tal

I'd only become aware recently that it's become less common for newer cars to have a spare tire. It was a bit of a shock to me.

The norm I'd been accustomed to was that a lot of cars would include a "donut" spare tire; a smaller, lighter, cheaper-to-manufacture thing. It would shave some cost off of the car, probably let the manufacturer increase their MPG rating a bit. However, it was only rated for something like 50 miles (80km) at a limited speed (say, 55mph or 90km/h) before it should be replaced. It was really designed to let a driver reach the closest tire shop and get a regular tire replaced.

What my dad always did, and recommended, and what I'd done, was replacing the thing with a full-size tire. That way, when you have a flat, it's not all that much of a problem. You just swap in the new tire, and next time it happens to be convenient, you get a new full-size tire. In my experience, spare tire wells included the space for a full-size tire; the manufacturer just didn't provide you with one.

However, in 2025, the situation doesn't look like that much anymore.

A number of spare tire wells don't appear to have enough space for a full-size spare tire. This seems, in my quick skim, to be something more common with hybrids or BEVs than ICEs, I assume because the battery is space-constrained and the tire is competition for space (and in the case of BEVs, range).

Some vehicles apparently ship with "run flat" tires. These can be driven for a limited distance, and appear to have about the same capabilities as a "donut" spare tire

they can go about 50 miles at a reduced speed before they need to be replaced, and I assume are aimed at letting one reach a tire shop.

A number of vehicles don't have a spare tire or storage space for one or a jack at all; for example, the 2025 Corolla Hybrid. The manufacturer provides a pump and a goop kit, and the idea is that if a flat is only a slow leak, one can hopefully nurse the car along well enough with that to reach a tire shop.

As best I can tell, full-size spares are only common today with pickups or off-road oriented vehicles.

I assume that part of this is because cell phone coverage is more widespread now, and the idea is that one should just call for roadside assistance and have them bring and change it. I saw some discussion on Reddit talking about how a lot of younger people don't know how to change a spare tire.

I'm not entirely sanguine about this. While I'll agree that it can save a bit of space, I really prefer knowing that even if I get a flat, the worst that can happen to me, even if I'm outside of cell range, is that I go swap in a new tire. I've only rarely gotten flats, but it's something that I'd certainly rather have.

I guess that one could just put a tire in a trunk or hatchback/crossover/SUV's cargo space as long as one is willing to expend some cargo space, but especially with a hatchback/crossover/SUV, I'm not entirely enthralled about the idea of having something large and unsecured crashing around the cabin in the event of a crash; normally, a spare tire well prevents shifting around and has a system for securing the tire.

Thoughts? Is a spare tire something that you want to have today in your vehicle?

Print shows Uncle Sam asleep in a chair with a large eagle perched on a stand next to him; he is dreaming of conquests and annexations, asserting his "Monroe Doctrine" rights, becoming master of the seas, putting John Bull in his place, and building "formidable and invulnerable coast defenses"; on the floor by the chair are jingoistic and yellow journalism newspapers.

Caption:

Uncle Sam's Dream of Conquest and Carnage

Caused by Reading the Jingo Newspapers

Puck, November 13, 1895

Note that I downscaled the image to half source resolution to conform to lemmy.today pict-rs resolution restrictions; it's still pretty decent resolution.

Illustration shows Uncle Sam using a magnifying glass to see in his left hand a diminutive man labeled "Rumor Monger" yelling "Panic, National Disaster, Failures, [and] Ruin" into a megaphone labeled "Wall Str."

Caption:

The Wall Street Rumor-monger

Uncle Sam

Well ! Well ! Will this nuisance ever learn that the country governs Wall Street ; not Wall Street, the country ?

Illustration shows an old man labeled "Republican Reactionary" and an old woman labeled "Democratic Reactionary" standing together, looking up at a dirigible labeled "Progressive Policies".

Caption:

Set in their ways

"Well, the young folks may go if they want to, but they'll never get you and me in the breakneck thing."

Source: https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.27734/

Puck, May 10, 1911.

Illustration shows a man labeled "Workingman" bent over under the weight of an enormous dinner pail labeled "Tariff for Graft Only".

Caption:

The Fullest Dinner Pail

Source: https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.26274/

Puck, May 27, 1908

Note that the dinner pail was the analog of what we'd call the lunchbox today; dinner was, at one point, the mid-day meal.

Illustration shows Uncle Sam in a tree, chased there by the Russian Bear which is standing at the base of the tree; Uncle Sam has dropped his rifle labeled "U.S. Duty on Russian Sugar."

Caption:

As the tariff-war must end

Uncle Sam (to Russia)

Don't shoot! I'll come down!

Source: https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.25550/

Puck, July 31, 1901

db0 set up an AI image generator bot both on the Threadverse and Mastodon some time back for anyone to use. All one needs to do is mention it in a comment followed by the text "draw for me" and then prompt text, and it'll respond with some generated images. For example:

@aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me An engraving of a skunk.

Caused it to reply back to me with:

Here are some images matching your request

Prompt: An engraving of a skunk.

Style: flux

The bot has apparently been active for some time and it looks like few people were aware that it existed or used it

I certainly wasn't!

I don't know whether it will work in this community, as this community says that it prohibits most bots from operating here. However, I set up a test thread over here on !test@sh.itjust.works to try it out, where it definitely does work; I was exploring some of how it functions there, and if you're looking for a test place to try it out, that should work!

It farms out the compute work to various people who are donating time on their GPUs via AI Horde.

The FAQ for the bot is here. For those familiar with local image generation, it supports a number of different models.

The default model is Flux, which is, I think, a good choice

that takes English-like sentences describing a picture, and is pretty easy to use without a lot of time reading documentation.

A few notes:

• The bot disallows NSFW image generation, and if it detects one, it'll impose a one-day tempban on its use to try to make it harder for people searching for loopholes to generate them.

• There appears to me in my brief testing to be some kind of per-user rate limit. db0 says that he does have a rate limit on Mastodon, but wasn't sure whether he put one on Lemmy, so if you might only be able to generate so many images so quickly.

• The way one chooses a model is to change the "style" by ending the prompt text with "style: stylename". Some of these styles entail use of a different model; among other things, it's got models specializing in furry images; there's a substantial furry fandom crowd here. There's a list of supported styles here with sample images.

db0 has encouraged people to use it in that test post and in another thread where we were discussing this, says have fun. I wanted to post here to give it some visibility, since I think that a lot of people, like me, have been unaware that has been available. Especially for people on phones or older computers, doing local AI image generation on GPUs really isn't an option, and this lets folks who do have GPUs share them with those folks.

db0 apparently has a bot, @aihorde@lemmy.db0.com, linked up to AI Horde, which will render images using various LLM models in response to comments.

All using it requires is, in a comment, writing the text:

@aihorde@lemmy.db0.com draw for me <prompt text>

It's apparently been active for years, but somehow, I'd been unaware of it until now, when db0 happened to trigger it in a thread on !imageai@sh.itjust.work where we were creating images to represent usernames. It looks like nobody's been aware of it, and it's gotten very little use.

It apparently supports multiple models (including Pony, which is trained on and can render furry art, and Flux, which does pretty well with ordinary, English-language descriptions). It looks like the default is Flux.

Note that according to the FAQ, it will try to block (and will do a 1-day tempban on users for) NSFW content.

I'm going to try out a few prompts here and maybe mention this somewhere higher-profile, because this is really cool

it lets users pseudononymously generate images on the Threadiverse without needing to use a commercial service or having their own hardware.

Bot FAQ:

https://wiki.dbzer0.com/cbotart/

AI Horde style list (these can be accessed by adding style: <stylename> to the end of a prompt). Some of these are clearly different models whose names I recognize, and I'm pretty sure that some are just adding some extra text to the prompt.

https://github.com/amiantos/AI-Horde-Styles-Previews/blob/main/previews.md

While Lemmy doesn't natively provide the ability to follow a user, it posts what it generates to !botart@lemmy.dbzer0.com, so you can subscribe and watch generation if you want.

There are several reasons that I'd like to see a "self-unfurling car tent" that could extend from a car and cover it when parked, and "de-furl" itself when returning to a car.

Shield the car from sunshine

People are always trying to park in what (usually very limited, where I am) parking spaces that are shaded. Carry a reflective, vented tent, and the problem goes away; you've got your own shade everywhere you go.

There are already car covers:

But these don't self-unfurl and furl, so they're enough of a pain to use that most people won't use them unless they're parking their car for some time; manually deploying the thing on a grocery store trip isn't worth the effort. The most people will normally do is put up a windshield sun shade, which is a lot less effort to put up.

Solar panels become a lot more practical

Volvo had a prototype unfurling-from-the-trunk solar canopy over a decade ago; I haven't heard of it since.

That thing took up a ton of space, and wouldn't work in a parking lot, but something that closely-matches a given car model's exterior shape might be a lot more practical.

There are vehicles that have factory built-in solar panels now; the 2025 Toyota Prius PHEV has a solar roof option, for example:

But they don't provide a lot of surface area, because they can't cover the whole vehicle, just part of the roof, so provide a limited amount of power. That Prius can get a maximum of about four miles (6.4 km) a day of range from sun.

But you can put whatever you want on the exterior of a tent that's only deployed when parked; surface constraints go away, so now you have a lot more surface area to work with.

There are existing car covers that have integrated solar panels, but the solar panels on these are tiny, just designed to keep a car battery topped off when a car isn't being used for long periods of time; they aren't designed to feed a larger battery bank.

Hail resistance

There are some places in the US where hail is a real problem, where it damages a ton of vehicles every year.

Cars, which are normally rigid, don't do well with hail. Fabric-like materials, which are springy, do a great job. There are some existing car protection systems that fit onto a car that make use of this, have a little standoff distance to permit the hail to decelerate in, as well as fixed structures and manually-deployable static fabric hail protectors. Looking online, soft-top convertables will suffer damage to the body in hail that the soft-top roof can just ignore. I don't know how well hail resistance would play with flexible solar panels---might need to pick one or the other. But I'd expect at least one or the other to be possible.

Issues

There are some issues I can think of.

A big one is that car exterior surfaces are more durable than tents, and I can imagine accidental damage being more of an issue for the tent, like being cut or something. Maybe it'd be practical to make such a system out of modular pieces that zipper or otherwise easily attach to each other, and if one piece of the tent is damaged, just pick up a new one, detach the old one, and stick a new one in; no big deal.

Theft of the tent (or pieces thereof, if modular) might also be an issue.

Original post by Crul@lemm.ee:

Source: Photo by Sandstein - File:Epson HX-20 in case - MfK Bern.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Wikipedia: Epson HX-20

The Epson HX-20 (also known as the HC-20) was the first "true" laptop computer. It was invented in July 1980 by Yukio Yokozawa, who worked for Suwa Seikosha, a branch of Japanese company Seiko (now Seiko Epson), receiving a patent for the invention.

Seen on Functional object - Object, Epson, Epson portable computer, 1980-1989

https://lemm.ee/post/65824884 for details.

Moderators interested in migrating to a new community on another instance might want to consider selecting an instance and doing so sooner rather than later so that users here have time to see a migration post here and subscribe to the new community.