Modern Cars Are Making Us Forget How to Drive

I'm in a car at the moment where when I approach the car it unlocks. When I get in the car it's already ready to go and it just gave me an indication now because it has a camera on the A pillar and that A pillar camera is looking at me and is looking at my eyes and every now and then it decides that I'm not paying enough attention to the road and it kind of admonishes me with a message. The car of course is electric. The car is of course automatic. I don't have to change any gears. It also has auto braking. Right now I could activate cruise control on this car which is not just cruise control of course. It's not even adaptive control. It's adaptive cruise control. It's actually intelligent cruise control which means that basically it's kind of like an autopilot system. Ah but it wants you to hold the steering wheel. There's the little sop that it gives you. It's like no no please hold the steering wheel however I'll do everything else and the weird thing on this particular car actually I really didn't like it because you know then if you do try and correct the steering of your own accord you have to really fight it you know because then it becomes sticky and like you know it doesn't really want to obey what you're telling it to do but that's the nature of the modern car of the brand new cars they're coming with all this equipment it'll brake for you you know it'll park for you it'll reverse out of a slot for you and the but the biggest thing about these cars as I mentioned is that it is monitoring you and a lot of these cars are recording inputs recording data they're not necessarily I've done another video about this and you can go and watch it where the video is basically the car is spying on you and the systems are in the car that enable them to be able to do exactly that but they're not doing that necessarily not at the moment um you know because of laws and stuff like that but they could do it because they're connected there are sensors they are logging inputs you know they are logging the amount of accelerator that you're using the time that you're going out where you are driving all of these things are being logged and recorded not necessarily sent anywhere they might be in your car only um but and they're not all doing it but they could do it the point is that they could do it i've been testing cars or reviewing cars for um over 35 years and you got into a car and all the controls are pretty basic and straightforward you knew where everything was you knew what everything did and the idea was that you got in the car and then you judged the car you judged the car because you decided um how does it feel how does it drive how are the controls how is the ride how is the acceleration how is the braking how is the turning how is the steering you know you're deciding that you're judging it that was part of the process of doing what we do the trouble is now you can't help shake the feeling that there's not so much me doing the judging as the car judging me you know and i think that's almost like the point of what we're getting at now especially when you're getting more and more ai in these cars and stuff like this the car is judging you the car is monitoring your driving it's monitoring what you're doing it's monitoring where you're going when you're going how you're driving how much accelerator you're using how hard you're braking the car is judging you and you know it gets to a point well it's like well the car will decide well actually i can do it better you know we're getting to that point already even the wipers are activated by themselves like what's that thing doing at the back it's just activated itself and you know there's less and less of you thinking and putting inputs in and more actually is doing it too much i need to stop that less and less of you thinking and putting in the inputs and more and more of the car actually deciding what it wants to do and what it should be doing and i think that we're losing something that's um that's very valuable here and we're losing that ability to control one of the joys of driving one of the great things about driving was to get into a vehicle and to know that you were the one driving it that you were the one that was going to exercise some mastery and control of that vehicle but now it's like no because the car is doing harm the car is steering for you for god's sakes it's like getting it's like one of those games you know like a racing game or something where you know you've got assistance set to maximum and you know so it's showing you the racing line it's doing the braking for you it's even helping you with the turning and everything like that because the assistance is maximum so you're not actually so you're almost a passenger at that point and it's getting to that point now with some of these cars and when that happens i think there's a certain level of complacency that sets in because people start to rely more and more on the tech you know that's when the more the tech takes over the more you then start to rely on the tech because you go well okay well the tech will look after me and then what happens if the tech fails what happened if the tech glitches so for example just now i always use the navigation systems right even when i know where i'm going i've said this before because it tells you about the cameras and the traffic and all the rest of it but somewhere where i was now i don't know if it was because of where we were or because of the rain because it was really stormy earlier on and the systems wouldn't work there was no signal whatsoever and i don't carry a map anymore like in the old days and all of a sudden i've left that place and i'm like oh man i have to remember which way i came in now because i can't there's no navigation to help me go out again so all of a sudden i've reverted back to like oh okay using my instincts and judgment going okay well must have been i must have come in from uh i think i turned west so i've got to go back east you know so it's it's it's that sort of thing and this is something that we used to do all the time before you know judging our way feeling our way getting lost and then only to go yes i found i found my way back you know but increasingly now we're relying so much on these systems that we've almost forgotten how to do that and i and i and again the same goes for the driving aspect of it i reversed to tell a car i was where i was i was reviewing a car and i had parked the car at the end of a narrow place where there was an empty space so i was filming it there then i had the car facing the wrong way and i wanted to leave and i thought rather than me doing a 15.10 to get it round again i'll just reverse out reverse all the way back and then i'll i'll go out and i put my hand over the you know over the shoulder of the passenger seat and turned my neck to look back and i thought well actually why am i doing that because it's giving me a camera on the screen between the camera and the rear view mirrors i shouldn't really do that i can just use those things and then of course it's beeping and bonging and if there is anything there then it will alert me but yet part of me was like no but that's the way i've been taught that's that's my instinct that's my gut instinct is to do it that way in the end i did a mixture of it you know so that's that's kind of a hybrid version of it and i think that this is and this is the aspect of you know what i'm talking about is losing the skills that we had as drivers because they've been taken over by the tech in the car which we then start to become reliant upon and complacent with and thereby completely erode the skills and talents and abilities that we had check out brown car guys latest novel silent ruin action adventure spies betrayal romance plus of course cool cars and car chases it's got the lot and don't forget how to be an automotive content creator the uless files and quantum races all brown car guys books are available on amazon and kindle unlimited so is this a good thing is this a bad thing discuss you know i think that the other aspect of all of this is the enjoyment and the satisfaction and the reality is that of course you're going to get more satisfaction and more enjoyment out of anything that you're controlling yourself especially the satisfaction part and the enjoyment part is because generally the things where you're having to control everything yourself are more visceral they're more connected the more not connected to the internet i mean connected to you so you know you feel more of what's going on and that adds to the enjoyment there was a survey that was done that was talking about yes there is such a thing as the thrill of driving and it's not even necessarily uh speed you know it's just the ability to feel the car to control the car to be to have the knowledge that you are actually in control of the car you know of course the speed element comes into it so we are i think losing all of those things now for a lot of people that might be okay i mean like you know they may be like i can't be doing with driving you know it's too much hassle it's too scary i'm too intimidated by and then you know what that's fine as well that's okay i understand that i understand that for a lot of people you know maybe driving isn't for everybody but could we have a happy mixture of that would we live in a world where we had autonomous cars and cars that you would drive yourself i don't know because i think at that point you would end up with a situation where road traffic control systems would require a certain symmetry of how the traffic flows which would then mean that humans would not be able to replicate what automatons ai driverless cars would be doing and i can see at that point particularly as i put a video up yesterday about the fact that you know there's been these trends about people driving recklessly and dangerously and posting videos and i can see a groundswell of public opinion and support eventually coming in to clamp down on those people and going you know what you know we don't want to let people drive the cars anymore because they're too stupid too irresponsible and too reckless and again that's another reason why we need to be careful about you know even as petrol heads you know we need to be careful when and where and how we're driving uh because we don't want that kind of thing to spread but again i do wonder if we would ever be allowed to do that and then i wonder well where would that leave classic cars because if you own a classic car it doesn't have all that tech in it and to read and to retro install like tech into a classic car i suppose you could you could install some monitoring equipment could it be gps and camera monitoring and stuff like that but you couldn't necessarily install stuff that would control the car you know because they're not drive-by-wire they're all mechanical mechanically driven cars but nonetheless i still you know wouldn't stop them from trying to do that to put a monitoring equipment into it or just ban them all together and that's a future that i have actually discussed in my uh in some in a couple of the short stories in my book quantum races there's a plug for my book you get them quantum races on amazon 13 short stories some of which are sci-fi and some of which are car related so if you're a petrolhead you might enjoy them if you found this video useful or entertaining support the brown car guy channel at these links hit like leave a comment and make sure you're subscribing this this all gives me pause for concern and it does make me wonder if we are on something of a clock now when it comes to cars and car culture and driving i hate to think so but i fear it is true let me know what you think i want to hear your thoughts i look forward to hearing them and i'll catch you all in the next video