I was watching this video of a live chicken trapped on a moving truck and thought it was strange that it’s not possible to say anything to them even when circumstances might warrant it. All we got is honking and waving. There could be a touchscreen interface with a map of nearby vehicles. It could be voice controllable or the passenger could do it for safety.
CB Radio was big in the 70’s.
“sir they’re hailing us!”
“Thanks wife, put them through.”
“HEY FUCKER YOU DIDNT SIGNAL”
* my bad hand wave *
A touch screen interface in a car is a TERRIBLE idea. Yeah a passenger could do it but only if there is a passenger in the car in the first place.
Maybe a manual dial to cycle through the available nearby vehicles then. The idea is just that there should be a way for it to be clear who you are contacting and where their vehicle is on the road relative to yours.
fictional spaceships have advanced sensors,manuverability, and subspace communication. cars dont have that capability.
Also fictional spaceships tend to have a whole crew instead of 1-5 people.
It’s called a CB radio. Enjoy.
If I can’t say “on screen” first then I don’t want it
You can just remember to say “Over” over.
Yeah, let’s add proximity chat to traffic. It’ll be great!
Because
- Road rage is bad enough, and-
- Americans still exist, which is why
- We can’t have nice things.
CB radio was briefly very popular in the US in the 1970s. But the fad quickly died out among passenger car drivers, and now with cell phones, few truck drivers use it anymore. It’s mainly used to harass people.
Similarly, for a short time Airdropping on iPhones was always-on. It was mainly used to harass people.
I keep a CB radio in my car, and have a few friends with them
It is actually really handy when you’re road tripping together in different cars to be able to just grab the mic and say something to the other vehicle when you need to stop for a bathroom break or you’re having an issue with your car or want to give them a heads-up about whatever.
If you’re fairly close together a set of cheap FRS walkie-talkies from Walmart does the job just as well. Probably worth stepping up to CB if you expect to lose sight of the other vehicle though, range is usually a bit better.
It’s especially handy if, like me, you go camping and such in rural areas with unreliable cell coverage.
You do occasionally also get helpful heads-ups from truckers if you’re listening to channel 19 about road conditions, police activity, traffic, etc. but mostly it’s just idiots babbling about conspiracy theories and immature bullshit.
Why is everyone so quick to recommend Walmart? Corpo advertising shouldn’t have a place on lemmy , intentional or not
Because they’re fucking everywhere, something like 90% of the US population lives within 10 miles of one.
It’s basically shorthand for “this is a common and readily available thing that you can acquire anywhere in the country for cheap even if megacorps have driven all of the local specialty retailers out of business in your areas”
As opposed to something like a HF ham radio which is a specialty item that no big retailers like walmart, to the best of my knowledge, carry, and so you’re probably not going to be able to find it locally.
I get that it’s short hand for that --but I still don’t think it’s good to push people forward to stores with so many moral and economic issues like walmart as the first suggestion.
A simple trucker’s radio is a common item in gas stations and truck stops–not that they’re necessarily better than walmart, but they’re just as common and weren’t put forth as a suggestion
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A “truckers” (CB) radio is exactly what I was suggesting FRS radios as an alternative to.
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I suggested them because they are much simpler to use. With a mobile base station you need to figure out where to mount it in your car, where to mount an antenna, tune that antenna, how to hard-wire it into your car’s power (or splice an adapter onto it to power it from the cigarette lighter), whereas with a walkie talkie you just need to turn it on, put it on the right channel and push a button.
(Handheld CBs do exist. I’ve very rarely seen them for sale in a brick and mortar store)
- It’s probably gonna depend on where in the country you are, but CB radio equipment is in fact not commonly available at gas stations and truck stops around me. It’s something I actually actively look for and take notice of because I’m a bit of a radio geek. In fact, if I needed to tell someone where to get a CB locally, their best bet for that would probably also be the-store-whose-name-you-seem-too-think-that-no-one-should-say-like-its-fucking-voldemort-or-something, and even that would be hit or miss, some TSWNYSTTTNOSSLIFVOSes don’t actually seem to carry them, but every TSWNYSTTTNOSSLIFVOS I’ve ever been in absolutely has at least one set of FRS radios for sale.
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Yeah no people are trash on average, I don’t want to get constantly pinged by trashy people while driving, I don’t even like proximity chat in games, imagine having that in real life, there’s a high chance of accidents happening due to distraction. Now if someone wants to add a little display on their car that can display some basic text messages, maybe that could be of some use
Hate to break it to you, but proximity chat is enabled in real life all the time.
People don’t have the balls to come up to you in real life and say the stuff they say from a place of saftey and anonymity.
@chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com @nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
One day I was driving on a highway at roughly 80km/h (no idea how much is it in miles per hour, we use metric around here), and there was a car almost glued to the back of the car I was driving, totally ignoring the “following/tracking distance” thing we’re used to learn during driving school (the faster the vehicles, the farther they should be from one another, so if the vehicle ahead needs to do a sudden break, the vehicle behind have the time to react and break as well with no collisions). The car I was driving has a quite sensitive break light: a gentle push is enough for the breaking light to light up without actuating the breaking system (not ABS, it’s an old car), so I had a quite unusual idea: Morse coding “DISTANCE” to the driver in the car behind through the breaking lights, using extremely gently pushes on the breaking pedal while I kept driving. I’m not sure if the driver could understand Morse, but at least I tried.
And that’s a problem for your scenario where “nearby cars” were to contact each other: even though they could listen to each other, could they actually understand each other?
Divide kmh by two and round toethe nearest 5/10 is close enough to mph for discussion purposes. It is off at times, but for discussion purposes it is close enough that your impression of how they drive is the same. (90 vs 100 kmh - not enough to matter in discussion - it matters in court so don’t try this in the real world)
Or we can stick to kph for discussion purposes, since that’s what most of the world uses
Sigh… Everyone is used to what they have used all their life and refuse to learn anything else…
Is there a reason why people on the metric system have a need to be learning imperials? (I know 1 mile = 1.6 km, but that’s another matter)
Road rage.
I think the inability to communicate makes road rage worse, actually. Simple matters that could be solved by a quick comment become rage inducing because there’s literally nothing you can do about them.
