Uh huh. Well, I'm not going to argue music, politics, war, the economy, and our space program with you. That's way off topic. I thought we were talking about cars here. However, you may be the only person who would volunteer to go back and live in the early 80s.

 

Youre vastly underestimating the cost tot develop an all new platform and completely retool everything in a factory. There is a reason the718s are expensive, and its not just because its a Porsche. To deliver a midengine csr they will HAVE to increase base price dramatically, especially if they add more modern features as well. A base ME car would likely have to start at 80k or so to hope to turn a profit, likely even more if GM is switching to 6 year product cycles vs 9 for C6 plus 8 for c5, C4 had 13 years,... it takes time to pay for this stuff. If GM were to try to keep with a short product cycle, itd easily crext 100k base price. This all assumes equal sales volume, which is unlikely due to the worse packaging, higher price, and general disinterest from legacy buyers.

I'm one of those young buyers GM is desperate for. If tne next vette is midengine, the new Supra would likely be my pick.

 

I wasnt alive for the early 80s, but i would take the 90s or 00s for sure.

 

Listening to people and reading posts whine about the mid-engine C8 reminds me a lot of the C6 headlights.

"OMG, I'm not buying a corvette because it doesn't have flip up headlights anymore."

Obviously people got over it, especially when the car was just better than the previous gen.

Been lucky enough to drive a mid-engine sports car before, '88 Ferrari 308. Hearing that V8 screaming into my right ear was awesome, even if it only was 3L. Would love nothing more than to replace that with a 6.2L roar.

 

Why? I originally thought that too. But then I remembered that other than the engine, there is pretty much nothing on the C7 that is shared with anything else in the GM parts pin. And then I remembered that the C6 Z06 even had a unique frame and floor pan (aluminum and balsa core) compared to other C6s, and they still managed to sell that for a reasonable price. And then I remembered that the Fiero and Toyota MR2 were both mid-engined cars that were sold for cheap. So I'm not seeing it. I'm sure the base C8 will cost a little more than the base C7, but it won't be $80k.

 

Read this. The mentioned "Lyn Smith" is actually a forum member. I met him myself through the board.

https://www.ohio.com/news/20190324/b...tone-down-tech

And yes, if I had to fight the wheel for a fraction of a second, that kid would have been dead. I had a little Chevy Monza with the best Goodyears on it I could afford. They gripped and reacted. Now I am not the best athlete in the world, I don't have that kind of muscle control, but I do have a short cut reaction circuit that allows me to react almost instantly to stimuli that I am not expecting. I dang near put the car in the ditch on the opposite side of the road getting away from him.

If I would have had to jerk the wheel back to over power a "lane assist", it would have altered the trajectory just enough that I would have caught him with the fender. You don't know how damn close it was. That boy was around 5 years old and he came very close to not living another day.

A co-worker's wife (when I worked at the bank) was involved in a rear end collision due to a malfunction of the ABS system in their new vehicle (at the time) it turned out that the sensor(s) were gapped wrong from the factory.

In my 04.5 2500HD I had an issue with the ABS that GM had to fix. When coming to a stop (on dry pavement, normal creeping up and stopping) the ABS unit would release the brakes allowing the truck to jump forward. Fortunately I am not one of those people that stop up on people's bumper.

In the line of work that I was in (computers) for the last 28 years of my working career I saw and experienced lots of failures simply due to manufacturing issues. I will bet you all didn't know that there was a bug burned into one of Intel's chips ? There is no way that anyone can guarantee that the electronics are going to work 100 % correct all the time. That's not the programming, just the electronic hardware itself.

How about our current car. A 2018 Equinox. The dang rear view camera is so bright that at night I cannot turn my head and see what is out the right rear corner of the car due to that dang camera and I cannot turn it off or dim it down. So if there is an obstruction above the range or to the side of the camera, you simply can't see it.

I am going to get myself a piece of cardboard to put over the screen to block it so I can see backing up.

We also cannot turn off the automatic turn off, when you come to a stop. I have figured out the pattern of how it works and have educated myself (muscle memory) on how to defeat the damn thing. Eventually when there is an interface built that will let me get into the computer I will set the lower temp limit (it won't turn off if the temp is in the 30's, I haven't figured out yet which degree it is set at) I will set the temp limit to 120 etc and then it won't shut itself off.

I got tired of being in a traffic line and moving 10 ft, turn off, turn on, move 10 ft turn off, etc. So you come to a stop and don't let the surge come back, it won't activate without the surge.

 

But that ain't true. Depending on the car (and the circumstances), they DO overrule the drivers intent.

Ever try to "rock" a modern car in mud or snow? Can't do it. Can't. It's my intent, but between the brake/shifter interlock (over ridden by two footing it), the ECM managed RPM limiter, and the ECM/TCM managed shifting delay...it's utterly impossible. Can't do it.

How about when I want to down shift from ~3500 RPM to a lower gear, which would put the engine at about 1000 RPM below the redline in that lower gear. You "manually" bang it down a gear with the "lever"...but the car won't down shift. WON'T DO IT. That is quite literally, overriding the driver's intent. 2012 Range Rover Sport, BTW.

How about when a modern vehicle won't let you turn it off? You hit the Start/Stop button....but it won't shut off b/c the ECM won't let it. Intent is clear here...shut the device off. There are many, many cases where new cars will go right ahead and override the driver's intent. For sure.



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If you can take your hands off the wheel and the car will parallel park for you, it is quite capable of effing up and turning the wheel at the wrong time. Boeing with all their millions and millions invested in technology can't keep their planes from killing people.

There are problems in the equation.

1. Simple statistics concerning manufacturing tolerance stackup and out and out failures. We are not omnipotent to create things that are perfect. Are we getting better, of course, but there is still going to be a percentage of failures.

2. People. No matter how good we are (the royal we) we are still going to not think of everything. I can't tell you how many times that some of you here on the forum have said something and I thought to myself that I didn't think of that and altered my thinking. I am quite adaptable and can shift my line of thought on the fly,

But I am typically behind a keyboard when I do. And no one gets hurt.

3. All too often the "bean counters" or "upper management" will second guess a decision or force an uninformed decision upon the engineers and they have to react or the culture just doesn't lend itself to addressing/fixing issues, hence the "GM nod" and the ignition switch debacle et al. Do some reading on the "GM nod". While it occurred back in 2014, it is still pertinent today.

I worked in big companies, this type of garbage goes on all the time.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/micheli.../#653ceb4950ed

In big companies there are "fiefdoms", design, engineering, management and they all protect their turf and cover their a** only so that they look good and their cost centers show a profit, regardless of how it affects other "fiefdoms", to the detriment of employees and customers.

I sat in on an audio meeting where the effing PR rep was laughing and joking and telling over 400 people their jobs were gone, that there was nothing they could have done different, that the bank simply didn't invest any money in their line of business and oh well, that is the way it is.

 

Again, though, a gradual intentional lane change is different from an emergency lane change such as you described. The car can easily sense the difference, and it can probably also sense that there's something crossing its path, too. There's no way in hell that any new car with lane assist is designed to resist an emergency maneuver like that. What it's designed to do is keep people who aren't paying attention to their driving from accidentally gradually wandering over into the next lane...something that happens all the damn time. If cars were routinely overriding emergency control inputs by drivers, don't you think we'd have heard about by now? That guy's article is pretty alarmist and ridiculous.

Yes, imperfections exist in technology, and always will. But again, technology is improving safety in giant steps. In both cars and airplanes, human operators will make many, many more errors than technology-related systems ever will. That's just a fact. In both aviation and vehicles, both the accident and fatality rates per mile driven/flown have been coming way, way down for several decades now. Since he brought up the Max8 crashes, we should mention that those were a result of human error too: not on the part of the pilots, per se, but on the part of Boeing who implemented them with far higher trim excursion limits than they were approved for, and on the part of whoever came up with the pilot training and didn't educate them about how to turn off the system in the event of a runaway. We should also mention the crash of Air France 447 (I think that's what it was), in which the copilot continually pull up elevator from cruise altitude to the ocean, with the plane's wings stalling the whole way down. Pure pilot error, and stall accidents happen all the time in less advanced planes than the Max8. Taht's what MCAS was designed to prevent, and it's probably already saved more lives than its cost, even with these two disasters.

Those things are true, but I should have been more clear: I meant that cars won't override emergency maneuvers. Nobody's going to die because they can't rock their car back and forth in the mud, or can't downshift when they want to. And on the rocking thing, every car I have (including a 2017 Jeep and my 2018 work-assigned Hyunaid Sonata) can turn the traction control off manually, to allow just such rocking. You just have to go through an extra step to allow that. I don't know if every car allows it to be turned off, but I bet the vast majority do, for exactly that kind of reason.

Again, the point is that technology is saving far more people's lives than it's taking. Everybody gets worked up about HAL-type tech takeovers and millions of people being killed due to errors in design. But the fact is that the average driver or pilot is far, far worse than the autonomous systems designed to assist or (eventually) replace him. The stats conclusively bear that out. The notion that a car will prevent you from quickly changing lanes to avoid a kid that runs into your path is preposterous.

 

Here is another issue with nanny cars. Automatic braking. You can never say it can't happen. These systems will work as designed most of the time, but....

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news...ng-062717.html

It is all good as long as you (the royal you, not the specific you directed at one person, so ie: not an attack sentence) are not the one experiencing the failure and not being able to control the car.

We had a 2005 Ford Taurus that went into a run away condition. The computer had no evidence that it went into a runaway. They called us up and said no evidence.

Luckily we had a mechanic friend (at that Ford dealership) that my wife helped take care of his dad in the hospital and he went through the car with a fine tooth comb. Subsequently he found out that there was a small piece of plastic that broke in the cruise control unit that allowed the connections to float and accelerate the car, but the componentry would settle back in place and function correctly afterwards and leave no evidence. He said he just happened to find it.

I found that there was problems reported about unexplained runaways regarding Tauruses on the NTSB site. I posted and sent them a communication that our friend had found the issue. I actually got a call back from that agency who had me explain in detail what was occuring. If it had been my wife driving I am not sure she would have had the presence of mind to go through the different motions to get the car stopped.

My point is that you can't say never. Where human designed systems are involved, there is always going to be a bug somewhere that will set itself up if the proper conditions are met.

 

I agree you can't say "never." And I didn't say it. What I did say is that advanced tech and automation - imperfections and all - has and will continue to vastly improve the overall safety of vehicles when compared to human operators left to do it all themselves. The latter have an appalling safety record compared to automated systems.

 

The C7, for all its "unique parts", is a continuation of the c6, and c5 platforms. A lot of things from it bolt into previous generations. It's not a clean sheet, all new everything design. The aluminum frame in the c6z was a straight material swap vs the steel frame, which is why it lacked the stiffness to do a targa roof. The fiero and mr2 were both cheap because they were CHEAP. Poorly built, poorly made, featureless cheap cars. And they weren't that cheap in their day either,. The industry was in a different place then too, they had a lot less financial oversight, and could do small runs of less profitable things.

I just dont ser how they can make a mid engine car be at the same relative price point as a continuation of an architecture 2 decades old (and still world class).

 

I don't think that's true at all. It was definitely true of the C5 and C6, but the C7 is supposed to be a clean-sheet design, and the only common parts are the cabin air filter and the roof latch. I know that the whole drivetrain was new, and the suspensions are completely different although they have similar architecture in many (but not all) ways. Likewise, the frame is a new design, and the interior is a world away from the C5/6. Chevy was clearly able to bring it to market with a vastly better interior and better base-model power output with only an incremental price increase.

The Fiero was typical GM poor quality in the 80s, but no worse than the C4 at the time. The MR2 was definitely a real step up from both in terms of quality. Not sure how many of those you've been around, but they aren't cheap in the ways that even a C6 was. But the point is that both of them were mid-engine, which you are claiming somehow entails a way higher price. The fact is that the Fiero was way, way cheaper than a C4, and no more expensive that other cars in its class. The MR2 was basically a direct competitor to the Miata (in base form, without turbo or s/c). It, too, was easily in the same price class. So I just don't see the evidence that a mid-engine design necessitates a higher price class than a comparable front-engine design.

 

No man....NO. I know what TC is. I know how to turn it off. But that ain't gonna then let you rock a vehicle(focusing on just that one example). Even after turning off TC, you still have the shift interlock mechanism. You can not row the lever (if the car even has one anymore) b/c the mechanism won't let you. This is for sure, in a 2012 Range Rover Sport and a 2019 Jeep CompASS -that I recently had the misfortune of driving. I'm sure it's pretty similar in most every new vehicle (I'm renting a GMC Terrain at the moment...it doesn't even have a shifter -shift "buttons" only. Anyway, the average guy won't likely figure this out and they'll be fucked (remain stuck when they needn't be), but a savvy driver would "two foot it", to trick the brake switch/shift interlock so you can then "row" the shifter. Now you're in action, right? Let the "rocking" commence!. BUUUT...no, no rocking. B/c the ECM/TCM/BCM won't allow these critical things:
*Shifting F-N-R with any throttle applied
*Shifting with any raised RPM (even slightly raised)
*Shifting. (Trans doesn't actually shift when you move the lever...it does so when the ECM/TCM/BCM all authorize it to).

SO....you have exactly zero chance of establishing a "rocking" rhythm, which is crucial to getting unstuck. CAN'T DO IT. Car will not let you b/c it's totally overriding what you're telling it to do. WON'T DO IT even though the driver is commanding it to....which is what we were talking about; what you said "can never happen". There are a plethora of examples where the car absolutely NOT do what you tell it to do...and that is when everything is working "right"!



That is not the point. Not my point, at least. I agree tech helps the masses. It doesn't help the savvy, however.

But it's not. There are already examples of these types of incidents happening. Common? No. "Preposterous"? Absolutely not; similar things have already happened.



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Oh, I see what you're getting at. Okay, fair enough. I concede that point.

If that's been documented to have happened, I've not seen it. I can't imagine it wouldn't have made front page headlines. But maybe I missed it.

 

By the time we see a C9 the C8 will be all wheel drive and be either partially or fully electric.

 

There have been some cases of C6's activating one corner brake "randomly". I admit I don't know much about it, haven't pursued reading about it, and it could easily be a function actuating properly, but misunderstood by the operator (still a critical problem, IMO).

The Jeep Compass issue (couldn't turn the device off) just happened to me about a month ago; 2019 CompASS...vehicle had a defect in the shifter assy....can not turn the device off.

 

I meant cases where a car's lane-assist overrode the driver's emergency lane-change attempt and caused the driver to hit something or someone he could have otherwise avoided.

 

A couple on the forum where active handling swerved them to the side into other cars. It happened to me but i was lucky to not have anyone next to me an also be paying attention.

Its also not just a c6 issue, happens on c5s and c7s as well.

 

No Corvette to date has any function that creates steering input on its own. The steering is entirely passive - the car cannot take over steering control from the driver. No active suspensions, either (in the common understanding of the term - MRC is active damping).