Have you ever printed something via wifi and it works and you’re like “ok, cool, I’ve set it up and it works” and then you don’t change anything at all and you go to print and your computer is like “no sweat, we’re definitely connected to the printer” and nothing prints, so you send more inputs and still nothing, so you take a break and then go to investigate and the printer is printing out 30 copies and you desperately try to cancel them but the printer keeps going like its on a mission from God?
That, but its a 6 ton trailer that’s phantom driving 60 miles an hour.
“Trailer. Unpaired.”
“NOOOO”
Your music slightly quiets, you think you just heard the windows Bluetooth disconnect sound… but the music goes back to original volume and everyone looks at each other like “did I just hear something? Nah, musta be crazy” and you go back to driving while your trailer quietly passes you by in the right lane.
I’ve actually seen that sort of happen with a conventional trailer, as someone hit a bad railroad crossing and seemingly didn’t have the trailer chains that you should have for such things. Watched both the truck and trailer go past while I was at the light, and thought, “huh, don’t see that often.”
The print spooler is basically the Typhon Expanse. You send a bunch of print jobs that disappear, and when you walk down there to see what the fuck is up some ancient print job pops out like Kelsey Grammer wearing the ancient Star Fleet uniform with the stack-of-coffee-filters collar.
Answer: Linux. My Windows machines jist fucking hate printers, I often have to delete and reinstall jist to get them to work. My Bazzite machine; “Sure, coming right up. Btw, you haven’t restarted your machine in 70 days, you really need to install updates.”
not even considering all the techy computery things that can go wrong, the little towing dongle needs its own whole drivetrain, with an engine more powerful than the car, so that it can keep up while hauling a load, better brakes so it can stop quicker than the car while hauling a load, and automated steering system. it’s like buying, and paying for gas for, a whole second car that’s better than the car you already have, but without seats
It seems to me that the use-case for this technique is freight hauling, where a series of trailers follow a single, human-driven truck, thereby skirting the law and reducing payroll. And, once again, the techbros have re-invented trains, but worse.
This is an idea similar to driverless / autonomous vehicles. Great on paper, but nigh impossible in the real world.
Imagine if you will a road train of several dozen trailers and a lead driver: what happens if wildlife jumps in between the lead driver and the rest of the convoy? Or if the lead vehicle has to make an emergency correction? Or if other traffic merges into the convoy? Or one of the trailers crashes?
There are so many ways this can go wrong and only one perfect scenario in which i all “just works”.
I saw this picture many years ago already, so I don’t think that’s happening anymore…
While that was my first thought, it might actually be useful in the “I rarely tow anything” category… like a Uhaul rental. So you don’t need to actually OWN the towing dongle. Or a car with that much power. You just rent it when you need it.
Which honestly would be nice… we’ve got too many people who own massive gas guzzlers just for that one or two times a year they need to use it for its intended purpose.
just for that one or two times a year they need to use it for its intended purpose.
Nah, that’s only the justification they use. Actually, they own massive gas guzzlers because it helps with their personal insecurity and makes them feel more manly.
It also needs enough ballast for the whole thing not to become unstable, which also lowers efficiency if it’s not itself carrying passengers or cargo.
All for what, less wear on your main vehicle
Absurd
I imagine people would rent these, not buy them. And it would mean you didn’t need a car rated to tow whatever trailer you have.
I was like 90% sure it’s a joke. It’s not
Thankfully it was published 4 years ago and didn’t seem to go anywhere in that time. Good.
I immediately checked to see if it was posted on April 1st. It was not
good and bad news, simultaneous: No one can have hitchless towing until patent expiration: 17 years from then, afaik.
No one can have hitchless towing until patent expiration
No one in the US/EU.
Folks in China and India will be cruising around with homelabbed wifi setups inside the next five years. Folks out in Nigeria and Yemen will be daisy chaining motorized vehicles for half a mile. Brazil will host an expo full of novelty wifi connected drone swarms. Cuba will invent some kind of insane telemedicine surgery tool that they only have the imported parts to build four of, but will revolutionize medicine for the next fifty years.
I don’t think this will be a real product. I did see this several years ago and having a friend that works on patents, for large companies for whom the patent application fees are rounding errors on budgets, the incentive is to patent anything you thought of that could possibly become a product in the future. Even if you have no real plans to pursue it.
Why did we skip past cool tech and go straight to idiocy.
Like if your car and trailer are connected physically and digitally that could be cool an enhance safety. A trailer that can respond and assist a hard brake? Cool. Wifi or digital connection goes down? Okay now it just works like a normal trailer.
But no that’s too simple and it works
A trailer that can respond and assist a hard brake
we already have that, and it’s legally required for trailers above a specific weight in many places
but think about how much more money the manufacturers could make if it claimed to be AI powered
A trailer that can respond and assist a hard brake?
Trailer brakes have existed for a long time, and are common. They’re often mandatory in some settings.
Even braking systems already exist, entirely in the realm of physics with no digital point of failure required
I presume the concept is “you have need to tow a 5,000 pound trailer and you just have your Toyota Corolla”
To provide effective towing, your vehicle has to be rugged, powerful, and weigh enough to not get yanked around by your load, meaning even when not towing it’s a heavy vehicle. Instead this imagines a self-driving, passengerless truck that plays follow the leader and hopes it’s close enough to towing to be allowed.
Of course, the problem as illustrated is that they show a tiny little thing towing a big payload. The physics just doesn’t work (I suppose if the trailer is hollow aluminum and the tow is lead…)
If I had to guess. Its because “hitches are ugly.”
Which incidentally is why we’ve had retractable hitches for a long time, fancier ones doing it with the push of a button
Really not sure what anyone was thinking when they came up with this one lol
Also, “my sports car is not made for tow capacity”. I think that that would be the main selling point. Is you could blow a lot of money on this module with the torque and power to tow a trailer and you are free to drive a car that is not made for that.
Why did we skip past cool tech and go straight to idiocy.
We didn’t skip past cool tech. We plucked a bunch of low hanging fruit. And now that fruit is gone. So we’re getting weird with it to justify further consumer spending.
Guess they were so impressed with Homer’s car, they invited him to help design the tow hitch.
I’ve been waiting for this since the moment trucking companies announced the intention to go driverless. Gonna grab some popcorn and watch cyberpunk road pirates become a thing.
I own several wifi jammers, lets see how this works out
Guys sliding into the DMs with a “Watch this one neat trick where I disable your wifi” when wifi is so unreliable that nobody will notice.
Just disabling? I disabled it then hosted an evil twin with the same name :) your toyota is mine
I made the device with FOSS code and like 30 bucks
FCC wants to know your location.
It’s going to be real interesting when there is a catastrophic power failure on the vehicle or trailer.
The wifi part is completely unnecesary, but powered wheeled trailers that assist “pull” is a clear benefit. Especially for camper trailers who need electricity to power life inside them. Solar+batteries also helps them power your primary home when they are parked. But a hitch, and wired “data” connection, is basic safety backup, and does not need a separate WIFI tow motor/vehicle.
If the trailer had some steering/drive, ok. This illustrated concept of a “detached hitch” has some physics problems, since the trailer is just going to yank that thing all over the place.
since the trailer is just going to yank that thing all over the place.
Yes towing… ?
Ideally in towing, the trailer is yanked where you want it to go, but if the towing vehicle doesn’t have the mass, then the trailer yanks the vehicle where the trailer wants to go.
Hey you know how towing takes advantage of the crazy amount of extra torque car engines have to facilitate the insane driving people do to increase that efficiency? What if we got rid of that, gave you another thing you had to fill up, and you just have to pray the most recent patch doesn’t make your trailer drive into a lake because it didn’t know the ramp was closed
Would you pay extra for that?
This may be one of the worst ideas I’ve ever seen be greenlit
You just established they in fact cannot catch you.
literally what’s the point of that
Another large purchase to foist onto consumers who opt out of the truck market, but fantasize about using this machine to haul stuff all over town.
Look up the towing capacity of a mid sized SUV. They can’t tow shit, you basically need a pickup to tow anything over 1500lbs. That’s only a small Uhaul 5x8 trailer.
Sure, but here you basically have to have an autonomous pickup truck following you. The question is if you need something about the size of a pickup anyway, why not just drive the pickup?
The diagram shows something impossible, a tiny little autonomous tow vehicle. The physics just don’t support it. Even a tractor is only acceptable for towing a big load by virtue of going at a relative snail’s pace. At speed the bigger mass will tend to dictate how the physics goes. So for decent payload, you’ll need basically a full on pickup truck.
So the usage scenario is “I want to rent something almost exactly like a pickup truck, but am not willing to actually drive the pickup truck”.
It would be more like a self powered converter dolly that is used in a B-train that has 3 drive axels. And you are correct it would weigh more than the lead vehicle.
“Towing” with a small car that couldn’t otherwise is the only reason I can think of.
Still dumb, but it’s something
Maybe you could tow with a motorcycle? I dunno.
It means you don’t have to put some ugly hitch on your Tesla.
Also, how is some tiny little robot thing going to habe the juice to pull a fucking trailer?
so, the problem is never the “pulling”, a Yaris can get a mid-size camper up to highway speeds no problem. The problem is controlling and stopping, and that’s where the length and mass of the towing vehicle comes into play. A longer and heavier tow vehicle is more stable, and a vehicle designed for towing will have bigger brakes to handle the increased stopping load.
Which, of course, also means that little tow robot will be even more useless for towing than the car it’s following.
It’s only the controlling bit, really.
For stopping, trailers have brakes. I have an old Audi wagon, it can legally tow 750 KG with no brakes or 1900 KG if the trailer has its own brakes (750 is the absolute limit for brakeless trailers in Estonia regardless of what you’re towing with, 1900 is what is considered safe with brakes for this car). Car itself weighs 1955 empty. But realistically, it could probably easily move and even brake 5 tons or more. It’s a remapped 3.0 TDI, it has more torque than some brodozers with their V8s (the petrol ones, anyway). And I keep my brake system in order, even the fluid is brand new. I don’t skimp on tires either. So between the trailer brakes and my own brakes, several tons could be stopped fairly quickly.
The issue is sideways forces. If I’m towing a really big trailer and there’s a strong gust of wind, it’ll affect my car much more than it would affect a heavy truck. Similarly in the winter if the trailer starts skidding, my car just wouldn’t have the mass to control it. The engine and brakes do a great job of controlling forwards and backwards forces, but there’s really no mechanism for a car to do much about a very heavy trailer enacting sideways force on the rear end of the car. That’s why the trailer limit is almost always smaller than the car’s own weight (tractors with semi trailers being an exception, but they’re limited to 90 km/h electronically and require much more extensive training)
consumer-grade trailer brakes fail or underperform with alarming regularity, especially if the trailer sits idle most of the year. It’s pretty nerve wracking stopping a several-thousand kg trailer whose brakes have failed with a pickup truck, and I’ve seen quite a few trailers towed by smaller cars in the ditch because they couldn’t stop or keep it controlled while stopping.
That would usually come up in the annual inspection. I don’t know anyone who buys a trailer to have it sit idle though if you can literally just rent one on demand if you only need it once or twice a year
Take a look at the size of a semi truck compared to the trailer it tows, and they have a cab for the driver.
Given this vehicle is a power train and nothing else, I’m sure power isn’t the issue.
Reads like a scene out of snow crash
Can’t wait to hear about one of these things causing a 47-car pile up when the metal in a tunnel superstructure interferes with the Wi-Fi signal.
