Don’t drink and drive over the holiday, particularly in a 1959 Chevy Bel Air.

Just a reminder to you Daily Exhaust readers who don’t know, I post a lot of car pictures on Instagram.

You know, life is too short for ugly cars.

Seriously.

via Coudal

Chris Ziegler at the Verge on Tesla’s announcement:

At a press event today, Tesla announced the release tomorrow of version 7.0 of the Model S software, a big, widely anticipated new build that finally enables the car’s self-driving features. Those capabilities were first announced last year and the necessary sensors were added to all Model S cars that have rolled off the assembly line since last September, but Tesla has needed additional time to flesh out the algorithms, which it has been testing this year. The 7.0 release starts in the US on a rolling basis tomorrow, and will proceed to Europe and Asia in the coming weeks pending regulatory approval; the Model X shouldn’t be far behind, since it has the same sensors in place.

Incredible. The technology of tomorrow keeps getting closer faster and faster.

Tesla’s cars wouldn’t be possible if they didn’t control both the hardware and software (they also value software much more than many other car makers).

From Vice:

Photographer Max Siedentopf has no idea who the cars in his photos belong to. What he did know the second he saw them, is that they were in dire need of an upgrade.

—Combustion Chamber Approved—

via Coudal

I love Jay Leno. I love him for different reasons. I love his YouTube show. I love his car collection. I love his enthusiasm for cars. I love his knowledge of cars. I loved that he worked at a car shop as a kid. I love that he’s from New York.

I also love his lack of pretension.

Here’s a quick screen grab from the promo for the series premiere of his new show on NBC, Jay Leno’s Garage:

Make up? No.

Comb your hair? No.

You going take off that stupid blue shirt? No.

Jay doesn’t give a fuck and I love that.

Driving a car will be illegal by 2030. Our economy will be severely impacted as millions of truck drivers, cabbies and delivery people are put out of work. In this era of endless innovation, man’s century-long relationship with the automobile is about to be permanently disrupted.

The reason has nothing to do with millennials, Uber, climate change or improvements in mass transportation. Driving should and will be made illegal because we now have the technology to prevent deadly traffic accidents; one of the greatest causes of premature deaths around the globe. More than 1.2 million people are killed in car accidents globally each year (which is more than the total casualties suffered by both sides in the Korean War).

—Jay Samit, Driving Your Car Will Soon Be Illegal

We don’t deserve nice things.

via HotWheels

via vintage everyday

Hey, Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee is back with Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

I have a thing for her. Man is she cute. And funny.

Eli Schiff has an interesting multi-part series on the “Fall of the Designer”.

Here’s a bit from Part 3, Conformist Responsive Design and the shift away from shiny, roundy, textural UI elements and towards ‘flat’ design:

Similar to web design, application design is becoming homogenized. Where before, apps like Tapbots’ Tweetbot were worlds unto themselves, with robotic sounds and futuristic cartoon aesthetics, today the only remnant of that past is robotic sound effects, devoid of any rationale as to why they sound the way they do.

Paul Haddad of Tapbots seemed to laud the shift, explaining in 2013 that he and his team “talked about making the Mac version a little bit more…plain” too. This hesitation might have invited our skepticism about their approval of flat design. But in the following years, Tapbots announced proudly their newly flattened Tweetbot 2.0 for OS X.

Tapbots is not alone in castrating Calcbot and their Twitter client Tweetbot. The Iconfactory’s Twitteriffic and Twitter’s proprietary iOS app in earlier days all attracted dedicated followings based on expressive designs which each exposed unique feature sets. But with their new flat interfaces, they struggle to differentiate their brands. Even with custom glyphs, animation and functionality, at a 10 foot view, it is difficult to tell one of these flat UIs from the next.

Did these developers suddenly have an epiphany and conclude that their former designs were ugly and overwrought? Or was it instead an imposed, though convenient, ideological shift by operating system designers?

I respect the time and thought Schiff has put into this series on design, and I think the answer to this last question is simple: fashion. UI design, like clothing, goes through different different phases and trends. Thats’ really it.

If you’re afraid skeuomorphism is gone forever, fret not. All you need to do is look at the achievement badges in the new Apple Watch exercise app:

There are gaudy ways of using depth and shading in UI design and there are tasteful ways of using depth and shading just like there tasteful and gaudy ways of using chrome and paint on a car.

I think what we’re seeing, as Schiff has pointed out is not so much flat design as lazy, flat design.

Formula E is an interesting beast.

So what does it sound like when vehicles have no exhaust:

There’s even a live DJ during each race — or “EJ,” as he’s called — who pumps music into speakers around the venue to help make up for the lack of engine noise.

And:

While the racing has been great, the most common complaint about Formula E was lodged well before the series even debuted: its sound, or the perceived lack of it. Traditional race fans love (or love to hate) the sound of combustion engines, and a series that lacks the rumbles and roars usually found in other motorsports is fighting an uphill battle.

“There’s always going to be standard combustion [engine] series out there, and we’re not trying to get rid of them,” Bird says. “There’s no reason why a fan can’t appreciate and love the so-called ‘normal’ concept of racing but at the same time appreciate and love what we’re doing here with our machines.”

But let’s be clear: these cars aren’t silent. The electric motors produce a sound that is somewhere between that of a giant RC car and something out of The Jetsons. They might be whisper-quiet from few hundred yards away, but they register about 80 decibels when they zip by. That’s plenty of noise to get your heart pounding.

I get sad thinking about combustion engines going away, but like most things, we adapt quickly to the new and forget about the old: cigarettes in bars, new operating systems, pagers.

Elon Musk: cars you can drive will eventually be outlawed:

Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk believes that cars you can control will eventually be outlawed in favor of ones that are controlled by robots. The simple explanation: Musk believes computers will do a much better job than us to the point where, statistically, humans would be a liability on roadways.

“I don’t think we have to worry about autonomous cars, because that’s sort of like a narrow form of AI,” Musk told NVidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang at the technology company’s annual developers conference today. “It would be like an elevator. They used to have elevator operators, and then we developed some simple circuitry to have elevators just automatically come to the floor that you’re at … the car is going to be just like that.” So what happens when we get there? Musk said that the obvious move is to outlaw driving cars. “It’s too dangerous,” Musk said. “You can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine.”

Bryan and I have talked about this more than once on the Weekly Exhaust podcast.

We humans are fucking idiots, driven by emotion and occasionally use our higher brains to achieve amazing things in areas like science, literature, and healthcare.

I’ll tell you a few things a self-driving car won’t do:

• text his friend while driving
• drive after drinking 7 Coronas
• drive angry after a blowout fight with her boyfriend

I look forward to the day manual cars are leisure vehicles we enjoy on the weekends and not something we have to endure on the highway 2 hours a day to go to and from work.

The Verge: Former GM CEO warns Apple against making cars

Dan Akerson, who ran General Motors for less than three and a half years, issued a stern warning to Apple this week against making a car. In an interview with Bloomberg, he noted that making cars was hard. “A lot of people who don’t ever operate in it don’t understand and have a tendency to underestimate,” said Akerson, who has held no other executive positions in the automotive industry. “They’d better think carefully if they want to get into the hard-core manufacturing,” he said of Apple. “We take steel, raw steel, and turn it into car. They have no idea what they’re getting into if they get into that.”

This sounds very similar to what former Palm CEO Ed Colligan said about Apple’s entry into the phone market in 2006:

We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.’

Is Apple going make it’s own car? Are they going to buy Tesla?

I don’t know.

I just know I’d love to be a fly on the wall in Apple’s labs because they’re working on some awesome stuff. Guaranteed.