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Tag: transport

  • Asleep at the wheel in the headlight brightness wars – The Ringer

    Gatto is the founder of the subreddit r/FuckYourHeadlights, the internet’s central hub for those at their wits’ end with the current state of headlights. The posts consist of a mishmash of venting, meme-ing, and community organizing. A common entry is a photo taken from inside the car of someone being blasted with headlights as bright as an atomic bomb, and a caption along the lines of “How is this fucking legal?!” Or users will joke about going back in time and Skynet-style killing the Audi lighting engineer who first rolled out LED headlights. Or they’ll discuss ways to write to their congresspeople, like Mike Thompson, House Democrat of California, who recently expressed support for the cause.

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  • Is Google Maps fatally misleading drivers in India? It’s complicated – Rest of World

    When Google Maps launched in India in 2008, it initially struggled due to the lack of street names, which were the foundation of its technology globally. In an X post from October 2023, Elizabeth Laraki, who led the global design team for Google Maps from 2007 to 2009, wrote that this rendered the app’s directions “pretty much useless.” The company subsequently used parks, monuments, shopping centers, landmark buildings, and gas stations to confirm directions instead.

    Over the years, Google has launched several new features to improve Maps in India, including voice navigation and transliterated directions in about nine and 10 languages, respectively, to increase accessibility. Most recently, in 2024, the company introduced a simplified interface for reporting road incidents, two new weather-related alerts for streets obscured by flooding or fog, an artificial-intelligence model that estimates road widths, and a feature that alerts users to approaching overpasses in 40 cities.

    Google has mapped 300 million buildings, 35 million businesses and places, and streets stretching across 7 million kilometres (over 4 million miles) in India, Ramani told Rest of World.

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  • Missiles are now the biggest killer of airline passengers – Slashdot

    Accidental missile attacks on commercial airliners have become the leading cause of aviation fatalities in recent years, driven by rising global conflicts and the proliferation of advanced antiaircraft weaponry. Despite improvements in aviation safety overall, inconsistent risk assessments, political complexities, and rapid military escalations make protecting civilian flights in conflict zones increasingly difficult.

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  • The most polarizing thing on wheels – Texas Monthly

    The Cybertruck is fully inside this tradition, loaded with new technologies and new materials that tend to malfunction. Tesla has already recalled the Cybertruck six times. The fixes include a piece of the truck bed that could come loose while driving; a faulty windshield wiper motor; a pedal that can get stuck while accelerating; and a display time-lag on the rearview camera. The company also issued a “stop sale” on the truck’s wheel covers, which damage the tires after a few thousand miles of driving. These issues are but a few examples of the vast number of more commonplace complaints that pervade the internet but which the company has not addressed. Leaky truck bed covers, chronic error screens, and fast-dying batteries are subject to no recalls at all. Yet Tesla’s chronic deficiencies, which would destroy a company like Ford or Toyota, have somehow not interfered with its relentless success, nor prevented Musk from becoming the richest man in the world, largely on the strength of Tesla’s stock price. It’s just the way Tesla rolls.

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  • Hallucinogenic sci-fi movie: Inside the rather bizarre relaunch of Jaguar – Car Dealer Magazine

    Unveiling a new concept car – the details of which are still under embargo until December 3 – Jaguar’s passionate team spoke for most of the day about how they plan to ‘delete ordinary’ and ‘live vivid’. Whatever that means… In what, at times, felt like a drunken dream, Jaguar personnel walked journalists through its plans to ‘reimagine’ the much-loved brand over the next few years. Calling it a ‘complete reset’, McGovern at one point told journalists that his team had ‘not been sniffing the white stuff – this is real’.

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