Volvo : removing more responsibility from the driver every day.

I couldn't believe what I was seeing in a commercial on TV last night.
Volvo have a new "safety" system in their cars now - a collision warning system. A radar sensor is designed to monitor the area in front of the car. If the driver does not react when the car approaches another vehicle from behind, a red light is reflected on the windscreen and a buzzer sounds to alert them of the impending crash. The commercial was brilliant in its utter retardedness; it shows a woman driving along whilst looking down on her passenger seat, riffling through a pile of papers. The buzzer sounds and she looks up to see she's about to crash and applies the brake.

.....!.....

It's not bad enough that these super-cossetting steel cocoons are turning marginal drivers into bad drivers, now Vulva are actually implying in their commercials that it's perfectly OK to be driving whilst paying no attention to the road in front of you.

This is another in a long-line of so-called "safety" aids which do nothing more than remove responsibility from the driver for their actions. The more safety crap they put into the cars, the worse people drive because they're being led to believe that it doesn't matter how shite they are behind the wheel, they'll be just fine when they have their inevitable crash.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Mercedes has system where a car will essentially maintain the distance between it and the car in front of you slowing down or speeding up as necessary so you don't even need your foot on the pedal.

I'm just a bit worried when the days comes that some clever clogs will think 'hey lets hook it up to the sat nav' and we end up with a robot car.
14:36
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The non-separation of the LDS church and Utah state.

Look - I understand that mormons think gays are somehow evil, subhumans. I understand that the LDS won't tolerate gays, doesn't like them and thus won't marry them. But for local government to overturn a supreme court ruling about gay marriage is taking it too far. This is religious persecution on a par with the dark ages. The church doesn't like gays, so it leans on its members in government to do everything possible to prevent them from having the basic rights afforded other couples who want to marry. In other words, the LDS church is forcing it's (wrong) opinion about the LGBT community on everyone, via state and local laws that it has had passed and enforced on its behalf. Why should non-religious people be forced to abide by the opinion of a religious cult that they have no affiliation with? Apart from anything else, the uber-conservatives in this state are always the first ones to bitch when something even slightly unconstitutional happens, yet here they are r
Read more

Employees don't want much

I'm sitting looking at my company's internal 'learning' system this morning - hundreds of online courses that are available to all employees, some of which we're mandated to take. I'm not sure why the rest of them exist. We certainly don't have time to do any of the courses, and for the average employee, they hold no relevance to what we do, or want to do in our day-to-day jobs. I for one just want to be assigned tasks, and then be left alone. I don't need to do hazardous material training - my job doesn't involve hazardous materials. I don't need micromanagement. I don't need all the various efficiency and ethics courses that are available because I have common sense. I don't need to be instructed how to use the email system, nor how 'just in time' manufacturing is good for the company (it has no bearing on our division). Ok I understand all of this is corporate C-Y-A but so many of these things are just inconsequential to us. On
Read more