Modern Motorcycles... and Technology

Donk said:
It's crazy if you think about it. In those older vehicles. if your windshield started to fog up you reached over and twisted a knob or slid a lever from heat to defrost and turned the fan up. You knew where the controls were by habit and you could adjust them from memory of the positions. You did not have to stop paying attention to the road to do it. On today's vehicles "climate" is buried somewhere on a menu on a big touchscreen which you have to "navigate" through to find it being completely distracted from the road. But fear not the manufacturers have laden our vehicles with systems to protect us from the system they installed, lane departure, collision avoidance, adaptive cruise control, ect. And to what end? We are no warmer, the windshield still fogs up, we are no safer if anything quite the opposite. Not sure things are going in a positive direction here. Unfortunately this same technology is trickling down to our bikes. Just read a review where the bike was knocked because connectivity didn't come standard, it was an option? *****? How long will it be before there is a yellow light on the dash to remind us when there is a passenger on the back?
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Careful, all new cars do not have all systems controlled through touch screens. My '25 has knobs for climate control. You would feel right at home.

Something to think about if you are looking for any good here (instead of the bad which is so bitter to the soul) is that the amount of driving has constantly increased over time and fatalities per mile and per 100,000 of population have consistently fallen since the horseless carriage became commonplace. The peak of deaths per driving population peaked in the 1930s. Sure spikes have occurred up and down by year but by any measure overall driving has never been safer.
 
There's a REALLY good argument against these nanny-minded contrivances right there, Martin.
That is CREATING more chances for mishaps, not avoiding them. Damn.
 
Sadlsor said:
There's a REALLY good argument against these nanny-minded contrivances right there, Martin.
That is CREATING more chances for mishaps, not avoiding them. Damn.
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There is assist, and then there is interfering, confusing, hindering...

Cruise control might be nice, comfy, helps avoiding tickets (which is I used it for in reduced speed zones like roadworks)
But with that hysterical front-assist a bit of a challenge...
Default distance setting about 700m/2000ft... if it spotted a car pulling out up there it... yep... slammed on the brakes...
So I set the distance to minimum... about 200m/650ft... but you have to do that every time, over and over...
Still hysterical, like when the trailer of a semi/HGV started to swing in the first lane... that T6 went: brakes--accelerate--brakes--accelerate... pfffff...

You're driving down the m/way, know that your exit is about to come up... suddenly that touchscreen thingy goes dark... huh?!
Takes about 2 kilometers till it finally decides to reboot and another click for a new satfix to continue navigation... I really started to hate that vehicle...
 
dduelin said:
Careful, all new cars do not have all systems controlled through touch screens. My '25 has knobs for climate control. You would feel right at home.

Something to think about if you are looking for any good here (instead of the bad which is so bitter to the soul) is that the amount of driving has constantly increased over time and fatalities per mile and per 100,000 of population have consistently fallen since the horseless carriage became commonplace. The peak of deaths per driving population peaked in the 1930s. Sure spikes have occurred up and down by year but by any measure overall driving has never been safer.
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Yeah Dave. But, you grew up like the rest of us having to actually drive the car yourself. These young kids don't know how to do it all by themselves. They depend on the technology.
When the technology goes, you and I know how to drive the vehicle, these kids have no clue. That's what scares me the most.
 
st11ray said:
Yeah Dave. But, you grew up like the rest of us having to actually drive the car yourself. These young kids don't know how to do it all by themselves. They depend on the technology.
When the technology goes, you and I know how to drive the vehicle, these kids have no clue. That's what scares me the most.
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They don't have to and all of us are overall safer for it. We can pi** and moan about cost of technology but there's no answer there for how a driver can wad a car and walk away when the same accident 20-30 years ago often produced serious injury or death. It's not just ST-O. Any forum with boomers is full of these threads. I remember my dad telling me I was lucky my little Honda didn't have a suicide foot clutch like his pre war Harleys did.

If you don't occasionally look at your phone while driving you are one of the few drivers on the road today not distracted about something. For all those head-down drivers I hope they have tech that keeps them from hitting my grandkids.
 
dduelin said:
They don't have to and all of us are overall safer for it. We can pi** and moan about cost of technology but there's no answer there for how a driver can wad a car and walk away when the same accident 20-30 years ago often produced serious injury or death. It's not just ST-O. Any forum with boomers is full of these threads. I remember my dad telling me I was lucky my little Honda didn't have a suicide foot clutch like his pre war Harleys did.

If you don't occasionally look at your phone while driving you are one of the few drivers on the road today not distracted about something. For all those head-down drivers I hope they have tech that keeps them from hitting my grandkids.
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That's all well and good, but what happens when the tech has a glitch and the young kid driving doesn't know what to do? He may run over your grandkids too.
 
dduelin said:
Careful, all new cars do not have all systems controlled through touch screens. My '25 has knobs for climate control. You would feel right at home.
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Yes but where do you look to see what you've set your climate control at?

I'm not against technology, mostly I'm for it. I am against technology for the sake of technology. At some point it becomes sort of self cancelling redundant. For a simple example do we need modes on a motorcycle and do they make a bike safer? Yes I can see a rain mode on a ZX14R Ninja but 5 modes on a 98hp Adventure bike? Just because you can doesn't mean you should or you need to.
 
dduelin said:
We can pi** and moan about cost of technology but there's no answer there for how a driver can wad a car and walk away when the same accident 20-30 years ago often produced serious injury or death.
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What you are describing is not the tech that I think that most people seem to be criticizing here. The fact that someone can walk away from an accident that was previously deadly is testament to the effectiveness of things like safety cages, crumple zones, energy absorption materials, air bags, seat-belts, etc.. These are all beneficial technologies that do not interact with the driver or the operation of the vehicle. While they are very effective at mitigating the impact forces of an accident once it is in progress, they do not prevent an accident from happening. What most people seem to be criticizing here is the tech that is intended to prevent an accident by interacting with the driver and with the operation of the vehicle before the accident becomes inevitable, tech that has become known as nanny tech.
 
ST1100Y said:
OTOH they already know where your house lives... ;)
cybersecuritynews.com

Volkswagen Data Breach: 800,000 Electric Car Owners' Data Leaked

Volkswagen has inadvertently exposed the personal information of 800,000 electric vehicle owners, including their location data and contact details.
cybersecuritynews.com cybersecuritynews.com
Positive they're not the only MFG siphoning customer data en mass...
Sure, OnStar and eCall have only our safety in mind... right... the latter is mandatory over here, even them BMW motorcycles have it...

And you thought that William Gibson's Neuromance Trilogy was fiction... pfffff...
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Regardless of how much truth is in the below article, it has to make one wonder about one's privacy.

It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy​

 
Donk said:
Yes but where do you look to see what you've set your climate control at?
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You don't have to look at it Don. If it is a little cooler than we like, just turn the left knob a little to the right. Like sliding a lever 40 years ago.
 
Donk said:
Yes but where do you look to see what you've set your climate control at?

I'm not against technology, mostly I'm for it. I am against technology for the sake of technology. At some point it becomes sort of self cancelling redundant. For a simple example do we need modes on a motorcycle and do they make a bike safer? Yes I can see a rain mode on a ZX14R Ninja but 5 modes on a 98hp Adventure bike? Just because you can doesn't mean you should or you need to.
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How about 4 modes on a 58 hp pseudo adventure bike? (you know which one I'm talking about) lol
 
Andrew Shadow said:
Regardless of how much truth is in the below article, it has to make one wonder about one's privacy.
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Andrew, to continue with our pissing and moaning (despite Dave trying to spin us into unbridled hope and optimism), I suspect most of us online these days would agree that "personal privacy" is a myth.

Google has over 700 million data points on most of us, farcebook has less, but still an astounding number.

Are there any major financial institutions or large retailers left, who have not had a "data breach"? Or does it even really matter at this point? I mean, they all have essentially the same information on us.

Even the IRS lost custody of 104,000 taxpayers' financial information recently.

So, nice try Dave. But let's face it... we're doomed, and we're all gonna die.

But ...Happy New Year, and have a really nice day!
 
Sadlsor said:
Google has over 700 million data points on most of us, farcebook has less, but still an astounding number.
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People think that Google is a computer program company. It is a data mining company that has some of the most extensive data bases in the world. The programs are a means to harvest data that they give to people free of monetary charge in exchange for harvesting their data. Google makes the bulk of their money from selling that data in one form or another.
 
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