[lug] OT: Runaway Prius

[Rob Nagler]

On 3/13/10, Jeffrey Haemer wrote:
> BLUG discussion.  Makes me wonder whether there might be a high overlap
> between car geeks and computer geeks.

I used to be a bit of a motorhead.  I'm finding the ability to build
electric cars is piquing my interest again.  I passed by an electric
MG the other day.  (It might have been something else, but it was an
old MG-green, two-seater convertable, which was cool.) A guy came by
the office a year ago with a fully converted plug-in Mustang.  The
dashboard was a raw PCB.  The motor was the same as a Tesla Roadster
(and I think the controller was, too.).  One of my friends thinks that
we'll be designing cars with 3d printers in the near future.

All this is software to me.  You can do all this with Linux, because
the time frame is milliseconds, not microseconds -- even nano-second
switches are built on Linux nowadays.  That means the machines are
easily hackable, just like robots.  If I had more time...

I think one of the frustrations for traditional motorheads is that you
need $2,500-$10K (proprietary!) computers to figure out what new cars
are doing.  There was a guy on my block with a Ferrari which he said
was the last model year he could work on.  He is a retired mech eng
from one of the "big" three.  He was using a timing light (which I
happily explained to my son, because I don't understand anything about
the "new mechanics" of electronic ignition).  Recently, I was driving
a Penske which had a check engine light on so I took it into their big
shop in Denver, and the first thing the guy did was roll over a
computer, plug it in, and play a mouse and keyboard for about a
half-hour.  He didn't touch the truck -- at that point, I knew I was
in trouble, and asked for a new truck. :)

Rob