think we'd be better going back to a lower level of technology. However a car in itself is the least of it. You can have a 1987 car which is analogue/manual.

It's the insertion of the Machine between the human and every aspect of his environment which is the disturbing part. The Man is no longer in control. The Machine is in control, and the Man asks its permission to see or do anything.

In Dune they had a Butlerian Jihad and banned 'thinking machines'.

Just how high were you when you wrote all that?

I don't share all the sentiments you wrote, but some are 100% legit, like GPS tracking and using infotainment screen for every action. Also, some cars now have steering by wire, which is outright scary.

 

[ssBaldy]

The interesting question is who will retain the corporate knowledge on how to make actual cars that are not computers on 4 wheels.

Will military vehicles be bare bones engine + wheels?

How much computer tech is in Ladas? I know the Nivas are basically still 70s cars and they just ended.

At some point less wealthy car buyers might have to say heck with it and give up buying a computers on wheels for a first car and we might see an emergence of some bare bones models. We have no idea what will happen as far as regulations that mandating things but American cars or foreign ones brought over might get road legal with less fancy tech.

Modern ladas are pretty much the same as other cheap-ish cars like Renaults, Opels, etc. They have some computer-aided systems but not the most advanced ones. Like, there's ABS, ESC, brake assistant, rear view camera, big multimedia screen, blind spot control, but no steer-by-wire, adaptive cruise control or autopilot.

 

[Contempt]

I tried to set up a recent model all-in-one printer/scanner/copier, and gave up before succeeding. Connect to the WiFi, sign up for an HP account, download and install the software, all your data are recorded, the device is crippled to unusability without connecting it to the WiFi and HP server, navigate through the maze software, deselect every privacy and automation option possible, of which there are many, it will only work with new, approved cartridges etc. etc. and then the fucking program would just crash when I told it to scan.

I know HP has become an awful company and their printers in particular are renowned for this kind of thing. Crippleware, ransomware, bloatware, spyware, vendor lock-in etc. It was a present from someone else to someone else.

So I went rummaging through the dusty storage boxes and produced a 2008 HP all-in-one device, covered in thick dust, dirty and bleached by the sun, cleaned it and plugged it into the PC with a cord. It's been at least eight years since it was used; maybe significantly more. There was a brief pause for its capacitors to charge, then it switched on and worked immediately (had to install new ink cartridges to print). You don't need the software, which will have come on a CD, or to operate the little screen and buttons on it, you can just print from Notepad or scan from Paint etc.

/

I had similar considerations with my e-reader. I ordered an obsolete no-name model from China which just displays the files. It doesn't have WiFi or Bluetooth and can't connect to the internet. It's not restricted to any source or format of files. There is no online software interjected between you and the device.

I just configured mine to use wired ethernet, hard coded it to an IP rather than use DHCP so I know the source and blocked all external traffic from that address on my firewall. It still prints and scans, that's all I give a crap about.

 

[NadaRekowski]

That is why @Slobodan still drives his Yugo.

and yes that IS Slobodan.... sad thing is he is only 21 and looks like that.
Them balkan genes.

That’s quite the handsome man! A success-story for you two! I am happy!

 

[650lb Sumo]

Just how high were you when you wrote all that?

I don't share all the sentiments you wrote, but some are 100% legit, like GPS tracking and using infotainment screen for every action. Also, some cars now have steering by wire, which is outright scary.

Higher than a stiltwalker on top of the Burj Khalifa.

While we're here, what are the laws on cannabis like now in Russia? Like would cops be interested in reports of someone smoking in a park in summer, or smell of cannabis coming from a residence? What if you get caught with a small amount for personal use on you? I suppose it's more relaxed than in the past.

Modern ladas are pretty much the same as other cheap-ish cars like Renaults, Opels, etc. They have some computer-aided systems but not the most advanced ones. Like, there's ABS, ESC, brake assistant, rear view camera, big multimedia screen, blind spot control, but no steer-by-wire, adaptive cruise control or autopilot.

(Узрите Ладу - Славянскую Богиню Любви! / Behold Lada, Slavic Goddess of Love!)

I just configured mine to use wired ethernet, hard coded it to an IP rather than use DHCP so I know the source and blocked all external traffic from that address on my firewall. It still prints and scans, that's all I give a crap about.

Yeah I'm no Gary McKinnon, but did consider gaolbreaking the POS or trying to, but we're just going to try to get a refund from the shop. I'm glad you were able to do that though, and if we can't get a refund it might be time to attempt that also.

 

[chardog]

I tried to set up a recent model all-in-one printer/scanner/copier, and gave up before succeeding. Connect to the WiFi, sign up for an HP account, download and install the software, all your data are recorded, the device is crippled to unusability without connecting it to the WiFi and HP server, navigate through the maze software, deselect every privacy and automation option possible, of which there are many, it will only work with new, approved cartridges etc. etc. and then the fucking program would just crash when I told it to scan.

I know HP has become an awful company and their printers in particular are renowned for this kind of thing. Crippleware, ransomware, bloatware, spyware, vendor lock-in etc. It was a present from someone else to someone else.

So I went rummaging through the dusty storage boxes and produced a 2008 HP all-in-one device, covered in thick dust, dirty and bleached by the sun, cleaned it and plugged it into the PC with a cord. It's been at least eight years since it was used; maybe significantly more. There was a brief pause for its capacitors to charge, then it switched on and worked immediately (had to install new ink cartridges to print). You don't need the software, which will have come on a CD, or to operate the little screen and buttons on it, you can just print from Notepad or scan from Paint etc.

/

I had similar considerations with my e-reader. I ordered an obsolete no-name model from China which just displays the files. It doesn't have WiFi or Bluetooth and can't connect to the internet. It's not restricted to any source or format of files. There is no online software interjected between you and the device.

In the world of apple, this is how all of their “airprint” compatible printers work, with the exception of wifi. No online accounts necessary, i have to print a fair amount for my business and rarely do my devices complain about a print, it just works.

Eventually, EV’s are headed that route

 

[Contempt]

Yeah I'm no Gary McKinnon, but did consider gaolbreaking the POS or trying to, but we're just going to try to get a refund from the shop. I'm glad you were able to do that though, and if we can't get a refund it might be time to attempt that also.

It only took five minutes, quicker than returning the printer.

 

[ssBaldy]

Higher than a stiltwalker on top of the Burj Khalifa.

While we're here, what are the laws on cannabis like now in Russia? Like would cops be interested in reports of someone smoking in a park in summer, or smell of cannabis coming from a residence? What if you get caught with a small amount for personal use on you? I suppose it's more relaxed than in the past.

(Узрите Ладу - Славянскую Богиню Любви! / Behold Lada, Slavic Goddess of Love!)

Laws on cannabis are very strict. Absolutely forbidden to use in public, small sentence for personal use, lengthy sentence for distribution if caught. Also the law views a very modest portion of the substance as a "large amount" leading to lengthy sentences.

Sadly Ladas are shit (again). There was a point in time when they started making cheap but decent cars that were no worse than their competition and the model line was getting bigger, but then the war started, the sanctions fell and those arseholes in management decided that they need not bother and can make all the same cars forever because foreign brands will just be too pricey for an average Ivan.