Large Cars, Windshield Displays, Self-Driving Truck Regulation, and Transformers

Off-Ramps for 23 January 2025

Welcome to Off-Ramps! Given that this feature was on hiatus last week to accommodate my interview with

Jeff Fong

of

Urban Proxima

, there’s a backlog of pieces to bring to your attention, enough that I can indulge in more curation than usual. So today, I’ll highlight four interesting things to read, all of which are about road vehicles. Please enjoy these on your morning commute, or save them for your weekend.

Large Cars Are a Positional Good

…or so argues the always-wise Alon Levy of Pedestrian Observations. You will recall that ‘positional goods’ are goods that are valuable because they make you better off relative to others who don’t have them. Ownership of the domain name Cars.com is a positional good, for example, because the short and memorable name gives advantage in the car-selling market, and no matter how many firms might wish to own it, there can be only one.

How are large cars a positional good? Because being in a large car allows you to see over other cars, making driving easier and more comfortable. Being bigger grants an advantage over all the other smaller cars.

Of course, that advantage only persists if the other cars remain small. And they are not: car sellers and buyers are now locked into a Red Queen’s Race, with car buyers—finding themselves towered over by hulking SUVs—have greater and greater incentive to buy large cars themselves. But if everyone drives a large car, no one has improved visibility any longer, so the advantage is lost; but the disadvantages compound: high purchase prices, increased fuel costs, and deadlier accidents, especially to vulnerable road users.

Levy, in short order, makes the case; considers and dismisses the other advantages of large cars as immaterial; and offers solutions. Read the whole thing.

BMW Turns Windshields Into Screens

As per TechCrunch, BMW expects to equip all of its models with visual displays on the windshield.

Image credit: Sean O’Kane of TechCrunch

To be specific, screens embedded in the dashboard project up, reflecting onto a treated portion of the windshield glass. So now you’ll be able to see your speedometer, odometer, available battery, and even your current musical selection on the windshield; the system will be customizable, to permit drivers to place whatever widgets they like right in front of them.

In the vernacular of the youth: thanks, I hate it.

Yes, I am on record observing that one of the problems with screens in cars is that they require the driver to look down, robbing drivers of focus. Positioning informational displays on the windshield reduces that problem. But of course the other problem with screens is that they rob drivers of peripheral vision. Obscuring parts of the windshield makes that problem worse than it was before. Also, it will have drivers looking at, not through, the window, meaning that their focus on actual objects on the road will be impaired.

I am sure the engineers of BMW are aligning their designs with what the law allows, and thus that they and regulators believe this approach is safe. Even so, I think this is dangerous design. I hope I am wrong.

A Court Battle over Self-Driving Truck Regulation

Also as per TechCrunch, self-driving truck company Aurora is suing the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, i.e., the national body in the USA that regulates, among other things, interstate trucking. Why?

Right now, if a semi truck stops on a highway, the driver has to place warning triangles on the road. Drivers of other cars, if they aren’t distracted by the speedometer on their windshield, see the triangles and pass the stopped truck at a safe margin. Aurora wished to be excused from this requirement on the grounds that their trucks won’t have a driver to put the triangles out, but the FMCSA denied their request. Aurora thinks this is unreasonable, so they’re suing.

Is this just a case of bureaucratic blankfaces insisting on a rule that doesn’t make sense in context? As much fun as it would be to sneer at regulatory foolishness, the FMCSA has good reason for its position. Aurora’s proposed alternative to the triangles is to activate flashing warning beacons mounted on the truck’s cab, but Aurora’s own studies demonstrate that these aren’t as effective as triangles, at least during some conditions. So I have some sympathy with the FMCSA… although less with the organizations who formally opposed the request to them, like the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association or the Transport Workers of America, who apparently are looking for any opportunity to delay automated trucking as long as they can.

I don’t know how this gets settled. Perhaps Aurora can demonstrate that the warning beacons are less effective than the triangles, but are sufficiently effective to an absolute standard. Or perhaps this ends with Aurora equipping its cabs with triangle-drones that can automatically depart the cab and transport themselves to the appropriate places on the road. Or perhaps the new US administration overrules its agency on this point. In any case, the larger point is that there is a thicket of regulations written for human drivers that cannot accommodate automated driving systems. Expect many more conflicts like this to emerge in the coming years.

Transformers One: a Review

Okay, this is only tangentially about road vehicles. But I can’t resist putting it in.

Not because I watched Transformers One, a movie about Optimus Prime and Megatron when they were teenagers (because yes, that’s how robots work, they start as children and become teenagers before reaching adulthood). I will be as kind as I can be and say that, to judge from the trailers I saw, I am not a member of its target audience.

Still, I want to highlight this review from Outlaw Vern, my favourite film critic. Late last year I complained that contemporary popular culture insists that its heroes ostentatiously deny ambition. Vern points out another problem with contemporary heroes:

…I really do hate this modern assumption that you can’t just have a character that’s cool in a movie, you have to make them awkward and wacky like a dude you know. They have to stumble over their words and embarrass themselves and, worst of all by far, they always gotta be a superfan of something. [Optimus and Megatron] idolize the Primes and have posters of them. Megatron’s first Decepticon logo is in fact a limited edition decal of the logo for his hero, so he wears it as some fanboy shit… There are times when it’s good to make your characters down to earth and relatable, but a story about the evil robotic gun-man from the machine planet is not one of those times.

…I would also ask for a temporary shut down of this idea that you can’t make a movie where the hero just does a bunch of awesome shit because it’s cool and we want to see them do cool stuff. It is unconscionable that in this day and age we still feel shackled to the Whedon Protocols, in which moments of awesomeness must first be earned through a series of corny fake outs where it seems like something cool is gonna happen but then – record scratch, armpit fart, wacky trombone – it’s actually set up for a corny joke. For example the first time Optimus says his catch phrase “Roll out” he says it too quiet and nobody hears him. The first time they’re going to transform they run right off a cliff…

I mean I like jokes too but you start to miss sincerity after two or three decades of everybody being too afraid to do anything with a straight face ever.

See also Raya and the Last Dragon, or Thor: Ragnarok, or indeed most of the Marvel films. I do enjoy them, but this is something they absolutely have to answer for.