Why Do Cars Have Brakes?

The premise is surely nonsense! The full logic ought to go: Why do we have cars? To go faster. Why do cars have brakes? In order to slow down again.<p>If all we were concerned about was going fast then why ever slow down? Cars need to regulate their speed in order to provide safety, and also so they are usable, if I can't stop then I can't get out at my destination. Many elements of a car help in it's overall function, which is to go fast, but you may as well say the purpose of a fan belt is to go fast. Brakes are a part of a car and saying that their purpose is the same as the whole car is useless and confusing. They have a specific purpose within the machine.<p>From the linked article: "[the] answer feels paradoxical which usually means there's a deep truth". Indeed. The simpler explanation is that it's pure twaddle.

I wonder if car technicians go around making weak analogies with software development to justify their industry practices. Something like: "Why do software developers have compilers? blah blah blah, and that's why we need to keep your tools organized"

Has the art of using the engine to slow down become so unknown that it is no longer considered a way to slow down a vehicle?

Overextending the analogy, there's no brakes on track bikes but they go fast too. They don't need them, the fixed gear means applying counter pressure on the pedals stops the bike.<p>The clunky software analogy would be to do with lightweight simplicity.

The analogy between automobiles and software testing can be extended to consider the racing line - the combination of velocity and distance through a corner which results in the fastest time.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_line" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_line</a>

Wow, a silly brain teaser AND a strained metaphor. I'll never hear the end of this one!

Even my parody "Ten Reasons Why Building a Startup is Like Riding a Motorcycle" has more meat than this :-) <a href="http://lazyant.com/post/37406994081/ten-reasons-why-building-a-startup-is-like-riding-a" rel="nofollow">http://lazyant.com/post/37406994081/ten-reasons-why-building...</a>

When I was on my company's R&#38;D team, we were looking at possibly designing a car. One of our ideas was regenerative braking (nothing new, I admit). Basically, you can use several types of pump or motor as a generator when run in reverse. This allows you to collect that energy back into the system instead of wasting it all as heat. It also has the added benefit of turning the rotational kinetic energy into stored potential energy, thereby slowing down the vehicle. Our design still included disc brakes for safety, but would have used the regenerative braking most of the time.

To really add breaks where you can stop while running without blowing completely up you need to add fault isolation and tolerance in your system. You need to use actors and messages (you might get parallel execution as well depending on your algorithm as a bonus).<p>The alternative is to prove that your program won't crash. So you need to write in a very restrictive style. This is more like you need to be able to compute a path your car will take ahead of time given all the other obstacles that could get in its way. That works too but it is highly impractical.

Why dont the lightcycles in Tron have brakes would be a better question.

I drove a motor scooter as a kid that had broken brakes. He's right--it wasn't much fun, because I knew I couldn't go fast.

If people knew how to drive efficiently they'd use gears to do this and only use brakes to stop. Just sayin'

This is ridiculous. The typical "stoner effect" -- a phrase that sounds in some way deep or metaphysical causing susceptible people's neurons to flare, producing only the word: "Woah..." I know this is probably controversial, but in my opinion it's the same effect that causes people to find deep meaning in a Jackson Pollock painting.<p>As others have pointed out, lots of fast things don't have brakes, because they don't need to stop. As I don't think others have pointed out, slow things have brakes too, such as the space shuttle transporter.

What a load of shit.