covered wagon wrote:
I'm sorry to be so contrary but, I do not want anything to do with things that have the potential to take away peoples mental alertness, navigation skills, sense of being an accomplished skilled driver.
The more electronics the more troublesome more control.
Do you have a manual transmission in your vehicle? Does the engine have manual control over the spark and mixture (if gas)?
I think that oftentimes things that make the actual task of driving easier and needing less continual mental alertness actually improve safety and driving quality. They enable one to concentrate on the more important things, rather than mere mechanics. They certainly make it easier for beginning drivers to concentrate on important things. In many cases, too, computers can be programmed to operate the mechanics more precisely and reliably than humans. Antilock brakes do a far better job of stopping in a controlled manner in slippery conditions than most if not all people; and if only one side of the road is slippery, they can modulate only the brakes that need modulation which would be impossible to do manually without tractor-style wheel brakes.
I remember when I was first learning how to drive a stick shift I had to be reminded a few times to look at the road when shifting. It probably didn't help too much that it was an old big pickup truck I was learning in, with a somewhat loose shift linkage and long throws between the gears, but nevertheless. If I didn't already know how to drive in general at the time, I would have been even worse off trying to master shifting simultaneously with other driving skills.
I also vividly remember trying to extricate myself from Pittsburgh before I had a GPS using a map. It was an exasperating experience, partly because there are roads in real life (that I was on) that were not shown on the city inset map I had and partly because I had to both drive and navigate at the same time to at least some extent. I did eventually manage to get free of the city and continue my trip, but I also decided buying a GPS navigator was very worthwhile...and using the GPS I can be a better driver and more efficient (as in less unnecessary driving) in areas that I don't know thoroughly.
I sometimes encounter similar concerns among photography buffs in relation to manual camera settings vs. automatic exposure. I'm of the opinion that automatic exposure is very often a most useful tool to allow one to concentrate on the more important creative aspects of photography (composition, lighting, etc.) vs. the purely mechanical work of getting an exposure that is neither too bright nor too dark. That's not to say that an understanding of the underlying concepts is unimportant, or that there are times when automatic systems need at least a little guidance, but often they free us to worry about things at a different level.
