Recently, Nissan put out a commercial that, on the surface, looked to be a simple tie-in with the movie “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”. It shows what you reasonably assume to be a father and young daughter driving along when a wild construction zone appears. The daughter gets nervous, then the father calmly reminds her that the crossover she is piloting has a system that will keep the vanilla cube in the lane as she proceeds to hallucinate spacecraft flying around her. Nevermind the ramifications of daydreaming while cruising through a construction zone in the middle of the freaking desert as concerning, but let’s look at what Nissan is really selling: gadgets that are designed to make you nervous about your own abilities about your skills behind the wheel.
There has been a big push in the last few years for autonomous driving and driving aids that require nothing more than a push of a button or less in order to remove the human from the operation equation. The heavy-duty truck can back up with a trailer if you just hit a button. The crossover can park itself inside of a tight parallel parking spot, impressing her dad and his friends. The full-size SUV stops before a distracted mom nearly backs over the kid from next door who didn’t have the common sense to stay away from moving vehicles in the first place. All of these little clips say one thing: You, the meatbag behind the wheel, are grossly incompetent. The Machine is better than you are.
As a meatbag with a driver’s license and a penchant for enjoying operation of a motor vehicle without assistance from the computer, I ****ing resent that. I don’t need to be told to stay in my own lane with an annoying “beep”. I know to look out of rear-view mirrors…hell, modern cars even give you one of the more useful inventions, the backup camera, on a screen that you can’t miss! And if you get nervous going into a construction zone on I-15 somewhere in the openness between L.A. and Vegas, and you get so nervous that you need something to intervene on your behalf behind the wheel, then you are not cut out to be behind the wheel. Get some confidence, get some experience, or get a bus pass and bicycle. I’m tired of watching the push for smarter cars. I want smarter drivers on the roads, dammit.
I rent cars quite a bit for business. I got a Toyota Corolla last year and it had their radar cruise control system in it. What a total piece of crap! I finally figured out how to not use it, and could actually drive smoothly and properly while making good time. All of this crap is no good. Even if it served some purpose, the end result is dumbing people down even further from the depths many find themselves at; in terms of being a functional human…
If you make the world safe for stupid people, pretty soon all there will be is stupid people.
Spot-on. I find it interesting every new car looks about the same, each equipped with gadgetry we really don’t need but consumers think they want to make them “feel safe”. None of it makes for better drivers, just dumber drivers.
BINGO
I rented a car last year in NYC. It was 2 days before I realized it had a backup
camera, I am 69 years old and too used to turning around and backing up LOL.
I read Car & Driver every month. Every time they have tested a car with adaptive cruise control, someone driving it has experienced a “random braking incident” where the computer has responded to some sensory input by jamming on the brakes. It doesn’t matter which brand. The technology is simply not mature enough to allow easy cruise control operation in a mode that adapts to surrounding traffic. That tells me true autonomy is still a ways off.
I daren’t even start a response about this topic, any decent person’d just have to delete it.
I have a curiosity about how Automatic Braking works with a Manual Transmission, if it decides to lock up the brakes then I guess the engine stalls out?
This morning I ran some errands in the ’85 Corolla, with both windows down, I felt wild and free! I agree with all comments, idiot-proofing the world is wrong and dangerous.
Backup camera even sucks. Only thing it’s good for is not hitting a kid. I hate all this shit. If I wasn’t so sentimental to old cars I would just drive old cars.
is this not the beginnings of the machines taking over? ie.. ‘Terminator’
I have a 2015 Taurus SHO with all the tech a guy can stand. After a few months with the car I am enjoying (and still occasionally discovering) all the tech available in the car. It has turned out to be my all time favorite personal vehicle. I do have a naturally aspirated 351 ci, 4 speed top loader equipped 79 mustang that has an MSD as its technological high point. It is loud, can rev 9000 and has been 195 mph in the mile..I like this one a whole lot too..
I can’t stand the added weight, complexity, and maintenance that comes with the added useless gadgets. I do however support something that would punch idiots who pull in front of my motorcycle directly in the face.
I like most of the features in the 2014 Fusion. It’s a nice driver and not loaded with a bunch of odd ball stuff, just cruise that works good, display and nav. Sync is the management – that sucks. The nav was $750 for the chip – it’s a POS. A cheap Garmin kicks it’s ass. The radio interface is lame, no way to scroll through the gazillion channels on Sat radio. We later dropped that and don’t miss it. Wife had to drive a 2016 Honda Accord the other day – said the cruise could not make up it’s mind how fast it wanted to go. The 2004 F-150 is more basic – cruise and CD, cloth bench – hard to find one like it anymore. The F-350 is even more basic. Cruise and cassette player. Looks like a truck, drives like a truck, rides like a one ton truck.
I do believe that the more they add in as “helpers” the more stupid some people can be behind the wheel. But that may be general – we had one day of some spot icing here and there are several thousand feet of guardrail, centerline fence, posts, etc that require repair in just the 19 miles I drive from work to the house.
Totally agree with you. technology for the sake of technology is bullsh*t. They can shove their computer crap up their a$$ses