Remember those old jokes about what would happen if cars ran like Microsoft Windows (TM)? If not, let me refresh your memory:
1. For no reason whatsoever your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn, would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
5. Only one person at a time could use the car, unless you bought "Car95" or "CarNT." But then you would have to buy more seats.
6. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would only run on five per cent of the roads.
7. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning light.
8. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.
9. The airbag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off.
10. Occasionally for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grab hold of the radio antenna.
11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of Rand McNally road maps (now a GM subsidiary), even though they neither need them nor want them. Attempting to delete this option would immediately cause the car's performance to diminish by 50% or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.
12. Everytime GM introduced a new model car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
13. You'd press the "start" button to shut off the engine.
Today, Bill Gates announced that Microsoft has partnered with Ford to offer a dashboard operating system for some 2008 vehicles. Aside from the easy jokes (see above), this seems like a bad idea. The OS will drive all kinds of personal computing devices, such as cell phones and MP3 players. Aren't drivers distracted enough? Isn't this just a spate of accidents waiting to happen? I have very little faith that it will all be so easy to use that drivers will be able to answer their email in traffic. How can they operate their vehicles when they'll need both hands to press control-alt-delete?
3 comments:
It's called "trying to appeal to the whatever the hell they're calling the generation of kids now." I saw it demonstrated recently and it was pretty cool, but I agree with you that people are distracted enough behind the wheel of a car.
I feel the same way about this as I do about those LED screens that project a movie onto the windshield. It's gonna be my arse that ends up getting run over by the moron trying to watch The Simple Life while doing 65.
I thought the purpose of being in a car was going from place to place. Don't they have drive-ins for watching movies in cars?
BTW... I laughed the first time I read that several years ago, and I still chuckled yesterday.
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