Brake fluid is hygroscopic and will accumulate water over time despite being in a nominally sealed system. Water in solution with brake fluid noticeably lowers the boiling point which leads to issues under repeated braking (e.g. down long steep hills) as the fluid boiling means you lose braking capacity in that circuit.
You should ideally be changing the brake fluid every few years (2-3 being the typical recommendation) and that applies even if the brakes are used less often.
Electric cars do have oil that will ultimately need changing but it’s less exposed to contaminants than the engine oil in a internal combustion engine and therefore will last a lot longer. EVs typically have a reduction gearbox and differential and these will require oil changes in a similar fashion to a manual gearbox or differential in a ICE vehicle - i.e. barring exceptional circumstances it will last long enough to get out of warranty but don’t believe it will never need changing.
The basics are easy - half an hour with someone who knows what they"re doing should be all you need to get out and about. Getting to the point where it’s instinctual and you don’t have to think about shifting is probably beyond the limits of a short trip but depending on how much driving you do you can be fairly smooth within a few days.
The main risk you run with learning manual is that once you get the hang of it it spoils automatics for you - you might end up having to buy yourself a manual car to avoid being annoyed by the missteps autos tend to do.
Old petrol engines do have something making them worthwhile though - they’re easier to run on wood gas. A gasifier would open options for fuel availability considerably as wood is a lot more likely to be accessible.
The Japanese brands are generally a safer bet for reliability. Toyota is one of the best reputation wise but that comes with an increased price due to that reputation.
A manual transmission is best for reliability IMO, but if for some reason you really must have a automatic look for one with a standard auto transmission rather than a dual clutch box or a CVT. Run away from VW dry clutched dual clutch and Ford Powershift transmissions.
Ideally you would have proof of regular servicing, though a completely good record is harder to get on a low budget. Not only do you want it to have the engine oil changed at the service intervals (depends on the vehicle but often ~10k km) but also the other regular stuff that often gets ignored - e.g. brake fluid, coolant, transmission/diff oils, brake pads/rotors. Keep an eye out for big ticket maintenance items such as timing belt changes (typically due around every 100-150k kms) as these are expensive so are often ignored at the risk of major failure.
If you’re not confident in spotting issues try and bring along a friend or acquaintance who is more familiar with cars to look it over.
Since you’re in Canada where I believe road salt is common check for rust under the car and in places like wheel wells where moisture is likely to be trapped. It’s hard to avoid some rust in such an environment but you don’t want rust holes anywhere or large sections of flaking rust.
It’s not a recent thing, but I would say there has been a decline over the last decade or so. Not only does it seem like spelling and grammar are getting worse but I feel it is much more likely these days to find comments defending improper English rather than correcting it.
I saw someone spell “extreme” as “extream” which is just kind of baffling, I actually can’t even imagine how one would make such a mistake?
Maybe they had just come from dealing with large quantities of paper? Or enlarging a bunch of holes?
How does it handle the heat of being in a car? The mirror housings I made for my dirt bike got a bit soft just being outside in summer sun (until I annealed them), and inside a car can get pretty toasty. My mirrors were PLA though, if you’re printing with higher temperature material it might not be an issue.
I think a wombat would be cool to have around the place, assuming domestication allowed for some level of trainability.
One of my old uni lecturers was very keen on the idea of domesticating the spotted quoll. He reckoned they would make a great pet for those who would otherwise get a cat (a convincing argument actually).
My unicorn phone would be one that is both small enough to use with one hand (currently have a Zenfone 10 largely for this reason) and has a secondary camera lens that’s a telephoto rather than an ultra ultra wide.
It bugs me that phones with a long lens are so comparatively rare, it’s always just wide (verging on ultrawide) as default and when a second lens is added it’s even wider again because people love distortions or taking photos in tiny rooms or something. Sometimes I just want to take a photo of something further away than a few metres and actually have it visible without zooming in, I’d even take a normal lens FoV as an improvement over ultrawide. Those phones that do have one tend to have it as a third lens and also tend to be huge, so get disqualified by the ‘usable with one hand’ criteria even before I reach the massively expensive part.
I’d also like an Instax back for the Hasselblad V series that was cheap enough that I could actually justify the cost of buying (say ~$200 AUD or less) though I will admit that’s a pretty niche thing to be after.
North orientation is the standard for when just browsing a map, but when in navigation mode applications usually rotate the map to match your direction of travel. If your car has a Android Auto/Carplay head unit or one otherwise capable of displaying maps it will also likely default to autorotating the map when driving even without a destination input.
This behaviour does make it easier to distinguish relative directions to your position (roads on your left as you drive will be on the left on the map and so forth) but also takes away an easy way to orient yourself on a scale broader than the limited section on the screen.
The cover art is real, but the words have been changed. The real book is The Sword of Bheleu.
It already is for some specific rail freight, iron ore haulage in Western Australia being one example. Rio Tinto has been running them in WA since 2019.
The Sydney Metro is also driverless, albeit a passenger only line rather than freight.
Closest I’ve come in a truck is an annoyingly loud alert for everything the computer reckoned was an issue and that was painful enough. Every time I’d drive it it’d be blaring the alarm for some reason or another and if it had been a long term company truck instead of a rental I probably would have ended up removing the speaker.
For example the lane departure warning would fire off every time you moved over to not run into someone parked on the side of the road, the close distance warning would fire off regularly when people merged in front of you, and if it was windy it’d set off an alarm to let you know the truck was being blown around when driving. Could be useful if you’re mentally challenged or blind but that sort of thing is just going to annoy anyone who isn’t. You couldn’t even turn the alarms off properly - you could go through the deliberately prolonged procedure to turn them off temporarily but then they come back again every time you start the truck.
I’ve driven an SUV with lane keep assist and it would pull at the wheel trying to follow lane markings that were outdated or ones it just made up, I hope that particular bit of ‘safety’ tech doesn’t make it to any truck I have to drive.