Zeno’s motorcar
I bought a relatively new used car a couple of months ago; it’s a 2005. I’m really enjoying it. The process of researching cars, however, really has to be annoying for anyone in the tech industry. The car industry is stuck in a last-generation mindset. Here are a couple of simple examples:
- Even as late as 2005, some luxury vehicles still had options for integrated phones but no option for bluetooth.
- Even today, there is no standard for steering control of car stereos. If you replace the car stereo and want to continue using steering controls, you need to get a special adaptor designed for the manufacturer of your vehicle.
The steering control thing really gets me. Car makers should have jumped on USB in 1998 when the first iMac• came out; even if they didn’t think that the combined market power of attractive, well-designed computers plus three or more marques of cars would ensure that USB lasted, they should have gotten on the bandwagon by 1999 when it was clear that USB was here to stay.
The state of attaching portable devices to car stereos is even worse. It isn’t until 2006 that car stereos really started including stereo jacks. And even then, the inclusion was haphazard at best. The 2006 Chrysler 300, for example, included a stereo jack on the base model stereo. But if you upgraded the stereo to a better model—you lost the jack.
Stereo jacks should have been standard on all car stereos since at least 1987, when Sony Walkman clones became ubiquitous. There was no excuse for being caught flatfooted when the iPod came out fourteen years later in 2001. There should never have been a market for cassette adaptors.1
These are not dangerous, untested advances. They’re simple to implement—simpler even than the current, less useful solutions2—and they would make using car stereos far easier for the average person. But the automakers don’t even seem to have thought about using them until long after they were obviously necessary.
I blame regulations. The state of industry regulation today is such that people prone to innovate are not going to do well making cars. Take this recent bit of news: Tesla Motors was fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for not having their car tested for direct emissions.
Tesla only makes fully electric cars. Their cars have no direct emissions. If I make a hand-operated blender with no electrical parts, it will never occur to me to check it for stray electricity. That would be a waste of money and time better spent innovating a better hand-operated blender.
Who would think that a car that burns no fuel needs to be certified that it doesn’t emit fuel byproducts? The kind of person who would think that is the kind of person who doesn’t like innovation. There is no limit to the regulations you have to watch out for when you have to watch out for regulations on matters that don’t apply to your product.
Should they have known about it? Given the state of regulations in the United States and especially California, yes. Should they have had to know about it? Of course not. The requirement fosters an environment in which businesses have to be paranoid about any kind of change, because it is literally impossible to know what kind of regulations you’re going to run afoul of.
It’s unlikely that there are regulations that keep manufacturers from using intelligent standards for electronics when they become available. But the safe bet is to assume that there are; and in any case, the kind of company that succeeds in this environment is the kind of company that is not going to change, because the companies that succeed in this environment will be companies that hire people who don’t like innovation.
- April 16, 2015: How to make life easier for car thieves
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This is how over-regulation blocks and retards technological advancement: the Code of Federal Regulations Title 49, Subtitle B, Chapter V, Part 541:
The purpose of this standard is to reduce the incidence of motor vehicle thefts by facilitating the tracing and recovery of parts from stolen vehicles.
How does it do this? By requiring that about eighteen parts that are normally interchangeable and thus candidates for stripping be labeled or inscribed with an identifying mark, usually or always the VIN or some subset thereof. Now, as a consumer, you might be thinking, that doesn’t really reduce theft, it just makes tracking the stripped parts easier, which doesn’t really help get your car back in one piece. And as an automotive engineer, you might be thinking, individually stamp that many interchangeable parts? The main purpose of interchangeable parts is to reduce the cost of the vehicle by making them exactly the same and easily reproduced on an assembly line.
Ah, but you would be thinking like an engineer, not a politician or government regulator. It’s only one change, how much more expensive can it be? To which the engineer rolls their eyes and thinks, sure, it turns standard parts into custom parts. But the politician gets their way, and now the automotive industry has to lobby them with money and support to get exemptions from the new rule.
Thus, the Code of Federal Regulations Title 49, Subtitle B, Chapter V, Part 543, “Exemption from Vehicle Theft Prevention Standard”.
The purpose of this part is to specify the content and format of petitions which may be filed by manufacturers of passenger motor vehicles to obtain an exemption from the parts-marking requirements of the vehicle theft prevention standard for passenger motor vehicle lines which include, as standard equipment, an antitheft device if the agency concludes that the device is likely to be as effective in reducing and deterring motor vehicle theft as compliance with the parts-marking requirements. This part also provides the procedures that the agency will follow in processing those petitions and in terminating or modifying exemptions.
- April 9, 2012: The Star Trek Experience: Stanley Jaffe was right
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The old neon signs at Fremont Street are the best reason to go. (Photography: Pete Angritt; Signs originally built by Young Electric Sign Co. (YESCO), CC-BY-SA 3.0)
There’s a great story making the rounds about what could have been an amazing attraction in Las Vegas. The basic story is that, in 1992, Vegas was looking for a plan to revitalize the Vegas downtown area so that it could compete with the Vegas strip. Two plans floated to the top: one of them an innovative, epic experience, the other a sort of mini-strip leveraging what was already working on the real strip.
Everyone loved the innovative, epic experience and it was the sure-fire winner… until a far-away bureaucrat whose permission was necessary to move forward said “no”. So everyone settled for the more boring, time-tested project instead.
The two projects were a life-sized Starship Enterprise from Star Trek vs. the Fremont Street Experience. The far-away bureaucrat was Stanley Jaffe. Asked to approve the licensing on the Paramount end for the Star Trek franchise, Jaffe said something like:
“You know, this is a major project. You’re going to put a full-scale ENTERPRISE up in the heart of Las Vegas. And on one hand that sounds exciting. But on another hand, it might not be a great idea for us—for Paramount.”
Everyone in the room was stunned, most of all, me, because I could see where this was going.
“In the movie business, when we produce a big movie and it’s a flop—we take some bad press for a few weeks or a few months, but then it goes away. The next movie comes out and everyone forgets. But THIS—this is different. If this doesn’t work—if this is not a success—it’s there, forever…”
I remember thinking to myself “oh my god, this guy does NOT get it…”
And he said “I don’t want to be the guy that approved this and then it’s a flop and sitting out there in Vegas forever.”
Gary Goddard tells the story from the side of the designer of the Enterprise project.1
That’s another thing. The CD had won the market wars by 1991; iTunes made CD burning popular in the mainstream in 2001. Looking at 2004-2006 vehicles, I was still able to find options to get cassette tape players in the 2004 models. But given that prior to 2006, there were no options for audio jacks at the time of sale, I wonder how many people upgraded to cassettes in order to listen to portable music.
↑When I installed my after-market stereo, Crutchfield provided me with a harness that plugged into the car’s stereo connection; it was color-coded to make it dead easy to wire the new stereo up—except for one thing. Ignoring that I shouldn’t have had to wire anything up in a world of cheap USB, I had to snip one wire behind the car end to connect the steering wheel adaptor. Which would have really sucked if I snipped the wrong wire.
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- Bureaucrats Gone Wild: Tesla Fined for Clean Air Act Non-Compliance: AaronT
- “Apparently Tesla Motors, which makes an all-electric (meaning it has a battery and motors, no engine at all and thus no fuel burning) car, is in violation of California’s Clean Air Act because they never submitted their emissions-free car to the California Air Resources Board (CARB) for certification.”
- iMac•
- A 27-inch iMac with 2.8 GHz Intel Core i5 quad-core processor, 1 TB Serial ATA hard drive, and 4 GB installed RAM.
- iPod at Wikipedia
- “The iPod is a portable media player designed and marketed by Apple and launched on October 23, 2001. The iPod line came from Apple’s ‘digital hub’ category, when the company began creating software for the growing market of personal digital devices. Digital cameras, camcorders and organizers had well-established mainstream markets, but the company found existing digital music players ‘big and clunky or small and useless’ with user interfaces that were ‘unbelievably awful,’ so Apple decided to develop its own.”
- iTunes
- “The best digital jukebox, with the #1 music download store inside.”
- TESLA MOTORS INC - FORM 10-Q - August 13, 2010
- “The Clean Air Act requires that we obtain a Certificate of Conformity issued by the EPA and a California Executive Order issued by the California Air Resources Board with respect to emissions for our vehicles. We received a Certificate of Conformity for sales of our Tesla Roadsters in 2008, but did not receive a Certificate of Conformity for sales of the Tesla Roadster in 2009 until December 21, 2009. In January 2010, we and the EPA entered into an Administrative Settlement Agreement and Audit Policy Determination in which we agreed to pay a civil administrative penalty in the sum of $275,000 for failing to obtain a Certificate of Conformity for sales of our vehicles in 2009 prior to December 21, 2009.” (Hat tip to Tesla Motors pays fine for lacking emissions Certificate of Conformity)
- USB at Wikipedia
- “The USB 1.0 specification was introduced in January 1996. The first widely used version of USB was 1.1, which was released in September 1998. The USB 2.0 specification was released in April 2000 and was standardized by the USB-IF at the end of 2001.”
- Walkman at Wikipedia
- “The original Walkman introduced a change in music listening habits by allowing people to carry music with them. The device was built in 1978 by audio-division engineer Nobutoshi Kihara for Sony co-chairman Akio Morita, who wanted to be able to listen to operas during his frequent trans-Pacific plane trips.”
More battery-powered cars
- Lazlo Hollyfeld on the electric car
- The problems with electric cars are insurmountable without completely new battery technology that no one who wants to mandate battery-powered cars is looking for. Almost as if the real purpose of electric cars is not transportation, but anti-transportation.
- What will a useful electric car look like?
- New technologies win by being better than previous technologies, not worse. The modern battery-powered car is ridiculously close to its turn of the century counterpart. They may look more modern, but the same hundred-year-old technology that has never met the needs of drivers still powers them and hobbles them.
- Socialized gasoline: The bureaucratic miracle of Vehicle-to-Grid
- Vehicle to grid, when managed by governments, will mean taking your car’s fuel and giving it to somebody else who needs it more.
More regulations
- How the left bribes big business
- There’s a reason giant corporations and the biggest conglomerates are almost all donors to Democrats if they prefer one party over another. The left’s policies kill their upstart competitors. Big government hurts small businesses far more than it hurts big businesses.
- The Star Trek Experience: Stanley Jaffe was right
- In 1992, Paramount executive Stanley Jaffe single-handedly killed an audacious, innovative, one-in-a-million Las Vegas attraction. Because that’s what he was hired to do.
- The Parable of the Mexican Farmer
- Betsey Stevenson’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs, Jared Bernstein.
- California threatens Amazon, kills affiliate programs
- By this time, California had to know that its new law would not bring in new tax revenue. The tax headaches aren’t worth the trouble of maintaining affiliate programs. The only reason to pass the law was to kill affiliate programs at places like Amazon and Overstock. I don’t understand; what is it about affiliate programs that states don’t like?
- The Bureaucracy Event Horizon
- Government bureaucracy is the ultimate broken window.
Remember: Trump reassures crowd after assassination attempt fails. (read more…)
Gotta love a system that subsidizes a car maker whose target market is the very wealthy, then fines them over a regulation that makes no sense. The net result: bureaucrats get their paychecks.
My fruitless search for aftermarket stereo equipment with a line-in on the front a few years ago doesn't support your contention that regulation (or fear of regulation) was the impediment to getting that functionality into cars. After all, BMW sold cars with an iPod dock very early on. I think for the most part the auto makers in general just cut a deal with the audio manufacturers and whatever features the gear has, that's what goes into the cars.
OK, obviously there is some regulation involved, like for front-seat tv's, so it's not as simple as I just made it sound. Still, car stereo manufacturers simply weren't putting the feature into their products. You could argue that lack of demand from auto manufacturers made the feature uneconomic, but even high-end gear that is never sold to auto makers didn't have the feature. I thought companies like Alpine would have jumped on the idea to give people more reason to upgrade.
Apparently, I thought wrong. I abandoned my search, and I use a cassette adapter. It sounds terrible. Perhaps it's time to try again.
As a side note, in one car stereo store I asked, "where is the section for grown-ups?" I really wasn't in the market for a light show.
The other Jerry at 4:14 p.m. May 20th, 2011
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Don’t know how high end you were looking for, and it’s hard to do a search for discontinued stereos, but by 2003, the Aiwa CDC-X437 and the JVC KD-SX990 both had front-facing audio inputs. So there were at least two companies making them at least 8 years ago.
I doubt anyone thought “if we put an audio line-in, we might have to pay a fine.” The regulatory environment is such that no one who survives in the industry would have such a thought in the first place.
capvideo at 7:15 p.m. May 21st, 2011
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