The near reality of Google’s driverless car dwarfs many of the technology driven advances available in today’s vehicles. But what about the building blocks that have brought us to where we are today? However unsophisticated or even juvenile they may seem on the dawn of an unprecedented age of advancements, they do contain the DNA of an auto industry that has always attempted to keep pace with consumer desire on a number of fronts.
Entertainment
Radios and cars were meant for each other. If nature abhors a vacuum, then a car abhors silence. The first radios in cars were carry-on units, but eventually, possibly by the late 1920s, definitely by 1930, car radios were built-in accessories. For twenty years or so that was the extent of in car offerings until a phonograph was made available in 1956. Somehow Chrysler devised a way to keep the record player’s needle steady in spite of vehicle vibration. The need to overcome that condition no doubt led to over 70 million 8 track tapes being sold from 1967- 1980, many of them for use in cars. With the exception of satellite radio all forms of vehicle entertainment have begun in the pedestrian format and been adapted to the car and truck market.
Safety
Once I took a defensive driving course and the instructor told a story of a crash that he investigated very early in his career. It took place before the use of seat belts or any regard for the danger that existed in the passenger’s cabin. The police officer told how an unrestrained child had been propelled over the front seat and impaled on the protruding knobs of the radio. No doubt, incidents like this and their legal aftermath gave rise to safer vehicles. A litany of safety features is fairly easy to rattle off: lap belts, 5 mph bumper, crumple zone technology, shoulder restraints, driver air bags, passenger air bags, air bag shut off switches, side curtain air bags, rear seat shoulder air bags. All of these innovations account for the decline in the number of fatalities per 100,000 registered vehicles from roughly 21in 1990 to just over 13 in 2009.
Systems
For many decades the responsibility for keeping a vehicle safely on the road fell on the shoulders of the operator. Part of that person’s job was to brake without skidding, to negotiate a curve without turning over and to be knowledgeable enough to recognize an underinflated tire. The car companies have moved forward with sophisticated vehicle control systems and in the name of safety have taken a large part of those duties out of the hands of the driver and given them to the car’s myriad collection of control modules. Anti-lock brakes (ABS), electronic stability control (ESC) and tire pressure monitoring (TPMS) now perform those functions to such a degree that in times of extreme stress control of the car is literally taken out of the hands of the driver.
Projects like Google’s driverless car will spawn technology far superior to what is now considered to be cutting edge. Just like the Highway Hi-Fi record player seems quaint if not crude, in the future today’s technology, when relegated to a museum somewhere in Michigan, will no doubt generate the timeless comment, “What were they thinking?”
Ernst Erb, First Car Radios – history and development of early Car Radios, radiomuseum.org