If you remove just one tiny detail from the incredible intricacy of this modern marvel, then you will arrive at a point where the whole thing stops being useless.
Size, power, safety. Annoying but necessary. I don't really like to admit it but frankly there's a logic to the idea that cars which protect the driver and other road and pavement users is broadly speaking, a good thing. The ability to have good tractability and direction change, and the ability to get out of trouble quickly is hard to argue away. Airbags save lives, crumple zones too. Pretensioning seatbelts and advance braking protection systems all help reduce incidents of injury and death on modern roads and are ultimately, a helpful and intelligent solution to the problem of modern speeds and traffic levels.
That is not to say that all electronic driver aids are equal and in practice this means some of them are just not very good at all. Long gone are the days of cars where the nearest thing to intelligent safety systems was a three point seat belt. A former Ferrari CEO once commented himself that after the release of the F40, they would never again be able to design and build a car quite like this one. There are many people now who would argue that the F40 was the last truly great car ever built as a result. I'll leave that one to the philosophers for now, although it is worth noting that Stuart Turner of Ford said the same thing about the Cossie, and he seems to have been broadly right about that one as well. Anyway the point is that successive years of updated car type-approval safety-regulations as well as economy and reliability requirements have hamstrung cars into producing heavier, larger cars with ever more complex safety electronics installed, then even more weight resultantly.
In combination with this is the worry that driver aids are breeding bad drivers. People who unknowingly rely too much on the vehicle making decisions for you. No longer content with minutely controlling the input of fuel atoms into the cylinder head of your engine, a job they would seem perfect for, processors are now increasingly handling such things as steering input, braking input and soon total autopilot. Already people are wondering just how happy they would be leaving the decision of which potential accident to chose between should things get out of control. How will a cold uncalculating machine weigh up the lives of innocent strangers? Who would the insurers blame in an accident?
It's not all doom and gloom though. Traction control systems are, for instance, on the funnier side of driver aids. Though the machinery behind them is often extremely complex and busy, their job is fairly simple to describe; deliver power where the grip is. When this works it is a revelation. The systems installed in a Range Rover are world famous for their ability to take a vehicle which weighs two to three tons and somehow make it dainty and agile on all but the most treacherous of surfaces. The Germans and Japanese have also both made excellent systems for dealing with this. On-road many of the European manufacturers have perfected theirs to track use and driver involvement. Where they become funny however, is on the systems where they do not work. In snowy weather you will see numerous BMWs and Mercedes sat at green traffic lights with their wheel jerking slowly around in little skips as they fail to understand one of the simplest of earthly weather systems. likewise if you show a Mercedes sprinter van an icy road it will completely lose it's ability to think clearly and promptly steer itself into the nearest ditch. This is a fairly serious problem for a vehicle designed to be the Backbone of Bavaria, where the winters are so very cold. Funny too is it to see various lads and ladies in their sporty little modern Corsas, desperately trying to get more than one of the front wheels spinning at any point in time. One does wonder though, when one sees a BMW X5, whether the weather should really cause a '4X4' to stop and slither quite so badly as that...
Now to be fair the aforementioned Sprinter, and its fellow competition the Ford Transit are only really ruined by very specific conditions. For the most part they are actually very good vans. In limited circumstances the driver aids can even in fact be genuinely useful. For instance both can be used to moderate the pendulum effect of the rear end when you step into a harsh bend, cutting power to a planted throttle at the perfect rate to allow gentle oversteer. The problem is always the one thing that kills the fun at the last moment. ( For the record, in the Transit, traversing an otherwise straight road with undulating bumps down it will sometimes result in the rear wheels leaving tarmac and the TC system cutting in causing an 'un'-sympathetic frequency on the driver and nasty resultant Kangaroo-ing.)
The worst examples of traction control are universally those where you cannot turn off the system when you decide to. All Mercedes, Most of the VAG stable, any number of modern cars really have this unerring propensity to basically assume that the driver will be literally incapable ever of using the vehicle to it's furthest potential. Almost any system for electronic interference, no matter how un-tunable or draconian, would basically be completely tolerable if only you could completely turn them off. The Peugeot 207GTi for instance, the TCS will never go off completely, and it kicks in too hard when it's on, so, it always kicks in too hard. No matter what you do as you try and hurl it about suddenly this gut wrenching lack of power tugs away at you while you attempt to do your thing. The Mondeo from the early noughties, too with a system designed for aiding the driver's control and safety, actually is almost so unpredictable you could never rely on whether it would, one of nine times out of ten, iron out the kinks in the road and your driving, or that terrifying one time in ten, where it would potentially get you into properly frightening trouble that you maybe couldn't even get out of.
All very annoying indeed, sometimes funny yes, but not always HA HA funny. There might be a solution however. You see cars from the Nineties would often have systems which though present would not really have much impact at all. Mostly the idea was that a driver would attempt to get out of trouble them selves and then when everything really all went Pete-Tong-shaped power would be cut to key areas and the ABS would buzz away. If modern units could be convinced to step in less frequently and with less vigour, or the option to turn them off completely were installed things may be acceptable. I understand that never again will a car with paper thin windows and pillars be permitted into production, and that forever will little microchips decide just what is and isn't appropriate for my wheels to be doing at the point of loss-of-control, but I would really appreciate it if car manufacturers would get the Idea that we occasionally as drivers just want to let our hair down and burn out the pads in style.
To end with I would like to tell of a Job I had as a youth. In a West-Country town I would zoom about delivering fast food to the residents at great speed in rubbishy cars. Much fun did I have on the streets of the venerable market down, but the most fun I ever had was in, of all things, a Smart Car. A car famous for it's terrible gearbox and hateful driver interruption devices. Slow and indecisive of 'Box, Nanny-ish of Throttle, in almost every condition the car was a nightmare until one fateful snowy night. Trying to dislodge a stuck seat mechanism I stumbled on a little trick. With the accelerator pushed down about a quarter of the way, and the brake pedal pressed as hard as possible, I knocked the console mounted key into the on position. The ignition lights did so, but the ABS and TC lights stayed on. I rebooted and they were gone. With a little trial and error the same faults I had found returned and thus began the most enjoyable night of my Pizza-delivering life. Drifting at 20 miles an hour, rooster tails of snow flying behind me I would perform deft flicks of the tiny vehicle. Handbrake turns everywhere, 360 spins at 30MPH. I spent that night perfecting escape manoeuvres and J-turns on empty streets. Even the geological-time gears-selection didn't bother me all that much. The tiny RWD had become a monster for the first and only time in its horrible life.
The evolution of the modern car has inexorably led us to this point then, except that rather like dogs and racehorses it was unnatural selection. So though it may seem always to go in one direction, it's not always actually necessary. Maybe we ought to make our selections a bit more unnatural occasionally. Or maybe just giving us the choice to go a bit devolved sometimes wouldn't be such a bad thing.
The moral of this tale then is clear. Evolution is a useful concept I am sure, but sometimes it's not always a good idea...
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Comments (5)
Could just pull the fuses. Thats what I did
Great Idea! If only it worked on ALL vehicles...
Should. Why wouldn't it