Old Cars Were Heavy — But Untamed

On By JohnIn interesting, vehiclesLeave a comment

A 1960s land yacht weighing 4,200 pounds didn’t feel safe because of weight. It felt safe because it looked massive. Under the hood and under the sheetmetal, there was very little to protect you in a real crash. Tires were bias-ply. Brakes were drums. Steering was vague. Suspension tuning traded precision for that “floaty” feel.

It wasn’t that those cars rode like clouds because they were magical. They rode that way because engineers tuned them to soak up bumps — at the astronomical cost of handling finesse.

Modern cars are heavier for a different set of reasons:

  • Crash structures that absorb energy where people sit
  • High-strength steels and engineered deformable zones
  • Electronics, sensors, and safety systems
  • Better brakes, better tires, better handling

The result is a car that weighs about the same as a big old sedan but stops and steers in ways nothing from 1965 could.

That lack of control didn’t stop people from feeling safe, though. In fact, many still remember those cars fondly. Which makes me wonder: are we remembering the machines accurately—or just the way they made us feel?

We’ve Always Driven Heavy Cars — We Just Didn’t Talk About It

On By JohnIn interesting, vehiclesLeave a comment

I keep seeing the same argument online: electric cars are too heavy. Yes, people like to complain about range, but that’s another rant.

Right now, I’ve a few thoughts about the weight.

People act like EVs invented vehicle mass. They didn’t. We’ve been driving 4,000-plus-pound cars for seventy years.

A mid-1960s full-size sedan — a Chevy Impala, a Ford Galaxie, a Plymouth Fury — often weighed the same as a modern EV crossover. Heavy bodies, big steel frames, cast-iron V8s. They didn’t need batteries to be massive; that was just how cars were built.

But the thing people seem to forget — or maybe never knew — is this: mass isn’t the problem. Control is the thing.

Of course, weight alone doesn’t tell the whole story. If mass were the real villain, those older cars should have been paragons of safety. They weren’t. Which raises the next question: if weight isn’t the problem, what actually was?

The Year So Far

On By JohnIn interestingLeave a comment

Had a little chat with, uh… ChatGPT. It tells me that this is representative of the year I’ve had:

Which is strange primarily because I haven’t worked on any Cessnas in about three years. Sure, I’ve done a few 150s, pair of 337s, a 310, and a Cessna 410. I don’t think I’ve mentioned to it at all that I’ve touched those Cessnas in the past.

But loads of 737s.

And what with the peppermint lollypop?!

TBI Challenge n+1

On By JohnIn health, psychology, tbiLeave a comment

Here I am, nearly eight years post-TBI. I’m still alive.

There are still two long-lived (heh) symptoms related to the TBI that I still struggle with regularly.

One of them is visual. Corrective lenses help to a point. And it’s exacerbated by simply aging — yay, presbyopia! I can cope with it to a degree.

But the other is just frustrating and leaves me feeling isolated from the world around me and yet bombarded by sounds. All sounds.

Let me explain.

After my TBI, I’ve come to describe my auditory system works more like a damaged signal-processing pipeline than a damaged microphone. The hardware (ears, cochleas, nerves) is intact, but the software stack that filters, routes, and prioritizes sound took a hit.

Normally the brain runs an automatic ‘noise gate’ of sorts that suppresses irrelevant audio, boosts meaningful signals (like speech), and manages bandwidth. Mine doesn’t always do that reliably. Under certain conditions—especially in noisy environments, multitasking, stress, or fast speech—the gating process struggles.

And when gating struggles:

  • Background noise and foreground speech come in at equal priority. I’m overwhelmed with “noise”.
  • I may hear a sound but not decode it. This one is difficult to put into words as human cognition is complex.
  • Some voices break through (especially familiar ones), yet others drop out.
  • Complex or rapid speech becomes garbled or unintelligible.
  • The whole system can overload and temporarily stop parsing input correctly.
  • It’s not hearing loss; it’s processing loss.

I do better with: slower speech, with one speaker at a time, quieter environments, visual cues, and a little extra processing time. Sometimes I’ll interrupt and ask, “Hold on a moment please while my brain processes this…”

Sometimes, it’s not possible nor realistic to ask for a moment to absorb or comprehend, yet I do my best to muddle through.