Driving in other countries can often bring a fresh perspective or highlight old ones. Rural situations will likely re-enforce old perspectives while more urban will perhaps new perspectives like appreciation for autonomy and self determination.
Its no secret driving requires a balance of awareness, aggressive, and defensive skills which is why vehicle engineers feel the need to “assist” in ways never before possible. Humble beginnings such as automatic braking systems (ABS) and daytime running lights (DRL) were designed not only to assist but to help protect by reducing emergency stopping distance and increasing visibility. But with DRL, driver’s no longer felt responsibility to turn lights on because it was automatic. Due diligence in situations of fog, dusk, or dawn was disappearing and more control was being given to the car itself but has that become the death of self control?
Fast forward and now there is parking assist, lane assist, collision avoidance, object detection, auto idle on/off, auto high beams and more and the complacency only increases. There is no argument some of these features are useful as most can attest to when parking in tight spots. Yet drivers awareness appears to have lessened accordingly. Less thought and reliance on technology has led, in part, to the familiar blinding highway experience. The assistant has now become the sole means of control. It doesn’t help that its the default setting. No need to be courteous because technology will do it. Automation isn’t perfect and it cannot account for hills, curves, and many other conditions which lead to blind conditions and driver ill will.
If it ended there it may simply be an inconvenience. Add collision avoidance and lane assist to suddenly take over gas, brake, and wheel and it may be another matter. Utopian urban settings may get away with it many other countries and rural settings a new perspective of death by automation is more likely. A driver desperately trying to navigate narrow roads with occasional painted lines, no shoulder, pot holes, animals, abandoned vehicles, farm equipment, oversized loads, and random pedestrians doesn’t need the back seat driver from hell beaking off and jerking the wheel.
It is difficult enough to navigate narrow roads in conditions a North American would never even dream of much less have to fight with a vehicle wanting to do the opposite of what is needed. Do the engineers all live in utopian urban settings with little to no real world experience? How else could they come up with these “features” that cannot be permanently disabled? Did they all get drunk and decide no one should control their own vehicle? Perhaps they all live in houses where the lights toggle themselves to what someone else prefers, stoves turns on only at specified meal times, and the HVAC can only be used in within specific temperatures. It is fundamentally stupid to require jumping through a 7 layer deep menu to find every occurrence of features that are not needed and turn them off every time the vehicle started.
Engineers need to return control to allow features to be set until toggled. At the very least, add a kill switch and/or manual over ride button for the works. If they really want to impress, make it warn of potholes and speed bumps without jerking the car off the road or blaring alarm sounds that scare a person out of their wits.
Unfortunately, this trend towards a loss of user control isn’t isolated and can be seen in the Laundry Babysitter, modern TVs, dishwashers, and many other appliances of today. It even extends to traffic where both right and left turns are in many cases solely controlled by traffic lights instead of allowing for people to make the determination of when its safe to go. It really has become the death of self control.