Reply to post: Too much tech!(?)

Too much tech!(?)

Tesla's are just loaded down with gizmos. I look at anything past the basics of a being a manual motor car as one more thing that can break and will be expensive/impossible to repair. Elon had said after finally getting the X to market that putting too many widgets on a car was a bad thing and really slowed them down. He then had that part of his brain chemically removed and built the 3. Sandy Munro praised the tech on the 3 as world class, but I think he may have missed the downside that all of that tech wasn't required to make a car that can get from point A to point B, the parts of the car that he took Tesla to task for being sub standard and heavy.

If you can't change lanes on the motorway, you shouldn't be driving the car. If you can't make decisions on what lane you should be in, you shouldn't be driving the car. If you don't have time to drive to your destination, you should take a taxi or train not rely on an "autopilot" to drive your car while you bang away on your laptop or mobile. It's still a long way out before automating cars is going to be viable. Because the roads are rather free-form in comparison to trains, trams and trollies, there are more variable's to contend with. Even commercial aircraft travel in "lanes" and are kept spaced out by controllers. It's not like one going the other way is going to have a puncture and jump the center divider into oncoming traffic. Check out the Russian dash cam videos on YouTube for all of the things that will make you want to be paying constant attention to the road and not nodding off while the car is doing a bunch of it for you.

In the first world, we are getting to a point like NAS (Nerve Attenuation Syndrome) as depicted in the movie "Johnny Nemonic". We train ourselves to be bored when all of our attention isn't being occupied by something tickling every sense we have. If an automatic car is only doing "some" of the driving, we may be worse off than when we are fully engaged and doing everything. It could be an all or nothing argument in the end. That doesn't say that blind spot detectors, backup cameras, closing rate meters and other sorts of assistance gear isn't useful. I too hate it when some shmuck pulls into my blind spot and just paces me on the motorway and if I could see better and have some alarms when I'm reversing, that would be great. I just don't want the car taking the driving decisions away from me until it can do it better than I can all of the time in every probable scenario and reasonably well in many edge cases. I also want the option of not installing updates automatically and being able to skip the odd "feature upgrade" update or portion of update. I'd rather wait a few days and read the boards to see if anybody has been bricked in some fashion.