My Car Is Very Worried About Me

There was a time when a car’s relationship with its driver was pleasingly straightforward. You bought it, put fuel in it, occasionally changed the oil if you were the conscientious sort, and in return it transported you to places. It did not ask questions, offer advice or monitor your emotional state. It certainly did not spend the entire journey behaving like an anxious aunt who has just discovered that you are planning to cross a road without holding anyone’s hand.

My first cars had remarkably little interest in my welfare. Some of them barely had any interest in their own. You could drive several miles with a door not quite shut, a passenger unbelted, a tyre quietly losing air and the engine temperature approaching that of a blast furnace, and the dashboard would remain serenely silent. Eventually, a small red light might illuminate, although this tended not to mean, “Something requires your attention,” so much as, “You should probably begin looking for somewhere safe to abandon the vehicle.”

Things have changed rather dramatically. Modern cars care. They care enormously. In fact, mine appears to have reached the conclusion that without constant electronic supervision I would probably be dead before reaching the end of the village. This is touching, obviously, but also exhausting, because the modern car has somehow evolved from being a machine you operate into something closer to a nervous passenger who has read too many safety leaflets.

The Car That Knows Best

The trouble begins almost as soon as you start the engine. Before you have travelled twenty yards, the car has already formed several opinions about the way you are conducting yourself. It knows what the speed limit is, or at least thinks it does. It knows where the white lines are. It knows whether someone has put a bag on the passenger seat. It knows whether your eyes have wandered momentarily towards the heating controls, and it knows when you have strayed slightly from the centre of your lane because you are avoiding a pothole large enough to qualify for its own postcode.

And it wants you to know that it knows. So it beeps.

The modern motor car has become extraordinarily fond of the beep. There are beeps for parking, beeps for reversing, beeps for seatbelts, beeps for speed limits, beeps for lane markings, beeps because another vehicle is near you and beeps because another vehicle might, at some point in the foreseeable future, become near you. Somewhere in the automotive industry there must be an enormous office building filled with people whose entire professional lives are devoted to developing new reasons for cars to make irritating noises.

I imagine their meetings are quite short. Someone enters the boardroom and announces that drivers are occasionally managing to complete entire journeys without being electronically reprimanded. There is a brief silence. Then somebody suggests a warning if the driver looks out of the side window for too long, everyone nods gravely, and within six months it is appearing on the options list of a £70,000 SUV.

The result is that driving a modern car can sometimes feel less like operating a sophisticated machine and more like taking a practical examination with a particularly nervous examiner sitting beside you. You approach a bend and the car has concerns. You edge slightly towards the centre line because there is a cyclist and the car has concerns. You begin an overtake and the car has very serious concerns indeed. At no stage does the vehicle seem prepared to entertain the possibility that the person sitting behind the wheel may actually have encountered a road before.

When Help Becomes Interference

Before anyone points out that automatic emergency braking saves lives, I know. Of course it does. There is a great deal of technology in modern cars which is genuinely extraordinary and which I would not willingly give up. Blind-spot monitoring is excellent. Reversing cameras are useful. Adaptive cruise control can make a long motorway journey considerably less tiring, and automatic emergency braking is exactly the sort of system you hope never to need but are extremely glad exists if you do.

I am not suggesting that we should all return to driving Austin Maxis fitted with drum brakes and electrical systems designed during a power cut. The problem is not technology itself. The problem is that once manufacturers discovered that computers could help, they became rather overexcited and decided that computers ought to help with absolutely everything, including things which had never previously been identified as problems.

The touchscreen is perhaps the finest example. For decades, car manufacturers had more or less perfected the heater control. There was a knob. If you were cold, you turned it one way. If you were hot, you turned it the other. Better still, after a week of owning the car you could do this without looking at it. Your hand simply knew where the control lived, leaving your eyes free to concentrate on the large transparent panel at the front of the vehicle, which is generally considered useful when travelling at 70 miles an hour.

Then somebody decided this was hopelessly old-fashioned. So now, in many cars, changing the temperature involves touching a glass screen, locating the correct symbol, opening the climate menu and dragging a virtual slider around until your feet are warm. We have taken a task which could once be completed by reaching vaguely towards the dashboard and converted it into something resembling online banking.

The same thing has happened to heated seats, radio stations, suspension settings, navigation, lighting and drive modes. In some vehicles, functions which obviously require attention while the car is moving have been carefully hidden behind menus on a screen which requires your full attention to operate. None of this would matter if cars were stationary objects, but unfortunately they are not. They move, sometimes quite quickly, which is why replacing a tactile switch with a tiny graphical icon is not necessarily the enormous leap forward the brochure suggests.

The White Line Emergency

Lane-keeping assistance deserves special mention because it perfectly illustrates the difference between technology designed in theory and driving done in rural Britain. According to the computer, roads have clearly painted lines, cars remain exactly between them and everyone proceeds in mathematical harmony. According to reality, many British roads were originally designed for two oxen and a cart, subsequently widened by approximately eleven inches, and are now expected to accommodate two SUVs, a delivery van, three cyclists and a tractor carrying something agricultural and enormous.

Sometimes, therefore, one has to move around a little. You might need to edge across a white line to pass a parked car, position yourself differently because a lorry is approaching or simply avoid a crater where the council once believed a road surface should be. The car, however, does not necessarily understand context. It sees paint and assumes civilisation itself is collapsing.

This is when you feel the steering wheel gently resisting you and the relationship between human and machine becomes oddly argumentative. You know why you are moving over. The car knows only that you have approached a line without submitting the appropriate paperwork. You correct slightly, the steering wheel nudges back, and for a brief moment you find yourself fighting a machine which you own because it believes it has a better understanding of the road than the person who can actually see the enormous pothole ahead.

Speed recognition produces much the same problem. In principle, it is sensible. Knowing the speed limit is useful, and anything which prevents people drifting thoughtlessly through restricted areas has obvious merit. Unfortunately, cars occasionally possess the geographical awareness of a spaniel. They see a sign on a side road and decide it applies to the dual carriageway you are travelling along. They remember temporary restrictions which disappeared months ago. They become confused by signs attached to the backs of lorries and, once convinced you are exceeding whatever number they have discovered, begin behaving as though they have caught you stealing teaspoons from a hotel.

This produces another small domestic dispute. The car flashes a number at you. You know it is wrong. The car insists. You continue. It beeps. You continue. It beeps again, with slightly more electronic sanctimony. Eventually you find yourself talking aloud to the dashboard, which is not generally a sign that technology has improved your quality of life.

Are You Paying Attention?

My favourite development, though, is driver attention monitoring. Some modern cars now watch you through a camera and attempt to decide whether you are looking at the road sufficiently often. Again, the underlying idea is entirely sensible. Tired drivers are dangerous. Distracted drivers are dangerous. A system genuinely capable of detecting fatigue before the driver does could be extremely valuable.

The difficulty is that computers have a slightly different definition of attention from humans. You glance towards a junction and the car becomes suspicious. You check the navigation. Suspicion increases. You look at a mirror and perhaps your eyelids remain closed for three milliseconds longer than the algorithm would prefer. Suddenly the dashboard wants a conversation about whether you need a rest.

There is something fundamentally peculiar about paying a substantial amount of money for an object which then monitors your behaviour. Imagine purchasing a sofa which, after twenty minutes, announced that you appeared to be slouching. Imagine buying a piano and having a warning illuminate halfway through Chopin to inform you that your left-hand technique may require attention. Or buying a very good bottle of wine which, after the second glass, began flashing amber.

We would not tolerate this from most objects in the house. Yet in cars we have somehow accepted the principle that the product should continually assess the customer. The modern vehicle does not merely transport you; it appraises you.

The Great Button Extinction

Perhaps all of this is part of a wider problem. Modern technology has developed a deep suspicion of anything simple. Buttons are simple, so buttons must go. Keys are simple, so we now have keyless entry, which means the car can unlock itself without you touching anything but can occasionally fail to recognise the key which is actually in your pocket. Handbrakes were simple, so they have become switches. Gear levers were simple, so they have become buttons, rotary dials, stalks or polished pieces of sculpture whose actual purpose becomes apparent only after consulting the handbook.

Even opening a door is no longer necessarily straightforward. Some cars now use electronic door releases, which is wonderfully futuristic right up until the moment the electricity disappears and you discover that the emergency mechanical handle is hidden behind a piece of trim somewhere near your ankle. At that point, the old-fashioned handle suddenly seems rather clever.

We seem increasingly to confuse technological sophistication with improvement, but they are not the same thing. The best technology disappears into the background. Power steering is brilliant because you do not spend every journey thinking about power steering. Anti-lock brakes are brilliant because they remain silent and invisible until the one moment you need them. Good technology assists without demanding attention. Bad technology spends the journey reminding you that it exists.

This is where some modern cars have gone slightly wrong. They behave like small children in the back seat shouting your name every thirty seconds. Nothing individually is especially serious, but after two hours you find yourself wishing there were a button marked “Please stop helping.”

The Strange Future We Have Built

The irony is that manufacturers are simultaneously trying to persuade us that cars will soon be capable of driving themselves. This requires a considerable leap of faith when your current vehicle occasionally struggles to identify the correct speed limit while travelling through an ordinary British town.

Perhaps fully autonomous cars will eventually work perfectly. Perhaps one day we will climb aboard, announce our destination and spend the journey reading a newspaper while the car negotiates the M25, roadworks, cyclists, vans, cones, badly painted junctions and a man in a Nissan Micra doing 48 in the middle lane.

But we are not there yet. Instead we seem to be passing through an awkward intermediate stage in which the car is not actually capable of driving itself but nevertheless feels extremely qualified to criticise the person who is. It is rather like employing an assistant who cannot do your job but follows you around the office pointing out possible errors.

The solution is not to remove the technology. That would be absurd. The solution is to remember what technology is for. A car should intervene when something genuinely dangerous is happening. It should warn me if another vehicle is hidden in my blind spot, apply the brakes if I somehow fail to notice stationary traffic ahead and tell me if a tyre is losing pressure. These are useful things and exactly what modern electronics should be doing.

But if I deliberately move six inches towards a white line because a delivery van is occupying half the road, perhaps the steering wheel could refrain from expressing an opinion. If the car has misunderstood a speed sign, perhaps it could allow for the possibility that the human being with eyes may have more recent information. And if I glance towards the heater controls, perhaps it could assume that I have not suddenly lost consciousness.

Essentially, what I want from a car is the same quality I value in people: competence combined with discretion. Help when help is required and silence when it is not.

That should not be an unreasonable request. The motor car remains one of the most extraordinary inventions humans have produced. A modern vehicle can carry five people and their luggage hundreds of miles in comfort, through almost any weather, maintaining a temperature accurate to half a degree while playing virtually every piece of music ever recorded. It can monitor its tyres, adjust its suspension, brake faster than most humans can react and keep itself remarkably stable in conditions which would once have sent a family saloon into a hedge.

It is an astonishing machine.

It just needs to stop worrying quite so much.

Because despite what the dashboard appears to believe, I have driven before. I know what a white line looks like. I am aware that bends exist. And should I ever require a small electronic device to remind me every thirty seconds that life contains danger, I already own a mobile phone.