Automotive technology has become staggeringly advanced, boosting safety and efficiency, and pandering to increasingly insatiable tastes in luxury, entertainment and gadgetry.
Boots opening with a kick of one’s foot, cars which can be summoned and park themselves, boot floors sliding out electrically, and ingenious touchscreens simultaneously serving up digital television for the passenger and sat nav for the driver are unarguably useful and desirable. Without going silly, there are some as-yet unintroduced features I reckon we could all benefit from, though.
Automatic high beam headlights are now commonly available, able to detect oncoming headlights and retreating tail lights, courteously switching off individual diodes, so why has nobody developed a photochromic windscreen that reacts rapidly to reduce the sun glare, without being flummoxed by tunnels, or oncoming headlights at night? Nobody has developed sun visors that automatically lower, either.
Car cameras are now ubiquitous, from simplistic reversing cameras upto Land Rover’s Surround Camera System and Nissan’s Around View Monitor, displaying every side of a vehicle on the dashboard screen. I’m unaware of a system enabling photographs or videos to be taken using a car’s cameras, though. For holidaymakers and car spotters, this ability would be welcomed, storing images and videos on the car’s hard drive.
In Japan, nearside rear doors of many taxis open ‘automatically’ or, more accurately, by drivers pulling levers. Soft-close door technology has been kicking around for years, so why doesn’t someone expand on this so that all doors fully open and close, not simply latch, in response to a gesture? Germaphobes and parents holding wriggling babies would surely embrace a system like Ford’s foot-activated tailgate, if it worked on each door. Driverless technology having surged ahead, surely incorporating safety parameters into door technology can’t be too challenging.
Mercedes has on some models enhanced the seat, wing mirror and steering memory function to include automatic rear view mirror adjustment, so it would be handy if this became mainstream. The ability to display a scrolling message on your rear window would sometimes be useful, too, although I realise this would be open to all kinds of misuse. It would also be great if someone could address the problem of getting one’s hands filthy whilst inflating tyres.
Today’s fleet managers and drivers have an array of technology available to them and hopefully manufacturers’ R&D teams won’t neglect practicality in favour of infotainment.
Lee Wolstenholme is a director of Vehicle Consulting
