When car gizmos drive you crazy
How come our road accident rates continue to go up by 7 per cent every year in spite of all the ‘safety features’ in cars
There is so much instrumentation these days that the whole thing looks like a cockpit rather than a dashboard. Istock
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I’VE just bought a new car and that has primed me to talk about cars this week. It’s a much more interesting subject, you will agree, than our politics, which has settled into a groove not unlike the exit drain from your septic tank and (pardon me) is the same old crap every morning.
I started driving in the Sixties; that was about when I started using after-shave since no girl would give me the time of day, forget about a slice of the evening. These initial forays were in my dad’s cars; he replaced the old one every four or five years because his job involved extensive touring and the roads those days were more like the pock-marked cheeks of Om Puri than that of the lady from Mathura. My dad was Calcutta born, bred and toasted (he played for Mohun Bagan), and so naturally bought only Landmasters and Ambassadors. No tougher cars have ever been built — with these rugged pioneers, one didn’t even need these ubiquitous XUVs, SUVs, MUVs and CUVs of today.
In later years, however, my dad gravitated to the Maruti, in recognition of the fact that the Ambassadors were becoming outdated and obsolete, like their All India Service namesakes in South Block today.
Those were the days of innocence: a car was supposed to get you from place A to B in reasonable comfort and hopefully in one piece. It consisted basically of three components — an engine, a body and four tyres. I’ve bought four cars in my entire misspent life — a second-hand Fiat in 1982, a second-hand Maruti 800 in 1991, a Hyundai i20 in 2010 and now the Venue. That amounts to a car every decade: it’s no coincidence that the Pay Commission is also set up every decade, what?
My problems started with the i20 and have reached total fruition with the Venue. For starters, I have paid more for just the insurance for the Venue than I did for the whole ruddy Fiat in 1982. More to the point, I thought I was buying a car, not a variant of a Boeing 747. There is so much instrumentation these days that the whole thing looks like a cockpit rather than a dashboard. One spends more time looking at the dials than the road: little wonder our accident rates are going up, notwithstanding Mr Gadkari’s 38 km of new expressways built every day. Or maybe because of them.
We no longer use the left hand to move the gear lever; cars now have automatic transmission, releasing the left hand for texting on the cell or scratching our testimonials in the time-honoured North Indian manner. For those who don’t want to scratch, there’s something called IMT (Intelligent Manual Transmission), but that’s only for those who have an IQ of more than 70, which means that this variant is not available in large parts of the country.
In my time, we were happy to have a stereo with two speakers; now there just has to be a small TV screen, six speakers and surround sound, even though one is surrounded by the sound of blaring horns and shrieking sirens.
In my halcyon but simple days, when lost, one stopped at a chaiwalla or taxi stand and asked for directions. No more. For one, all the chaiwallas have become ministers; two, the taxi chaps have become “business partners” of Ola and Uber and communicate only through apps and QR codes; and three, there’s now something called GPS and Satnav — two charming ladies who sound like Girl Guides and guide you to Meerut when you actually want to have paranthas in Murthal. They also turn deaf when you need them the most, no doubt powdering their noses in Palo Alto or Guggenheim, while you’re stuck under the Ashram flyover.
Consider, if you will, the biggest scam of all — the sunroof. Do we need this? Really? It makes sense for a meerkat in the Kalahari desert or a marmot in the More plains of Ladakh to occasionally stick his neck out for fresh air, but a dude in Delhi or Mumbai or Kanpur? Who needs a sunroof when the daytime temperature is 40º Celsius for seven months, it rains incessantly for three months and for the remaining two months, the outside air contains more PM2.5 particles than fake news in an Amit Malviya tweet?
What about those other desiderata bent upon stripping us of our few remaining faculties — ADAS (Advanced Driver Assist System), Brake Assist, Hill Start Assist, Highline TMS, Auto Driving IRVMs, SMS (Stability Management System)? Apart from the fact that a driver now has to decipher more acronyms than there are in our PM’s speeches, the question that arises is: how come then that our road accident rates continue to go up by 7 per cent every year in spite of all the “safety features”? Proof, if needed, that the more gizmos you add, the more atrophied the human brain becomes; what we have on our roads now is not drivers but distracted zombies.
I don’t know much about law: I can’t tell the difference between a habeas and a corpus, but I do feel it is time for our courts to apply their famous “essentiality doctrine” to these accessories and save us from being ripped off of tens of thousands of our unearned shekels. They should forget about applying it to hijab, triple talaq, Jallikattu or Sabarimala — India has too many of these windmills for even a Solomon to tilt at. Bring the doctrine to bear on these gizmos instead — are they essential to the purpose for which a car is built? Can a car reach its destination without the breathless voice telling you to take a U-Turn at a T-junction? Can you press the clutch, or brake, without three pinging reminders? I, for one, would be willing to submit my considerable research to the court in a seat — sorry, sealed — cover for the perusal of My Lords.
Can we please get back to driving a car by the seat of our pants and the out-sized brain God gave us with such high expectations?
— The writer is a retired IAS officer
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