What happens with street based racecars now?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/12/business/automakers-will-make-automatic-braking-systems-standard-in-new-cars.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

With all of the electronic nannies being mandated or becoming standard, how are we going to turn standard street cars into showroom stock racecars in the future? Sooner or later these systems will not be able to be turned off without voiding your insurance.

How are NASA and SCCA going to deal with this?

Thoughts?

Why buy a new car if it doesn't suit your intended usage? Manufacturer wants to make it hard to turn their car into a racecar? berkeley 'em- don't buy it.

It seems like the US government is willing to try any and all technology EXCEPT better driver training to keep the highways safe.

You learn to drive around it/with it. Part of being a "driver" is learning the car and how best to get performance out of it.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ wrote: Why buy a new car if it doesn't suit your intended usage? Manufacturer wants to make it hard to turn their car into a racecar? berkeley 'em- don't buy it.

This.

Not even from a "i don't need or want those gadgets" perspective, but the complexity of a car WITHOUT all this crap is still plenty for me to handle. This is going to sound like posturing, i'm sure, but i rip a/c and power steering out of most of my cars. (Cars, not trucks) That's two less things to break or have to repair later, or hell, it's two less things to work AROUND when i'm fixing other things.

I prefer my cars as simple as possible. Why do i want anything more than power steering, a/c, and a nice stereo for something i'm going to put a lot of miles on? I don't. I really don't.

This sounds a lot like the "Carb Argument," but it's not. Cars today, even in the last decade, are just too complicated for me to want to work on them, and i'm way too cheap to pay someone else to work on them. Why do we NEED all of this crap?

Does anyone here ACTUALLY want adaptive cruise control? Automatic brakes? Lane departure warnings? Heated and cooled seats with built in massagers? TPMS? I've never heard ONE positive thing about TPMS on this board, EVER.

Nobody wants this. So don't buy it. I think i'll be driving 80s and 90s cars for the rest of my life. They're still capable enough to be driven daily, yet still simple enough that any moron can keep them going for cheap. The only cars i've owned in the 2000s have been carryovers from far in the past. Miata (still the same thing in 2004 as in 1989, pretty much), and a 2000 Cherokee. (Oh look, it's a 1984 Cherokee with a different interior.)

Ideally, automatic braking shouldn't cause any problem. It should only activate when a crash is inevitable or very close to it. But in case it does...

At first you'll be able to fix it by unplugging your front-facing radar sensors on the track. It'll throw a warning light I'm sure, but it will keep your car from coming to a dead stop when you follow a guy close into a braking zone.

Later cars will have cameras and LIDAR sensors instead of the little radar "buttons" and unplugging these will be difficult and/or disable the car. At this point you might need to disable the ABS to take out the automatic braking. Not too bad, just a little collateral damage. ABS pumps fail you know

Even later, there will be no point using a production-based car for a track car. They won't have controls and will require heavy retrofitting to be human-controllable. They might not even have windows in the right places.

GameboyRMH wrote: ...Later cars will have cameras and LIDAR sensors instead of the little radar "buttons" and unplugging these will be difficult and/or disable the car...

I suspect you could disable all of these with some simple metal tape or the like. This of course assumes the car will allow you to drive it with the sensors blocked.

G. P. Snorklewacker wrote: It seems like the US government is willing to try any and all technology EXCEPT better driver training to keep the highways safe.

What he said.

I'll add to this my belief that strategic enforcement of traffic laws geared towards actually improving safety and usage of the roadways rather than generating easy revenue would go a long way as well towards breaking currently ingrained habits of bad driving.

Taping over them probably won't be practical, they'd have some kind of self-cleaning screen, maybe like the rotating cylindrical lenses you usually see with "press" cameras on race cars.

CGLockRacer wrote: Sooner or later these systems will not be able to be turned off without voiding your insurance.

I found this amusing... road insurance? On a race car? Worried about voiding the warranty?

I see an increasing industry for after-market ECU's and other plug-in modules that will allow the engine to run without having to "see" other unrelated computer systems. Of course, these will be "off-highway only".

The problem with some of the systems is they do/will prevent use of the car if you disable the system, esp. if NTSB/NHTSA has their ways. Working on the inside in an industry that supports autonomy (which irks me to the core, and is one reason I want out of the auto industry), it is coming faster than anyone realizes. I wonder if GRM could do a short article on SCCA and/or NASA's plans for dealing with this future.

In reply to Ian F:

I was referring to street car insurance. Poor wording on my part and implying that you won't be able to drive the car without these systems enabled, and the inability to turn them off or disable them for racing purposes.

You must have faith in the performance aftermarket. It's their job.

For all those complaining about the nannies - that wasn't the OP's question. They are a fact of life on new cars for better or worse. How do they affect the sport of amateur racing?

As for buying an older car if you need a race car, that's true to some extent. But how many new enthusiasts will you lose if they buy a new, sporty can and can't come out to the track day or autox to try it out? There's no way I'd have gone out and bought a dedicated track car just to find out if I liked autocrossing. In addition, someday the only options will be cars that have factory nannies. Twenty years from now there won't be many Neons and Fox Mustangs on course.

All of which leaves some interesting questions. There are workarounds for most of those systems now, but that won't always be the case. I'd love to hear how this is being discussed by the people who organize groups like SCCA, etc.

Swank Force One wrote: Does anyone here ACTUALLY want adaptive cruise control? .... Heated and cooled seats with built in massagers?

I do! I know these opinions will make me an outcast in the GRM world but I genuinely find they make the drive less stressful. I average about 1000 miles a week and I LOVE adaptive cruise and heated/cooled seats. They are awesome.

I like cruise-control for long highway commutes and cooled seats sound nice. I once put a seat cover with fans built into it into my Samurai, it broke within a year though...

G. P. Snorklewacker wrote: It seems like the US government is willing to try any and all technology EXCEPT better driver training to keep the highways safe.

States control that, not the Feds...complain to your Governor and State Legislature.

I am serious about this too. I complain every time I run into a rep about revamping driver training in the state.

Maybe that should be a GRM outreach project to push legislatures to pick up real driver training and not 15 minutes in the high school parking lot for $200.

In reply to Swank Force One:

I'm with Swank here, the 80s-90s represents the best balance point for me in terms of modern features that are actually useful or helpful vs extraneous crap.

I partially caught a snippet on the local news a couple weeks ago talking about how little people actually use most of the junk new cars come equipped with these days. I forget the actual statistics they had, but basically the vast majority of new car buyers had never used or were unaware of over half of the features their car had. Granted, the study was more focused on infotainment crap pushed on us by the manufacturers rather than government mandated safety crap, but the point still stands that the consumer is being forced to pay for features they don't need or want if they must have a new car.

TPMS has saved me twice from ruining a tire.

Yep the only problem with TPMS is that you can't make it shut up when you want to. I'm looking at adding TPMS to my car, along with CANbus (already have the master device) and Bluetooth (already have one adapter for the ECU and a tablet to interface with it).

Within 50 years nobody will be driving cars on the street anyways. That task will be dealt with by computers and Google.

The good news is that car racing will probably experience a rebirth as a link to the romantic "Old days" when people actually touched a steering wheel.

Not real sure how we are going to get our races cars to the track, but I'm sure it can be sorted.

NOHOME wrote: Not real sure how we are going to get our races cars to the track, but I'm sure it can be sorted.

Pretty similar to how you get non-street-legal race cars to the track right now, except instead of driving the truck you'll punch a destination (and maybe a trailer spec) into the truck.

I use my cruise control every day going to work and quite enjoy my heated seats. As for race cars road racers may eventually have to do what stock car racers did when their supply of suitable cars disappeared and build tube frame cars. For showroom stock cars they would have to run them with all the nannies in place, after all isn't everyone's biggest complaint about NASCAR that they don't run the cars the way they left Detroit? That would include running with the stuff you don't want like automatic braking.

I'm patiently waiting for CAN filters to become available in the aftermarket. Intercepts messages from sensors and replaces them with ones that say "everything is OK" regardless of the actual situation.

Don't really care if the warrenty is voided or not because racecar.

Flight Service wrote:

G. P. Snorklewacker wrote: It seems like the US government is willing to try any and all technology EXCEPT better driver training to keep the highways safe.

States control that, not the Feds...complain to your Governor and State Legislature. I am serious about this too. I complain every time I run into a rep about revamping driver training in the state. Maybe that should be a GRM outreach project to push legislatures to pick up real driver training and not 15 minutes in the high school parking lot for $200.

Not quite right...

In reality they both do.

There are Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, which a car must meet in order to be sold in the U.S., but on top of that are what the States dictate. This is also how there are blanket EPA things in regards to emissions and there is also C.A.R.B. in California, where they have much more strict requirements.

NHTSA is the group requiring backup cameras, automatic braking, event data recorders, TPMS, Stability Control, and all those things.

As far as the Federal safety standards, they are controlled by NHTSA, who is controlled by congress. You (as a citizen)actually do have a chance to weigh in on what NHTSA is proposing. You can do that on www.regulations.gov Basically, look for what is called an NPRM (Notice of Proposed Rule Making) being put out by NHTSA. They have to put forth the case there. You can comment on pretty much any government regulation there. You could band together with a politician and approach it that way as well. Any valid comment (other than a comment lacking substance, like for instance, "Jesus says synthetic materials in car interiors is sinful") has to be replied to by the agency in question. For most big things they end up doing it in batch form as many comment on the same type of thing.

Now, another thing to consider is that you can do whatever the hell you want to your car after you buy it (from a federal perspective). You just can't do it to someone elses car for profit. (seriously, if you run a shop converting cars to race cars you need to pay attention here) You cannot, as a business, take a car OUT of compliance with safety standards (unless you are exempted, which isnt going to happen for racers). NONE OF THIS APPLIES if the car is not going to be used on the road. This is why you cant go to a place when you have an airbag light and just have them remove your airbags. There are some significant fines associated with this type of thing.

In short, do it to your own car, no problem. Do it to someone elses car for profit, problem, but only if its going to be used on the road.

Honestly, the aftermarket will adapt. Everyone thought EFI was going to be the death of performance and it has ended up being a boon. Yeah, there are things like CARB to get around for tunes and such, but the aftermarket has adapted and solutions exist.

If you go and read what your state requires, you will likely be amazed how light it is there. (well unless you live in CA)