No Stupid Questions

CB radio? That shit is for truckers and nerds but it was solid.

Road rage.

"sir they're hailing us!"

"Thanks wife, put them through."

"HEY FUCKER YOU DIDNT SIGNAL"

* my bad hand wave *

Yeah, let's add proximity chat to traffic. It'll be great!

Here in South Korea every car has the phone number of the owner displayed through the windshield so you can always call them when they parked false or so.

Bruh that's just multiplayer game voice chat IRL. Imagine chaos and trolling.

That sounds awful. But it does exist, its called a cb radio

This is what CB Radios are, and many more people used to have them before cell phones.

People in mountainous areas where a cell phone is useless still do.

It's called a CB radio. Enjoy.

Many people would use such a method to troll and be disruptive, possibly causing collisions

Yeah no people are trash on average, I don't want to get constantly pinged by trashy people while driving, I don't even like proximity chat in games, imagine having that in real life, there's a high chance of accidents happening due to distraction. Now if someone wants to add a little display on their car that can display some basic text messages, maybe that could be of some use

Lady honked at me the other day for not turning left at a light (she obviously didn’t see the motorcyclists) and began making rude gestures.

Well anyway it’s probably better that we can’t talk to each other.

I absolutely would not want an open channel to everyone around me. The potential for abuse is too high.

Imagine the giant trucks road raging because you’re in the left lane and only going +20 the speed limit. Or the old creeps hitting on teenagers.

And then there’s the privacy concerns. In order to connect to your car-specifically- it has to know your car is there. Which means your car is constantly putting out a beacon. This would be similar to how cell phones work - and are now being used by merchants and advertisers like Walmart to track where you go in stores.

And then there’s the security concerns of people pushing malware.

And then there’s the question of distractions from having to respond to people reaching out or shutting them up or whatever.

It's not a bad idea, but there are plenty of countries where it would be abused to xbox live chat levels.

We do...?

It's called a CB radio. Though usually it's only semi-trucks and enthusiasts that use 'em. It would be pretty awesome if they were just a standard feature, tho.

Honking IS how you contact nearby vehicles.

CB Radio was big in the 70's.

They do. Some people poat their radio frequency their car.

You could publish you phone number right on your car. See how it goes.

CB radio still exists.

Have you seen the movie Serenity? When they're out in Reaver space, remember the radio chatter?

That's what it would sound like.

Dude, people can't handle the complexity of simply driving the vehicle as it is. Bad things happen when adding handling dynamic communications into the mix with people who aren't trained to the level of combat pilots. That's why we don't let people juggle a cell phone while driving.

I used to have a cat that loved to jump up under any truck that would be delivering something. We used to tell them not to leave until we had eyes on our cat. Even with that, he was such a varmint that I'd give them my business card, and tell them that if they got to their next delivery, and found him in their truck, to call me, and I'll come get him.

Luckily, our precautions worked, but he was a troublemaker.

In the eighties when cell phones started being installed in cars, some people posted their phone numbers on their back or side window. That didn't last long.

Because

1. Road rage is bad enough, and-
2. Americans still exist, which is why
3. We can’t have nice things.

I do a lot of water sports in the UK and we use VHF radios. Certain frequencies are used by marinas and the like, and nearby boats will be tuned into them. Then there is a frequency used for emergency calls - the coastguard listens on that and answers, and will move your call to another frequency for more details, leaving the mayday one open again.

We mainly use VHF for boat-to-boat comms, or boat-to-shore. The local range is decent - a few miles from our base, depending on atmospheric conditions, obstacles etc. I honestly have no idea if you could use VHF radios between cars though. It's not private for a start - everyone can hear you - and once someone is yammering on the marina frequency no-one else can transmit. So it's just brief messages with protocols.

A touch screen interface in a car is a TERRIBLE idea. Yeah a passenger could do it but only if there is a passenger in the car in the first place.

This might shock you but I dont want nearby people to be able to talk to me. Chicken or not.

@chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com @nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

One day I was driving on a highway at roughly 80km/h (no idea how much is it in miles per hour, we use metric around here), and there was a car almost glued to the back of the car I was driving, totally ignoring the "following/tracking distance" thing we're used to learn during driving school (the faster the vehicles, the farther they should be from one another, so if the vehicle ahead needs to do a sudden break, the vehicle behind have the time to react and break as well with no collisions). The car I was driving has a quite sensitive break light: a gentle push is enough for the breaking light to light up without actuating the breaking system (not ABS, it's an old car), so I had a quite unusual idea: Morse coding "DISTANCE" to the driver in the car behind through the breaking lights, using extremely gently pushes on the breaking pedal while I kept driving. I'm not sure if the driver could understand Morse, but at least I tried.

And that's a problem for your scenario where "nearby cars" were to contact each other: even though they could listen to each other, could they actually understand each other?