The time when the classic in the back of your shed wasn’t fundamentally different from your daily transport is long gone as Rob Blackbourn explains in this edition of Garage Gurus…
While Friday lunch with the mates is generally a calm enough affair, certain issues produce the odd passionate outburst.
Recently, Jeff, a man who usually arrives and settles in quietly enough, at least early on, turned up at lunch with steam already coming from his ears.
A week’s battle of wills with the ‘Driver Alert’ set-up on his new work ute had clearly taken its toll.
Apparently, the technology behind the system is very particular about how drivers go about their behind-the-wheel business, in particular that they look ‘alert’ while doing it.
The ute’s definition of ‘alertness’ seems to use a one-driving-style-fits-all template – it will apparently beep out an alarm message when the camera detects even a single yawn (who doesn’t yawn harmlessly here and there?), soon following up by urging the driver to take a break.
Others report that it treats opening your mouth to sing along to your favourite songs a risky behaviour that looks mighty like a troubling yawn to ‘Big Brother’.
Sunglasses can be a ‘No-No!’ given that the system needs to monitor eyelid movements to detect the first signs that you’re about to nod off. The low interior light-levels during night-time driving present similar challenges to eye-lid monitoring.
It seems that adjusting your mirrors can be called out as failing to keep your eyes on the road, as will head-checks of mirror blind-spots.
A real surprise is that the system ignores the distracting effects of input-actions required to disable the alerts while driving – as permitted by the system.
Rubbing salt into Jeff’s wounds was the fact that the system defaults to re-activating the alerts afresh, every time he starts the engine.
Jeff’s irritation at being nagged pointlessly by the safety-tech stuff, and his challenge to its relevance in a real world, on-the-road context prompted me to give it column space simply because this stuff is so foreign to me.
I’ve just never been a bells and whistles kind of bloke and with the youngest member of my little domestic vehicle fleet being over 20 years old, I’m not accustomed to being beeped, buzzed, or nagged by factory-installed, behind-the-dash technology.
Also, my work experience during 20-odd years in automotive and wider industrial settings did nothing to prepare me for this over-egging of the tech pudding. I always looked for solutions that employed the simplest technology possible to deal effectively with issues crossing my desk – yep, I’ve long been a fan of the K-I-S-S principle.
Clearly, though, that was then, and this is now – we live in an era where regulation and legislation, particularly out of the EU, have left automotive engineers with little choice but to raise the tech-bar significantly.
So, it was interesting to get a sense of colleague Dave Morley’s take on this stuff in last month’s issue of Unique Cars, given that, unlike me, his work has kept him abreast of automotive engineering trends over recent years.
Unsurprisingly, his tongue-in-cheek critique of automotive safety-tech per se showed him more open to embracing it than me (and mate Jeff …), while he’s clearly quite critical about how it is being implemented.
He sees merit in lane-keeping tech, while criticising some set-ups for being poorly calibrated, for intervening too aggressively – aggressively enough to frighten a timid driver into a panicked response.
His report of one fundamentally flawed example left me gasping – after losing contact with a rural road centre-line, the lane-keeping tech moved his press-test car to a new position just to the left of the line marking the right-hand edge of the road!
Active cruise-control also seems to need a bit more work in Morley’s opinion – he’s not that fond of its ability to slowly wind back his speed to match the slow guy in front without alerting him. Plus, I have to say that Dave’s Utopian dream of Lane-Keeping Assistance converting to Racing-line Assistance seemed like a bridge a bit too far.
Mate Jeff was a bit more philosophical when I spoke to him a week or two after he got the Driver-Alert grievance off his chest at lunch.
He wondered aloud about how he possibly manages to keep it all together when he’s out cruising in his favourite four-wheeler, a lovely 1963 US-model Falcon V8 convertible, with its only alerts being the fuel and coolant-temperature gauges that sit quietly on opposite sides of the speedo giving him no grief at all …