21st century guilt is getting in the way of the hovercar
If you travelled back in time to the 1950s and asked the average nine-year-old what the cars of the future would be like, I have no doubt the words "flying", "floating" or "hovering" would figure pretty largely in their description. From the 50s Dan Dare comic strips onwards, iconic sci-fi cars have all been flyers. Examples from my own, 80s childhood include the De Lorean from Back to the Future, the cop cars in Blade Runner, most of the memorable Star Wars vehicles - to name but a few. What the cartoonists' and film makers' designs are all about is verticality, and ultimately the dream of automotive freedom. The car we know allows man to travel vast, previously unimaginable distance over land, but this is its limiting factor: the need for a relatively flat surface on which to do that travelling. The car of the future, they think, will dispense with this need and make man totally free to explore - as free as a bird. It's become a bit of a cliché to say that present-day technological innovation (life) imitates the comic books and cartoons (art) that our boffins read and watched back when they were nerdy teenagers. Take the first NASA Space Shuttle Enterprise, for instance, so-called after thousands of Star Trek geeks wrote in to request the name of Gene Roddenberry's fictional starship. Take mobile phones, artificial intelligence, cloning, genetic mutation and a host of other technologies and discoveries - all too often inspired by or prophesied in comics. But the one area I can think of where this isn't the case, and where the demand for sci-fi innovation is massive nonetheless, is in automobile technology of the 21st century. The direction today's car designers are going in, it seems, isn't to lift the restraints on today's driver - to free him from the tarmac and let him fly - no, the direction is towards limiting freedoms and wresting control away from the driver. Where the 50s nine-year-old would tell us to expect flying cars, cars that can cover vast distances, space cars, underwater cars and so on, instead we have cars these days that won't even start up unless you meet certain specified criteria. Today's concept cars wow the investors at motor shows by refusing to start for drink drivers, limiting the level of harmful emissions produced in their engines, monitoring performance at the wheel and informing your 'cheap' car insurance firm if you're out after bedtime. So what's going on? These are all very laudable aims in principal, but is it the place of the car manufacturer, who is supposed to be appealing to the consumer after all, to build law enforcement systems and a guilty conscience into a new breed of A to B-ers? Let's take a look at the new technologies and what they mean in terms of driver freedom: 1. Anti-drink driving systems
Recently, we at Hoot Car Insurance Services brought you news of the latest attempt by a car manufacturer - Toyota of Japan in this case - to stop drink drivers getting home in one of their vehicles.
The result is a prototype that assesses your blood-alcohol level from the moment you first put your fingers on the steering wheel, via your sweat, and then continues to check for inebriation by monitoring pupil dilation whilst you are driving. If either system detects an illegal level the driver is automatically (and safely) pulled over. The Toyota design offers a solution to the problems posed by other, more exploitable systems, which relied on breathalyser-type technology and made only one sobriety check per journey. These were easily defeated if the drink driver employed a sober accomplice to provide a 'clean' breath sample. 2. Emissions
A great deal of work is being done to reduce the levels of pollution produced by cars. Perhaps the most successful example of this is another Toyota effort - the much-lauded Prius.
Via its patented 'Hybrid Synergy Drive', the Prius recycles as much of the power made by its highly efficient petrol engine as possible - turning it into stored electrical energy in a substantial onboard battery. While old-fashioned cars have harnessed this excess energy to power a few electrical items, the Prius actually drives on it in certain beneficial situations - stop/go city driving being the ideal. The Prius has a loyal following among film stars, politicians and others in the public eye who want to maintain a squeaky-clean image. Its detractors will point out that the impact of disposing of a Prius battery pretty-much outweighs the environmental benefits of driving one, however. 3. Black Boxes
Cheap car insurance companies have found an ingenious third way of limiting a driver's freedoms, and it's all done under the guise of restricting the price of their car insurance premium.
Installing a satellite hooked-up 'black box' in your car gives your motor insurance firm access to a world of information about your driving habits. Presently, they're paying attention to only a few details to calculate your premium - what times of day or night you travel, and how far you go - but the potential for monitoring you more intimately must be getting mighty tempting. Customers are queuing up to get the boxes fitted for the short-term benefit of cheaper car insurance - but look further down the line, and you'll perhaps get a bit worried by the Orwellian potential of the system. In the US, for instance, information gleaned from black boxes is regularly and quite legally submitted as evidence in court cases involving RTAs or other car crimes. In conclusion, one can't help but feel that cars are falling foul of an increasingly common phenomenon these days - excessive political correctness. Our childhood dreams of flight and limitless travel are being suffocated by an Einsteinian guilt on the part of the auto manufacturers. Designers have become consumed by the idea that their creations are lethal killing machines, and seeking to limit the damage they'll cause is their prime concern. But the car is not the same as an atom bomb. Sure it pollutes and kills, but it also gets children to school, sick people to hospital and poor folks like you and me to work. And there's a real danger that reckless drivers won't have to learn any more responsibility at the wheel if their cars are designed to be responsible for them. The innovations discussed above make it feel like there's a policeman, an environmentalist and a snitch sat on the back seat, tutting and shaking their heads at every corner. Call me a frustrated nine-year-old, but I reckon it's the weight of these imaginary passengers which is stopping my hovercar getting off the ground.
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