I missed out on the Great Self-Driving Car Debate, but let me tardily declare myself on the side of driving myself. I love driving; I always have; I always will; and I’ll do it as long as I can.
Now, please allow me a jeremiad about something else: the failure of carmakers to understand what I have summarized in my headline.
On a recent long drive with my parents, I had the sad experience of comparing their newish vehicle with my own, which is a little over a decade old. Theirs was simply contemptible.
Instead of a normal gear shift — one that you don’t have to look at to figure out which gear you’re in — they had a knob. A knob! Can you imagine it? You had to glance at the damn thing in order to use it properly. (Yes, I know, there are dashboard lights that tell you what gear you’re in, and theoretically you can rely on them plus the direction of your turning of the knob. But a satisfactory mental–tactile map this is not.)
You started the thing by pushing a stupid little button. Headed toward extinction, the emphatic pleasure of the turned key. I deplore, I decry, I lament.
You engaged the parking brake by lifting a teeny, tiny, barely findable little latch — not, as it ought to be, by yanking a lever or slamming down your foot.
It was horrible in almost every way. Driving a car should be like playing an organ, an all-limb experience in which each function correlates with a distinct motion.
Driving a different vehicle recently, also not my own, I was dismayed to find that the stereo and radio controls were all on a touchscreen. A touchscreen! Can you imagine it? You had to look at the damn thing to select your music or adjust the volume.
Do the people who make cars nowadays bother to test-drive them? Do they even know how to drive? It’s like* they’re all techies sitting behind screens, designing screens for people who sit behind screens.
It calls to mind the enormous deficiency of touchscreen devices for listening to music. With the original iPod, you had that wonderful wheel and its delightful clicks. If you had a decent mental map of your library, you could sometimes find a song without even looking at the device. This was useful if you were, say, driving a car, or lying in a sleeping bag, or doing anything else that made it inconvenient to hold a screen in front of your eyes. Now we are doomed to look at little screens all day forever. I consider it a factor in the production of hell.
* * *
The problem is not just convenience or aesthetics. It is also safety. If I look away from the road to turn the little knob or touch the textureless screen, I’m more likely to crash.
And, to broaden the point, as drivers learn to rely on overly complicated systems modeled on computers, they will lose basic but necessary skills. For instance, my parents’ vehicle had little warning lights on the sideview mirrors to inform us whether someone was in our blind spot. That’s great as long as the sensors and lights work, but suppose they fail — will people know to check visually? Do they even bother anymore?
Remember those Boeing 737s that just nosedived into the ground because the sensor/software system failed and the pilots didn’t react perfectly? Same principle; worse motive; catastrophic result. The MCAS was invented so that Boeing could increase the capacity of an existing model and bring it to market faster and more cheaply than would have been possible had it built a new plane from scratch. If it had started from scratch instead of giving pilots an opportunity to react imperfectly to something needlessly complex, two planefuls of people would still be alive.
* * *
Shifting gears, if you’ll forgive the metaphor, we could make a tangential point about custom and tradition. The old-fashioned dashboard, gear shift, radio dial, etc. were not top-down interventions. They came about through generations of trial and error, culminating in systems that were highly intuitive and easy to use safely. This shows why we should be wary of people who show up wanting to change the way we’ve been doing things forever.
On the other hand, custom and tradition can overlook necessities or embed errors. Sometimes reform is needed. For a long time, cars had no seatbelts, and this was just stupid. Then some people thought, “Let’s put some seatbelts in these death traps,” and people stupidly resisted them. And it would have been no argument in favor of the resisters to say, “No, no, we mustn’t add these strange bands of fabric, because it goes against our sacred driving customs and the arguments we have reverse-engineered to defend them.”
End of jeremiad.
*Note: “Like” is not a conjunction, and my use of it above is ungrammatical. I get to do that when I want to, because.