In the last 20 years the automotive industry has seen many technological advancements. Everything from airbags to automatic gear boxes that shift like a manual have been developed for cars these past decades. All of these technologies are driven by computers. This is great news, computers becoming the brain of your car and it won't be long until our cars can transport us to our destination with the only inputs from driver being where we want our car to go. But is all this technology a good thing for drivers? Sure cars are safer than ever before, gas mileage from a 70's V8 engine can in no way match the mileage or performance of a modern engine, and finally luxury's such as satellite navigation, bluetooth and heads up displays are all available because of power of the computer.
So what am I ranting about? I actually enjoy driving cars and I feel that all this computer power is ruining my driving experience and possibly the computer is overriding my decisions in controlling my car. Let me begin with this new paddle-shifting technology that car manufactures have started to use to replace manual gear boxes. This technology came from Formula 1 racing (actually a lot of automotive technology comes from auto racing), the paddle-shifting transmission uses paddles on the back of the steering wheel (picture of what I'm talking about http://images.sportcompactcarweb.com/features/0802_sccp_05_z+2009_nissan_gtr+paddle_shifter.jpg ) for gear changes. This transmission doesn't have a clutch so pretty much everyone can drive it. I have driven a Volkswagon (VW) GTI that had this technology (and good site that shows how it works http://auto.howstuffworks.com/dual-clutch-transmission.htm ) every automotive magazine I have read has praised it for working like a manual transmission car. Hold on for a second I drive a manual transmission car and I hated the VW because it refused to change to a gear that I wanted. This Volkswagon was overriding my decision for a gear change. This makes me feel that I'm not in control of the car and the computer has more control over it than I do. Now there are better versions of this technology out there but unless some one hands me $240,000 or the keys to a Ferrari the best technology out there for the rest of us is from VW. This technology is getting better though and in 10 years the manual transmission will probably no longer be offered and possibly automatic transmissions will suffer the same fate as well.
*On a side note for you automatic drivers out there that are worried about fuel economy a manual transmission increases fuel economy between 5 and 15 percent while a paddle-shift transmission adds between 5 to 10 percent.
I just really feel the driver is being taken out of the equation and soon I'll be bored driving instead of I enjoying it. The future is happening now, to see what features regular cars will have in the future all you have to look at is the expensive cars that are out now. I'll use the BMW M5 as an example. In 2005 it had the most powerful computer processor that had been approved for cars. The car's suspension has 3 settings, the transmission has 18 settings, the engine output has 3 settings, and the car comes with more 3 letter acronyms than I know what to do with (examples EDC (Electronic Damper Control), EMS (Engine Management System, DSC (Dynamic Stability Control just to name a few and there are much more). You need a automotive dictionary just to figure out what all this means, and just for reference every manufacturer uses a different letters for all the same systems. Why do we need all this customization? It would take you 20 minutes to start up the car change the settings the way you wanted then you could start driving to your destination 20 minutes late and I'm only giving you a snip it of the customizable settings lurking inside of BMW's computer.
I want my cars to do what I tell them to do, I don't need 20 million settings for the transmission or infinite settings to tell the car how long I want my headlights to stay on after turning the ignition off. I want simple and I want control. Computers seem to be taking this away from me, as much as I blame computers for this disconnect its really isn't the computer thats causing the problem. Its the programmers who designed and create the computers controlling the car. We need to be careful what we allow computers to control. Computers do make our lives easier and safer. But, humans can think outside of the box while computers are only good as the person who has programmed it.