Automaton

Ford is rolling out its MyKey technology to Europe. This will enable parents to pre-program set speed-limits, radio volume, and seatbelt and fuel reminders. It can also be used to prevent certain safety features, like blind spot detection and parking assistance from being deactivated. The idea is that parents will set the key, and their new-driver offspring will then only use that key to borrow the car. Simpler, safer – nothing to worry about, surely?

Well – driving a car is a pretty complicated process. It takes a combination of skills, which are learned while travelling at higher speeds than human naturally achieve. It also takes observation, concentration, the ability to react and perform various simultaneous muscle movements in response to something outside the immediate in-car environment. This isn’t easy, and yes, inexperienced drivers are more likely to be in accidents than experienced ones. But as safety features increase, and more and more of the driving process is taken over by computerised systems, and the driver’s job made simpler, it seems to me that this will ultimately result in ever more complications: computers crashing or hanging at high speed, drivers who haven’t the skills to take manual control in emergencies or unpredicatble conditions. If we made the cars simpler again, then learning to drive might be more complex, but driving itself would be easier – we’d drive in the knowledge that we can control the car and handle the situations we’re likely to encounter. And isn’t that certainty simpler than feeling out of control, managed by computers?

Simple isn’t always what it looks like at first glance.