Quote:
Originally Posted by Swish
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I feel lost without a sat-nav if I'm somewhere I don't know..
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Roads in the U.S. tend to be fairly rational such that sat-nav isn't as strictly necessary as it may seem. Mostly it might just save a little time. Over the past summer I drove from home to Minnesota and back (~800 miles each way) and didn't even bother to bring a road map or sat-nav devices (I refuse to carry a cell phone). Didn't encounter any undue problems. I would probably want a regional road map if any significant city-street driving would be needed but nothing much beyond that seems necessary.
Traffic fatalities are lower nowdays mostly because federal crash standards have gone a bit haywire in the past 20 years. Notice the significant weight gains in modern cars versus similar models from a couple decades ago. A cramped little Chevrolet Cruze weighs only a couple hundred pounds less than my Coupé de Ville.
Cars with automatic brakes or reverse cameras whatnot don't bother me so long as such features remain optional much as how electronic traction control typically remains optional. Some drivers need those features, especially given the woefully inadequate state of U.S. driver training. Other increasingly common features, such as dash-mounted LCD screens cluttered with multiple menus, strike me as idiotic beyond belief. I wish modern cars still had proper bumpers, too.
What does it really matter, though? Driving aids or no driving aids, it hardly seems to matter in the long run for a different reason: Pretty much all modern general-purpose cars are awful anyway. They're uniformly small, cramped, hard-riding little econoboxes that all look the same as everything else from more than 100 feet away. Driving some wretched sardine can like a Ford Focus feels so dreary and miserable that I'd rather have the car do the driving automatically and save me the bother.
Danth