How drivers have become less and less autonomous over the decades
01/04/2020
There is a lot of talk about autonomous driving and the "old guard" of drivers in particular are skeptical about this achievement. However, driver autonomy has been increasingly restricted for many decades:
It started with the electric starter motor, first tested by Cadillac in 1911. Since then, we have been using an electric motor to start the combustion engine.
With the automatic ignition point adjustment, we gave up the possibility of deciding for ourselves when to ignite early or late.
With power brakes, brake boosters and brake force distributors, we no longer had to determine the effect of the brakes solely with our foot. With power steering, we left part of the steering work to a servo pump (and later to an electric motor).
With the automatic choke, we relinquished control of the mixture enrichment, and with the automatic transmission, we left it up to the car to select the gear itself.
The intermittent windshield wiper saves us from constantly switching the wiper on and off, and the automatic light switch-off prevents us from draining the battery if we forget to switch off the lights.
The ABS helps to keep the front wheels steerable under heavy braking when our foot has too little feeling for it. The anti-slip system prevents us from limiting driving stability by spinning the wheels.
Modern cars prevent us from restarting the engine when it is already running or from dazzling oncoming traffic by automatically switching to dipped headlights.
A starting-off aid relieves us of the trouble of needing the handbrake to drive off. And the handbrake is also automated, releasing itself when we want to drive off.
Various assistants prevent us from driving into obstacles and causing accidents. Modern cars can even recognize traffic signs and automatically adjust the car's speed accordingly. And more recently, there is also a car wash assistant that closes the windows and prepares the car for the drive through the car wash.
So you can see that our cars are no longer autonomous. Every year, further achievements are added. At the same time, skills are being lost, because hardly any of us can still start a car with a crank or effectively handle a braking system that acts on the wheels and the cardan shaft.
Have we forgotten something? For example, the self-resetting blinker or the rev limiter? The list could probably be extended by many more points ...
