It’s no secret that vehicles have become safer over the years. In the past decade especially, active driver assistance aids have become more commonly equipped to new vehicles.
We all know that there is so much more information available to us than there ever has been before. Even though the internet is full of silly facts, false information, and unsupported opinions, it also provides a wealth of just about any information anybody would care to find at the click of a button.
In other words, it can be very helpful and enhance learning because of the information we find.
However…
The process of finding information, reasoning through it, doing further research about it, and supporting everything we find is more beneficial to our overall experience and reasoning abilities if we do that research “the old fashioned way.”
Actually searching for the books and publications we need, writing out our findings by hand, and working to get the information we require – it may be more time consuming than searching Google for a keyword, but it is much more beneficial to our growth.
The same can be said about driving a vehicle on the road, in real life, with you behind the wheel. It forces you to use your senses, your awareness, and your physical abilities.
Driver assistance systems are wonderful… just like Google. They have allowed our vehicles to be safer by mitigating distracted driving errors. But, driving has become too easy… just like Google has made it easy to find information quickly.
Of course, I’m not trying to equate a Google search for tomorrow’s weather to a vehicle which saves somebody’s life by automatically stopping when it detects a pedestrian walking in front of it.
I am saying that driving a vehicle with few driver assistance mechanisms has many more benefits than one that has more. A more basic vehicle teaches us to be aware of our surroundings, to react quickly in an emergency situation, and to responsibly interact with those on the road around us.
And now, as a result of an increasing number of driver assistance aids, an increasing number of people need an increasing number of aids to responsibly operate a vehicle.
This is the main reason that so many people look favorably at the prospect of self-driving vehicles. Theoretically, they don’t need an operator constantly controlling them. On top of that, people would be free to go about their normal routine while on their way to work.
For me, self-driving vehicles makes complete sense. I hate the idea of self-driving vehicles, because I love cars, and I love driving them. But, it makes logical sense that self-driving vehicles would eventually replace operator-driven vehicles. After all, it is a proven statistic that most accidents are caused by user error. Total, high-quality automation would all be eliminate driver error.
It seems to me that we are living in the worst possible time throughout history to operate a vehicle. The older population will soon hang up their vehicles for good and often don’t like the newest vehicles. Soon-to-be drivers will understand less and less the concept of actually driving a vehicle. And, everyone in between is stuck in a strange hodgepodge of new “super safe” vehicles and “less safe” yet still technologically advanced vehicles from 10 and 15 years ago.
The fact is that the majority of current drivers are losing their touch on the roads. Unless fully automated, no amount of safety features in a vehicle can truly eradicate someone’s bad decision or few seconds of distracted driving.
I don’t believe there is any viable solution to this problem except to simultaneously switch every single vehicle on the road from operator-driven to self-driven, just as one would turn on the light in a room. Unfortunately, the infrastructure, culture, and a host of other factors make it impossible to do this.
So then, we are stuck with the hand we’ve been dealt. With that in mind, we must be better drivers, because the best safety equipment a new vehicle has to offer inevitably makes its driver lazier. It makes it easier to allow the vehicle to do more than it was designed to do, and thus, makes its driver more dangerous on the road.
The future may look great, and eventually, we may get to the point in time where we will no longer have to drive anywhere.
The fact is that we are not in the future, and “eventually” has not yet come. If we are safer drivers, those around us have the opportunity to be safer as well. We all must remember to use whatever safety technology in our vehicle as a safety enhancement, not a crutch.
