Our parallel loves of cars and technology have been dovetailing since the automobile was invented.
Surely not 10 minutes after the first Model T rolled off the assembly line, someone said, “Man, it’d be nice to equip this thing with a telegraph machine, wouldn’t it? Y’know, in case they want to send a wire to New York while they’re motoring.”
This tendency has yielded some worthwhile, even necessary developments (as anyone who’s gone on a long car trip with a broken stereo can tell you).
Listen, we’re big proponents of technology and social media around here, and we hate to even say this because we helped a friend of ours win a Fiesta for 6 months and we’re big fans of Ford, but their latest generation of syncing features has us more than a little concerned. Maybe it’s time to calm the hell down with the tech integration before we all kill each other, hm? Yes, we know Americans can’t go two goddam seconds without engaging with an electronic device, but if we’re going to muster up an attention span for one activity, shouldn’t that activity be driving a car?
Not to sound like your mother or anything, but you’re propelling two tons of steel down a street that likely has some very soft human beings on it. If you’re focused on the myriad things you can do in your car (calling people, receiving calls, browsing your address book, texting, tweeting, updating Facebook, listening to music and podcasts, tagging songs for future iTunes purchase, charging your peripherals, getting directions, looking up movie schedules, making dinner reservations, checking sports scores, inquiring into to the health of your vehicle, and more), it doesn’t matter that you can do most of it with your voice or steering wheel buttons, does it? The sheer number of potential distractions are enough to take anyone’s mind off the road for a critical couple of seconds. Just because your eyes are on the road doesn’t mean your brain is.
The solution to the distracted driving epidemic is not to invent new ways to operate our devices without looking at them. It is to remove them from the car entirely. (You wouldn’t put a gate up at the top of the stairs to protect your toddler and then give him a stool.)
So yes: the fact that Ford can put all these neat gadgets in their new cars is incredibly cool. But perhaps somebody over there should be thinking about whether they even should.
In the meantime, maybe we’ll just stay off the road entirely.
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