Information overload - What do you reckon?

By: Glenn Torrens

Date: 22.02.2024

Glenn Torrens has a giggle at the serious problem of information overload

Image: Seiberling Tyres

It's several kilometres down the hill to the Talbotville campground near Dargo in northern Victoria. It’s a reasonable dirt road (or it was!) that, via the campground, eventually gives access to Billy Goat Bluff and a few other ‘must see’ sites in the Victorian High Country. I’ve been through there a few times with my role with 4X4 Australia magazine.

One time, we had a bloke in our group that had a new tyre monitoring system on his 4WD. I don’t know why this feller chose this particular track to ‘test’ his fancy new toy – and not the freeway from Melbourne or Geelong or wherever he lived – but I guess going through the physical and psychological ‘gate’ of putting his vehicle in to 4WD might have had something to do with it. With that little ‘4WD’ light glowing on his instrument cluster, this bloke was now definitely ‘off road’!

This feller was obviously very proud of his new tyre bling-box because over the radio, it didn’t take long for him to begin telling all the rest of us in the convoy about how he could "keep an eye on the tyres". 

"I can see what the tyres are doing!" he boldly proclaimed. "It’s easy! There’s a display right here in the cabin with me so I can see what they’re doing, all the time!"

After explaining this, our radios fell silent until a few minutes later, it began crackling again with questions about what the tyre pressures should be, and what the gauge was doing and what the beeps were and how fast the numbers on the display were changing and what temperature was normal.

In other words, this feller didn’t have one skerrick of knowledge about the actual behaviour of tyres or what he should be ‘monitoring’ with his you-beaut system.

"I don’t want them getting too hot!" he continued. "These tyres – they’re going up a few pounds! I better slow down a bit! Yeah, maybe I should slow down so they don’t get too hot! What temperature should I be seeing?"

And this was all happening on a dirt access road into a campground that I’d be happy to have driven a Holden ute or a VW Beetle along.

Ol’ mate’s situation was a classic case of ‘data daze’, where someone is seeing a stack of information but has absolutely no idea what it all means for them, or their vehicle. With cheap mail-order tech, plenty of people are plugging-in little $100 black boxes to their car’s EFI computer and jumping on the internet to ask: "Hey everyone! Just came off freeway to home. Is a three-degree variance in coolant temp normal? Dealer says it’s okay, but what do people think?"

Can you imagine how pissed-off some car dealers and mechanics are with answering inane questions such as this? Most vehicles have had a billion dollars thrown at design and development, and been tested for years and hundreds of thousands of kays in minus 40°C Korean or Canadian winters, and plus 40°C Aussie or Californian summers. So yeah, a three-degree change in temp is probably not going to blow the engine …

It seems to happen a fair bit in the growing classic-car scene too, as more ‘non-car people’ discover the simple joys of cruising older cars thanks to the recently introduced freedoms of low-cost car-club registration.

Of course, it’s wonderful that we have inexpensive tools that make it easier to look after our cars, even our older ones. But I just don’t understand the mentality; the need for some people to go looking for problems where there are none! 

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