What needs more ground clearance? The Rivian R1S/R1T have air suspensions with a lot of flexibility.
Well, I was talking about the picture right above what I quoted - the last "SUV" image that looks like it's got about 4-5" of clearance. I mentioned the Rivian's have the clearance, but there's 2 big problems. 1) They cost ~$70,000. 2) they have air suspension which historically has been both so likely to break and so expensive to fix that there's multiple youtube videos and channels that talk about converting them back to a normal suspension for an "affordable fix" when it dies.
No idea what a CT is - last I heard it was a medical scan.
- you can put them all into entry/exit mode and it slams the vehicle so it's like getting out of a small CUV - or you can leave it at normal height if you like - and you can adjust these settings as they are all configurable. So your entry/exit height can be set to exactly what you want. How on earth is configurability a bad thing with this in mind? Your logic against configurability makes zero sense to me.
Well, my logic is this:
Have you ever walked up to a heavily customized computer of someone elses? Or maybe a DSLR / MILC someone else customized a lot? When I do, I find that I'm flailing a bit for a while cause I literally "don't know how to work it". I.e. someone is using a different window manager, or I don't know what the programs are called (like on a Mac). Or the camera example many people can't pick up my camera and use it cause they have no concept of back button focus, nor do they know where the autofocus button might be.
Now in these cases, it's almost always not a safety concern - you can miss some pictures (or take 100 out of focus ones), you can pull out your phone to look up what stuff is or even just ask the person to show you how to start a program etc.
With a car - if you're thrust into needing to drive it - say you're on a trip and the owner gets too tired, or you rent an unfamiliar car, or whatever - well if basic things like heat, or signals, or ride, or whatever are unclear, soft buttons with no labels, there's no basic intuitive config that matches cause you know, most cars have substantially similar controls - even for like a radio (this has been changing which is my complaint). For a very long time, you could find a radio volume dial, and likely somewhere around there is a tuning dial. There's a dial, level, slide, for cold/heat, fan speed, there's some sort of shifter with at least P, R,N, D on it somewhere. I've seen all sorts of issues and various dangers as they've started "customizing" these things by brand, forget about by individual car. People who only knew cruise control as faster / slower toggle get in one that sets a desired speed, and all of a sudden they're "uncontrollably accelerating to 95" cause that's what they set when they held down the faster toggle. But they had no idea what was happening or why the car was still accelerating when they let go of the toggle. People who meant to go from R to D but hit P instead when it's buttons vs a shifter. People who thought the lane keep assist and auto follow was something very scarily wrong with the car not letting them change lanes or accelerate. Hell, someone who had a manual mode on the shifter and their husband accidentally hit it into that mode with his knee and found suddenly the car was stuck in 4th gear unexpectedly, and the car wouldn't accelerate or decelerate as expected.
Luckily, these all were in situations where there was enough of a buffer of safety and cool heads that no one wrecked and they're funny stories. But consider the Toyota carpet acceleration debacle where people killed themselves or others because the car unexpectedly locked in the throttle. And this was a "simple" physical thing they could "supposedly see" and easily correct by "pulling with their feet" to unjam the pedal or hit the brake.
Now imagine the entire UI is customized via software. There won't even be "a standard" for rental companies to use anymore because it's just all customization. This is why pilots need to be type rated on each plane - because when you're flying (or driving) it can really matter how much the vehicle is muscle memory and an extension of you in "extreme situations". Now maybe someday we'll all be forced into some cloud thing where your face "auto configures" your settings to any car you sit in, but at least across brands and models, I think this is a LONG way off.
This is how you make the product appeal to a broader audience in reality - because each consumer can configure their SDV - fire and forget - for their exact wants and needs. That's the entire logic behind SDVs
This is horrible logic IMHO though - I don't want to find out the car I'm in somehow got the steering or brake and ... go? pedal reversed for giggles of the owner or last renter. Also, I think this appeals to a very specific audience - while I'm ranting about the issues above, I also find that there's another insidious issue. We see it all the time with Microsoft:
Most normal people don't customize electronics. You have to be a gear geek to do so. Most people use the defaults cause they either don't know or don't care to know any better. Even gear geeks probably are left hoping that the defaults are at least sane if they have no existing knowledge or interest in the setting.
But when Microsoft assumes (or pretends to assume in some cases) that people know this is customizable - the defaults aren't tested or thought through much - because "everyone is going to change it to suit them". This is how you get insecure / dangerous defaults - passwords blank or 12345. 90% of the world using IE6 still in 2011.
Sounds like your BIL is a child living in an adult's body - can't solve for these problems until and unless people grow the heck up.
I agree - we say he "identifies as a 12 year old". But I'm also slow to dismiss mental health challenges of people.
I'd love to try an EV just to see, but they're such a high expense if I'm wrong that I'm not going to "take a chance" on one. And rentals don't really seem like a good place to do that either where I don't have a plug in and have 0 idea about how an EV works at all.
