I was in a new Citroen Berlingo yesterday. A van which lacks central locking and yet has electric windows listed amongst its bits of technology. But amongst the other pieces of useless trickery was a button that automatically locked the cargo bay whenever you set off, meaning that you had to unlock it with the key every time you wanted to get in. Pointless, time wasting technology at its absolute bloody worst.
It came back to me as I was bimbling about in the aged Peugeot earlier today. I had the cool blower of much leafiness on (so named because you never know if you’re going to get foliage blown through the vents at you) and was playing my mp3 player through its now obsolete tape deck. I’m obstinate in my ways, and I think that the pinnacle of “Sensible technology” was probably about the mid 1990s. By then we had traction control for the idiots who can’t handle hairy cars yet think they need them, PAS for the feeble of wrist, automatic gearboxes and in-car-electrics for the lazy, and sufficient choice of entertainment to satisfy the majority. We even had the airbag lest you crash.
Yet I think a lot of the modern stuff is at the same time impressive and irrelevant. Adaptive cruise control – a setup that keeps you a set minimum distance from the car in front or varies with the speed limit – is a perfect case in point. Cruise control has been about in various forms since it was first fitted to a Chrysler Imperial in 1958; the hand throttle in an old Land Rover being one of the more rudimentary variants; yet it only really took off here in large luxobarges of the 1980s. Being a top spec XT, my 306 has got cruise control as standard fit, but because I see it as a dangerous invention I never use it. Essentially it hands over a key part of driving – that of speed regulation – to your car. And now it’s becoming clever enough to vary itself we need not bother having our wits about us on the motorway or on similar constant speed journeys. As far as I’m concerned this is a danger to road safety as it means fewer people are concentrating on the job in hand – and the adaptive cruise we get now has only added to that.
Damn clever though – using both GPS signals to determine speed limits and radar to determine distance. And I’ll admit there’s some impressive tech out there too. Night vision cameras may be nothing new; Cadillac was doing it in the 1990s. But still I am amazed by the concept that one can hop into a car and drive down a deserted country road in complete and utter darkness and also utter safety. It’s mad (especially as lights at night play on the trees in a mesmerising fashion). Lexus, Mercedes, Audi, BMW, GM and Honda all have variants of night vision technology, and thermographic imaging or infrared cameras to aid driving at night can only be a good thing – they have the potential to show hazards your lights would only alert you of too late.
Thomas Dolby probably owned an XJ6 Series 3 or an SD1 Vanden Plas EFi – as THE technology crammed cars to have in the early 80s, they were clearly at the forefront of his mind when he wrote about being blinded by science. And he had a point. But now even more outlandish scientific developments can help the car see.
I remember sitting in the car with my dad as we crawled through thick fog back to Leicestershire after visiting the motor show at Earl’s Court in the early seventies. He never drove on the motorway in such poor conditions, maintaining as he did that there were too many idiots out there. Night vision would have been excellent then and I am sure it is now, but only in the hands of the responsible. Every safety innovation has, I am afraid, resulted in a false sense of security for those convinced they possess skills only experience can provide, and even then not always; technology compensating for deficiency and all too often, stupidity.
Still, we cannot dumb everything down to account for morons and back then, in the middle of a freezing night as my dad made his slow and very careful progress towards home conscious of the evil and lethal sheen of black ice settiling across the road and glueing his wipers to the car’s screeen, dipped headlights throwing up a wall of white and barely illuminating the kerb a yard to the side of his bonnet, I suspect he would have been grateful for ABS, a heated windscreen, night vision, stability control and yes, even an automatic gear box, not so much a safety device as a labour saving one and which, at my age and given the traffic conditions in Angola, I rather like.
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