This is why everyone should be forced to drive manual transmission.
I am also of the opinion that, to obtain a DL in North America, you should at least be able to demonstrate the ability to start, shift, and stop in a car with a manual transmission. The massive shift to automatics has correlated strongly with increased driver distraction and stupidity. It's actually funny - one of the best ways of ensuring your car won't be stolen in the US and Canada is to buy one with a manual transmission. (And it goes without saying that I will have a manual as long as I can still buy one).
I agree. And manuals are so much more fun. I don't think manuals are going to go away any time soon since i believe that would make car sales lower.
The next part that's great about manuals is that it's a real pain in the ass to receive and talk on your cell phone while you're driving. Answer the call, put the phone down, shift, pick the phone up again and say something, put the phone down, shift, etc. Some people i guess don't mind hurt their necks holding the cell phone that way (ouch). Some people are highly experienced with switching hands of the cell phone constantly between the shifter hand and the steering hand. I said screw that, what a pain in my ass, talking on the phone is supposed to be easy.
I'm too cheap for phone hands free devices, i'd rather get to my destination safely completely ignoring texts and calls (my car is a manual). The other thing that worries me is a lot of new cars and the commercials for them telling you how much you can do while you're driving. So now cars come with distractive crap if you have the extra money for it. Which leads to the hyping of touchscreens in cars for the dash controls like gps, sound system, etc. I like the normal radio dashes with buttons. You generally don't have to take your eyes off the road to turn down or up the volume, let alone hitting a preset, or seek button. You do take your eyes off the road if dash controls are completely buttonless. As far as gps goes, there's three awesome locations for non-built in ones.
Right along side the rear view mirror is awesome (makes you use your rear view mirror a lot more), or the same level as the rear view mirror on the top left corner of the windshield. The last good location was on the bottom left corner of the windshield. It's the best locations for gps guidance i could find that don't pan your eyes away from the windshield to other areas of the car, thus making a great attempt at the gps itself becoming as least intrusive and distracting as possible.
I agree with The_E: let's have googlecars as fast as possible. I wanna text all the time while an internet terrorist virus causes all cars to smash between themselves. Hail to the Singularity!
Google cars better be good. Programming errors can kill and injure. Reminds me of the uncontrollable acceleration problem found in a lot of toyotas of the last half of the last decade. I don't understand why toyota couldn't just make a software update for the computer in the car unless it was impossible, which i doubt the impossible part. All toyota did was take years of covering up their problem blaming it on driver error. Yes people with lots of money prefer to focus on sales over user fatality. Google had better make a perfect car in this case.
A fun thing to explore is if google did produce a car that drives itself. And that there was a software error at least causing accidents. How would google blame that on the occupant of the vehicle?
Most people would say that this is the perfect situation, that google wouldn't have anything to say but "my bad, here's reparations". That's much too short sighted in my own opinion. This is why i think the scenario would be fun to ponder
