As more and more of the features are electronic I could well believe it. Mastering the interface of my new car is hard work. I’ve a few videos to watch and the manual to scrutinise before a trip to Italy next week. All these wonderful new features are damn all use if you’ve got to press multiple buttons on the steering wheel and flick through pages on the central screen, all at 130 KM. The car has a “personal assistant” which chips in every now and then and says “I can’t help you with that” and then won’t shut up. I’m trying to teach it what piss off means. Maybe I should try “sich verpissen”. If that’s not bad enough it also has Siri through the iPhone and Alexa through the app. I’ve no idea who I’m talking to.
Ach shame, what a disappointment for us arty types…
I once accidentally enabled the super-duper latest racing-car-fast version of our operating system costing ££,£££ on a site of the Foreign Office in the course of a much more boring update. Just one box accidentally ticked did it .
I was all alone in their computer room - always the best place to feel cool in those days - so the client didn’t know. So I decided to hang around for a bit and watch the new operating system run (I was also a performance specialist, so I was curious to see the effects.).
Well their system sat like a brick and ran no faster - I ran all the checks. So I removed the ££,£££ ugrade by unticking the box. They never knew they’d had the latest and greatest version of our system for a brief while. Their main app was a piece of software we’d also sold them, so now I knew that was a dog and why.
Some time later on another visit their IT Manager was giving me a hard time because he’d acquired some budget and wanted the latest and greatest operating system upgrade. I told him I wasn’t recommending it for their particular software profile. He persisted so I told him exactly what had happened. They were gutted I hadn’t called them into the computer room to see it run but accepted it. Just a risk I hadn’t been able to take, to let them know only 1 bit had to be flipped and they’d get ££,£££ worth of overrated upgrade for free.
ICL? 1900 series perhaps
HP 40/42 or 64/68 upgrade. Long ago, can’t renember which. Probably a 42 upgrade. Basically it introduced caching that hadn’t been seen before. Not a CPU upgrade, and many clients were already at maximum memory, apparently the upgrade only benefited apps doing massive i/o or batch/search type stuff. So unless they needed more memory anyway the upgrade was just flipping a very, very expensive switch to click on the new cache handling.
HP not ICL. They were being very adventures
This sounds fun
Not.
Listening occasionally to LBC is fun.
It is a strange tale all round.
I wonder if he was aware of the emergency braking available in the parking brake switch?
I discovered that on a previous, non-electric, car when I tried to close the window and pulled up the wrong button. It’s surprisingly effective.
It has evidently happened with MG before. I heard of a tour de france cyclist had the same problem with his leccy rover suddenly accelerated and took off. Which brings the question about the lady who crashed her car into the school, was this case a similar one??
Big brother is watching where you go.
I’m not bovvered You don’t have to subscribe and the videos are only of the outside (from, sides AND rear ) of the car and only stored on the car, or your USB if you choose to download them. It’s the cars that have cams inside to make sure you’re “alert” I’d be worried about
It does indeed, and is way up there in excuses for not getting home from the pub on time. Of course, it’s a problem with autonomous driving regardless of engine type. If your adaptive cruise control decides not to disengage, off you go. In fact an electric car has quite an advantage here because of the relatively short range. In an economical diesel one could be driving around for weeks.
The sensible thing to do is to always order a sunroof. Then you can exit through it if your new car does run away with you. Some form of padding (à la Bibendum) for higher speed egress should be stored on the back seat, along with your gilets jaunes, just in case.
Mr.Morrison was lucky he was in Glasgow, had it been the Met the method of stopping the car may have been somewhat more abrupt and less agreeable.
I wonder if they’ll rename MG to BYN (Build Your Nightmare) now?
Now that MG is a Chinese company they have decided that MG now stands for Modern Gentleman. Major Gaffe might be more appropriate.
Years ago now, I heard about someone who couldn’t disengage the cruise control on his ICE car - I guess mechanical/electrical/controls failures can and do happen. Again, it’s the way the media grab stories and create headlines and stories to scaremonger that’s more concerning. A bit like when I was making my first trip to work in Russia late 90’s. Friends and family asking what the hell I was doing, as the country was full of mafia and outright dangerous. When I got over there, and beyond media headlines, the reality was rather different, with many very humble people.
I had a new Jaguar 5.0 V8 XFR-s with around 590bhp, it had Jaguar’s first radar cruise control, kept the distance between you and the car in front, slowed down and sped up itself, it had done 2k miles when it decided to accelerate itself under full kickdown on the motorway one day, this was eye opening with that much power, I ended up doing 140 mph before I managed to get it to disconnect it was a development car and went back to Jaguar for two weeks and they said it was cured, 2 weeks later it did the same again and I had to go into neutral and switch the engine off and back on to reset it, it was then disconnected after that by Jaguar and they didn’t resolve the issue by the time I sold it back, I haven’t trusted radar cruise on any other car since.
I wonder what the conversation would have looked like if you’d been clocked speeding
Nice to drive but constant km anxiety less in winter by some way and worse if needing heater ! Some bornes difficult to locate, some not working, different cards needed even in same area…ok for city run around but unless top of the range hybrid I would not bother.
i think things have moved on even since Mat’s post. There are a lot of chargers around now, every Lidl for example or in municipal carparks. Though really one doesn’t normally need to recharge during day, unless on a long trip. For those the key factors are battery size and charging rate. If one has a city run around it’s probably not practical to do frequent long trips.
I was sitting in the new Volvo EX30 tonight and quite tempted. The range is a bit less than I’d like but I keep asking myself how often I would actually need greater range since I stop every couple of hours anyway.