I was watching this video of a live chicken trapped on a moving truck and thought it was strange that it’s not possible to say anything to them even when circumstances might warrant it. All we got is honking and waving. There could be a touchscreen interface with a map of nearby vehicles. It could be voice controllable or the passenger could do it for safety.
CB Radio was big in the 70’s.
it must have been super fun. I wish the world was based on magnets again
I heard it’s not completely dead, just mostly. Be the change you want to see!
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.
Maybe a manual dial to cycle through the available nearby vehicles then. The idea is just that there should be a way for it to be clear who you are contacting and where their vehicle is on the road relative to yours.
Many people would use such a method to troll and be disruptive, possibly causing collisions
BRETTS_NISSAN has just sent you an unsolicited dick pic
Yeah just like every online videogame with strangers. I would immediately mute it and never unmute.
It’s called a CB radio. Enjoy.
If I can’t say “on screen” first then I don’t want it
You can just remember to say “Over” over.
Is the communications holofilter ready?
Engage the overlay. Put them on screen.
“sir they’re hailing us!”
“Thanks wife, put them through.”
“HEY FUCKER YOU DIDNT SIGNAL”
* my bad hand wave *
CB radio still exists.
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
- Road rage is bad enough, and-
- Americans still exist, which is why
- We can’t have nice things.
That sounds awful. But it does exist, its called a cb radio
Yeah my friend has a cb radio and he says when traffic is bad people are just yelling at each other. Although that’s anonymous, if the messages showed you were X person from C vehicle it would probably be a bit more civil
CB radio was briefly very popular in the US in the 1970s. But the fad quickly died out among passenger car drivers, and now with cell phones, few truck drivers use it anymore. It’s mainly used to harass people.
Similarly, for a short time Airdropping on iPhones was always-on. It was mainly used to harass people.
I keep a CB radio in my car, and have a few friends with them
It is actually really handy when you’re road tripping together in different cars to be able to just grab the mic and say something to the other vehicle when you need to stop for a bathroom break or you’re having an issue with your car or want to give them a heads-up about whatever.
If you’re fairly close together a set of cheap FRS walkie-talkies from Walmart does the job just as well. Probably worth stepping up to CB if you expect to lose sight of the other vehicle though, range is usually a bit better.
It’s especially handy if, like me, you go camping and such in rural areas with unreliable cell coverage.
You do occasionally also get helpful heads-ups from truckers if you’re listening to channel 19 about road conditions, police activity, traffic, etc. but mostly it’s just idiots babbling about conspiracy theories and immature bullshit.
Why is everyone so quick to recommend Walmart? Corpo advertising shouldn’t have a place on lemmy , intentional or not
Because they’re fucking everywhere, something like 90% of the US population lives within 10 miles of one.
It’s basically shorthand for “this is a common and readily available thing that you can acquire anywhere in the country for cheap even if megacorps have driven all of the local specialty retailers out of business in your areas”
As opposed to something like a HF ham radio which is a specialty item that no big retailers like walmart, to the best of my knowledge, carry, and so you’re probably not going to be able to find it locally.
But I can buy that thing on eBay for 3X more plus shipping!
I get that it’s short hand for that --but I still don’t think it’s good to push people forward to stores with so many moral and economic issues like walmart as the first suggestion.
A simple trucker’s radio is a common item in gas stations and truck stops–not that they’re necessarily better than walmart, but they’re just as common and weren’t put forth as a suggestion
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A “truckers” (CB) radio is exactly what I was suggesting FRS radios as an alternative to.
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I suggested them because they are much simpler to use. With a mobile base station you need to figure out where to mount it in your car, where to mount an antenna, tune that antenna, how to hard-wire it into your car’s power (or splice an adapter onto it to power it from the cigarette lighter), whereas with a walkie talkie you just need to turn it on, put it on the right channel and push a button.
(Handheld CBs do exist. I’ve very rarely seen them for sale in a brick and mortar store)
- It’s probably gonna depend on where in the country you are, but CB radio equipment is in fact not commonly available at gas stations and truck stops around me. It’s something I actually actively look for and take notice of because I’m a bit of a radio geek. In fact, if I needed to tell someone where to get a CB locally, their best bet for that would probably also be the-store-whose-name-you-seem-too-think-that-no-one-should-say-like-its-fucking-voldemort-or-something, and even that would be hit or miss, some TSWNYSTTTNOSSLIFVOSes don’t actually seem to carry them, but every TSWNYSTTTNOSSLIFVOS I’ve ever been in absolutely has at least one set of FRS radios for sale.
the-store-whose-name-you-seem-too-think-that-no-one-should-say-like-its-fucking-voldemort-or-something,
Believe it or not. Shopping at unethical companies is unethical . I don’t like people advertising for a terrible corp. Especially a fascist corp.
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Name another place to buy a radio besides amazon
Would’ve looked a lot better if you commented that when I hadn’t already
As evil as Walmart is it’s undeniable they do have everything you could think of under one roof. The idea isn’t awful if it wasn’t so harmful.
Well, not always. Mine apparently doesn’t have any vanilla extract right now. I can only assume that it’s tariff related
GMRS has mostly replaced CB now. Cheap and works better than CB at short range. Adoption has been slow, however.
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
Hate to break it to you, but proximity chat is enabled in real life all the time.
People don’t have the balls to come up to you in real life and say the stuff they say from a place of saftey and anonymity.
Just look at the stuff people say on Lemmy, to someone they will never even meet, ever.
Why do we even leave comments here. Just total strangers. And yet people care very much about what others say.
Just look at the stuff people say on Lemmy, to someone they will never even meet, ever.
That’s ridiculous! I will find you and flay your children alive! :D
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.
fictional spaceships have advanced sensors,manuverability, and subspace communication. cars dont have that capability.
Also fictional spaceships tend to have a whole crew instead of 1-5 people.
Have you seen the movie Serenity? When they’re out in Reaver space, remember the radio chatter?
That’s what it would sound like.
Yeah, let’s add proximity chat to traffic. It’ll be great!
