The newer mustangs have buttons to change the exhaust sound...
Lot of research going into self driving cars...LOT of research.
The active exhaust is pretty neat, but it's just a butterfly valve with a variable position controller. The EVs that mimic ICE sounds are a bit weird to me. Hearing a sound through a speaker and hearing the same sound from the real source are always going to be different.
SDV technology has been in development since the 1950's, back when tow motors started being guided by wire instead of rail. What we're seeing in EVs for self-driving technology is a combination of vision guidance, LIDAR, and GPS technologies that have been developed in industry over the decades. Machine vision is as impressive as it is finicky. 18 years ago, a good vision system was $50k+ and had a 0.08mpx resolution. These days, you can get a 12mpx industrial high-speed camera for $12k, and basic 0.3mpx "checkers" for $600. Huge advances every year. I deal with sales reps all the time who demo these units, make it look absolutely perfect, and then we have nothing but trouble with the unit in an actual real-world environment. Deep learning is the game changer there. You basically feed a program examples of OK and NOK to learn from, with nuances, and the program develops its own set of criteria. Any time you solve a Captcha online, you're feeding a deep learning program. Here's the scary part though... when EVs start adopting "machine learning," it brings in the topic of ethics. Machines don't have ethics, so someone has to assign priority to scenarios. You've probably read articles about a certain EV automaker getting in trouble because an EV might choose to harm the driver instead of harming pedestrians in the event of a crash.
So, how does that relate back to the topic of the thread? Future looking bleak and all? It's trending towards rental over ownership. EVs are being pushed to total autonomy, and the cost is going to be more than what most people can afford. Many people will be pushed to simply "rent" an EV when they need to get somewhere instead of owning one. That's bleak.
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