Technology and the Automobile Automobiles are changing and because technology is advancing so fast it is hard to keep up with what we are on the verge of seeing. Toyota is about to do something which would have seemed impossible a few years ago. There has been a lot of talk about the military developing a material which can bend light and make things seem invisible. Toyota has patented a material which can also do this and the talk is they are going to use it to make those annoying pillars which are around your windshield disappear. The idea is to give the driver of the vehicle the best amount of visibility anyone can have. There are probably also a lot of other uses for this material. I wonder what it would be like to drive a vehicle which is completely transparent. It reminds me of Wonder Woman’s car and plane which were also transparent. Seriously though if we eliminated everything from blocking our view which was above the door line of the car it would be like driving out in the open. The next thing they may want to work on is making invisibility work from the inside of the car but not from the outside looking in, you don’t want to ruin those beautiful lines. Scientists have been working on a way to power an electric car while it is running. The idea is to transmit electricity to it or to make it able to charge enough while it is moving to keep the battery at full charge. There are a lot of ideas which have come up about creating roads which would supply electricity, because of electronics embedded in them and supposedly an automobile would be able to draw this electricity. While this idea is fascinating, it seems to be at least partially impossible to do. What I mean by this is we may be able to electrify the main roads at a huge cost, but what about all the secondary inside roads. It seems to be an impossible task to me to electrify every road, so what does that leave us with? It leaves us with an automobile which would still need some sort of battery system so that when it gets off of one of these types of roads the car will still have enough juice to get where it’s going. The advantage here is when you get back on the main road your car will begin to charge again. There is no fighting against the advancing technology which wants to take over your car entirely. I think just about everyone can see it is only a matter of time before all vehicles will be capable of driving themselves. There are a lot of people who do not trust this idea, but is the wave of the future. It is sort of like texting on a cell phone. Many old timers like myself do not like the idea of texting even though I am capable of doing it. Most others my age don’t even want to try. The same will turn out to be true for self-driving vehicles. The people who remember driving their own vehicles will probably never be comfortable with one that drives itself, while the generation born into a time when vehicles drive themselves will be quite comfortable. If the promise of self-driving vehicles comes true, accident deaths will decrease by a considerable amount, we may someday praise the people who thought we should go in this direction, but on the other hand if this leaves all of us open to hackers, those people were able to divert an automobile system and make it do whatever they want, then no one is going to be happy and our cars may turn out to be terrible weapons in the hands of terrorists. There is another technology being spoken about which is closely related to the autonomous technology where cars drive themselves, but it has a twist. This technology will have the car watch what you do and if the software program feels you’re incapable of making a correct decision, it will take over the driving duties for however long it feels it must. One of the uses would be to prevent someone like an intoxicated person from trying to drive their car. I must say I applaud this venture even though I am not too happy about a computer making decisions about me. You have to wonder about this idea, especially when you sometimes see the software in your car not acting correctly. Let me give you an example of what I am talking about. I love my car and while it is not a luxury brand, it is equipped with every option they had at the time. There is a signal that goes off when I got near my home. Sometimes it goes off and sometimes it doesn’t. Also, there is another alert which is supposed to let me know when I am too close to the car in front of me due to the speed I am driving at. A couple of times when I was stuck in traffic and was going very slow this alert went off for no reason. What happens if a car decides in error that you shouldn’t drive it? Will it stop you from going somewhere or will it insist on driving you there itself? Have you noticed the increase in cars having keyless entry? This requires you to carry a key fob which is activated by a battery and sends out a frequency that matches one programmed into the car and this allows you to not only open the car, but also to start with a start button. Car manufacturers say they have a better idea and soon the key fob will disappear. They say they want to use your finger print to open the car door and also to let you start the car. I remember when a certain computer company installed a device on their laptop which would let you sign into the computer with your finger print. There were a lot of problems at the time with people not being able to get their computers operational, because even though they had registered their fingerprint, it still wouldn’t allow them to get back on the next time. If something goes wrong would the reader on the car prevent you from being able to open the door and start it? What happens when it snows or ice formed on the car? Will the reader be vulnerable to getting scratched and not be able to read a fingerprint correctly anymore? I’m not crazy about the fingerprint reader idea. Maybe voice recognition would be a better idea. Carmakers are also talking about putting heads-up displays known as HUDs on many more cars. These are the displays which appear on your windshield and allow you to look through them to see the road at the same time. They feel that this is a safety feature since you don’t have to look down at gauges and such. I can’t help but question this since we will soon see all the cars driving themselves and it will be unnecessary for a heads-up display, but this is just my feeling on the subject. They do look very futuristic, so maybe it is felt they will serve as a design feature in the future and also, they may become a lot cheaper than actual instruments built into the dash. Another innovation car companies are starting to use may disappear before it ever gets to the majority of cars. The reason for this is it pertains to gasoline powered engines. A lot of automakers are using smaller engines and yet are able to get superior performance, how is this possible? There is a relationship between horsepower and weight. If a company is able to make a lighter car they can maintain the same horse power to weight ratio using a smaller engine. It has been predicted that the first four-cylinder engine capable of driving a car over 200 miles an hour will appear by 2020. Making electric cars lighter would also allow use of smaller electric engines. A lot of changes are coming to the auto industry and just as incredible advances are appearing in electronics, the same is true for automobiles as they merge with electronics. |
