55.2-59 Self-Driving Truck?

[MiraclePieCo]

I see many hot rod builders are eager to install every modern gadget on their cars and trucks: power steering, GPS, power windows, remote door locks, reverse cameras, EFI, and computer-controlled engines. I hear it 100 times a day on the Motor Trend channel: they want an old truck with all the comfort, convenience, and performance of a modern vehicle. Well, autonomous vehicles are coming - will you go so far as to retrofit self-driving technology into YOUR classic Chevy pickup? Guys are hurriedly pulling carbureted engines out to install LS motors and electronic transmissions, so where does the modernization end - or does it end at all? Will it be just a matter of time before human-driven vehicles are actually FORBIDDEN from roadways?

Self-Driving Cars: The Future of Transportation -...

[Zippi]

I wouldn't want that in my daily driver let a long my classic truck. I use to never buy warranty's but now a days anything I buy that is electronic I purchase all the warranty I can get because they most of the time fail. In the past 6-8 years I have had these items replaced due to failure. TV, washer and dryer (twice), laptop, etc. I would hate to think if something electronically went wrong on one of these un-maned vehicles and it sent you through an intersection and you T-boned another vehicle. Not for me.

[nvrdone]

im not a fan of the self driving vehicles only because i enjoy the driving experience. But I think the upgrade / modernization / changes will allways happen as long as there is some one with the desire to change things. After all, if not we would still be driving trucks with straight 6's, drum brakes, no power steering etc.

[dsraven]

yeah, we need stuff that gets jobs done without interaction. how would the young people of today finish their video games, eat breakfast, do their make up, read the unimportant "important stuff" on social media etc, if they have to stop and drive?

just for giggles, try to establish how much time in a day you spend looking at your "device" or using it or thinking about what you may have missed because you left it in another part of the house or on your truck console or whatever. it makes a noise and people stop what they are doing to see what they may be missing on the device. social media bongs every time somebody feels the need to let everyone else in their circle know that they just finished drying their hair, putting on their socks or some other task. I was thinking the other day how much I used to get done before I had a cell phone. how much stuff I remembered because I couldn't just google it anytime. I had to talk to one of the guys at work because he was always on his phone, texting, talking, checking, something. I said he is addicted to the phone. I told him to try voluntarily try putting it in his locker upstairs for the morning and see how anxious he got just because it wasn't on his person. see how many times he felt he needed to go and get it. I said don't tell anyone what he was doing, so it would be like normal with calls and texts and social media inputs to his phone like normal. if something important was happening he could always be contacted through the work phone like normal. then just see for himself how he reacted mentally and how many times his brain told him to "sneak in and check". how many times he habitually reached in his pocket for his phone, how many times he actually had to socially interacted with the other cohorts face to face because he wasn't texting etc. to do his job like he is supposed to and see how much he accomplished without interruption. that way he would know, first how much company time he was wasting, second how much he could accomplish if uninterrupted, third how much his cohorts pick up his slack because he is "busy" and also how uncomfortable he is without it and how addicted to his device he is. after lunch I talked with him again. he was truthful and said he didn't realized how he is addicted to his device and did feel anxious without the phone on his person. he also realized that all morning there was nothing on his phone that was important or life altering or anything like that. just crazy stuff people sent him. dumb videos, emojis, etc.
I tried it myself. left the phone in the house all day while working in the shop. the house phone any rang with dumb stuff like windows was calling about a computer virus, the govt was calling about a tax rebate and if I only give my bank info...you know, those calls. never missed anything important. I figured maybe it's just me, I'm not important. haha.
end of rant.

[G&R's57GMC]

Quick dsraven your phone is beckoning you ...

There is an important message waiting, an email binging, an alert beeping and your boss is screaming for you !

Oh BTW your door bell ,phone and car alarm are all going off !

The dog is barking and the cat is climbing the curtains again !

Wife is screaming at the mouse in the house and your mother in law is coming to dinner !

And your truck is rolling down the driveway !

[dsraven]

umm, hold on a sec. I just gotta finish this. I'll be right there.

I WON! I'M ON THE NEXT LEVEL.

haha. thnaks G&R.
oh, wait a sec. tht looks weerd. is that how you spell thnaks. ley me spell check that, I'll be right with you. I shouldda paid more attention in school that day.

[mr48chev]

The good thing is that there are several schools of thought on how and what you modify your trucks, cars, hotrods or what ever. None of them wrong except the ones that call for things that could make your rig quite unsafe to drive.

Build your vision of what one should be as long as you build it to be safe to drive and be driven around others. On that I am talking about the designed in hazards to one's health and well being that are there to draw attention and are not safe on the road.

[01spirit750]

Keep this in mind about self driving cars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4fdUx6d4QM

[PDW HOTRODS]

Hot rodding was invented by people upgrading their cars and trucks for better performance, power, speed... I don't see a problem with most of these adds, but no one will ever convince me a cars computer can't be hacked. Banks and hospitals get hacked and files held for ransom. They have better security than any car. Control of a car should be by someone in the car. My old cars and trucks have Chevy v8's, power steering, power brakes, and some have A/C. All that was around in the 50's so not new tech.

[Dieselwrencher]

IMO integrating self driving technology in a classic is an oxy moron. The whole point to owning a classic to actually drive one. With that being said I could see someone/or a company actually do this to sell these to a market of people that love not doing anything themselves.

[1project2many]

Will it be just a matter of time before human-driven vehicles are actually FORBIDDEN from roadways?

I don't believe this will happen in the US within my lifetime. I am a firm believer that networked vehicles or self-aware vehicles working in cooperation are likely to be safer overall than bunches of angry, selfish, careless individuals prone to believing they are better than 99% of the drivers on the road. But if we get to that point I suspect that fully manually driven vehicles will be restricted from travelling on some roads, and I would expect that these vehicles will be required to have devices that provide outgoing communication alerting other vehicles to their presence and to what the driver is doing.

I have driven many miles and I've never shied away from bad roads or bad weather. These days I find it can be relaxing to turn over the responsibilities of driving. I could easily trust a properly installed and programmed autopilot for reasonable periods of time. In truth I find humans are much less predictable than machines. Yes, the machine could get hacked but I have learned to trust that on average, average things happen to average people.

As a side note, I have wondered about the effectiveness of a pre-paid speeding system. Think about being able to select average and miximum speeds for a trip then pay a risk-based "fine" prior to setting off. What a difference it could make in terms of safety and control to know where your speeders are miles before they can cause a problem.

[mick53]

I want everyone else to have collision avoidance on their cars. That way when I want to change lanes it just moves out of my way as I wave "thanks".

[gigamanx]

Before automation enters our vehicles, I'm waiting for some sort of electric drive and battery system to replace our combustion engines. When the old Tesla's get parted out or some other high torque battery conversion becomes the norm...I'm thinking 2022 we get a million ford trucks with battery engines along with the Mustang-e (ok its an SUV)... Maybe 15 years from now the common swap will be Chevy 1500 electric motor rear end with a brand new Interstate 300 mile range battery pack and controller. Remove the acceleration curve from the computer for instant torque and "hot rodding" begins all over again

[dsraven]

check this

https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesl...all-block-v-8/

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10...lt-ev-hotrods/

https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-cul...c-crate-motor/

[dsraven]

https://gmauthority.com/blog/2019/11...r-performance/


done. in an old truck even.

[gigamanx]

I'm not saying it hasn't been done...I'm thinking for both electric drive and some of the automation for braking/acceleration/lane keeping we would need it to be common place in a vehicle that is inexpensive and readily available in a junk yard. That seems to be what makes us backyard wrenchers get excited. Tesla V8 swap motor coming in at $11,000 I wonder how many LS swaps or 350 swaps I can still do for that haha.

[mick53]

So I'm confused, do I hook the electric motor to the blower?

[G&R's57GMC]

Sacramento has a Tesla wreaking yard and I've asked about the components to convert my '57 to all electric .

It would be a bit spendy but doable .

Now that I have 2 electric cars and the latest has 201 hp 291 lb.ft. torque at 0 rpm .
With traction control on it chirps the tires on take off , today I was going 30 mph and floored it and it chirped the tires and took off .
I took off the T.C. and from a stop it smoked the tires across the intersection and then some . They just have to address the torque steer now .

Anyway think about a vehicle that sits over the winter and then you have to deal with all the maintenance of an I.C.E.

Electric looks better all the time .

Ok enough of that back to the original team of this thread ....

[MiraclePieCo]

Originally Posted by G&R's57GMC

Electric looks better all the time.

The electric grid can hardly meet the demands on it now; what happens when 273 million vehicles need to plug in daily? We lose our home heating in winter and AC in summer due to brownouts?

Now how about the environmental consequences: virtually all forms of electricity generation have serious environmental consequences, from fish-killing hydroelectric dams to coal-burning plants. Right now the vast majority of electric power in the US comes from coal-fired plants: EVs don't eliminate pollution, they simply transfer it somewhere else.

The elephant in the room is battery disposal. Imagine the environmental disaster of 273 million EVs, each with eight batteries and you begin to see the magnitude of the problem.

If a bear poops in the woods, it's natural and normal. But if 7 billion bears poop in the woods, it's a global environmental disaster. Ultimately the answer to pollution isn't electric vehicles, it's fewer people.

Here's just a small foretaste of a future world with a massively enlarged grid to accommodate EV charging:

[mick53]

There is no doubt that self driving and certainly electric vehicles are here to stay. They are superior in many ways from a transportation point of view. A lot of the charging will take place at night when we have excess production of power and we know how to lay wire. I would consider an electric truck for my daily driver but I still want my hotrod.

[1project2many]

Local power generation is a way to reduce load on the grid. Unfortunately the cost for solar is prohibitive for most folks without subsidies.

I'm sure many of us have spare engines we could use to run a generator. Internal combustion engines can be very efficient in a relatively a narrow RPM range.

There are videos of a Tesla P100D rcing on the street and track. It runs around 10.8 on the track. With the instantaneous torque available it's crazy quick in a short street race.

[MARTINSR]

Electric cars, I dig them been a fan since the seventies and can't believe I have never had one. Driven many, the power is wild instant torque.

But the technology in these late model cars is getting old for me, really getting tired of it. I am in the collision industry and the crap we have to deal with, WAY more cars go to the dealer than ever before to get crap done that we can't do without Zillion dollar equipment.

And the funniest part is all this safety crap, lane change avoidance and automatic braking all this the shop is still FULL of cars with that stuff that we are fixing.

Ask an insurance adjuster they will tell you there are way more lane change accidents since that stuff because people rely on it, they aren't even thinking anymore, they let the car do it for them.

Yep, guys, drive your cars, don't let the car do it for you.

Brian

[dsraven]

we have become a civilization that is so prone to multi tasking and rely so heavily on tech that we are lost without it. we would rather check the phone app for the weather than simply go outside and look up. most young guys these days couldn't tell you how to return to a destination that they were at a day ago, they would have to look it up on their app. I have been at accident scenes where vehicles are trying to go through the middle of the scene where we are trying to extricate victims from a wreck. when stopped the people say their digital map and route finder says this is the way and they must carry on. it's the only way they know. they can't figure out another way by themselves. our brains have stopped being able to think for ourselves. a lot of guys will spend hours on youtube trying to figure out a way to fix something instead of digging in and putting common sense to work. common sense is becoming a lot less common. we park our car at the mall and forget where it is because our app will find it for us. we don't have to worry about closing our garage door because an app will tell us if it is open, and close it for us if we are in another country. we can start our car and run it for a few minutes to charge the battery-from another country. I am waiting for the app that brings me a beer in the shop when I think I need one. haha.

[MARTINSR]

Originally Posted by dsraven

we have become a civilization that is so prone to multi tasking and rely so heavily on tech that we are lost without it. we would rather check the phone app for the weather than simply go outside and look up. most young guys these days couldn't tell you how to return to a destination that they were at a day ago, they would have to look it up on their app. I have been at accident scenes where vehicles are trying to go through the middle of the scene where we are trying to extricate victims from a wreck. when stopped the people say their digital map and route finder says this is the way and they must carry on. it's the only way they know. they can't figure out another way by themselves. our brains have stopped being able to think for ourselves. a lot of guys will spend hours on youtube trying to figure out a way to fix something instead of digging in and putting common sense to work. common sense is becoming a lot less common. we park our car at the mall and forget where it is because our app will find it for us. we don't have to worry about closing our garage door because an app will tell us if it is open, and close it for us if we are in another country. we can start our car and run it for a few minutes to charge the battery-from another country. I am waiting for the app that brings me a beer in the shop when I think I need one. haha.

There's an app that tells you to buy the beer, so it being brought to you in the shop isn't far off!

It's funny, I park my car in different places at the store so my brain has to work when I come out.

Before and without the googlemaps and stuff people have done that with cops for years. The cop is standing at the front of a street waving cars by as behind him the street is full of cars dealing with something and the car in front of you pulls into that street with the cop telling him they can't go and they say something like "but I live down that street" LOLOL geeez.


Brian

[mick53]

It was hard for me to give up the gas pedal but I'm putting cruize on my 53. I can't see me ever giving up the steering wheel. I still hover my foot over the gas pedal.