It’s not a flaw it’s… no it’s definitely a flaw
Last month’s news that Apple was abandoning plans to develop its own car may have caused some wailing and gnashing of teeth among the faithful but I have to admit I was not one of that number.
I don’t mind using an Apple computer, laptop, phone, watch or TV box but there are some places where I draw the line. Cars is one of those.
Where some people might have been relaxed enough to say ‘Apple you can drive my car’, I am much more in the ‘I like driving in my car’ camp.
It’s not just Apple either. The same goes for any technology company seeking to convince me to use its own designed car. As far as I’m concerned, they’re all on the road to nowhere.
Why, you might ask?
The answer is simple. I firmly believe that quality control for technology is much more lax than for cars. We’ve all lived through software and hardware releases that are incomplete or sub-optimum because the vendors have rushed to get them out the door to meet a deadline. The usual attitude is “we can patch that later” if it’s software or “we can disable that feature for now and add the relevant component in the next release” if it’s hardware.
Unsurprisingly, crashes have been a commonplace occurrence in IT over the years. Thankfully, the consequences of those crashes have rarely been life-threatening but can you imagine if they happened in a car when you were driving it? Sorry, make that when the technology was driving it.
It’s true, cars crash every day but a lot of the time that’s down to human error, weather conditions or a faulty piece of equipment. The latter is often because the car has not been maintained properly. As to human error, the causes for that are often very easy to diagnose, hence the advertisement campaigns aimed at drink driving, drug driving and driving while tired. Weather conditions are self-explanatory even if, way too often, people pretend they’re not an issue.
Yes, technology can help to alleviate some of those issues but the most effective piece of technology that can prevent a large number of road deaths is a breathalyser.
Self-driving cars would be another answer and I have no doubt that, at some point in the future (maybe not too far off), there will be safe and effective models available to buy. But I would stress that if those cars are manufactured and sold under the brand of a technology company, you can count me out.
And let’s not get into the whole area of security which is becoming a huge focus of technology today. Yes, cars get stolen everyday but they don’t get stolen while you’re driving them with you still in the car. With the growing prevalence of software in cars and those cars being connected, there is a very real risk of you car being taken over instead of over taking.
When you get right down to it, the thing is that I have reached the point where I trust cars to work and to do so reliably, day in, day out. I have got to that point with technology too but only for certain things. The big problem I have with the tech mindset is that it nearly always over-promises and under-delivers.
And while that might be acceptable in terms of how it could affect the performance of a feature in a phone or laptop, it just won’t cut it for something in motion that weighs over 1,000kg.
Many years ago, Queen sang “I’m in love with my car” in a song that was destined to be the band’s next single before Bohemian Rhapsody took its place, but if you fall in love with a car made by an IT company, you might well find yourself on the highway to hell.
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