Driving isn’t that hard – it just requires some grey matter and a bit of concentration.
A few years ago, a Japanese beverage manufacturer came up with a new product to cash in on the diet crazes that were sweeping the globe.
Sapporo Holdings Ltd, the makers of Sapporo lagers, decided to tap into the market by adding specialised peptide bonds to a popular drink. This was said to give you more amino acids and supposedly make you healthier.
The problem was, it wasn’t a fancy electrolyte-filled sports drink – it was plain and simple water. The resulting product was labelled ‘Diet Water.’ No, I’m not kidding.
As far as inventions go, Diet Water has to be right up there as one of the most useless things ever invented alongside shoe umbrellas (to stop them getting wet), noodle coolers (a battery-operated fan attached to chopsticks) and DVD rewinders.
The car industry is also full of inventions that are effectively pointless, too. But only if you can drive properly! Just look at surround view cameras. Unless you’re off-road and need to see whether a rock is going to puncture your tyre, you already get a full 360-degree view around you. If your mirrors are adjusted properly – with the wing mirrors just showing a millimetre of the door handles, for example – then there’s nothing you can’t see while driving along.
Now, I agree that reversing cameras are absolute lifesavers, literally. But in every other situation, mirrors do the job just fine. The same goes with blind spot monitoring. How hard is it to turn your head and look? I don’t buy the argument that larger C-pillars are destroying visibility. Mirrors are now convex shaped, allowing even greater visibility down the side of the car.
You don’t need to look at the side of your car, you need to look at the road – make sure your mirrors are properly adjusted, and you’ll see everything you need to.
While we’re on the subject of mirrors, two words spring to mind: use them.
A car doesn’t suddenly jump out of nowhere into your so-called blind spot. They move gradually into it. A few glances at your mirrors every few seconds will put you in the picture of what’s happening around your vehicle, and you’ll be better prepared for every eventuality.
Another useless invention is auto headlights. If you’re driving, you’re not blind (at least, I hope not). So you can definitely tell when it’s daylight and when it’s night-time, right? So how hard is it to turn your lights on or turn them off when appropriate?
And while we’re at it, manufacturers should not be backlighting instruments when the lights are off. How many people have you seen at night with no headlight on, simply because the instruments are all lit up and they assume (which is a dangerous action) that the headlights are on. It should be mandatory that they’re not backlit when the lights are off – a simple solution.
You see, all these inventions are for lazy people who don’t want to take any responsibility for their driving. When you actually look, when you’re actually involved in the driving, you shouldn’t need half these things to keep you safe. You just need that grey matter and a little bit of concentration. Driving is not that difficult!
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