Candy Crash

As a driver, you are piloting a large hunk of metal, weighing between 1.5 and 2.5 tonnes, at speeds potentially in excess of that of a 9mm bullet,

What about taking your eyes off the road for “just a second”? A second isn’t long, no harm done, surely?

Well, chew on this – at 60mph, you cover 27 metres every second. In 4 seconds, you’ve travelled the length of a soccer pitch.

In the few seconds that you take your eyes off the road, you could have left a trail of broken bodies in your wake.

That is why this dumb shit is illegal:

But, get this, this equally dumb shit is legal(!):

That is, under the law as it stands, you can be fined / banned for being distracted by the screen on your phone – but you’re encouraged to be distracted by the screen in your car. That’s legal. WTF?

Increasingly, car manufacturers are substituting stupid and dangerous screens (which require line of sight to operate) for proper switches (which you can operate quickly and safely by touch, without ever needing to remove your eyes from the road).

Recently, Tesla even introduced a feature whereby you could play fucking video games while driving:

As the press reports, in de facto admissions of (i) just how thick modern drivers are, and (ii) how completely boring and un-interesting modern cars are, “Tesla turns to gaming to keep its car owners entertained“:

Thankfully, there’s now been a federal probe into this insanity, and Tesla apparently has disabled this lunatic “feature” when the car is in motion. 

But why stop there?

Why a federal probe into big screens being used for gaming; but no federal probe into the same big screens being used for anything else, including all manner of luxury nonsense, such as fiddling with the sub-menus to adjust your heated seats?

After all, when a screen-fiddler runs over a cyclist or t-bones another car because they were fiddling with their damned screen, it’ll be of little consolation to the victim that s/he was totalled while the driver was doing something ‘worthy’ such as adjusting the sub-menu for their heated seat temperature, as opposed to playing Candy Cru[a]sh.

The law is in utter disarray here.  The law currently states that you’re not allowed to touch your smartphone screen.

Touching the screen is viewed, correctly, as a sign that you’re distracted.

Meantime, manufacturers install more and bigger touch screens … (!)

The only thing that will stop this so-called technological “progress” b/s is a relative of someone killed by a  distracted driver suing, not just the killer driver, but the idiot manufacturer who designed a fundamentally unsafe vehicle which was deliberately designed to take your attention off the road. 

Cars are changing, and traditional car culture – with its emphasis on individual responsibility, and responsibility’s concomitant attribute of freedom, and freedom’s concomitant attribute of fun – is disappearing fast. Solo, independent driving, with minimal state supervision, has always been a reliable indicator of freedom in a democracy. No surprise that the women-hating Taliban has recently banned all long road trips by women drivers.

Badass cars are no more; all cars now are bourgeois. 

The new breed of car driver is a navel-gazing wuss, more concerned with his poxy screen time than with driving.  Increasingly, new car sales nowadays are concluded without even a test drive.  Once you’ve checked that the screens work, what would you need a test drive for? The new breed of car “driver” is a social-media addicted twerp who is wholly divorced from the machine that they’re nominally in charge of.  They dislike driving; and they want someone else to do it for them, preferably the government.

We need to be protected from such people. Their feeble minds are unlikely to be up to the serious business of driving in any event; but it makes matters immeasurably worse if the car manufacturers are now hell-bent on introducing guaranteed sources of lethal distraction for them.