More nanny state crap.
More nanny state crap.
Last edited by karmapolice; 04-22-2015 at 08:36 PM.
With this kind of "OH PLEASE LET REGULATIONS KEEP US SAFE" attitude toward motor vehicles, I'd expect you to be championing so-called 'smart' guns with all the rabid, hand-flailing teeth-gnashing one could muster.Originally Posted by GardoneVT
Ultimately this is an underhanded manipulation of a totally unrelated law for the sake of screwing over private owners/users just one more way these companies can.
On the back end of it, the inability to disable things like traction control, etc, is simply a matter of protecting those automakers from litigation. There's a particular case where a wealthy supercar enthusiast ignored his instructor-driver about the braking zone, made a terrible and unfortunate driving error in a Porsche Carrera GT at a track day, which led to an impact against a retaining wall at a high rate of speed and his immediate death.
His widow sued Porsche, and her lawyer convinced a jury of 12 random bottom-feeding welfare recipients and retired schoolteachers, etc, that Porsche was responsible for her husband's death because Porsche had the ability to install things like traction control, advanced ABS, etc in the Carrera GT but CHOSE NOT TO because Porsche intended the Carrera GT to be a purist driver's car, free of nanny-aids. etc.
Which is why Porsche decided to step up and start making SUV's, Sedans, and neutered half-911's called the Cayman - and every single one comes with ABS, traction control, etc. The case law precedent from that case basically murdered any chance of having a pure 'drivers' car anymore.
To make an allegory into the world of firearms, imagine if someone doing something stupid led to their death because of mishandling a 1911, and that in turn led to a legal precedent that all but forced gun makers to end production of anything that wasn't DAO with a positive safety. That's the level of derp involved, and that's the level of derp you're de facto supporting with your superiority complex and your profoundly ignorant opinion of the aftermarket automotive industry.
No it is not.
I drive a 15+ year-old Nazi roller skate with a manual transmission because I like the interaction with the machine, too, but there's no need to invent a mythology behind why certain Jerry automakers wanted a larger market share as a hedge against bubbles and trends.
(And you might want to look at the 2016 Cayman, now that Porsche has finally decided to let the 991 age gracefully into the GT for silverbeards it has de facto become.)
Motor vehicle fatalities-30,057 in 2013.
Number of firearms associated homicides in the same year, justified ones included-11,208
The only thing profound is your ignorance of the statistical risks. For all the public angst about guns, the deadliest machine under our household roofs isnt the handgun by the safe, but the cars in our garage.
Those stats dont include the people crippled for life because of a wreck. Most of which can be traced to people with more horsepower then brains .
Guns arent a comparable object, because with a new firearm some minimal background check is enacted, and a degree of vetting takes place before one can travel with it legally . Any moron with 50K can buy a high speed sports car without so much as a motor vehicle history check, and many do. Still others rip the guts out of 10+ year old family cars, and dump obscene amounts of money into "the aftermarket" to make said family sedan travel speeds it was never engineered to do safely.
Think for a moment-how many people who buy tunes legally race their cars ? How many folks pumping money into boost kits, test pipe exhausts , and headers and intakes rent track time to legally use those mods? I used to be part of the Chicago street racing scene. I can tell you right now most of the guys I rolled with back in the day raced on the road course commonly called the Interstate Highway System. Im amazed thinking back on those times I didnt end up a red smear on I-190 somewhere.
It isnt about 'Murrica!'-as I seem to have missed the Constitutional Amendment granting one the right to flash their ECU with a homemade engine management system. Its about prudence-since you think im being nanny state about this matter, let us review precisely WHY one would monkey with their vehicle's computer.
A-Change Engine Timing. Usually because the factory spark map isnt programmed to calculate forced induction , so bolting on an aftermarket FI system isnt enough for max output-you have to change the spark timing to maximize the horsepower.It should only be done by professionals with proper dyno systems. What actually happens is somedood plugs his computer into the car, guesstimates a spark map, deactivates a few factory protocols, and then the unfortunate user grenades his engine or some important component thereof. Cue forum butthurt because GM/BMW/etc didnt build their components to survive 150% + of the car's factory HP.
B-Delete safety features which inhibit performance. Many companies, knowing the generally inattentive and untrained nature of the American motorist, take precautions to ensure their customers dont wrap themselves and their products around the nearest tree.Some atttentive but still untrained motorists go the next step of deactivating stability control software, speed governors ( cant impress the four women at your street racing meet with a 130 MPH fuel cutoff!) , and other engine and transmission software to 'maximize performance'. Spending money on professional driving instruction would be a better performance mod, but the four chicks at the racing spot dont know who Bob Bondurant is.
Those two reasons arent what the dictionary would call prudent or safe, which might be why car companies do what they can to obstruct them. But what do I know? Not like I was part of that scene or anything.......
The Minority Marksman.
"When you meet a swordsman, draw your sword: Do not recite poetry to one who is not a poet."
-a Ch'an Buddhist axiom.
So, ah, do you think a software license that makes you promise not to make dangerous mods, that this will impact street racing one single solitary modicum?
Those who sacrifice speed and hp in exchange for improved safety, will get neither speed, nor hp, nor improved safety, nor certainly any of the 4 girls at the meetup....
The answer, it seems to me, is wrath. The mind cannot foresee its own advance. --FA Hayek Specialization is for insects.
Granted - it's because they simultaneously would rather sell tons and tons of Boxsters, Cayennes, and Panameras instead of a piddly handful of GT3RS's *and* not face nasty legal repercussions at the behest of 12 random folks who don't know diddly about sports cars. Point taken.
I really don't care to go tit-for-tat with you again on this because you cannot seem to comprehend how profoundly rare it is that speeding alone is the sole contributing factor for a fatal collision, let alone street racing. I've been into the NHTSA's own FARS database repeatedly to prove this point on many forums to include this one, but your confirmation bias and pride of having owned and driven a Pontiac like a kittenhead once upon a time somehow makes you an expert on it all, which holds about as much weight as saying one's uncle knows everything about guns because he did a 3 year stint in the Navy.
You make a number of totally fallacious assumptions from there.
First - the primary and most dangerous behaviors, and the ones with repeatedly proven causality towards fatal collisions are drunk driving and distracted driving. Driving after downing a six-pack and then trying to reply to a text at the same time is a much, much more dangerous behavior than a sober, attentive highway pull and the numbers overwhelmingly support that.
Second - you're making a guilty-until-proven-innocent assumption about a modified car leading to stupid, illegal, and dangerous behavior with all the depth of ignorance demonstrated by Suzy soccermom clamoring about how nobody needs an AR-15 unless they want to murder people. Same fallacy, and a similar order of magnitude between the number of AR15's, Mustangs, Camaros, WRX's, etc out in public hands and how many end up connected to someone's death because of Felonious misuse.
I work in the aftermarket performance industry. I've spent the past 17+ years being deeply involved in high performance cars of one flavor or another and I am intimately familiar with all aspects of building a car from a Spec Miata all the way to a 1500+whp Coyote 5.0L Mustang - and yes, I've done a hell of a lot of street racing along the way, especially when I was younger and admittedly less wise.
That said, the vast majority of my customers and the countless friends I've made as a result of my interest and expertise in cars are largely law-abiding and simply enjoy their cars for their own sake - to include P-F's own BOM, who could tell you a few stories about pre-fatherhood shenanigans in the GTO he used to own.
But since you went there, let's evaluate the scope of your ignorance about modifying cars and see if you're really qualified to judge this. You mention ignition mapping - yes, one needs to retard ignition timing advance if you're keen on running nitrous or a turbo or a supercharger. There's a lot of ways to do that. Back when the only turbo Mustangs anyone really knew about were the mid 80's SVO's, folks in my area figured out that a 5.0HO Foxbody makes some good power with a decently-sized single turbo plumbed up to it, so long as you had a big enough set of injectors and a matched MAFS to go with it, a big enough fuel pump to keep them supplied, and one locked out the timing advance at the distributor so it wouldn't advance with higher RPM to match what that primitive early 90's ECU thought it should do. Somehow a lot of cars like that made great power and ran a long time - until they split their engine blocks in half because that's what 5.0HO blocks like to do around 500whp.
Now, instead, I can just plug an SCT hand-held or my laptop with HPtuners into a 2011+ Coyote 5.0L Mustang's factory ECM and remap every parameter to my heart's content with a number of datalogging features to include fuel and spark trims ran off of the factory knock sensors, so that if it goes lean or starts detonating, the ECM will pull timing advance and add injector duty cycle to save the engine far faster than I could ever lift off the throttle. The variable cam timing available on both the intake and the exhaust cams allows me to run a ridiculously high static compression and drop dynamic compression at will with intake cam phasing to permit the response, efficiency and of course power of running forced induction in tandem with high static compression ratios without needing race fuel or E85 24/7.
I can easily tune that ECM to run injectors in excess of three times larger than the factory units and it'll still hot start, cold start, idle, run in traffic, etc quite nearly as good as stock. Similarly, where the old pushrod 5.0HO blocks used to split in half at 500whp, the aluminum 5.0L Coyote engines are getting pushed to 1000whp or more on stock rotating assemblies thanks to these advancements in engine management, and with a built shortblock they do crazy things like make 1439hp and 1217ft-lbs of torque at the ground and still retain all the same hot start/cold start/idle characteristics/etc of a stock Mustang GT. Hell, the 2014 Mustang in my shop that made those numbers gets 20mpg on cruise control on pump premium 91 octane at 10 over the limit and drove happily on a 2000 mile road trip through 5 states and ~7500ft of elevation changes like a normal car. Don't mistake comparison for simply touting Ford's improvements - Similar options are available for most GM, Dodge, Nissan, Subaru, Honda, and countless other vehicles too.
While that is work at a professional level, when a professional can access that sort of result with relative ease by remapping a factory ECM with the right implements, you're trying to tell me that an enthusiast that cares enough to read the manual is totally incapable of plugging an SCT X4 into his OBD-II port to tweak the factory fuel tables as needed to compensate for his cold-air intake and his longtube headers? And should he do those things, he's only interested in driving at 3x the speed limit through school zones without regard to anyone's safety including his own?
I'm not buying it and I find it rather sad that an intelligent person like yourself could be so one-dimensional and sweepingly judgmental
On the environmental angle, sure, a lot of folks remove Federally-mandated emissions controls in the course of these modifications. I don't see how they don't own their actions in doing so or how they're personally responsible if they're called on it by the appropriate authorities that catch them doing that with proper due process.
I also can't help but feel that there's much bigger fish to fry than busting a 19 year old for running a catless exhaust in his '99 Camaro when his friend with the '71 Camaro can run straight pipes and belch out all the hydrocarbons he can, and be 100% lawful in doing so.
The diesel truck guys used to be armpit-deep in hand-held programmers that allowed them to turn off the DPF and EGR systems literally at the push of a button, but the EPA got their hands on that part of the industry and after a few of those companies got sued into oblivion, the rest eliminated those features from their programmers and a handful of others simply set up headquarters where they were out of the EPA's reach - such as Italy.
In considering that from another angle, it is pretty easy to get a 1-2mpg improvement in fuel economy with a decent tune on most modern vehicles. Sometimes a tune like that is necessary for reliability - such as 07-10 Subaru STi's that were so aggressively lean near peak torque for the sake of emissions that the stock tune was quite literally melting stock engines. An aftermarket tune in that case was absolutely a reliability and longevity mod as much as it could ever be about improving peak or midrange power. A customer of the shop I work at recently called to gush with thanks about how his freshly tuned '14 V6 Challenger was now up from 26-27mpg and now breaking 30mpg on the highway after he came to us to get a cold air intake installed and a dyno tune. So don't try to tell me that aftermarket tuning of a factory ECM can only be about improving power, and don't keyhole the desire for more reliable power into an assumed need to profoundly break the law. Those changes still void the warranty, yes, but that's the price one pays to tinker and that's been well known for decades.
Are emissions systems important? I've been to LA, so yes, I get it and even agree with them and their presence as a factory item on modern vehicles. Do I believe someone has the right to remove those parts from their own vehicle even if that results in their breaking Federal law by doing so? Absolutely. Grown adults can own their actions for good or bad, as silly as those actions might be.
As for B, well, I simply have to call BS. There isn't a single 'safety feature' that I've seen in a factory ECM that needed to be removed unless you're including speed limiters and rev limiters. Not all of them are simply for safety from speed or performance itself, as you imply - some were implemented because the factory components were incapable of holding together at those levels and the maker in question simply wanted to avoid warranty returns. More than one OE has set a relatively low speed limiter for the sake of a cheap OE drive shaft's integrity. Similarly, most cars worth talking about that have things like traction control also have some way of disabling it completely without going into the ECM at all.
In the case of speed limiters, we could revisit the 80's when factory cars had 85mph speedometers and often had 90-95mph governors to match the 55mph speed limits, and totally ignore how the accident rate on interstate highways went *down* after the 75mph standard was adopted, because folks were spending far less time getting to their destination and were less likely to drive while tired/sleepy as a result.
But I digress - how is it that a factory speed limiter at 155mph matters at all? Is that some arbitrary number where 155mph is safe, but 156 will F-ing KILL YOU? I don't think so, especially when for every fatality that results from flagrantly excessive speeds (100+mph) there are literally hundreds of folks are killed at intersections at speeds in the 40-50mph range because someone was too drunk or too busy texting to see the light turn red.
The one thing I'll agree with is that performance driving instruction on a closed course is money well spent as well as being a hell of a lot of fun.
As for the rest, though, you basically sound like the anti-car version of Carolyn McCarthy, using a single anecdote to bang on a drum and letting your ignorance and confirmation bias carry you the rest of the way to your inflexible, and regrettably incorrect conclusion.
So you admit to street racing yourself, and don't see a problem with people making unwise decisions driving modified vehicles ?
Glad we established that point.
I'll bow out now and leave you to your 'murica!' cult session. Drive safely!
The Minority Marksman.
"When you meet a swordsman, draw your sword: Do not recite poetry to one who is not a poet."
-a Ch'an Buddhist axiom.
He addresses your points systematically and all you have by way of rebuttal is a weak ad hom and a flounce?
You're never going to accumulate social capital if you blow it as fast as it comes in.
That is what you took away from JRB's post. Frickin' awesome.
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