Tech Talk: How much tech is too much on the road?

The amount of technology packed into new cars is truly astounding. Braking assistance features to prevent fender-benders, lane-keeping to make sure you don’t drift into the wrong lane, collision avoidance to warn you if you’re about to sideswipe someone, adaptive cruise control to keep your place in bumper-to-bumper traffic. All of it is wonderful. Other advances to improve economy or manage range in both electric and gasoline vehicles pay dividends for both the consumer and the environment. But how much is too much?

One of the biggest issues I have with a lot of new cars is the lack of physical controls for common tasks like adjusting the temperature or managing music. Even with all of the driving assistance helpers in the world — even if the car is essentially driving itself, it’s still a two-ton hunk of metal, composite and things that don’t react well to being jostled like batteries and gasoline hurtling down the road at seventy miles an hour. If you have to take your eyes off the road to do something as simple as changing the temperature, it’s a problem.

To be fair, manufacturers are including things like gesture control and voice command into cars to try to simplify things but as good as those technologies have become, they’re not as infallible as a switch or a button. Voice command can be frustrating if you don’t know the precise phrase the car is looking for. As for gesture control — if you’re from NEPA and you have a vowel at the end of your name, there’s a good chance you might use your hands for emphasis when you’re speaking. More than once I’ve been interrupted mid-conversation by the radio suddenly increasing in volume because the car decided my hand motions were an instruction.

Don’t get me wrong — I love when cars are jam-packed with all kinds of options and features. But I also love driving, and I can’t help but feel that the experience — particularly when you’re sharing the road with a lot of other people, should be as intuitive and distraction-free as possible. In the past, you could rely on muscle memory and touch for any adjustments you needed to make in a car, without taking your eyes off the road. People were worried about radios being a distraction. Then cell-phones. Then the navigation system. Now we’ve got literal screens full of swoopy effects and no physical buttons whatsoever, and while it definitely looks cool, I can’t say it’s an improvement.

There are some things that manufacturers are doing right: safety features, self-tensioning seatbelts, crash mitigation features, and headlights that can selectively avoid blinding oncoming drivers. I can’t help but feel that they could be doing better when it comes to how we interact with the cars. Try though they might to make it seem like the car is a piece of computer hardware, driving is one of the most dangerous things most people do day-to-day, and not by a small margin. To me, that means the experience should be as natural and intuitive as possible, and if your attention is focused on navigating through multiple layers of menus to change a setting on your ambient lighting instead of driving, all that technology might be a hindrance.