Can you believe all the gizmos they put on cars these days? It’s as though the driver didn’t have a brain.
When I bought a new car recently, I had to accept more features than I needed in order to get the color I wanted. Now I am beginning to question my decision.
There are 19 buttons and levers on my steering wheel alone, not counting the various controls on the two columns for the lights and the windshield wipers.
I know a couple of those levers are supposed to satisfy my desire for a standard transmission, but it’s not a stick shift, especially without a clutch.
The first real insult came when I was sitting at a stoplight.
My car beeped and a message appeared on a screen above the steering wheel: “Vehicle ahead has moved.”
Then the car beeped every time it passed over the white line near the shoulder of the road. If my blinker wasn’t on, it also beeped when the car crossed the centerline. Each time a little image of the deviating car appeared on the screen before me. I soon found a way to disable that annoyance.
Most of the time I don’t mind the beep that sounds when the car senses movement behind it. It’s actually kind of exciting.
The exception was when I was lined up to parallel park on Main Street in Presque Isle and traffic passing on the street caused the car to beep and lights to flash on the rearview mirror. There was no obstacle in my parking place, but I was so distracted by the beeping and flashing that I decided to move from the street into a parking lot.
In days past, when I bought a new car, I would read the owner’s manual from cover to cover in about an hour, highlighting important information for quick future reference. The owner’s manual for my new car contains 557 pages. It is nearly an inch thick and heavier than a Bible. In its black leather case, it looks like a Bible.
And that’s just for the car. The multimedia/navigation system requires a separate manual — 300 pages, a quarter-inch thick.
A third 97-page manual describes the technology that nearly drives the car for you when fully engaged.
I have to store the manuals in back with the spare tire to have room for anything else in the glove compartment.
And have I read them? During the first few weeks of ownership, I brought them into the house each night, thinking I would try to absorb one section at a time.
Thankfully, the manufacturer also provides three abbreviated “quick-reference guides” — my “Cliff Notes” salvation.
The multimedia and navigation book begins with a list of 32 warnings and cautions and a disclaimer that “we cannot guarantee that the map data contains no errors” since changes might have occurred since the data were collected. The warnings include items such as, “Before viewing a video, be sure to park the car in a safe place and apply the parking brake,” “Do not park in prohibited areas to use the unit” and “Do not use the unit when it is malfunctioning,” along with more important items, such as “In a thunderstorm, do not touch the antenna line or the unit. Lightning may cause an electric shock” and “Do not use while there is an abnormality such as sound break-up or distortion. Doing so may result in a fire.”
I am a patient person, but my tolerance for technology can wear thin. When I was stopped in a long line of traffic between Searsport and Stockton Springs, I decided to see if my multimedia/navigation unit could tell me exactly where I was between the two towns. A crash ahead required the “jaws of life” to extract the occupants of the cars involved while traffic from both directions waited.
I selected navigation and up came a map. Yay! It showed the names of all the intersecting roads and streets, but no town names or distances. I zoomed out. It gave my latitude and longitude, and precise position on the planet, but it could not tell me how far I was from either Searsport or Stockton Springs.
And, of course, while I am fiddling with “the unit,” the car beeps and tells me the “vehicle ahead has moved.”
Once I got rolling again, I realized I had not entered a destination when I opened navigation. No matter what buttons I pushed or unprintable words I uttered, I could not silence the voice that insisted on instructing me to turn left here and right there, as though I didn’t know where I was going.
I have decided the designers of new cars must assume the brains of drivers are indeed compromised. Today’s drivers are likely to be focused on smartphones or multimedia units while waiting for a light to change or a line of traffic to move. Most of them live in cities with a lot more traffic than we have in Maine, making beeps and flashing lights valuable.
Urban drivers spend hours waiting in their cars. A screen on the dashboard offering a menu of information on the stock market, sports and weather, as well as countless options for music, can help them pass the time.
Maybe the diversions will even reduce road rage.
I only hope they do not cause an increase in accidents for the drivers who cannot resist fiddling while driving.
Kathryn Olmstead is a former University of Maine associate dean and associate professor of journalism living in Aroostook County, where she publishes the quarterly magazine Echoes. Her column appears in this space every other Friday. She can be reached at olmstead@maine.edu or P.O. Box 626, Caribou, ME 04736.