These two approaches seem to be the main ones these days, in the Bay Area of 2018.
Barrels…
…and metal accordions like this one:
I’d much prefer the barrels, which also might help to put out a fire / prevent an explosion.
To me, it’s totally obvious which would work better.
Maybe I’m wrong, but this looks like a no-brainer…
A four wheel drive Model S, for extra confusion, UBERing away in Lower Pacific Heights, the Locus of Lyft:
So how does this work?
Buy car for $100,000. Then start paying it off through Lyfting?
Seems a lot of effort…
You can generally go right on red to get onto Polk, but you need to stop first – there’s the rub. Or maybe slow down enough to qualify for a California Stop. But When you treat a red as if it were a green or a yellow, well, that’s running a red, six-figure Tesla driver:
You see a lot of Teslas with manufacturer’s plates about Frisco. IDK why…
[UPDATE: Oh, I said plates even though I know/knew that the DMV only issues one MFR plate at a time, and not in pairs the way it usually does for most cars. This means that the driver of this ride has an excuse for not having a Front License Plate, unlike so so many other Tesla drivers on the Streets of San Francisco these days. And I should note that this station wagon looks exceedingly ugly, from the standpoint of a normal person in 2017 – it’s on a par with a memorably ugly vehicle like a Pontiac Aztek, something like that. And the ridiculously large Conestoga wheels don’t help neither. Sry, not sry.]
“At the old GM plant in Fremont, Calif., the system had been totally different and there was one cardinal rule that everyone knew: the assembly line could never stop.
“You just didn’t see the line stop,” Madrid said. “I saw a guy fall in the pit and they didn’t stop the line.”
Lee, the supervisor who oversaw the plant summed it up this way: “You saw a problem, you stopped that line: you were fired.”
As a result, vehicles at the plant had lots of defects. Haggerty saw all kinds of mistakes go right down the line.
“So we had Monte Carlos with Regal front ends and vice versa,” he recalled. There were cars with engines put in backwards, cars without steering wheels or brakes. Workers fixed them later in a yard outside — sometimes doing more damage to the vehicles.”
So those were the bad old days of GM in Fremont. But then came the Toyota Way of doing things during the NUMMI era:
At the NUMMI plant you can see Toyota’s solution to this — a thin nylon rope that hangs on hooks along the assembly line. It’s called the andon cord and when pulled, it will stop the line.
The first pull summons a team leader. Workers try to correct the problem on the line. If it takes too long to fix, the line stops. The andon cord also plays a surprisingly cheerful little song that workers can chose. For longtime GM workers who switched to the NUMMI system, all this was a revelation.
When Madrid trained in Japan, he saw workers stop the line to fix a bolt.
“That impressed me,” he said. “I said, ‘Gee that makes sense.’ Fix it now so you don’t have to go through all this stuff. That’s when it dawned on me. We can do it. One bolt. One bolt changed my attitude.”
And guess what’s made at that very same factory down south in Fremont today – that’s right, Teslas:
After Tesla’s Model S sedans and Model X SUVs roll off the company’s Fremont, California assembly line, the electric vehicles usually make another stop – for repairs, nine current and former employees have told Reuters.
The luxury cars regularly require fixes before they can leave the factory, according to the workers. Quality checks have routinely revealed defects in more than 90 percent of Model S and Model X vehicles inspected after assembly, these individuals said, citing figures from Tesla’s internal tracking system as recently as October. Some of these people told Reuters of seeing problems as far back as 2012.
By now, the reader should have realized that New Tesla is sort of like Old GM.
Artist’s conception of Elon Musk wearing Mens crocs size XXL, if he ever were to do that and then pose awkwardly in/on an expensive vehicle that obviously didn’t fit him (or Arnold, or Gavin, or a lot of others who Wanted To Believe):
END OF LINE
1) Porsche. This brand has gotta be the #1 offender in Frisco. The funny thing is that Porsches in Germany have front license plates, but low aspect ratio American license plates apparently mar the good looks of these rides stateside.
2) Tesla. I mean, they all look the same from the front without a FLP, right?
Just one after the other…
Same-o same-o:
3) BMW. I don’t have a shot of a recent BMW without an FLP, but they’re out there, all over.
Why is it that regular ppl have FLP’s and richers don’t even though they should?
Seems odd…
Look what I saw coming out of Hayes Valley – it’s VEHT2079, a brand-new self-driving Chevy Bolt all the way from Orion Township, MI. It’s different. Notice the white thingamajigs above the front wheels:
At first I thought it could have been a Project Titan from Apple, but no. It’s just an updated version of what we’ve seen for a while now.
Of course that’s the human minder in the driver’s seat, but is that the robot in the passenger seat? Let’s ENHANCE:
I’ll think of him as Frisco’s Star Trek Data, or Johnny Cab 2017, but you make the call, Gentle Reader
Off they go, a boy and his robot:
But not without a few Grove Street hassles. I mean, that’s what GM is doing here, a kind of driving torture test, right?
And all this is just one block away from the Hayes Street block where Anthony Levandowski’s long-forgotten self-driving Pri-Bot used to get parked, right?
The Future is Now…
I guess the ad is what’s new here – I’ve never seen this:
Serramonte Center is your prototypical mall. It’s undergoing an urbanist-inspired makeover that makes it an even less attractive place to go to. I’ll tell you, I’m not going to go there and then complain about going there on a regular basis, it’s just that my special lady friend had something delivered to the fucking mall (like why would you want to go there?) instead of to herself, by mistake, and of course it wasn’t her mistake. But what can you do? So you drive on down there and there are zero parking spaces and all this, as I said, urbanist-type crap (huge sidewalks, aesthetic plantings what take up a lot of room) that they are constructing. There’s no place to park as they are making new multilevel structures and there’s no real place to drop people off close to the stores. It’s a hybrid of old and new, and it’s not looking good. And of course even after they finish it’s still not going to be good.
JMO.
As seen, en La Mision, on Mission:
[UPDATE: Indeed, it doesn’t look very pro-Elon, Reddit. Oh well.]
[UPDATE II: Oh, Nitasha Tiku has the whole story in WIRED.]
I don’t know what to call this part of the Western Addition anymore. Anyway, here’s your notice that things are afoot:
And here’s the nitty gritty from ElectricTrees.
What’s that you say, your electric steed has a ludicrous mode / concomitant large battery? Well, you’re going to have to pay more, pal:
Charging services are offered to subscribers based on the type of vehicle they own and its battery size. The service allows unlimited charging sessions and provides the fastest speed of charging for the subscriber’s registered vehicle. Once a vehicle is finished charging, a notification is sent via phone to the driver. The driver then has 15 minutes to move their vehicle before a parking fee is initiated that increases each hour the car remains in the parking space for a maximum of 4 hours. If the vehicle is still connected or the charging session ends after midnight there is a flat fee to stay in the space until 7 a.m. when the vehicle must be moved.
This could be your future if you don’t have a suburban-style garage / charger set up…
